Gaming History

In the 1970s, Atari became the leader in home video gaming with the Atari 2600. But were they the first? And how did it evolve into the revolutionary games and systems of today? Listen to learn the answers to these questions and more.

Steven L. Kent has been playing video games since Pong and writing about the industry since the Nintendo Entertainment System. In volume 1 of The Ultimate History of Video Games, he chronicled the industry’s first thirty years. In volume 2, he narrates gaming’s entrance into the twenty-first century, as Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and Microsoft battle to capture the global market.

Bloomberg tech journalist Mark Bergen delivers the definitive account on YouTube, detailing how it started, how it works and ultimately how it drives Google's success. It can be seen as the story of a technical marvel that has upended traditional media and created stars out of everyday people, or the story of the rise of a ruthless advertising conglomerate with little regard for its impact on the world beyond the bottom line—but in reality, it's the story of both.

One of Michiko Kakutani's (New York Times) top 10 books of 2016. A funny thing happened on the way to the digital utopia. We've begun to fall back in love with the very analog goods and ideas the tech gurus insisted that we no longer needed. Businesses that once looked outdated, from film photography to brick-and-mortar retail, are now springing with new life. Notebooks, records, and stationery have become cool again.

Herman Narula argues that it is all of these things. His vision of the metaverse, deeply rooted in history and psychology, looks to the Egyptians, whose conception of death inspired them to build the pyramids, to modern-day sports fans whose fantasy leagues are as competitive as the real thing, and finds that humanity has always sought to supplement our day-to-day lives with a rich diversity of alternative immersive experiences.

Die Videospiele-Industrie sorgt seit Jahrzehnten nicht nur für virtuelle Unterhaltung, sondern sie schreibt einige ihrer größten Geschichten in Form von Skandalen, Kontroversen und denkwürdigen Ereignissen auch selbst. Dabei ist alles: von unterhaltsam und amüsant bis hin zu ekelhaft und abstoßend, aber auch überraschend.

Na sowas! Nintendo zeigt Super Marios Schniedel in einem Manga. Was es mit dem Gamer-Blase-Weltrekord auf sich hat. Als ein wütender Mitarbeiter die Kontrolle über ein Kinder-MMO übernahm. Niemand kann Tetris besiegen. Abnehmen mit den Angry Birds? Der Drogenrausch im Pilzkönigreich. Die Queen spielte Wii. Ein Arcade-Spiel gibt Verlierern Elektroschocks. Wenn ein Spiel Kinder beleidigt. Ein Popo-Foto sorgte für eine Release-Verschiebung.

Gambling captures as nothing else the drama of the "long eighteenth century" between the age of religious wars and the age of revolutions. The society that was confronted with games of chance pursued as commercial ventures also came to grips with unprecedented social mobility, floated by new wealth from new sources created fortunes from trade in sugar, cotton, ivory, silk, tea, or enslaved human beings. The Gambling Century focuses like no previous work on those who enabled, facilitated, and profited from gambling, as well as on efforts to regulate or outlaw it.

If you want to change your life during the coming metaverse bull run, then keep reading. When Facebook changed its name to Meta, everybody and their dog started talking about the metaverse and how it will be the next big thing. But how many people know what they are talking about? That is why we wrote this audiobook to help you become a profitable investor in the metaverse; cryptocurrency, NFTs, virtual lands, and blockchain gaming will be the assets of the future, and you have to master them all if you want to succeed.

Before Indian casinos sprouted up around the country, a few enterprising tribes got their start in gambling by opening bingo parlors. A group of women on the Oneida Indian Reservation just outside Green Bay, Wisconsin, introduced bingo in 1976 simply to pay a few bills. Bingo not only paid the light bill at the struggling civic center but was soon financing vital health and housing services for tribal elderly and poor.

When video gaming started in the 70s, most people saw it as a bit of fun, but as the craze took hold, even in that decade, intellectuals and educationists began calling it "a stupid distraction", thinking that gamers were "dumb". This continued until fairly recently, and millions of disparaging words were written about video games and gamers.