Book 7: All Your Base Are Belong to Us

All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture

Harold Goldberg

It should be obvious from this book's title that Harold Goldberg's audience is a certain kind of videogame enthusiast, one who recognizes the badly butchered English of a poor (but iconic) translation. The catchy phrase pairs nicely with the subtitle, which purports to be- but never actually becomes- the book's thesis, but it should serve as a kind of warning. Despite possible overtures to the contrary, this book about the rise of the videogame industry seems to be meant for readers who have a fairly solid grasp of videogame history. My own experience with the medium is scattershot and largely confined to a particular era (I prefer the SNES and N64 to newer systems and suck at first-person shooters), and I found it difficult to follow the book as it described systems that I have never played (particularly in the early chapters) and games that I have never seen. Likewise, the game-based similes are charming at first, but they soon become a bit tiresome and wordy, as though Goldberg is showing his own familiarity with the subject matter rather than attempting to construct a useful literary comparison. These missteps and assumptions, which are especially pronounced in the first chapters for younger readers who have little or no firsthand experience with the earliest gaming systems, can be alienating and, ironically, undermine Goldberg's supposed thesis regarding games' rise to ubiquity.

And about that would-be thesis. All You Base Are Belong to Us purports to both dive into some of the most interesting developments in the gaming industry- and the games and/or developers who spawned them- and show how these moments contributed to a pop culture sensibility that is largely influenced by (and composed of) games. Goldberg largely succeeds on the first point: his retellings of pivotal moments are compelling and are clearly based on first-hand knowledge and, crucially, genuine passion. He clearly has respect for the industry's pioneers and appears to have chosen some of the most important, if not always the most popular, games and systems to illustrate the medium's rapid growth. The stories he tells are always interesting and always obviously important, but these anecdotes are rarely placed into their proper context. Not only is it often difficult to figure out when events are happening (both in actual and relative time), but there is rarely any exploration of the time between these signature moments or the industry-specific context surrounding them. Goldberg occasionally hints at drawing conclusions within and even (rarely) between various chapters, explaining how a particular innovation changed videogames, but this context is usually dropped as soon as the next chapter begins. A few segments are paired nicely, such as essays on EverQuest and its direct successor, World of Warcraft, but more often the book becomes less of a history and more of a group of interesting, loosely linked essays.

The essays are, again, interesting throughout, and obviously crafted by someone who has a very deep and personal appreciation of videogames. Goldberg has a knack for discovering and conveying the human stories beyond the bits and bytes, though the writing can occasionally stray into technicality a bit beyond the casual reader. Though it can be difficult to figure out why particular innovations were as earth-shattering as the author claims (particularly in the chapter about Grand Theft Auto III, which implies that it was the first open-world game in 3D but confusingly refers to other preexisting 3D titles), the book's descriptions of gameplay are accessible for those who have never played the games in question. Goldberg's writing can be mesmerizing at times and should easily convince skeptics that videogames are, indeed, a multifaceted art form with a unique history. He is hampered by the subtitle's stated objective and his failure to adequately present a cohesive story between chapters: he nails who, what, where, and (to a lesser extent) when, but struggles to always explain why the industry is where it is today and why the innovations he describes were truly revolutionary.

There are hints of a greater theme throughout the book, but too often Goldberg hits a warp pipe instead of playing through the levels: the reader finds themselves transported to World 8 without knowledge of most of Worlds 2-7. The writing itself is solid, aside from some ill-informed, strained, and self-aggrandizing analogies and a weird overuse of the word "nerd" that seems more disparaging than Goldberg surely intended, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention the charming design elements: each chapter opens on a page illustrated like a Pac-Man maze and section breaks are formed from a group of blocks straight out of Super Mario Bros. At the end of the day, though, All Your Base Are Belong to Us is a kind of echo chamber for gamers who already know the basics and Goldberg, despite clearly possessing the knowledge and ability to do so, fails to construct a compelling narrative about the videogame industry, settling instead for a series of compelling- but inherently disconnected- essays.

Grade: B