Video Game Themed Cookbooks: Labors of Fan Love

Passion for video games will always produce some interesting merchandise, but cookbooks are a highlight! It allows a connection to video games, which many crave through role-playing games. As soon as a video game reaches a certain level of popularity, it gets a cookbook. At this point, it seems like a rite of passage, food-related or not. Often, dishes are based on actual food seen in the games, or sometimes, when there is little to work with, landscapes and characters. A video game cookbook is a great gift for someone who wants to immerse themselves in a world, and a unique, practical type of merchandise. Cookbooks are also sometimes used as promotional material, with anticipated games like Borderlands 4 receiving a book already

Some fans are so passionate that they can not wait for the company itself to produce the cookbook. As of March 31st 2019, the Kickstarter page for the Mother-inspired cookbook, a 1989 Japanese RPG known in the West as Earthbound, received 1,030 backers who pledged $52,031 to help bring the project to life. The creator, Chef Bryan Conners, used his love of chemistry, cooking shows and video games to begin a career in video game food.

Bryan said in an interview with Rebekah Valentine in VG247, “For video game food, there’s a lot more imagination. The food items are often dreamt up without any kind of basis in reality. Taking these outlandish items and figuring out what flavours go together, or what you can add to tie it together, or trying to bring those things that were never meant to be in real life to real life is a fun puzzle.”

The Unofficial Sims Cookbook is another fantastic example of true fans putting their passion into something video game-related

These types of fan-made cookbooks, like that of the Unofficial Sims Cookbook or the Unofficial Legend of Zelda Cookbook, demonstrate the immense love of the fanbases, and I would personally recommend them over the official ones. Without the stress to turn a profit or promote a new release, you can take time to add in layers upon layers of detail.

The Unofficial Sims Cookbook is another fantastic example of true fans putting their passion into something video game-related. Taylor O’Halloran is a Sims content creator and was behind the 2019 website Ultimate Sims Guides. Playing the games since the 2000s, her book comes through as a letter of love to the games. I would strongly recommend checking it out.

Eurogamer’s Robert Purchese interviewed video game designer Victoria Rosenthal. The creator of the website, Pixilated Provision, has been in the video game food industry for over 10 years. She spoke about her process behind the cookbooks, going through as many as 70 recipes in 2 months, along with all the layout and design decisions.

Some of the trickier books to make are the ones with no food at all, like Halo and Destiny. Game companies come to her looking to expand their worlds through food based on the characters and the world. Victoria thinks about the world. Considering the accessibility of food, the climate the game takes place in, and the personality of the character. On top of working with developers and playing the games to understand the character’s wants. For example, Victoria spoke about creating the Halo cookbook and how, in more combat-focused games, characters would be after more high-protein, heavy meals to get them through the day’s trials.