Lewis Packwood tells all about his new book
It’s always nice to see a regular Retro Gamer contributor taking a deep dive into a subject they’re passionate about, and Lewis Packwood has done just that with his new book Curious Video Game Machines. We caught up with him to find out what went into making the book, and what we can expect within.
What draws you to obscure and unusual games machines?
I think it’s really interesting, seeing an alternative history of videogames because we’ve had so many books about Atari, Sega, Nintendo – the kind of mainstream history – and there’s all of this other history that never gets talked about. So I wanted to explore that because sometimes, I think failure is more interesting than success.
Sometimes it’s not because of a bad product, it’s just the wrong time or just other circumstances that don’t work out for whatever reason. Things like Virtuality, which was years ahead of its time and worked very well for the time, but was just too expensive and couldn’t really cut it in the market.
How did the book deal come to be?
It was remarkably smooth. I was surprised, I anticipated spending a long time pitching this idea to publishers, but actually the first one went for it straight away. So it was remarkably easy in the end. I was prepared for a long battle, but it didn’t happen.
The book covers consoles, computers and arcade games – it seems pretty much any hardware is fair game. Why did you choose that broad approach?
I didn’t want to limit myself by saying something wouldn’t be going in the book, because one of the first ideas I had was to do something on the Avatar machine, which is the final chapter in the book and isn’t really a videogame machine at all in the strict sense. It’s a suit that you put on where you can view yourself in third person, as if you’re in a videogame. It was created as an art project by a guy called Marc Owens and only a few were made, I think he did sell a few, but it was quite a remarkable weird thing so I spoke to him for the book.
Because I wanted to include that, I was like, ‘I want to keep this definition as broad as possible.’ But basically anything that’s odd, I would like to include. At the same time I wanted to be quite narrow in what I covered in the book – rather than do an encyclopedia of every curious games machine I could think of or find, I wanted to do real deep dives on each one.
Roughly how many people have you spoken to for this book?
That’s a good question. I’d say dozens. I’ve spoken to a lot of people and done a lot of research. It’s been quite difficult to track down some of the people, because some of these machines are so obscure that
