Over the many decades I’ve been playing video games, I’ve owned enough books on the subject to fill a small library. As years have passed and space became more limited, many of these tomes went the way of friends, eBay, and charity stores. But there’s one book that I’ve never considered selling. One of my favourite video game book of all time. I’m talking about Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age 1971-1984.
Authored by American writer Van Burnham and published by MIT Press, Supercade is a glossy and stylish compendium of images from gaming’s golden era. Formatted in a classy, museum-style layout, Supercade boasts over 400 pages of colourful and exciting images of screenshots, photographs, flyers, and more – all taken from an era where gaming exploded onto the scene and took the entire planet by storm – right before the crash came and ruined the party. It’s a treasure trove of arcade history.
For years I’ve hoped that we’d see a sequel, focusing on the re-birth and boom that took place in the video game industry after said crash. And now, almost 20 years after Supercade was first published, Van Burnham is ready to pen such a sequel.
Source: Destructoid Supercade, one of the finest gaming retrospectives ever written, is getting a sequel