This Book Is a Game Console: Writing Vicarious Universes in Code
In 1979, four programmers walked out of Atari because their employer refused to put their names on the boxes of games they had made.
They founded Activision on the premise that designers are authors - that credit belongs to the people who do the work. This Book Is a Game Console tracks what that premise became across forty years of video games.
Thirteen chapters follow the designers who turned a commercial medium into a craft with named authors:
Warren Robinett, hiding his name in a catacomb room of Adventure because Atari refused to credit him on the box.
Howard Scott Warshaw, building the shimmering "neutral zone" in Yars' Revenge by pointing the display chip at the game's own program code - and, thirty years later, becoming a licensed therapist for Silicon Valley engineers.
Carol Shaw, whose procedurally-governed river in River Raid was one of the first continuity-constrained worlds in consumer video games, and whose cartridge was one of the first to carry a woman's credit on the box.
Dona Bailey, the only woman in Atari's coin-op division, who chose the pastel palette of Centipede because she assumed women would play it in numbers equal to men - and was right.
Bill Budge, who in 1983 shipped Pinball Construction Set: a program whose primary activity was making other programs, and the hinge on which the entire user-content-creation industry rotates.
Richard Aplin, who shipped a loading-screen minigame called Invade-a-Load in 1987, which Namco patented eight years later and enforced across the commercial game industry for the next twenty.
The book also tracks the structural pressures that buried authors: the Kassar-era Atari management style, the Pac-Man-for-2600 impossible deadline, the 1983 crash, and the patent enclosure that still shapes the industry today. It ends on a single designer whose credit has only partially been restored - and the practice by which readers can continue that restoration.
This Book Is a Game Console is the third volume of Kase Branham's Book Is the Program trilogy (following Colossal Cave: A Book You Can Walk Through and The Game That Opened a Door). Every volume is CC0 - public domain - and ships with a compilation kit: structured specifications a reader can hand to an AI to build playable games from the book's material.
This one includes twelve cartridge specifications styled as 1979-era Atari internal design documents, plus a Credits Cartridge that closes the compilation by naming the designers the first twelve honor. The chapters can be read without the kit. The kit can be compiled without reading the chapters. The two together are the product.
For readers interested in: the craft of making things under constraint; the history of video games as a medium; the structural pressures that erase authors and the practices that restore them; the specific designers whose work forty-plus years ago produced the industry we now live inside.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
