The Ultimate History of Video Games

With all the whiz, bang, pop, and shimmer of a glowing arcade. The Ultimate History of Video Games reveals everything you ever wanted to know and more about the unforgettable games that changed the world, the visionaries who made them, and the fanatics who played them. From the arcade to television and from the PC to the handheld device, video games have entraced kids at heart for nearly 30 years. And author and gaming historian Steven L. Kent has been there to record the craze from the very beginning.

This engrossing book tells the incredible tale of how this backroom novelty transformed into a cultural phenomenon. Through meticulous research and personal interviews with hundreds of industry luminaries, you'll read firsthand accounts of how yesterday's games like Space Invaders, Centipede, and Pac-Man helped create an arcade culture that defined a generation, and how today's empires like Sony, Nintendo, and Electronic Arts have galvanized a multibillion-dollar industry and a new generation of games.

Inside, you'll discover:

The video game that saved Nintendo from bankruptcy
The serendipitous story of Pac-Man's design
The misstep that helped topple Atari's $2 billion-a-year empire
The coin shortage caused by Space Invaders
The fascinating reasons behind the rise, fall, and rebirth of Sega
And much more!

Entertaining, addictive, and as mesmerizing as the games it chronicles, this book is a must-have for anyone who's ever touched a joystick.

From Publishers Weekly
In this rollicking, mammoth history of video games from pinball to Pong to Playstation II Kent, a technology journalist and self-professed video game addict, covers almost every conceivable aspect of the industry, from the technological leaps that made the games possible to the corporate power struggles that won (and lost) billions of dollars. Anecdotes are legion. Readers learn that early Atari, for example, had the corporate climate of a dot-com startup, with rampant drug use and meetings staged in outdoor hot tubs. The original name for Pac-Man turns out to be Puck-Man; its creators changed the name after worrying that vandals in arcades would replace the P with an F. In 1978, there were so many people playing Space Invaders in Japan that the game caused a national coin shortage. Kent meticulously documents the rise of home video games and the console wars of the past decade, when Sega, Nintendo, Sony and others raced to produce the fastest, most powerful game system. Also addressed is the public backlash of the '80s, when video games were thought to distract students from homework, and the '90s, when Doom and other violent games were linked to the massacre at Columbine High School. Along the way, Kent interviews virtually every key player in the industry. At times, Kent's comprehensiveness is exhausting 500-plus pages on video games may be a bit much, even for their most ardent admirers. But most often Kent's infectious enthusiasm is enough to carry the reader along. Equal parts oral history, engineering study, business memoir, game catalogue and Gen-X nostalgia trip, Kent's book is a loving tribute to one of the most dynamic (and profitable) industries in the world today.

Ryan Sharpe, GamePolitics.com

Admittedly, The Ultimate History of Video Games is not a new release. This amazing book was first published in 2001. But it's still available, and, given its timeless quality, gamers with a yen to know more about how their beloved hobby was born and evolved will crave it for their libraries.

Author Steven L. Kent sets straight readers who may think Pong was the first video game. Or that Sega started as a Japanese company. The truth, fascinating, bizarre and sometimes comical, reveals itself in page after page of Kent's near-encyclopedic recap of 70 years of electronic games, from the first pinball machines in 1931 to the sound and fury of the 2000 E3 Expo (i.e - just prior to that fall's PS2 launch).

Kent sprinkles his work with hundreds of quotations from dozens of sources who comment on the game industry's roller coaster ride through recent history. Readers will marvel at the unexpected rise of gaming in the Atari era, wince at the bad management that brought on the near-fatal crash of '83, and snicker at the unintentionally prophetic words of clueless game business executives.

Did you ever wonder how the NES managed to earn a staggering 90% market share? Steven Kent's book tells you. Or what possessed Sega to support seven (!) different hardware platforms at one point in the 1990's? Kent's got your 411.

But it is the author's recounting the industry's human dramas which transforms The Ultimate History of Video Games into something more than a mere reference book. Among the best of these are his description of the bitter struggle Atari visionaries Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn waged against notoriously nasty Commodore strongman Jack Tramiel and his associates.

At just shy of six hundred pages, this book will take even the most voracious reader days to work through, but the constant mix of storytelling and fascinating trivia will keep readers coming back for more. On the other hand, The Ultimate History of Video Games is the kind of work one can pick up and put down when the mood strikes. And,even when finished, readers may well find themselves referring to it again and again.

If there was ever a must-buy book for gamers, The Ultimate History of Video Games is the one.