Second paragraph of third chapter:

Before all of these looms Adventure, Warren Robinett’s second game for Atari. (His first, Slot Racers, was a combat racing game in which each player navigated a rudimentary slot car through a maze, attempting to fire a bazooka and hit the opposing player’s car.) Robinett was the first Atari employee who had a degree in computer science, which may have had something to do with his visiting the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and encountering another kind of maze there – one that would inspire the cartridge he created. The game he devised was not at all obvious at the time, but it would manage to establish the basic conventions of the graphical adventure.

I know very little about computer games, and still less about the early history of the Atari system; but sometimes it does you good to read about a field of human endeavour with which you are completely unfamiliar. This is a tremendous analysis of how coding is affected by external factors, especially the way in which the business of game development is financed and structured, but also from learning about player preferences and making crazy bets about game features which turn out to pay off (or not).

This slim volume looks in depth at six games, only one of which I had heard of – Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars’ Revenge, Pitfall and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, but also in passing at the other games developed before or at the same time in each case, to paint a picture of the intellectual moment in which the writing of the game took place. There is a modest amount of machine code, but a lot of analysis of how ideas get turned into player experience. I don’t think I have retained very much of the information, but I come away struck by the cultural profundity of the whole enterprise. Recommended even for those like me who are not immersed in the subject. You can get it here.

This was my top book acquired in 2019 which is not by H.G. Wells. Next on that pile is The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless.