The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect

Abstract

The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect Chris Melissinos and Patrick O'Rourke New York: Welcome Books, 2012. Contents, images, credits. 215 pp. $40.00 paper. ISBN: 9781599621098The Art of Video Games, by Chris Melissinos and Patrick O'Rourke, published in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is a catalog and companion to a high-profile exhibition of the same name that opened at the Smithsonian facility in Washington, DC, in 2012 and is scheduled to travel to many regional museums. This is a lushly illustrated coffee-table book that offers readers full-page, color photographs and succinct summaries of video games, descriptions of their significance, and interviews with many of their creators. Slick and gorgeous, the book offers an important permanent, widely distributable, inexpensive complement to the exhibition.Given the noise the Smithsonian exhibition has stirred up, the bar was high for Melissinos and O'Rourke: the authors needed to prove video games worthy of the moniker "art" and of their standing as part of the "record of the American experience," to pull a quote from the museum's publicity. But for those of us who have long been making, studying, using, and advocating for video games, the mere fact of the exhibit and its publication counts as a success-not so much because the likes of game designers David Crane and Ron Gilbert now find a place beside artists David Hockney and Mary Cassatt, but because video games do belong in a record of the American experience. Melissinos and O'Rourke deserve praise for having spearheaded the project.Beyond that abstract victory, The Art of Video Games is a bittersweet triumph for those with a more nuanced interest in and understanding of video game history. The book's organization of the history of video games into five eras offers an admirable summary of the key trends and shifts in the gaming landscape. Of course, so did earlier illustrated histories such as Rusel DeMaria and Johnny L. Wilson's High Score! The Illustrated History of Video Games (McGraw Hill, 2002), though the latter never reached beyond the enthusiast and is now out of print.But while the shiny pages and fullcolor spreads telegraph official approval, the content is sometimes incomplete and inaccurate. I will pick as an example something I know well, the 1977 Atari Video Computer System (VCS), also known as the Atari 2600. The authors get a lot right. Their coverage of VCS titles such as Pitfall! and the Atari port of Pac-Man, for example, discusses the important technical and historical situations that influenced the creation of these games. But they are less sure-footed in their discussion of Combat, the pack-in title that shipped with the Atari VCS in 1977. They correctly identify it as a port of the Key Games title Tank, but they also draw the conclusion that "developers were just starting to learn how to wring experience from the new platform. As such, Combat was a two-player activity with no computer-controlled competitor in the game" (p.15). There's no denying that the title is two-player only, but the reasons for that are more complicated than this conclusion warrants. In fact, video games of the mid-1970s were primarily two-player head-to-head affairs, and the VCS platform was designed to facilitate such experiences-and not much else. …