The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to PlayStation and Beyond

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The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to PlayStation and Beyond traces the growth of a global phenomenon that has become an integral part of popular culture today. All aspects of video games and gaming culture are covered inside this engaging reference, including the leading video game innovators, the technological advances that made the games of the late 1970s and those of today possible, the corporations that won and lost billions of dollars pursing this lucrative market, arcade culture, as well as the demise of free-standing video consoles and the rise of home-based and hand-held gaming devices.

In the United States alone, the video game industry raked in an astonishing $12.5 billion last year, and shows no signs of slowing. Once dismissed as a fleeting fad of the young and frivolous, this booming industry has not only proven its staying power, but promises to continue driving the future of new media and emerging technologies. Today video games have become a limitless and multifaceted medium through which Fortune 50 corporations and Hollywood visionaries alike are reaching broader global audiences and influencing cultural trends at a rate unmatched by any other media.

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The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to PlayStation and Beyond Review

If you're like me and you are looking for a book that provides a comprehensive, authoritative history of video games...keep looking. This is not it.

Starting on page 10, where the chapter's author (and editor of the book) Mark J. P. Wolf cites Defender as an example of a vector arcade game, I found myself stumbling upon inaccurate information sprinkled throughout the book.

Because there are a number of different authors, the chapters tend to vary rather drastically in quality. Some chapters, like Chapter 14 (The Rise of the Home Computer by Bob Rehak) are well-written and very interesting. Another contributor is noted video game historian Leonard Herman (whose own "Phoenix: The Fall and Rise of Video Games" is a far superior book on the subject of video game history). Herman's space must have been limited by the publisher or the editor in this case. For example, his chapter profiling Atari, the most prominent company in early video game history, is a mere three pages long and covers the formative years of the company, the 11 years when Atari was at the height of its success(1972-1983), in only three short paragraphs!

Unfortunately, the well-written and informative chapters are in the minority here. For example, Wolf's chapter profiling the adventure game genre somehow manages to mention neither Infocom (developer of the most popular text adventures ever published on home computer systems) nor World of Warcraft--the online multiplayer adventure game played by millions around the world and considered by most to be the peak of modern adventure game development.

In addition to glaring omissions like these, the research behind the book is extremely spotty. It is obvious to anyone who is familiar with the subject that the information in arcade game chapters is primarily drawn from the Killer List of Video Games [...], an informational site that lists thousands of arcade games. The game names are peppered through these chapters in shotgun fashion, with often questionable release dates but little elaboration on the nature of the games themselves. There is also an obvious unwillingness throughout the book to follow up on games whose histories are hazy (read: not fully documented on KLOV)--in numerous cases game titles, which were probably just culled from a list of a company's games on KLOV, are mentioned but then said to have "possibly never been released." Video games haven't exsisted nearly as long as most other forms of entertainment, so the people who made them are still around for the most part. While you might not be able to ask a 17th century writer if he had ever released some rumored manuscript, one CAN contact video game manufacturers/designers/programmers from the 80s and ask them whether a game was ever released. (I know...I've done it myself. Video game developers are very approachable and, for the most part, easy to find.)

Anyway...the bottom line is that you should save your hard-earned money. If this book had been well researched and consistently well written, I would wholeheartedly endorse dropping $[...] on it. As is, you can pay a fraction of that for Leonard Herman's book or Steve Kent's "The Ultimate History of Video Games" and learn a whole lot more about video game history.

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