Legend of the River King Format: Paperback

Featuring a baseball-capped kid who leaves his tiny village for the wilds beyond to catch valuable creatures, Victor Interactive's 1998 Game Boy classic Legend of the River King arrived in North America mere months before Pokémon Red and Blue, raising the question: What if River King, the world’s first portable fishing RPG, had been the game to change culture forever?

You're invited to play along with writer and scholar Alexander B. Joy on a travelogue through the game's meadows, forests, lakes, and rivers, stopping along the way to explore River King's valuable insights in the fields of art, culture, philosophy, and ecology. Drawing connections to the work of Rachel Carson, Plato, Pearl Jam, David Foster Wallace, Richard Brautigan, and more, Joy shows River King to be a work of art in its own right.

Whether you’re a diehard fan of the game or just learning of it now, Joy’s work of digital nature writing encourages readers to take a closer look at River King’s surprisingly rich meditations on humankind’s relation to the natural world, our fragility in the face of elemental forces, and the duty of care we owe other living beings.

Alexander B. Joy is a writer from New Hampshire. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and is the editor of Flaxman Low: Occult Detective (MIT Press, 2026). Find him on Bluesky at @aeneas-nin.bsky.social, and see more of his work at alexanderbjoy.com.