Chapter 36 — Further Reading

A short annotated bibliography for the designer who wants to build genuine fluency in the history of the medium. These are the sources I return to and recommend to colleagues. Your list will evolve as you find the writers and channels whose voices fit your own thinking. These are the starting points.

Books

Tristan Donovan — Replay: The History of Video Games (2010). The single best general history of the medium in book form. Donovan is a journalist, not a fan, and his research is serious. He covers North America, Japan, Europe, and the Eastern Bloc with a breadth that most histories lack. Read this first. It will give you the chronological spine that the other sources hang from.

Steven L. Kent — The Ultimate History of Video Games (originally 2001, expanded 2021 edition). Kent's book is more anecdotal and more American-focused than Donovan's, but the anecdotes are invaluable — first-hand accounts from Nolan Bushnell, Shigeru Miyamoto, Howard Lincoln, Trip Hawkins, and dozens of other principals. The 2021 expansion covers the PS3/Xbox 360 era and the indie explosion. Treat it as an oral history.

Keith Burgun — Game Design Theory: A New Philosophy for Understanding Games (2012). Not a history book, but a design-theory book that uses historical examples aggressively to build arguments about what games are for. Burgun is opinionated (sometimes aggressively so) and his taxonomy of "contest, puzzle, toy, strategy game" is worth wrestling with whether you agree or not.

Jesper Juul — Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (2005). Academic but accessible. Juul's framework for how games are simultaneously rule-systems and fictional worlds is foundational to modern game studies. If you find yourself in conversations about what games "are," Juul gives you vocabulary.

Jason Schreier — Blood, Sweat, and Pixels (2017) and Press Reset (2021). Not historical in the strict sense, but essential for understanding how games actually get made. Schreier's reporting on the production of specific games (The Witcher 3, Diablo III, Destiny, Uncharted 4, Halo Wars) is the best journalism on working conditions and management failures in the industry. Read these when you start thinking about your own studio.

Anna Anthropy — Rise of the Videogame Zinesters (2012). Polemic, brief, and essential. Anthropy's argument that games should be more personal, more amateur, more diverse, more made-by-people-not-just-corporations was ahead of its time in 2012 and has been largely vindicated by the indie scene's subsequent history. Read it in an afternoon.

Ian Bogost — How to Do Things with Videogames (2011) and Persuasive Games (2007). Bogost is one of the sharpest thinkers in game studies and writes accessibly. Persuasive Games is the definitive treatment of games as rhetorical objects. How to Do Things with Videogames is a tour of the medium's full range of uses (and non-uses).

Richard Rouse III — Game Design: Theory and Practice (2nd edition, 2004). Older now but still the cleanest practical-design textbook I know. Rouse interviews designers (Will Wright, Sid Meier, American McGee) and the interviews alone are worth the price.

Ernest Adams — Fundamentals of Game Design (multiple editions). The other standard design textbook. More comprehensive than Rouse; less opinionated. A good reference to have on the shelf.

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman — Rules of Play (2004). The academic doorstop of game design theory. Long, dense, and foundational. You will not read it cover to cover. You will consult specific chapters when you need them. Keep it nearby.

Websites, Blogs, and Long-Form Journalism

The Digital Antiquarian — Jimmy Maher (filfre.net). The best long-form writing on the history of PC games that exists anywhere. Maher has been writing chronologically through the entire history of computer gaming since 2011, starting with Adventure (1976) and working forward. Each post is a full essay. The back catalog is a graduate-level seminar. Read chronologically if you have the time; search by game name if you need it.

Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra). The professional trade publication for game developers. The post-mortems are the archive's most valuable content — developers writing about what went right and wrong on specific shipped projects. The post-mortems for Thief: The Dark Project, Diablo II, System Shock 2, Psychonauts, and Dwarf Fortress are professional reading.

Rock Paper Shotgun and Eurogamer. The two most thoughtful English-language game journalism sites. RPS for PC focus; Eurogamer for broader industry coverage. Both have strong historical coverage and retrospective feature writing.

GDC Vault (gdcvault.com). The archive of every major Game Developers Conference talk. Thousands of hours of video from the people actually making games. Filter by year or topic. Recommended starting points: Jonathan Blow's Design Reboot (2007), Jenova Chen's Journey (2013), the various Celeste post-mortems from Maddy Thorson, Clint Hocking on BioShock's ludonarrative dissonance, and the full archive of Jonathan Blow, Jenova Chen, and Ron Gilbert talks.

Video and Documentary

High Score (Netflix, 2020). A six-episode documentary series covering the medium's history from Atari through the 1990s. Interviews with principals including Nolan Bushnell, Howard Phillips, Rebecca Heineman, and Roberta Williams. A good introduction for someone without a background in the history; not exhaustive but accessible.

Noclip (YouTube, documentaries). Danny O'Dwyer's long-form documentaries on specific games and studios. The documentaries on Rocket League's rise, The Witcher 3's making, Dwarf Fortress, and Double Fine are all professional-grade journalism. Patreon-supported, ad-free, archival quality.

Ahoy (YouTube, Stuart Brown). The best video essays on specific retro games that exist. Brown's work on the histories of the FPS, the JRPG, and individual games like Elite is both rigorous and entertaining. Slowly produced; deeply researched.

The Game Historian (YouTube, Norman Caruso). Deep dives on specific games and genres. The strength is in obscure games and regional histories that broader channels ignore. The Deep Cuts series on forgotten arcade games is recommended.

People Make Games (YouTube). Quinns and Chris from the old Shut Up & Sit Down boardgame team, now covering video games. The investigation into Roblox's labor practices (2021) is the best piece of games journalism I have seen in the last five years.

Jacob Geller, Razbuten, Matthewmatosis, Mark Brown's Game Maker's Toolkit (YouTube). Four individual voices worth subscribing to. Geller does philosophical essays; Razbuten analyzes playtests with non-gamers; Matthewmatosis does long rigorous reviews; Mark Brown is the cleanest explainer of design principles working in video form.

Primary Sources and Archives

The Internet Archive's MAME emulator (archive.org). Thousands of arcade games playable in the browser, free, legal (for games the archive has rights to distribute). The single most valuable resource for a designer who wants to actually play historical games rather than read about them. Visit. Play Pac-Man and Defender and Robotron and feel the difference between them in your hands.

MobyGames (mobygames.com). The most comprehensive game metadata database on the internet. Credits, screenshots, release dates, platform lists. When you need to know "who designed what when," MobyGames is the first stop.

The Videogame History Foundation (gamehistory.org). Nonprofit preservation organization. Their ongoing work on archiving development materials, prototypes, and lost games is important. Donate if you can.

Console-specific archives: Digital Eclipse and Limited Run. Both companies have produced interactive documentaries built around historical game collections — The Making of Karateka (2023), Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration (2022), Jeff Minter: The Nature of the Beast (2024). These are the model for how interactive documentary should work. Play them.

Magazines (for the 1980s–2000s archives)

Edge Magazine (UK, 1993–present). The most thoughtful games magazine of the last three decades. Back issues are collectible. The reviews, especially in the late 90s, shaped an entire generation of designers.

Game Developer Magazine (US, 1994–2013). The developer-facing counterpart to Edge. Columns by Ernest Adams, Soren Johnson, and others. Archive available via Gamasutra.

Famitsu (Japan, 1986–present). Japan's major games press. Many of the best Japanese design interviews appear here first. A few are translated; most require Japanese.

A Suggested Reading Order

If you have never studied the history before and want a working foundation in a month:

1. Week 1: Donovan's Replay.
2. Week 2: Binge High Score on Netflix, then Schreier's Blood, Sweat, and Pixels.
3. Week 3: Read through Jimmy Maher's Digital Antiquarian posts on the games that interest you most.
4. Week 4: Actually play five pre-2000 games on the Internet Archive's MAME emulator. Take notes.

After that month, you will have more historical grounding than most working designers in the industry. Keep the reading going. The history keeps being written.

Sources Specifically for Underrepresented Voices

The Anglophone canon above is where most written English-language history lives, but it is incomplete. A few additional starting points for the designer who wants to look beyond the standard canon.

Shira Chess — Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity (2017). Chess's work on the "designed identity" of women gamers and the ways casual games have been structured around assumed gendered play patterns is essential for understanding the mobile market's design history.

Adrienne Shaw — Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (2014). Interviews with players at the intersection of marginalized identities who do not fit the assumed "gamer" profile. Shaw's research changes what you think a game's audience can be.

Soraya Murray — On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (2018). Critical visual-studies analysis of games including BioShock Infinite, Assassin's Creed, and Tomb Raider. Especially good on how game spaces encode politics.

Kishonna Gray — Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming (2020). The experience of Black players and the design patterns that exclude or marginalize them. Recommended reading alongside the Chapter 33 ethics material.

Kris Graft, Simon Parkin, and other games journalists who report on international studios. Parkin's Death by Video Game (2015) covers international case studies of gaming's extreme subcultures. Graft's reporting on Chinese and Korean studios is among the most accessible English-language coverage.

Brendan Keogh — A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames (2018) and The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist (2023). Keogh is one of the sharpest voices on the actual global shape of game development. His argument that "the game industry" as commonly discussed is actually a collection of several distinct industries is a useful corrective to monolithic thinking.

Translated interview archives. Shmuplations.com has done heroic work translating Japanese developer interviews from the 1980s and 1990s into English. For a western designer who wants to understand the Japanese design tradition in the words of its principals rather than through western summary, this archive is irreplaceable.

A Final Recommendation

Keep a design journal specifically for game history. When you play an old game, write a page. When you read a post-mortem, note the lesson. When you watch a GDC talk, write down one specific technique you want to try. The cumulative journal becomes a personal reference that is more valuable than any book on this list, because it is your history — filtered through your own design interests, in your own language, with your own commentary.

Most working designers do not have this journal. The ones who do outperform the ones who do not over time. The effort is small. The compounding is large. Start tonight.