All absolutely true! It's shocking that such important parts of gaming history are overlooked in such a way.

I believe Codemasters was also born out of the popularity of the old Speccy. It's pretty shocking that this is all missed out in these books, when they were so dang important to a lot of us Brits.

I definitely agree. The fact that the likes of Frontier Developments, Rare & Codemasters are still around today is a monumental achievement in an industry where developers come and go in the blink of an eye. But it would still be nice if that achievement was acknowledged somewhere by those people who claim to write the definitive historical texts of our industry.

These books are being read by tomorrow's gaming journalists. It's bad enough that today's gaming journalists barely acknowledge anything that happened in the 20th century, but there's something not quite right about video game history being written in which the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro are notoriously absent. Thankfully there's enough of us preserving and blogging about this aspect of gaming history that things will course correct themselves eventually. And long may the success of the stalwart British developers continue!

I'll forgive Loguidice and Barton, given that their book is largely anecdotal (and Barton's given the Speccy fair dues on his blog), but I expected more of Kent, who presents his book as more of an objective history. Then again, he spent so much time on the history of Atari that everything else ended up as a mere footnote.

I was surprised that Populous got a mention, although only in a throwaway sentence that referred to it as a Sega Genesis game from EA. Perhaps most startling was that there was no mention of Tomb Raider. How anyone can claim to have written the Ultimate Guide to Video Games and not even make a passing reference to it simply boggles the mind.

Though there perhaps isn't as much information about the early days of British gaming in books, there have been several recent television programmes which delve into the history behind the video games industry and the British video games industry – notably Games Britannia & Micro Men, which were both interesting to watch :-)

What's great is to see the likes of Frontier Developments, Rare Ltd, Codemasters and other pioneering British games developers still going strong after so many years. I think that's what we should be more proud of rather than being mentioned in books :)

And not just to us Brits. Rare were responsible for a significant number of commercial hits on the NES, SNES and N64 and no doubt helped shift a lot of hardware for Nintendo. I bought my N64 on the strength of Rare's titles alone.

Hey, there, thanks for mentioning Vintage Games. I'd like to counter a few of your suggestions about the book. First off, I would like you to point to any other book ever that mentions as many platforms as this one does. As a collector with over 350 platforms, I'm as hardware agnostic as they come. Even though I'm in the US and a US videogame and computer history expert, I have as a matter of course "foreign" systems in my collection, particularly from Japan, Australia and England. So I certainly appreciate diversity and the importance of mentioning EVERYTHING as much as possible and I stand by everything in the book. Between the in-book and online bonus chapters, British computers ARE mentioned, and my own ZX Spectrum collection is fairly extensive, particularly for an American. Second, the book is about GAMES, not platforms. So even though dozens of platforms are mentioned, really they're irrelevant in a discussion about games, which are typically multi-platform anyway. The list of games in the book was carefully chosen and I wonder what ZX Spectrum game in particular should have been mentioned in there based on your statements. It's also a US book written by US authors, though I'm pleased to say it has sold and been reviewed quite well in places like England and Germany, and there's even a translated Italian version available now. I'm working on a feature film documentary on the history of videogames right now and I'm sorry to say that the Spectrum is not in there, though again, more games and systems than have ever been mentioned in film before are being mentioned there. It's an important platform (just like the BBC, among others), but really only in the UK. It was a technologically mediocre, though well supported platform, and the only impact it had in the US was influencing the design of the mostly incompatible Timex Sinclair 2068 (which I also own with various mods to improve that compatibility). I have another book in the works covering everything games-capable platform released in the US, but that only includes the Timex Sinclair 2068 for obvious reasons. Anyway, it's hard enough to get something mainstream to mention something like the Commodore 64, which is the best selling computer of all time, let alone essentially a region-specific platform like the Spectrum. I understand and appreciate your concern, but there's only so much room in books and film for things, and only so much space to go into greater detail. It's not like there are not at least a few books on the Spectrum, anyway, so certainly that's something to enjoy and support.

First of all, many thanks for taking the time to offer your perspective on this topic. It was perhaps a little unfair to drag your book into this debate, given that it's primarily about very specific, influential games rather than a comprehensive acknowledgement of every hardware platform since the year dot. If I were to draft up my own list of the most influential games of all time then the Spectrum and BBC wouldn't get much of a look in (perhaps with the exception of Knight Lore and Elite respectively).

Your book just so happened to be one of the closest I could find by way of an example, mainly because it does take pride of place on my most accessible book shelf and isn't languishing in a box in the attic. I'm a big fan of Vintage Games and never fail to recommend it whenever someone asks me about decent video game books. (I'll also be doing an article on video game books some time in the near future.)

Like you say, when it comes to painting the broadest strokes on the video game history canvas, some systems will have to fall by the wayside. There simply is far too much for any one book (or documentary) to cover in any significant detail. Thankfully there are numerous bloggers out there with the ability to explore these niches, so these minor systems are unlikely to be forgotten, even if it seems like the heavyweight tomes in book stores may be neglecting them.

Thanks again for the comments, Bill. Your input is always welcome on this blog.

No problem at all and I also understand you not seeing the reference to the ZX Spectrum in the book, since it's indexed poorly (it wasn't done by us), but if you look closely (REAL closely ;-)), it's actually mentioned twice, even though we say the book has a US focus in the foreward (again, especially for space reasons, but it was important to sneak in critical worldwide references). And of course Elite is one of the online bonus chapters that didn't fit in the book (25 fit in the book, 9 went online only), but is still in the TOC and referenced throughout. Knight Lore didn't make the cut (no connection to the canonical 34 in the book), but I agree it's a great game!

Hi

I am developing a videogame history timeline and most of my sources are, as you may imagine, US-biased. I have seen the Games Britannia documentary (well, part 1 and 3 only) and Gamer Revolution which offer some British information. My timeline is interactive and I am using it in my videogame history course. You can see it here:

http://www.mauriciogiraldo.com/vgline/beta/

I cannot, realistically, put every single relevant event but I am making my best. Any input from the UK point-of-view will be appreciated. Most of the trouble for me has been finding birth dates of important designers/developers (you can see them all born 2010).

I do have the CPC : )

Only idiots don't know about ZX Spectrum; only cowards try to hide it in their "books".