ReadItDaddy's First Book of the Week - Week Ending 5th January 2018 - "The Comic Book Story of Videogames" by Jonathan Hennessey and Jack McGowan (Watson Guptil)

Our first Book of the Week of the new year! Hooray! Combining two of our great loves, videogames and comics - here's a sublime slice of the history of electronic gaming.
Way back in the days before Charlotte was born, I used to write about videogames. My painfully awkward reviews of various games may not have been the best 'read' ever, but videogames have been a huge obsession of mine for over 40 years.

Ugh, has it really been that long since I first spotted a strange looking machine nestling in the corner of the cafe at the Picketts Lock Leisure Centre in London, and decided to investigate?

That machine was a variant of Pong - one of the first "proper" arcade games. Not the actual Pong machine itself, but some cheap knock-off, like a stand-up version of those TV games everyone would later pick up for an extortionate amount of money, that had you batting pixels around using a paddle controller, purporting to offer you a realistic simulation of sports like tennis, football and squash.

In "The Comic Book Story of Videogames" by Jonathan Hennessey and Jack McGowan, you'll find an amazing fact-filled slice of videogaming history presented in a series of brilliantly illustrated comic panels.

Pong - The original sports game that kicked off my ridiculous obsession with videogames (well, at least a clone of it did!)

For old-skool gamers like me, it's a fairly potted history at times but does at least give you a lot more background on some of the characters who kicked off the videogaming revolution, and went on to become legends in their own right.

Folk like Steve "Woz" Wozniak and Richard "Lord British" Garriot, and of course the hugely famous and successful Shigeru Myamoto. These amazing figures all had their own contributions to an industry that has become a gigantic global entertainment phenomenon, seeping into just about every aspect of our lives whether we want it to or not.

The history of amusement arcades goes back as far as mechanical machines and pinball tables, long before proper videogames came along and stole the show

For me, the book brought all sorts of memories bubbling to the surface. Memories of the first time I saw Taito's Space Invaders - and ended up blowing my entire holiday budget on that (and various other early 80s arcade games) much to the annoyance of my parents (who would probably have liked it better if I'd spent the money on ice creams and naff seaside gifts).

Shigeru Myamoto. Mario's Dad! Have you ever seen that guy without a big beaming smile on his face?

Memories of playing some of the early text-based RPGs and adventures on home microcomputers with less processing power than your mobile phone.

By association it also looks like I've unwittingly become part of this book's version of videogame history as well. There's a comic panel featuring a certain issue of awesome 80s computer games magazine "Zzap 64" - the very issue I had a reader letter published in (if you ever hunt out a copy, look for a letter entitled "Soooooo Excellent" and see if you recognise the writing style :)

It goes without saying that the book was also fantastic for Charlotte, who has grown up in an era where videogames are increasingly more realistic, where virtual reality has now become a viable entertainment medium in its own right, and where touch screen devices can offer up a bit of gaming distraction on the move with minimum effort.

Teaching her some of the history of videogames, not just via this book but via a long boring series of my own personal anecdotes did at least unearth something surprising. Kids still love to hear about (and play) those old-skool classics. So this book is undoubtedly going to find a hugely broad audience.

"The Comic Book Story of Videogames" by Jonathan Hennessey and Jack McGowan is out now, published by Watson Guptil (kindly supplied for review).