In the beginning, a small unlicensed game development company was hit with divine inspiration: They could make a lot of money (and escape the wrath of Nintendo) by creating games for Christians. With the release of the 1990 NES platformer Bible Adventures, the developers saw what they had made, and it was good. Or, at least, good enough. Based on extensive research and original interviews with Wisdom Tree staff, Gabe Durham's book investigates the rise and fall of the little company that almost could, the tension between faith and commerce in the Christian retail industry, culture's...

Upon its release in 2000, BioWare's PC role-playing epic Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn was hailed as a paragon of its genre and named -RPG of the Year- by IGN, GameSpy, and GameSpot. A game like Baldur's Gate II requires not just a master wordsmith but a dungeon master. Enter award-winning novelist Matt Bell, author of four works of fiction and co-author of the Dungeons & Dragons novel The Last Garrison. Bell's book explores BG2's immersive narrative and complex mechanics, unpacks how RPG systems enable our emotional investment in characters, investigates the game's non-linear story, and...

When Derek Yu released Spelunky for free in 2008, his roguelike-inspired platformer took the indie game community by storm with its combination of classic platform mechanics, extreme difficulty, and random level generation. Four years later, Spelunky's HD remake went on to become PC Gamer's Game of the Year and earn perfect scores from Polygon and Eurogamer. But how is a -perfect- game made? Spelunky is Boss Fight's first autobiographical book: the story of a game's creation as told by its creator. Using his own game as a vehicle, Derek Yu discusses such wide-ranging topics as randomization,...