Review by C.J. Bunce
Not many books give you goosebumps as they take you back to a moment in time. How do you create not only a new game, but a new industry? Your next time travel adventure needs to be Arjan Terpstra and Tim Lapetino’s giant look back at not only Pac-Man but the rise of video games. It’s Pac-Man: Birth of an Icon, simply an incredible, deep dive into the development of the video game and all its incarnations from its beginnings as Puck-Man, almost called Paku-emon (sound familiar?). From development via pinball, coin-op, and theme park companies Namco, Bally, and Midway (and side-dances with Atari), fans of 1970s and 1980s nostalgia will see how a few key players in Japan created Pac-Man, and even more around the world expanded it into an icon–all out of 111 yellow flashes of light on a computer screen. The giant book is full of vintage photographs, marketing materials, corporate and engineering design notes, and much more. Pac-Man: Birth of an Icon might be the best video game history yet, and it’s now available here at Amazon.
