Here’s our World Book Day post from White Owl Books author, Chris Scullion.

The N64 Encyclopedia is the fourth of my video game encyclopedias for Pen & Sword. Video games have been my hobby for my entire life, and for the past 17 years they’ve been my career too: I joined the Official Nintendo Magazine as a staff writer back in May 2006 and have been a professional video games journalist ever since.

When I was about 7 years old my dad bought me a magazine called The Complete Guide to Consoles, which had small reviews of a few hundred video games in it. I was obsessed with that magazine and have always thought “it would be great to have something like this, but with every single game in it, not just the ones they decided to include”. After having a chat with Pen & Sword, I was finally given the chance to write exactly that, and The NES Encyclopedia – a reference book covering every game released for the Nintendo Entertainment System console – was released in 2019. I’ve since released The SNES Encyclopedia and The Mega Drive & Genesis Encyclopedia, and my latest is The N64 Encyclopedia.

Although there are a couple of video game encyclopedia books like this available, many of them are written by enthusiasts and self-published or crowdfunded. While that’s a perfectly viable way of doing it, I feel proud that my series is not only written solely by one writer – and therefore has the same ‘voice’ and tone throughout – it’s written by someone with nearly 20 years’ experience writing about video games professionally, and someone who lived through the video game eras presented in each volume.

Because I’ve written a few of these books, they’re starting to come together as a proper series: the structure is the same in each of them, so that anyone new to the series can pick up the third, fourth or fifth book and can then happily buy the earlier books and know exactly what they’ll be getting. I’m really proud of how the series is taking shape, and with a fifth book, The Dreamcast Encyclopedia, coming later this year and at least a further five planned in the coming years, I dream of a day when video game devotees have a big shelf with all my books on them, like a gaming version of the Encyclopedia Britannica!

You can order this title and others by Chris Scullion here.