The entire book is a nostalgia circle-jerk of “hey remember that thing that existed in the 80s?,” the main character is the most blatant Mary Sue I’ve ever come across, and the plot lacks any real conflict whatsoever (“To get the first key you had to beat a certain game. Fortunately, I’m the best in the world at it and win on the first try!” – rinse repeat for literally every “challenge”), and the majority of the book is just a series of "and then"s with basically zero cause and effect. The author is wildly misogynistic and weird about women , the main character is the epitome of someone who belongs on r/niceguys.
Also I suppose this could be a nitpick, but the author did absolutely zero research into how games are actually made, which as a game dev very much annoyed me. The most glaring example was the idea that one or even two people could create an entire expansive MMO, so widespread it basically becomes the entire internet, all on their own is ridiculous…those size games are made by teams of thousands of people, sometimes even upwards of ten thousand.
The entire book is a nostalgia circle-jerk of “hey remember that thing that existed in the 80s?,” the main character is the most blatant Mary Sue I’ve ever come across, and the plot lacks any real conflict whatsoever (“To get the first key you had to beat a certain game. Fortunately, I’m the best in the world at it and win on the first try!” – rinse repeat for literally every “challenge”), and the majority of the book is just a series of "and then"s with basically zero cause and effect. The author is wildly misogynistic and weird about women , the main character is the epitome of someone who belongs on r/niceguys.
Also I suppose this could be a nitpick, but the author did absolutely zero research into how games are actually made, which as a game dev very much annoyed me. The most glaring example was the idea that one or even two people could create an entire expansive MMO, so widespread it basically becomes the entire internet, all on their own is ridiculous…those size games are made by teams of thousands of people, sometimes even upwards of ten thousand.