Again in 2021, Philip Summers launched a Kickstarter marketing campaign for Hand-Drawn Sport Guides, a collection of books that resembled conventional technique guides, aside from the truth that they had been all illustrated by Summers. The marketing campaign was a success, producing over $300,000 in pledges, however like plenty of fan initiatives using recreation firm IPs, it was pulled earlier than the countdown ended.
He ended up altering plans as a consequence of authorized issues, occurring to work on different initiatives and releasing the deliberate guides from the marketing campaign as free downloads. From the skin, that appeared like the brand new path for Hand-Drawn Sport Guides.
However then, in January 2025, Summers returned to Kickstarter with a shock announcement — he’d struck a cope with Capcom to make an formally licensed entry within the collection: Hand-Drawn Sport Guides: Mega Man. That marketing campaign was additionally a hit, and Summers is now engaged on the e book and desiring to launch it later this 12 months.
In an effort to highlight game-related books and documentaries, todaysviralmedia is operating an electronic mail interview collection with the individuals behind them. We beforehand linked with Julian Rignall about his not-quite-an-autobiography The Video games of a Lifetime, Paul Vogel about his Housemarque documentary The Title of the Sport, Lewis Packwood about his obscure recreation {hardware} e book Curious Video Sport Machines, and Oliver Harper about his Road Fighter 2 documentary Right here Comes a New Challenger. Under, Summers discusses how the Mega Man mission happened and the place he desires to take Hand-Drawn Sport Guides sooner or later.
todaysviralmedia: If you launched the Kickstarter marketing campaign, lots of people had been shocked that the e book was licensed by Capcom. How did that come about behind the scenes?
Philip Summers: Lucas Thomas from Nintendo Drive Journal/NF Publishing was a fan of the unique Hand-Drawn Sport Guides marketing campaign and mainly remembered me all these years later! He has been increasing into e book publishing and wished to work on a property formally. With some work he was in a position to get the license from Capcom to create Mega Man books and requested if I’d be keen to resurrect the Hand-Drawn Sport Guides idea and do it legit this time. We nonetheless wanted to pitch the e book to them for approval, so we created a sequence of pages to current. They appreciated what they noticed and we had been in a position to transfer forward from there.
Picture: Philip Summers/Hand-Drawn Sport Guides
There’s an extended historical past of recreation books operating into authorized points with copyright holders. Do you’ve any recommendation for others trying to do related initiatives?
Sadly I don’t have any actual recommendation on methods to go about leaping by a few of these loopholes. Within the years since my authentic marketing campaign shut down, I’ve come to search out that completely different firms reply to several types of initiatives and so they all have their very own causes. What I can inform you is that for those who plan on launching one thing like a Kickstarter the place your funding totals are public and the mission closely options IP that you simply don’t have the rights to, it’s extremely probably it should get shut down.
Within the Mega Man Kickstarter marketing campaign, you talked about the potential of doing extra Mega Man books after this one. What’s the standing of that?
At this level it’s too early to inform. I believe we’ll have a a lot better understanding of the place we stand as soon as the e book is accomplished and shipped. Assuming persons are proud of it, and Capcom is proud of it, I believe it’s truthful to say we’ll be capable to transfer onto the following one, which the apparent alternative is Mega Man 2. Although I actually love Mega Man X too!
Lengthy-term, what are your plans for Hand-Drawn Sport Guides? Is the concept to get official licenses for different video games and make this a daily factor?
For certain! I’ve an entire listing of video games I’d like to work on, and if we find yourself placing out an excellent product we’re hopeful extra firms might be receptive to letting us give one among their traditional video games the Hand-Drawn Sport Guides remedy. This can be a facet gig for me, so I can solely work so rapidly, however who is aware of perhaps that would change someday too.