Back in 2021, Philip Summers launched a Kickstarter campaign for Hand-Drawn Game Guides, a series of books that resembled traditional strategy guides, apart from the fact that they were all illustrated by Summers. The campaign was a hit, generating over $300,000 in pledges, but like a number of fan projects utilizing game company IPs, it was pulled before the countdown ended.
He ended up changing plans due to legal concerns, going on to work on other projects and releasing the planned guides from the campaign as free downloads. From the outside, that seemed like the new path for Hand-Drawn Game Guides.
But then, in January 2025, Summers returned to Kickstarter with a surprise announcement — he’d struck a deal with Capcom to make an officially licensed entry in the series: Hand-Drawn Game Guides: Mega Man. That campaign was also a success, and Summers is now working on the book and intending to release it later this year.
In an effort to spotlight game-related books and documentaries, Polygon is running an email interview series with the people behind them. We previously connected with Julian Rignall about his not-quite-an-autobiography The Games of a Lifetime, Paul Vogel about his Housemarque documentary The Name of the Game, Lewis Packwood about his obscure game hardware book Curious Video Game Machines, and Oliver Harper about his Street Fighter 2 documentary Here Comes a New Challenger. Below, Summers discusses how the Mega Man project came about and where he wants to take Hand-Drawn Game Guides in the future.
Polygon: When you launched the Kickstarter campaign, a lot of people were surprised that the book was licensed by Capcom. How did that come about behind the scenes?
Philip Summers: Lucas Thomas from Nintendo Force Magazine/NF Publishing was a fan of the original Hand-Drawn Game Guides campaign and basically remembered me all these years later! He has been expanding into book publishing and wanted to work on a property officially. With some work he was able to get the license from Capcom to create Mega Man books and asked if I would be willing to resurrect the Hand-Drawn Game Guides concept and do it legit this time. We still needed to pitch the book to them for approval, so we created a sequence of pages to present. They liked what they saw and we were able to move ahead from there.
Image: Philip Summers/Hand-Drawn Game Guides
There’s a long history of game books running into legal issues with copyright holders. Do you have any advice for others looking to do similar projects?
Unfortunately I don’t have any real advice on how to go about jumping through some of these loopholes. In the years since my original campaign shut down, I’ve come to find that different companies respond to different types of projects and they all have their own reasons. What I can tell you is that if you plan on launching something like a Kickstarter where your funding totals are public and the project heavily features IP that you don’t have the rights to, it’s highly likely it will get shut down.
In the Mega Man Kickstarter campaign, you mentioned the possibility of doing more Mega Man books after this one. What’s the status of that?
At this point it’s too early to tell. I think we’ll have a much better understanding of where we stand once the book is completed and shipped. Assuming people are happy with it, and Capcom is happy with it, I think it’s fair to say we’ll be able to move onto the next one, which the obvious choice is Mega Man 2. Though I really love Mega Man X too!
Long-term, what are your plans for Hand-Drawn Game Guides? Is the idea to get official licenses for other games and make this a regular thing?
For sure! I have a whole list of games I’d love to work on, and if we end up putting out a great product we’re hopeful more companies will be receptive to letting us give one of their classic games the Hand-Drawn Game Guides treatment. This is a side gig for me, so I can only work so quickly, but who knows maybe that could change one day too.
