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Review: Vintage Games by Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton


Vintage Games: An Insider Look at the History of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the Most Influential Games of All Time
Retro Rogue reviews a new scholarly offering by the people behind Armchair Arcade
- by Marty "Retro Rogue" Goldberg

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Lets face it - books that simply repeat facts, figures, and stories are boring. Unfortunately, books like that pervade the technological history book market. How many times can you read Pac-Man was released in 1980 and designed by Iwatani, along with several different stories of a pizza being involved? Truly engaging books have had the author put forth a personal viewpoint or hypothesis, and proceed to interpret the presentation of the material around it. It gives freshness to the material, and allows the reader the chance to experience a unique and entertaining perspective on the subject. Fortunately for all of us, Vintage Games is one of the latter a very engaging, entertaining, and informative read.

Written by Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton of Armchair Arcade fame, their book is meant to engage the readers in the process of identifying what makes a video or computer game notable and influential. In the tangled web of games and genres influencing each other, what makes a game stand out - even over the other games with similar elements that came before and after it?

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The book leads with Alone In The
Dark
and it's influence on the
horror and adventure related genres.

Well, as they state in their forward, The books main focus is to provide a concise yet detailed overview of an influential game, its antecedents, and its predecessors. This means that the games Loguidice and Barton have chosen represent either an extremely important stepping stone, or a culmination a crescendo of all the elements of a genre vs. game mechanics vs. innovations if you will. In a road map of sorts theyre careful to present the games that came before and paved the way for the main focus of each chapter, the influential game itself. But they in no way feel obligated to present every single game that came before or, as they also mention, list a game simply because it was successful or contained a first.

So what do they do in each chapter? Well look at their chapter on certainly one of the most influential games of all time Space Invaders. After briefly introducing the game and proceeding to give the obligatory summary of why it was successful and the many clones it produced, they proceed in to the meat of the chapter. Loguidice and Barton take us on a journey encompassing two full pages of discussion on Japanese culture and gaming in an effort to also broach the subject of why the Japanese are so successful as game designers and how Japanese pop-culture fits in to the equation. They then proceed to place its appearance and eventual success at the time in relation to American pop-culture, such as the appearance of Star Wars and how the sound of the aliens advancing played in to the very fears generated by the shark in the movie Jaws.

The authors then proceed to identify what the important aspects of the game were itself what innovations it introduced, or important game play and graphical elements it included. Of course, the chapter then continues to list some later very popular games that were influenced by it. Loguidice and Barton are not content to simply list clones, but rather focus on how Space Invader style games also produced innovations in their own right in their attempts to expand on the basic formula including introducing several different genres hinted at by Space Invaders. This then transitions in to a discussion of what constitutes the generic shooter vs. space invaders style" genre (or for that matter, other similar genres), because as they suggest Its tempting to try to lump all games that involve spaceship combat under the shooter designation. Thats an important distinction, because all too often when pop-culture (often the lowest common denominator) takes over and substitutes for accuracy, lines of distinction are blurred and we have generations of fans regurgitating said blurriness as fact. Loguidice and Barton not only explain why the need for these distinctions, but give compelling arguments as to the importance of their approach in doing so.

About the only criticism I could find to level on the book was in the book's forward and related online bonus chapter for Spacewar!, and this is in relation to their working definition of video game vs. simply a computer game while discussing Spacewar!, Tennis for Two and OXO (also known as Noughts and Crosses). With all the importance to description and distinction laid across the rest of their work, I feel this is an important distinction to make. The description of any game with an interactive display as a video game is a modern pop-culture definition wreaking havoc on technical accuracy. A perfect example of a term taking on pop-culture definitions over time, and then the public/media/etc. attempting to apply the more generalized pop-culture term back in to a technical definition in hindsight - not realizing that the term arose from very specific technological definitions in the first place.

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Some of the beautiful in-game screen
shots used to illustrate the evolution
of fighting games towards the important
Street Fighter II. (photo courtesy of Bill
and Christina Loguidice)

The differentiation for the term "video game" actually has to do with the display i.e. the presence and manipulation of a video signal and raster display, which is also why the early video games were referred to as "tv games". It had nothing to do with the simple presence of a format for visual representation via computer control, as in general computer games which actually predated video in the use of gaming. I.E., "video games" technology wise is a subset of "computer games", whose term and category refers to the display and visual interaction method with said player. Spacewar! used a vector monitor - which has no video signal present - as did Tennis for Two (via an oscilloscope). OXO also used a crude vector display CRT that was meant to display dots representing memory locations, which was a feature hacked to display a representation of a tic-tac-toe board. Certainly all three are representative of computer games, the very first technology and platform. However, the word "video" in the term "video game" is there for a reason. Unfortunately, thanks to a later blurring of lines in the media "video game" and "computer game" as terms (instead of technology) became synonymous, as mentioned earlier - when the term "video game" ceased to be purely a technical term and in pop culture evolved to be a catch all phrase. Thats why I feel its important to differentiate between the modern broad pop-culture influenced term, vs. the accurate technical description which is something the authors do well everywhere else in the book.

This book is a smooth and entertaining read, while also satisfying the academic qualifications of any serious book on the subject. You'll definitely come away feeling you learned something, without hitting the mind numbing brick wall of boredom caused by the dry approach taken by other authors in related subjects. A great deal of care and attention to the flow and presentation of information in each chapter was taken, and it leads to a rewarding reading experience. You get the full sense of why each game was picked, and what makes it stands out in the plethora of games both before and after. Highly recommended!



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