Preface

Video games have been part of my life since my childhood, but I have found myself intensely interested in them during two periods: the early 1980s, and the years I have spent on this book.

I began the research for Atari Age not out of any particular desire for recapturing the past, but out of an interest in one aspect of the history of television. While writing about digital television innovations of the early twenty-first century, such as DVRs and online video, I wanted to understand a longer history of TV’s technological improvements. Ideas about video games in the 1970s, along with ideas about cable TV, videotape cassette recorders, and other new ways of using a TV set, were remarkably similar to ideas about television during the era of digital convergence. In particular, people assumed that TV was in need of a technological upgrade to give its viewers more agency and alleviate problems associated with mass media.¹ This book began as a project of tracing the history of interactive moving-image technologies, of entwining video game and television history. After all, the medium’s name includes a word that was for many years a synonym for TV, and “video games” was used interchangeably in the 1970s with “TV games.”

While looking into this connection, I discovered that relatively little had been written about early video games, particularly little social and cultural history of the medium as it emerged, and I became eager to help fill that gap.² Early cinema and early television had been studied in illuminating and influential historical work.³ Early video games, I thought, had the potential to be just as productive for historical study. I also saw that doing research on this topic would give me an excuse to read old magazines, which I knew would be fun. This book is the result.

Once immersed in research, it was probably unavoidable that I would come to an expanded understanding not only of games and related media, but also of my own childhood. Although it wasn’t my conscious agenda, I did relive my younger years through writing this. I was born in 1972, the same year as the debut of Pong, and I was ten years old in 1982, when the most desirable plaything in North America was an Atari 2600. I played video games including Tron, Tempest, and Ms. Pac-Man (as well as pinball games) at Uptown Variety, a convenience store on Eglinton Avenue I could ride my bike to from my family’s home in a residential neighborhood of Toronto. I played console games in the rec rooms of friends’ houses. I also played in arcades like the clean and respectable Video Invasion on Bathurst Street, where classmates had birthday parties, and some seedier, less wholesome spots on Yonge Street downtown, where I traveled by subway. I owned a few handheld electronic games, but we had no Atari console (or any of its rivals), and the family’s first PC arrived years later. My own parents were suspicious of video games and objected to their presence in our home. They shared a fear (which I discuss in chapter 5) with many other grown-ups at the time: that their children’s success in school and their childhood development could be threatened if they became addicted to playing Atari games all the time. As a result, I have always regarded video games, like many kinds of popular media, as something of a forbidden pleasure at odds with adults and their culture. This feeling lingers even now, when I have the Atari I so desperately wanted as a child.

I cannot really feel in middle age what I might have as a child. Some early games are disappointingly dull or confusing to me now, though I love the candy-colored stripes of Super Breakout and the abstract splotches of Asteroids. Happily, the pleasures of clearing Ms. Pac-Man mazes of pellets and devouring blue ghosts have not faded. Writing this became an effort to substitute for my lost childhood thrills an intellectual pleasure of producing insight and preserving the meanings of the past through their historical interpretation. My mom and dad’s refusal must, at least in some tiny way, be an origin point for this book, so in retrospect I can be grateful for the deprivation. It has helped me to appreciate in a personal way what was so appealing and also so worrisome about video games when they were new.

Notes

1. Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (New York: Routledge, 2011); Michael Z. Newman, “Free TV: File-Sharing and the Value of Television,” Television and New Media 13, no. 6 (2012): 463–479.

2. Work published several years after I began my research includes Carly Kocurek, Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Arcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

3. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 3, no. 4 (1986): 63–70; Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (London: BFI, 1990); William Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Cecilia Tichi, Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).