I wanted to share with you a personal project that I’ve been working on over the past few weeks behind the scenes, and hope to release this year for the Dreamcast community: a new physical book titled The A-Z of Dreamcast Racing Games.
This book will cover all 50 racing games ever released on the Dreamcast (as well as a few extra that never actually got released), featuring a retrospective review of each game as well as some insight and interviews from the original development teams of select titles. There will be some additional content included as well (I’m not giving away everything just yet!) and it will be the ultimate companion for any Dreamcast fan who loves racing games.
I’ve made a conscious decision not to go down the traditional crowd-sourcing route for this book and instead will be self-publishing via Amazon. This decision enables me to keep costs down as low as possible, not having to commit people to up-front orders and additionally, makes the book readily available to anyone worldwide. It also means that the book will be published in a format that is not too dissimilar to a cheats book from back in the 90s, which I must admit I really like!
Like any great adventurer, I’ve decided not to go totally alone and have enlisted the help of at least two Dreamcast juggernauts to lend their expertise for a few of the games. Tom and Mike from the Junkyard (and also the Power Drifting podcast) are known fans of the racing genre and will no doubt have some phenomenal contributions for you to enjoy in the book. I have little doubt that as things progress, more expert contributors will be included as well.
There is no official release date set, but I’m going to do everything I can to get the book completed by the end of the year, so that Dreamcast fans can wake up to a copy of The A-Z of Dreamcast Racing Games in their stocking on Christmas morning. Doesn’t that sound great?!
I will of course keep you posted with how things are progressing here on the Junkyard, but feel free to comment below or on Twitter if you have any initial questions or thoughts. If you'd like to register your interest in the book, drop an email to book@dreamcast.shop and I'll keep you updated that way, too.
8 comments:
Interesting — I had never though that there as many as 50 or so racing games for the Dreamcast. Though if there is ~625 games in total (I am going off the number on wikipedia), there are probably that as many games for the visual novel, shooter, fighter, etc, genres.
I will be looking forward to read of updates to the project.
Yep, 50 racing games which include just one JP exclusive!
That's a book I always dreamt of. Arcade racing games on Dreamcast were really top notches. And there some that were really underrated. Keep on and I want absolutely one copy!
@Sandman66 - thank you!
Cool. I will probably buy one.
This is a great idea James, I wish you the best of luck with it! Just a little info about 4X4 evo, we are going to start seeing awesome themed car packs for it since it is a Windows CE game and shares file formats with the PC version of the game. Which means mod tools exist and we already have people working on modding it and basically porting over the maps from Monster Truck Madness as well as the Monster Trucks so we will be able to play that classic game on DC in this updated engine. We can also lock it to specific servers so it will only allow you to play online with other people who have this same modded version to keep it fair for all.
Also, I have started looking into modding Sega GT making car liveries based on Fast & The Furious cars. Still researching everything but I planned to try and do custom soundtracks for it as well as car textures.
There is also a modded version of Gran Turismo 2 out now which is still being worked on that patches the game fixing various bugs, glitches, adds back in missing cars from first game, and a lot more things. It is now playable on Bleem but you can find out more about it here. The site requires you to supply your own copy of the game to patch so the site is DCJY friendly in that there is no copyrighted content there so link should be cool.
https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/threads/mod-gran-turismo-2-plus-bug-fixes-restored-content-and-new-content.378282/
Fascinating stuff @Anthony817 - will check that link out. Thanks!
Very cool! Nice to see more Dreamcast books! This would be a definite pickup for me. I hope it comes it out in 2022 :)
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