Things That Never Were - HG101 Presents: The Guide to Konami

Hey all! I've been thinking of various bonuses I could give to all of my awesome Patreon contributors. I have a lot of unpublished stuff sitting around, some of which might be good as previews, others which would never see the light of day otherwise. Like, this one here: HG101 Presents: The Guide to Konami. This was meant to be our follow-up to the Guide to Classic Graphic Adventures, published back in May of 2011, but eventually we decided to rework the project, for a number of reasons. First off, there was an issue of scope. We always run into this problem with anything that tries to be comprehensive, because at a certain point, projects become too overwhelming. How much of Konami should we be covering? We knew we wanted to do their most famous franchises (Castlevania, Contra, Gradius, Silent Hill, Metal Gear), plus assorted arcade and console titles. But did we really want to cover Frogger, or the bazillion Tokimeki Memorial/dating sims games, or their expansive rhythm game selection? What criteria would we use to include/exclude their numerous one-shot games? When planning the book, we were shooting for something along the size of the adventure game book, which is to say about 750 pages. Even if we skipped certain topics, we realized that we'd have to cut down a lot of articles substantially, usually giving no more than a page or two to many games, and skimp on the screenshots too. Finally, and this was something that somehow didn't sink in until a few months after the adventure game book was published, was that we never wanted to edit a project of that size again. If you check the Amazon reviews for the adventure game book, most are positive, but nearly all noted the numbers of typos. And it's true! It was four people trying to copy edit several hundreds of thousands of words in their spare time, and it was just too overwhelming. We've been cleaning them up with small revisions over the years, but a project of that scale was, frankly, crazy, and we needed to reel things back in order to get anything done at a decent quality level. As a result, the single book was cut down into several smaller projects. Castlevania would get its own book, as would the topic of all of Konami's shooters, which is next in line for publication. Other series like Contra and Mystical Ninja/Goemon would be placed in other collections of similar sizes. And we didn't have much written for Silent Hill or Metal Gear in the first place, but those would probably deserve their own separate books too. Beyond making these projects more manageable, it gave some breathing room for individual topics. The Castlevania book has a lot of extra images, trivia, and reviews of clones, stuff which we would've had to cut if we were just doing reviews. The smaller page count also meant that we could afford to print books in color, which is still astronomically more expensive than black and white. Because of this, we also decided to switch to an actual graphic design program instead of Microsoft Word, and create layouts which were both more consistent and more visually appealing. Of course, what actually ended up happening is that I somehow got re-obsessed with Sega arcade games (these things come and go in waves), so while I started work on the Castlevania book, I got distracted with the Sega book, and ended up publishing that one first. The attached file is all of the work we did on the Konami book project until we dropped it. It was actually quite a bit of work - about 100 pages - though the text is rough, and in some parts not even complete. Though most of the content can be found on the site, there are a few articles that are currently unpublished, though some, like the Castlevania ones, have been revised for the upcoming book. None of it is in any real order other than the alphabetical listing on the files on my computer. I definitely think we made the right decision, but personally I think it's kinda cool to flip through these and wonder what might have been, because I do have a weakness for gigantic tomes about video games, even though they're hugely impractical from a production standpoint.