The Ultimate History of Video Games

Executive Summary: Ultimate history this is not. It left me rather disappointed in some regards. That said, there is a lot of great stuff here, and I enjoyed it overall. 3.5 Stars.

Audiobook: Dan Woren does a good job narrating. Nothing spectacular, but then this is non-fiction so I don't really want spectacular. He speaks clearly and with good pacing making audio a good option in my opinion.

Full Review
I've been a gamer for almost as long as I can remember. My first gaming platform was an Apple IIgs in the late 80s. That was replaced by a Nintendo in the early 90's and that was my platform of choice until I got my first PC in the mid 90s. I'd visit an arcade on occasion, but I never really had the money to play a lot of video games, so home gaming has made up most of my experience.

I never played Atari. All of the early days of Atari was brand new and pretty interesting to me. I really liked the stuff about arcade games as well. That said, I felt like the early part of the book focused entirely too much on Atari. This book as a whole is told from an American perspective, so any involvement of Japan mostly is covering the impact of Japanese companies on the US gaming market. I'd have liked more history of Japanese companies than we got. I'd also have liked more detail on the other companies involved in the early days of video games.

My biggest complaint was how little Computer Gaming was covered. Sure the Apple II and Commodore 64 were mention. So was Doom. He made brief mention of how some third party publishers were focusing on Computer Games, but mostly as part of the story of how they were lured to make console games. Blizzard wasn't mentioned at all. Apart from the mention of Doom, id was ignored. Sierra Online, who was a huge part of my childhood barely got mentioned.

My final complaint is this book relied too heavily on quotes. It's hard to say for sure since I did audio, but it felt like half of each chapter was simply quotes of people in the industry. I don't really need quotes. I need the author to interview and research and present a narrative to me. The occasional quote to drive a point is fine.

All that said, I enjoyed this book. I've read a lot of books on early computers and a few things on video games in particular and this book covers a good range of detail from the 1970s until the late 90s.

If you're particularly interested in American Console game video game history, this is a good choice. However it's far from the Ultimate history simply because too many things I feel were important to the rise of video games in not only the United States, but the entire world were badly neglected.