Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I've been playing video games for 20 years now. I began with the Atari, saw the market crash, grew up with Nintendo, and got caught up in the 90's proliferation of newer and hotter systems. I know a great deal about the industry, yet this book puts my knowledge to shame.
Exhaustively researched and crammed ridiculously full of information, anecdotes, and hundreds of direct quotes from every walk of video game life, this book is worth more than one read-through. My copy is well-worn because I find it so easy to take with me on plane trips and just start reading through at random points. It's written in a very friendly, conversational tone and engages you with its prose. The book is extremely interesting because the author is clearly interested in the subject himself. He manages to get the kind of details and answer the type of questions you'd want to know, yet stays very thorough and accurate throughout.
Loads of different subjects are covered, sometimes at great length: The bar where Pong was first tested. Nintendo's lawsuit against Galoob's Game Genie. Tengen illegally producing Nintendo games and the big N's forceful prosecution. The battles over Donkey Kong and Tetris. The founding of Electronic Arts. Sega's mid 90's dominance and slip of the cd based systems. The furor over Mortal Kombat. School shootings. I can't list enough, and I can't go on enough about it. This book is extremely comprehensive and covers the entire video game industry and all its major players chronologically from the 70s until the turn of the century. It's well-written, accurate (given all those direct insider quotes) and completely objective. One of the best things about it is the fact that it gives details of so many things from my video game youth, such as the first Nintendo commercials, as well as the good old days of parents rampaging through stores for a copy of the "low supply" games. Aside from interesting industry information, this book helped me reminisce.
I've read "Game Over" (the only book comparable to this one on the subject, though it centers on Nintendo), "Phoenix, the Fall and Rise of Videogames, "Masters of Doom", and several other video game books. Honestly, this one still entertains me after four years. Though it ends at about the dawn of the PS2 and Xbox, it covers so much history and gives so many informative, interesting, and humorous stories that it really does deserve the title "Ultimate". Forgive me for not being more objective, but I must shrug and stick to my story. At 500 pages, and with such a wealth of information about so many familiar faces, companies, and games, I just find this to be the best book on the subject without question. Absolutely worth checking out for any video game player.
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The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon--The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World
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