It’s time for our 2026 plans! There’s a lot going on so this is going to be a long post.
In 2024, we published two HG101 books – Arcade Cult Classics and Sega Console Classics Vol. 1. In 2025, we didn’t publish anything. But for 2026, we’re gearing up for three more books:
Ys and Other Falcom Classics
Ys was one of the first series we covered back when the site was founded in 2004 – back then, Ys VI had just been released for Japanese PC, and now we’re up to Ys X (along with several more remakes). The update has been updated and rewritten many times over the past two decades, so I wanted to give it another pass before publishing it in printed form, especially with tidbits from Hiromasa Iwasaki’s excellent Ys General History doujinshi. (Maybe this is something we should try to get published in English too? We’ll see!)
Though Ys is the centerpiece, there’s also many other Falcom games featured, like most of the Dragon Slayer series (including Xanadu, Romancia, Legacy of the Wizard, Sorcerian, and Legend of Xanadu), Popful Mail, Brandish, Zwei!!, and Gurumin. And since the team behind Ys also founded Quintet, as a bonus we’re including reviews of their SNES games like ActRaiser, Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia, and Terranigma. I’ve also compiled a catalog of the many, many, many Falcom soundtrack albums, especially made for VGM fans. However, we’ll be leaving the Trails games for a sequel volume, because it’s a massive series that deserves its own tome.
If you’re a Patreon at the $5 level, you can grab a preview copy here. The book is about 90% done, what’s left are a few pages to format, a few additional articles to write, and the cover. This should be completed within the next few months.
Metal Gear, Silent Hill and More Konami Classics
This speaks for itself. Metal Gear and Silent Hill are both enormous series, so they take up a big chunk of the book. Also included are reviews of Snatcher, Policenauts, and the Zone of the Enders series. I’m trying to squeeze in a few other pieces too, depending on how much space we have left. I’m aiming for this to be published sometime in summer 2026.
Mascot Platformers
It’s a book of scrimblos! Of course, we can’t call it that because it’s an even more impenetrable term than “metroidvania” or “roguelike”, but I think readers will get a sense of what this will be. It covers the many 16-bit games that came in the wake of Sonic the Hedgehog and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, that heavily emphasized personality along with platforming – games like Bubsy, Battletoads, Earthworm Jim, Jazz Jackrabbit, lots of furry anthropomorphic creatures and such. There are a lot of DOS and Amiga platformers that ended up qualifying, too. I’m aiming to have this one out before the end of the year.
Also, Patreon donors at the $5+ level can get the HG101 Holiday Special 2025 PDF, which compiles a lot of our work-in-progress books, like the above Konami and Mascot Platformers books, as well as a few other long term HG101 projects we have in the works, like Beat-Em-Ups Vol. 2, Sega Console Classics Vol. 2, Capcom and SNK Arcade Classics, More Taito Arcade Classics, and a few others.
Now, for a few non-HG101 books:
The Guide to 1990s PC Games
We don’t have a proper name for this yet, but you might guess, this is an enormous book focusing on everything from the golden era of PC gaming. Obviously it features a lot of the big-name first person shooters, adventure games, RPGs, shareware titles, strategy games, FMV games, educational titles, and so forth, but we’re really digging into the weeds to dig up some of the most unique and interesting games from this period, from all around the world. In the end, I think it’ll end up approaching something like the Home of the Underdogs but in book form. The approach we’re taking is similar to Bitmap Books’ A Guide to Japanese Role-Playing Games, with brief write-ups and a handful of screenshots, and a design inspired by the 1990s American PC Gamer magazine. We’re aiming to cram a lot in there, roughly 700 pages worth.
We’ve actually been working on this for roughly three years at this point, and we have about 300 pages done, but we still have a long way to go. Patreon donors at the $5+ level can get a 50 page preview here. We are planning to pitch this to a publisher since we can’t publish anything on this scale on our own, but it’ll still be quite aways off.
Guide to PlayStation Imports
There are hundreds upon hundreds of PlayStation games released only in Japan, and a lot of them are pretty cool! Some of these are approaching thirty years old and the international scene is still slowly picking up on these. This book aims to delve into this enormous and fascinating library! We’re still discovering things to include all the time – I bought two Japanese-language catalogs to help research this – but it’s probably going to be in the area of 500 pages or more.
Unlike some of the other books here, there isn’t any sample PDF, because there’s not much of the book that’s actually been produced – I still need to finalize the layout (particularly the info box at the top) before I start designing it. However, we’ve been posting many of the intended write-ups over the past couple of years as part of our Japanese Obscurities column.
The History of Westone
We have the opportunity to write about the history of Westone, sourced from previous Japanese and English language interviews as well as primary sources with the directors, programmers, musicians and artists. While most known as the developer of the Wonder Boy/Monster World series, they’ve worked on many other games, and had close relationships with Sega and Hudson. Their story also parallels the Japanese game scene in general, starting with the arcade and console boom of the 1980s and 1990s, along the difficulty that small developers faced when transitioning to 3D development at the turn of the century.
Retro Anime Book
Back during the lockdown days of the pandemic, I thought it would be neat to get into retro anime. I was a big weeb back in the late 1990s when a teenage me got their mind blown by Evangelion, but I’d never really delved back in the earlier days of the 1970s and 1980s, when so many genre conventions were established. Even though I didn’t grow up with these series, their fingerprints are all over Japanese pop media at the time, including many classic video games. There were tons of licensed games for stuff like Urusei Yatsura, Ranma ½, and others, but plenty of other genres were inspired by popular anime of the era – you’ll get a greater understanding of shoot-em-ups if you’ve seen Mobile Suit Gundam or Macross, or gain better appreciation of beat-em-ups with Fist of the North Star. (Our colleague Kate Willaert has also done a fantastic job of tying Metroid to Space Adventure Cobra.) There are also all of those bikini warrior games like Valis and Athena that evolved out of OVAs like Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko. So this book aims to untangle a lot of these roots, along with plenty of original screenshots, per usual HG101 standards.
This is way too big of a project to do at once, so I’ve roughly broken them down into two projects: one that focuses on 70s/80s anime, and a follow-up for 90s anime. I started work on this more than three years ago, around the time I began the 90s PC book, but there’s only about 100 pages done. Patreon donors at any level can grab all of this preview work in PDF format here.
However, I’ve run into a bit of a production snag. This is an overwhelming topic for a single person, so I usually look to hire some expert freelancers to fill in stuff where I can’t. However, most of the funding for these book projects come from the Patreon. We’re a video game site, so people are paying for video game content, and I don’t feel right allocating the budget for a different topic, even if they’re related. As such, I need to find a different source of funding. I could fund it through an alternate crowdfunding campaign, or even look for a proper publisher (though I have no idea who would be interesting in something like this.) But here’s a problem – you’ll notice that we’re already juggling about half a dozen other books. If we commit to something like this, then the anime book takes priority and everything else will get pushed by the wayside. Therefore, I’d like to spend the year focusing on getting a few more of these out the door, and continue to work on the anime book slowly, until more of my plate is clear.
Now, for some notes on assorted upcoming and past projects:
Now Playing: A Guide to 1980s and ‘90s Movie Games
This is being published by Press Run Books! There was a pre-order period back in summer 2025, which has since passed, but the book is currently being printed, and pre-orders should be shipping at the end of February. After this, any remaining copies will go on wider sale.
Japanese Video Game Obscurities
As I wrote about last year, the publisher, Unbound, went belly up last year, denying me a few years worth of royalties in the process. I’ve seen a few copies pop up on Amazon every now and again, but otherwise it can now be considered out-of-print – from my understanding, there’s a handful of copies in a UK warehouse somewhere, but I have no way of affordably getting them to me. Anyway, since the publisher is bankrupt, that means the rights revert to me. However, I only own the text, not the layout, so if I were to self-publish it, I’d have to redesign it.
I had originally written many other pieces with the intention of doing a follow-up volume, but I’ve thought that it may be better to do a revised edition that has all of this additional content. After all, there were many games that were Japan-exclusive at the time that have seen modern ports and remakes released internationally, along with fan translations, so they may not be quite as obscure as they were ten years ago.
The book had been out for several years and I think it’s probably run its course. However, I do like to try to keep my books in print in perpetuity, if possible, so this is something I still need to hash out.
Secret Bitmap Books Project
I have another book coming from Bitmap! It’s even larger than the JRPG book! It’s probably not going to be out for awhile, though. I can’t say anything until they say something, so keep your eyes/ears open!
Other Site News
Podcast
As of early 2026, the Top 47,858 Games of All time podcast has ranked over 1,500 games! We also discuss a lot of unusual titles, stuff that I guarantee you won’t find on other video game podcasts. I appear sometimes myself, but I also use it as research for my own written work, too! For $3 a month, you get access to ad-free, higher quality versions of all episodes, plus more than 380 bonus Patreon-exclusive episodes! Plus, you can participate in monthly polls to vote on which games to cover on future episodes.
Postcards
For the past several years, we’ve been commissioning artwork and creating custom postcards. Here’s the whole gallery of them, over 30 in total! Though we’ve fallen behind on producing these, we’ve got eight done over the past two years, as seen above! We’re putting the finishing touches on them now, and should be printing (and then shipping) these to $20+ Patreon donors within the next month or so. Anyone who joins the Patreon at this level over the next few months will receive these in the mail too! We have some leftovers of the previous ones, so please let me know if you want any extras and I’ll add one if I can find one. We’ll continue to commission more as long as we can afford to, because it allows us the opportunity to fanart for some lesser known titles.
Submissions Reopening Soon
I’ll be reopening submissions on a limited basis shortly, since we’re planning on more books for the next few years. However, we’ll only be accepting pitches on specific topics, but if you’ve been visiting the site for awhile, you probably know the kind of stuff we like – more Sega (particularly Genesis, Saturn, or late 90s arcade stuff), Taito and Namco arcade stuff, strategy-RPGs (since we’re planning an Ogre Battle/Final Fantasy Tactics book for 2027), more beat-em-ups, things of that sort.
Video Game Storybundle 2026
I’m curating the next video game Storybundle for sometime later in the year! Do you have a video game book you’d like to feature? Are you planning on writing one? You can be included with several (usually around a dozen) other video game related ebooks and get some extra cash! Please note that this doesn’t have to be anything actually published by HG101 – you still own all of the rights and can sell it elsewhere. If you want to write one, all you need is Word, plus a way to output PDFs and convert Word DOCs to digital formats like Kindle and ePub. If you’re interested, drop me a line at kurt@hardcoregaming101.net!
Site Ads
Recently, HG101 has been dropped by its ad server, Publishers Collective. I was fine with this, since the ads were barely bringing in much money anyway. I only kept the ads around in case the Patreon ever had to be closed, so at least the site would be self-sustaining enough to cover server costs. However, for the past few years, ad income has been roughly $75 per month, which only covers a little more than half the hosting bills. For the moment, I’ve shifted back to Google Adsense, since I used to use them a long time ago. However, everyone hates ads, so I figured that I’d add a new Patreon goal – if we can get the site funded the $1750 per month, then I’ll ditch these ads totally (though I’ll still keep certain ads on the sidebar that promote my own and other colleague’s books). This way, you won’t even need to use an ad blocker!
For $5 a month, you’ll get all of the bonus books above, plus digital copies of our two more recent ones, Arcade Cult Classics and Sega Console Classics Vol. 1. The major video game journalism sites have been crumbling over the past few years, so please consider any independent outlets like HG101, which have been around for more than twenty years. The money keeps the site alive and regularly updated, plus it funds the podcast and all of the many books we’ve discussed above.
One other main goal in the year is to finally get this site onto HTTPS. It doesn’t really need it since there’s no real personal data that needs to be sent securely, but browsers and search engines complain about it, so we have to comply eventually. This is far more complicated than it should be – I miss the days when all you needed to know to create a webpage was some HTML and how to use an FTP program.
Please look forward to more news when we’re ready!
