It's publication day for a dream project of mine: A Tale of Two Halves: The History of Football Video Games, a 628-page book about the many many attempts to distil the beautiful game (association football) into digital interactive entertainment.
A Tale of Two Halves explores 30+ years of football games in all their forms—even platformers like Soccer Kid and GO! GO! Beckham—with a season-by-season breakdown of the genre's history, lots of insight, and plenty of fun stuff like PES player shirts and pixel illustrations. And 13 in-depth interviews, too.
It comes in two flavours: a standard edition, with shoelace bookmark ribbons for a touch of whimsy, and a "Captain's Edition" that adds in a heavy-duty slipcase and swanky fabric armband emblazoned "Captain." Both are available directly from Bitmap.
https://www.bitmapbooks.com/pages/search-results-page?q=tale%20of%20two%20halves
(Or if you're in Australia, you'll save loads on shipping by going to Pixel Crib: https://www.pixelcrib.com.au/search?options%5Bprefix%5D=last&q=tale+of+two+halves)
@MossRC As a huge fan of football games (Both management & arcade) from the original Football Manager on the Spectrum to eFootball on PS5 (Which isn't so good!) this book has a big appeal 👍
I bet you could've written a book purely on #ZXSpectrum football games as there was so many !
@iSabreman Yes, definitely. Even showing restraint and leaving out anything I felt was overly derivative, I still ended up with more than 30 Spectrum football games. There was a point also where I considered going for just 2D titles, since there are hundreds of them, and then leaving 3D for a volume 2, but I really liked the idea of showing the slow, messy transition from 2D to 3D.
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