TEN YEARS OF BITMAP BOOKS


If you don’t have space for a classic gaming machine or the money to keep it fed with original games, the next best thing might be a book that celebrates them. MCV spoke to Sam Dyer, the brains behind some of the best around


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“I didn’t set out to create a publishing business. It was just me having a bit of fun” Sam Dyer, Creative Director of Bitmap Books


42 | MCV/DEVELOP April/May 2024


ast your mind back ten whole years to 2014. It was a heady time, before NFTs and


AI dominated the game development discourse, when crowd-funding was all the rage. That year Frontier went to


Kickstarter to get Elite Dangerous noticed (£1.5 million). Baldur’s Gate 3 studio Larian had recently done the same for Divinity: Original Sin (£760,000), and Chris Roberts was well on the way to receiving the first of his crowdfunding millions. ($50 million then, $688 million now). In comparison to those and other


numbers doing the rounds, the £35,594 Sam Dyer was pledged in April 2014 seems like chump change. Yet it was enough to establish Bitmap


Books, which at the end of this year will have published more than 35 titles, all devoted to retro games, their host machines and the people that put them all together. “I wouldn’t be sitting here if it


wasn’t for Kickstarter,” admits Dyer, who after years working as a graphic designer for a Bath-based creative agency, started developing his first title in his spare time as a means to offset the frustrations of his work. “I was getting back into gaming,


retro gaming, and saw that there were a couple of retro gaming themed books out there. I couldn’t believe there were enough people like me that would be interested in the Commodore 64, for example. I just thought that I’d try my hand at


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