Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)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
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