You know you want it

Earlier this year we told you about The Lost Worlds of Power: Volume 0, a free eBook — led and collated by Nintendo Life alumni Philip J Reed — which included five new tales inspired by the notoriously awful Worlds of Power video game novels from the NES era. That was merely a taster, of course, and now the full eBook — The Lost Worlds of Power — is about to arrive.

Time for a disclaimer, and a break into first-person — this project has been led by Mr Reed, as highlighted above, a former writer on Nintendo Life and swell guy. Illustrations for the book have been produced by our reviewer-extraordinaire Ron DelVillano, while I'm doing the boring bit of formatting the eBook that'll you'll eventually enjoy on an assortment of devices. Despite this blatant conflict of interest we're plugging the book anyway, mainly because it's a free eBook and we want to; if you disagree with this harmless act feel free to troll me on Twitter.

Back to the matter at hand, this eBook will be available for free from 27th November over on noiselesschatter.com and has been in the works for 11 months. It features 12 literary adaptations of NES games, listed below.

  • “Milon’s Secret Castle,” by R.J. Burgess
  • “The California Raisins: The Great Escape,” by Samuel Clementine
  • “Bad Dudes,” by Ramona Donohue
  • “Double Dragon Warrior,” by Theodore Geise
  • “Monster Party,” by Tomm Hulett
  • “Marble Madness,” by James Lawless
  • “Yo! Noid,” by Jerod Mackert
  • “California Games,” by Matthew McKinley
  • “Battletoads,” by Philip J. Reed
  • “Linus Spacehead’s Cosmic Crusade,” by J. Paul Roe
  • “Legendary Wings,” by Guy Vollen
  • “Renegade,” by Jeffrey Zoerner

Philip J Reed, for his part, shared these eloquent words on the project:

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with those books right from the start. Even as a child I could tell they weren’t great, but I loved the games they were based on, so I had to have them. Once I opened The Lost Worlds of Power up to submissions, I realized quickly that the love/hate toward those old novelizations was universal. I wasn’t alone.

The chance to ‘go back’ and write Worlds of Power books themselves was a kind of catharsis, and everyone handles that differently. Some authors wrote scathing parodies of the originals. Others took a respectful approach to the source material and proved that video games can be novelized well. One author even reimagined the series in the vein of Choose Your Own Adventure. Literally every submission was a pleasant surprise.

Be sure to check out this free eBook when it arrives this week, and do let us know which story you're most looking forward to reading — a couple of Ron's illustrations are also below, as a little bonus.

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