What’s up Undertoads?
This is Jonathan from Classic Game Room, and I’ve got a special treat for you today.
There have been books on video game history for a while now, but there’s one book that
stands out above the rest as the ultimate resource for video game industry history.
It’s the big book o’ history, The Ultimate History of Video Games, by Steven Kent!
The story behind the craze that touched our lives and changed the world.
It’s a really cool book, just look at the cover!
How can you see that the shelf and not go “wow, that’s awesome!”
The Ultimate History of Video Games is a big book featuring rather extensive interviews
with several prominent figures of the video game history.
Mr. Kent met with guys like Nolan Bushnell from Atari, who later founded Chuck E. Cheese’s,
Mr. Arakwara of Nintendo of America, Al Alcorn, the designer of Pong, and many other industry
leaders and employees of various video game companies.
What I like about this book’s layout is that each of the interviewee’s quotes are
presented in a blockquote format, allowing you to easily skim through the book to find
a quote you like, or find a quote from a certain interviewee.
It also makes the book extremely easy and comfortable to read since the quotes help
break up the multitude of information presented by providing us with a direct source for some
of the things talked about.
There’s a lot of personal anecdotes that you wouldn’t read about in other history
books like this, like how Steve Bristow, also of Atari, and his wife carried a hatchet on
their coin-collection route since they couldn’t carry a gun.
If I had hundreds of dollars worth of quarters at any given time, I’d be nervous too, so
I can’t really blame them, but it’s funny to see it quoted in a book like this.
So it’s the ultimate history of video games, but what does this book really focus on?
Well, everything.
From Steve Russell’s Spacewar computer game the creation and conceptualization of the
Odyssey, to Al Alcorn’s quick repair of a Home Pong unit for demonstration for the
Sears company, to the initial problems Nintendo had breaking into the crushed video game market
in America, this book really covers it all.
But since this book was published in late 2001, it doesn’t deal with anything past
the beginning of the 6th Generation of video games.
Also, this isn’t necessarily a book about the history of specific games.
There’s some stuff on the creation of the first Final Fantasy game for example, and
how Square was facing the possibility of bankruptcy, but don’t expect a complete and total history
on Final Fantasy, or for that matter, many other games.
The creation of Pac-Man is touched on a bit, how the Legend of Zelda had a 1-800 number
to call if you needed a hint, some fun stuff like that, but this book mainly focuses on
the video game industry, the difficulties it faced in the early 80s, how games got sold
to retailers who were very skeptical at first, and other things.
And for that, this really is the ultimate resource; a bulky, 600 some page tome that’s
incredibly well written and detailed.
There’s even a section on everyone’s favorite countertop console, the Vectrex!
If this book seems up your ally, I encourage you to check it out!
It hardly costs anything anymore to pick up online, and there’s far more going on inside
the book than I talk about in this video, but it’s really worth checking out if you
want a detailed overview of how the history of one of the most profitable, interesting
industries has involved over time.
From Arakawa’s money-back offer on unsold NES units, to the birth of the Xbox, the Ultimate
History of Video Games is a book that belongs in any video game addict’s library.