Some material from this article is sourced from combined, previously published IGN features, updated with new information and recommendations.
Holiday break is fast approaching. If you're looking for a good book to read while curling up near a roaring fire and sipping some delicious cocoa, check out this great collection of novels, essays, quizzes, and Game history. These thought-provoking page-turners are guaranteed to entertain and educate.
Boss Fight has carved a niche in publishing with their terrific collection of books, each focusing on a single video game. In the Spelunky volume, Developer Derek Yu reveals the inspirations, influences, and processes that combined to create a wildly-successful roguelike adventure. Yu's concise, well-narrated account is one of the most readable peeks behind the curtain of game creation you'll find anywhere.
I Am Error explores the mysterious inner workings of the Nintendo Entertainment System, exposing every arcane avenue of the base console hardware, the Famicom Disk System, custom memory mappers, emulation, and much more. It’s a glorious glimpse into the guts of the most influential video game system of our generation, a detailed history book, and a treatise on the essential elements of game design. The technical language is parsed down to give readers a clear idea of why so many Nintendo games ended up looking, feeling, and playing like the classics they are.
Jeremy Parish’s meticulous study of the Game Boy’s birth catalogs twenty-five software titles from the first year of Nintendo’s groundbreaking handheld. While the extensive historic treatments of popular classics like Super Mario Land and Tetris are certainly welcome, Game Boy World 1989 really shines in its exposure of the lesser-known launch titles. Parish makes astute observations on even the most mundane-looking games and paints a wonderful contextualized picture of the advent of handheld gaming. Plentiful box art scans, lovingly captured images, and a clean style tie the whole thing together. Parish has kept adding to the series since then, with an equally-enjoyable 1990 installment now on shelves.
Good Nintentions 1985 is a journey through the first year of the NES, carefully exploring the black box launch titles that accompanied the console's US debut. The deeply-researched prose is accompanied by rich captured game imagery pleasingly laid out in a clean, appealing style. Good Nintentions is a delightful deep dive into the Nintendo revolution focusing on the substance and design of classic hardware and iconic games.
Drawing on experience in several development studios, Austin Grossman provides an informative documentary glimpse into the world of game design, but punctuates the experience with a Gibsonesque techno-fantasy layer. As the protagonist slips effortlessly through past and present, game play and game creation, we find ourselves questioning what exactly distinguishes reality in a universe where we can build our own worlds. The self-indulgent tone of the text sometimes pushes to the edge of grating, but again and again Grossman proves that he’s just setting us up for a clever punchline, a sentimental revelation, or an intriguing new plot development.
The Atari 2600 was a Frankensteinian abomination that cut hardware corners wherever it could to achieve a lower price point. The resulting internal architecture proved one of the most fertile proving grounds for software hacking ever constructed. Breaking down the design process and philosophy behind six classic VCS games, Racing the Beam is a powerful argument that limitation is sometimes creativity’s greatest asset. It’s essential reading for any programmer or designer and a deeply informative study of gaming’s origins.
The 25th anniversary edition of Steven Levy's informative technology book features new material from hackers like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. But the thrust of this early history text is more about the brilliant minds who were computer hacking from the late 1950s to the early '80s and changing the world in the process. The largely anachronistic focus of the text comprehensively covers portions of the computer story usually glossed over by other books on popular technology, and the section on Sierra Online’s rise to prominence reveals a lot about the early days of the game industry.
Mechner’s personal diaries chronicle his time creating two supremely influential games: the Apple II classic Karateka and the ubiquitous cinematic masterpiece Prince of Persia. Both texts are first-hand time capsules into the early world of computer game development, when a single programmer wielded tremendous creative control and responsibility. The struggles, frustrations, failures, and triumphs of the development and publishing processes are viewed through the eyes of a teenage kid coming to maturity in the midst of an exploding, dynamic industry. Both books are well worth your time.
Dungeons and Dreamers is a chaotic katamari of gaming culture spinning around the bright center of Richard Garriott, creator of Ultima. King and Borland’s marvelous study of the connection between tabletop game culture and computer role-playing traces the high-school hobbyist origins of Akalabeth and Ultima through their world-altering implications in the MUD and MMO space. It’s a wonderful read on the social revolution that accompanied the rise of electronic escapism and is one of the more delightfully anecdotal books on video game history.
A collection of meditations on the artistic merits and deficiencies of video games, Extra Lives alternates between expert criticism, biographic self-loathing, and brutal honesty. Bissell explores the potential of games to transcend entertainment and become an unparalleled medium for immersive expression, but spends equal time lamenting the challenges and limitations that make these lofty aspirations so difficult to achieve. Extra Lives breaks its thematic core into an a la carte essay approach which allows readers to take on the weighty subject matter in easily-digested bite-sized chunks.
The Media Equation is a heavy read, but it’s an extraordinary book, a scholarly examination of just what the implications are for generations of human beings growing up surrounded by interactive technology. The scientific data carefully revealed and interpreted in this tremendous work may have you questioning your own grip on reality, as Reeves and Nass convincingly demonstrate that human beings willingly project social behavior onto the computers they interact with. While less-overtly video game themed than other books on this list, The Media Equation is among the most important works available on the power electronic simulation wields over our minds and what the future likely holds for games, artificial intelligence, and our understanding of just what defines a living thing.
Those of us old enough to remember the days of Nintendo and SEGA going at each other's throats will absolutely adore Console Wars. Indeed, largely due to the fall from grace SEGA experienced in the days following Genesis (and later Dreamcast), scholarship on SEGA as a company simply doesn't exist in the volume that it does for Nintendo. Console Wars aims to fix that.
What's truly fascinating about the Genesis is that it put a significant dent into the myth that Nintendo, having single-handedly revived console gaming, was untouchable. By focusing on older gamers and leaning towards edginess, SEGA managed to paint its better-funded and much-more-powerful competitor as behind the times, and even childish. Nintendo ultimately had the last laugh, of course, but in the early '90s, it was SEGA that put Nintendo on the defensive.
Blake Harris' definitive history of the SNES-Genesis war is a must-read. Period.
Japanese companies are notoriously quiet operations. Nintendo, easily Japan's most famous video game export, is no different. Finding a conclusive and worthwhile history on Nintendo in the English language is, therefore, virtually impossible. There is a saving grace, however, and it's in the form of Game Over, a book written by journalist David Sheff and one that covers Nintendo from its 19th century origins and into the 1990s. And thankfully, reading about Nintendo's rise to dominance is, in a word, fascinating.
Combining persistence and knowledge with the ability to execute, Nintendo meteorically went from an obscure playing card company to a burgeoning electronics firm to arcade game designers to the creators of the Nintendo Entertainment System, inarguably the most important gaming device ever created. David Sheff's book examines how this all happened, especially with the release of the NES in America in the wake of the video game crash of 1983. How Nintendo made the NES work Stateside in such a climate is the stuff of legend, and it's all covered here in this book.
And if you're lucky, you'll get the updated copy with a few additional chapters written by none other than IGN alumnus and game industry super-veteran Andy Eddy.
Out of all of the books on this list, Masters of Doom is probably the most outright riveting. Masters of Doom tells the story of now-famous game studio id Software -- from its humble beginnings and up through the 1990s and into the 2000s. Of course, it was the release of Doom in 1994 that truly cemented id as one of the premiere game developers in the industry, though it has plenty of games before and after Doom (from Commander Keen to Quake and beyond) that are worth reading about as well. And thankfully, Masters of Doom covers all of that in plenty of detail, too.
If this book sounds drab, let's put it this way. Do you like first-person shooters? You do? Then you should be on your knees worshipping id Software because it essentially created the genre as we know it today with Wolfenstein 3D in 1992. So if you're interested in reading about the history of the genre that sucks hours and hours from your life every week on PlayStation Network or Xbox Live, then look no further. The rise of Carmack and Romero is simply too good to pass up.
And if you want to research an interesting aside from the book while waiting for your imminent book delivery from Amazon, go ahead and Google "Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement" and read about id's early work illegally porting Super Mario Bros. 3 to DOS.
Replay covers games from a pretty unique angle. Unlike the other game-centric books on this list, Replay comes from a more generalized and overarching perspective and tells the story of the industry from its very roots at laboratories on Long Island and school computer labs in Massachusetts and California to the present-day phenomenon we know all too well. Indeed, gaming's roots are incredibly humble and stretched out over decades. Tristan Donovan's exhaustive research pays credence to this fact and explores plenty of gaming's niches to tell an interesting story.
It's the actual European subject matter that makes this book truly worthwhile. We've heard the stories about Atari's rise and fall a million times. We know that gaming was dominated by Americans until companies like Taito and Namco got in on the act with Space Invaders and Pac-Man respectively. Donovan covers all of that, but he also covers the European side of the industry with a fair amount of depth, including the computer-centric early years of gaming, when consoles had yet to take hold around the world.
This is definitely a book that jumps around a fair bit, but it certainly covers all of its bases succinctly, and is definitely worth a read, especially for its coverage of European gaming and obscure computer-based gaming from the days of yore.
Let's face it: while Japan's prominence in gaming has fallen in recent years, the fact remains that Japan is the epicenter for the evolution of our favorite hobby, especially in terms of console gaming in the 1980s. A vast majority of the early companies in gaming in the 1970s were American, but by the time the bottom fell out of the industry in 1983, the major players would no longer be the likes of Atari and Coleco. Rather, they would be Japanese gaming companies like Nintendo, SEGA and Sony. Heck, when you think about great games on the NES (the first true infiltration of Japanese gaming into American homes apart from the arcades), you'd be hard-pressed to think of a game of note that came from a studio outside of Japan. That's how entrenched our industry was in Japanese influence following the crash.
Kohler's book tells the tale of the Japanese side of gaming. The subtitle of the book is actually quite accurate because it was Nintendo's NES that revived gaming when everyone thought console gaming was dead. Arcades were still raging at the time and personal computers were slowly but surely creeping into people's homes, but it was Nintendo's gamble with its NES that brought gaming back into the fold in households across the world. Who knows what gaming's landscape would look like today had that not happened?
So while it appears that Japanese gaming is on the wane today, it's worth your time to read about an era when nothing could be further from the truth. Power-Up is now available in a new, expanded edition that includes an additional chapter on the late Satoru Iwata.
A mere dream of engineers and scientists in the decades following World War II, the personal computer went from impossible to unlikely to sitting right on your desktop by the late 1970s. And there would be no videogames without those machines.
Naturally, computers are important to the history of gaming simply because the earliest games ever created weren't on consoles. The earliest games were played on mainframe computers and other large devices, played exclusively with archaic tools like punch cards. By the time monitors and keyboards became more widespread, the power of gaming was forced to the forefront. But you really have to know where computers came from to understand where gaming came from. After all, the very first recognizable video game, Tennis For Two, was created nearly two decades before the first console on a primitive computer using an oscilloscope as a monitor.
Half text book, half in-depth history, Fire in the Valley is chock full of fascinating information and tidbits. And yes, it's also the inspiration for the cheesy (yet awesome) late '90s made-for-TV movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley, starring Noah Wily and Anthony Michael Hall.
Here's a final pick that's just for fun. I love trivia and I love podcasts, Good Job Brain consistently creates a wonderful intersection of these two interests. The four-person pub trivia team, (including Wired editor and Power-Up author Chris Kohler) have transformed the airy, family friendly, and delightful tone of their popular show into a wonderful written anthology. The quizzes are certainly a delightful diversion, but it's the brief, well-researched bite-sized essays and factoids that really steal the show.
Jared Petty is a Senior Editor for IGN and Colin Moriarty is a former Senior Editor for IGN.
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