"A razor-sharp comedy and a smart meditation on the nature of gaming." --"Boston Globe"
When Russell joins Black Arts games, brainchild of two visionary designers who were once his closest friends, he reunites with an eccentric crew of nerds hacking the frontiers of both technology and entertainment. In part, he's finally given up chasing the conventional path that has always seemed just out of reach. But mostly, he needs to know what happened to Simon, his strangest and most gifted friend, who died under mysterious circumstances soon after Black Arts' breakout hit.
As the company's revolutionary next-gen game is threatened by a software glitch, Russell finds himself in a race to save his job, Black Arts' legacy, and the people he has grown to care about. The deeper Russell digs, the more dangerous the glitch appears--and soon, Russell comes to realize there's much more is at stake than just one software company's bottom line.

The popular Postmortem column in Game Developer magazine features firsthand accounts of how some of the most important and successful games of recent years have been made. This book offers the opportunity to harvest this expertise with one volume. The editor has organized the articles by theme and added previously unpublished analysis to reveal successful management techniques. Readers learn how superstars of the game industry like Peter Molyneux and Warren Spector have dealt with the development challenges such as managing complexity, software and game design issues, schedule challenges, and changing staff needs.

YOU determine the story! YOU choose your own destiny! When Russell gets a job at Black Arts games, he reunites with the people who were once his closest friends: the people who he spent hours designing, playing and discussing games with. He soon realises that all is not well at Black Arts. There's a software glitch threatening the next revolutionary product launch - and in order to find it and save his job Russell has to follow it back through twenty years of real and virtual worlds, boardrooms, computer camps, rivalry and loss. You is a story of facing dangers, realising that the most obvious path isn't always the best one to follow, and learning that playing a game can sometimes save your life.

This is the story of the great con game that was the late twentieth century, of American history's worst presidency, of how I learned to lie. It is not history as you know it. There are at least three sides to this story, and I'm telling both of mine. I promise you I will show the same contempt for the historical record that it has shown for me. My name is Richard Milhous Nixon. I swore an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, and I have seen the devil walk. An alternate history, a horror novel, a political satire and a study of what people will sacrifice to succeed, CROOKED is the ultimate inside story of the strange, all-too-human monsters at the heart of American power.