Felipe Pepe

Growing up with computers in São Paulo

Pepe was born in São Paulo and lived most of his life there before moving to Japan. (⁶) His early access to computers came through his father, an engineer interested in the technology. In a 2014 autobiographical essay, he described himself as unusually fortunate to have an Amiga 500 at home. He recalled that the machine had been brought into Brazil clandestinely under restrictive import conditions and that much of its software arrived on copied floppy disks. (⁷) He was fascinated by the animated pieces in Battle Chess. (⁸)

His father brought back months-old issues of Computer Gaming World from business trips. With little English and no access to the bulletin boards it discussed, Pepe encountered the English-speaking game world at a distance. (⁹) The magazine’s RPG critic Scorpia became an important guide. (¹⁰) Years later, he could contact Scorpia, Warren Spector, and Tim Cain directly while making the book. (¹¹)

His account of childhood play is broader than a list of computer RPGs. In a 2024 conversation with Dave Jackson, he remembered watching his father play Betrayal at Krondor when he was too young to understand the English. He played other computer genres, while friends’ consoles introduced him to games such as Chrono Trigger and Breath of Fire. Around ten, he also encountered tabletop systems including GURPS, Dungeons & Dragons, and Vampire. These offered another way of approaching characters, rules, and improvised situations. Fallout became a decisive experience: a magazine’s example of a conversation about crop rotation made its possibilities sound unlike the games he knew. He and his younger brother played it separately and discovered strikingly different outcomes. The attraction was the possibility that the same software could produce different experiences for two people living in the same house. (¹²)

These memories include ordinary hardware constraints: launching Eye of the Beholder with a DOS command, swapping disks, and finding that Fallout’s full installation would exceed his hard drive’s capacity. (¹³) He learned English through Baldur’s Gate, enjoyed progressive rock, and reported eleven years in RPG Codex in 2018. (¹⁴)

Education, paid work, and the move to Japan

Pepe’s formal preparation was in marketing. His public professional profile lists a bachelor’s degree at São Paulo’s Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing, attended from 2005 to 2009. It records a decade in advertising agencies and production studios, freelance video editing and motion design from 2012 to June 2016, and teaching motion graphics at Alpha Channel from late 2014 to June 2016. It also lists volunteer advertising work for Educadores Sem Fronteira in 2007–2011. These self-reported dates place his publishing within an existing communications and visual-production career. (¹⁵)

His communications career supplied experience in presenting information and working with images. The book required a further apprenticeship in historical research, built through play, reading, correspondence, and public correction.

Japan was an interest before it became his home. He visited in 2012 and later wrote about the odd familiarity of Tokyo back alleys after years of playing Resident Evil 3. His first trip to the United States, by contrast, had not occurred until his mid-twenties. These encounters fed an essay about cultural recognition: games could make a foreign place feel familiar without giving a player much understanding of its actual inhabitants. He drew on Koichi Iwabuchi’s discussion of cultural “odor” to consider Japanese exports and Brazilian games, and resisted the idea that cultural authenticity required excluding foreign influences. (¹⁶)

In February 2016 he announced plans to leave Brazil for Japan that July. Asked why, he explained that he had long wanted to go and that Brazil’s economic crisis and scarce work made it a reasonable moment to pause his career and try living abroad. Paperwork and uncertainty also made him reluctant to promise when the book would be finished. He initially presented the move as an open-ended experiment and a pause in his existing career. (¹⁷)

His later Portuguese account makes the mechanics of the move unusually clear. Writing in August 2021, he said he had arrived in 2016 at twenty-nine, after years of saving, researching, attending talks, and planning. He enrolled in a Tokyo Japanese-language school and entered with a student visa. At first he worked remotely for Brazilian employers and took assorted part-time work, including office jobs and jobs found through Craigslist. A subsequent full-time position supplied a work visa. He explained that this was a route through education and his professional qualifications, rather than the ancestry-based route familiar to many Brazilian migrants to Japan. He wrote the guide because information was hard to find in Portuguese and people repeatedly asked how he had managed the move. (¹⁸)

The transition remained demanding while the book grew. His January 2018 update recalled months of job hunting in 2017 and passing the Japanese Language Proficiency Test at N3. (¹⁹) His professional profile lists Japanese study at the Intercultural Institute of Japan in 2016–2018 and work at Go! Go! Nihon from December 2017. Coordinating Portuguese-speaking students led to market leadership and campaign management; the last listed role, assistant marketing manager, began in January 2024. Its responsibilities include advertising, social media, newsletters, blogs, events, and design. (²⁰) The company assists people coming to Japan to study. (²¹)

His work also appears in another Brazilian’s account of studying in Japan. In a January 2019 sponsored report, writer Piti Koshimura described exchanging many emails with Pepe about language courses, then meeting the company’s Tokyo team. The account gives a concrete glimpse of the Portuguese-language student assistance behind his job title. (²²)

A forum poll becomes a book

The immediate beginning of The CRPG Book was a community exercise. On February 5, 2014, Pepe posted the results of RPG Codex’s Top 70 poll. A ranking did not answer the question that interested him: why were these games worth playing? He asked people to supply short explanations, added screenshots, and then wanted longer accounts and practical advice. (²³)

Selection quickly grew beyond the poll. Pepe added popular or historically important titles, including Diablo and Skyrim, and covering entire series multiplied the entries. On days without freelance commissions he worked full time on the book. Tim Cain, Scorpia, and Chris Avellone were early contributors whose participation helped give it credibility. He thought its noncommercial premise encouraged them. For little-known games, however, he often had to investigate and write the entries himself. (²⁴)

By October 2014 he described an international group of more than a hundred contributors. The internet had made accessible exchanges with figures previously encountered through imported print. (²⁵)

One such exchange was a September 2014 interview with Warren Spector, whose projects included Ultima, Deus Ex, and Thief. Pepe asked about the difficulty of deciding what belonged in the book when level-ups and numerical statistics were becoming a common shorthand for RPGs. Spector argued for looking at characters and their interactions instead. Pepe’s question about whether younger players could understand Ultima IV also brought the book’s intended purpose into focus: helping readers encounter games whose original assumptions had become unfamiliar. A conversation with an experienced developer thus helped him think through an immediate editorial question. (²⁶)

Pepe was also building a reading practice around the project. In December 2014 he said he had spent its first nine months seeking out books on RPG and game history. He recommended Neal and Jana Hallford’s Swords & Circuitry for its historical research and design documents, Matt Barton’s Dungeons and Desktops for the genre’s earlier periods, Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World for tabletop history, and Tristan Donovan’s Replay for its breadth and references. He discussed their limitations as well as their usefulness. The free Computer Gaming World archive connected this adult reading to his childhood magazine. Such material supplied models and evidence for a project whose editor identified himself as neither an academic nor a professional game designer. (²⁷)

One early motivation was his dissatisfaction with the way contemporary games were described as improvements that made earlier work obsolete. In “The Ministry of Hype,” he recounted asking a class of aspiring game developers about The Elder Scrolls: almost everyone knew Skyrim, progressively fewer had played its predecessors, and none had played the first two installments. He took this as an example of a wider failure to make older work intelligible. This was a classroom anecdote, not a representative study. Its biographical importance lies in the role he adopted: someone using writing and teaching to interrupt the assumption that an unfamiliar older game had little to offer. (²⁸)

What editing hundreds of games actually required

His November 2014 update described a recurring sequence: find a reviewer, receive a draft, discuss it, lay it out, then begin again. He had set himself the goal of posting a monthly progress report. Ian S. Frazier’s Ultima V contribution became an occasion to explain a technical problem identified by Arhu at RPG Watch: screenshot proportions. Readers then offered different solutions, and Pepe tested and responded to them. In December he issued a 100-page preview with 36 reviews, inviting feedback on an openly unfinished “alpha.” The record captures a serial process of drafting, checking, and circulation well before the finished book attracted a large audience. (²⁹; ³⁰)

The project’s updates make visible work usually compressed into the word “editor.” In October 2016 the master file had reached 420 pages. Pepe was adding reviews, rewriting unsatisfactory ones, developing a glossary, checking font sizes, and inserting hyperlinks. A short Japanese-RPG history section drew on a longer article he had written separately. He also wanted a hardware introduction for readers unfamiliar with names such as Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum. He explicitly asked for specialists because he did not consider himself qualified to write that material alone. Expertise was distributed, and identifying its absence was part of the job. (³¹)

The fifth preview, released in April 2017, had 450 pages. It added a computer-history timeline, PDF bookmarks, hyperlinks, articles on ports and cancelled games, and a beginner FAQ. Reviews, however, were arriving slowly. In the comments Pepe explained why the book could not accommodate every requested game and why Japanese-only MSX titles fell outside its scope at that stage. He also treated proofreading as something to organize once the text became sufficiently stable. These decisions reveal the conflict between a growing archive of possible content and the finite labor needed to make a readable object. A contributor’s enthusiasm did not eliminate the need to obtain a complete text, revise it, place it, and check it. (³²)

The February 5, 2018 release contained 528 pages and contributions from 112 volunteers, with proofreading unfinished. Many writers, including Pepe, were not native English speakers; the text exceeded 310,000 words, and the project lacked money for that stage. His machine could not run SpellForce 3, and no volunteer had supplied the desired series review. A hardware chapter lacked enough specialist contributors. He simultaneously needed to attend to his work visa. Equipment, language, time, and available people therefore shaped the finished publication’s limits. (³³)

The release opened another cycle of work. Within five days Pepe reported more than 100,000 downloads, new proofreading volunteers, and a patched version that corrected errors and restored three missing contributor credits. He made the InDesign project available for people wanting to inspect, adapt, or print it, and identified the license as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0. Groups had begun Spanish, German, Russian, and Chinese translations. An EPUB export was much harder: the page design did not readily become reflowing text. Publication, in this workflow, was a point at which another set of collaborators and defects became visible. (³⁴)

Playing, capturing, and explaining

For Pepe, screenshots were research material. In his 2017 description of the gallery, Pepe contrasted the repeated promotional pictures attached to coverage of old games with the difficulty of finding images that showed what playing them involved. To illustrate Neverwinter Nights 2’s trial sequence, he had to reach that part of the game. He accumulated thousands of his own captures, then asked the CRPG Addict for permission to share more. The resulting collection could show interfaces, inventories, combat, and visual change across years. He distributed it without watermarks so others could use it. This labor explains why producing a visually accessible guide could require many hours of play for a small amount of printed space. (³⁵)

Even a faithfully captured image could misrepresent the original experience. In a 2015 technical essay, he explained that many DOS games stored 320-by-200 images intended for a 4:3 CRT display. Displaying that data with square pixels produced a wider-looking picture than players had originally seen. He worked through ways of correcting the aspect ratio without destroying the pixel detail, credited people who had drawn his attention to the problem, and incorporated further advice from Per Olofsson. It is a small but revealing example of his method: making the evidence usable demanded attention to the technology that mediated it, and public feedback could improve the result. (³⁶)

Hosting was another material condition. In November 2018, Flickr’s announced limit of 1,000 images for free accounts prompted him to move the collection to Google Drive. At that point it covered 488 RPGs. The project now advertises more than 20,000 PNG screenshots from over 750 games, supplied by contributors and the CRPG Addict. Maintaining access therefore involved finding somewhere to keep the files as well as generating them. A volunteer historical resource was exposed to the changing terms of a commercial platform. (³⁷; ³⁸)

In “Learning the Video Game Canon,” he distinguished knowing that a game exists, understanding its basic play, finishing it, and learning its many possibilities. He loved Daggerfall without finishing it: creating another character could be more interesting than completing its long and repetitive later stages. A few hours with key older games could provide an initial historical map, which he acknowledged as only a beginning. The position fits the guide he edited: readers gain orientation for further choices, with deeper familiarity requiring more play. (³⁹)

A physical book, free access, and charity

Turning the PDF into a printed book required another institution. At the first release, Pepe reported that print-on-demand services either could not handle its size or would require expensive reductions; crowdfunding also seemed difficult to organize as a Brazilian on a temporary Japanese visa. The solution was a relationship with Bitmap Books. Its preparation brought professional proofreading, further revisions, and a cover by Jan Pospíšil. His November 2018 announcement specified that the money he would receive would be donated to Vocação and that the improved text would eventually be downloadable for free. (⁴⁰; ⁴¹)

Free access was negotiated through a compromise. In March 2018 he announced that the print contract required him temporarily to stop issuing files and remove official download links while the hardcover was produced and sold. Some readers objected or worried about the agreement. Pepe replied that he could not disclose all the details but understood it as a short arrangement with a reputable publisher: the files already existed online, and a professionally proofread version would become freely available afterward. His account does not disclose the entire contract. It does document a period when the official free-distribution principle was restricted to obtain a better physical edition. (⁴²)

By April 2019 he announced that the corrected PDF was free again, with the hardcover’s updates and improved navigation. He also reported the first donation of £12,475 and plans for a further print run. The relationship thus did more than manufacture a collectible: it supplied editorial improvements that returned to the freely circulated version. Vocação, the recipient, works on education, technical and social preparation, and access to employment, with facilities in São Paulo. The connection kept a Brazilian institutional destination for income generated by an English-language book edited from Japan and published in Britain. (⁴³; ⁴⁴)

The expanded hardcover’s 2023 announcement again specified that 100 percent of the author’s revenue would go to Vocação. The currently reported £41,438 total is dated March 2026. Pepe also used the free 2022 PDF to encourage donations directly to Instituto Dara, offering a printed acknowledgement to readers who sent receipts before preparation for print closed. This was a separate appeal, not a statement that the book’s royalty recipient had changed. Neither campaign establishes his private financial situation or what portion of a book’s retail price becomes author income. The evidence supports an unpaid original writing project and a specified donation policy for his publishing proceeds. (⁴⁵; ⁴⁶; ⁴⁷)

Japan, unfamiliar histories, and a wider field of work

Living in Japan created opportunities for new inquiries without making language or technical obstacles disappear. In October 2016, while unemployed, Pepe published a guide to the beginnings of Japanese RPGs. He approached early games through distinct microcomputer platforms, competing definitions, and uncertain evidence rather than beginning the story with Dragon Quest. He acknowledged cases where he could not find a disk image or adequate analysis. This was research undertaken during the same uncertain period as language study, job hunting, and the book’s construction. (⁴⁸)

He also interviewed Motoya Ataka, a designer and director associated with Wizardry derivatives and Experience Inc. The questions concerned dungeon RPGs, player expectations, platforms, puzzles, and the persistence in Japan of a form that English-language discussions often treated as a fading tradition. He thanked Experience staff for making the conversation possible. Here a developer was a source for understanding a continuing practice, rather than simply a celebrated name lending prestige to the book. (⁴⁹)

A different inquiry led him to Özgür Özol, designer of Turkey’s Legends of Istanbul: Tulip Warriors. In 2018 Pepe explained that he could not read Turkish and found little information about the game in English. Its contemporary Istanbul setting and local cultural references interested him enough to contact its designer. He initially tried shortening the resulting interview, then kept its length because the story of making and distributing the game mattered. He identified a connection to his own Brazilian experience of uneven access to technology and information. The article showed how a game could open a history of families, amateur groups, businesses, and local working conditions that a conventional recommendation paragraph would lose. (⁵⁰)

The subsequent articles widened his public practice beyond the book. His 2021 Chinese-language RPG history distinguished Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China, including the writing systems and different environments through which games circulated. A Korean history followed the path from boxed single-player “package” games to online and mobile play, explicitly acknowledging its debt to Sam Derboo’s research at Hardcore Gaming 101. His RPG Maker history connected a Japanese creation tool, magazine culture, unofficial translations, and amateur or commercial games. Across these pieces, the unit of interest was increasingly a scene and its means of access, not just a celebrated Western release. (⁵¹; ⁵²; ⁵³)

Revising the book and recognizing its limits

In June 2021 Pepe announced another substantial revision. The proposed changes included games through 2019, the long-delayed hardware explanations, MUD and MMORPG history, and RPGs never released in English. He also admitted that some contributor credits had been mishandled and needed correction. He was publishing parts of the research separately while seeking volunteers for missing reviews. The plan matters as an account of what revision meant to him: correcting attribution and providing context accompanied enlarging the selection. (⁵⁴)

The expanded digital edition appeared in February 2022. Pepe explicitly reconsidered the first edition’s scope. He had included Chinese Paladin as a curiosity without recognizing the scale of the tradition around it. Encounters with other players, further research, and books including Video Games Around the World, Video Games and the Global South, and Gaming the Iron Curtain had exposed limitations in his own picture of the field. The revised book added material on Flash, RPG Maker, Mac-only games, online games, and untranslated titles. He presented this broader selection as a correction to limitations he had come to recognize in himself. (⁵⁵)

The expanded hardcover appeared in August 2023, reporting 65 additional reviews and professional proofreading. That was followed in October by a corrected digital edition. Pepe repaired high-contrast display behavior, links from the contents and cover gallery, incorrect image ratios, and screenshots whose colors had been converted for print. New findings from the CRPG Addict led him to rewrite part of the PLATO section. He squeezed in further titles from the Philippines, Iran, and Russia. These changes show revision operating at several levels simultaneously: scholarship, selection, page layout, and the ordinary experience of reading a file. (⁵⁶; ⁵⁷)

He also stopped. In October 2023 he said this would be the final large update: the book was already too big and was intended as a curated overview, not a complete catalogue or a perpetual review of new releases. Games after 2019 remained outside that endpoint. When asked again for an EPUB, he explained that dismantling the complex layout would require months. These were editorial and personal boundaries within a project whose public demand could continue indefinitely. (⁵⁸)

Translation gave the work another life, and another set of labor problems. The authorized Chinese project, CRPG 通鉴, announced that, at Pepe’s suggestion, it would add original accounts of Chinese-language games instead of only translating the English text. Its call invited articles about work from mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and Chinese-speaking teams elsewhere. Its recruitment page separated translation and proofreading, layout, publicity, and adaptation for readers using Traditional Chinese. It requested regular weekly contributions and explicitly offered no direct payment. Those terms belonged to the Chinese translation group’s own arrangements. They show why reaching another language community requires local editorial knowledge and continuing organization as well as permission from the original editor. (⁵⁹; ⁶⁰)

Tastes, arguments, and intellectual changes

Pepe’s historical work remains connected to the enjoyment of playing. In February 2016 he described searching for obscure games as a hobby in itself: although he enjoyed a newly purchased XCOM 2, he had spent more time with the older Mordor. This is a useful ordinary detail about the project. Forgotten games were not solely obligations to document; they could divert him from a new release he already liked. (⁶¹)

He is also an argumentative critic of what games ask players to think about. In 2016, after playing extensively for the book, he called for RPGs with more serious political and economic choices. He contrasted simplistic good-and-evil decisions with the questions raised by Ultima V’s authoritarian enforcement of virtue and Divinity: Dragon Commander’s policy debates. Contemporary arguments about a possible military intervention in Brazil made the former particularly resonant for him. He still criticized the game’s eventual supernatural explanation for withdrawing the ambiguity it had opened. The essay locates a preference: he values systems and settings that let players confront conflicting reasons and consequences. (⁶²)

His January 2025 essay “The Gentrification of Video Game History” made that reflection more personal. He remembered first playing Pokémon through an emulator and spending time in Brazilian LAN houses, yet initially excluding those modes of play from his own book. He drew on Mia Consalvo and Christopher Paul’s Real Games and Brendan Keogh’s The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist to question assumptions about which games and players deserve historical attention. Hourly access in a shared venue, modified games, unofficial servers, and mobile play could disappear from a story built around buying and owning prestigious releases. An exhibition in a Taipei library, presenting local classics alongside internationally familiar games, offered him a concrete example of a different historical arrangement. (⁶³)

A June 2025 essay likewise revisited the title The CRPG Book. Pepe acknowledged that irritation over games being adapted for consoles had been part of his own earlier perspective. The 2014 project belonged to that particular period and community. Subsequent multiplatform releases and changing usage made “CRPG” mean something different to many readers. Citing Jon Peterson’s historical work and a reflection by Pierre Bourdieu, he argued for making a definition’s time, place, and audience explicit. His book could retain value as a record of one historical framing while ceasing to look self-explanatory. (⁶⁴)

Audiences and the next project

The audience for Pepe’s work extends across specialist fan media and historical discussion. He appeared on Brazil’s Jogo Véio podcast in 2018, spoke with the Video Game History Foundation in 2021, and joined Tales from the Backlog in 2024 to discuss RPG history and Baldur’s Gate 3. In February 2025, Gamers with Glasses interviewed him about the exclusions examined in his recent essay. These are distinct channels of exchange: Brazilian enthusiasts, preservation practitioners, players seeking an entry into the genre, and critics interested in how histories are written. (⁶⁵; ⁶⁶; ⁶⁷; ⁶⁸)

The book’s reception also gives some evidence of the editorial work’s effect. Reviewing it for Retronauts in January 2025, Stuart Gipp described himself as intimidated by CRPGs but found the book inviting. He singled out its concise, personal accounts, informative captions, sidebars, and apparent consistency despite the many contributors. The unusually broad selection initially puzzled him but became more understandable through the book’s explanations. Gipp’s response provides a concrete example of the guide working as Pepe intended: a newcomer could use a large collective history to find an accessible route into the games. (⁶⁹)

In May 2025 Pepe published My Little Game History Anthology, a working collection of links organized by regions, platforms, preservation, magazines, and forms of play. He explained that curated links could help readers rediscover material buried online or recover archived pages when search no longer made them easy to find. The list connected academic work with blogs, fan archives, documentary interviews, and his own articles. It made his reading and source world visible as a practical tool for other researchers. (⁷⁰)

On October 31, 2025, he announced The Video Game History Expansion Pack, a new book centered on histories outside customary United States perspectives. Its proposed economics differed from the wholly volunteer CRPG project. He had set aside a personal fund and offered US$300 for accepted articles of roughly 3,000–5,000 words, undertaking to fund at least ten. He requested a perpetual, nonexclusive license and allowed writers to reuse earlier work; translation could be discussed. The intended ebook would be free, visually accessible, and easier to translate, with a possible physical edition afterward. He also stated that he was doing it alongside a busy full-time job and offered no release date. The public evidence here establishes the announcement and terms, not a finished publication. (⁷¹)

Pepe’s trajectory joins a childhood relationship with computers, a professional communications career, migration, and the persistent work of organizing a volunteer publication. The book changed him as he changed it: playing, correspondence, contributors, and unfamiliar sources forced revisions to the historical field he thought he knew. Its practical achievements depend on that revisability, but also on ordinary acts—getting a review finished, correcting a credit, reaching a scene for a screenshot, finding space on a page, and deciding when to stop. The wider project he subsequently proposed retains the wish to make games and their histories accessible while changing how new writers would be paid.