I’ve received enough “what in god’s name are you thinking?” responses to my plan to phase out Anatomy of Games over the past few weeks to make to reconsider my decision. I’m unhappy with the way the site turned out, but enough people enjoy it that killing off the site altogether seems a little rude. I don’t intend to write any more entries in the series, but I’ll leave the site up, at least. I’ve also updated the main page with a link to the permanent archives.
And I am putting forward a vague, if unlikely, prospect of more Anatomy projects in the future. I’ve retooled my Patreon campaign for Game Boy World (et al.) to change targets and tiers beginning this month. As with Retronauts, the minimum support level for early content access is now $2 instead of $1. However, I’ve also stripped out a bunch of useless tiers and greatly lowered the price for supporting the site and getting PDF and print editions of Game Boy World (et al.) collections and the like before they’re available for sale elsewhere. My expectation is that this will result in the campaign bringing in less money each month, but I have put a regular Anatomy of Games video series tier out there as a dangling possibility if the campaign manages to climb about 50%, to $1500/month—the point at which all the money I bring in via Patreon would no longer go entirely toward taxes/book distribution to backers/sourcing materials for Game Boy World (et al.). Seems unlikely, trending on impossible, but I suppose anything can happen.
I thought the two Anatomy videos I did create last year turned out quite well — so well, in fact, that they’re honestly the reason why I decided to deprecate the text series in the first place. This is the format I should be using. And maybe I will, someday. Who knows.
For the foreseeable future, though, there’s plenty to read in the archives.
Oh man, this is great news. I’ve been doing some game replays thanks to these (metroid fusion woo) and I’m looking forward to the revival of FFVI since I’ve never really managed to overcome my ennui during the world of ruin to polish it off. Also, I just started linking a friend who’s delving deep into Mario Maker to your Mario discussions to inspire some design (along with the daily Mario videos).
I didn’t want to push when you seemed pretty decided that this was something that could stand to go, but I’m glad that you’ve found a reason to keep it.
Great news. I humbly suggest that if you ever do bring back the Anatomy, you begin with Metroid Zero Mission. Your pieces on Super and Fusion are top-notch, and I’m looking forward to your thoughts on the last of the original Metroid games.
Does this mean you’ll also be leaving the books up on Amazon, do plan on getting them in the near future once I’ve gotten some bills out of the way and after the big gaming period coming up with the 3DS RPG Avalanche XD
No, I’m still delisting three of the books, but they’ll remain available in a Gumroad bundle as PDFs.
Great news, Jeremy, thanks!