R.I.P. Prima Games

Well it’s a good thing we still have BradyGames guides.

They merged with Prima in 2015.

Sorry, I forgot to close it with /s

…uh, it’s a good thing GameFAQS.com is still lively and active, right? /s

My Fallout and Skyrim guides act as a stand for my monitor. I always bought the guide with the Bethesda products because they helped considerably.

Completing mine on this side, lookie what arrived today:

Finally mine!

Incidently, I had dug out from the mossy basement Rome on 640K a day yesterday, then launched Civilization… then lost my evening to it

OMG congrats! Truly one of the finest strategy guides ever written. I’m still reading through mine, taking my time and soaking it all in, as it’s much about game design as it is about the game itself.

When I first entered the game industry as a tester, I hadn’t really given a thought to how these books were composed. Naturally, the authors of them weren’t actually supreme experts at the game; the studio provided nearly everything (minus, of course, the color commentary). So when we got to the weird dead state between a game being “done” (and in submission to first parties, then waiting on RTM), we started pounding away at the game to provide info to Prima for the strat guide.

That was a lot of fun. We had some crazy challenges in the game, and having a whole crew of young, rowdy testers competing with one another to come up with the most efficient strategies so we could provide the steps to them was a blast.

It also astounded me how quickly these things got turned around. While some stuff - lists of weapons, levels, etc., were prepared well in advance, these kind of hard core tips waited until the last minute. I mean, I’d always thought of books and how long the lead times were on those; these were these huge glossy tomes, yet here we were, creating content for them, and they’d be out in just a couple of months.

For a bunch of testers, the guide was as valuable to them as the game, because they were often thanked in the book, meaning it was another opportunity to see their name published in some fashion. So my memories of them are fond, not just from the consumer perspective, but from the other side of it, too.

That is an awesome story! Thanks for sharing!

I cowrote this one for Brady. Basically, troubleshooting DOS games, early DirectX games, getting games to work well under WIndows. Brady gave us a super-tight deadline, to the point that TC and I finished it during covering E3.

Then they sat on it for 9 months before printing it because their sales team had no idea how to sell a troubleshooting book into stores. By the time it came out, Win 95 gaming had taken hold and it was completely out of date.

This came in.

Only the Imperialism 2 one left from my priority list!

Cool! :)

@Left_Empty, Terry was my coauthor for the book I linked directly over your post. :) TC lived and breathed turn-based strategy at the time, so I have to imagine that book is awesome.

IIRC Terry was the editor who game me most of my wargame writing assignments when I freelanced for CGW way back when.

Yep, he would have been.

God, I miss making a living writing about games. Stupid Internet.

:)

I would have loved that book.

Instead, everything I learned about getting DOS games to work I learned from the Mechwarrior Boot Disk Maker.

For me it was futzing with the Tie Fighter boot disk.

Origin games molded me into a hardened conventional and EMS/XMS memory ninja.

Wish that Brady guide had come out prior to Win 95. During the DOS-Windows 3.1 period, a buddy of mine taught me the dark arts of config.sys/autoexec.bat file management. Splurged once on a memory management program called QEMM (or something like that) but I could never get it to work right.

QEMM (by Quarterdeck) was great, once you figured it out. I had my batch file menus set up to run various configurations based on the memory and BIOS needs of each game. Fun times. (not)

Dear Lord yes. Getting an Ultima game to run was a 5 hour quest all its own. You should start the actual game at level 2 after that shit.