Aside from the occasional round of TETRIS, MINES or WORDS WITH FRIENDS on my iPhone, I really don’t play video games anymore, but I sure appreciate how far they’ve come. My kids are part of the generation who’ve never known a life without them, but I remember being in grade school, struggling to push a lawn mower across neighborhood yards to save up enough money for an Atari 2600.
Once I hit the halfway mark, my father agreed to match it, and the 2600 was ours. It came with COMBAT, and Dad bought SPACE INVADERS and SURROUND to go along with it. You may scoff now, but it was heaven. I was alive to witness the video game revolution, which makes me the perfect person for Tristan Donovan’s REPLAY: THE HISTORY OF VIDEO GAMES.
A journalist in the UK, Donovan was more interested in the evolution of the field from a creative standpoint, so the book is more about the software than the hardware. This approach makes sense, since it was the games that could make or break a console or even an entire company.
And to think it all started in 1958, with a crude tennis game played on an oscilloscope.
But the match that lit the flame really didn’t strike until 1971, when Nolan Bushnell birthed COMPUTER SPACE — not quite the first coin-op game, but the first one to get people to part with loose change on an enormous basis. It’s interesting to see quotes from amusement-industry leaders of the time saying things like, “There is no future in video games and if the day comes … I will eat my hat.”
Was there ever! Bushnell went on to make bring the arcade experience into the home — again, not first, but certainly best — with the Atari 2600. Again, it’s hard to fathom today how it encountered such initial difficulty breaking through to the mainstream, but soon the company went from struggling indie to the crown jewel in the Warner Communications family.
From there, Donovan traces the never-ending line of dominoes, as one console’s success spawns rip-offs and shoddy imitations that saturate the marketplace and ironically lead to that console’s demise, letting another company take the lead. With each leg, the innovation grows as creators push the technology and their creativity, redefining what a game even means.
Like Will Wright, whose SIM CITY and THE SIMS became all-time bestsellers, yet who was met with flummoxed looks from publishers when he sought distribution for his quirky idea. No doubt today, those people are kicking themselves. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Donovan recalls the twisted history of TETRIS, the puzzle phenomenon from Soviet Russia whose exporting became a mired mess of company squabbles and legal battles, all due to a language barrier that resulted in one huge misunderstanding.
Great stories abound throughout REPLAY’s well-organized 28 chapters — roughly chronological, yet sturdily themed. The game designers in France might not command your attention, but what other book is going to dare touch such a niche market? No doubt you’ll be all over the Japan sections, where their porn games are so perverted and/or demented, they make CUSTER’S REVENGE look like Q*BERT.
Nearly 70 pages at the end are devoted to a gameography and glossy of home hardware units, as if I needed another reason to gobble REPLAY’s contents up. From the PAC-MANia to government’s outcry over video game violence, it’s all here. Whether you grew up with your eyes glued to ADVENTURE or SUPER MARIO BROS., with your hand around a joystick or inside a Nintendo Power Glove, this is one history lesson worth its weight in quarters. —Rod Lott
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- The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science, and the Human Brain
- Q&A with SKINTASTIC VIDEO GUIDE’s Mr. Skin
- Mr. Skin’s Skintastic Video Guide: The 501 Greatest Movies for Sex & Nudity on DVD
- The Black-Out Book: 500 Family Games and Puzzles for Wartime Entertainment
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My folks were too cheap to buy us an Atari, so we were stuck with an Odyssey. We also had an ancient Pong game, which I still count as one of the funnest games ever made–well. at least to the mind of a 7-year-old
I can only hope there is an entire chapter devoted to the E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL debacle–my all time favourite pop culture fiasco of the 20th century. Actually, I hope not, cuz that story deserves a whole freakin’ book of its own!
Not a whole chapter, but it’s in there!
We also had an ancient Pong game, which I still count as one of the funnest games ever made–well.