The Comic Book Story of Video Games: The Incredible History of the Electronic Gaming Revolution

by Jonathan Hennessey, Jack McGowan (Illustrator)

Overview

A complete, illustrated history of video games--highlighting the machines, games, and people who have made gaming a worldwide, billion-dollar industry/artform--told in a graphic novel format.

Author Jonathan Hennessey and illustrator Jack McGowan present the first full-color, chronological origin story for this hugely successful, omnipresent artform and business. Hennessey provides readers with everything they need to know about video games--from their early beginnings during World War II to the emergence of arcade games in the 1970s to the rise of Nintendo to today's app-based games like Angry Birds and Pokemon Go. Hennessey and McGowan also analyze the evolution of gaming as an artform and its impact on society. Each chapter features spotlights on major players in the development of games and gaming that contains everything that gamers and non-gamers alike need to understand and appreciate this incredible phenomenon.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780399578915
Publisher:	Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date:	10/03/2017
Series:	Comic Book Story of
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	86 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

JONATHAN HENNESSEY is the author of three previous nonfiction graphic novels, The U.S. Constitution, The Gettysburg Address, and The Comic Book Story of Beer, as well as the history-based time travel series Epochalypse. Based in Los Angeles, he works in film and television. After receiving a BFA in illustration from Syracuse University, JACK MCGOWAN worked in-house for the Buffalo design firm Wynne Creative Group. Now freelance, McGowan focuses on drawing pictures, collaborative projects, and bringing a human story back into marketing and branding.

Editorial Reviews

"For anybody wondering how we went from Pong to Pokémon Go in just a few decades, this history is a great starting point." —Publishers Weekly

“A highly entertaining book that will resonate with gamers and nongamers alike. Grades 9 and up.”—School Library Journal
 
“Full of interesting information and insight.”—Kirkus

"[A] thorough, entertainingly illustrated account of an often overlooked corner of pop-culture history."
—Peter Blenski, Booklist

“The idea of telling the history of video games in a graphic novel is a radically inventive idea, and Jonathan Hennessey and his team have done an amazing job of it. It is chock full of fascinating stories about the people who laid the foundation for the technologies we take for granted today. I wish my history textbooks from high school had been this cool. I highly recommend this book!” —Warren Davis, designer/programmer of Q*Bert

“The Comic Book Story of Video Games is fun, smart, and informative, all at the same time. Hennessey manages to be scholarly, too, as he blends forty years of sources, putting mysteries in context and settling controversies. The illustrations by Jack McGowan are terrific and appear lively enough to spring from the page.” —Dona Bailey, Atari programmer of Centipede

From the Publisher

2017-07-03
The popular progression of video games as rendered in graphic narrative.The subject would seem to be a natural for the comic-book treatment, which can show as well as tell, but the contextual expanse here and the narrative tone result in a work that is less breezy and playful than one might anticipate. Hennessey (The Comic Book Story of Beer: The World's Favorite Beverage from 7000 B.C. to Today's Craft Brewing Revolution, 2015, etc.) and McGowan introduce readers to Japanese history and culture, which, along with World War II (and its emerging technology), the Cold War, the space race, science fiction, and the emergence of the home computer and the internet, they view as essential to their story. The result is a very ambitious history, more than most in this format, which doesn't even reach Pong until it is almost halfway through and in which Nintendo doesn't emerge until nearly the end. Hennessey's previous work includes graphic treatments of The United States Constitution (2008), The Gettysburg Address (2013), and Alexander Hamilton (2017), and his method includes spotlight chapters on major figures in the development of gaming, most unknown outside the video game industry. The author and illustrator show how video games developed from their pre-computer incarnations through their popularity in arcades through advancements in special effects and portability. They explain how hackers pushed the technology of gaming forward, how devices developed for war craft found their way into game craft, and how rivalries among and within corporations have turned competitively vicious. The book ends with speculation about how virtual reality technology and corporate data collection might continue to inform not only the world of gaming, but the world at large. Full of interesting information and insight, but nongamers may bog down in the details.

Kirkus Reviews