LudoScience

History of videogames (encyclopedia)

Author(s) : Arnaud Bonnet
Editor : Editions Pix'n Love
Publication date : 06-24-2015
Language : french

As the title suggests, this book gathers trivia and factoids about 100 popular video games: Zelda, Mario, Resident Evil, Shenmue, Dragon's Lair, Viewtiful Joe, Journey, Half-Life, etc. 10 pieces of trivia are presented for each game, with a lot of pictures. The book is quite beautiful, and both pleasant and quick to read. However, it's clearly an "entry-level" book, as the pieces of trivia are very short: each one is told over one or two lines. Moreover, the author doesn't give any source or reference for his information, and we can actually doubt that several factoids are false. Overall, this book isn't a reliable historical reference, but it's rather a "leisure" book. It's pleasant to browse through it to (re)discover information about our favorite games. The book can also be used as first step towards a more serious study of the history of video games: I invite the reader to go into these factoid in depth (and verify them) by reading other books or by searching over the Internet.