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High Score
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.
Already reviewed here.
I won't complain though.. It's a great book..
=-Jippy
Halcyon Days. This used to be commercial a few years back.
What's the point? Why not just sell a CD with a handful of emulators and all these classic games available to be played?
Oh yeah - legal reasons.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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If you had nuts on your chin, would they be chin nuts?
I have had the book since it first came out. The one big thing I noticed was that SquareSoft was not in it at their request. Square being one of the main reasons the Playstation succeeded, yet not wanting to be including in a book about gaming history. They are ,to me, one of the most influental gaming software comapanies.
If you have fond memories of happily wasting time with Slashdot for hours on end, or thinking how cool the book reviews were, or better yet can remember when a post has already been done and a book already reviewed, you may (or may not) enjoy Jon Katz's review of High Score: An Illustrated History of Electronic Games.
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I was a bit disappointed though in the depth that could have been covered. Johnny Wilson was editor of Computer Gaming World for many years. That being said, many in the gaming industry felt that he was a person that could make or break your game. Problem is that his presence isn't really felt in the book. The guy has plenty of stories to tell about the industry, but it's not told in this book.
Overall, it's a great read. One thing it does do is focus on computer games more than consoles. Often it's the other way around. There are better books that focus on video game history (such as Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of Videogames) but if you grew up during the 80's and 90's playing computer games, this book will bring back many memories. Just take care of the binding on the book. It isn't the best and you'll be constantly flipping the pages.
yeah, they were the JAM!
Heck- I had an arcade bachelor party- Dave & Busters- I drank this whack midori drink all night long (green tea) and played games till the cows came home. Even a lil' skeeball, jsut for old times sake! You gotta love cashing in hundreds of those damn tickets for a $5 stuffed animal...
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
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").
I'm very surpised that I didn't read anything about the 11+ Million Commodore 64's that were sold worldwide. In its heyday, that was probably the most popular PC to use as a gaming platform, and the thousands of games out there prove it. Better graphics than any other computer at the time it was produced. And, it stood the test of time... How many computers have revisions spanning 7 years without ANY functional upgrades?!?!? Same O/S, same CPU, same RAM, different look. Pretty damn amazing, actually.
That's my $.02.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
The only book I ever read on classic gaming showed me the patterns for succeeding at PacMan. But by that time, I had already spent enough money on the game to pay for the book, and to commission the author write another one.
I was more into the interative adventure games (like H2G2), but his enthusiasm was contagious. I got to see, and play test a little, his first game "Sneakers" and even suggested a name for one of the screens, which comemorated the wing of the college where the computer labs were.
He could pretty much kick my butt at anything requiring hand-eye coordination, except one night I truly smoked him on one of those night-driver games (achieving the rank of Speed Racer :-)
He started at Ferris State University, but an offer from a Sacramento game company lured him out of to the city where I visited a couple times and met developers and heard some of their inside stories about what sudden large chunks of cash does to 18-20 year olds.
When the game industry crashed (prior to the NES reviving it) he survived, but many sold off their few extravegances and moved back in with their parents or went back to school.
It was a pretty cool age to grow up in, where entire projects were handled by highly motivated and enthusiastic individuals. Times have changed, where now it's a house thing with teams of 3D artists, sound people, programmers, designers, etc.
Still, between 1980 and 1985 I saw more innovation and truly fun, entertaining games than I have in the past decade. Back when one person could write a game, some pretty neat ideas were manifested.
I'm back into playing games, on Apple ][ and C64 emulators and rediscovering those games I always loved playing.
Oh, and yeah, I did dump some serious money at Alladin's Castle: Mouse Trap, Qixx, Amidar, Tempest, Wizard of Wor and the Black Knight pinball machine. Good thing I had that student job to fund that habi^H^H^H^Haddiction.
I'll probably be playing more Seven Cities of Gold this evening and maybe a little Paradroid for old times sake...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
My first TV screen interactive experience was in the middle 70's using the 3-sided Coleco box. It had 3 games: Pong, a driving game (keep a dot between two swerving lines), and a shooting game ( a light sensor in the barrel of a gun).
When tell kids today of those days they think I'm joking. They can't imagine that first time you could do something that caused changes on your home tv set and how important a change that was.
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! ]
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
This was the first time a game was so feature-rich
I remember having to replay the complete 4-5 episodes in order to decrypt the Shikadi alphabet so that I could find read the sign explaining me how to access to the secret level in the gravitational damping hub.
Oddly enough, I finally almost felt a similar gameplay in Quake's level Satan's Dark Delight.
Note that this is not the unique re-apparition in ID Software's games.
You also have the Dope Fish, first seen in Keen's Well of Wishes, then in Quake's Crypt of Decay, and also Commander Keen which appears in Doom 2's super secret level along with a bunch of Wolfenstein 3D soldiers.
Ah... Nostalgie...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
What it did was this - it used an optical illusion involving lenses and mirrors and it made a video on Laserdisc (I assume) appear to be "standing in midair". I've seen patent diagrams Sega filed and while I admit the machine was complex, short of the laser used to read the Laserdisc, there were no lasers used in making these "holograms". If you moved from side to side while watching this game you didn't see the other sides of the figures, all you saw was the same thing, only the angle kinda threw the picture out of thwack. These holograms were about as 3-D as the characters in the original Wolfenstein 3-D (remember the bodies on the floor that looked the same from all angles?)
Also did anyone else notice how the machine was kinda generic, in the same way that Neo Geo arcade machines were generic? I think the original idea was to have a string of "Hologram" games, but since the idea died away quicker than you could say "Dragon's Lair II" it didn't happen.
And yet, with the exception of the review linked above, I've always heard this game referred to as using holograms. Now, am I the stupid one here? Is this what is considered a hologram? I know we all see the Holodeck on ST:TNG and we all figure that eventually "holograms" will be these things we use to make fake people and situations, but do we have a generation of people thinking we have holograms in existence already because they saw a video game? Or am I just sorely misunderstanding this whole thing - are the things in Time Traveler actually what we're calling holograms now?
Oh, and the game was "ported" (snicker) to the PC and to DVD players. Digital Leisure has made a niche industry out of porting Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, et al to the PC (in many times in many formats) and recently employing very creative use of DVD Video authoring. Of course the problem was always the somewhat flaky remotes that come with DVD players - they weren't meant to be game controllers. So when Sony releases the PS2 and the controller is the remote, it's a perfect match for their titles, so they slap a "Works with PlayStation 2!" sticker on the discs and they get lumped in with the PS2 games at your better Toys 'R Us stores. This is precisely what Sony feared and XBox (since DVD Video isn't a given) and GameCube (since DVD just isn't) nicely avoided - games for their console relying soley on DVD authoring capabilities and not owing Sony a dime in royalties or development costs. I hear there's a porn game industry that does the same thing...
Schnapple
Hee-hee. Dying tickles!