Press Start - The History Of Video Gaming

A must-read journey through the history of gaming

As a gamer, Press Start: The History of Video Gaming was an amazing read. I consider myself to have a pretty vast amount of gaming knowledge, but the amount of things I was learning as I worked my way through this book really took that knowledge to another level. What I loved most was that it never felt like I was reading a massive history textbook full of random facts. Instead, the book tells a story. It takes you on a journey through gaming history, starting with the very early days of video games and the first consoles, before following the industry through the generations and into the modern day. The book is broken down into smaller sections covering different consoles, games and periods of gaming, which makes it incredibly easy to pick up and read. Once I started reading, it was genuinely difficult to put down. There are so many little tidbits and facts throughout the book that kept surprising me. Even though I already consider myself someone with a huge amount of gaming knowledge, I was constantly coming across something I'd never heard before. And the best part is that none of these felt like boring or useless facts thrown in just for the sake of filling pages. They were genuinely interesting, fun and easy to read. For me, the early history of gaming was probably the most fascinating part. Reading about the origins of games like Pong, Pac-Man, Tetris and Donkey Kong, along with the story of Jumpman, and seeing how consoles eventually became something people could simply have sitting in their own homes, really showed just how much the industry changed the world around it. And that's what makes this book so interesting. It's not simply about games. It's about how gaming changed. There is something here for every type of gamer, whether you're a casual player who picks up a controller every now and again or someone who has spent most of their life playing games. I genuinely think every person who has ever held a gaming controller can find something in these pages that they can connect with. Even if you're a massive gamer who thinks you know almost everything there is to know about the industry, I would still recommend picking this up. There will be something here that surprises you. What I particularly loved is how the book connects all these individual moments together. You're not just jumping from Pong to Pac-Man to Mario to PlayStation and so on. You're watching an industry evolve, technology develop and developers continually find new ways to change what video games can actually be. The book's contents are deliberately organised around these major eras and turning points, from the Pong and cartridge eras through Nintendo, PlayStation, the connected age, the age of movement and into modern gaming. By the time you reach the end, it feels like you've travelled through decades of gaming rather than simply finished reading a book. And honestly, I hope that in 30 years' time there's another version of this with another 100 pages for me to read. Because if Press Start proves anything, it's that the gaming industry is never going to stop evolving, flipping the script and changing what we think is possible. We have no idea what gaming is going to look like in another 30 years. And that's probably the most exciting thing of all.