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April 15, 2013
Unsure of how his "life had failed to come together," Russell Marsh gets hired on as an "entry-level game designer" for Black Arts Studios in this second novel (after Soon I Will Be Invincible) from video game design consultant Grossman . But when co-founder Darren Ackerman suddenly resigns from his post and takes most of the "senior design and programming staff" with him, Russell is handed the lead design post for Realms of Gold VII. As he navigates between his own creative anxieties of how to design "the ultimate game" and making sure he doesn't "turn the hallowed Black Arts name into a joke," a bug appears in the memory of the WAFFLE software, the system "that powered Black Arts games first, to critical success" and begins "messing with" Russell's game. To unravel the mystery of the "Mournblade bug" Darren will have to comb through the fictional ages of the Realms of Gold franchise and his own past. Readers interested in software and game design will find some reward in Russell's reflections about life as a game designer, but these reflections, along with Russell's tangential back-story and surreal visits from characters of the gaming world saturate the plot, turning a neat science-fiction short story into a haphazard novel.

March 1, 2013
Calling all video gamers...here's a novel about designing, playing and ultimately becoming obsessed with fantasy and science-fiction games. The book involves two time periods: the halcyon early days of gaming, from 16-bit to 64-bit Commodore computing, and the contemporary world of realistic effects and virtual reality. One of the more significant questions the early pioneers wrestled with was, which is more important, the narrative arc of a story or graphics technology? While most opted for the former, one of the problems is that unpredictable and sometimes untoward things can and do happen in the world of games. Russell, the narrator of the story, had originally been one of the self-professed nerds who started writing code and creating games at a young age. He even graduated from college and had a year of law school before "dropping out" and joining some of his old friends at Black Arts games. The two leaders of this company were Simon, now deceased, and Darren, both held in awe by the gaming community. Simon was a true genius, with perfect scores on his SATs. Disdaining college, Simon developed a series of games that Russell discovers in a desk drawer. Meanwhile, Darren breaks away from Black Arts and takes most of the talent with him, leaving the inexperienced Russell in charge of designing a game that needs to be a blockbuster. Fantasy and reality get confused when Russell falls in love with a character on the screen. But, as he points out, why not? After all, she's "smart and confident and had amazing hair, and she was a princess." Reality is ever so much duller. While Russell becomes more and more obsessed with tracing Simon's legacy through the games he discovers, he begins to get equally involved in the game he's designing--and only negative things can come from this. While Grossman's imagination is fertile, the narrative is overly discursive and rambling.

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October 1, 2012

Russell is happy to be a part of Black Arts, the soaring new games studio where the industry's techiest techs work in unison. But the studio's hot new game seems to be suffering from a software glitch, and Russell finds himself in a race to save the game, his job, and his friends. The trouble dates back 20 years to some very human bugs. Expect Grossman, author of the best-selling Soon I Will Be Invincible and the creator of several popular games (Deus Ex, anyone?), to deliver sleek techno-brilliance with heart. If the name and face seem familiar, know that Grossman is Magiciansauthor and Time book critic Lev Grossman's twin.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2013
Grossman, author of the delightful Soon I Will Be Invincible (2007), here draws on his own experience as a video-game designer to take us behind the scenes at Black Arts Games, a (fictional) video-game company poised to release a new version of one of its biggest hits. Russell, a new hire at the company (but an old friend of the company's founders), is thrown in at the deep end when a software bug is discovered that threatens to sink the new game. To find the source of the bug, Russell explores the history of the company, its founders, and his complicated relationships with them. Although it's structured as a mysteryRussell tries to track down the source of the bug the way a detective might pursue an unknown perpthe book is really a celebration of video games and their creators. It's full of terminology and dialogue that might seem like another language to the uninitiated reader (we do pick it up as we go along), but, mostly, due to his boundless enthusiasm for his story, Grossman never makes readers feel uninformed or left out in the cold. He invites us into the world of video games, introduces us to the people whose lives revolve around them, and makes us feel right at home. This is only Grossman's second novel, but, given the strength of this and his first book, we can only await his next offering with keen anticipation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)