"Emag Tresni"
Written: Jul 21 '01
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Well-balanced view of video game history, with plenty of quotes, written in an approachable style.
Cons: An enormous amount of proofreading mistakes and a lack of detail in the final chapters.
The Bottom Line: The First Quarter is an enjoyable, if incomplete, retelling of the history of video games. It may be a good idea, though, to wait for a more polished second edition.
|
|
|
| arada392's Full Review: Steven L. Kent - The First Quarter: A 25-Year Hist... |
Warning! Long review ahead!
Deep into The First Quarter, Steven Kent presents us with a sublime moment in the creation of a video game. Curiously tucked away in a footnote, it happens almost at the end of the book, at about the same time he describes the launch of the Sony PlayStation. He tells the story of how one of the last great games of Nintendo’s SNES, Yoshi’s Island, was rejected at first by Nintendo’s own marketing department. Their reason for doing so was that the game did not have graphics similar to the "waxy" computer-rendered ones of Donkey Kong Country.
Shigeru Miyamoto, the producer behind Yoshi’s Island, was offended by this response, but instead of changing the graphics to a visual style he did not like, he intensified the artistic style of the game to give it a more hand-drawn look. When he presented this version of the game to the marketing department, they accepted it. "Everybody else was saying that they wanted better hardware and more beautiful graphics instead of this art," Miyamoto explains.
What is most memorable about this segment, though, is what Miyamoto says next:
Even while I was working on the Super Mario World, I was thinking that the next hero should be Yoshi. Other people have created the games based upon Yoshi… Yoshi’s World Hunters, [what Yoshi’s Safari was called in Japan] Yoshi’s Eggs, [Mario & Yoshi] Yoshi’s Cookie, and so forth –games that I don’t really like. So I decided that I should make an authentic Yoshi game.
It is remarkable how Kent displays in what is supposed to be just an appendage to the main text the passion that video game makers have towards their creations and their desire to create something truly special. It is unfortunate, however, to see that Kent almost spoils the magic that moments like these possess by a total lack of detail of presentation and hurried work in the end parts.
However, a book like The First Quarter would have never arrived in this form if it were not for the true dearth of books about the video game industry. While thousands of books have been written about aspects of the computer industry, very few authors have had the impetus –or perhaps courage– to write about video games. Admittedly, the computer industry is much bigger and is taken more seriously than video games, which are just brushed off as "toys"; but you would expect at least ten books on the subject instead of the six or so that have been published. So every time a new book on video games appears, the video game media treats it as a man stranded in the desert treats an oasis.
The First Quarter is perhaps the most ambitious book about the subject to date: It bills itself as a "a 25 year history of videogames," and tries to retell every event in this brief time period, from Steven Russell and Spacewar to ultimately the launch of the Sony PlayStation 2. The author, Steven Kent, is no stranger to this subject, and readers of the magazine Next-Gen might recognize him as the person responsible for the column "Retrogaming," which also deals with the same subject.
Cynics might suggest that the book is only a compilation of his published columns, but a cursory comparison of the two reveals that Kent is, if anything, an honest writer. He takes advantage of the longer nature of the book format to explain in much more detail each and almost every event. It does this using plenty of quotes and a rather dry, somewhat simple, but accessible, style of writing. Unlike David Sheff’s seminal Game Over, though, Kent is not quite as adept at explaining some of the more complicated terms used in the business. This means that you sometimes read about highly technical aspects of technology, especially hardware, involving "daughterboards" without any sort of explanatory note.
Nevertheless, the book is successful at describing the events in the book in a clear and enjoyable manner. In fact, Kent manages to blend the mechanical, textbook-like style of Phoenix with the more lyrical, "storyteller" prose of Game Over so that, even while focusing on the "facts" of what he is presenting, the book succeeds in relating, like a museum, an interesting narrative of every person involved as well.
With Kent as your tour guide, you are presented to a multitude of fascinating material about the industry. He succeeds in explaining the beginnings of the industry in pinball machines, recounting the birth of the most powerful companies in the business, and even detailing the legal battles that have had a significant impact upon it. Kent creates a thorough overview of how the industry behaves, illustrating well the successes and failures of the companies and the people involved –not only programmers and designers, but even the executives as well.
The best and most entertaining parts of the book come when the people involved in the history relate their experiences. It is truly fascinating to read what prominent people like Nolan Bushnell, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Trip Hawkins and more obscure characters, like Steven Russell, Al Alcorn, and Ed Logg have to say about some of the decisions that revolutionized the industry throughout its short history. A favorite passage of mine involves a bittersweet moment when Ralph Baer, whom Kent posits as being one of the "forgotten fathers of the industry," and Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, who is generally perceived as the "father of the industry," meet at a press show:
Years later, Baer would run into Nolan Bushnell and Gene Lipkin, Atari director of marketing, on the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show. According to Baer, Bushnell introduced him as "the father of video games." Baer smiled and said, "I wish you would have said that to the press."
However, Kent’s museum is, frustratingly, slipshod and incomplete. Having been released just after the launch of the PlayStation 2, the book shows signs of being rushed to print. I do not expect typeset perfection in every book I read, but the enormous amount of proofreading mistakes in The First Quarter become too many to ignore: there is one in virtually every two or three pages. Most of them are minor, mostly resulting in slightly odd sentences, repeating the explanation of a certain fact too many times, or annoying carelessly introduced sections; but other errors are truly embarrassing to read. At one point, for instance, Kent refers to David Rosen, the founder of Sega, as the "founder of Nintendo of America."
These mistakes would be easier to forgive if it were not for the biggest flaw in the book: its incompleteness. Although Sheff’s goal in Game Over was to focus on the situation in the United States, I was surprised at the amount of description of the Japanese market and its various prominent companies. The First Quarter, unfortunately, is focused squarely on the United States. I can understand Kent’s reason for doing this; as the "birthplace" of video games, the United States has seen some of the most fascinating stories in the industry, and the book observes this well.
Yet, if a book wishes to call itself "a 25-year history of videogames," then it must make an added effort to include everything in that span –something that does not happen in this book. Kent only looks at Japan on a somewhat superficial level, and, except for an intriguing subplot about the development of Rare, he ignores Europe almost completely.
This approach skews the narrative in a misleading way. For example, Kent writes, "Square Soft’s final title for the Super NES was [Super] Mario RPG, a game that applied Square Soft’s signature in-depth stories and turn-based combat and applied it to the [Nintendo] Mario universe." This may be true and exhibits a certain amount of irony –but only from the point of view of the West. In truth, Squaresoft’s last game for a Nintendo console was Treasure Hunter G, a quiet RPG –released only in Japan– that employed a curious mix of strategy and traditional role-playing.
This is not the only problem with the book. In fact, this bias towards the U.S. can be attributed to a bigger problem overall. As much as The First Quarter tries to be a complete account, it fails in the end: While Kent describes the happenings in the late seventies and early eighties in fine detail –with Atari, Coleco, and Commodore as the companies at the helm of the industry– the amount of detail spent on the narrative slowly begins fading away as the book goes on.
There is a small section dividing the book in the middle that contains photographs of a lot of the major people that have influenced the history of video games, like Ed Rotberg, Ray Kassar, and Ken Kutaragi. This is a nice touch on its own, and it is delightful to see many of the faces of whom you only read about in the book. On a higher level, this division is symbolic of the time between the crash of the industry and its revival thanks to the Nintendo Entertainment System; but, ironically, it also indicates the moment when the book starts losing its grip on the narrative. Kent covers the era of the NES well, but his description lacks the detail that was shown in earlier chapters. The later chapters show the book going on a unmistakable downwards spiral: the last ten years, roughly, are covered in the final 110 out of a total 462 pages.
Sadly, Kent seems more eager to retell the events and consequences of the "Lieberman hearings" than to concentrate his full efforts into describing the 16-bit generation. The situation gets even worse, as the last five years in the history of the market are very hurriedly depicted and sometimes ignored. Kent devotes only five pages to the emerging PC market. There is no mention of most influential games of this period, like Metal Gear Solid, Tomb Raider, or The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time; and the biggest events (the rise of Sony as the market leader and the struggles of Sega and the Nintendo 64) are reported in a very slapdash manner. By the end of the book, Kent is only happy with the launches of Sega’s Dreamcast and the PlayStation 2.
Yet this thoughtless neglect in the end is frustrating because Kent has made it obvious in the first half of the book that he has a true understanding of the industry; we realize that The First Quarter is a work in progress. Fortunately, there are some fragments of the book that hint at the greatness that the book can attain in the future. For example, Kent may write that "[a] number of insignificant consoles came during the 16-bit era," but this fails to explain why he reserves twice as many pages to the "insignificant" Sega 32X system as he devotes to the massive phenomenon of the Pokémon games. When the book promises developments on the Super Game Boy or Sony’s purchase of Psygnosis, you expect a detailed explanation of their consequences; it is disappointing to realize that Kent never fulfills these promises.
Kent writes that he planned to finish this book with the launch of the Sega Saturn and the PlayStation, but various delays kept its release until 2000. The book shows obvious signs, like the unsatisfactory ending, that during the delays, Kent wisely decided to focus on the early history of the industry and just sketched the narrative for the five years that passed meanwhile.
Ultimately, the second edition of the book promises to be a much more complete attempt at the history of videogames. Hopefully he will not be tempted to cover more recent ground-breaking events, like Sega’s decision to become a software company, but instead do what the book needs most: a thorough revision. If what Sheff has stated in his many interviews is true, though, this means a lot of work: Sheff said that it took two years of intense work just to write about fifteen years of the history of a particular video game company. It would not surprise me to find that a future revision might feature the same subtitle, "a 25-year history of videogames."
Nevertheless, with all the research he did at his disposal, (over 500 interviews, according to Kent) he might just fulfill that potential. In its current form, the book is a mixed bag. As an account of the early days of the video game industry, few books can match it: it is highly enjoyable and even compelling at times. It is much more difficult, though, to recommend the flawed second half, and the lack of an index hurts its chances to be used as a reference book. In the end, whatever the blurbs and the strong recommendations by the media might suggest, The First Quarter falls short of being "essential reading" for anyone interested in the more recent history of the industry –even for video game players.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
arada392
|
|
Member: David Teixeira
Location: Dunedin, Otago
Reviews written: 32
Trusted by: 24 members
About Me:
What do you think of me, that I am a chiaus?
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.