Insert Coin

About This Book

In 1958 a physicist at a nuclear weapons laboratory built a tennis game on an oscilloscope to stop visitors being bored. Sixty-eight years later, video games earn more than film and recorded music combined, and roughly three billion people play them. This is the story of how that happened — and of how almost everything you have been told about it is wrong.

The famous version of this history is a marketing document. The coin box at Andy Capp's Tavern, the yen shortage caused by Space Invaders, the landfill that buried E.T., Nintendo single-handedly rescuing a dead industry, Sony blindsiding Nintendo at CES, blast processing, Doom causing Columbine, the PlayStation 2 restricted as missile guidance — every one of these stories is either false, unprovable, or a real event wearing a much better story's clothes. They survived because the industry had a commercial interest in them, and because until very recently nobody was keeping the receipts.

In Insert Coin, E.B Cohen tells the whole medium's story as the record actually supports it: the definitional trap of "the first video game" and the twenty-year patent war that settled it in court rather than in history; the 1983 crash that was a North American retail event, not the death of a medium — while the Famicom was already leading Japan and Britain's bedroom coders were accelerating; the lockout chip and the stolen source code; the long road out of Moscow that brought Tetris west; the engineer nearly fired for moonlighting the sound chip that became the PlayStation; China's console ban that accidentally built the world's free-to-play industry; and the exquisite irony of an industry whose private censorship board, created under Senate duress, became its constitutional shield at the Supreme Court.

Cohen explains the machines from first principles, too — why a programmer had to race an electron beam across a screen in real time, what a bit count actually measured and why every one of them was attached to the wrong component, how emulation works and why it is the only reason much of this history still exists at all.

Because that is the closing argument. Roughly 87 percent of games released before 2010 are out of print and commercially unavailable. The largest entertainment medium on earth is losing its own past faster than it writes it down — which is precisely why the myths in this book survived. Even-handed, propulsive, and built on the primary record rather than the press release, Insert Coin is the first single-volume history of the whole medium, from a physicist's oscilloscope to the trillion-dollar machine, that shows its receipts.