High Score

If you have fond memories of happily donating quarters to the Konami corporation for hours on end, or thinking how cool the Dragon's Lair graphics were, or better yet can remember when Pong was hip, you may enjoy Alex McLintock's review below of High Score: An Illustrated History of Electronic Games. Update: 10/04 16:17 GMT by T : Yes, this is the same High Score that Jon Katz reviewed a few months ago. High Score: an Illustrated History of Electronic Games author Rusel Demaria, Johnny L Wilson pages 328 publisher McGraw Hill rating 8 reviewer Alex McLintock ISBN 0072224282 summary Words and pictures about sprites and beeps; traces three decades of video game development.

This book is fascinating for anyone around my age (thirty something) who remembers Atari Video Console Systems, Apple ][, and the space invader tables where you sat two people down.

Many people have flicked through my copy of this book and taken trips down memory lane. Almost anyone who has played computer games will find something in here that they remember. The book is a large paperback full of glossy pictures of screenshots, game packaging, and celebrities from the world of computer games. I can't really fault it on production values (though I did spot one photo of an Apple which they printed the wrong way round).

The organisation of this book leaves something to be desired. You would have thought that as a "History" book it might be organised in chronological order, but not really. It has sections on the 70s, 80s, and 90s but within those sections there is only a token effort to write things in order. Thankfully the index saves the day.

The first section ("Before the Beginning") looks at the pre-cursors to computer games such as pinball, and analogue electronic games. These are as fascinating as the computer based games. We learn that "Sega" stands for "Service Games" and "Nintendo" means "Leave Luck to Heaven". The article on "SpaceWar" (probably the first graphical computer game) was fascinating. It ran on a PDP 11 costing 120000 US dollars.

The section on the seventies is (you will forgive me) before my time. The book tells us about "Pong", the early days of Atari, but I don't think I played on any of those machines.

The section on the eighties is where I really start saying "Oh I remember playing that". Missile Command, Defender, Pac-Man and so on. This is the first section where we can't just list everything in date order. The authors have decided to switch between writing about a particular year, writing about different computer games systems and finally writing about different games companies.

It has a couple of pages on Infocom who did the most famous Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Adventure Game including a photo of Douglas Adams (the author) and Steve Meretzky who programmed most of the game. This game almost convinced me to create interactive fiction as a career.

As another example I played Br0derbund's "Lode Runner" on a schoolfriend's Apple ][e. The authors suggest that this might have been the first game that allowed you to create your own levels. That ability found in Lode Runner and David's Midnight Magic was exactly the sort of thing that got me into writing computer programs rather than just playing games.

What it doesn't have is any mention of British companies like Sinclair, BBC/Acorn, or Amstrad. I was shocked to find that "Elite" wasn't mentioned at all in the index. This is a diabolical let down. Sure these companies didn't sell very well in the United States, but they did play an important part in most Brit's growing up. You Americans might not care that much, but I'm reading this book because it is being published in Britain... No where on the cover does it say Illustrated History of Electronic Games played by Americans.

I suppose it does open up the opportunity to some quick thinking British journalist to write an "Illustrated History of British Electronic Games" as a companion piece to this book.

Another snapshot from my youth.... Page 155, Sir-Tech's game Wizardry had a "faux 3D maze". I liked this effect so much that I learned how to program the same effect into my Acorn Electron computer. And some 18 years later I'm still cutting code.

There are real gems hidden away in here. For instance I never knew there was a game based upon the sixties tv series "The Prisoner". I know a lot of Prisoner fans who would love to be able to play that one... And "Wing Commander" which I played for hours on end on my college science fiction society's PC. It was the summer holidays and I didn't have anything better to do....

The Nineties: Maybe I had played myself out, but with a computer degree, and a job I don't think that I played all that many games in the nineties. Sure - it is interesting to read about the SimCity related games. Of course we have a few pages dedicated to id Software, Doom, Quake, and the related games. I've just realised what went wrong. I get motion sickness playing Doom (and all subsequent first person shot-em-ups) I remember playing Doom during my lunch hour at work and then feeling sick for the next hour whilst I tried to recover.

The Playstation, Eidos / Lara Croft, Lemmings, all get a look in, and we finish with Online Gaming, Playstation 2, Gamecube, and XBox.

The verdict -- a great book for delving in and remembering the good old days and a great present for game-playing boyfriends too.

Alex McLintock is the editor of DiverseBooks.com. You can purchase High Score from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Repost from July 10th.

[Jippy_]

Already reviewed here.

I won't complain though.. It's a great book..

=-Jippy

Re:Repost from July 10th.

[Otter]

Well, unlike most of the dupes, this one is at least useful to everyone who blocks Katz stories. Which may or may not include Timothy.

Anyway, at least this reviewer doesn't call them 'e-games'.

Not the first

[iamdrscience]

The article on "SpaceWar" (probably the first graphical computer game) was fascinating.

Spacewar was not the first graphical computer game, the first graphical game was created by Willy Higinbotham at Brookhaven National Labs over ten years prior to Spacewar. He made it to entertain tour groups going through the labs, it was written for an analog computer and was displayed on an oscilloscope. It was supposed to be a simulation of tennis, but unlike pong it was from a side view, the only displayed elements were the ball and a net. It wasn't really a skill game because the only controls were two buttons (one for each player) and you could hit the ball back to the other player regardless of the ball's position on your side (I don't know if it even had to be on your side!).

A lot of videogame books don't talk about it or just brush over it because it was never seen or played by anyone except for the people that visited or worked at Brookhaven National Labs. Spacewar on the other hand was passed around all over the country by the hackers who wrote it (the real deal hackers, it was a product of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, members of which were the type of people that coined the phrase "hacker").

Re:Do we want a book?

[ngoy]

There ARE people who sell full cd's of MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) with all the ROM's (IIRC, the .61 version is up to about 8 cd's). If you really have to have them all or are looking for a certain one, usenet almost always has everything. For mame, alt.binaries.emulators.mame. I think someone posted all 8 cd's not long ago.

If anyone is interested in playing any of the games from their adolescence, check out http://www.mame.net for MAME, and http://www.classicgaming.com or http://www.vg-network.com for other emulators.

They have emulators for anything from arcade to Nintendo (original to 64), Apple ][, Amstrad, and Vectrex.

It is truly amazing the amount of people who have spent their time to keep them from dying out.

Shango

The Real Thing

[Reality Master 101]

Yeah, books are nice, but there's nothing like the real thing. Ever desired to own almost every video game ever made? Yeah, everyone knows about MAME, but perhaps you don't know about Tombstones, which is network of volunteers who will send you CD-ROMS of all of the MAME roms -- for about $7. 3,486 roms (about 1900 unique games, I think).

It's unbelievable how much game you can put in about 4K of ROM space.

Now, what I want to know is when is SOMEONE going to make a hardware emulator of Death Race. The schematics are available on the web. [it didn't you use a microprocessor... all electronic! ]

Sinclair Spectrum and the european scene

[ggambett]

It is really sad that the didn't mention the Spectrum and the british side of this. For some reason, here in Uruguay the computer culture grew around the european culture. I guess it was partly because the magazines that came here were published in Spain.

And there were great games. I particulary remember one called Sir Fred, that in some way can be seen as a precursor of graphic adventures or CRPGs (and we are talking 80s!!). Did that games get to the US?

BlarrrgG!!!

[NitroWolf]

If you want a *REAL*, comprehensive/exhaustive, *FREE* and fun to read history of video games, go read The Dot Eaters.

I spent a couple hours reading through this, and refer back to it often, just for fun. It sounds like it's a lot of the same stuff as in the book, but it also sounds like Dot Eaters is much more professional and comprehensive in regards to the *history* of games and what they mean to us (30 somethings).

It's definitely worth a read.

Re:Do we want a book?

[AtariKee]

"It is truly amazing the amount of people who have spent their time to keep them from dying out." Not to mention the many arcade game and console collectors who are restoring these monuments to good times and originality in gameplay.

And then there are the MAME cabinets

:)

Re:Sinclair ?

[vjzuylen]

There's a reason that people don't remember the Sinclair when talking about the history of video/computer games, and that reason is that the Sinclair was and is utterly unimportant in this regard.

I disagree. With titles such as Alien 8, Head Over Heels, Laser Squad, Manic Miner and Spindizzy, the Sinclair was both an inspiration and an affordable training ground for many of Britain's current top coders. A lot of promising and prominent commercial game designers have listed Spectrum games among their all-time favorites - among them Frederic Raynal of Alone in the Dark fame, David Perry of Shiny Entertainment and Demis Hassabis of up-and-coming Elixir Studios. Read an interview in the British games magazine Edge sometime, and you'll see just how often the Spectrum pops up.

Re:What Karma is for

[Anonymous Coward]

Cadash?

Spacewar first ran on the PDP-1

[John_Sauter]

The review refers to the PDP 11, but the original version of Spacewar ran on the PDP-1, which was a $120,000 computer. Spacewar may have influenced Pong, though there is no proof. I brought Spacewar from Stanford to Sanders Associates in 1969, where it was played on Sanders' PDP-1 at about the time that Pong was invented. Unfortunately, there was no log kept of PDP-1 users, so there is no proof that the inventor of Pong played Spacewar.

John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)

Re:Spacewar first ran on the PDP-1

[TriggerHappy]

The review refers to the PDP 11, but the original version of Spacewar ran on the PDP-1, which was a $120,000 computer. Spacewar may have influenced Pong, though there is no proof. I brought Spacewar from Stanford to Sanders Associates in 1969, where it was played on Sanders' PDP-1 at about the time that Pong was invented. Unfortunately, there was no log kept of PDP-1 users, so there is no proof that the inventor of Pong played Spacewar.

Um, actually there is, since Pong inventor Nolan Bushnell's first production arcade game was Computer Space, which was more or less exactly Spacewar in a cabinet.

Re:Sinclair ?

[TriggerHappy]

There's a reason that people don't remember the Sinclair when talking about the history of video/computer games, and that reason is that the Sinclair was and is utterly unimportant in this regard.

Uh, did you ever hear of a little company called Rare which developed various all-time classics for SNES and N64, including Goldeneye? Which has just been bought for half a billion by Microsoft?

It began as a company making games for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

Lesson over.