Aidan Moher takes his video game writing to the next level.
The writer from Victoria and Nanaimo has been writing professionally with bylines in video games such as Kotaku and Wired for years. In 2014 he won a prestigious Hugo Award for best fanzine with his online magazine A Dribble of Ink.
Now he is crossing the physical world with his very first book: Fight, magic, items.
The book, out today, builds on Moher’s decades of personal and professional video game experience, focusing on the specific, influential subgenre of Japanese roleplaying games, or JRPGs. Moher says his personal experience with JRPGs goes all the way back to when he was a child, babysitting by a teenage friend of his family.
“One night he came up with a new game for my new Super Nintendo called Final Fantasy 3,” said Moher. “He put that into the console — and that was it at the time.”
That kind of personal experience mixes with JRPG’s professional history in Moher’s book. Over the course of 33 chapters, Fighting, Magic, Items explores the backgrounds and development of titans of the genre such as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, while also drawing the story from Moher’s own relationships with many of the games.
He wanted to create a book that would appeal to gamers and novices alike by delving into the creators’ unique backstories.
“Those human stories — about what drives us, what drives our creative ambitions — I think are interesting for everyone,” Moher said. “I hope people will read the book and feel like they know more about that creative process.”
It is a unique process for writing a piece of culture, because unlike other artistic disciplines that are hundreds or even thousands of years old, the individuals involved in video games are largely still alive and available to talk about their work.
Some of the people Moher spoke to for the book include Alexander O. Smith, a noted translator of Japanese games for English localization, including Vagrant Story, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and Final Fantasy XII, and Peter Tieryas, a writer and VFX artist who has worked on games such as Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, Escape from Monkey Island and Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault.
The book follows the evolution of the genre, from spectacularly successful games like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy taking their first tentative steps, all the way up to today. But even these contemporary success stories were pioneers on shaky ground; Final Fantasy, in particular, was so named because the studio feared it would be their last title and a financial failure.
Moher’s research even revealed some unexpected Canadian connections. Looking at the crossover in themes and inspiration between Western games, starting with Dungeons and Dragons and JRPGs, Moher spoke to a Quebec studio that makes its own JRPG-style game called Sea of Stars.
Canada, the third largest producer of video games in the world after the United States and Japan, even has industry roots dating back to one of the most influential companies out there: Nintendo of America.
Moher highlights in his book that Nintendo of America founder Minoru Arakawa first came to North America when he moved to Vancouver with his wife Yoko to invest in a condo project.
Yoko was the daughter of Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo’s notoriously spiky third president, and Minoru Arakawa actually “married” into the family business — a company Yoko detested almost as much as she detested the North American lifestyle.
Moher writes that the family was towed by Arakawa to a hotel in Vancouver and taken to a Denny’s next door, where Yoko stated, “If this is America, I’ve made a big mistake.”
After first investing in a million dollar condo project in Vancouver, Arakawa was then urged by Yoko’s father to head Nintendo’s new US division out of New York City, and the family left Vancouver for a cross-continental road trip on May 18. 1980, which Moher notes is the same day that Mount St. Helens erupted in Washington state, a coincidence he describes as a “prophetic omen of Nintendo’s explosive growth in the West led by Arakawa.”
“When this was all traced back to Canada, I thought, this is so fascinating to me, because I don’t think Canada is necessarily connected to the world of video games,” Moher said.
“But of course that has changed a lot. Canada is a huge home to so many game developers and publishers, and I think it’s only natural to look back and find all these connections to Canada.”
Fighting, Magic, Items will be available everywhere books are sold, including online through Amazon or Kobo and in stores like Chapters and Indigo, as well as local favorites like Munro’s Books. Local buyers should also keep an eye out for signed copies, which Moher says he plans to make at select stores on Vancouver Island.
Now a parent raising some members of the next generation of gamers, Moher hopes his book will find an audience both inside and outside the gaming world.
“I think people can connect with those feelings, that nostalgia, just thinking back to playing a game with their brother or their sister one night,” he said.
“I think hopefully people will take that away and think back and look at the way art can inspire people; the way it can leave memories and bring people closer together. And that is a kind of universal experience.”
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