Hello there! I have been delving in the world of video game books for quite a while now, and let me tell you, there's a lot of room for discussion here!
My starting points in all this business have been the books I've personally gone through up to this point and listening to the PixelLit podcast (highly recommend it) while going through the motions in my day to day life. Those books have three main purposes I could identify, between enriching the world of the games and franchises they adapt, trying to adapt the games to the written medium so they could hook in new people and the omnipresent one: cashing in on the success of the games. I'll take a closer look at the first two, the third one being pretty bland and self-evident.
Enriching the world
When I'm talking about enriching the world, I am both talking about weaving new stories in the same setting, be they prequels, sequels or completely unrelated to the actual events of the games, and filling in gaps between stories which have already been told in the games. A great example of this (from my personal experience) is Assassin's Creed: The Secret Crusade by Oliver Bowden. The book follows the story of Altaïr, the protagonist of the first game in the series, Assassin's Creed Bloodlines and certain segments of Assassin's Creed Revelations (I have openly been a fan of the series for a long while, if you can't tell), and it does retell the game segments throughout, but the meat of the book are the events interspersed between them and delving into his mindspace, really showing off how he turns from an arrogant and impulsive young man into a wise old mentor of the brotherhood, each success and tragedy molding him and, as the reader, you have front row seats into what he feels and is thinking. The book also straight up pulls a final twist too, unveiling that everything you have read was basically a journal that Ezio had been reading on the way to Masyaf to seek Altair's library, effectively being the catalyst of Assassin's Creed Revelations's events. The book is absolutely great and I would recommend it to anyone, not just AC fans.
Another great book that is mainly in this category is Far Cry Absolution by Urban Waite, a relatively short prequel to Far Cry 5. It follows 2 perspectives, that of Mary May Fairgrave, a quest giver in the game and owner of a bar, on a journey to get her brother back from the Eden's Gate cult, and also a hunter called Will Boyd, who is an Eden's Gate member who slowly has a fallout with said cult and has an almost family connection with Mary May. The way the tension build in the book is sublime in my opinion, and you really feel that the cult has insidiously got themselves into power in all aspects of the fictional Hope County, between basically owning huge swaths of the forest, to having a highly militarized compound in said forest, to having the power to close down businesses in town and even diverting cargo deliveries from them, and even killing people that oppose their dominance while the police does absolutely nothing about it. I will not spoil the story, because this is a great read, but I really wanted to showcase this one, because Urban Waite is an amazing writer and this was, I believe, the fourth book he ever got published.
Other books that I'd highly recommend in this category are Bioshock: Rapture by John Shirley and Halo: The Rubicon Protocol and Halo: Epitaph, both by Kelly Gay.
Lost in translation
Now we're getting into some less interesting books, at least from a story standpoint. They are still interesting though, from how the authors and publishers choose to adapt the source material. The first book of this kind I've gotten into was Assassin's Creed Renaissance by Oliver Bowden, which is an almost exact adaptation of Assassin's Creed II, and for someone that played the game, it was a bit of a slog. The nature of this kind of book is that someone who played the game can not really get invested, since they already know everything (or close to everything) that happens in the book and also, at least in my case, can't help but continuously compare it to the game. As the heading of this section suggests, I feel like some of the magic of the stories is lost in translation, mostly due to how different games and books are, starting from the fact that written words are not an interactive medium, so plot points and scenarios which were originally designed to directly involve a player's inputs have been translated to a second hand recollections of events. I know I sound pretty negative, but my intention here is to show that this kind of book really isn't designed for people that are already invested in the games, they are closer to jumping on points. This also presumes the books are still well written.
There are pretty bad adaptations out there, like Metal Gear Solid by Raymond Benson, which mostly fails because it translates dialogue from the game without any changes, and it just doesn't have the same vibe without the kinda cheesy voice acting (the absences of David Hayter's and Cam Clarke's voices are really felt), accidentally making out Snake as an absolute lecher, starting the book off by him hoping to be examined by a cute nurse or talking about Meryl swinging her ass when she walks being the reason she recognized her when disguised. There are many moments like that combined with glossing over almost all of the sneaking sections from the game which really hurt the book.
Metal Gear Solid might have been bad, but Dead Island by Mark Morris is even worse. The game didn't really have much of a story, but it did have some endearing characters, like John Sinamoi, a Polynesian lifeguard on the fictional island of Banoi. I am bringing him up specifically, because the book basically commits character assassination on him, turning him from a friendly middle aged guy who risks his life to save others into a dude who can barely speak English and is only helping the main characters for monetary gain. Overall the book generally follows the same events of the game, having the characters meander through most of the same locations, even if their layout doesn't match (for example, the Sinamoi's lifeguard tower is just a shack in the book, I feel like they really just hated Sinamoi). There is also a small delve into Purna (one of the main characters)'s backstory, of her going for vigilante justice after a rich and powerful criminal managed to wiggle himself out of legal trouble, which I don't really remember if it was in the game or not. Overall, I would not recommend this one.
There are books that are almost straight adaptations which are pretty well written I would recommend, like Warhammer 40K Fire Warrior by Simon Spurrier, which is actually a great book based on a bad game, or ICO: Castle in the Mist by Miyuki Miyabe.Conclusion
In the end, I hope you found some of my thoughts about books based on video games interesting and I'd like to encourage people to pick up some of the books I've recommended (and maybe some I've recommended against) to form their own opinions and to also talk about their favourite games and books and anything in-between.
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What a great overview and review of Video Game books and adaptations! I've read the original Starcraft books Liberty's Crusade, about a freelance reporter that gets involved with the events of the Terran campaign in Starcraft 1 and its characters and shadow of the Xel'naga, which I cannot quite remember the plot. I've read Halo: Reach which was a pretty interesting backstory in the Spartan Program and other Spartans along 117.
I too also read the Metal Gear Solid and Assassins Creed 2 adaptations aswell as the Warhammer 40k Blood Ravens, a Dawn of War adaptation, and felt them lacking in comparison to the events in the game.
I think I lost a taste for books based on/around popular video games when I realized that most events in the book often went unrecognized in the game and its developers hardly mentioned it at all which created a disconnect between the story I read and the continuation in the game.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this concept! It's funny how much a story from a video game can sprawl off into different genres of books and sometimes surprise the reader with a surprisingly great read from a game series they know.
The funny thing about Halo: The Fall of Reach is that the book came years before the game, so Halo: Reach is technically a game based on a book, a whole other can of worms I will probably have to deal with at some point, between this book you mentioned, The Witcher and Metro, probably among many others.
I do have to admit that not acknowledging cross-media stuff is also a pet-peeve of mine. To my knowledge, Halo and Assassin's Creed are mostly up to par with keeping the continuity relatively clean (the games themselves sometimes breaking lore and failed live action projects notwithstanding).
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Although I know that there are some books about video games, I thought there were very few and of very specific titles. I am surprised to see that Assasins Creed has several.
Yeah, AC basically has one book for each game, plus a lot of spinoffs. Still, there are books for a lot of franchises out there, learned of them mostly due to that podcast I mentioned at the beginning of the post. The most surprising one for me is an Infinity Blade novella written by Brandon Sanderson.