Latest 'Video Game Maps: SNES' Book Dives Into Zelda, Kirby, Mega Man And More

This looks beautiful 😍

Can't see any overworld maps in these images.

Nostalgia is a burden. I'm going to need this in my collection.

1. Yay Lufia 2!

2. How is this legal if it's copyrighted work from other games?

I miss a paper map in the game box. Bring back manuals et al

Always loved geography as a kid. And cartography obviously went well with this. Allegedly i was directing family road trips with the road atlas from a young age so well my dad stopped learning routes and now has no idea where he is going lol. So i used to love pouring over video game maps. Especially when they were published in mags and official documentation. That might have even encouraged my love of geography and maps even more. I sucked at zelda though haha.

I’ll pass, but it still looks cool.

Eh, have you checked the shipping costs for the UK? Absolutely insane.

I don't see many maps in those photos :/

If anyone's into it (I am), here are high quality scans of every SNES manual...
https://archive.org/details/snes-manual-archive

@LikelySatan
Awesome! Thanks!

@JohnnyMind thanks for the e-book tip. Just picked up the first one as well.

@LikelySatan Great find! Archive.org has so much cool stuff but you have to dig for it sometimes. Thanks.

@Jeff lots of strategy guides on there. Playing Zodiac Age w a guide rn, actually.

@GamerGrandpa sure thing! Glad you checked it out.

I'm a sucker for guides. Even if I don't get stuck, they serve as yearbooks reminding you of your journey. (E.g.: "Which boss came second?" "What was my favorite level?" "Which of these levels are most adaptable into a Mario Kart track?") Since platformers are my favorite genre, the terrain itself is really the star of the show, and maps are a much quicker reference to scan than a walkthrough video.

The thing I most hate about the transition to 3D is that maps had to be original rather than ripped. The brilliance of a video game is many things: music, writing, characters, art style, puzzles, etc. But ripped maps simultaneously convey the art style and puzzles both. Original maps don't quite do that, especially when rendered isometrically for 3D. If I get rich, I'll donate a lot to vgmaps.com in gratitude for what they've done.

Thus, I'm the target audience for this book, but I'd need to see some maps in the pics. I'm skeptical of a book that small (length and width) being good for maps. The binding will interfere, and it likely won't lay very flat except for the 10% of pages in the middle.

I find the lack of maps in the promotional images disturbing...

Having said that, I have the digital book for Metroid from Retro Game Books and I love it! I would love to get physical books from them too, but they're a bit pricey.

@ryan_nil Good call. I have the first map book he ever produced and bizarrely he chose to publish in a 5x7 size which is absolutely tiny and you can’t see anything on any of the maps. I hadn’t realized this when ordering and my intent was to use the book to actually play games with it by my side, so it turned out being useless to me. At least the new book is 8x11, but yeah digital may be the way to go.