A few come to mind.
"Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured your dollars,
and enslaved your children", by David Sheff. Random House, 1993. Great
book on the history of Nintendo, their American operations, and their effect
on the US Market, esp. retail channels. Lots of information on the Tetris
scandal, retail price fixing, etc. Its an amazing read if you have the
time. Paperback is still in print I believe. (Did you know Nintendo
consumed 3% of the semiconductors produced in Japan in 1992?)
"Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of Videogames", by Leonard Herman. Rolenta
Press. Leonard is a truly amazing historian, and covers basically a upto
the publication history of all systems and the market during their release.
An excellent book, although it may not have too much information on the
social impact.
Dick Bueschel's books on pinball, named Pinball 1 and Pinball 2, are
excellent, although perhaps not within your scope. Dick before he passed
away was quite the historian of pinball and its effects, and commentary is
contained in his analysis of the history of the game. Many social impacts
are discussed throughout. Unfortunately, Dick passed away far before
finishing the intended 10 volumes, leaving late-model history for someone
else to discuss. Incidentally, there's a video called History of Pinball
that's pretty good and has some good factual information. But, again, this
is probably before the period you seek, and I digress. There's a few good
books on pinball artwork too, for example, backglasses of wartime periods,
happier periods, social outcry, etc. Again, I digress. There's a ton more
pinball stuff because its impact is far more measurable due to the time that
has passed since that period. Tough to measure something so recent...
http://www.videogamespot.com/features/universal/hov/index.html has a
"History of Video Games", written by the afformentioned Leonard Herman and a
few others, worth checking out, has a few useful things for what you might
need.
I also swore to god there was either a paper, magazine article, or small
book written on the effect of Pac-Man on American society, had lots of
information on kids pilfering their parents coin collections to play,
associated crimes, and other outrageous but factual accounts -- now I have
no idea where it is. Perhaps an old issue of Arcade magazine or something
of the sort.
-Dan
--
Dan Mowczan, xxxxxx@home.com
> From: "Landis" <xxxxxx@rochester.rr.com>
> Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 13:53:27 -0400 (EDT)