Our review of From Pixels to Prose: What Video Games Taught Me About Storytelling, by Toronto’s Nadia Oxford, published by Retro Game Books.

Indie publisher Retro Game Books has been producing high-quality, budget-friendly gaming books for a good six years now, founder Brian Riggsbee establishing the imprint in 2020 as a way to share unique, never-before-seen perspectives on retro gaming.

Highlights of their extensive back catalogue include their bestselling Video Game Maps series (reproductions of high-quality in-universe maps for various classic games) and their ongoing line of slimmer, more personal stories collected in paperbacks like I Am Not Good: The History of Cheating in Video Games.

Earlier this year, Retro Game Books published a lovely volume of essays and reminiscences by Toronto’s own Nadia Oxford, recounting her journey through gaming and her career in the gaming press. From Pixels to Prose: What Video Games Taught Me About Storytelling is a beautiful, heartfelt story of a “lifetime spent in digital worlds”, tracing Oxford’s journey from those early attempts at trying to conquer Donkey Kong, through her engagement with the increasingly sophisticated adventures of 16-bit gaming and beyond.

From her earliest days at Gamepro (rip) and 1Up (also rip) through more recent gigs at IGN (still, thankfully, alive and well), Oxford’s journey through gaming in many ways mirrors the story of 21st century interactive entertainment.

As she tells it, one of the things that fascinated her from the start is the unique ways in which games tell their stories. Even something as simple as the original Donkey Kong – a pre-Mario “Jumpman” clambers to the top of a series of platforms, only for the (then-)evil Donkey Kong to snatch damsel Pauline away – reveals something interesting about how audiences engage with this artform, and about the way that player agency (and the judicious taking away of that agency) distinguishes gaming from anything else.

Moving swiftly from Donkey Kong to the earliest Super Marios (Jumpman now given a proper name), Oxford shares with us a nostalgia-laden perspective on what it means to grow up with video games. Playing the hot new NES at a friend’s house (been there), scrounging for allowance money to acquire her own console (also been there), the attempts at publishing her own, heavily-RPG inspired, fantasy novel (well, maybe not that one).

Oxford is an engaging, entertaining storyteller. It’s not just the familiarity of her world which makes this memoir such a joy to read (though there is of course that); it’s that she consistently evinces an earnest, unironic affection for a medium which too many, for too long, have refused to treat seriously.

When she writes, for example, about how Secret of Mana (a game, I must confess, I still haven’t gotten around to playing) taught her something about humankind’s relation to nature, you believe her. Later, in a standout chapter on 1994’s Final Fantasy VI, she makes a compelling case for the impressively rapid maturation of this very young artform, noting the “awe and reverence” with which FFVI’s major moments were first encountered by a generation, and the interesting ways its designers subvert expectations even in this relatively early release. (That includes, perhaps most famously, FFVI‘s daring decision to grind the entire story to a halt for an altogether delightful interactive opera sequence.)

For the most part, From Pixels to Prose is organized by game – the ones that mattered most to her, at least when it comes to the specific features of interactive storytelling – with necessary and welcome detours along the way. Hence, a chapter on Dragon Quest which dovetails into her attempt to write a novel, “Shadow Dragon”, and a chapter on cult-beloved Undertale which also pays homage to forgotten PS1 RPG Moon: Remix RPG Adventure. Other chapters focus on Mega Man, Pokémon, and the interesting interplay between anime and modern gaming.

Even if you’re less familiar with, or less invested in, these games (I am an avowed Undertale contrarian), the stories which Oxford tells, the way she describes what these games meant to her, make for an engaging text throughout. It’s nice to know there other dorks like us out there, just down the street.

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Nadia Oxford’s Axe of the Blood God podcast, where she and a group of friends talk all things RPG, can be streamed here.

Check out Retro Game Books for all things retro, gaming, and map-based.