In The Comic Book Story of Video Games, author Jonathan Hennessey and artist Jack McGowan reverse engineer the fascinating and often off-the-wall true history of video games — from their improbable origins among occultist scientist monkeying with glass tubes in the late 1800s to the AAA blockbusters of today whose graphics and gameplay blow our minds and whose DLC clog our bandwidth.

As in no other book, the graphic novel format whisks readers to the times and places where it came together... And sets us face to face with the people who made it all happen: television tinkerers, striving Japanese businessmen, steel-jawed Cold War military men, provocateurs with Ph.D.s., and modders up all night scripting their latest overhaul on a heart-pounding sugar rush.

Too many gamers don't know their own story. And this is a story about them. The Comic Book Story of Video Games is the patch we have all been waiting for to reconnect gaming's past with its present.  
The idea of telling the history of video games in a graphic novel is a radically inventive idea, and Jonathan Hennessey and his team have done an amazing job of it. It is chock full of fascinating stories about the people who laid the foundation for the technologies we take for granted today. I wish my history textbooks from high school had been this cool. I highly recommend this book!
Warren Davis
designer/programmer of Q*Bert

FROM EARLY DAYS...

Not that you a computer is a must-have if you want to play a video game. It's not! Some of the classics of the medium, like Pong, had not a microchip under the hood. And some others — including the first game that we know was actually played by a kid — were put together with pieces of purely analog gear.

But did you know that some of the earliest computers were contrived so the U.S. Army could better calculate the trajectories of artillery shells?

Much of America's forward strides both with pure numerical processing power and with consumer electronics like television screens came about directly because of massive government, academic, and military investment in research, development, and manufacturing.

In The Comic Book Story of Video Games, you'll learn that American video games evolved in lock step with its military might... And that a staggering number of gaming's most influential people and companies are inextricable from the experience of World War II.

...TO LATER DAYS.

Beginning with video games' hugely successful transplantation to the country that arguably bore the greatest brunt of American military firepower in World War II — Japan — the medium has jolted forward in surprising ways ever since.

When personal computers first appeared on the horizon, the sobering truth is that most people could find no good use for them. Except, that is, playing video games.

Gamers' appetite for ever more gripping and fully realized visuals, sound, and real-time interaction drove innovation in the computing industry in ways that have proven to have changed the world forever — and multiplying computers' value to science, medicine, communication, and more.

The Comic Book Story of Video Games weaves together the icons of gaming with sharp observations on the pop culture, history, and politics of decade after decade of our ever more game-obsessed world. You won't believe how much video games can teach us about ourselves.