LudoScience

History of videogames (encyclopedia)

Author(s) : Rémi Lopez
Editor : Editions Pix'n Love
Publication date : 04-17-2014
Language : french

This book presents 100 music albums based on famous video games original soundtracks. The author reviews each album over two pages, featuring beautiful illustrations. The author successfully shares his passion for video game music through this book. The text is easy to read and full of interesting information. My only complaint lies in the author's choice to focus on game OST published in separate CDs, which tends to heavily bend his OST selection towards Japanese console games, and J-RPG in particular. Nevertheless, the author has included a couple of games coming from other countries and genres (Hotline Miami, God of War III, Turrican, Halo, etc.), even if most of the book presents classical games music: Zelda, Final Fantasy, Mario, Kingdom Hearts, Jet Set Radio, PaRappa the Rapper, Silent Hill, XenoSaga, Chrono Cross, Street of Rage II, etc. A nice book, but if you want to learn the history of video game music instead of a mere selection of classical OST, you should read "Video Game Music " instead.