Category: The Book Shelf

Trevor Strunk is the host of the No Cartridge podcast, though you might also know him as @Hegelbon on Twitter. As of today, he is also the author of Story Mode: Video Games and the Interplay Between Consoles and Culture, which was recently published by Prometheus Books.

Story Mode looks to examine how several popular game franchises (such as Call of Duty) have changed over the years, as well as how those games have begun to rewrite our culture in their own way:

In Story Mode, video games critic and host of the No Cartridge podcast Trevor Strunk traces how some of the most popular and influential game series have changed over years and even decades of their continued existence and growth. We see how the Call of Duty games—once historical simulators that valorized conflicts like World War II—went “modern,” complete with endless conflicts, false flag murders of civilians, and hyperadvanced technology. It can be said that Fortnite’s runaway popularity hinges on a competition for finite resources in an era of horrific inequality. Strunk reveals how these shifts occurred as direct reflections of the culture in which games were produced, thus offering us a uniquely clear window into society’s evolving morals on a mass scale.

Story Mode asks the question, Why do video games have a uniquely powerful ability to impact culture? Strunk argues that the participatory nature of games themselves not only provides players with a sense of ownership of the narratives within, but also allows for the consumption of games to be a revelatory experience as the meaning of a game is oftentimes derived by the manner in which they are played.

An excerpt from Story Mode detailing the rise of id Software’s Doom and how it eventually gave way to “acceptable” violence in games (“How To Get Away With Making An Ultraviolent Video Game”) can be found at Defector.

Are you looking to delve deeper into game history and the study of game culture? Then look no further than the Big List of Books About Games.

Obviously, the Big List of Books About Games is not a list of every book ever published about video games. But it’s certainly a good place to start… and there is a lot of options about exactly where you could begin.

History buffs would do well to begin with Steven Kent’s The Ultimate History of Video Games, a book that provides a pretty good overview of everything from Pong through the beginnings of the PS2/GameCube/Xbox era. David Sheff’s Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children fills in a lot of the gaps with a very detailed account of Nintendo’s rise from the early 1980s up through the dawn of the Nintendo 64. And Tristan Donovan’s Replay: The History of Video Games travels across the pond to cover the same timeframe with an additional focus on the game development industry in Europe.

If you want to go way back, David Sudnow’s Pilgrim in the Microworld is a wild game-specific study about how one non-player got sucked into an obsession with video games. Out of print for decades, the book was republished by Boss Fight Books in 2020.

Closer to now, Jason Schreier’s Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made and the anthology The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture will give you a painfully accurate picture of what game development and game culture are like today.

I would also strongly recommend David Kushner’s Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, especially if you ever wanted to know more about the creation of Doom or the diverging career paths of John Romero and John Carmack.

With hundreds of choices like this, the Big List of Books About Games is currently split into four categories (and like these titles, some will be highlighted as “Recommended” picks):

▶ Commentary, Criticism, and Cultural Studies
▶ History (Before 2000)
▶ History (2000 – Present)
▶ Memoirs

The Big List of Books About Games will be updated on a regular basis, but if there’s a title you know I’m missing, please let me know through the Contact page.

If you want a good overview of the video game industry’s early days, Steven L. Kent’s The Ultimate History of Video Games is a great place to start. Beginning with a quick primer on the pinball craze of the 1930s, the author quickly introduces readers to touchstones like Spacewar, Ralph Baer’s Brown Box, and Pong. Hitting all the highlights from the next 30 years over the book’s 600 pages, the story culminates with the launch of the PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox in 2000-2001.

But a lot has happened since then, and so Steven L. Kent has returned with The Ultimate History of Video Games Volume 2: Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and the Billion-Dollar Battle to Shape Modern Gaming. As you might have gleaned from the title, he picks up right where he left off with the turn-of-the-millennium’s four-way fight for console supremacy (you can’t forget about the Dreamcast), but the book also delves into the later PS3-Xbox 360-Wii era:

The home console boom of the ’90s turned hobby companies like Nintendo and Sega into Hollywood-studio-sized business titans. But by the end of the decade, they would face new, more powerful competitors. In boardrooms on both sides of the Pacific, engineers and executives began, with enormous budgets and total secrecy, to plan the next evolution of home consoles. The PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube, and Sega Dreamcast all made radically different bets on what gamers would want. And then, to the shock of the world, Bill Gates announced the development of the one console to beat them all—even if Microsoft had to burn a few billion dollars to do it.

A short excerpt touching on Ken Kutaragi’s tenure at Sony’s is available on the official website for the book’s publisher, Crown.

The Ultimate History of Video Games Volume 2: Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and the Billion-Dollar Battle to Shape Modern Gaming is available to purchase from your favorite bookstore (or digitally as an ebook) beginning today.

Evan Amos’s The Game Console dissected the “grisly innards” of more than 80 different platforms when it was first published in 2018. The author explored each machine’s history in a series of short blurbs while also using the “exploded view” photography on each page to dive into the many layers of silicon, plastic, and metal used to build them.

No Starch Press recently announced that this incredible visual study is getting a sequel next month with the release of The Game Console 2.0: A Photographic History from Atari to Xbox, a “Revised and Expanded” edition that’ll add more than 50 consoles, variants, and accessories to the original book:

Revised and updated since the first edition’s celebrated 2018 release, The Game Console 2.0 is an even bigger archival collection of vividly detailed photos of more than 100 video-game consoles. This ultimate archive of gaming history spans five decades and nine distinct generations, chronologically covering everything from market leaders to outright failures, and tracing the gaming industry’s rise, fall, and monumental resurgence.

The book’s 2nd edition features more classic game consoles and computers, a section on retro gaming in the modern era, and dozens of new entries — including super-rare finds, such the Unisonic Champion 2711, and the latest ninth-generation consoles. You’ll find coverage of legendary systems like the Magnavox Odyssey, Atari 2600, NES, and the Commodore 64; systems from the ‘90s and 2000s; modern consoles like the Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5; and consoles you never knew existed.

The Game Console 2.0: A Photographic History from Atari to Xbox will be available in bookstores and as an ebook in August 2021.