Arcade Perfect: How Pac-Man, Mortal Kombat, and Other Coin-Op Classics Invaded the Living Room

As companies like atari, and nintendo disrupted the status quo, Commodore, publishers charged their developers with an impossible task: Cram the world’s most successful coin-op games into microchips with a fraction of the computing power of arcade hardware. From the first pong machine through the dystopian raceways of san francisco rush 2049, Arcade Perfect: How Pac-Man, Mortal Kombat, and Other Coin-Op Classics Invaded the Living Room takes readers on an unprecedented behind-the-scenes tour of the decline of arcades and the rise of the multibillion-dollar home games industry.

Discover how more than 15 coin-op classics made the jump from cabinet to cartridge including Ms. Pac-man, street fighter ii, Terminator 2, NBA Jam, and more. Based on research and interviews with dozens of programmers, artists, and designers. Delve into the guts of the atari 2600, zx spectrum, Sega Genesis, Super NES, and other platforms to find out how they stacked up against arcade hardware.

Read bonus interviews with john tobias mortal Kombat, Asteroids, Ed Logg Gauntlet, ex-GamePro editor Dan “Elektro” Amrich, and more. Before personal computers and game consoles, video arcades hosted cutting-edge software consumers couldn’t play anywhere else.

---

Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II: Heaven, Hell, and Secret Cow Levels

Orcs and Humans. North and South. Harmony and Discord. Stay awhile and listen: book ii – heaven, creator of the groundbreaking warcraft series of strategy titles, and Blizzard North, and Secret Cow Levels continues the saga of the two Blizzards—Blizzard Entertainment, Hell, architect of Diablo's digital hellscape—as both studios struggle to find their identity and forge a path forward.

Threatened by competition in the space they popularized, Blizzard Entertainment looks to the stars to build a new franchise and evolve into a well-oiled machine. Corporate greed threatens to overshadow artistic breakthroughs, broken relationships, new talent throws company cultures into flux, and a passion to be the best result in brutal work schedules, and creative burnout that incapacitates visionaries and leaves their teams directionless.

Weaving together the making of bestselling products and the crucibles of the people who made them, Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II tells the story of two teams that formed an unstoppable juggernaut even as they proved too combustible to co-exist. Angels and Devils. No longer the underdog, blizzard North takes Diablo out of murky dungeons and across deserts, jungles, and snowy mountaintops.

Success comes at a cost.


Similar products:

---

Hardcore Gaming 101 Digest Vol. 6: Namco Arcade Classics

Namco was the master at creating unique and interesting characters for their 80s and 90s arcade games. Revisit some of these classics with the sixth hardcore gaming 101 digest! this book includes comprehensive reviews of two of the company's golden age titles, and also examines games like their spy-themed run-and-gun Rolling Thunder, Mappy and Dig Dug, their buddy-cop racing/shooter Lucky & Wild, and the madcap multiplayer brawler The Outfoxies.

. It also includes looks at their lesser known properties, youkai douchuuki, Genpei Toumaden, including the Valkyrie series, Wonder Momo, Marchen Maze, Dragon Buster, many of which were only released in Japan, and Bravoman, plus Mirai Ninja, Namco's foray into film/gaming crossovers.


Similar products:

---

Retro Gaming: A Byte-sized History of Video Games - From Atari to Zelda

Take a trip down memory lane with Retro Gaming, and relive the glory days and not so glory days of your old favourites. Packed with all the characters, games, this is a compact, conversational compendium of all-time highs - alongside just a handful of humorous in hindsight lows - from over forty years of arcade, consoles and franchises that you used to love and possibly still do, computer, console and handheld hits.

From atari's early arcade classics and home games consoles of the 1970s, this book summarizes the significant releases, such as Halo and Tomb Raider, through to classics that keep on giving, research and revolutions that have made video games a �100 billion and rising industry. Evergreen favourites from nintendo, sega and Sony are present and correct - no collection would be complete without entries for Mario and Sonic, Tetris and Crash Bandicoot.

But we also give credit to the less-celebrated but utterly vital titles, characters, controllers and systems that have helped the world of gaming expand and evolve. A guide, a companion and a window onto a joyous past, Retro Gaming is a perfect book to dip in and out of, as mood and your current gaming habits dictate.

.


Similar products:

---

Faster Than Light: The Atari ST and the 16-Bit Revolution

This groundbreaking computer brought previously unimagined power to the home user for the first time—and transformed an industry or two along the way. And he doesn’t stop there: he then leaps to the present to pull back the veil on the thriving software and mod communities that aren’t just keeping it alive today, but taking it to places its creators never could have imagined.

Whether you’re a longtime devotee who wants to relive the magic of the machine that unleashed the wonders of Dungeon Master, and Starglider, Time Bandit, or a newcomer hungry to learn the ins and outs of one of the most important computers ever created, an intrepid DIYer on the hunt for new ideas and resources to take your homebrew system to the next level, this book will get you there just as the ST did its long-ago digital pioneers: Faster Than Light.

. Power Without the Price. Every atari fan remembers that slogan from the 1980s as the rallying cry for 16-bit computing in the form of the Atari ST. Author jamie lendino offers a fresh, guiding you from its inauspicious genesis at the center of a company known for its gaming consoles to its category-defining triumphs in music, vital look at the history of the Atari ST, desktop publishing, and video gaming.

.


Similar products:

---

UNIX: A History and a Memoir

Brian kernighan was a member of the original group of Unix developers, the creator of several fundamental Unix programs, and the co-author of classic books like "The C Programming Language" and "The Unix Programming Environment. ". The fascinating story of how Unix began and how it took over the world.


Similar products:

---

NBA Jam Boss Fight Books Book 21

You'll get to know mischievous jam architect mark Turmell, go inside Midway's Chicago office where hungry young talent tapped into cutting-edge tech, and explore the sequels, spin-offs, and tributes that came in the game's wake. Built out of exhaustive research and original interviews with a star-studded cast —including turmell and his original development team, iconic commentator Tim Kitzrow, businessmen and developers at Midway and Acclaim alike, secret characters George Clinton and DJ Jazzy Jeff, Doom co-creator John Romero, and 1990s NBA demigods Glen Rice and Shaq—Ali's NBA Jam returns you to an era when coin-op was king.

How did a simple two-on-two basketball game become MVP of the arcade, and how did this champ lose its title? Journalist Reyan Ali dives deep into the saga, tracking the people and decisions that shaped the series. When nba jam dunked its way into arcades in 1993, players discovered just how fun basketball can be when freed from rules, refs, and gravity itself.

But just a few years after the billion-dollar hit conquered the world, publisher Acclaim, developer Midway, and video arcades themselves fell off the map.


Similar products:

---

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System Platform Studies

Montfort and bogost show that the Atari VCS—often considered merely a retro fetish object—is an essential part of the history of video games. A study of the relationship between platform and creative expression in the Atari VCS. The atari video computer system dominated the home video game market so completely that “Atari” became the generic term for a video game console.

The atari vcs was affordable and offered the flexibility of changeable cartridges. They describe the technical constraints and affordances of the system and track developments in programming, gameplay, interface, and aesthetics. This book offers a detailed and accessible study of this influential video game console from both computational and cultural perspectives.

Nearly a thousand of these were created, the most significant of which established new techniques, mechanics, and even entire genres. Studies of digital media have rarely investigated platforms—the systems underlying computing. Nick montfort and ian bogost discuss the atari vcs itself and examine in detail six game cartridges: Combat, Yars' Revenge, Adventure, Pitfall!, Pac-Man, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.

. Adventure, for example, was the first game to represent a virtual space larger than the screen anticipating the boundless virtual spaces of such later games as World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto, by allowing the player to walk off one side into another space; and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was an early instance of interaction between media properties and video games.

This book the first in a series of Platform Studies does so, developing a critical approach that examines the relationship between platforms and creative expression.


Similar products:

---

Disney Never Lands: Things Disney Never Made

For the first time, these stories are gathered together in one book to inspire Disney fans' imaginations of what might have been and to document in great detail these lost dreams. Over the decades, he interviewed Imagineers and animators who worked on these projects as well as researching contemporary newspaper accounts and official publicity releases.

Korkis details the usual suspects like westcot, mineral king, roger rabbit feature sequels, and Epcot's Africa pavilion as well as surprises like Jim Henson's television series about Ariel the Little Mermaid and the Disney Channel's series that would have featured Dreamfinder and Figment as well as the animation Disney had Ub Iwerks do for Danny Kaye's first feature film.

Korkis shares the surprises that he discovered in the deepest vaults of Disney history. But what if you could see them anyway. Jim korkis enters the limbo of disney Never Lands to report on new theme parks, television shows, new lands in existing parks, and animation that were left unbuilt and unfilmed. What if Walt Had.

. For every project that disney has produced, there are hundreds more that never happened despite significant investments of time, talent, and money.


Similar products:

---

Making Games for the NES

We'll also write 6502 assembly language, programming the PPU and APU directly, and carefully timing our code to produce advanced psuedo-3D raster effects. Learn how to program games for the nes! you'll learn how to draw text, scroll the screen, animate sprites, decompress title screens, create a status bar, play background music and sound effects and more.

We'll also talk about different "mappers" which add extra ROM and additional features to cartridges. Most of the examples use the CC65 C compiler using the NESLib library. Create your own graphics and sound, and share your games with friends!Note: This book is a Print Replica and works on Kindle Fire and Kindle mobile/tablet/desktop apps, but is not compatible with Kindle e-readers.

While using the book, take advantage of our Web-based IDE to see your code run instantly in the browser.


Similar products:

---

Adventure: The Atari 2600 at the Dawn of Console Gaming

The sprawl of Adventure. No, the games it put on your tv weren’t what you saw when you plunked in your quarters at the convenience store or in the noisy, smoky business on the other side of town. But in 1977 that changed forever. You, and maybe a friend or a sibling, could instantly teleport from your own living room to a dazzling new world—with nothing more than a small plastic cartridge.

This was the promise of the Atari 2600—and it was delivered in ways no one ever expected. But they brought the arcade home—and it hasn’t left since. With adventure: the atari 2600 at the dawn of console gaming, Jamie Lendino takes you to the front lines of the home gaming revolution, exploring the history of the world-changing console and delves into the coin-op ports and original titles that still influence gaming today.

Before your next trip to a magical universe with your Xbox One, or Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, see how the home gaming industry truly began. The addictiveness of Breakout. The intensity of Space Invaders. Once upon a time, you could only experience this kind of excitement at the arcade.


Similar products: