The Ultimate History Of Video Games:  The Story Behind The Craze That Touched OUr Lives And Changed The World, by Steven L. Kent

One thing to note about this book is that although it is massive in scope at about 600 pages or so, the book itself ends around the year 2000.  At the end of this book, Microsoft is still about to enter the video game industry, so the format war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD that was won by Sony as an aftereffect of its victory in the PS3/Xbox 360 competition is not included in this particular book.  But if you want a history that spends a lot of time on the early video game world and sets our contemporary fondness for video games in a context that looks at its origins, this book is certainly a worthwhile and entertaining book that appears heavily based on either first-person interviews or some very sound reading that manages to capture a lot of quotes.  To say that there are some massive ego battles and some epic competitions and struggles here is a great understatement, and this book speaks not only about the personalities involved in video games but also the games themselves, and the choices that were faced by game designers in seeking to make the best games given the constraints they worked with.

This book is nearly 600 pages and 30 chapters and it begins in the world before pong (1) and ends at the period where Sega abandons the console wars to Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft because it cannot compete with the larger and better funded competition (30).  The author begins with a discussion of the development of early games, the forgotten fathers of video games, and the pinball and arcade machines that served as the foundation for video games.  There is a discussion of the rise of Atari, the golden age of video games that boo place from 1979-1983 (10, 11), as well as the crash that followed and the aftermath that made consumer stores a bit more reluctant to support video games.  The author spends a fair amount of time talking about Nintendo and various game makers and designers and the way that Nintendo’s rise made it possible for Sega, Sony, and others to join into the console market with profit.  Nor does the author neglect the forgotten video game consoles that simply failed to catch on, ranging from the headache-inducing Virtual Boy to the highly overpriced 3DO offerings and the late and lamented Saturn and Dreamcast that doomed Sega.

Again, it should be remembered that this particular history of video games is missing at least nearly two-decades of computer gaming, so we don’t have discussions of MMORPGs or the rise of PC gaming or the way that cell phones and their games has drastically slowed the pace of video game consoles in a world where gaming has become less profitable than it once was.  But what this book does and does very well is put video game history into a context that allows the reader to recognize that the creation of good games, their pricing in such a way that the games could sell, and the distribution networks that allowed the games to reach their audience were all of great importance long before contemporary video games.  Some games were too expensive, some were on formats that simply did not have a large playing base, and so some great games fell by the wayside.  Some systems (the PS2 and beyond) were so advanced as to create problems for video game designers who had thrived in the face of constraints but were overwhelmed by having those constraints removed and being unable to choose how best to optimize their games given the huge amount of features that could be included.