How a former NASA employee became the world's foremost author of videogame cookbooks: 'It can't look like you're eating a Pokémon'

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