This was my first book review!
Atari 2600 Encyclopedia Volume 1
The Atari 2600 Encyclopedia Volume 1 covers a quarter of the US releases in great detail. Every game gets the attention it deserves, with scans, screenshots, as well as a lengthy write up. Each write up is done in a casual, reader friendly tone that both informs and entertains. The Atari 2600 is the system that gave a lot of us our introduction to video games, and this book aims to help preserve the memory of the games that made this system what it was.
Purchase the hard cover book:
http://www.amazon.com/Atari-2600-Encyclopedia-1/dp/0985480572/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1442673236&sr=8-1&keywords=atari+2600+encyclopedia
PDF Version:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/atari-2600-encyclopedia-vol./id985834985?mt=11
Atariage Thread:
http://atariage.com/forums/topic/236829-vcs-encyclopedia-coming-soon/
Purchase Ecstasy of Gold on Itunes:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/ecstasy-gold-from-good-bad/id667433180
Ecstasy of Gold Wiki page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ecstasy_of_Gold
Atari 2600 Game by Game Podcast
http://2600gamebygamepodcast.blogspot.com/
Transcript
I have recently purchased the Atari 2600 encyclopedia volume one, physical book, well a few months back, and this is my review. The book is also available as a digital download for about $14. The first thing I noticed when I received this item was the beautiful hard cover with the nice image on it. My particular purchase unfortunately came shipped from Amazon with some of the corners bent in a bit, but I decided not to issue a return, purely out of laziness I suppose. When you first open the book you are presented with the opening credits and a nice one page introduction explaining why Derek Slaton, the author, took on this project. He also explains that this is the first of four volumes and this book represents 25% of the US game releases. Flipping the page we are presented with a very nice two page table of contents. The first game being “The Activision Decathlon” and the last being “Double Dragon”. The games are listed in alphabetical order. This table of contents is extremely helpful when trying to jump straight to particular game right away. Flipping the page yet again we are presented with the first two pages of the book. The page numbers are presented on the bottom left and right corners of each page. At the top left we have the games title, the release year and the name of the programmer of the game, if known, a real nice touch. At the bottom in the footer area, it also lists the publisher, controller type, number of players, genre, and the games rarity which is on a scale of one to ten, ten being the most rare. A couple of things missing from this are the size of the cartridge, 4k, 8k etc, and if the game is stereo or mono. Derek gives us a one page summary of each game, coupled with nice images of game art extracted from the box art, manuals, catalogs, and in game play. On the Activision Decathlon he even has images of the patches that were given out to top players of the time.
Now I am going to speak to the overall build quality of the book. I love the fact that it is a hard cover, glossy book and looks really great. However once you deep dive into the book you start to notice a few issues with the print quality. The page paper used within the book sort of reminds me of the print quality of the old “Computer Shopper” magazines. There are many, many, pages within my copy of the book with a vertical “bar” of faded out print. This is very unfortunate and really makes the book feel like too many corners were taken during print production. There is an atariage thread on this book which speaks to some of these issues. From what I gathered those of us that were early supporters of the book were rewarded with the initial defects. These printing issues have supposedly been corrected.
Derek is to be commended for the level of work and detail that has gone into the book, I could not even imaging how much of a monumental task this is, to cover all US games. If I am being a little bit critical, I would have like to have seen even more details on each game. It would have been nice to had each games history of development, a bit of trivia and some game play tips thrown in. Let me list a few examples. On the game Adventure, although he did mention that it was one of the early games that had an inventory system, and the first with an easter egg, he did not mention that Adventure was the first action adventure game ever released, creating a new Genre and that it sold over a million copies. Adventure was the first multi-screen Atari game. The bat in Adventure is the first video game character to have two states, agitated and non-agitated. Although Derek did mention the easter egg, he did not mention why Warren Robinett decided to included it within the game, the reason being that back then Atari did not give credit to any of its games authors. Also, the easter egg took up 5% of the available cartridge space.
Moving on to the game “Alien”, he mentions that this game is based on the movie, but he does not mention that this was the first video game based on the 1979 classic. He mentions the flame thrower but does not mention that this is the only Pac-Man game where Pac-Man has a defensive weapon.
Moving on the game “Berzerk”, this was an arcade port. The arcade version was associated with the first video game death. A 19 year old suffered a heart attack in 1981 shortly after playing the game. Also, Atariage offers a Voice Enhanced version of the game for the 2600 that has many of the popular arcade catch phrases, “Intruder alert”, “Chicken fight like a robot”, “The humanoid must not escape”.
In the game “Chopper Command”, on page 233, there is not an image of the Patch that activision gave out and he does not mention that this is essentially a Defender knock-off.
Okay, let me get off of my soapbox and just say that despite these omissions and inconsistencies, I still really like and recommend this book and I will be purchasing the remaining three volumes when they are released. The sheer amount of work, detail, and screenshots that went into it are fantastic. Check the notes at the bottom for links on how to purchase this book. Stay tuned for an un-related bonus segment…
Youtube Original Post Date: 09/20/2015
