There is a new video game related novel coming out called Lucky Wander Boy that I think all of you should read. I haven't quite finished it yet, but so far it is a very enjoyable book. The book won't be out until February 25, 2003, but in the meantime, please continue reading for more info on Lucky Wander Boy:

About The Book

As a child, Adam Pennyman become convinced that his success at the Intellivision game Microsurgeon prolonged his terminally ill grandmother's life. When his Intellivision finally gave out after hours and hours of play, his grandmother passed away immediately. If only the repair shop bad been able to fix the Intellivision faster, he could have kept his grandmother alive.

Or, at least, that's what Adam believes. In LUCKY WANDER BOY (Plume Original Fiction, Publication Month: February 2003), D.B. Weiss, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, takes readers on a journey with the adult Adam as he reignites his fervor for Lucky Wander Boy, the video game that changed the way he viewed the world.

After being fired from his job as a designer in Poland, Adam returns to Los Angeles with a beautiful Polish girlfriend, Anya Budna. A chance meeting lands him a job as a copywriter at Portal Entertainment, where he learns that Portal holds the film rights to the Lucky Wander Boy concept.

With the assistance of a fellow game-head named Clio and a whole lot of luck, he might just locate Araki Itachi, the ageless female creator of Lucky Wander Boy, and learn the secrets of Level Three.

For anyone who ever lined a quarter for next game on a game console at an arcade, for anyone who played Atari 2600 until the joystick caused blisters, LUCKY WANDER BOY will validate that time as well spent. The appeal of this novel is not the games nor the nostalgia. Whenever a gamer played the first quarter on a new video game or opened the box containing the latest video game cartridge, there was a sense of wonder, that feeling that the game might take the player to a place he'd never been before. LUCKY WANDER BOY, like the best video games of that time, takes readers to that same place and is well worth every quarter.

"Ambitious... Both a heartfelt paean to old-school video gaming and an angry, Chuck Palahniuk-style exploration of contemporary anomie, the novel can be slyly post-modernist and surprisingly erudite. The literary and pop culture references come fast and furious, drawing from sources as offbeat and various as Shakespeare, Leonard Cohen and Donkey Kong...Undeniably original."
--Publishers Weekly

"D.B. Weiss uses classic video games as a form of modern mythology, a template to understand life. His passion for games is evident and I'm happy to report that he represents their essence with surprising eloquence."
--Will Wright, creator of The Sims and Sim City

"Lucky Wander Boy is an entertaining journey into the twisted psyche of the videogame obsessed. D.B. Weiss has captured the strange combination of mania and nostalgia classic games inspire within the collective consciousness of our generation."
--Van Burnham, author of Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age

D.B. Weiss was born and raised in Chicago, where he honed his skills on an Intellivision. A graduate of Wesleyan University, he earned a Masters of Philosophy in Irish Literature from Trinity College in Dublin and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Iowa's Writers' Workshop.

In 1993, Weiss was fired from an internship at MTV. He has also served as a script researcher and office PA on the film Viking Sagas (New Line Cinema); a freelance internet copywriter; a script analyst for National Geographic Films; a research assistant for marine biology/animal psychology research in Santa Cruz, the Bimini Islands and in Hawaii; and as a screenwriter, working scripts on location in Warsaw, Poland, for Red Branch Productions, and for Next Entertainment in Hollywood.

Now that he has written "The Great American Video Game Novel," he no longer feels compelled to play video games every waking moment. He lives in Los Angeles.