Today, the comic writer and gaming journalist Dave Cook revealed on Twitter that the publisher Bitmap Books will be designing and releasing his upcoming book on the run 'n gun genre.
Cook was previously the author of Bitmap Books' Go Straight: The Ultimate Guide to Side-Scrolling Beat 'Em Ups, which gets a second run later this year, and has been plugging away at a new book for a while now. According to his substack, it will explore the genre from "its origins with Taito’s 1975 arcade shooter, Gun Fight, all the way through to present day", with some of the games featured, including Contra, Gunstar Heroes, Metal Slug, and Cuphead.
Cook wrote the following about the news:
"I’ve teamed up with Bitmap Books once again, and they’ll be designing and publishing my run ‘n’ gun book. We’ll have more to share on a cover reveal, the first fully designed pages, a release date and pre-orders in due course.
"Today is my last day of writing the book’s first draft, then we need to get all the guest writer pages in and then a long editing and design process. The Bitmap Books team puts so much love and care goes into the look and feel of these books, and it really is a fascinating process behind the scenes."
As Cook mentions, there's no information on a release date or a price yet, or any images of the book to share for that matter, but Cook has published a writing sample on his Substack about Treasure's Sega Mega Drive / Genesis shooter, Alien Soldier to celebrate finishing the first draft. You can find that here.