Zap: The Rise and Fall of Atari [Hardcover]

Scott Cohen (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 177 pages
• Publisher: Mcgraw-Hill; Revised edition (June 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0070115435
• ISBN-13: 978-0070115439
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,713,427 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fun To Read In Retrospect, August 29, 2001

By 

Mark Androvich (California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ZAP!: The Rise and Fall of Atari (Paperback)

Cohen's book does a great job documenting the founding of Atari and introducing readers to the colorful personalities who worked there. At the time of its original publication (1984), it was one of the first books to do so (if not the first). Now, however, there are several books that chronicle the same events: Leonard Herman's Phoenix, and Steven Kent's The First Quarter, for example. These latter books are also more comprehensive than Zap!, since they don't focus only on Atari but include the history of Nintendo, Sega, Sony and others.
In retrospect, it is fun to read the author's predictions when he wrote the book in the fall of 1983. The videogame market had not yet collapsed completely. Nintendo had not arrived, and Warner had not sold off Atari. Cohen discusses Atari's potential bright future with telecommunications projects, the likelihood that computers will make videogame systems obsolete, possible competition with Nolan Bushnell, and videodisk arcade games becoming the wave of the future. Now that we are actually in the future, we know that none of these things came to fruition.
Zap! is still a good reference and an interesting read for those who are curious about the beginnings of the videogame industry's once-dominant company, Atari. However, since the manuscript was written some 18 years ago, don't expect a lot of revelations or anecdotes that haven't already been written about in many subsequent books.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Zap! and the world forgot about this book, July 20, 2002

By 

Gerald Siegel "G.S." - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ZAP!: The Rise and Fall of Atari (Paperback)

The fact that it's a classic in video game history writing made me buy this book. My disappointment is great. The author falls short in almost every aspect of the project. Heavily relying on wild guesses to disguise his lack of real content, Cohen desperately simplifies, inflates small bits of information (some of which are false) to fill the pages and is history and probably the founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell, not doing a favor by overglorifying him. About two thirds of the book seem only to exist to portray the incompetence of the author, particularly when he writes about "related" subjects, and goes on to repeat statements over and over, which were not necessarily interesting ones in the first place, until one ponders the thought: With a skill like Cohen's, how else to accomplish volume? I want to give you a quote here from chapter 14 where there's a lot of out of place talk about IBM and the stock market. At one point you can read: "It's a glamour stock. Or it was. It might have been - and still might become - a blue chip, but so far it hasn't." Now we know. Not clueless enough, it seems, because a couple of paragraphs later, the author adds in his quest for written nonsense: "They designed a product that wasn't bad. It wasn't a breakthrough, but it was good; there was really nothing wrong with it." And ever so on. If you're intrigued by video game history, rather consider getting (all of) these fine books: 'The Ultimate History of Videogames' by Steven Kent, 'Game Over - Press Start to Continue' by David Sheff and 'Phoenix - The Fall & Rise of Video Games' by Leonard Herman.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very interested and heavily boorowed from book on Atari, September 26, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Zap: The Rise and Fall of Atari (Hardcover)

No doubt if you have read Game over by David Sheff you will have allready absorbed a bit of this book since he liberally used it as a reference. A very good read for those seriously interested in the biginnings and eventual horrific end of Atari's reign.