In between playing Thief 3, I got a couple books in the mail the other day and I’ve started reading Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar and The Making of Doom 3. Both books are visually amazing, but they are interesting in comparison to each other. The Doom 3 book is full of suitably scary and gothy fonts and layout, while the Half-Life 2 book is more slick and streamlined. The Doom 3 paperback, Half-Life 2 hardback. It is obvious that they meant the Half-Life 2 book to be more of a coffetable book. So far the Half-Life book is much more informative than the Doom one, at least in terms of background info. The Doom book is much more concerned with the technical things, while the Half-Life one is a more historical book.
The biggest thing though is that the Doom book has an author, Steven Kent, while the Half-Life book is simply “by Valve.” Who knew that beside making games, the folks at Valve wrote books? Seriously though, while the book is full of lots of quotes, almost like a commentary track on a DVD, there still had to be someone who sat down and interviewed these people and put all this into some shape. Since I tend to spend a lot of time interviewing people and putting those interviews into some sort of order, I’d like to see the person who did that get some sort of credit besides contributing editor or manager. It is interesting that a company like Valve that has had issues with people stealing their work, would put out a book without attributing it to someone. There’s all kinds of theft in the world. Just because some of it is legal doesn’t mean it is any more right…
On another note this is my 101st post on movable type (ok, sure there might have been a couple test posts in there, but still!) Of course before I used movable type, I had a site on geocities that I put up sometime back in 2001, and then started using blogger in April of 2002. I finally moved to my own dot com site in January of 2004 where I will be for a long time to come. 101 posts in a little over a year, not so bad, if I do say so myself. Thanks for reading!