Not quite a game-changer

It reads like a coffee-fuelled blog, but this pixel ’n’ polygon memoir evokes some warm nostalgia, writes Sam Leith

Nintendo’s Jaguar JN-100, we learn, was a Game Boy/sewing machine hybrid

F--- YEAH VIDEO GAMES by Daniel Hardcastle 381pp, Unbound, £12.99 ★★★☆☆

Afew years ago, I tried to sell publishers a proposal for a book on video games. I had no luck. Industry wisdom holds, one publisher told me, that people who play video games don’t read books. I think that’s wrong. Novelists such as Naomi Alderman and Alex Garland are massive games spods. Martin Amis’s first book was a guide to games called Invasion of the Space Invaders. And Stephen Sexton’s recent debut collection of poetry If All the World and Love Were Young has been acclaimed as bearing comparison to

Seamus Heaney – and it’s all about Super Mario World.

It may be true, however, that people who play video games and read books don’t usually want to read books about video games. Certainly, aside from strategy guides and suchlike, only a handful are published each year and even the good ones don’t usually trouble the upper reaches of the highscore table. Some – such as Simon Parkin’s Death by Video Game – are cultural histories; some – such as Steven Poole’s fine Trigger Happy – are something closer to criticism or theory; some – such as Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken – aim at the “smart thinking” category.

Some, though, are your basic pixel ’n’ polygon memoirs – and it’s into this category that F--- Yeah Video Games falls. Daniel Hardcastle is a 30-year-old professional gamer of the shares-videos-with-zillionson-Twitch-and-YouTube type rather than the “cyber-athlete” type, and this is a labour of undiluted love and enthusiasm. As he writes in his introduction:

Since I was knee-high to a particularly small grasshopper, I’ve loved video games. They’re magic. Actual magic. Plug a machine into your TV and suddenly, you control what happens on the TV. That’s not science, that’s spellcraft.

Well, quite. And there’s something winning about the excitable way in which Hardcastle makes free with the bold and italic buttons, to say nothing of capital letters and exclamation marks and footnotes and what he coyly calls “naughty words”. The enthusiasm can’t be gainsaid.

What follows is a long series of short chapters about different games in no discernible chronological (or any other) order, written in the style of a series of overcaffeinated late-night blog posts and illustrated with likeable cartoons by Hardcastle’s wife, Rebecca Maughan.

Mostly, these chapters link a very vague description of the experience of the game (often risking you-had-to-be-there syndrome) with some jocular personal wibblings, be they on the annoyance of waiting in for a delivery, the author’s enthusiasm for air travel, or the memory of going to a preteen birthday party at a soft play centre.

The one chapter on a game he really dislikes – the famously hopeless Ride to Hell: Retribution

– gives you a pretty good sense of the style:

Everything, every single inch of it is broken, bad or mad. It’s confusing, offensive and somehow bland simultaneously. It’s like an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical designed exclusively for the deaf but the interpreter can only sign in Dutch and 10 minutes in is attacked by a bird of prey while the cast sing a song that is entirely racial slurs before they all get naked, urinate on each other and the theatre explodes.

Another even longer paragraph of similes follows. Now and again

Call 0844 871 1514 to order from the Telegraph for £10.99

a joke lands – but these jokes are saturation-bombed in the manner of a boss-fight in Ikaruga. As someone who shares Hardcastle’s love of games, I wanted to like this more than I did. The problem is, it’s hard to see who exactly it has been written for, and I suspect no one bothered to think all that hard about it, knowing that

Hardcastle’s two-and-a-halfmillion-odd YouTube subscribers would pay for it faster than you can say “Game Over”. It took them just 15 minutes to cover the book’s costs through the crowdfunding publisher Unbound.

For the reader, chapters on the games you might have played (Tomb Raider, God of War, Sonic the Hedgehog, Portal, Metal Gear Solid 2, Mario Party) won’t usually tell you much you don’t know, and chapters on less familiar games (Noby Noby Boy, anyone?) will often leave you with only the sketchiest sense of how the game even works. Nevertheless, some of us will experience warm nostalgia when Hardcastle talks about the good old days of all-night LAN parties, or the febrile pre-internet spread of playground rumours about tricks and hacks to catch rare Pokémon.

Interspersed with this are four chapters dealing with the hardware histories of Sega, Sony, Nintendo and Atari. These have some interesting nuggets – Nintendo’s Jaguar JN-100, we learn, was a short-lived Game Boy/sewing machine hybrid – but will not be a resource for scholars. Of that sewing machine he admits “the only evidence I can find about this machine is, unsurprisingly, all in Japanese, and to be honest this might all be a mad 3am writing session fever dream”.

I have a sense that, like that very games console/sewingmachine hybrid, this particular games-blog/book hybrid isn’t destined to be a game-changer.

POWER UP The title screen for Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros 3, which was first released in 1988