More Video Game History Books
May. 5th, 2022 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroBible Adventures by Gabe Durham - Another of the Video Game Histories series from Boss Fight Books; and this one was fantastic. It details the creation of Color Dreams as a studio making unlicensed NES games that discovered a huge untapped market (American Christians) and blundered into brief success and shocking nostalgia value in the process. Nintendo of America actually left them alone so they could cite their existence in anti-monopoly court cases; they were serving a market Nintendo never wanted to touch anyway. I would probably recommend this out of all the Boss Fight Books; see below for a few others.
I started Final Fantasy VI by Sebastian Deken, but was disappointed and dropped it. This focuses almost entirely on the music and doesn’t really say much else about the history of the game; and there’s only so much music geekery I want to read about when I have friends who’ll dedicate entire dinners to wanking about Wagner.
Continue? The Boss Fight Books Anthology, ed. Gabe Durham - On one hand, this gets a little repetitive, telling either people’s true-life nostalgia stories about video games or fictionalized stories about people’s lives intersecting with video games. On the other hand, a number of them are well-written and have some clever ideas. The standouts for me were “Navigators,” which spins the tale of an imaginary anti-Metroidvania where you lose powers as you explore; and “JILLOJUN,” which got me to pull up GOGalaxy and try out Jill of the Jungle for the first time.
Galaga by Michael Kimball – A set of 255 paragraph-long entries about Galaga and the author’s youth escaping his abusive home situation by playing it. The fact that some of the trivia about Galaga is made-up (he admits it 2-3 entries later) was intensely annoying to me, but especially when you consider that the game is relatively simple and has no plot or major development stories, this is a solid book. Content warning for details of childhood physical and emotional abuse.
Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line by Ken Williams – Williams is clearly talented and hard-working, and I suspect that I wouldn’t want to spend more than ten minutes with him, because the dude is also hella arrogant. He dedicates whole chapters to tips for running a business that probably make him good money as a guest speaker at business schools, but are very condescending and reflect very specific 80s white man monovision. That said, he really did manage to drive some impressive innovations in computer gaming (his wife wanted graphics for her adventure game, so he figured out how to do memory-efficient lineart on the Apple II) and luck into several others (Microsoft insisted that they sell any software they developer for the PCJr to other publishers as well to stave off monopoly accusations, so they got funding to make games from Microsoft but could still sell those games for other systems when the PCJr was a flop). The story of the company itself is really interesting, and Williams doesn’t fully appreciate how much late-stage capitalism drove both his success and the company’s ultimate failure. (He went public, got acquired, got sidelined by the acquiring company and quit, and then when the acquiring company did another big merger it came out that there was massive fraud in the financial statements. So he was gone and had cash in all of his stock, but the company got repeatedly sold and consolidated until only the IP was left.)
I started Final Fantasy VI by Sebastian Deken, but was disappointed and dropped it. This focuses almost entirely on the music and doesn’t really say much else about the history of the game; and there’s only so much music geekery I want to read about when I have friends who’ll dedicate entire dinners to wanking about Wagner.
Continue? The Boss Fight Books Anthology, ed. Gabe Durham - On one hand, this gets a little repetitive, telling either people’s true-life nostalgia stories about video games or fictionalized stories about people’s lives intersecting with video games. On the other hand, a number of them are well-written and have some clever ideas. The standouts for me were “Navigators,” which spins the tale of an imaginary anti-Metroidvania where you lose powers as you explore; and “JILLOJUN,” which got me to pull up GOGalaxy and try out Jill of the Jungle for the first time.
Galaga by Michael Kimball – A set of 255 paragraph-long entries about Galaga and the author’s youth escaping his abusive home situation by playing it. The fact that some of the trivia about Galaga is made-up (he admits it 2-3 entries later) was intensely annoying to me, but especially when you consider that the game is relatively simple and has no plot or major development stories, this is a solid book. Content warning for details of childhood physical and emotional abuse.
Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line by Ken Williams – Williams is clearly talented and hard-working, and I suspect that I wouldn’t want to spend more than ten minutes with him, because the dude is also hella arrogant. He dedicates whole chapters to tips for running a business that probably make him good money as a guest speaker at business schools, but are very condescending and reflect very specific 80s white man monovision. That said, he really did manage to drive some impressive innovations in computer gaming (his wife wanted graphics for her adventure game, so he figured out how to do memory-efficient lineart on the Apple II) and luck into several others (Microsoft insisted that they sell any software they developer for the PCJr to other publishers as well to stave off monopoly accusations, so they got funding to make games from Microsoft but could still sell those games for other systems when the PCJr was a flop). The story of the company itself is really interesting, and Williams doesn’t fully appreciate how much late-stage capitalism drove both his success and the company’s ultimate failure. (He went public, got acquired, got sidelined by the acquiring company and quit, and then when the acquiring company did another big merger it came out that there was massive fraud in the financial statements. So he was gone and had cash in all of his stock, but the company got repeatedly sold and consolidated until only the IP was left.)
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Date: 2022-05-06 10:46 pm (UTC)