Book: Secrets Of Monkey Island (& The Rest)

A splendid, PC-loving chap has made a 500-page book about the history of point and click adventure games - yer LucasArts, yer Sierras, yer Revolutions, yer all the rests. Even Simon the bloody Sorcerer. All the way up to Grim Fandango, bless its skull-patterned socks. Your coffee table would probably very much appreciate straining under the weight of Graphic Adventures' nostalgia-strewn, many-pictured pages - though you can also read a free digital version.

Interesting things about this book: it's constructed primarily from Wikipedia pages. Which does sadly mean it's a little (i.e. a lot) on the dry and roboty side, but it has been tarted up a bit, lavishly illustrated and then bulked up significantly with bespoke interviews conducted by compiler/author Philipp Lenssen - including Al 'Leisure Suit Larry but not the incredibly obnoxious recent ones' Lowe, and dudes behind the likes of Zak McKraken, Space Quest and Tex Murphy.

Also, you can buy it (from Amazon or Lulu) and stare at the pretty retro pictures in a comfortable setting such as on sofa, on the toilet or levitating on top of a cloud, OR you can download an editable digital copy for free, as per Wikipedia's usage rules.

Obviously Mister Lenssen would much prefer you to buy a copy as he's spent an awful long time compiling it, but you can at least suck it and see first, via the slightly cumbersome magic of HTML files. The link to that is towards the bottom of this page - I'm not going to link to the file directly, as he deserves some eyeballs at least reading his pitch rather than everyone going straight to the zip file and buggering off.