Is this the best book on the subject thus far? I'm inclined

>$16.99
>sale price
It better be for that much.

Just lurk /vr/ for a week and you're an expert.

>>3229749
It's Nintendo focused, but Game Over is really good. I need to read Ultimate History though.

>>3229749

It's definitely worth a read, especially for the first 1/3 of the book that focuses heavily on Atari. Also, the chapter on how Mortal Kombat basically was the catalyst for the Senate hearings on video game violence was really interesting too.

Some of the best lessons learned from that book:

>don't sell your company and simultaneously sign a seven year non-compete agreement
>protect your products from imitators and unauthorized third party software
>maybe it's not the best idea to have veteran of the textiles industry with minimal tech skills to run a video game company?
>it takes more than 6 weeks to develop a blockbuster video game
>don't price your game system at $699, especially if you rely on third party games for your library
>one bad press conference can sink your business (Sega getting cucked by Sony at the first E3)

File: 1366778543417.jpg (126KB, 500x500px) Image search: [Google]

126KB, 500x500px

>take speech in college
>decide to do informative speech on Nes and how it changed the gaming market in the 80s
>get this book for source material
>start reading it
>end up just playing tons of retro games and dropping the course

fffffffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccckkkkkkkkkk

There has never been a decent history of video games that doesn't read like a bad GameFAQs forum post.

>>3231291
This.

Don't fall for the videogame history books.

Studies on the subject are extremely recent and since nobody in the industry or outside it bothered making accurate logs or even keeping them means a lot of what you're going to read in those books is literally rumours with little to no basis.

How are you even going to make a book on the history of videogames when you have to tackle stuff like the C64, with its gargantuan market based on homebrew and bootlegs released mostly illegally by authors using pseudonyms?
How are you going to make a history books when most of the stuff going behind the scenes in the japanese market was also tied to Yakuza groups?
How are you going to make something like that when a lot of software houses have literally disappeared so you can't even find the people you're supposed to talk about, let alone have documents on anything?

The best you can get out of those books is a really vague and often inconsistent and contradicting picture outside of the stuff you can find on old interviews and articles on the internet, those books are a huge scam made to make a profit off people.

You might not want to admit it, but at this point it's impossible to make a story of videogames as a medium unless you're starting from the mid 80's or 90's and that's even being optimistic, anything before that is just extremely nebulous outside of the big names like Wizardry, even making statements on the videogame world and industry of today is extremely controversial because a lot of stuff simply doesn't leave the studio and never will for a huge number of reasons.

>>3229860
Not sure about that. A lot of different games and different genres or platforms are discussed here indeed but I would advise to look on other sites as well. Tons of interviews or additional lore info that can be found that way.

Adequate histories of the personal computer/video game industry only exist for a few high profile companies and individuals such as Steve Jobs or Nintendo.

>>3231323
Most of those books never even try to deal with computer games beyond a few vague references to Sierra and Wolfenstein/Doom.

>>3230303
>decide to do informative speech on Nes and how it changed the gaming market in the 80s

You saved yourself an embarrassment.