Ten years ago I unleashed my video game ghost story VAPORWARE on the world. It’s the tale of a video game project that gets cancelled – but doesn’t want to go away. The cover is by the amazing Lynne Hansen, who did a great job of capturing the personality of the book!
VAPORWARE was actually born at Necon in a late-night discussion with, among others, best-selling author Douglas Clegg. He riffed on the idea of writing what you know, and what did I know? Video games, and how they’re made. But I was tired of stories where either A)the video game monster gets loose and starts eating people or B)the hero gets trapped in a video game and something starts eating people. I wanted to do something different, to write a story about the real horrors of game development, the toll it could take on the people making the game and the passion and love that went into the process.
Thus, VAPORWARE was born.
It originally came out in 2013 from JournalStone. I ran a wacky promo called People Doing Terrible Things To My Book, wherein I posted people doing awful things to copies of VAPORWARE. There were chainsaws. There were knives. There were copies of TWILIGHT and milkshakes and many other things. And it was a lot of fun.
But that was ten years ago. Now it’s back, and I hope you enjoy it.