Felipe Pepe released an expanded digital version of the CRPG Book:

IT IS DONE! The Expanded Edition of The CRPG Book is here, with 680 pages & over 400 RPGs! :D

This is a FREE ebook created by 145 volunteers over the last 8 years, expanded with new sections on MUDs, MMORPGs, Korean, Chinese and French RPGs! Grab it here.

Felipe Pepe posted another update for his CRPG Book Project that has information on his books progress, and shares a link to an updated article on Gamasutra.

Sorry for the delay in this update, but I have a lot to share today!

First, the book’s preview is now over 30.000 downloads! That’s almost as many people as the population of the town I grew up, which is quite scary.

Second, I expanded the “Hot Ratios” post I wrote last year into a full fledged article at Gamasutra. The article was very well received (Ron Gilbert even retweeted it!) and I hope more people become aware of the issue of non-square pixel aspect ratios and learn a few tips on how to solve it.

Third, I’m almost finished with the 20 pages of gaming history that will serve as chapter division, splitting the reviews in intervals of five years: 1974-1979, 1980-1984, 1985-1989, and so on… These will give some context as to what was going on at the time, pointing out key events (and not just console releases).

Felipe Pepe posted the fifth update for his CRPG Book Project that has information the early preview has been downloaded over 20.000 times, and gives a status update.

Last book update I posted was back in January 23, when I celebrated reaching 12.000 downloads of the book’s 100-page preview. A month and a half have passed since, and I’m very happy to share that we reached 20.000 downloads yesterday:

I guess we must be doing something right!

Work on the book is progressing nicely, with a steady flow of new reviews arriving. It’s becoming quite bulky as well, I recently made a 200-page sample that is very gratifying to flip through. It’s so amazing to see things taking form like this. There’s still a way to go, with various essential games lacking reviews, but we’re getting there!

I’ve added a few more reviews to the Review Index page, including classics such as Dungeon Master, Ultima, Gothic, Diablo, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and Darklands. These are web versions, I’ve also been posting new layouted book pages regularly on my twitter account: @felipepepe

And now, Dungeon Master review! One of the most important RPGs in gaming history, it was revolutionary at the time.

Felipe Pepe latest update on his CRPG Book Project has news the review Index is online. Don't forget to send in any reviews if you promised to help out with the book.

Here I’ll be posting some of the finished reviews, so they can be easily read in a computer, linked, commented and archived. I’ll start slowly, but hope to have all reviews hosted here in the future.

He also talks about how 12,000 CRPG Fans Can’t Be Wrong.

Today marks one month (and two days – I’m late!) since the release of the 100-page preview!

I’m happy to share that than 12,000 people downloaded the preview.

I’ll take that as an indicator that there’s some interest for this book! People seem to enjoy the reviews and articles while ignoring the spelling errors (or send corrections by e-mail – thanks!), and a lot of good feedback came in as well. I’ll use them to make the book as good as I can.

My only disappointment is how hard it has been to get some media coverage. In the past month, even with the release of the preview, proving how this isn’t just a crazy idea, we only had one newspost about the project, on Kotaku Brasil. I honestly expected to be easier to promote a free project with names like Chris Avellone, Scorpia and Ian Frazier on board, but that was not the case… can’t imagine how hard it must be then for those with commercial projects.

Felipe Pepe has released a 100 page alpha version of his CRPG Book. He also wants to remind everyone who has pledge to help with a review to please send them in.

I’ll keep this one short: The first public release of the book is out, a 100-page preview featuring 36 reviews, many articles, a working bookmark thingie and countless grammar errors and nonsense like calling the preview of a book an alpha build. 

Grab it here: https://www.mediafire.com/?66nybfqbxfn3p2g

And please, share any feedback you might have. I got a thick skin, I can handle it. ;) Merry Christmas, happy holidays and a great 2015 for everyone!

Since last month Felipe Pepe has updated his website for his CRPG Book Project. The first update takes a look at 15 RPG games that never got a release.

Talking about canceled games is a hard thing… there’s little concrete information, a lot of rumors and, sadly, there are way more canceled games than I can ever hope to address here.

Restricting ourselves to CRPGs, there are numerous titles such as Deus Ex: Insurrection and Deus Ex 3, Alpha Protocol 2, Betrayal at Krondor’s original sequel Thief of Dreams, Arcanum 2, Backspace, Ishar 4, Black Isle’s Torn, Ascendant, Armalion, Stonekeep 2, Cyclopean, Tannhauser Gate, Whichwood, Lord of the Rings: The White Council, etc…

There are also canceled MMORPGs, such as Ultima Online 2, Shenmue Online, Blizzard’s Titan, the World of Darkness MMO and Fallout Online/Project V13. Plus all the countless kickstarter projects that never made it, including Guido Henkel’s Deathfire. And even fan projects, such the recently canceled Project Vaulderie - a remake of VtM: Bloodlines. The list goes on and on and on… and those are the ones we know about. Most of them go silently into the night, with developers spending years of their lives without the audience ever seeing their work or being aware it existed.

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.

His second post shares a list of books to read for any CRPG fan.

The discussion about canceled CRPGs last week was very productive, spawning some interesting forum threads and showing me a lot of games I had missed.

So today I’ll bring up another topic for debate: Books on Computer Role-Playing Games.

I’ve been working on the book for about 9 months now, and during this time I tried to read every book on CRPG & gaming history that I could find. Bellow is a selection of the best ones I found that might be useful to other CRPG fans – including a few on tabletop RPGs and general gaming history.

Felipe Pepe sent out news he posted the first update for his CRPG Book Project.

Wow, it has been a month already since I last posted here… I kind of get why kickstarter projects have such a hard time posting regular updates. Can’t really blame them.

Anyway, a lot of things happened in this past weeks. It has been hard to get big websites to cover the project, so I decided to do it myself and wrote an article on Gamasutra about the current (sad) state of video-game history and my work on the book.

It payed off really well, I got a lot of good feedback from that, reposts in various websites, over 2500 visits to the blog over the month and e-mails from developers willing to take part in the project and give interviews. A guy even translated the whole article to Spanish. Es un honor!

If you’re interested in nerd talk with a Brazilian accent, I also gave an interview about the project to Jeremy Smith of General Protection Fault, a US radio show about technology & games.

Thanks to those, about 30 more games have been assigned and 23 new reviews were delivered, meaning we now have 70% of the game assigned. The list of games to be featured on the book also had new additions, with the release of the amazing Legend of Grimrock II and the announcement of PC ports for the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy and Valkyrie Chronicles. What a great time to be a CRPG fan!

Felipe Pepe sent out news that he was interviewed on site called General Protection Fault to talk about his CRPG Book Project in a new audio interview.

Felipe Pepe has spent a lifetime in Brazil gaming and is interested in giving it all back to past and future gamers through his crowdsourced book, The CRPG Book Project.

Felipe from the RPG Codex posted a new interview with Warren Spector from his upcoming book. Also as a reminder here is the thread on our site for the book.

Mr. Warren, in 1998 you wrote an article for Game Developer magazine, where you argued that RPGs were betraying their role-playing roots by focusing only on “statistics or exploring randomly generated worlds of crate-filled buildings”. That was sixteen years ago, do you think things have changed since? Has any recent game impressed you in that regard?

WS: I think things have changed some, but not enough. We’re still stuck in a world of character classes and traditional RPG statistics. I like to think that games like Deus Ex made a bit of a difference, changing the way people think about RPG’s but maybe I’m fooling myself.

To my mind, the Thief games from Looking Glass did a great job of putting players in the role of an intriguing character without any of the classic RPG tropes. More recently, I thought Deus Ex: Human Revolution did a pretty good job.

One of the biggest challenges in editing this book has been deciding what games to include. Over the years the “RPG” term seems to be more and more used as synonym precisely to those “statistics”, with even games such as Call of Duty and Battlefield claiming to have “RPG-elements” in the form level-ups. As a side-effect, this led to games with no stats, such as Thief and the first System Shock, to not be considered RPGs. What are your thoughts on that?

WS: I don’t think I’d include Call of Duty or Battlefield as RPGs. However, that isn’t because they lack stats. I think games that have no stats can be the ultimate roleplaying games. They force players to adopt a role instead of depending upon rolls (if you see what I mean).

RPG’s should be defined by character and interactions, not by levels and stats.

Felipe from the RPG Codex is putting together a new digital book that will review over 280 CRPG's. Some of our members already know, and are helping him with reviews.

He recently got memotioned on Kotaku with a small update.

This guy is compiling a digital book that will review over 280 computer RPGs—and when it's done, you can get it for free. Developers like Obsidian's Chris Avellone have already agreed to participate. "The book is going well, but I need some spotlight to travel into the far reaches of the internet and reach fans with stories to tell," curator Felipe Pepe tells Kotaku. You can see some sample reviews here, and keep track of his progress on Google Docs.

Also thanks to Hiddenx I have a reminder he still needs more help.

If you're willing to help Felipe and write about one of the unassigned games, just send him a mail (Email-address: see Google Docs).

You can follow the development on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/felipepepe

We also have a pinned thread on our fourms with more infomation.