The History of Video Games is a short book, giving more of a broad overview of video games than anything too incredibly detailed. And it works well for an overview, with sections dedicated to particular personalities, and a chapter discussing gender in games, paying particular attention to the issues with gender and Gamer Gate.

The majority of the information in here is pretty well known, with long-time video game fans likely knowing it already, just from being in that world. Plus, if, like me, you’re 30+ and lucky enough to grow up with consoles, most of this you would have absorbed by being in the world when most of these consoles were released.

Some of the stats are interesting, but for the most part the first two sections of this book were largely dry. I did like learning about the earliest forms of games, but I think I prefer these sort of books when there’s more of a personality behind them, and it lets you in on the author’s relationship with the subject matter, too.

I also don’t know the criteria for the “Personalities” section, but this section was heavily male dominated, and it would have been great to see a few folks in there who weren’t men. Overall, this is a hard sort of book to do right – there’s some interesting elements to it, but the majority of information feels like repetitive if you’ve watched a single documentary on the industry. It also isn’t quite inclusive enough to reach outside a gaming audience, though it might make a good gift for someone who is perhaps just getting into video games or a bit on the younger side.

Thank you to Pen & Sword for providing me with this ebook via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Views remain my own.

This is an interesting look at the history, especially the 1970s/80s, of video game development. It's 120 pages but has a lot of illustrations, so it's a pretty fast read. I don't know the field well enough to know if this is a truly exhaustive source, but I think a video game fan will enjoy reading it.

Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for the opportunity to review a temporary digital ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

Despite being relatively short, this is a fantastically detailed account of the history of electronic gaming. A fun, informative read.

First things first, wow. This book was packed with so much information about the history behind video games. I loved playing video games as a child. Coming home from school and playing Donkey Kong Country is so vivid in my mind, it feels like yesterday. But learning how far video games have come and what some of the original video games looked like, it's almost unbelievable to think we have the games that we have now.

I admit that I had never researched video game history. I honestly thought video games first popped up in the 80's and went from there. But knowing that video games are from way before that really blew my mind. This book makes me wonder what original video game pioneers would think of how far gaming has come now. We can essentially have video games in our pocket, and to think they were at one point huge machines is so amazing.

I recommend this book to gamers, game designers, game developers, or anyone who works in the gaming industry. Even history buffs would enjoy this book.

Billed as a ‘potted history’ of the video game industry, this is a slim volume with some interesting stories and a lot of facts and figures. The main plus is probably a huge dollop of nostalgia, especially if you’re of a certain age (the author was born in 1980, so we share a similar kind of experience of the gaming boom), but you might also learn a thing or two.

For instance, the first video game was released much earlier than I would have expected! And yet, the real ‘start’ of the culture wasn’t that much before my own experiences with the Spectrum ZX and the Commodore 64 (yup, aging myself here!). The first chapter – excuse me, ‘Level 1’ – is about platforms and technology, and how the available tech shaped what was possible in gaming.

Other ‘levels’ delve into the people and personalities behind both the tech and the biggest games. This was largely new to me, I don’t really think about the individuals behind the games – these days it’s all big teams for big games, I’m sure. We then move through the capitalism aspect, and the fascination here is with the companies that didn’t survive versus those that made it huge, and some of the stories behind those.

The last two ‘levels’ cover gender and representation, and culture and community. These felt a little surface-level, I felt, not adding too much – this is where we strayed from fact into more opinion, I suppose.

Overall, this is a good attempt at a fun little book, but after some interesting history, the rest is neither in depth enough to capture the real hardcore gamers or quite entertaining enough for a wider audience. It’s a bit on the dry side at several points, and I skimmed a lot of the final ‘lists’ chapter on top games – so few of them meant anything to me, really. The mentions of games I remember and loved were all too brief, really, and I suspect that’ll be the case whether you’re enthused about Pong and Pacman, or Super Mario or Pokemon – or whatever the cool kids are playing now ;)

Fish goes over the wonderful world of video games, filled to the brim with fun tidbits and facts about the early days of gaming. I quite liked the third chapter, which detailed some important people in the history of the medium. While I knew the greats like Nolan Bushnell and Gabe Newell, there were quite a few figures I didn’t realize had a huge impact on gaming, such as Roberta Williams (who popularized the graphic adventure genre) and Clive Sinclair (who helped usher in the UK gaming scene with the ZX Spectrum).

I think the weakest chapters in this book are the first couple of chapters (which go over a brief history of video games as a medium) as well as the fifth chapter (which delves into gender and representation). The first two chapters simultaneously feel too short and yet too long since most of the information here is basic knowledge to even non-gamers. The fifth chapter, while having fair points about some video game depictions of women highlighting the oversexualization of female characters, feels like it’s editorializing and stretching the points a bit too much. When you’re highlighting how apparently Toadette is the only named female Toad (an incorrect notion, just looking at Paper Mario’s cast of Toads), it feels like this should have been combined into the next chapter of Culture and Community. (The author even spells SoulCalibur wrong… twice!)

As for presentation, each chapter is adorned with full color photos of different gaming memorabilia and gameplay screenshots. I really loved the hardware pictures and press conference photos, while the gameplay screen feel a bit dated and sloppy. The overall package is serviceable and a nice treat for those who want a crash course in video game history.

The History of Video Games starts as just about every other book about the history of video games. It definitely isn’t a bad start, and it makes sense - there’s only so much to write about something fairly new in our own history. It’s written well, though, and there’s a nice chapter included which focusses a bit more on people who contributed to the rise of video games.

Where this book stands out a bit more, is the chapters áfter the history. It has a chapter about gender and the problem of sexism in the video games industry, which was very well written. After that comes a chapter about the impact video games have and had on our culture, including the way they influenced movies and music.

This book isn’t groundbreaking in any way, but it was a nice and quick read with some interesting chapters about the most recent history of video games - up to 2019.

this is an insightful non fiction on the history of video games, and it does what the title says- gives you the history. As a big gamer from a young age, i keep up with the newest releases and spend hours playing them, but to learn the history behind the industry, animation and everything that goes into videogames was very interesting. Also very well researched!

This is an informative and well researched book but a bit dry. Gamers should check it out as they might learn something. Non-gamers may enjoy it but it would appeal more to gamers.
I voluntarily reviewed an advance reader copy of this book.

I've always been interested in video games, how the simple pleasure of 'pong' type games has evolved in to the animated works of art that most people have experienced today.

It was a lot more academic and informational than I was expecting, it read more like a textbook, but I still enjoyed reading it.

With a lot of articles from the media writing off video games as the reason 'why children are violent' or that they're a waste of time and there's nothing educational to be gained from them, this book is the perfect response to prove them wrong.
I was always taught as a child, that the best way to understand something is to understand how it came to be / where it originated from.

A great read full of interesting information about the rise of the video industry. I wish it had more details on some titles but I feel its a must read for gamers.

NOTE: I received a free preliminary, and likely unedited copy of this book from Netgalley for the purposes of providing an honest, unbiased review of the material. Thank you to all involved.

Going into this book, I was honestly skeptical that a 200 page book was sufficient enough to cover a topic as dense as "The History of Video Games" without glossing over large swaths of time, or focusing on things that weren't as important as stated. The recent Netflix show "High Score" comes to mind with what it focused on - while important, not everything presented was actually warranting a full episode to cover, and LOTS of stuff was left out. That isn't an issue with The History of Videogames by Charlie Fish, the book is jam-packed with plenty of information, and does a fine job as any other history book at presenting a general topic.

I quite enjoyed that the book didn't just focus on the tried-and-true pop-culture history of games, it successfully goes over the full origin of games, going back to huge machines that played simple games such as tic-tac-toe using lightbulbs as a graphic interface dating all the way back to post-war America. This part of the lineage is almost NEVER discussed, usually people start with 1959s Spacewar! as "the first videogame" which is not correct in many ways. I appreciate the research that Fish put into this, and enjoyed his unique experience as a gamer based in the UK, as that scene never really gets elaborated on, seeing that its fairly divergent than either the Japanese or American scenes.

Perhaps my main quibble with the book was the formatting - about one-quarter of the book is the "history of videogames" all in one section, then it goes to a section on profiles of important people in the field, then a section on companies, social issues, a section on top ten lists (such as bestselling games) and more. I think the book could benefit form being reshuffled to being broken up a bit more and having those latter sections intertwined into the main section, as it feels a tad like a series of blog posts that have been collected as-is. What is here works well nonetheless, and this isn't a huge deal-breaker. the book is still organized well, and contains pictures and screenshots to help illustrate certain points.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone looking for a fairly concise history of videogames, I've read a lot of similar books in the past (especially when I briefly worked for a gaming website), but honestly this is probably one of the best I've come across.

I enjoyed reading this micro-history of the video game industry! I grew up video game-adjacent: I've never lived in a home without a computer and at least one video game console. Some of my earliest memories are of watching my parents play Donkey Kong Country, I've played simulation games for most of my life, and to this day I enjoy watching my husband play Elder Scrolls. With all that in mind, I have a lot of background context for this book. If you aren't already familiar with the major video game names and franchises, this one will be pretty data-heavy. There were also some disappointing omissions, most notably The Sims franchise. My favourite sections were the history of the various businesses in the industry and the role of gender in video games over time.

I was looking forward to this book since it is a huge topic and not enough is written about it. The history of video games is technically and culturally fascinating; it is the story of crude symbols evolving into photo-realistic graphics, of diversions for computing professionals developing into something everyone does without thinking out it, playing a game on their smartphone, console or computer.

Given the scope of the task then, I have to admit to some disappointment about the way the author has chosen to organise the material. Rather than tell the story from beginning to end, each chapter looks at the subject from a different angle: chapter 2 platforms, chapter 3 people, chapter 4 companies, and so on. What this means it that the entire history of video gaming is crammed into chapter 2 which is therefore sketchy; some of my favourite machines, like the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST, are not really mentioned. Then we get the people chapter and a lot about the Sinclair Spectrum, because it tells the story of Clive Sinclair; but that really belonged in the platforms chapter. So there is some repetition and some jumping back and forth in time and I am not convinced it really works – especially given the book’s title.

That said, there is plenty of interesting material here. I learnt a lot about the early history of Nintendo and how Super Mario Bros and Donkey Kong came about. I also found the chapter on gender and representation a compelling if dispiriting account of video gaming’s male-centric history.

The last chapter on games is really a set of lists, top ten best selling arcade games, top ten bestselling console games, and so on. There is just a paragraph on each one and again it seemed too brief and many seminal games are not mentioned. It would have been beneficial to look at game genres in more depth and some of the best examples in each.

In the end the book feels rather scattergun in its approach which spoilt it for me, even though there are some parts which I enjoyed.

Having lived through the growth of gaming era, this was a fun walk through the past. My first gaming experiences came from playing the arcade game Space Invaders and a first ti me two-and-a-half-hour binge on Pac-Man, where a buddy of mine and I played so long and hard we rubbed the skin off our pointing fingers and developed blisters. Fanatics aren’t born, they are created.

Author Charlie Fish’s book starts way before my initial experiences, opening the door to a time when games were birthed in companies and at universities. The book is nicely split into sensible chapters, which include platforms, the most important creators, companies and marketing, gender representation, and the games themselves. His choice to break the games discussion into decades was a good idea, as the gamer universe is huge and recent games would have dwarfed their ancestors. This enabled a balanced view of the games most popular in the 80s, 90s, etc. I also enjoyed the numerous colored pictures of the various consoles and games.

There is a nice Reference section at the end for those who wish to explore further (although noting the specific articles a publication offered would have been more helpful). The book doesn’t go so deep in depth that the reader becomes bored. It constantly moves forward in a whimsical sort of way, making it a book one could easily read in a day or less. While I might have wished for more, what I got was good enough to more than satisfy. Five stars.

My thanks to NetGalley and Pen & Sword for a complimentary electronic version of this book.

I grew up with gaming computers in the 1980s and remember you my mind was blown the first time I heard the zx Spectrum shout "Ghostbusters!". I worked in a factory to get my first Spectrum, and envied the C64 owners with its three channel sound chip. So I was looking forward to this book.

Sadly, I was a little bored. The history of computer and console releases is mostly facts and figures which drags after so many pages. The sections on gaming personalities (although no Rob Hubbard!) And gender representation were interesting though.

Maybe in the print version the pictures will be larger but on the Kindle version they were quite small. Why? We want to see the machines in all their olg glory.

There's nothing wrong with this book and obviously a great deal of research has been done. But it might suit a game researcher more than your average Joe.