Just Finished Reading: Replay – The History of Video Games by Tristan Donovan (FP: 2010)

I started playing video/computer games in the early 1970’s and have been hooked ever since. But, after my first encounter with them on a Pong machine in a hotel in the French Alps, I had a close to 10 year hiatus in the gaming arena. I missed out on many of the advances talked about in the first sections of this totally fascinating history not having the resources to buy any of the early gaming rigs – though I did have a few friends whose families had somewhat larger disposable incomes than mine. My next real encounter with gaming was in the arcades of the seaside town of Morecambe where I spent the 2nd Year of my University days pushing my grant money into slot machines like Space Invaders and X-Wing. I see from the history of such things the driving forces of why particular machines ended up there – I think I was there in the transition away from pinball machines to video game machines – and moved away just as the video arcade hit its apogee and started to collapse in on itself in a blaze of multi-coloured pixels. Machines were getting bigger, more powerful, and naturally more expensive to both use and run/maintain. Then, of course, came the console….

I, for one, was never a console player. Again I knew people with various gaming rigs but I never owned one even after starting work. Looking back on it I’m not exactly sure why. My 6 year stint in London was definitely video game lite except for the (very) odd trip to the nearby seaside resorts in the summer. In those days – prior to moving here with work – I was without a computer but did (briefly) try out the Atari Lynx. I still have it somewhere….. Only in the early 90’s did I reconnect with the gaming world – now exclusively on the PC – with games like the iconic Doom (my first ever multi-player experience) and SimCity. After I borrowed an older model 386SX from work I really didn’t look back and have been playing ever since.

Naturally the nostalgia index was high whilst reading through this pretty exhaustive account of the video game industry from its earliest days up till about 10 years ago. My potted history of personal gaming will show you that most of gaming development passed me by so it was interesting and informative to fill in the gaps. It was fun to recognise games and incidents from growing up and even more fun remembering playing them and some of the experiences I shared with various gaming buddies over the decades. Even many of the games I’d never played, or systems I’d never played on, elicited recognition if nothing else.

One of the things that I did find fascinating was the chaotic nature of the gaming industry in the early years/decades. It was only really after games themselves and the technology used to both create and play them became much more expensive that the *industry* we know and hate these days became such a factor. Before that things were pretty much thrown together and, to be honest, often looked it. Of course one of the main issues with the corporatisation of gaming is the lack of imagination and the reduction of risk taking (to say nothing of taking fans/users for granted). It seemed, at least for a while, that the BIG companies would kill the goose that had laid so many golden eggs. Then came the Internet, independent games designers and platforms such as Steam to distribute them online. With that everything changed……

If you’re a gamer like me this will pretty much be a guaranteed fun read. It was definitely interesting to understand how games came about, the wild-west style industry in the early days and the ever expanding technology that helped it grow. Much nostalgia was experienced (along with a sprinkling of sadness at the loss of some ‘freshness’) and many a smile passed across my face. A recommended fun read.