Console Wars (Blake J. Harris)
Those of us old enough to remember the days of Nintendo and SEGA going at each other's throats will absolutely adore Console Wars, the newest book on this list of six tomes, and the only one that focuses entirely on the rivalry between Nintendo's SNES and SEGA's Genesis. Indeed, largely due to the fall from grace SEGA experienced in the days following Genesis (and later Dreamcast), scholarship on SEGA as a company simply doesn't exist in the volume that it does for Nintendo. Console Wars aims to fix that.
What's truly fascinating about the Genesis is that it put a significant dent into the myth that Nintendo, having single-handedly revived console gaming, was untouchable. By focusing on older gamers and leaning towards edginess, SEGA managed to paint its better-funded and much-more-powerful competitor as behind the times, and even childish. Nintendo ultimately had the last laugh, of course, but in the early '90s, it was SEGA that put Nintendo on the defensive.
Blake Harris' definitive history of the SNES-Genesis war is a must-read. Period.
Game Over (David Sheff)
Japanese companies are notoriously quiet operations. Nintendo, easily Japan's most famous video game export, is no different. Finding a conclusive and worthwhile history on Nintendo in the English language is, therefore, virtually impossible. There is a saving grace, however, and it's in the form of Game Over, a book written by journalist David Sheff and one that covers Nintendo from its 19th century origins and into the 1990s. And thankfully, reading about Nintendo's rise to dominance is, in a word, fascinating.
Combining persistence and knowledge with the ability to execute, Nintendo meteorically went from an obscure playing card company to a burgeoning electronics firm to arcade game designers to the creators of the Nintendo Entertainment System, inarguably the most important gaming device ever created. David Sheff's book examines how this all happened, especially with the release of the NES in America in the wake of the video game crash of 1983. How Nintendo made the NES work Stateside in such a climate is the stuff of legend, and it's all covered here in this book.
And if you're lucky, you'll get the updated copy with a few additional chapters written by none other than IGN alumnus and game industry super-veteran Andy Eddy.
Masters of Doom (David Kushner)
Out of all of the books on this list, Masters of Doom is probably the most outright riveting. Masters of Doom tells the story of now-famous game studio id Software -- from its humble beginnings and up through the 1990s and into the 2000s. Of course, it was the release of Doom in 1994 that truly cemented id as one of the premiere game developers in the industry, though it has plenty of games before and after Doom (from Commander Keen to Quake and beyond) that are worth reading about as well. And thankfully, Masters of Doom covers all of that in plenty of detail, too.
If this book sounds drab, let's put it this way. Do you like first-person shooters? You do? Then you should be on your knees worshipping id Software because it essentially created the genre as we know it today with Wolfenstein 3D in 1992. So if you're interested in reading about the history of the genre that sucks hours and hours from your life every week on PlayStation Network or Xbox Live, then look no further. The rise of Carmack and Romero is simply too good to pass up.
And if you want to research an interesting aside from the book while waiting for your imminent book delivery from Amazon, go ahead and Google "Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement" and read about id's early work illegally porting Super Mario Bros. 3 to DOS.
Replay: The History of Videogames (Tristan Donovan)
Replay covers games from a pretty unique angle. Unlike the other game-centric books on this list, Replay comes from a more generalized and overarching perspective and tells the story of the industry from its very roots at laboratories on Long Island and school computer labs in Massachusetts and California to the present-day phenomenon we know all too well. Indeed, gaming's roots are incredibly humble and stretched out over decades. Tristan Donovan's exhaustive research pays credence to this fact and explores plenty of gaming's niches to tell an interesting story.
It's the actual European subject matter that makes this book truly worthwhile. We've heard the stories about Atari's rise and fall a million times. We know that gaming was dominated by Americans until companies like Taito and Namco got in on the act with Space Invaders and Pac-Man respectively. Donovan covers all of that, but he also covers the European side of the industry with a fair amount of depth, including the computer-centric early years of gaming, when consoles had yet to take hold around the world.
This is definitely a book that jumps around a fair bit, but it certainly covers all of its bases succinctly, and is definitely worth a read, especially for its coverage of European gaming and obscure computer-based gaming from the days of yore.
Power-Up (Chris Kohler)
Let's face it: while Japan's prominence in gaming has fallen in recent years, the fact remains that Japan is the epicenter for the evolution of our favorite hobby, especially in terms of console gaming in the 1980s. A vast majority of the early companies in gaming in the 1970s were American, but by the time the bottom fell out of the industry in 1983, the major players would no longer be the likes of Atari and Coleco. Rather, they would be Japanese gaming companies like Nintendo, SEGA and Sony. Heck, when you think about great games on the NES (the first true infiltration of Japanese gaming into American homes apart from the arcades), you'd be hard-pressed to think of a game of note that came from a studio outside of Japan. That's how entrenched our industry was in Japanese influence following the crash.
Kohler's book attempts to tell the tale of the Japanese side of gaming. The subtitle of the book is actually quite accurate because it was Nintendo's NES that revived gaming when everyone thought console gaming was dead. Arcades were still raging at the time and personal computers were slowly but surely creeping into people's homes, but it was Nintendo's gamble with its NES that brought gaming back into the fold in households across the world. Who knows what gaming's landscape would look like today had that not happened?
So while it appears that Japanese gaming is on the wane today, it's worth your time to read about an era when nothing could be further from the truth.
Fire in the Valley (Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine)
Out of the six books on the list, Fire in the Valley is the only one that's not really about games at all. So how is it relevant? Well, in a way, Fire in the Valley is more relevant to gaming history than just about any other book here simply because it chronicles the rise of the personal computer. A mere dream of engineers and scientists in the decades following World War II, the personal computer went from impossible to unlikely to sitting right on your desktop by the late 1970s. And there would be no videogames without those machines.
Naturally, computers are important to the history of gaming simply because the earliest games ever created weren't on consoles. The earliest games were played on mainframe computers and other large devices, played exclusively with archaic tools like punch cards. By the time monitors and keyboards became more widespread, the power of gaming was forced to the forefront. But you really have to know where computers came from to understand where gaming came from. After all, the very first recognizable video game, Tennis For Two, was created nearly two decades before the first console on a primitive computer using an oscilloscope as a monitor.
Half text book, half in-depth history, Fire in the Valley is chockfull of fascinating information and tidbits. And yes, it's also the inspiration for the cheesy (yet awesome) late '90s made-for-TV movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley, starring Noah Wily and Anthony Michael Hall.
Those of us old enough to remember the days of Nintendo and SEGA going at each other's throats will absolutely adore Console Wars, the newest book on this list of six tomes, and the only one that focuses entirely on the rivalry between Nintendo's SNES and SEGA's Genesis. Indeed, largely due to the fall from grace SEGA experienced in the days following Genesis (and later Dreamcast), scholarship on SEGA as a company simply doesn't exist in the volume that it does for Nintendo. Console Wars aims to fix that.
What's truly fascinating about the Genesis is that it put a significant dent into the myth that Nintendo, having single-handedly revived console gaming, was untouchable. By focusing on older gamers and leaning towards edginess, SEGA managed to paint its better-funded and much-more-powerful competitor as behind the times, and even childish. Nintendo ultimately had the last laugh, of course, but in the early '90s, it was SEGA that put Nintendo on the defensive.
Blake Harris' definitive history of the SNES-Genesis war is a must-read. Period.
Game Over (David Sheff)
Japanese companies are notoriously quiet operations. Nintendo, easily Japan's most famous video game export, is no different. Finding a conclusive and worthwhile history on Nintendo in the English language is, therefore, virtually impossible. There is a saving grace, however, and it's in the form of Game Over, a book written by journalist David Sheff and one that covers Nintendo from its 19th century origins and into the 1990s. And thankfully, reading about Nintendo's rise to dominance is, in a word, fascinating.
Combining persistence and knowledge with the ability to execute, Nintendo meteorically went from an obscure playing card company to a burgeoning electronics firm to arcade game designers to the creators of the Nintendo Entertainment System, inarguably the most important gaming device ever created. David Sheff's book examines how this all happened, especially with the release of the NES in America in the wake of the video game crash of 1983. How Nintendo made the NES work Stateside in such a climate is the stuff of legend, and it's all covered here in this book.
And if you're lucky, you'll get the updated copy with a few additional chapters written by none other than IGN alumnus and game industry super-veteran Andy Eddy.
Masters of Doom (David Kushner)
Out of all of the books on this list, Masters of Doom is probably the most outright riveting. Masters of Doom tells the story of now-famous game studio id Software -- from its humble beginnings and up through the 1990s and into the 2000s. Of course, it was the release of Doom in 1994 that truly cemented id as one of the premiere game developers in the industry, though it has plenty of games before and after Doom (from Commander Keen to Quake and beyond) that are worth reading about as well. And thankfully, Masters of Doom covers all of that in plenty of detail, too.
If this book sounds drab, let's put it this way. Do you like first-person shooters? You do? Then you should be on your knees worshipping id Software because it essentially created the genre as we know it today with Wolfenstein 3D in 1992. So if you're interested in reading about the history of the genre that sucks hours and hours from your life every week on PlayStation Network or Xbox Live, then look no further. The rise of Carmack and Romero is simply too good to pass up.
And if you want to research an interesting aside from the book while waiting for your imminent book delivery from Amazon, go ahead and Google "Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement" and read about id's early work illegally porting Super Mario Bros. 3 to DOS.
Replay: The History of Videogames (Tristan Donovan)
Replay covers games from a pretty unique angle. Unlike the other game-centric books on this list, Replay comes from a more generalized and overarching perspective and tells the story of the industry from its very roots at laboratories on Long Island and school computer labs in Massachusetts and California to the present-day phenomenon we know all too well. Indeed, gaming's roots are incredibly humble and stretched out over decades. Tristan Donovan's exhaustive research pays credence to this fact and explores plenty of gaming's niches to tell an interesting story.
It's the actual European subject matter that makes this book truly worthwhile. We've heard the stories about Atari's rise and fall a million times. We know that gaming was dominated by Americans until companies like Taito and Namco got in on the act with Space Invaders and Pac-Man respectively. Donovan covers all of that, but he also covers the European side of the industry with a fair amount of depth, including the computer-centric early years of gaming, when consoles had yet to take hold around the world.
This is definitely a book that jumps around a fair bit, but it certainly covers all of its bases succinctly, and is definitely worth a read, especially for its coverage of European gaming and obscure computer-based gaming from the days of yore.
Power-Up (Chris Kohler)
Let's face it: while Japan's prominence in gaming has fallen in recent years, the fact remains that Japan is the epicenter for the evolution of our favorite hobby, especially in terms of console gaming in the 1980s. A vast majority of the early companies in gaming in the 1970s were American, but by the time the bottom fell out of the industry in 1983, the major players would no longer be the likes of Atari and Coleco. Rather, they would be Japanese gaming companies like Nintendo, SEGA and Sony. Heck, when you think about great games on the NES (the first true infiltration of Japanese gaming into American homes apart from the arcades), you'd be hard-pressed to think of a game of note that came from a studio outside of Japan. That's how entrenched our industry was in Japanese influence following the crash.
Kohler's book attempts to tell the tale of the Japanese side of gaming. The subtitle of the book is actually quite accurate because it was Nintendo's NES that revived gaming when everyone thought console gaming was dead. Arcades were still raging at the time and personal computers were slowly but surely creeping into people's homes, but it was Nintendo's gamble with its NES that brought gaming back into the fold in households across the world. Who knows what gaming's landscape would look like today had that not happened?
So while it appears that Japanese gaming is on the wane today, it's worth your time to read about an era when nothing could be further from the truth.
Fire in the Valley (Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine)
Out of the six books on the list, Fire in the Valley is the only one that's not really about games at all. So how is it relevant? Well, in a way, Fire in the Valley is more relevant to gaming history than just about any other book here simply because it chronicles the rise of the personal computer. A mere dream of engineers and scientists in the decades following World War II, the personal computer went from impossible to unlikely to sitting right on your desktop by the late 1970s. And there would be no videogames without those machines.
Naturally, computers are important to the history of gaming simply because the earliest games ever created weren't on consoles. The earliest games were played on mainframe computers and other large devices, played exclusively with archaic tools like punch cards. By the time monitors and keyboards became more widespread, the power of gaming was forced to the forefront. But you really have to know where computers came from to understand where gaming came from. After all, the very first recognizable video game, Tennis For Two, was created nearly two decades before the first console on a primitive computer using an oscilloscope as a monitor.
Half text book, half in-depth history, Fire in the Valley is chockfull of fascinating information and tidbits. And yes, it's also the inspiration for the cheesy (yet awesome) late '90s made-for-TV movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley, starring Noah Wily and Anthony Michael Hall.
