Worlds of Power: Metal Gear Novelization Book Cover

[Pogue-Mahone]

The cover to the novelization of the original Metal Gear removed the gun from Snake's hand. This was probably because the book was published by Scholastic, and they primarily sold books to school children.



I've had this book for 3 months and I'm just noticing it now! I was probably too amazed by the name they gave to Snake...Justin Hailey.

Does anyone else remember the Scholastic book order? That flimsy fold out lightly colored newspaper sheet where you could order Batman coloring books? Those were cool! And now we have Amazon.

[Psychospacecow]

I'm not going to lie. I hated scholastic. Its still a thing, mainly just selling at book fairs and such.
All they really sold were overpriced censored equivalents. Nice find though.

[Spherix*]

I read several of the "Worlds of Power" books when I was a kid. It's interesting how seriously the writers took the project, the juxtaposition of detailed accuracy and deliberate variation, in an attempt to write literature that would appeal to children who prefer video games to reading.

It didn't really seem strange when I read them, because the video games were made by adults as well. But looking back on it, it's a little surprising for the time period, where video games were generally considered to be either for children, or evil. So for a couple adults to take these games seriously enough to play through them, try to extract a coherent plot out of them when they had so little, and yet still be so self-righteous as to then scrub the stories of violent content... It's a bit baffling.

Same with censoring the weapons on the covers. The target audience probably already had the games, with the same images, uncensored, on the boxart and cartridge labels...

According to this article, these changes were made by the creator of the series, Seth Godin, rather than at the behest of Scholastic. They were more concerned about the occult content of Beyond Shadowgate, which Godin found ironic because they published Harry Potter only a few years later.

All that said, I rather enjoyed the novelization of Bionic Commando. It's the only one I remember much of. I don't know that it would hold up reading it now, but it felt like it dealt with some mature material for being a children's book.