This book focuses on a little known and hardly discussed period from the history of video games: the ends of the 70's, and more specifically the 1976-1980 years of the home consoles. The books explains how, after Ralph Baer's pioneer invention of the Magnavox Odyssey, and the success of Pong in arcades, home video games takes over TV sets around the world thanks to... General Instrument. Indeed, the introduction of a new integrated chip, copying Pong and sold for a few dollars only, allowed many
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Keywords : pong, globalization, economic history, home console, 70's, japan, france, usa
Almost unknown, BOA is a nice little game for MS-DOS created in 1989 by Dean Ballard for Microsoft. It's an arcade game similar to Snake, besides the fact that you are playing a rat trying to avoid being eaten by the snake! The oddest thing about this game lies in its distribution model: it was solely available through the driver disk of a mouse created by Microsoft, the "Contour Mouse", also known as "Dove Bar." Due to the technological limitations of the era,
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Keywords : microsoft boa, history, mouse, pix'n love
Over 300 full-color pages, this book focuses on one particular aspect of video games: music. Seven thematic chapters details the impact of the technological evolution on video game music, the similarities and differences between game music and movie music, the various ways music is actually used in video games, the wave of rhythm games, and the rise of rearranged OST and concerts. Each chapter is concluded with a short biography of the main compositors cited as examples, and the last book chapte
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Keywords : music, j-rpg, concert, rearranged album, compositor, video game, history, analysis
This book presents 100 music albums based on famous video games original soundtracks. The author reviews each album over two pages, featuring beautiful illustrations. The author successfully shares his passion for video game music through this book. The text is easy to read and full of interesting information. My only complaint lies in the author's choice to focus on game OST published in separate CDs, which tends to heavily bend his OST selection towards Japanese console games, and J-RPG in par
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Keywords : music, video game, album
The first part of a non-official biography of Shigeru Miyamoto, famous creator of Mario and Zelda. William Audureau, a keen expert of his works, invites us to a journey through his life, from his childhood to the release of the first Zelda episode in 1986. In the absence of a direct involvement from Miyamoto in the book, the author relies on more than 150 of his interviews published in press, alongside with a trip to Japan. Very easy and pleasant to read, this book manages to go beyond "ins
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Keywords : biography, shigeru miyamoto, nintendo, mario, zelda
This bible focuses on the Game Boy portable console from Nintendo, in its "classic" version (black and white games) . The first part of the book tells a detailed history of this console with a lot of pictures, and also presents the various Game Boy models: the original one, the "colored" versions, the Game Boy Light, and a lot of limited editions. The second and main part of the book is dedicated to a list of every "black and white" game cartridge ever rele
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Keywords : bible, history, encyclopedia, game boy, nintendo
The biography of Eric Chahi, a famous french creator behind the international hit Another World / Out of this World (1991). Full of pictures, this book details the main events of his career. As he is a talented but shy creator, this book doesn't detail his private life, only the videogames he created. He began when he was still at high-school, by creating games for Oric-1 and Amstrad CPC, such as Le Pacte (1986), a game that pushed him to abandon his studies at the age of 19 to pursue a full tim
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Keywords : biography, eric chahi, out of this world, another world, heart of darkness, from dust
This book details the captivating story of the scandalous game series "Grand Theft Auto". Over 300 pages, the author tells us about the most epic moments of this saga: humble beginnings as a small arcade game made in Scotland by DMA Design; hiring Max Clifford to use media scandal as a marketing campaign; the hijacking of the series leadership by the Houser brothers and their studio Rockstar during the creation of GTA III; the first legal actions against the game series and the rise of
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Keywords : grand theft auto, history, dma design, rockstar, jack thompson, david jones, sam houser, esrb