How A Former Nasa Employee Became The World's Foremost Author Of...
Victoria Rosenthal has written recipe books based on Fallout, Guild Wars 2, Final Fantasy 14, and many more.
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It's easy to dismiss videogame recipe books as a frivolous marketing gimmick, and I'm as guilty of this as anyone else. My original plan for this article was to find the most preposterous example of a gaming-themed cookbook, then attempt to recreate the silliest recipe from it. I assumed this would be easy. I mean, nobody could actually write a good Sonic-themed cookbook, could they?
Yet when I looked into this odd corner of gaming culture, I noticed two things. First, many of the gaming-themed recipe books you'll find on Amazon are not only well designed, but they're also filled with dishes that look like something you would actually want to eat. Second, many of them are written (or co-written) by the same author—Victoria Rosenthal.
This is not a coincidence. Rosenthal has been writing recipes inspired by videogames for well over a decade, first on her own cooking blog Pixelated Provisions, and later penning official recipe books for a wide range of games. For Rosenthal, gaming is as essential a part of cooking as any other ingredient. Her passion for games is what motivates and inspires her to cook, the thing that sparks her imagination and drives her to experiment with new dishes.
"I've been a gamer my entire life. I had an original Nintendo growing up and then from there [made] a big jump to the Nintendo 64," Rosenthal says. Studying 3D animation in college, Rosenthal's journey into blending gaming and cooking began when she got a job at NASA in Houston, using AR and VR to assist astronauts in training. "It was for crew and trying to figure out ways to make their life easier," she says. "I definitely saw a lot of different crew come in, a lot of the younger people, and it was just like 'Oh you're gonna go to space one day, that's cool!'"
Living in Houston meant doing a lot of driving, which Rosenthal, a Chicago native, doesn't especially enjoy. To avoid driving to restaurants and takeout joints, she began cooking more from home, initially from family recipes. "Then I had friends from college t
Source: PC Gamer
