All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture [Paperback]

I usually don't review other writers' books, but this one was so filled with errors that I was truely dissapointed while reading it. I'll list some of them. I have to say that, although I enjoyed the book, the errors were very distracting.

Page 1: "In 1966, Ralph Baer, a short, bespectacled man with a deep, radio-quality voice and a sharp wit, had been a successful engineer for thirty years."

If this is true, then Baer became a successful engineer in 1936 when he was 14 years old, and two years before he fled Nazi Germany.

Page 20: "The testing ground for Pong, the very first arcade game, was a newly opened bar in the Silicon Valley."

But Pong was not the first arcade game, Computer Space was. And the book says that on the following page.

Page 34: "At first, no one was interested in the home version (of Pong), even when the game was shown to retailers at New York City's famous and chaotic Toy Fair. Part of the Toy Fair debacle was due to Bushnell and his people being wet behind the ears. Their space for Toy Fair wasn't in the building at Broadway and Twenty-third Street where most business was done. It was far away (in the Jacob Javits Convention Center). Few stopped by."

Home Pong came out in 1975. The Jacob Javits Convention Center opened in 1986.

Page 42-43: "Wozniak pocketed $375, but Jobs kept the remainder of the $5,000. When Wozniak discovered what Jobs had been paid, his hacker heart, which had led him to work on Breakout for art's sake, was broken. Wozniak never really trusted Jobs completely again - even though they went on to create Apple together"

Wozniak didn't learn about how Jobs screwed him on Breakout until 1984, years after they started Apple, when he learned about it while reading a book about Atari during a flight to Fort Lauderdale.

Page 45: "Stella, with its eight-bit graphics processor, became the Atari 2600, proudly nicknamed the Video Computer System (VCS)."

It wasn't nicknamed the Video Computer System, it was called that. It didn't start being called the 2600 until 1982, after the 5200 was released.

Page 53: "On December 8, 1982, after horrible earnings were reported to the public, the stock plummeted. .....No eyes were sewn shut, and no one had to lie prostrate on the ground, but New Atari owner Jack Tramiel, formerly president of Commodore International, butchered the staff from two thousand to a few hundred."

Tramiel bought Atari in 1984.

Page 242: "In 1999, much of Sony Online Entertainment's early work was with casual games......Sony's PlayStation 2, which played games and DVDs, had been released that past March to great acclaim......Some of this chapter is informed by my firsthand experience in working with the casual genre while employed at Sony Online Entertainment."

The PS2 was released in Asia in March 2000 and in North America in October 2000.

Disclosure #1: I was an arcade junkie. Even today, I have a full-size Joust upright in my basement. Somehow I missed catching the online gaming bug, but I have enjoyed console games from the Atari 2600 through multiple PlayStations to my current Xbox 360.

Disclosure #2: I already own several books on the video game industry, from colorful coffee table books to inclusive price guides to encyclopedic references. Comparatively, All Your Base Are Belong to Us was disappointing.

Fair or not, this book got off on the wrong foot. The title is an in-joke: a poor translation from a forgettable game (Zero Wing*) not even released in North America. Choosing this broken English as a cultural touchstone seems an odd choice for a book which the publishers hope will appeal to a wide audience. Worst of all, the phrase is not elucidated in the book, and barely mentioned in an easy-to-miss reference between the Table of Contents and Introduction.

The book itself is juvenile and gossipy. It needed an editor. If it had an editor, it needed a better one. The writing level and jocularity might be acceptable for online newsletters (for which the author has much experience), but that same freewheeling familiarity falls short here. The overused idiom "so much so" appears in virtually every chapter, so much so that I found myself keeping track. I gave up counting after fifteen.

Essentially the book is a compilation of reminiscences from interviews. While primary source material is commendable, plenty of other books already cover this territory, and they do it better. Goldberg also fails to reap maximum value from contextual history.

Here are several other choices:

Steven L. Kent's The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon--The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World

Tristan Donovan's Replay: The History of Video Games

Leonard Herman's Phoenix: The Fall & Rise of Videogames

Bill Loguidice's Vintage Games: An Insider Look at the History of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the Most Influential Games of All Time

Even David Ellis' Official Price Guide to Classic Video Games: Console, Arcade, and Handheld Games includes well-written history in addition to the exhaustive pricing guide.

* See link in Comments section below

Jason Kirkfield, Vine Review, February 22, 2011

Harold Goldberg's inappropriately titled All Your Base Are Belong To Us (AYB) - more on that later - is a comprehensive and thoroughly researched look into the people behind the last 50+ years of video games. From moving dots to bits and bytes, AYB provides readers with a fantastic dissertation on game development. With such an ambitious goal, there are bound to be successes and failures that mirror those of the geeky innovators who provided everything from Pong to World of Warcraft. For the most part, however, the book moves along pretty well for what amounts to a biographical compilation of programmers, investors, companies, and games.

While perfect for someone wanting to know the history behind the rise of gaming, and perhaps ideal for someone with dog-eared copies of old Nintendo Power magazines, I found the book a bit lacking for me, an actual geek. That is neither a slight upon this book nor Goldberg's work, merely a note for other game-playing, computer-programming geeks out there. Had a little more technical information been thrown in, I'm sure it would have satisfied my unfed cravings that were, for the most part, satisfied by the linear content. Two other faults, in my opinion, concern the book's title. First and foremost, the Engrish origin of AYB (FYI - Zero Wing) should have been explored, and could have seamlessly fit into any number of Japanese influences in gaming's rise in popularity. Second, as an avid gamer who has owned nearly every console from the Atari 2600 & Colecovision to Xbox and Wii, I felt there was a glaring omission of the fighting genre that swept the world in the late 80s and early 90s. The Street Fighter franchise alone has turned into a multimedia franchise, and several other titles such as Mortal Kombat gobbled up quarters at an unprecedented rate. Otherwise, the highlights covered in this book hit most of the significant steps of game development.

If searching for information about the games that made history is your goal, then: Game Over. On the other hand, if you want to know about the brilliant, daring minds who cultivated a world in which gaming is widely accepted, then it's probably worth the handful of quarters - regardless of a slightly unfocused connection to actual pop culture influence - required to play games in an arcade today.

Jason Elin