My Favourite Game Nate Crowley

The author on making up games, failing to make one, and relaxing with Civilization.

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Nate Crowley is a sci-fi author who got his publishing career started after taking a Twitter joke with a best friend too far. His new book, 100 Best Video Games (That Never Existed), is based on a Twitter thread started late last year when he decided to create a fictional game for every like received. Here, he discusses how making up game names is, funnily enough, much easier than actually making the things.

Where did you even begin to come up with so many game ideas? 

What’s really funny is my cat was just whining to get into the room and then immediately started whining to get out again, which was the inspiration for the first game in the book, Look, Are You Coming In Or Not? So there was at least that much inspiration from real life. Probably one in five of them I thought of a mechanic I quite liked and then came up with a tweet to go around it. Those ones weren’t very funny, to be fair.

What was it like having game concept artists illustrate the games for you?