If you want a good overview of the video game industry’s early days, Steven L. Kent’s The Ultimate History of Video Games is a great place to start. Beginning with a quick primer on the pinball craze of the 1930s, the author quickly introduces readers to touchstones like Spacewar, Ralph Baer’s Brown Box, and Pong. Hitting all the highlights from the next 30 years over the book’s 600 pages, the story culminates with the launch of the PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox in 2000-2001.
But a lot has happened since then, and so Steven L. Kent has returned with The Ultimate History of Video Games Volume 2: Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and the Billion-Dollar Battle to Shape Modern Gaming. As you might have gleaned from the title, he picks up right where he left off with the turn-of-the-millennium’s four-way fight for console supremacy (you can’t forget about the Dreamcast), but the book also delves into the later PS3-Xbox 360-Wii era:
The home console boom of the ’90s turned hobby companies like Nintendo and Sega into Hollywood-studio-sized business titans. But by the end of the decade, they would face new, more powerful competitors. In boardrooms on both sides of the Pacific, engineers and executives began, with enormous budgets and total secrecy, to plan the next evolution of home consoles. The PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube, and Sega Dreamcast all made radically different bets on what gamers would want. And then, to the shock of the world, Bill Gates announced the development of the one console to beat them all—even if Microsoft had to burn a few billion dollars to do it.
A short excerpt touching on Ken Kutaragi’s tenure at Sony’s is available on the official website for the book’s publisher, Crown.
The Ultimate History of Video Games Volume 2: Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and the Billion-Dollar Battle to Shape Modern Gaming is available to purchase from your favorite bookstore (or digitally as an ebook) beginning today.