Amazon.com recommends lots of stuff. Some of it I am not at all interested in. Some of it I can’t believed they recommended at all. And some of it is right on the money. Brian Eddy’s Classic Video Games: The Golden Age 1971-1984 is one of those.
Amazon said, “You might like this,” and I said, “Yeah, I might.” So I downloaded the preview. Pretty soon I downloaded the whole book. It is very much like my Arcadian n that it gives a brief overview of the arcade games of this era. One exception is that Eddy gives more a sense of history than what I did/could. Another is that he has pictures. On my tablet Kindle app, those pictures look great.
Some have criticized the book as being short in length and on details, but in my opinion, Eddy gives me just what I’m looking for: portable nostalgia, the opportunity to open my tablet anytime I’m missing the neon lights and digitized sounds of the game of my youth and relived them for a moment. In reality, there is no way you can encapsulate the beauty and meaning of a golden age video game in a book. But you can evoke the feel. You can point to it. You can echo it. That’s what I wanted to do in Arcadian. I don’t know Eddy, and I don’t know if that’s what he wanted to do in Classic Video Games, but he did, and I thank him for it. I hope another volume is coming!
Pick up Classic Video Games: The Golden Age 1971-1984 here. It’s a little pricier than Arcadian, but it has pictures and there is a hard copy.
