High Score! the illustrated history of electronic games rusel demaria & johnny l. wilson review by Zube (zube@stat.colostate.edu) Created: Feb 4, 2003 Updated: Apr 30, 2006 http://www.stat.colostate.edu/~zube/highscore.txt My friend is a Gary Numan fan. Gary Numan is usually identified as the singer of _Cars_, an early 80s song. However, Mr. Numan has not been sleeping since the 80s. He has released many albums, boasts a small but loyal fan base and is regarded as an influence by many a band. As you might imagine because of my friendship, I know more about Gary Numan than I really care to. One bleak night, I caught a small bit of a "Where Are They Now?" program on VH1. Gary Numan was featured. VH1 summed up his career like this: Gary Numan comes on the scene and has a hit with _Cars_. Follow-up songs and albums aren't as successful. Fades into obscurity. Has plane crash. Makes a comeback by singing _Cars_. Had I not known more about Mr. Numan's career, I might have thought the segment interesting. Knowing what I did, it was nothing short of a travesty. High Score! is the video game equivalent of this. Oh, the pictures are nice, the boxes of PC games doubly so, and there are some interesting bits about PC game companies, but this book had me tearing my hair out due to the ultra-superficial, 30-second-soundbite approach to most of vg history. Perhaps it was because I'd recently read Supercade and Arcade Fever and this was the last straw. For the record, High Score! is better than Joystick Nation and Arcade Fever but worse than a head cold. Since I'm fed up, I present the following for exactly one purpose: to lower my blood pressure. If it turns out that it helps someone too, that's great, but most people will just keep churning out dreck, so I have to write this for my own amusement. Along the way, I hope to show where High Score! went wrong and also offer one hope for the second edition of the book. *** All right, you lot of video game authors. This *isn't* rocket science. You already have a leg up on most other subjects, as the history of video games is very interesting and covers a wide range of subjects. For crying out loud, you aren't trying to explain Australian Parliamentary Voting Procedures or Superstring Theory. So: 1) Don't waste your head start. Try to convey in your writing the excitement of the genre. If you honestly love video games and their history, that will come out in your writing. This doesn't mean I care about what your favorite video games are or about one time when you had to take quarters out of your brother's coin collection to play Tempest. My sincere advice is to buy _A Year at the Movies, One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey_ by Kevin Murphy. This book has precious little to do with video games and the writing is, at times, a bit more unfocused and coarse than I like. What comes shining through (even to me, someone hasn't been to the theater in years) however, is Mr. Murphy's love of films. It is unmistakable and infectious. 2) Add something special or different; don't rehash. Herman and Kent have *done* the history of video games. It's over. Finished. Not a single book need ever go over this territory again; any one that does will more than likely do it worse. At least Supercade tried to present a visual history, which was different than the text-heavy Phoenix and The Ultimate History of Video Games. High Score! breaks this predictably. It's a VH1 history of video games that skims the surface without ever breaking it. 3) Pick something new and go deep. Just because Herman and Kent have done the best general overviews of the subject doesn't mean there isn't room at the top. This is the most *frustrating* part of High Score! To its credit, the best sections are those that deal with PC game history. This is exactly where it should have concentrated. No one, to my knowledge, has done a complete history of PC gaming. Throw out the weak attempts to cover consoles and make a 300+ page book about PC gaming. That is focused. That is interesting. 4) Check your facts. When writing, you have three choices: a) don't mention it b) mention it and check it and double check it before writing it c) say whatever you want and turn the book into fiction, thereby casting doubt on everything else in the book. High Score! suffers badly in this area. Some of the things it claims as facts are: * Sierra created 2600 games called Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Winnie the Pooh. (p. 136) This "fact" is "not well known." * Lucasfilm games were pirated and put on the internet before 1984. (p. 198) * Rock N Roll Racing was an NES game. (p. 210) * The Neo-Geo cart system was so close to arcade quality that it was actually used in many arcades .... (p. 246). * The Lunar games were on the Genesis. (p. 251) * Super Virgin Girl is a "best-remembered" SNES title. (p. 252) * The 32X was a "hybrid CD enhancement ...." (p. 279) * The Saturn had a built-in modem. (p. 282). * Donkey Kong Country is an N64 game. (p. 291) A brief cheer for mentioning Willy Higinbotham is appropriate here. Damn shame they didn't spell his name correctly. 5) Don't superimpose text over anything unless the text isn't important, and if it isn't, why the heck is it there? High Score! likes to put all sorts of inane backgrounds (which usually are copies of something else on the page) and then put text over it. It's annoying and childish and it detracts from the writing. You do care about the writing, don't you? 6) Captions should be brief, relevant and not a word-for-word description from the text. This next one is the least kind, but probably the most needed. 7) Shut up and get the hell out of the way! Tell the history and leave yourself out of it. If you are Chris Crawford, Trip Hawkins, Sid Meier or Shigeru Miyamoto, I want to know what you think because you have insight that others do not. However, if you are an author who thinks it's interesting to write what your favorite games are (for example, one of Mr. Demaria's all-time favorite games is Archon), you are mistaken. The history of video games is generally important; your strolls down memory lane are certainly not as important as the history you skipped to make room for them. If you want to analyze and back up your analysis, I'm all for it. But frankly, opining on your favorite games is nothing more than personal ego-stroking. A history book is no place for it. For pictures, let the pictures speak for themselves (simple captions are fine). Also, don't put text over them! It's the reverse of 5). If the pictures are important, they should be left alone and if they aren't, why are they there? 8) Don't choose a pretentious title and/or don't promise what you can't deliver. _Phoenix, the Fall and Rise of Videogames_ is a great title. The Ultimate History of Videogames is pretentious, but it (perhaps) may be forgiven because it is a good history and because it was originally called _The First Quarter_, another great title. High Score! isn't a bad title, but the back cover has the following: "The Ultimate History of Electronic Games." This is nearly as accurate as saying that a limp noodle is the ultimate weapon for hand-to-hand combat. ******** There. I feel better. My last comment is that if Mr. Demaria and Mr. Wilson were to throw out all of the non-PC sections of High Score! and instead write "The Ultimate History of PC Games" the average number of BTUs of pleasure in the world would be greater and my blood pressure would be lower.