John Walsh bound 21 fake games into one huge hardcover

The object is absurd in the best way: A4, 1.1 kilograms, three centimeters thick, cover art by Plastiboo printed in full color over holographic silver hot foil. Inside are 176 pages of magazine-style reviews, previews and retrospectives—fictional staff writers, period-correct layouts—for 21 games that do not exist. The stock announcement that surfaced on my feed came from All The Problems In This World, a Kreuzberg bookshop, treating an Italian import like a sneaker drop.

The Bizarre World of Fake Video Games is written by John Walsh, known to a few million YouTube subscribers as Super Eyepatch Wolf, and published by Hollow Press as the first of its U.D.W.F.G. essay series—edited by Michele Nitri with Marco Cirillo Pedri, who also did the design, and Tiziano Antognozzi. The first edition ran 12,000 copies in November 2025; the English version is already on a second printing of 6,000.

The roster is the fake-game scene's whole family tree: Plastiboo’s Vermis, Leon Chang’s Bird World and Return to Bird World, Adam Butcher’s The Disappearance of Catastrophe Crow, Harry Partridge’s GHOSTBLEED, Sukinapan’s Peklo, LumpyTouch’s corrupted-cartridge nightmares. What binds them is a shared bet that criticism, manuals, and lore are themselves a medium—that you can build a game out of its paratext and skip the game entirely.

The form is older than the boom, and we have the receipts: back in 2016 we wrote about Japan’s annual exhibition of fake Famicom games, where artists produced cartridges and box art for imaginary releases. A decade later, the same instinct has a hardcover, a second printing, and a Berlin shop announcing restocks. The alternate timeline is doing fine.