Author: Alex Aniel
Year Published: 2021
Genre: Video Game History
Rating: |

Okay so … I didn’t actually have 120 pages left, it was more like 30 pages and then 90 pages of footnotes, acknowledgements and a very healthy index. I’m only over Chicago stuck in a patch of very bouncy turbulence (yay).

This was very well researched and narrated, giving us insight into the games we’ve been playing throughout our entire relationship! I think Catrena and I have finished at least 10 RE games since we first got together in 2015. Aniel doesn’t just cite interviews, he’s also conducting first hand interviews with the people that made the games happen. It’s actually incredibly impressive the amount of access he has to these game makers. I also enjoyed all the ancillary history on games like Devil May Cry, Killer7, P.N.03, God Hand and Okami along with the creators of these games. It’s an interesting period of time for video game history, one of growth and hope, unlike now which feels like watching a good friend refuse an organ transplant. Lots of my favorite game creators come in and out of the story with a special shoutout to Suda51 who made Killer7 at the time Capcom was bring Resident Evil exclusively to GameCube. In 2026 I couldn’t help but compare it to a stream of MCU post credit scenes.

While I did enjoy this book, it has the tendency to repeat the same information over and over and the language used often felt like reading a longform wikipedia article. These are small complaints leveraged over a very interesting and thought provoking history of a famous video game archive spanning at least 20 years so I can understand the necessity to keep thing factual. If you are at all interested in Resident Evil, Capcom, or any of the ancillary games, companies or people these topics engulf than read this book, which is (finally) being re-released by Lost in Cult.