There are other gaming books out there. What makes Vintage Game Consoles different, however, is the thorough nature of the writing, while still being condensed enough to tell a story. While it’s easy to pull facts from websites like wikipedia.org about the number of NES consoles Nintendo produced or the RAM that the Atari 2600 shipped with, there are other facts and interesting trivia that make the material come alive. In the book’s opening, the authors describe the limitations of the Atari 2600, and described how the programmers basically hacked the system to make it perform feats that it should not have been able to do. Its appalling lack of RAM was turned into an advantage by clever programmers. Another example is the excerpt on the game Zork for the Apple II computer. As the short passage explains, this is a 30 year old precursor to modern text parsing applications like you might find on your smartphone. This humble, unassuming text-based game was very special because you could type in a phrase like "open the mailbox," and the game would determine what you meant. Books that list dates and facts make nice coffee table reference, but I love books like Vintage Game Consoles for the special insight they offer on the subject. It’s like talking to an avid fan and really getting into why they love something.
The fandom surrounding the different systems is also given some space in the pages of this book. It helps paint a picture of the culture and the world that these systems were introduced in. After all, even if you documented the marketing, specs, and events that were happening when a game was released, you’d still never have the full picture about how it felt to be a gamer when those games came out. The book often quotes forum users by their online names, and uses their stories to enrich the stories about the consoles and games. It also talks about the collector community for each console, and about the current online community surrounding many systems like the Amiga and the Apple II. The authors even go the extra mile and give information that will help you purchase a retro system, or a current replica production or emulator. I can’t say enough about how awesome that is, given the vast number of websites and dead ends out there on the internet that they have to dig through for each system.
The book is not without its flaws, of course, but these are small compared to the overall value of the material. The places it tends to fall short are places where it feels like you are missing some small bit of background information. They are the places where you want to nudge the author to tell them, "Don’t forget about this if you’re going to talk about that!" And really, you can’t fault any book for that kind of shortcoming. We’d never have enough pages to correct it.
Authors Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton have done an excellent job pulling a vast amount of information together into a great book. It seems like just another gaming history book, but it’s special. Sure, it does the standard history thing and tells you which game was the first to do this, and which was the first system to have that, but there’s more to Vintage Game Consoles than that. This book has that special ability to put into words those feelings, those gaming moments that us long-time gamers sometimes have so much trouble explaining. It lays down the reasons why the death of the Dreamcast made us so sad. It helps us remember those special things like the Super FX chip, and why it made Super Nintendo games like Star Fox rock so much. It helps neatly summarize the meteoric rise of the PlayStation over its rivals of the time. This book tells the stories, and explains the timelines of these systems together in a way that’s simple and easy to understand and it will help you explain to your weary-eyed children why this gaming stuff was so much fun, so wild, and why the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s were such an interesting time in which to grow up.
