LudoScience

History of videogames (biography)

Author(s) : Mat Dickie
Editor : Createspace
Publication date : 01-06-2009
Language : english

Who said that you had to be famous in order to write down your own autobiography? In this book, Mat Dickie, an indie video game creator, tells us about his personal life alongside with the various games he created during his 10 years career. While we can smile at the fact that the oversized ego of this unknown author led him to write such a book, it's a quite interesting book for the videogame history specialists. It tells us the life of a British kid born in the 80's, fan of videogames, who started to create his own games as an amateur before creating a one-man company to start selling them. While Mat Dickie is quite unknown, even in the indie scene, he nevertheless managed to keep is company afloat and to create an audience for his games by focusing on a nice genre: wrestling videogames. This book deals with a very common kind of videogame creator that is unfortunately ignored by history books: the amateur who becomes a professional indie with small success but enough money to earn his living. Such game designers usually remain in the dark, which can be frustrating to some of them, sometimes enough to make them write their autobiography. It also means that this book, which contains a quite unusual story, can help us to widen our definition of what a professional videogame creator is.