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Author: Harold Goldberg
ISBN : B004J4WKBA
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Format: PDF, EPUB
Download electronic versions of selected books Free Download All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture [Kindle Edition] for everyone book with Mediafire Link Download LinkThrough the stories of gaming's greatest innovations and most beloved creations, journalist Harold Goldberg captures the creativity, controversy--and passion--behind the videogame's meteoric rise to the top of the pop-culture pantheon.
Over the last fifty years, video games have grown from curiosities to fads to trends to one of the world's most popular forms of mass entertainment. But as the gaming industry grows in numerous directions and everyone talks about the advance of the moment, few explore and seek to understand the forces behind this profound evolution. How did we get from Space Invaders to Grand Theft Auto? How exactly did gaming become a $50 billion industry and a dominant pop culture form? What are the stories, the people, the innovations, and the fascinations behind this incredible growth?
Through extensive interviews with gaming's greatest innovators, both its icons and those unfairly forgotten by history, All Your Base Are Belong To Us sets out to answer these questions, exposing the creativity, odd theories--and passion--behind the twenty-first century's fastest-growing medium.
Go inside the creation of:
Grand Theft Auto * World of Warcraft * Bioshock * Kings Quest * Bejeweled * Madden Football * Super Mario Brothers * Myst * Pong * Donkey Kong * Crash Bandicoot * The 7th Guest * Tetris * Shadow Complex * Everquest * The Sims * And many more!
From the Trade Paperback edition.Direct download links available for Free Download All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture
- File Size: 2035 KB
- Print Length: 352 pages
- Publisher: Crown Archetype (April 5, 2011)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B004J4WKBA
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #429,589 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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. I gave up counting after fifteen.