All Your Base Are Belong to Us - Book Review

- Print Length: 352 pages
- Publisher: Three Rivers Press (April 5, 2011)
- Language: English

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All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture

by Harold Goldberg

From the perspective that knows more than a few game industry stories, the most frustrating aspect of All Your Base Are Belong To Us, is that each chapter reads a little like a pitch for a 300-page non-fiction book. At 19 chapters that means a 5,700 page book, which writer Harold Goldberg has boiled down to 386 pages (not including the index, acknowledgements and glossary).

For the most part, Goldberg moves through the first 50 years of video games in chronological order, beginning with Ralph Baer's earliest forays, through the rise and fall of Atari, the impact and importance of Sierra On-Line, and right up to some

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of the behind the scenes looks at the development of BioShock and Shadow Complex, touching on points in between including 7th Guest, Crash Bandicoot, world of WarCraft Electronic Arts, Will Wright and Shigeru Miyamoto.

However, as mentioned previously, each chapter could have easily been spun out into full books, along the lines of Kushner's "Masters of Doom" which chronicled

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id Software's existence and the principle involvement of John Romero and John Carmack. This is particularly evident in stories such as the creation of Trilobyte Software, the company responsible for 7th Guest and its sequel 11th Hour. It's quite an interesting read and is the story I was least familiar with when I started reading All Your Base. How its creation lead to massive changes in the PC market (through CD-ROM technology), the huge windfall of cash, and a fracture so bad between the two principals that they didn't speak to each other for a decade makes for a fascinating read.

Goldberg's style definitely reads like a enthusiastic blog series. He doesn't restrict himself to a "just the facts" reporting style and often he interjects his own thoughts and opinions directly into his prose. During his Videogames 101 overview of Rockstar Games, he takes more than a full page to expound on Sam Houser's writing ability, which is, in Goldberg's opinion "second to none in any medium." Goldberg's style is defined well before this, especially in a chapter which focuses on EverQuest. Goldberg was editor in chief of Sony Online Entertainment and "helped create Sony's Web portal to EverQuest." In other words, it's somewhat of an insider look at the early development and growth of EverQuest. This insider look offers a perspective not many others could offer, but again, there's so much here that could crafted into a full work of non-fiction!

As an introductory "text" on videogames, All Your Base Are Belong To Us is essential for anyone that might not be aware of any of this history. There are a million stories in the game industry and there's all sorts of potential for a second volume of stories, but the ones that Goldberg presents here are important chronologies to know because they all represent important aspects of gaming and just how much craziness, dysfunction, and luck goes on behind the scenes.

- Aaron Simmer

(July 27, 2011)