Typically, video game books tend to be either art books, novels set in the same world as a game, or novels that utilize games to tell a larger story.

But New York Collapse: An Urban Catastrophe Survival Guide is taking a rather different approach. The book is supposed to be a survival guide written by Warren Merchant. Yet, when you open it, you realize that what you've got is a secondhand copy of the book that was given to a woman named April Kelleher by her husband, and that it's full of notes she made while going through the disaster that's depicted in Ubisoft new game, The Division. There's even a map, a Metro card, and other artifacts stuck between the pages.

To figure out exactly how this book came together, and how it intersects with the game, we spoke to the book's real author, Alex Irvine, whose gaming credentials not only include the new Deus Ex comic and the script for the mobile and Facebook game Marvel: Avengers Alliance, but also a little something called "I Love Bees."

GameCrate: Where did the idea of doing an annotated survival guide come from?

Alex Irvine: It happened in stages. Ubisoft wanted to do a tie-in/prequel novel, but they wanted it to be kind of meta. Y'know, kind of like that novel that J.J. Abrams did a few years ago called S.. I don't know who originally brought up the idea of making it like S., but S. is a novel that has notes written in the margins that are about someone else.

I was brought in when Ubisoft hired Melcher Media to produce the book. John Morgan, an editor at Melcher who I knew from when he worked at DC Comics, put this in front of me, and I said, "What if we took the concept behind S. but took it a bit further?" We all thought S. was pretty cool, but that there was more you could do with the idea. The idea of it being a survival guide was already present, and Melcher wanted there to be a puzzle element to it, but I asked, "What if, in reading the book, April starts to realize that the guy who wrote the survival guide knew what was going to happen in New York, so she goes back through it and discovers that he had left Easter eggs in the book in the form of puzzles, and that they're clues to what's happening, as well as clues to Merchant's true identity?"

But then I thought, and this was the real exciting part for me, "What if we write part of this into the game? What if the book is part of the game?" And Ubisoft were into that.

GC: How exactly does that work?

AI: Well, there are quests in the game that require you to look at pages in the book, and there are some puzzles in the book that will lead you to things in the game that you wouldn't find otherwise.

GC: And at what point did the idea come in to include things like a map and a Metro card?

AI: That came from someone at Melcher Media. They do a lot of books that are unusual and have inserts and things like that. And we did that because it helps make the book feel like something that someone else had before you, like it really was owned by this woman April Kelleher and you found it.

GC: Did anyone ever suggest including a real New York City Metro card, maybe with one ride on it?

AI: Heh. We did think of that, but were somewhat constrained by legal stuff. Though not with a ride on it, that would've driven the cost of the book up.

GC: So how did you actually write the book? Did you write each page with all of the elements, did you write it in stages…?

AI: I realized that I would drive myself nuts if I wrote the survival guide and April's notes at the same time. So I researched and wrote the survival guide first — I did a ton of research, actually — and then went back through it and tweaked some of it to make room for the puzzles, and made other notes about what April might write in the book. At this point, Melcher laid out the survival guide, and then sent me the pages as a PDF, on which I wrote April's notes in different colors and made doodles. They then converted that to a handwriting font to make sure it would all fit, and then someone at Melcher hand-wrote April's notes, which were digitized and laid over the original PDF.

GC: Wow. You mentioned that you did a ton of research when writing the survival guide part. Did you have someone make sure you weren't giving out bad advice?

AI: Yeah, there were things in the book originally that Merchant pointed out someone could get hurt if they did. Though they'd have to be really desperate or stupid to try any of them.

But a lot of it was derived from other survival guides, as well as government websites, and research from urban foragers. And some of the stuff actually works. I read this one article, I forget where, about how you could heat a room with some clay pots and a candle. So I went to the hardware store, got the clay pots and a candle, and set it up in a room of my house that wasn't heated, and when I came back an hour or so later, the room was actually warmer.

GC: That's cool. I assume you collaborated a bit with the people at Ubisoft Massive, who are making the game.

AI: Right.

GC: How often did they tell you to cut something because it conflicted with something in the game? Or did they kind of see the book as something that might have mistakes in it?

AI: Both of those things happened. There were a couple times when I was coming up with April's story that Massive said that they didn't want to touch upon some part of the story. But the first time that happened I said, "Well, what if April is wrong? Because she's only seeing things from her viewpoint." So some of that stuff stayed in the book.

GC: While the book is mostly serious, there are a couple funny bits in there. Was this a concern for anyone?

AI: No, it wasn't. They're pretty sensitive to character at Ubisoft, and we talked about the fact that one of the ways people deal with terrible situations is to make jokes about it. So, not only does April do that in the book, but there's also times when Merchant does that in the survival guide as well.

GC: So are you into games?

AI: Well, I'm looking forward to playing The Division. *laughs*

GC: Uh, yeah. And what about games you're not writing books about?

AI: Well, I'm playing the hell out of Fallout 4 right now, and I got a PS4 for Christmas and it came with Star Wars Battlefront, so I've been playing that with my sons, who are big Star Wars fans. I'm also working on a new Deus Ex comic, the first issue of which came out last week. I got a chance to play that game, that game's a blast.

GC: So what other games do you think could warrant a book like this? And I don't just mean an annotated book, but rather something that is an extension of the game way more than a novel or comic.

AI: I would say just about any game with a rich story. I'm a big believer in these kinds of things, and I've wanted to do a project like this for a while. So I could envision a book like this for almost anything. I mean, can you imagine a book like this for a Batman game, a book written by The Riddler? I think this book is proof that something like this could work.

New York Collapse: An Urban Catastrophe Survival Guide will be out March 8 in paperback. You can check out a trailer for the book here:

Tom Clancy's The Division will be out March 8 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.