Rating:
(75 reviews)
Author: Visit Amazon's Harold Goldberg Page
ISBN : 0307463559
New from $11.95
Format: PDF
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From Publishers Weekly
This highly informative book, written by veteran gaming columnist Goldberg, is billed as the first of its kind, spanning 50 years of video game history with its zany personalities, many trends, and marketing coups. The video game industry boasts revenues equaling that of Hollywood and a huge consumer base of 70% of Americans playing its games, Goldberg reveals. He details the ebb-and-flow of video game history and stories of its creators such as Ralph Baer, Nolan Bushnell, Hiroshi Yamauchi, William "Tripp" Hawkins, Dan and Sam Houser, Graeme Devine, and Jason Kapulka. His coverage of the development of games like Tennis for Two, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Dungeons & Dragons, Myst, Sims, and Grand Theft Auto will appeal not only to nerds and gamers in Goldberg's easily accessible anecdotes but to those who grew up with these games through generations. (Apr.)
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Review
"
A love letter to gaming...filled with fascinating behind-the-scenes vignettes of game creation…perfectly encapsulates the passion and dedication of videogames’ creators and fans."—Abbie Heppe, senior producer, G4TV
"
The best window into the video game industry on the market today."—Steve Kent, author of
The Ultimate History of Video Games
"Harold Goldberg’s portrait of a weird, often dysfunctional and amazing video game industry makes
a great, great read."—Ken Levine, co-founder and creative director, Irrational Games
"Indispensable
…Goldberg
takes us inside the hearts and minds of the hackers, hustlers, engineers, and dreamers who changed electronic entertainment forever."--Matt Helgeson, senior editor,
Game Informer
"
A story as riveting and addictive as the games it explores…If you’ve ever wanted someone to explain how and why video games captured the world’s imagination, this is the book for you.
"--James Ledbetter, editor in charge, Reuters.com
See all Editorial Reviews
Direct download links available for Free Download All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture
- Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: Three Rivers Press (April 5, 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0307463559
- ISBN-13: 978-0307463555
- Product Dimensions: 0.7 x 5.2 x 7.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Free Download All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture
I usually don't review other writers' books, but this one was so filled with errors that I was truely dissapointed while reading it. I'll list some of them. I have to say that, although I enjoyed the book, the errors were very distracting.
Page 1: "In 1966, Ralph Baer, a short, bespectacled man with a deep, radio-quality voice and a sharp wit, had been a successful engineer for thirty years."
If this is true, then Baer became a successful engineer in 1936 when he was 14 years old, and two years before he fled Nazi Germany.
Page 20: "The testing ground for Pong, the very first arcade game, was a newly opened bar in the Silicon Valley."
But Pong was not the first arcade game, Computer Space was. And the book says that on the following page.
Page 34: "At first, no one was interested in the home version (of Pong), even when the game was shown to retailers at New York City's famous and chaotic Toy Fair. Part of the Toy Fair debacle was due to Bushnell and his people being wet behind the ears. Their space for Toy Fair wasn't in the building at Broadway and Twenty-third Street where most business was done. It was far away (in the Jacob Javits Convention Center). Few stopped by."
Home Pong came out in 1975. The Jacob Javits Convention Center opened in 1986.
Page 42-43: "Wozniak pocketed $375, but Jobs kept the remainder of the $5,000. When Wozniak discovered what Jobs had been paid, his hacker heart, which had led him to work on Breakout for art's sake, was broken.
Disclosure #1: I was an arcade junkie. Even today, I have a full-size Joust upright in my basement. Somehow I missed catching the online gaming bug, but I have enjoyed console games from the Atari 2600 through multiple PlayStations to my current Xbox 360.
Disclosure #2: I already own several books on the video game industry, from colorful coffee table books to inclusive price guides to encyclopedic references. Comparatively, All Your Base Are Belong to Us was disappointing.
Fair or not, this book got off on the wrong foot. The title is an in-joke: a poor translation from a forgettable game (Zero Wing*) not even released in North America. Choosing this broken English as a cultural touchstone seems an odd choice for a book which the publishers hope will appeal to a wide audience. Worst of all, the phrase is not elucidated in the book, and barely mentioned in an easy-to-miss reference between the Table of Contents and Introduction.
The book itself is juvenile and gossipy. It needed an editor. If it had an editor, it needed a better one. The writing level and jocularity might be acceptable for online newsletters (for which the author has much experience), but that same freewheeling familiarity falls short here. The overused idiom "so much so" appears in virtually every chapter, so much so that I found myself keeping track.