Author: Steve Bloom
Publisher: Arco
Date: September 1982
Pages: 240
Review: derboo

Video Invaders may not be the oldest monograph on video games. In fact, there were literally dozens of books out before. The focus, however, were guide books of all sorts; most would teach the reader how to get the highest scores at recent arcade games, others provided maintenance aid for machines. By 1982 even the first self-help books for "arcade addicts" appeared in bookstores. Steve Blooms however, was the first (to our knowledge) who attempted to write a thorough history of the still young medium.

The book opens with a very personal introduction, a very lively description of the authors childhood/youth experiences in the 1960s-'80s arcade scene. History truly comes to live on these first couple of pages, and it almost holds up better than the rest of the book. The following three chapters are a bit more dry and make up the straight history portion of the book, "Who Really Invented Video Games" reminds us how old the dispute between Nolan Bushnell and Ralph Bear really is, and it even goes into the making of Spacewar!, which predates both their efforts. "The Games: A Chronology" gives a rundown of the most important arcade game releases up to 1982, while the third chapter focuses entirely on the Pac-Man phenomenon, which swept over America in the early 1980s. With hilariously outdated assessments like this description of Defender "With its joystick and five control buttons, it's about as close to a cockpit as amateur video pilots will ever get, these chapters are now more enjoyable for their entertainment value.

Perhaps most impressive is chapter 4, which as a collection of ten interviews with video game developers and producers is one of the biggest journalistic efforts in that field for its time. Of course Steve Bloom had no access to Japanese designers back in 1982 (although he speaks with the spokesman for Namco in America in chapter 3), but David Crane and Alan Miller, founders of Activision, Morgan Henry (Battle Zone), Donna Taylor (Centipede) and Ed Lodge (Asteroids, Centipede), Edward Rotberg (Battle Zone), Eugene Jarvis (Defender), Tim Skelly of Cinematronics (Star Castle, Star Hawk, Rip-Off), Dave Nutting of Nutting Associates, and Gary Shannon of (Sega-)Gremlin all give insights into their trade that no one had heard of before. In the case of Gary Shannon, who had programmed and published home computer versions of Othello and Chess before joining Gremlin, the book even gets subtly critical at the state of the industry: "As a hobbyist he received credit for his work (disks and cassettes are by-lined), but as a professional he must remain anonymous." Shannon even hints at his work on what might have become the first rhythm game, if only Sega-Gremlin didn't close up shop soon after:

Personally, I thing rhythm is a major factor. We have two games in development that will make players respond rhythmically to the sound pattern. If you can figure it out, then you'll be able to go for more targets, for instance. You'll almost have to be a musician to play the game well."

Chapter 5 and 6 show the less enviable tasks of video game journalism: Bloom visits the major console manufacturers (Atari, Magnavox and Mattel) as well as the first and biggest third party game publishers, Activision and Imagic, were he tries persistently to get past all the PR talk.

"The Great Debate" is an odd, but no less interesting one. It talks about various attempts of governments to try and get rid of those "non-useful commercial enterprises." For that the book goes back to as far as the 1920s, were billiards used to be the target for the war on entertainment. It is further described how more recently Mesquite, Texas banned the chain of coin-op establisments Alladin's Castle and the playing of arcade-type games. However, the bright side of the argument is also shown:

More startling news, however, was this recent development in two Milwaukee schools: Wauwatosa and Nicolet High Schools each reported earnings over $400 a month during the 1980-81 school year after installing video and pinball machines in the schools' commons.

(...) "one principal contended that the in-house arcade contributed to a decline in student vandalism and loitering at nearby stores, noting: "As educators, we're providing for the total student and part of his life is socializing and recreating. I don't know any concrete educational value in the games, but I do believe they are a good supplement to a well-rounded education."

Chapter 8 is once again reeks of nowadays involuntarily comical content, as it deals with the future of the medium. On the other hand there's a truly prophetic statement by Harold Vogel, who basically predicts the 1984 video game crash. It also contains a review of the then-recent movie Tron, for the sequel author Steve Bloom has recently made a brief return to writing on video game related matters.

The remaining 60 pages all deal with winning strategies for popular arcade games, which are illustrated by nice hand-drawn representations of the game screens, followed by 20 pages with brief reviews of console games, text only. Home computer games were still an entirely different world to the arcade crowd, so the book all but ignores that phenomenon.

Video Invaders has long been out of print and might be hard to come by nowadays. Prices can range from less than a dollar for discarded library copies to high double digits from collector's treasuries. Since there's no way anyone who did any work on the book is still going earn money with it, we're providing a full scan for everyone who might be interested in reading the whole thing. It also features some very trippy illustrations throughout, which alone are worth a look.

Steve Bloom was also an editor for Video Games Magazine, and worked for the marijuana activist magazine High Times from 1989 to 2007. Nowadays he keeps a blog on celebstoner.com.

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Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Methuen
Date: November 1982
Pages: 120
Review: derboo

While Video Invaders had some interesting illustrations, it did shine with content rather than flashy imagery. Invasion of the Space Invaders on the other hand was the original coffee table book on video games. With supersized photos of suave teens in front of arcade machines and beautiful colored screenshot reproductions (and some not so beautiful real screenshots), the look and feel of the period is documented here more than anything else.

Martin Amis apparently wrote it at a very young age, and rather than a serious journalistic work, Invasion comes off as a peer-written lifestyle book, full of casual expressions and forced sexual innuendos. ("If Jumpman gets to the top a certain number of times, Jumpman saves the Lady. You have to be over eighteen to see what he does to her next.") At the same time the author is painting himself as a penniless loser who "can't seem to find any girlfriends." Yep, opening with a somewhat awkward foreword by Steven Spielberg the whole book totally seems to buy into the "video games are a dangerous addiction" thing, but all the while being really hypocritic about it. It's all "video games will drive you into child prostitution with your local pastor, who then steals money from your church, and also get your parent's asses evicted. Now go and play those awesome games!"

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? It's the sort of talk you hear from a "reformed" alky, as he braces himself to describe his latest relapse.

The narrative itself is a very personal one, Amis most of the time talks about his own experiences. So half of the text is anecdotes with whole pages of weird tangents, like the philosophy of high score table initials (COQ, FUC, BUM) or analog cheating with analog cheating by messing with the machines with electric cigarette lighters or "battery-run kitchen gizmos." There is a bit of history, but it's basically just "Nolan Bushnell invented video games, but they were boring. Then came Space Invader. The End." The strong bias for Namco's hit and space games in general is found throughout the book. Video ping-pong was a "moronic fad," and his opinion the new cartoonish games like Frogger and Donkey Kong is equally dismissive:

In acquisitive panic, the video moguls decided to go for the banal fantasies of the nursery, the cinema and the grandstand. I venture to suggest that these games will not last. They will not last because they are boring games."

He does kinda like Pac-Man, although he describes its thrills as short-lived, too, likens the yellow protagonist to a lemon rather than a pizza and doesn't go much into the American Pac-Man craze. The game is only really mentioned in the second of three chapters, where individual arcade games are described together with some winning strategies. Among all the famous classics, one also finds some now obscure games no one remembers, like Gorf and Pleiads. With 45 pages, this section is the longest of the book.

Home console games once again get the shaft, as now all the images are merely black&white, and the focus is on how much inferior the games are to the arcade experience. Mr. Amis also had some trouble setting up the whole thing: "Now you plug in the game power cord, monkey with the aerial switch box, and 'tune' your television to an unused channel. Abracadabra! The word Pelmellivision, or whatever, appears on the screen!" They also have to share their space with LCD handhelds and chess computers.

Rather arbitrary appear the two BASIC source codes for the Sharp MZ-80K, especially since once again commercial home computer games are ignored entirely. The final two pages about video game competitions are interesting (and prove that retro game shirts are older than the NES), but are also oddly placed. If you're hunting down a copy of Invasion of the Space Invaders today, you'd probably do it just for the images. The text is not as informative and doesn't hold up too well, but at least it's funny, in a very '80s sense. The language is very colorful, sometimes almost poetic, like in his closing paragraph on Galaxian:

Now, of course, in the bars of Paris (cheap and exotic drinks, pinball, space games—heaven), the Galaxian machines themselves cringe unused in the corners, rejected, gestured at. How far away their proud dawn now seems! They are leaned on and eaten off, like any old Space Invader. People stub out butts on their screens. Everyone is playing PacMan, or Defending. Soon the machines will be shipped off to some seaside arcade, to wait out their days—slapped to pieces by children, their wires fizzing from the damp air, and dreaming of the great day in '79 when they invaded the space of the Space Invaders.

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Author: Hector Briceno et al.
Publisher: Rolenta Press
Date: July 2010 [first edition 2000]
Pages: 70
Review: Kurt Kalata

Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom was published by Rolenta Press (which has put out a couple of other cool video game books like Phoenix: The Fall & Rise of Videogames) in 2010, but is actually a reprinting from a college paper back in 2000.

The central thesis of the book is that Infocom's downfall was not solely caused by the development of Cornerstone, the database software that massively flopped and drained substantial resources from the company. Personally, I didn't even know that was an argument—I guess maybe some interactive fiction fans were incredibly annoyed that the company was diverting so much of its resources away games and putting them towards boring business software, but I think in retrospect, most people realize that text adventures were simply falling out of fashion, and Infocom was doing a poor job adapting to new marketplace. Of course, there are many more reasons than that, which this book handfully illustrates. Indeed, the executives seemed to realize that Infocom's games might eventually go out of fashion and sought to diversify, which was where the idea for Cornerstone came from. Of course, that didn't quite work out in practice, for reasons which are, again, well explained. The best bit is this advertisement, teasing the likes of Sierra and other adventure game developers for their awful graphics.

It's a great read, but with a few fundamental issues. Mostly, much like GET LAMP, it does a fantastic job illustrating the history of the business and (to a lesser extent), why the genre is so fascinating...but it largely glosses over the games themselves. It talks about the creation of feelies for Deadline and a bit of about Floyd in Planetfall...but barely mentions any of the rest of their titles, other than that they exist. What about Trinity? A Mind Forever Voyaging? The collaboration with Douglas Adams on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the drama behind its failed sequel? While this was initially a history paper and such criticism would have originally been beyond the scope, but the result is that the book is just way too short, considering it's only 50 pages worth of content and sold for $10. The Zork article in the HG101 adventure game book is almost as long as this entire production. The font type is also large and the layout is rather amateurish. It's a great topic and what's there is good, but it feels like it's only half done.

You can view a sample at the Rolenta Press homepage.

Author: Steven L. Kent
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Date: October 2001
Pages: 624
Review: derboo

The Ultimate History of Video Games is a bold title for a book to carry, and as if determined to keep that promise, author Steven Kent starts his book at the very beginning—the Pinball industry. The entire first chapter is dedicated to these forefathers that paved the way for an arcade industry to blossom in their wake. Another chapter deals with those pre-industry pioneers that didn't really get the recognition they deserved until much later, Space War und Ralph Baer's Odyssey console. Then the book really kicks of with the rise of Nolan Bushnell and the founding of Atari, following the history through the crash and its revival, courtesy of Nintendo. This era is no doubt the strongest focus of the book, by the time we reach the 1990s, we're already a good 400 pages in. After that, it gets a bit more spotty. The book tells about the 16- and 32-bit console wars fueled by Sega's and Sony's ambitions, respectively, but also spends an entire chapter on Mortal Kombat, Night Trap and the debate around violence in video games. It ends a bit on a low on Sega's departure and Microsoft's entry into the industry. Those final chapters seem a bit less interesting than the rest of the book, for the sole reason that video game history had become a bit less interesting.

The biggest strength of The Ultimate History is no doubt the sheer magnitude with which Kent makes the voices of the makers heard. The man must have conducted hundreds of interviews. A page without a blockquote is a rare sight, up to three citations per page quite common. Over the almost 600 pages one learns how Ralph Baer had the first prototype for his console engineered in secret at his position as a division manager at the defense contracter Sanders; how a filthy young good-for-nothing named Steve Jobs (RIP) makes his first couple thousand bucks in the games industry by exploiting other people's work; or finds out what's the story with Shigeru Miyamoto's grudge against Donkey Kong Country (apparently his first draft for Yoshi's Island got rejected because it didn't look as good as DKC).

To fulfill the claim on an "ultimate history" inside a single volume is frankly impossible, but Kent's book doesn't just fall short on that goal, it doesn't even try. When Kent writes "video games," he has in his mind the old, more narrow definition that distinguishes coin-op and console software from home computer games, and thus safe for very few, arbitrary exceptions the latter are rarely even mentioned, disregarding the fact that many are much more inseparable from the history of video games than the generously covered pinball industry.

There's also a strong US-centered point of view. Even developments in Japan are only taken into account when they had an immediate impact on the US. Dragon Quest, for example, is only ever mentioned in passing when talking about people standing in line for the release of the seventh iteration. Rare is the only European company that gets some spotlight, and only so because it became Nintendo's second party flagship with Donkey Kong Country. Former editions of The Ultimate History of Video Games were titled The First Quarter. While that in fact would sell the book in its current form very short, it at least showed some modesty and was mildly poetic. A more accurate title would be "A mostly anecdotal history of arcade and console games, as perceived in the United States," but naming the book as such of course would be quite insane. False advertisement aside, Kent nonetheless has produced an invaluable resource of anecdotes all would-be historians should have sitting on their shelves. Though not as overarching as the title claims, it still remains by far the most ambitious work of its kind to this day.

For all readers suffering from ADD, it should be noted that it is not a very illustrated history, though. There is a collection of black&white photos on 18 pages in the middle of the book, but safe for those, the book is carried by its text alone. The strong focus on quotations and the structure broken down to very short subchapters make for an easy read, though. I also gotta nitpick about a pet-peeve of mine, namely the source notes, which are compiled at the very end. If one actually cares for them, it's really annoying to jump through the book each time a reference comes up. Even less understandable as there are frequent footnotes on the bottom of pages, only they are reserved for editorial annotations.

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Author: Brad King & John Borland
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Date: August 2003
Pages: 284
Review: derboo

Dungeons and Dreamers is another book that doesn't quite follow up on it's title—actually, the fact that it doesn't include the name Richard Garriott alone is enough to constitute false advertisement. A good portion of the book is basically the Ultima inventor's biography. It begins with his school days and first contacts with both home computers and Dungeons & Dragons and first follows his career up to the foundation of Origin. A few anecdotes about other developers are thrown in for good measure, followed by a whole chapter on id and the Doom story. (Did you know Wolfenstein 3D was an Ultima Underworld clone? No, seriously, the book dramatically says about an early tech demo by the team that would eventually make Ultima Underworld: "Romero saw it, too.") Mostly to lead into the development of the LAN culture and online gaming, to set the stage for Garriott's Ultima Online as the revolution in gaming.

Then all of a sudden we are faced with a chapter focusing on the Columbine incident and the following shitstorm against violent video games, which is one of the more differenciated narratives on the matter, but by this point feels really tacked on regardless.

It's interesting to read some quotes by MIT professor Henry Jenkins, author of the book "From Barbie to Mortal Kombat" and participant in the hearings after Columbine, especially since his theories deal with video games from an old-fashioned but at the same time rather insightful viewpoint:

Exploration of the environment has long been a critical part of growing up, particularly for boys, and video games have become that space for urban children without access to forests and fields.

As the boys play these macho games, their parents—and particularly mothers—are suddenly exposed to the content of adolescent fantasies that traditionally have been kept well outside parental view.

It just doesn't gain the weight it deserves in a book where the last sentence of every third paragraph opens with "Just as Richard's..." or "Like Ultima..." Who's the father of video games? Bushnell? Baer? Russel? In the eyes of Brad King and John Borland, apparently it's Garriott.

The authors are also never quite explicit about this supposed transition "from geek to chic," or what this "chic" is supposed to mean in this context, for that matter. Sure, there is some babble about changing demographics of the people that play video games, but even the book itself concludes towards the end: "It's still a little geeky." The kind of games that Richard Garriott used to make still is, eight years later.

All that said, if you cut away some of the fat (and use it for books that concentrate on other subjects) it is a very good biography. At times it feels as if Garriott's voice is felt even more clearly than the authors', and that's the way it ought to be. At times the language can be somewhat pompous, with plenty of superlatives and more 4-syllable adjectives than you can shake a stick at, but there's also the humble moments of sincere awe, when Garriott talks about players that seized "his" castle in Brittania during a demonstration against bad lag: "As unhappy they were about the game, they voiced their unhappiness in the context of the game," or when his do-gooding Lord British is schooled about the ethics of his creation by a petty thief.

It couldn't have come at a better time, too. In it's concluding chapter, Garriott is just working on Tabula Rasa in its early stages, his last big game project and the one whose failure marked at least a temporal stop in his exceptional career as a game designer. Nonetheless, the authors were working on a new edition as of summer 2011, but the project blog hasn't been updated in a while. The first chapters are also available for download as an audio book, although it is not a professional read and at times not that pleasant to listen to.

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Author: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
Publisher: Ohta Publishing
Date: December 2003
Pages: approx. 200
Review: John Szczepaniak

There have been several attempts at comprehensive books focusing on the games of the Famicom/NES. David Sheff's Game Over doesn't count since it's mainly about the business. There was a two volume encyclopaedia-style book in Japan (Fami-Complete), and there's also La Bible NES, written and published by the French. Both of these examples, as fine as they may be, are sadly not available in English and are therefore of limited use to those not proficient in either language. There was an American attempt to catalogue all the games with screens and reviews, by a gentleman known online as ManekiNeko, but without publisher backing he put it online. The resulting A-Z entries were brief, uninteresting and lacked insider insight. Without question, the best book for any fan of the Famicom or NES is still Family Computer 1983-1994 by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and Ohta Publishing, in conjunction with the Level-X exhibit to celebrate the Famicom's 20th anniversary.

It is the perfect book. For a start it features interviews with several major Japanese developers, regarding either their work on Famicom games or, if they worked on rival hardware, their views on the era. It features Shigeru Miyamoto, Shigesato Itoi, Yuji Horii, Kouichi Nakamura, Satoshi Tajiri, Ken Sugimori, Hideo Kojima, and Yuji Naka. Their answers are candid, very detailed and—best of all—available in English alongside the original Japanese. In fact everything in the book is available in both Japanese and English. The translations aren't perfect; while they do not appear to be machine translated, they were definitely done by someone with more passion than ability. Not that it's a deal breaker, since everything is perfectly understandable, and it makes for more charming reading than something done by committee and filtered through corporate PR.

Additionally it features full-page examinations for major releases and quarter-page bites for other interesting titles (see to the right)—these are more than mere reviews though, and contain nuggets of insight regarding who worked on them and how they resonated with the public. There are photographs of everything else. This is important to note: every single Japanese Famicom game ever released has been photographed and includes an entry detailing its name in both Japanese and English, publisher and developer, precise release date, and launch price. It's safe to say that the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum got their facts right, which makes this tome an extremely valuable resource. The addition of the reviews also offers great insight into the atmosphere of the time and a snapshot of Japanese tastes. There are the obvious contenders (Mario, Dragon Quest, etc), and some US favoured titles are not covered in-depth, but significantly it contains detailed opinions on games unique to Japan which you'd otherwise never find insight on—such as an intra-office simulator fronted by an actual Japanese politician. These entries might not resonate with hardened Zelda fans, but it paints a fascinating view of the foundation of Japan's entire industry.

It's clear that a tremendous love for the subject matter was had by those who produced this extremely professional book, and the fact that they had the foresight to translate it into English is miraculous. The praise given here might seem a tad over-zealous, but if you're even remotely interested in either the Famicom or the NES, then there is no way you could be disappointed by this book.

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Author: Chris Kohler
Publisher: Brady Games
Date: September 2004
Pages: 312
Review: Kurt Kalata

Written by Wired's Game|Life editor Chris Kohler and published by BradyGames in 2004, the only thing wrong with this book is the title. "How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life" implies a history of how Nintendo saved the US console industry back in the 80s and dominated consoles up until the early 2000s. Rather, it's a series of largely disparate articles about various facets of Japanese gaming, tied together loosely about them all being about (obviously) Japan. There are chapters on MMOs (Final Fantasy XI in particular), rhythm games, game shopping in Tokyo, the video game soundtrack scene, localization, the development of Starfox (mostly interesting due to how it was largely developed by foreigners in conjunction with Nintendo of Japan, a rarity at the time), the roots of Japanese gaming in manga, the attempts to marry narrative with gameplay, and many others. Some sections historical in nature, others are analytical, and yet others are simply interesting collections of trivia.

While indeed there is a substantial amount of topics that are glossed over or simply never addressed - a huge chunk of the book concentrates on Nintendo at the exclusion of Sega, NEC, Sony or other notable companies—when you accept the scope of the book is more limited than the title suggests, it's all quite excellent. Most of the stuff in the invididual chapters could easily be expanded to full books themselves, so some topics may come up short, but as broad level analysis it's all very well done. The writing is lively and although the book is black and white, there are numerous pictures and illustrations to support Kohler's points. There are numerous bits from interviews with Shigeru Miyamoto as well. I've heard other reviews complain about the sections where he lists various Final Fantasy soundtrack albums, but it's just done to illustrate the various styles that its music has been arranged in, and the culture that supports it. Similarly, the section outlining shopping in Akihabara may not be of immediate use to anyone outside of travelers, the description of how pristine Japanese game stores keep their products is sure to rankle the nerves of those familiar with Gamestop's terrible policies.

Of course certain sections are slightly dated - the book was written before the Japanese industry started contracting in the recent HD era, and the chapter on rhythm games predates Guitar Hero and the success of these Western games. Still, a great read, mostly because books that focus on the Japanese side of things, as opposed to the American side, are relatively rare. And it's always great to find a video game book that talks about the games themselves, rather than solely concentrating on their history. Unfortunately, since the book was published by Bradygames, the same group that churns out crappy overpriced strategy guides only to be literally torn up and discarded a few weeks later, the book went in and out of print fairly quickly. Coupled with the high quality of the book, it fetches a higher price on the used book marketplace than most game history books, despite it not being that old.

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Author: Tristan Donovan
Publisher: Yellow Ant
Date: April 2010
Pages: 516
Review: John Szczepaniak

We already covered The Ultimate History of Video Games, by Steven Kent, acknowledging both its excellence and its shortcomings. It�s a fantastic book and absolutely worth owning, despite some glaring omissions. Tristan Donovan�s Replay: The History of Video Games aims to fill the same niche, even starting its introduction with a quote from Michael Katz who asks: why another book on gaming history? Although Donovan never mentions Kent�s work outright, he makes it explicitly clear that Replay is intended to provide more balanced global coverage; not just the history of US videogames, but of Europe and Japan as well, covering computers, arcades, consoles, plus factoring in snippets on real world conflicts, comic books, films, censorship, and all else related. An all-encompassing holistic view of video game history.

Donovan actually manages to pull off such an ambitious goal, over Replay�s roughly 500 pages. As a Brit he pays respectable attention to uniquely British games, such as Deux Ex Machina on the Spectrum, and there are two chapters dedicated entirely to European gaming (with a bit of Australia too). While it starts off strongly US-centric, which is understandable, it does branch out into chapters dedicated to Japan, South Korea, snippets of East Asia, plus online and indie games. While these individually don�t offer the range of information that a dedicated website can (such as HG101�s Korean History feature), to criticise Replay for this would be wrong. It still casts the widest net of any currently available book.

It uses a combination of fresh interview material, plus quotes from a range other sources, including old newspaper clippings and modern magazine interviews. This is significant, since while most games magazines have disdain for re-using old quotes, Donovan shows how important it can be to build on the work of others, doing it to great success. Furthermore he provides a meticulous list of sources (8% of total page volume) and footnotes, which is something every videogame publication should contain though sadly almost never does.

For those wanting direct comparisons to Kent�s book, Replay lacks its rival�s ostentatious US swagger—there�s no enlarged industry quotes which leap off the page and the layout is more understated. There�s also a few grammatical errors and sometimes the prose are slightly stilted, but this shouldn�t put you off. A single body of work of such length and scope on games is rare, with the effort and research required by Donovan evident on every single page. It�s also a fantastic and fascinating read, filled with fresh trivia and anecdotes, and is wholly conscious of the wider context of the gaming world. Donovan also managed to secure some nice archive photographs, prefacing each chapter. Replay doesn�t entirely make Kent�s work redundant, but it takes the scope to a new level. If you�re into gaming enough to own one book on its history, you�ll probably want both of them.

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Author: David Kushner
Publisher: Random House
Date: May 2003
Pages: 352
Review: Wild Weasel

Masters of Doom is a reasonable departure from the majority of books that discuss the history of video gaming. Rather than documenting video gaming as a whole - understandably a very broad, massive subject, especially taking into account every region and every platform - Masters of Doom instead focuses on being a biography of sorts, following John Carmack and John Romero as they work for software company SoftDisk, found id Software, and eventually have their fallings-out and go their separate ways.

This book is, in a way, about the games industry itself, albeit from the perspective of Carmack and Romero. The author, David Kushner, paints the Johns as polar opposites of each other - while their interests are similar in some ways, their personalities are as distant as they get, with Romero (the �grock star,�h as the book puts it) being more outgoing, somewhat aggressive, and generally a proud man, while Carmack is the hyper-intelligent, quiet, almost creepy "rocket scientist" (a title that rings true, since John Carmack does actually build rockets in his spare time). Throughout the book, the two Johns experience certain turns of the game industry, like the launch of Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES, the Senate hearings regarding video game violence, and eventually even the Columbine High School shooting.

Kushner's writing does a remarkable job of capturing each time period in such a way as to not only provoke nostalgic flashbacks for those who remember them, but also to inform those people who might not know of some of the events that are described. Given that latter point, though, it should be said that Masters of Doom does not patronize its readers by stating the obvious, nor does it leave curious subjects unexplained. I like to consider myself well-learned on the topic of games like Wolfenstein and Doom, but there are some facts in this book that even I hadn't heard of before. The book puts a great amount of detail into the guys playing Super Mario Bros. 3, only for them to wonder how cool it would be if the game ran on their "borrowed" IBM PCs. From that point, they set to work on recreating the entire first level of SMB3, complete with smooth multi-plane scrolling (something John Carmack put a great deal of effort into, as it had not previously been done on a PC at that point), with the resulting �gDangerous Dave in: Copyright Infringement�h eventually being pitched to Nintendo as a PC port of SMB3 - which they actually sent a letter back in reply, stating their disinterest in entering the PC gaming market.

The time frame that Kushner covers in this book is actually quite expansive, from both Johns' childhoods and how they individually discovered video gaming, how they met, their time making shareware programs and games for Softdisk Publishing, leading into id Software's golden age, and even up to the point where Romero bails on id Software to form Ion Storm. There is even an Epilogue chapter that covers Romero and Carmack's inductions in the AIAS Hall of Fame, some years after the closure of Ion Storm.

Overall, I would consider Masters of Doom to be a highly entertaining and quite informative read. While most "video game history" books cover the perspective of the consumers, this is one of those that covers from the developer's perspective and beyond. When I read it, I feel as if I was there.

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