Country: USA
Genre: Memoir/History
Pages: 306
Many males of my generation were born with a Nintendo controller in their hands. It means that for us, video games is a part of our culture and not some surprising revolution that would be, let's say..social networking*. They are a part of us. I often tell people that Super Mario taught me from SUPER MARIO BROS. to SUPER MARIO WORLD,as much things as I've been taught in two complete twenty-one years tenure in school. Harold Goldberg is slightly older than I am and understands how video games became a part of pop culture and a part of our lives. So in ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US, he retraces in a very narrative and entertaining fashion, the steps video games took into basically create a new kind of people - gamers. I've had this love/hate relationship with gaming since I have worked as a gamer tester myself and gained insight on how the industry works, so I was very intrigued to see how Goldberg tackled his subject. There were so many ways this could go wrong.
Amazingly enough, Goldberg starts with the story behind TENNIS FOR TWO, which is to me the very beginning of video games history (I know this is disputed, but really this is just nerds splitting hairs in four). Like many art forms**, video games were born from a creative use of a technological tool. A few engineers were bored with what they could offer at a museum and boom, video games were created. While Golberg goes through Pong! and the whole Magnavox Odyssey/Nolan Bushnell adventures, he really doesn't bother turning his book into an exhaustive history after those chapters and it works very well. He highlights some interesting chapters in the history of the medium, but doesn't really bother tying them up together. Which is cool because it gives a very anecdotal flavor to his book. For example, did you know that Roberta Williams, of the KING'S QUEST-PHANTASMAGORIA legacy was one of the Sierra On-Line owners (the developer-publisher of those games) No wonder why there were those huge A ROBERTA WILLIAMS GAME stickers on them and I thought she sucked as a writer. She paid for for those goddamn stickers.
I'm not really in love with the tone Goldberg is using, because he's trying to be very respectful to his subjects and yet his subjects are not always respectable people. Powerful, sure (or once-powerful), but there has been a lot of assholes in that business (and there's still are) that try to sell you gold-wrapped turds for 59,99$. There's maybe five pages dedicated to the movie tie-in games (which are a plague) but nothing controversial or ballsy. Video games are in need of that kind of journalism and Goldberg didn't make the most out of his platform for that. I would have loved to have a section dedicated to Activision for example and their rise to power.*** But he does compensate with a great portrait of the infamous Houser brothers (from Rockstar Games, arguably the best video game developer out there), where I learned some pretty funny insight on the hot coffee**** debacle.
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US is a safe book made to embrace the evolution of gaming, rather than to raise some questions. It's written with some kind of passionate admiration that gets in the way sometimes. Makes Goldberg's book seem tame by moments, because he has the same approach to every developer and to every chapter of his tome. I would have loved to see more of his personality on the page. It's a very narrative book anyway so I would have liked to see what he loves, what he hates and what annoys him, but all we have is this very flat admiration. It's not a bad book, but it could have been a lot livelier if he would have changed his approach a little bit (emphasized the gamer-memoir style). But if you're looking to learn things about the history of games, this is great. Harold Goldberg covers the important chapter and talks to the relevant people. Just don't expect the passion of a Chuck Klosterman book.
*Which will totally be a part of our kids culture
** This is debatable that video games are art forms in themselves, but for the sake of the review, let's just pretend they are.
*** He makes a few allusions to ego problems and power trips in Electronic Arts, but it's not really in depth.
**** There was a modification to the PC code of GRAND THEFT AUTO: SAN ANDREAS that let you have wild and rabid polygon sex with CJ's girlfriends.