By J. C. Herz

In a scant fifteen years, video and laptop video games have grown right into a $6-billion-a-year international undefined, sucking up ever-increasing quantities of relaxation time and disposable source of revenue. In arcades, residing rooms, scholar dorms, and (admit it) places of work from Ohio to Osaka, games became a fixture in people's lives, marking a tectonic shift within the leisure landscape.

Now, as Hollywood and Silicon Valley rush to promote us on-line interactive multimedia every thing, J. C. Herz brings us the 1st renowned historical past and critique of the video-game phenomenon. From the chilly battle laptop programmers who invented the 1st video games (when they need to were operating) to the studios the place the networked 3D topic parks of the longer term are created, Herz brings to existence the key heritage of house Invaders, Pac guy, large Mario, Myst, Doom, and different celebrated video games. She explains why other kinds of video games have taken carry (and what they are saying concerning the those who play them) and what we will be able to count on from a iteration that has logged hundreds of thousands of hours vanquishing electronic demons.

Written with 64-bit strength and packed with Herz's sharp-edged insights and asides, Joystick state is an interesting popular culture odyssey that is must-reading for media junkies, pop historians, and an individual who pines for his or her previous Atari

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Additional info for Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds

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Video killed the radio star, the old song goes. Well, Skee-Ball killed the video arcade. But surely the cavelike game room of high school remem brance has survived the onslaught of claw machines and Skee- Ball. No. At Memorial City, my dilapidated hometown mall, the teenage stoners in Poison T-shirts and Mexican urban cowboys in acid-washed jeans have given way to a herd of baby boomers en famille lined up outside the multiplex. The video arcade of yesteryear has vanished, long since replaced by a 46,000square-foot family entertainment center called Exhilarama, conveniently located next to the food court.

We were getting ready to take all these Skee-Balls out when we realized that they make money, and they're very steady, as opposed to a videogame, which you buy, and the sales curve starts out high and then trickles down. Skee-Balls were just a nice steady in vestment. Not only that, but women liked them. It was some thing they could understand. It was a skill game. Parents were intimidated by the technology in the seventies. This was some thing they could do with smaller children. And an operator can buy a Skee-Ball and it remains popular for ten years.

VF2 transcended the gore of Mortal Kombat with the brutal ballet of m 5 Nintendo dominates the holiday season with SNES and Donkey Kong Country 2, the swan song of 16-bit videogames. Hong Kong cinema. The "Next Generation" Era Sony Playstation. Sega Saturn. iqqE. E3 Nintendo 64. JOYSTICK NATION II. PHYLOGENY The early 1980s were the Cambrian Age of videogames, when new species proliferated like so many marine algae. By the mid dle of the decade, distinct genres had evolved from archetypes like Adteroidd, Space Invaderd, and Middile Command into a whole menagerie of side-scrollers, maze games, driving games, and martial arts contests.

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