Video Games: From Pong to the PS5

A book for beginners and general historians
This is a book for someone who wants a general or beginner’s look at the history of video games. It takes a general look at each era/game console while singling out a few examples of games that personified the era (some examples I disagree with).There are plenty of photos to give the beginner enough of a look to understand each period/console.

Coffee table book for gamers
This is an extensively illustrated history of video games with quality photos of hardware, ads, and box labels, and with good, if brief, descriptions of video game history. It is a book that a computer gamer can display on his coffee table: cloth-bound and nicely printed on glossy pages. There is typically a half-page or so of text along with a photo or two for each topic. It is mostly about the games, but it touches on players and their devotion to gaming, about economics and the development of in-game purchases, and a bit about the psychology of video gaming and its place in society. It briefly discusses the developers of games, but this is a book about the games themselves and people are seldom discussed at length. The text is written to be interesting to a lay reader as well as a gaming enthusiast.There are very few screen shots, and the book does not go into depth about software development or actual game play. Keeping to its video game topic, it also does not cover text-based computer games such as the classic “Colossal Cave Adventure.” While there are photo credits and an index, there are no references nor a bibliography.The book is an enjoyable reminiscence of gaming by someone who knows the subject and writes well about its concepts, attractions, and development. The reader won’t learn to program, build, or play video games, but there is nostalgia and enthusiasm for the subject that is contagious.

Great
This video game book is fantastic for an enthusiast and history buff.The pages, history, and layout is colorful and very insightful.Makes great for a coffee table book, but also a history lesson.I’m not old enough for pacman and pong, but was around for the rise of psone and gameboy. This is a clinic in the history of gaming and comforting nostalgia.

More of a focus on the devices than the games themselves
This is a great coffee table book for gamers. We remember when even the earliest of these gaming devices came out and can now prove to our kids that what were are telling them is true. I had Channel F growing up and even it is documented in this book where it is hard to find proof of its existence anywhere else. One thing that I would have liked to see more of in this book is a bit of a catalogue of more of the early games. We remember certain games but can’t remember what they were called, so that would have been a great addition because it only has mention of a few select games that went with each device. Also, although the dates are in there, I would have loved more of an obvious visual representation of the dates in one of the top corners of the book so you could flip through more easily by time. All in all, it isn’t terribly in-depth about the games themselves, as examples are only given here and there of what the graphics looked like. I can only guess that this was done for copyright reasons, but it would have really been cool to see a page comparing side by side how the graphics evolved over time.