An Interview with Crypt Quest/Space Battles: A Play-Your-Way Book Author Gabe Soria
Crypt Quest/Space Battles: A Play-Your-Way Book (Midnight Arcade Series #1)
Hardcover $13.99
Crypt Quest/Space Battles: A Play-Your-Way Book (Midnight Arcade Series #1)
By
Gabe Soria
Illustrator
Kendall Hale
Hardcover $13.99
As someone who devoured Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books all through middle school—and also spent many hours playing video games—I was thrilled to get the chance to interview Gabe Soria, author of the new middle grade novel Crypt Quest/Space Battles: A Play-Your-Way Book. It’s the first novel in the Midnight Arcade series, a new adventure series about being trapped in an 80s-era haunted video arcade.
As someone who devoured Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books all through middle school—and also spent many hours playing video games—I was thrilled to get the chance to interview Gabe Soria, author of the new middle grade novel Crypt Quest/Space Battles: A Play-Your-Way Book. It’s the first novel in the Midnight Arcade series, a new adventure series about being trapped in an 80s-era haunted video arcade.
What were you like as a kid? What was your connection to video games?
I assume I was like most kids who came of age in the late 70s and early 80s—I loved Star Wars, Indiana Jones and getting into trouble with my brother and my cousins. Video games were an early obsession of mine.
My mom somehow managed to get an Atari 2600 for my brother and me, and we spent hours and days playing it. This was in addition to regular visits to the Redlands Mall in the downtown of Redlands, CA, the town I spent the early part of my life in and where a lot of my family still lives.
I used go to an arcade called The Flipper Flapper. That place is my Midnight Arcade. I can close my eyes and see and hear everything that went on there. I remember playing games there for the first time ever, games I love to this day, like Dragon’s Lair and the first Star Wars arcade game.
Pigs Might Fly
Paperback $15.99
Pigs Might Fly
By
Nick Abadzis
Illustrator
Jerel Dye
Paperback $15.99
I really dig the way you get to choose your next move with the game controllers in Midnight Arcade. How did you come up with this idea?
I really dig the way you get to choose your next move with the game controllers in Midnight Arcade. How did you come up with this idea?
This was literally a “riding down the street on my bike” epiphany. It hit me all of a sudden and I nearly crashed because it solved a problem I’d been studying pretty hard on.
What are your favorite books you’ve read recently?
I am a reader of EVERYTHING, from graphic novels to strange literary fiction to brick-like history tomes.
Here’s a quick rundown of what’s on my nightstand:
- The Art of Over the Garden Wall (by Sean Edgar and Patrick McHale),
- Pigs Might Fly (by Nick Abadzis and Jerel Dye)
- Cloudia & Rex (by Ulises Farinas, Erick Freitas and Daniel Irizarri)
- Station Eleven (by Emily St. John Mandel)
- Paperbacks from Hell and My Best Friend’s Exorcism (both by Grady Hendrix)
- Chuck Amuck (by Chuck Jones)
- Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and The Ladies of Grace Adieu (by Susanna Clarke)
- Video Tonfa (by Tim Goodyear), The House With a Clock in Its Walls (by John Bellairs)
- The Parable of the Sower (by Octavia Butler)
Elliot and the Last Underworld War: The Underworld Chronicles
Hardcover $12.99
Elliot and the Last Underworld War: The Underworld Chronicles
By
Jennifer Nielsen
Illustrator
Gideon Kendall
Hardcover $12.99
Crypt Quest/Space Battles is the first book in the Midnight Arcade series. So, what’s up next for you?
Crypt Quest/Space Battles is the first book in the Midnight Arcade series. So, what’s up next for you?
I hope to debut a new comic book series a little later this year. The artist Gideon Kendall is illustrating, and it’s something for kids and adults. It’s going to be epic.
The fall of 2018 will see the release of another Midnight Arcade book, and I’m currently writing the third and fourth books in the series! Each one will have two new games for readers to “play” through, and I think they’re fun—and funny!—but I’ll let you be the judge of that.
As the mother of a biracial daughter, I’d love to know about your future plans to connect to female readers and readers of color.
That’s a good question. First off, I hope that by simply being a visible creator of color I can inspire other readers of color.
If I am here and I am working then you can be here and working, too. And I hope ANY kid reading the Midnight Arcade series is able to imagine him/herself as the protagonist of the story, no matter who you are or what your background is.
That’s important to me and is one of the reasons the series is written in the second person. YOU are the hero, no matter who you are, and I hope that that comes across.
That said, the leads of some of my upcoming works (a series of novels separate from the Midnight Arcade and the comic book series I mentioned before) are, respectively and matter-of-factly, about a young woman and a young man of color. Because why the heck not?
Crypt Quest/Space Battles: A Play-Your-Way Book hits B&N bookshelves February 13, but you can pre-order it now!