Posted by Glory Whore at 216.77.127.206 on September 19, 2001 at 14:06:13:
Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age, 1971-1984.
By Van Burnham from MIT Press. Oct. 2001 release @ $49.95.
ISBN: 0-262-02492-6. 448 pages, with illustrations.
Remarkably, the first interactive computer game was programmed in 1958 ("Tennis for Two," devised as a way to occupy bored guests to Brookhaven National Laboratory), and the first commercially available hardware able to download games over telephone lines was produced in 1982 (Gameline, a modem marketed for the Atari 2600 game system). These are but two of the many fascinating facts in this lively, colorful history of the golden years of the video game (i.e., the years before the personal computer became the primary medium of the games). The author, a contributing editor to Wired magazine, enlists the help of numerous experts in the field to tell this splashy story in a detailed but user-friendly style. For some readers, this will be a trip down memory lane (Atari, Activision, Pong, Space Invaders, Pac-Man); for others, an eye-opening story about the quest for video-game supremacy. Either way, it's a winner. [Reviewed by David Pitt in the 15 September 2001 issue of Booklist magazine, page 175]
I know a lot of us grew up on videogames!