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Student Affairs Daniel Salter Penn State University Editor Stuart
Brown Winter 2002 • Vol. 3, No. 1 |
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Van Burnham |
Stuart Brown President StudentAffairs.com |
In college I was a pinball player. For a measly quarter, five balls were deposited in the spring-loaded chamber ready to rock ‘n roll. Many an afternoon and evening were spent racking up the points as opposed to hitting the books.
During my freshman year a new diversion quietly appeared in the Rutgers Student Union on College Avenue, nestled among my favorite arcade games. These mechanisms, with their video screens, joysticks, push button controls and weird, sci-fi sound effects were mesmerizing. Soon my beloved pinball games began to move to less desirable locations in the basement level games room, if not disappearing altogether. What was happening? Was the world turning upside down? What were these strange invaders? There were, I realized years later, the first of the freestanding video games to enter the U.S. market. I was witnessing the dawning of the video game craze.
Many happy times-and rolls and rolls of quarters-were spent zapping, nuking, and simply saving the world during my undergraduate years. These memories wonderfully bubbled to the surface as I read Van Burnham’s coffee table sized book, Supercade: a visual history of the videogame age 1971-1984. Ms. Burnham, a self-described videogame junkie, delivers pithy descriptions of what seems like every video game released during this time frame. The oversized, glossy pages, with their colorful “screen prints” of so many unforgettable arcade attractions transport the reader back to a time when both graphics and function were incredibly simplistic. In fact, they could be classified as downright prehistoric when compared to the PlayStations, Xboxes, and GameCubes of today.
The book is much more than a listing of videogames and memory-provoking pictures. The author gives readers a succinct history lesson on the development of these attractions from their humble beginnings at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island &emdash;where Pong prototype Tennis For Two was a smash hit--through refinements later on at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-home of Spacewar!--and beyond. The text is user-friendly and full of quaint, detailed-filled reminiscences by the pioneers of these early computer-generated machines.
Supercade also chronicles the rise and fall of the home interactive entertainment market. Remember the Magnavox Odyssey systems? Coleco’s Telestar units? The Mattel Intellivison? Hooking up to a home television set enabled the consumer to plug-in a wide assortment of games cartridges to play in the comfort of their living room. As someone who never partook in the pleasures of these product lines I was unaware of their impact on the consumer electronic market. Van Burnham brings alive their stories, chronicling their stupendous rise and spectacular fall.
What makes Supercade a wholly satisfying experience is the structure of the book, broken into yearly subsections. This allows the reader to easily follow the development and growing sophistication of both the arcade videogames and entertainment systems.
Still, the singular delight is browsing through the hundreds of pages of pictures and descriptions of the video arcade games of yesteryear. All my favorites are lovingly commemorated. Such titles as Sea Wolf, Asteroids. Galaxian, Tank, Centipede, Phoenix and my number one machine (only because I could actually destroy the mother ship at game’s end), Zaxxon. Where appropriate, Van Burnham discusses how some of the classic titles, most notably Space Invaders and Pac-Man, entered the pop mainstream of American culture and helped to validate the video industry to the masses.
For fans of video games, especially players who lived through the glory days of the 1970’s and early 1980’s, Supercade: a visual history of the videogame age 1971-1984 is the ideal book to own. It’s almost guaranteed to provide hours of reading and viewing gratification.
