There are two really interesting gaming books that have just gone up for preorder. First is The NES Encyclopaedia by Chris Scullion, who used to be the editor of Official Nintendo Magazine.

It looks admirably comprehensive, featuring not only every official release for the NES, but also every unofficial one, too. Judging by Chris’s excellent and exhaustive history of the Street Fighter series over on his website Tired Old Hack, this book should be very special indeed. Check out the spread below for a taster of what to expect.

Amazon is taking preorders for The NES Encyclopaedia right now, but it won’t be released until March 2019.

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Next up is a project that’s being crowdfunded over on Volume, a sort of Kickstarter for fancy coffee-table books. Japansoft: An Oral History is a semi-sequel to the critically well received Britsoft: An Oral History. I’ve been meaning to buy the latter for ages now, as it looks utterly fascinating, full of exclusive interviews with the coding greats of the British computer scene in the 1980s and 1990s, like David Braben, Peter Molyneux and Jeff Minter.

Japansoft is basically the same idea, but for Japan (natch), and it’s something I’m particularly keen on reading, as I know little about the early days of Japanese gaming. I did a bit of research on 1980s Japanese games for my feature on the phenomenally popular JB Harold series, and I’d love to find out more about where the big franchises like Dragon Quest actually came from and what inspired them.

You can back Japansoft on Volume by heading of this link – it’s currently at about £11,000 of its £15,000 target with 32 days to go.

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