Gamehistory interviewed Felipe Pepe about the CRPG Book Project:

Ep. 34: The CRPG Book

Felipe Pepe is here to showcase his collaborative, non-profit project to create a historical guide to computer role playing games: The CRPG Book: A Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games. What CRPG’s around the world are cool, interesting, historically important, popular, meaningful, and why are they so? Each entry highlights a game’s eccentricities, context of the time to better understand it, and the straightforward reasons why you should play it (though, there are plenty of games they recommend you don’t play). What started as a six month, 72 item project quickly became a four year, 400 item effort, but only due to overwhelming participation from the community. While the PDF version is completely free for download, all profits from hardcover sales benefit an educational charity in Brazil.

Pre-orders are available for The CRPG Book with delivery in March.

About the book
Spread over more than 500 pages, CRPG Book: A Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games reviews over 400 seminal games from 1975 to 2015, covering the role-playing classics we all know and love such as Ultima, Wizardry, Fallout and Mass Effect – all brought to life with vibrant and engaging in-game images. Each entry also shares articles on the genre, mod suggestions and hints on how to run the games on modern hardware. The book is completely by written by fans, AAA developers, indies, journalists, modders and industry personalities such as Chris Avellone, Ian Frazier, Scorpia, Ferhegón, Richard Cobbett, Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green, Durante, George Weidman and Tim Cain, to name but a few.

CRPG Book: A Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games comes as a hardback as standard and uses thread sewn binding for extra durability. Each copy is then shrink wrapped. The cover features a specially created artwork by fantasy artist Jan Pospíšil.

In line with the project's non-profit nature, all of the author's profit will be donated to the Vocação charity in Brazil, where the books author, Felipe Pepe comes from. Vocação helps kids and teenagers from poor areas to get education and employment, who then go on to help others around them to do the same, changing the community for the better.

Book specifications
528 pages, 254mm x 203mm, Lithographic print, Hardback, Sewn binding, Gold foil blocked cover and spine, shrink wrapped.

Collector’s Edition
The Collector’s Edition of The CRPG Book: A Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games will be exclusive to the pre-order period and limited to just 1,000 units. The book will come within a heavy-duty board slipcase with metallic gold branding and include an A2 rolled poster, A4 Dungeon Map Pad, branded pencil and a pack of 5 postcards.

[...]

The CRPG Book has gone to print and pre-orders are due to open 14/01/19. You can sign-up to be notified here.

OK, so over 100,000 words edited, 1,400 images optimised for print. 528 pages of epic CRPG goodness has now gone to print! @felipepepe

Pre-orders open on 14/01/19
Sign-up to be notified: https://t.co/3MK8TItWU2 pic.twitter.com/RbwgLgCWKW

— Bitmap Books (@bitmap_books) December 13, 2018

Bitmap Books will publish the CRPG Book according to this tweet.

Bitmap Books is proud to announce it will be publishing a new title called The CRPG Book: A Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games. Reviewing over 400 role-playing classics from 1975 to 2015.

More info 👉 https://t.co/IFkfxIBS2u
Sign-up for updates 👉 https://t.co/qNGJShlJVL pic.twitter.com/Zk1TRqfMDX

— Bitmap Books (@bitmap_books) November 5, 2018

[...]
As you’ve come to expect from Bitmap Books, this won’t be a straight printing of the digital book. We’ve commissioned fantasy artist Jan Pospíšil to create the cover and have devised two separate editions of the book, including a very limited collector’s edition that includes a bespoke slipcase and desirable collectables, such as an A2 poster and a dungeon map pad.

The CRPG Book hardcover deal is signed. Due to the deal the links to the CRPG Book will go down until the Books are sold so download while you can.

Hey everyone, the deal for the hardcover CRPG Book has been signed, and as part of it I won't distribute any files until after the books are sold. I'll take the links down tomorrow, grab them while you can! ;)

— Felipe Pepe (@felipepepe) February 28, 2018

Felipe Pepe has confirmed on Twitter that a hardcover version of the CRPG Book will be produced as part of a charity fundraiser.

Good news: got a deal for a hardcover version of the CRPG Book. Professionally proofread & to be used as a charity fundraiser. More details soon ;)

— Felipe Pepe (@felipepepe) February 25, 2018

Felipe Pepe just released version #5 of his CRPG book:

The 5th release of the CRPG Book is here! 450 pages showing over 250 RPGs, plus mods, dev quotes & more! All free! -> download

Felipepepe has announced the third "alpha" release of his mammoth project, the CRPG Book.  Check out the latest here.  Excellent work, and kudos to all who have helped!

Last month I skipped the updated, but I have something good this time to make up for it – the third, 300-page release of the CRPG Book!

CRPG Book Preview 3

This is our third public “alpha”, once again released six months after the previous one and offering 100 additional pages of content – bringing us to amazing 300 pages! That’s more than many books already, but we still have a lot of work to do…

It’s hard to believe, but it has been now two years since I first began to work on this project. My first estimate was “I’ll finish this in 6-8 months”, the first page layout was horrible, and many other foolish mistakes were made, but the journey has been a blast so far. My thanks to everyone who joined!

I consider this release to be the “structure” update. That’s because it comes with at least a small glimpse of all the sections I wish to include in the final version, such as the “Further Adventures”, “Hardware” and “Further Reading” sections. They are still missing most of their content and changes might yet be made, but this should provide a good sense of how the final release will look like.

That in no way means it’s short on games – this edition adds reviews to many of the most popular (and controversial) RPGs, such as Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Baldur’s Gate, Pool of Radiance, Quest for Glory, Knights of the Chalice, Neverwinter Nights 2, both KOTOR games, Dragon Age: Origins and its sequel and many more, pushing us to just over 150 reviews!

Once again, however, there are many more games that still need to be reviewed, so, if you’re interested in helping, please e-mail us: crpgbook@gmail.com or contact me on twitter @felipepepe

Merry Christmas everyone, a great 2016 for all of us! :D

More information.

CRPG Book Project author Felipe expanded his abridged version of CRPG History with a second part, titled 12 more RPGs that brought something new to the table.

Now, if that wasn't clear last time, I'm intentionally leaving out games like Diablo, Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Mass Effect and other extremely popular titles that everyone know about in order to focus on the obscure and amusing games, mechanics or even curiosities.

This once again is just a random sampling of cool/weird computer RPGs I wanted to talk about, in no way intended to be a comprehensive listing - that's what the CRPG Book is for (..)

Games in the spotlight:

• Rings of Zilfin (1987)
• Star Saga: One - Beyond the Boundary (1988)
• The Magic Candle (1989)
• Might & Magic III: Isles of Terra (1991)
• Princess Maker 2 (1993)
• Superhero League of Hoboken (1994)
• Omikron: The Nomad Soul (1999)
• Gorky 17 (1999)
• Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (2001)
• Freedom Force (2002)
• 7.62 High Calibre (2007) & Marauder (2009)

Previous article: CRPG History Abridged - 21 RPGs that brought something new to the table.

Felipe is still looking for contributors to his CRPG Book Project.

Another sneak peek at Felipe's CRPG book:

CRPG History Abridged - 21 RPGs that brought something new to the table

As some of you might know, due to my occasional rant here, I'm the editor of the CRPG Book Project, a non-profit, crowd-sourced project to promote Computer RPGs and their rich history.

Over the past 18 months working on the book I've examined almost 300 RPGs, from the latest releases to PLATO titles from the 70's. All this research is being put into the book, but I'm fully aware that not everyone thinks a +400-page book on RPGs is a cool thing (shame on you), so I've decided to make a really, really, really abridged version, focusing on one single aspect: cool stuff.

So here's a clickbait-like article on some of the most interesting things I came across. I'll focus on more obscure stuff (or at least obscure outside hardcore RPG forums), but I'll also add a few well-know games that do deserve another pass at the spotlight:

• Dungeons of Daggorath (1982)
• Alternate Reality: The City (1985)
• Alien Fires: 2199 A.D. (1986)
• Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna (1987)
• Bloodwych (1989)
• World of Ultima: The Savage Empire (1990) and
• Martian Dreams (1991)
• Ishar: Legend of the Fortress (1991)
• Might & Magic: World of Xeen (1992)
• Wizardry VII - Crusaders of the Dark Savant (1992)
• Ultima VIII: Pagan (1994)
• Wizardry 8 (2001)
• Geneforge (2001)
• ZanZarah: The Hidden Portal (2002)
• Fable (2004)
• Magical Diary (2011)
• Expeditions: Conquistador (2013)
• NEO Scavenger (2014)

Special mention: The Age of Enlightenment Trilogy:

• Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (1985)
• Ultima V: Warrior of Destiny (1988)
• Ultima VI: The False Prophet (1990)

Felipe Pepe just released a 200-page preview of his CRPG book:

It took a lot longer than it should but here it is, the CRPG Book Project 200-page preview:

I apologize for delaying it so much. As you read on the last update, I had created a “few 5-year summary” pages to split the reviews and give some context of what was going on around that time. They were mostly finished, but I couldn’t get them to feel satisfactory and keep delaying the preview to re-write them… after a while I got a bit burned down and was going nowhere, so I decided to shelve them for this update (I’ve kept only one, as a prototype). However, that meant I was suddenly 20 pages short, so it took me a while to fill that blank in with more reviews.

Another factor that delayed it was my big mouth. The whole P.T. & Konami deal in the last month led to a lot of debate about gaming history, and I just couldn’t keep my mouth closed, so I went and wrote A LOT about that in a Gamasutra article.

Regardless, this release marks about 50% of the book being done AND released, which feels great. The feedback for the 100-page preview was great, with over 32k downloads and a lot of e-mails, and I hope everyone enjoy & comment on this preview as well. There’s still a lot of work ahead, but it should go smoother from now on.

One thing that we still need a lot of help are reviewers. I’ve updated the games list, so if you see any game there that you would like to write about, please contact me at crpgbook@gmail.com

Thanks for reading and for all the support!

Keep up the good work, Felipe!

Felipe Pepe tweeted that he has updated the list of pending reviews for his CRPG-Book-Project:

In preparation for the upcoming book preview I updated the list of pending reviews. Take a look if you want to help: -> Spreadsheet

That list is impressive but some promised articles are still missing or are not assigned. So if you ever wanted to be in a book about your favorite hobby and can contribute something interesting contact Felipe.
We have a CRPG-Book-thread here on RPGWatch where you can post questions, suggestions and remarks.

A new blog, the CRPG Book Project, contains this interesting post on 15 CRPGs that were never released:

Thus, this isn’t an absolute list, nor a best-of rank., but rather a collection of some of the most interesting ones that we know about. And a small tribute to those that worked so hard on a game that never saw the light of day.

Given recent rumors about inXile's next RPG, I thought this comment was especially interesting:

[Meantime] is also the reason I decided to compile this list. The Wasteland 2 team announced that they are working on a new RPG, and I want to bully them into making it Meantime. DO IT!