The Ultimate History of Video Games
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Paperback - USA - 1st edition. |
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The Ultimate History of Video Games is a history book focusing on the global video game market written by Steven Kent and published on 2001-09-06. The book is an updated version of The First Quarter: A 25-Year History of Video Games, which Kent self-published a year earlier. It was reprinted as The Ultimate History of Video Games, Vol. 1 in 2021 when the sequel, The Ultimate History of Video Games, Vol. 2, was published.
The book covers video game history from Ralph Baer's early invention of the Brown Box in the 1960s up to the release of the PlayStation 2, focusing primarily on popular arcade and console systems.
Personal
| Own? | First edition paperback. |
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| Read? | Audiobook read by Dan Woren. |
| Finished | 2023-09-18. |
I remember seeing this book in stores when it came out and thinking it looked interesting, but I never got around to buying it. As I got more into understanding video games from an academic perspective, I felt like I needed to read this book.
Review
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Overall: |
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Good
- Rather than focus on games, the book goes into detail about the founding of several major video game companies with many direct quotes from the people who worked there. There is a lot about the individuals, the legal battles, and the complications faced in the manufacturing process. This is important, because, anyone can play the games, but getting the stories around how they got to market is much harder to find.
- The book is chock full of direct quotes from many different big names in the video game industry, and when personal accounts conflict, the author notes the differences between them.
- The illustration section has a lot of interesting and historic photographs of important gaming figures.
Bad
- For all the games described in the book, there are almost no illustrations relating to them. I would expect plenty of screenshots, photos of arcade cabinets, scans of boxes, etc., but the vast majority of the book is text only.
- The book makes several questionable or erroneous historical claims or describes video games and hardware incorrectly.
- The game claims Space War was the first computer game, which is difficult to justify.
- The author claims Pong was released on the 2600, but it wasn't. The most similar game was Video Olympics.
- The book claims Adventure contained the first video game Easter egg, but there are several earlier games with Easter eggs.
- The game repeats the tale of Space Invaders causing a coin shortage in Japan, which appears to be an urban legend.
- The book suggests that the NES Deluxe Set, Control Deck, and Action Set were all available at the same time along side equivalents for the Master System. In reality, these sets were released over the span of a few years.
- The description of Donkey Kong implies that the game only has two stages, but it actually has four. However, several home ports only have two stages, which may have been what the author was referring to.
- The book suggests that the arcade version of Super Mario Bros. predated the NES cartridge. This is forgivable since the national release of the home game really was after the national release of the arcade port, but there was a New York test market release several months before the arcade release, and a Los Angeles release around the same time as the national release of the arcade port.
- The game says you can dodge Bald Bull's bull charge in Punch-Out!!, then follow it up with a counter-punch. However, if you dodge the punch, you can't counter-punch, a body blow at the right time is your only way to stop it.
- The Game Genie is described as an adapter that lets you expose hidden Easter eggs left behind by the programmers. While this is technically possible in a handful of games, it's a pretty inaccurate description of the peripheral.
- Wolfenstein 3-D is incorrectly titled "Castle Wolfenstein 3D" multiple times. This is a mish-mash of Escape from Castle Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein 3D. The book also claims Super Noah's Ark 3D has different art, but uses the same "mazes" as Wolfenstein 3D, which it doesn't.
- The author mistakenly claims Breakout was a launch title for Game Boy; he's confusing it with Alleyway.
- It gives the impression that toy manufacturer LJN was created by Acclaim Entertainment to get around Nintendo's five-games-a-year rule (like how Konami created Ultra. In reality, LJN was founded in 1970 and was already publishing games on the NES independently. Acclaim was looking for a way to publish more than five games, so it bought LJN in 1989 to have access to their existing license and game developer contacts.
- The murderous Black Warriors martial arts gang who have taken over the post-apocalyptic city in Double Dragon II: The Revenge are described as "muggers."
- It describes the Sound Blaster as having a "MIDI joystick port," when it actually has a DA-15 "game port."
- It implies Myst predates The 7th Guest, but The 7th Guest was released about five months prior.
- It claims Night Trap was released on Genesis, but the closest thing to it was the 32X, which is an add-on to the Genesis, so it's not much of a stretch.
- The reader of the audiobook occasionally mispronounces some of the more esoteric terms like referring to id Software as "eye-dee software." There were a couple other examples, but I didn't keep track of them.
Ugly
- I understand that the title change was outside of Kent's hands, but even his original title makes it sound like he's going to cover all the major events of the global video game industry. In reality, the book's focus is much more narrow being almost exclusively on the major arcade and console games, and, even then, most of the unpopular consoles were ignored entirely like the Sega SG-1000, Super A'Can, Pippin, and Loopy. Computer games, which made up a massive industry, and totaled probably around 100,000 games across scores of platforms by the time the book was published, are left out, almost entirely. Only about a dozen of the most popular titles are mentioned. The book also focuses almost exclusively on the US and Japanese markets, despite Europe being an enormous market, and the growing markets in South America, mainland Asia, and elsewhere in the world.
Media
Covers
Paperback - USA - 1st edition. Uses typefaces from Moon Patrol, Defender, Donkey Kong, Centipede, Zaxxon, and Pac-Man.
Paperback - USA - Reprint. Features pixel art of early console controllers.
Links
