Late at night during early October 2014 I was surfing news over at the Commodore is Awesome (CiA) website and came across a Kickstarter project (related to Commodore 64 pixel graphics) which grabbed my attention.

Commodore 64: a visual Commpendium by Bitmap Books

Now, how in the HELL can anybody ask for funding of £20,000 (and actually getting up to £35,594) to produce a 200 paged book of Commodore 64 Pixel Graphics that is simply put a cut and paste scenario of other people's artwork back in the days??!!

The guy how created the project (Sam Dyer) mentions:
The C64 played a massive part in inspiring me to become a Graphic Designer and from an early age I used to actually look forward to the tape loading sequences because you got to see the stunning loading screen artwork! So this book brings together 2 of by biggest passions; Graphic Design and retro gaming and is something that I have always wanted to do.

That sounds EXACTLY like me, true, because I have worked as a Graphical Designer since late 1999 and was also inspired about the pixels of C64 and how just 16 colors in 320x200 resolution could tell more than a thousand words.

Looking at the screenshots from the book, there is MINIMAL work done by this guy, and if you are a Graphic Designer, this job couldn't take more than a week to stitch together (based on that the underlying Commodore 64 artwork was 99% readymade already). Any job with scaling the C64 screenshots could be done in minutes!

To be honest, if you have worked as Graphic Designer for 10 years compiling such an book (from the looks of it) is a walk-in-the-park and something that goes incredbly fast for skilled guys (like me, hehe).

You don't charge or need any money to do a project like this, seriously, you do it in your own free-time, loving it while doing, then releasing the work for free to please others. Is that SO HARD?!

Going further down, he mentions that "he always wanted to do" this kind of book (or related books probably for that matter).

Well, just to show how incredible lazy/blind both the founder and the funding people are, it's amazing that anybody would back up such an (from my point of view: easy) project is unbelievable!

You know, back in 2003 I started organizing a database (SGIL) for all the games I wanted to copy over to my Stone Oakvalley's Multi Arcade Console 2000 (SOMAC). When I finished my project in 2005, I released my database and all in-game screenshots (26000 of them) for free on my website (check link below). I spent 8 hours EVERY day for months producing this database and its including screenshots.

Did I charge anything for that?
Did I need funding to do that?

Hell NO!

I did it because I loved doing it and loved helping others that could use those screenshots and structured database I had worked very hard on.

Then, in 2010, I compiled 3 massive PDF files (during a couple of weeks of work) to layout all the screenshots in a book with a purpose of releasing it onto the online print website called www.lulu.com. However, at that time, my files became very large and LULU had problems processing them. In total the files are 5.6GB. The page format was 22.85 x 17.89 cm.

When I finally managed to reduce the quality down to an unacceptable resolution the price could be calculated and each book came to about $100 pr. printed physical book.

The book by Bitmap Books are 200 pages, format sized at 23cm x 17cm, more or less the same as mine actually!

My books, which initially named "The SOMAC Games Bible 1,2,3" consisted of 960 pages and is a massive beast. You can see by that page number, there was nothing else to do but to split it into 3 parts which worked out just fine.

Keeping that in mind, neither is the book by Bitmap Books complete or my SOMAC BIBLE books complete, so you get what you get.

My book project was not really intended as a full complete compendium, it mainly focuses on my Arcade Machine, but still, the in-game screenshots are naturally something that everybody could enjoy.

During October and about after 4-5 days of work I totally re-layout the entire book to provide bigger screenshots, more extras and ended up producing 5 nice looking books which span a total of 2366 pages. See, I told you that creating books like this takes only days for a skilled graphic designer and did I need a kickstarter funding project to do that?!


Because of this recent discovery, I will during the next weeks try to re-instate my SOMAC Bible of Games series into LULU and see what kind of price will come out of that. In either case, it will be made available as a FREE, yes, FREE DOWNLOAD as e-pdf via Lulu or on my own website, just to show what dedication for something is really about. If anybody would buy those 5 books, I shall ask no more than $5 pr. book for that massive work that was put into these, just to again show HOW YOU SHOULD DO THINGS RIGHT and as a showstopper, or should we say 'Kick Stopper" instead, just to show my disgust with Kickstarter projects in general. HAH!