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The Media Snatcher
An in-depth exploration of a neglected video game platform of the 1990s and a reflection on the way we construct the cultural history of video games. In The Media Snatcher, Carl Therrien offers an in-depth exploration of NEC's PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16, a little-studied video game platform released in the late 1980s. The PC Engine was designed to bring technological expandability to the world of game consoles; The Media Snatcher's subtitle evokes some of the expansions and the numerous rebranded versions of the system released by NEC, including the first CD-ROM add-on in video game history. The platform makers hoped that expandability would allow its console to remain at the cutting edge and e...
Before the Crash
Contributors examine the early days of video game history before the industry crash of 1983 that ended the medium’s golden age. Following the first appearance of arcade video games in 1971 and home video game systems in 1972, the commercial video game market was exuberant with fast-paced innovation and profit. New games, gaming systems, and technologies flooded into the market until around 1983, when sales of home game systems dropped, thousands of arcades closed, and major video game makers suffered steep losses or left the market altogether. In Before the Crash: Early Video Game History, editor Mark J. P. Wolf assembles essays that examine the fleeting golden age of video games, an era s...
Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware
How the Super Nintendo Entertainment System embodied Nintendo’s s resistance to innovation and took the company from industry leadership to the margins of videogaming. This is a book about the Super Nintendo Entertainment System that is not celebratory or self-congratulatory. Most other accounts declare the Super NES the undisputed victor of the “16-bit console wars” of 1989–1995. In this book, Dominic Arsenault reminds us that although the SNES was a strong platform filled with high-quality games, it was also the product of a short-sighted corporate vision focused on maintaining Nintendo’s market share and business model. This led the firm to fall from a dominant position during i...
The Game Console
The Game Console is a tour through the evolution of video game hardware, with gorgeous full-color photos of 86 consoles. You’ll start your journey with legendary consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey, Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, and the Commodore 64. The visual nostalgia trip continues with systems from the 1990s and 2000s, and ends on modern consoles like the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Wii U. Throughout the book, you’ll also discover many consoles you never knew existed, and even find a rare peek at the hardware inside several of history’s most iconic video game systems.
Practical Archaeogaming
As a sequel to Archaeogaming: an Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games, the author focuses on the practical and applied side of the discipline, collecting recent digital fieldwork together in one place for the first time to share new methods in treating interactive digital built environments as sites for archaeological investigation. Fully executed examples of practical and applied archaeogaming include the necessity of a rapid archaeology of digital built environments, the creation of a Harris matrix for software stratigraphy, the ethnographic work behind a human civilization trapped in an unstable digital landscape, how to conduct photogrammetry and GIS mapping in procedurally generated space, and how to transform digital artifacts into printed three-dimensional objects. Additionally, the results of the 2014 Atari excavation in Alamogordo, New Mexico are summarized for the first time.
Mainstreaming and Game Journalism
Why games are still niche and not mainstream, and how journalism can help them gain cultural credibility. Mainstreaming and Game Journalism addresses both the history and current practice of game journalism, along with the roles writers and industry play in conveying that the medium is a “mainstream” form of entertainment. Through interviews with reporters, David B. Nieborg and Maxwell Foxman retrace how the game industry and journalists started a subcultural spiral in the 1980s that continues to this day. Digital play became increasingly exclusionary by appealing to niche audiences, relying on hardcore fans and favoring the male gamer stereotype. At the same time, this culture pushed jo...
Seeing Red
The curious history, technology, and technocultural context of Nintendo’s short-lived stereoscopic gaming console, the Virtual Boy. With glowing red stereoscopic 3D graphics, the Virtual Boy cast a prophetic hue: Shortly after its release in 1995, Nintendo's balance sheet for the product was "in the red" as well. Of all the innovative long shots the game industry has witnessed over the years, perhaps the most infamous and least understood was the Virtual Boy. Why the Virtual Boy failed, and where it succeeded, are questions that video game experts José Zagal and Benj Edwards explore in Seeing Red, but even more interesting to the authors is what the platform actually was: what it promised...
Who Are You?
The Game Boy Advance platform as computational system and cultural artifact, from its 2001 release through hacks, mods, emulations, homebrew afterlives. In 2002, Nintendo of America launched an international marketing campaign for the Game Boy Advance that revolved around the slogan “Who Are You?”—asking potential buyers which Nintendo character, game, or even device they identified with and attempting to sell a new product by exploiting players' nostalgic connections to earlier ones. Today, nearly two decades after its release, and despite the development of newer and more powerful systems, Nintendo's Game Boy Advance lives on, through a community that continues to hack, modify, emula...
Rockstar Games and American History
For two decades, Rockstar Games have been making games that interrogate and represent the idea of America, past and present. Commercially successful, fan-beloved, and a frequent source of media attention, Rockstar’s franchises are positioned as not only game-changing, ground-breaking interventions in the games industry, but also as critical, cultural histories on America and its excesses. But what does Rockstar’s version of American history look like, and how is it communicated through critically acclaimed titles like Red Dead Redemption (2010) and L.A. Noire (2011)? By combining analysis of Rockstar’s games and a range of official communications and promotional materials, this book of...
Horror Video Games
In this in-depth critical and theoretical analysis of the horror genre in video games, 14 essays explore the cultural underpinnings of horror's allure for gamers and the evolution of "survival" themes. The techniques and story effects of specific games such as Resident Evil, Call of Cthulhu, and Silent Hill are examined individually.
