TITLE: All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture
AUTHOR: Harold Goldberg
PUBLISHER: Three Rivers Press
MSRP: $15.00
RELEASED: April 5, 2011

By Eric Stuckart
Creator, Destroyer

Gamers are a fickle crowd. After a couple of decades of being patronized, we’re a crowd of people that don’t like being pandered to or spoken down to in a manner that would further justify that pandering.

However, we’re also a crowd that tends to just as often almost — I said almost — deserve that very patronization that we so claim to despise. And while Harold Goldberg’s All Your Base Are Belong to Us does a wonderful and informative job of detailing some half a century of video game history, such is my biggest problem with the book.

I suppose that a problem like that is easily overlooked, but when you’re reading a book whose sole purpose — it says so on the cover — is to explain how video game culture was able to overcome all of the stereotypes and obstacles that were in its way, clunky dialogue that feels the need to reference video games in a way that’s unnatural and unnecessary doesn’t help.

One of the first and many occurrences of this take place in the prelude chapter. “I passed indistinguishable tall apartment complexes with ratty balconies like something out of Gears of War.” Really?!!? I dunno, maybe I’m being a jerk here, but I don’t really think of video game landscapes when I see things in real life. At least not in that sense. I mean, from time to time, maybe, but the bigger point is that I don’t need a bunch of quirky analogies thrown at me in order for me to tackle a three hundred plus page non-fiction book. Also, some of Goldberg’s stories venture into TMI territory just ever so slightly. I didn’t really feel the need to know that Rockstar Games’ Sam and Dan Houser were rambunctious and fought a lot as children. Perhaps it’s just me.

Fortunately, that’s the biggest issue I have with the content at hand, and there’s a ton to dive into. The histories of everything from the early days of Pong and Atari and the precursor to that, all the way to developer Chair Entertainment and their masterpiece downloadable title Shadow Complex get a very in depth treatment. Through the use of hundreds of interviews that took a few years to conduct, there’s a lot to be found within the pages of All Your Base.

Some readers may be turned off by Goldberg’s sometimes conversational style, which once again contradicts the goal to allow gamers and gamer culture to be taken with an air of seriousness, and he tends to overuse certain phrases. Part of me kind of wishes I had kept count of the word ‘crestfallen,’ because for a word that I’ve never heard people use often, it was very noticeable. Also, some may be equally turned off by the general lack of Eastern developers discussed in the book. Aside from a chapter on Nintendo and some very interesting back story on game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, there weren’t any chapters devoted to any other Japanese developers. At the end of the book, there were a great many stories that I was hoping to read.

That being said, I would have loved to read anything about Capcom, Squaresoft and Enix (in their early, pre-merger days), Konami or Sega, but for all I know, Goldberg could have tried to get a hold of those companies and failed. Either way, it’s a glaring omission to an otherwise very interesting read. Ultimately, I don’t think that All Your Base Are Belong to Us really explains how video games conquered pop culture; that’s a very lofty goal that I’m not sure gamers are yet able to achieve. And besides, the stories and information more than make up for that — occasional awkward dialogue notwithstanding — and that’s the important part.

RATING: 8/10

Photo of Goldberg from randomhouse.com, All  Your Base… meme image from the internet.