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Van Burnham

Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age 1971-1984 Hardcover – September 1, 2001

by Van Burnham (Author)

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Finalist in the category of Popular Culture in the Independent Publisher Book Awards 2002 (The Ippy Awards) presented by Independent Publisher Magazine.

It was a time when technology was king, status was determined by your high score, and videogames were blitzing the world...

From Pong to Pac-Man, Asteroids to Zaxxon—more than fifty million people around the world have come of age within the electronic flux of videogames, their subconscious forever etched with images projected from arcade and home videogame systems.

From the first interactive blips of electronic light at Brookhaven National Labs and the creation of Spacewar! at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; to the invention of the TV Game Project and the myriad systems of Magnavox, Atari, Coleco, and Mattel that followed; through the rise of the Golden Age of videogames and forward into the imagination of millions, Supercade is the first book to illustrate and document the history, legacy, and visual language of the videogame phenomenon.

Exuberantly written and illustrated in full color, Supercade pays tribute to the technology, games, and visionaries of one of the most influential periods in the history of computer science—one that profoundly shaped the modern technological landscape and helped change the way people view entertainment.

Supercade includes contributions from such commentators and particpants as Ralph Baer, Julian Dibbell, Keith Feinstein, Joe Fielder, Lauren Fielder, Justin Hall, Leonard Herman, Steven Johnson, Steven Kent, Nick Montfort, Bob Parks, Carl Steadman, and Tom Vanderbilt.

Print length

448 pages
Language

English
Publisher

The MIT Press
Publication date

September 1, 2001
Dimensions

10.25 x 10.25 x 1.25 inches
ISBN-10

0262024926
ISBN-13

978-0262024921
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The generation now in its 30s pumped innumerable quarters into free-standing video consoles with protruding joysticks, steering wheels, and "fire" buttons the quaint precursors of today's dollar-based sensory overload and sleekly sophisticated home systems. Burnham, an L.A.-based Wired contributing editor and a member of the Video Arcade Preservation Society, lovingly collects screen shots of faves like Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Q*bert, along with early games like Computer Space and Pong, and home games from Atari and Nintendo. The cheeky capsule descriptions of each game from Burnham and others are matched with longer essays from writers like Julian Dibble (My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World), who writes about the text-based game Adventure, and former Feed editor Steven Johnson (Emergence) on Atari competitor Intellivision. The chronological organization holds the book's disparate games and players together adequately, but readers looking for a straight narrative history should look elsewhere: this is all about memory jogging and rapturous description. Notably, Burnham did the book's text, design and production; the layout is quirky and provocative but not disorienting, and the print quality is excellent. (Nov.) Forecast: While the book can't compete with the actual experience of playing the games, Burnham's time capsule will given as a gift among gamers (not a small subculture), and browsers from its demographic will at least flip through. The MIT imprint could lead to some campus acquisitions, especially for schools with modern media and culture departments.

From Library Journal

Initially thought to be mere fads, video games have become entrenched in global popular culture. These two books use different approaches to document the phenomenon. Kent, a freelance writer, interviewed video game innovators such as Atari founder Nolan Bushnell and Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani, among hundreds of others, to provide a definitive history. He includes photos of the major video game players and quotes extensively from his interviewees in an academic but highly readable style. The promised index will be needed to navigate the text, but this remains a fascinating and well-researched account of the games many of us grew up with or have encountered in an arcade.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Remarkably, the first interactive computer game was programmed in 1958 ("Tennis for Two," devised as a way to occupy bored guests to Brookhaven National Laboratory), and the first commercially available hardware able to download games over telephone lines was produced in 1982 (Gameline, a modem marketed for the Atari 2600 game system). These are but two of the many fascinating facts in this lively, colorful history of the golden years of the video game (i.e., the years before the personal computer became the primary medium of the games). The author, a contributing editor to Wired magazine, enlists the help of numerous experts in the field to tell this splashy story in a detailed but userfriendly style. For some readers, this will be a trip down memory lane (Atari, Activision, Pong, Space Invaders, PacMan); for others, an eyeopening story about the quest for video-game supremacy. Either way, it's a winner. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From the Back Cover

It was a time when technology was king, status was determined by your high score, and videogames were blitzing the world...

From Pong to Pac-Man, Asteroids to Zaxxon--more than 50 million people around the world have come of age within the electronic flux of videogames, their subconscious forever etched with images projected from arcade and home videogame systems.

From the fist interactive blips of electronic light at Brookhaven National Labs and the creation of Spacewar! at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; to the invention of the TV Game Project and the myriad systems of Magnavox, Atari, Coleco, and Mattel that followed; through the rise of the Golden Age of videogames and forward into the imagination of millions, Supercade is the first book to illustrate and document the history, legacy, and visual language of the videogame phenomenon.

Exuberantly written and illustrated in full color, Supercade pays tribute to the technology, games, and visionaries of one of the most influential periods in the history of computer science--one that profoundly shaped the modern technological landscape and helped change the way people view entertainment.

Supercade includes contributions from such commentators and participants as Ralph Baer, Julian Dibbell, Keith Feinstein, Joe Fielder, Lauren Fielder, Justin Hall, Leonard Herman, Steven Johnson, Steven Kent, Nick Montfort, Bob Parks, Carl Steadman, and Tom Vanderbilt.

About the Author

Van Burnham is a Contributing Editor at Wired magazine and a member of the Video Arcade Preservation Society.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ The MIT Press; 1st Edition (September 1, 2001)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0262024926
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0262024921
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.76 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 10.25 x 10.25 x 1.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #553,819 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,112 in Video & Computer Games
- #1,296 in Computer & Video Game Strategy Guides

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Jim Van Cise

Tried the rest. This is the BEST coffee table book offered

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 19, 2003

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In recent years, I had bought the other similar historical reference books on the subject and saved this one for last because I took the bad reviews about the photo quality seriously. I work in printing/graphic design and I avoided buying the book until the price came down. After thumbing through it for only five minutes, I knew I'd found the best one. Yes, it may be true that many of the images could have lifted from MAME screen shots but here's my take on that. I was looking for the best VISUAL record of the era. That's what this about isn't it? Walking into an arcade today may have the same visual appeal with all the lights and noises, but since the late 80's, our expectations obviously changed. No one can milk a quarter for more than 3 minutes anymore. My memories of the old arcades are the unique characters, the first time that we were able to play with multiple players and all those other "firsts" that influenced what we see today. This "found art" really takes me back in time. The images may only be low rez screen shots, but for the most part they are clean and made more fun by being enlarged to the point where you can see all the pixels. I think the word from art school I'm trying to remember is MACRO. Where you zoom IN to a particular piece of the image and crop it to make it more interesting visually. These photos are big and bleed beyond the edge of the page. It's funny now to how those huge pixels made us spend so much in the 80's in our era or super slick realism in current games. While THE FIRST QUARTER and THE ULTIMATE HISTORY OF VIDEO GAMES may be a "good read" for historical facts and funny stories, they lacked imagery. The book ARCADE FEVER is another strong visual book for it's sharp photography of actual game cabinets and more traditional screen shots. Supercade is an artsy (but not cheesy) way of showing the era. I was also happy to see arcade games featured that came along years after 1984. This book goes the extra mile visually.

5 people found this helpful

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Anthony Volpe

An absolute explosion of eye candy

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 12, 2021

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As far as coffee table books go, this is probably the greatest video game related book ever made. The information in this book is exhaustive, the layout is fantastic, and the information in this book is amazing. By the time you’re through the middle of this book, you’re still barely out of the 1970s. This book is an absolutely wonderful combination of eye-opening information and I candy.

Apparently the author is working on a sequel that takes us to the present day, and if that’s the case, I am buying this book on day one.

One person found this helpful

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Clay N. Cowgill

It's very pretty, and very big, and a little bit frustrating.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 8, 2015

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It's very pretty, and very big, and knowing Van I would love to give it a glowing 5-star review, but in an attempt at being impartial I need to dock it in two critical areas.

First, the image quality of a lot of the historic material is really rough-- perhaps too-small of scans blown up too large for the format of the book? While I originally tried to write that off as simply being part of "the aesthetic" there were enough counter-examples of good quality images interspersed that that seemed unlikely. While it's not easy to source the sheer volume of all the material available, I wish that better quality examples were presented. (I mean, really, there's no reason an Atari 2600 box should be a blurry two-page spread when there's plenty of good quality examples to photograph/scan available on eBay every week. Similarly, a weekend spent with a game flyer collector would have yielded plenty of better quality images of those...)

Second, the heavy reliance on emulated screenshots as others have mentioned bothers me as well for a work that purports to be a 'visual history'. I can forgive that in the case of particularly rare games, but having extremely low resolution shots of rasterized/emulated vector games is kind-of unforgivable for a book that really would do well to show off some of the beauty of technologies that a lot of people have never experienced first-hand today. It's a bit like going to a museum only to find that all the displays are cardboard props instead of real artifacts.

I'm still generally pleased with my purchase as it was via a gift-card from Christmas, but if I was spending 'real money' I'd be tempted to pick up a used copy of the paperback on the cheap before committing bigger dollars.

12 people found this helpful

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Adrian Roberts

Gorgeous and beautiful

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 17, 2001

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Finally, a book about the classic era of videogames that strikes a gorgeous balance between history lesson, nostalgia trip, and that initial lo-tech excitement that videogames garnered back in their early '80s heyday. The design of this coffeetable book is beautiful, jam-packed with images, many familiar, others of rarely-seen videogame gems. The articles that are interspersed amongst the large images are well-written and informative. A very immersive book, one that belongs on every classic gamer's coffeetable -- perfect for a quick flipping through of pages by curious house guests, after which you will soon be suckering them into a few quick rounds of arcade classics on your Playstation (or hell, even your Atari 2600, if you still have one.) A bit pricey, but hey, it's a huge, hefty, HARDCOVER book, so what do you expect? It's worth it.

2 people found this helpful

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Clint Feddersen

All the classic games are here!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 31, 2014

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This book is great for anyone who remembers or wants to learn more about the arcades and home video game units of the 1970s and 1980s. I have owned, played or wanted pretty much every game and unit featured in this book, so I love it! The layout is visually engaging, making it a great coffee-table book as well as a great cover-to-cover read.

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Toastlord

Interesting but flawed book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 7, 2020

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With the kickstarter campaign for volume 2 of this having recently happened I wanted to take a look at what the fuss was all about re the first book. I'd had my eye on it for a while but it had been expensive here in the UK, but recently the price has dropped to a more reasonable amount.

Unfortunately despite being something I was really looking forward to I'm afraid the book is a bit of a disappointment - it's certainly not terrible but there are a lot of other options on the market that do it better.

First the format - it's a well printed square paperback, and already after only a few weeks of owning it it's looking very tatty (and I am someone that takes a lot of care with their books so it's a binding issue rather that me chucking it about). Although the books looks good overall, as other have mentioned some photos often look awful, small images blown up to too large a size so you get a very blurry two page spread. It's a very chaotic layout to the book, which sometimes works and sometimes it's less effective. There's a couple of silly mistakes in there too.

The content itself is again a mixed bag, sometimes there are really interesting insights and sometimes it's the same old ground being covered. It's very US-centric so there's little about the scene outside of that country.

I've got a shelf-full of books about video games now, and despite my initial high hopes for this title I'm afraid it's not one of the better ones. For arcade lovers in the UK the forthcoming "Coin-Op - the Arcade Guide" looks like it will cover much of the same ground here but should hopefully do a better job.

One person found this helpful

Greentraveller

Retro Love

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 19, 2020

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Superb

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L. M. Davis

Stunning piece of Nostalgia!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 21, 2004

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I had seen this book advertised on various sites and as I am a devotee of computer games old and new I felt I needed this in my life ;-)
The book itself it HUGE and contains pages and pages of nostalgia. There are full page photos of game screenshots and old advertisements.
This book WILL appeal to anyone who has grown up with computer games and played different formats (the book seems MAINLY geared towards the home console history).
Everytime I want to relive my childhood the book comes out - what I want to know is, when is Supercade 2, 1984-2003 coming out!!!!

3 people found this helpful

Homo_Ludens

Opulenter Bildband über eine faszinierende Ära des Videospiels

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on February 18, 2009

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"Supercade" ist - wie im Titel bereits erwähnt - ein äußerst aufwendig und opulent gestalteter Bildband über die Frühzeit des Videospiels. Im Großformat wird dem Leser auf Hochglanzpapier in Bildcollagen oder Großaufnahmen von Screens der Glanz und Charme der frühen Coin-Op- und Homecomputer-Ära nahegebracht.

Wer noch das Glück hatte, in den achtziger oder frühen Neunzigern zumeist im Ausland in einem Pub oder auf Fähren die lärmenden Automaten mit seinem eh nicht umwechselbaren Kleingeld füttern zu dürfen, wird vermutlich nie den faszinierenden Charme vergessen, der von den damals in der Regel jeglicher im eigenen Hause stehenden Hardware unendlich überlegenden Automaten ausging.

Die Autorin fängt diese Atmosphäre mit den großformatigen Abbildungen sehr gut ein. Aber nicht nur das Bildmaterial überzeugt, sondern auch die Texte weisen im Regelfall einen großen Informationsgehalt auf und/oder sind mit interessanten Anekdoten gespickt.

Schade nur, dass der Bildband bereits mit dem Jahr 1984 endet. Andererseits sind bereits so 430 großformatige Seiten zusammengekommen; eine Fortführung bis in die frühen Neunziger hätte wohl den Umfang des Bandes gesprengt. Auch aus struktureller Sicht bot sich der Schnitt im Jahre 1984 an: Der Crash der Videogameindustrie zog weitgehende strukturelle Veränderungen mit sich, die das bisherige Erscheinungsbild der elektronischen Unterhaltungsindustrie weitgehend umgestalteten (Wechsel von Arcade/Videospiel hin zu Multifunktions-Heimcomputern wie dem VC-20 oder dem C64).

Insgesamt halte ich diesen Bild- und Textband für eine lohnende Investion für alle, die sich mit dem Thema auseinandersetzen oder einfach noch einmal in ihrer Kindheits- und Jugenderinnerungen schwelgen wollen.

3 people found this helpful

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Jason Eckert

The best arcade nostalgia book I've read

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on November 11, 2019

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The visuals and presentation of this book are what make it great, because that is what originally drew us to arcade games during the 1970s and 1980s. It gives enough background information on the culture, time period and games without becoming boring, and offers some interesting perspectives you won't find in other arcade-related history books.

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Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age 1971-1984 Hardcover – September 1, 2001

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