Reddit reviews Replay: The History of Video Games

if your interested in an over-all history of video games The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steven L. Kent is a good read with a focus on arcade and early console games while Tristan Donovan's Replay: The History of Video Games has more of a focus on the development of pc games.

Replay: The History of Video Games

Not a lot out there (that I know of) focuses on the fall half, but I feel like you'd appreciate these:

From For Amusement Only: the life and death of the American Arcade by The Verge

Replay: The History of Video Games

The Arcade Experience: A Look Into Modern Arcade Games and Why They Still Matter

Game Over: Press Start To Continue, The Maturing of Mario

The history of the United States video game crash, and Nintendo's success, it seems every video game journalist needs to do it.

People should check out a book like Replay : The History of Video Games if they're curious for a much more thorough account.

Here are some of the highlights you don't usually see video game journalists mention.

It happened in the United States, and not the world, during a US recession. Part of Nintendo's success is they simply weren't caught up in it, they were a Japanese company that hadn't really entered the US market yet. They got to learn from all of the mistakes made by US companies.

VCR sales were rapidly rising as video games declined. Home computer prices were coming down sharply. There were too many different consoles competing with each other.

Way too many games and systems were manufactured, not just E.T. Retailers massively discounted many of these unsold games once they decided to get out of video games and flooded the market, depressing prices everywhere.

Arcades were also crashing, there was a giant boom based on the sudden national popularity of games like Pac-Man, but when that interest subsided, the income was spread way too thin. Those games were bought using credit from the manufacturer, a bunch of arcades defaulted on those loans leaving all those video game companies with tons of debt. Arcades and arcade manufacturers responded by trying to milk the people who were still playing by making games much harder and more expensive, and it just drove them away faster.

US Retailers didn't want to stock the NES, even with the new name, the toy peripherals, etc, until Nintendo made an interesting move to prove the retailers and analysts wrong. They did a massive marketing blitz in just New York, and offered the retailers full money back on anything they stocked that didn't sell. It worked and they started spreading around to other large cities before a nation wide launch, to prove its appeal.

The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon--The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World by Steven Kent

Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered The World by David Sheff

Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds by J. C. Herz

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner

Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing by Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig De Peuter

Replay: The History of Video Games by Tristan Donovan

All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg

Vintage Games: An Insider Look at the History of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the Most Influential Games of All Time by Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton

I'm not really sure what sort of book you're looking for here. The study and thought of games written in long form is sort of broad. I would recommend Replay: The history of videogames for just long form analysis of videogames in general. It's all really interesting stuff that gets into such detail you wont read past the Nimrod computing machine from the 1940s world fair until a chapter or two in, but again, I don't really know what you're looking for other than "very in-depth book about videogames".

I don't want to undersell replay though, it's a fantastic book. There's no way you wont read it and come away with some impossible tales to tell your friends and it does get pretty deep into just how the technological limitations, economic conditions, and corporate culture of the 70s, 80s, and 90s shaped what we know as genres today. It's good stuff.

I think you might be a little late: http://www.amazon.com/Replay-The-History-Video-Games/dp/0956507204/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1371550963&sr=8-4&keywords=replay

I can recommend it btw. Not the greatest writing, but so many interesting tidbits.

The two most interesting books I've read on video games have been Tristan Donovan's fascinating history of the medium, "Replay: The History of Video Games". It is a very in-depth history that gets down into a lot of nitty gritty stuff about the birth of video games and stays very in-depth up until about the late 90s when it starts to go big picture. Still a great read.

If you're looking for something that's more of a critical piece, I'd suggest Brendan Keogh's close reading of Spec Ops: The Line, "Killing is Harmless". It's an incredible way to enhance your playthrough of what is already an incredibly emotional game. Keogh breaks down everything from the allusions to literature and film to the significance of scripted events in the game. The only advice I have is if you haven't played the game before and you try and read along as you play the game you do get hit with some spoilers as Keogh assumes you've finished the game when you're reading the book. Still def worth your time though.