The Games of a Lifetime

Pixels, Print, and Pure Nostalgia

If you spent the 90s squinting at a CRT and hoarding battered copies of Mean Machines, Julian "Jaz" Rignall's The Games of a Lifetime is aimed squarely at you. It's not a dry encyclopaedia of release dates and hardware specs. It's a memoir of an industry growing up, written by one of the people who covered it as it happened. Across 420 pages, Rignall runs through gaming's history in order, from the Space Invaders arcade days through to the modern era. The games are the backbone, but it's the personal stuff that carries it. He writes the way he always did in the mags: sharp, opinionated, fan-first. It's a lovely book, too. Bitmap Books rarely put a foot wrong, and the edge-to-edge printing makes the hundreds of carefully grabbed screenshots look great.

Excellent trip down memory lane

It was great reading about the journey Jaz has been on. There's a huge amount of content, I wasn't expecting it to be so detailed, but glad it is. It reminded me of my time in the arcades as a kid, minus the high scores ;)

Nostalgia Bomb

What a trip down memory lane this book has been so far. I'm still in 2004, a magical gaming year with the launch of iconic World of Warcraft and I'm loving this. I'm really enjoying reading Julian Rignall, and this style of book (someone's journey in video games) is so interesting, without taking the risk of becoming "boring" by being an autobiography, it has so much potential and I can imagine a dozen of other authors I would love to read in this format. Perhaps Bitmap can entice a few more people, and go for a "The Games of a Lifetime" collection!