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Game On! From Pong To Oblivion: The 50 Greatest Games Of All Time by Simon Byron, Ste Curran and David McCarthy
01/12/2006 . Source: Phil Jones 
pub: Headline. 255 page illustrated softcover. Price: £14.99 (UK). ISBN: 0-7553-1570-7. Buy Game On! From Pong To Oblivion in the USA - or Buy Game On! From Pong To Oblivion in the UK  check out websites: www.headline.co.uk , www.hodderheadline.com and www.madaboutbooks.com
The first patent for a video game console in the US was presented in 1948. The first 'video game' was created in 1958 by William Higinbotham using an oscilloscope titled 'Tennis For Two'. At first, computer games were limited to mainframes and programmed by individuals as a leisure pursuit. A group of students at MIT programmed 'Spacewar!' which when it was distributed with Dec computers became the first widely distributed game. Later, the game was released as a coin-operated arcade version called 'Computer Space' developed by Ted Dabney. In 1972, Atari was formed and in the same year 'Pong' was released selling 19,000 Pong Machines. The first commercial game console was released in 1972.
The arcade industry blossomed and in 1978, 'Space Invaders' was released by Taito and 'Asteroids' was released by Atari in the same year. Meanwhile, on mainframes the first adventure game was developed by Will Crowther called 'ADVENT', later to be known as 'Colossal Cave'. The sequel 'Zork' found its way onto early mini and home computers released by Infocom who went onto release the popular text adventure 'Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy'. The first role playing game which was based on the familiar 'Dungeons And Dragons' game running on PDP-10 Mainframes was known as 'Dungeon' but unlike games today it was unlicensed.
Handhelds first appeared in 1972 with the game 'Tic Tac Toe' made by Waco but really took off with the advent of cheap LCD screens. With home computers becoming popular in the late 70s and 80s, in these early days, computer games were a small cottage industry. Initially copying arcade games due to the low production costs very interesting and bold games were released. Very few publishers from the 80s have survived apart from the likes of Electronic Arts and Activision. The main gaming computers were Commodore 64, Apple II and ZX Spectrum. The Apple II over 15 years had over 20,000 programs. In 1985, the arrival of the Atari ST and Amiga ushered in 16-bit gaming. It wasn't until the 90s we saw PC gaming flourish.
Of course, in the 80s we had both Nintendo and Sega develop consoles. Gameboy was released in 1989 and in 1995, Sony released the PlayStation. Now, of course, we have the new wave of next gen consoles beginning released along with the whole realm of PC and console online gaming. I digress though back to the book.
Well you probably can guess from the title what this book is about. It just lacks the history above. The authors from what I can see, are just providing their personal choice of video games and picking the high points in gaming. The book draws from arcade, console, handheld and PC gaming.
Each game or game series is present with mainly an outline of the game and sometimes its history or social context along with plenty of screenshots. There is a foreword describing the authors came about the game choices. Picking gaming high points or, for a gaming series such as 'Final Fantasy' or 'Resident Evil', choosing the best in the series and giving background about the rest. There is also a boxout for each game describing the best way to play the featured game which is useful or telling you about more recent updates to games.
The games are not ordered, just presented as the 'best' fifty games. Like any 'best of' books, you are not necessarily going to agree with the choices. The biggest problem I have with the book is most of the games in the 80s and 90s have been totally ignored. The game choices favours popular, successful and predominately mainstream choices. There is, of course, thousands of games which they could have chosen from. It's a shame they've gone for the easy, safe choices. You expect to see 'Final Fantasy VII', 'Pong', 'Asteroids' and 'Halo'. Most of the games are relatively new so, of course, they tend to be better. Having larger scope and plenty of eye candy. I think it would have been better in some respects to show those stunning older games that we're the precursors to their modern counter parts. The book also ignores arcade machines for the most part. Just because they have fallen out of the mainstream somewhat doesn't mean they should be ignored.
There is a large chunk of gaming that has been basically excluded. Games like 'Little Computer People', the first game to simulate a person - randomly generated you observed the character in his house and interacted with him. Each copy of the game would generate a different 'person'. This was obviously the start of the evolutionary tree that became games like 'The Sims'. It was entertaining and pushed the existing technology of the time. It's games like this and the likes of 'Doom', 'Prince Of Persia' (original PC game), 'Wipeout', 'R-Type', 'Defender', 'Sensible Soccer', 'Rainbow Islands', 'Monkey Island', 'Gauntlet', 'Vagrant Story', 'Super Metroid', 'Flashback', 'Pitfall' and 'Boulderdash'. I could go on and on but you get the idea.
For me, I would personally change a few choices, I would include 'SSX', swap 'Jak And 'Daxter' for 'Ratchet And Clank' to name a few. I don't have any particular knowledge of gaming except for playing them since the early 80s on a whole host of systems, arcade games and computers.
I think what this book lacks is balance. It almost feels as if they had to include 'old' games just as a token gesture and rushed to add newer brighter games to the list for the majority. It would have been good to have more background and development information about the games rather that the style of just saying how wonderful the games are. Perhaps if they could have found the original developers included a few short interviews and the like. It would have been nice to at least have an idea of what the background was of the three authors.
So what we have here is a coffee table book. It's not going to broaden your gaming knowledge if you want to know about video gaming history and development. Most of the games listed, you can probably get hold of as they are relative new so in that respect it's not bad but as an information source or point of inspiration its lacking especially if you're a veteran gamer.
Phil Jones
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