Oh, She's Bookish: Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry

Completed: July 7th, 2026

After reading “Play Nice” and being absolutely immersed in the history of one of my favorite studios, I decided to look into more books in the genre. I tried “Doom Guy,” which is an autobiography of John Romero, co-founder of iD and all the Doom games. I could not get into the narrative, which may be the first-person writing style. So, I returned to Jason Schreier. I found Play Nice to be dry on the writing, but unmatched in the content he was able to get access to, and the bear of a process I can luckily only imagine of getting it all into order. For all of its investigative journalistic quirks of being measured and direct, it still felt compelling. Press Reset is more of an anthology of stories and, true to its title, is quite a downer. You can’t really let that influence your review per se, but I did have to take this book slower just to balance out the emotional tone of it all. So, in that way it was a success. As I think part of Schreier’s point of writing was to both inform and disillusion the public and potential developers by findings so many real-world examples of how it all goes wrong. And what is particularly powerful is how it does not matter who you are - unless you are Gabe Newell, I guess- but everyone else, even the greats, fall to the machine that is the video game industry. There is more of Schreier’s personality in this book, though it is still very sparse. His moments don’t add anything for me, but it may add levity to others reading. I’m glad these stories are documented and I’m glad this book was written, but I can’t really recommend it unless you are a diehard fan of one of the games covered, a general fanatic about the games industry, or on the academic/historian side of this because of all the primary sources.