Game Over (book)

Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children

Cover of the first edition
Author David Sheff
Country United States
Language English
Publisher Random House, Inc. (New York)
Publication date
 1993
Media type Hardcover, paperback
Pages 445 (First edition, including index)
ISBN 0-679-40469-4
OCLC 26214063
338.7/617948/0952 20
LC Class HD9993.E454 N577 1993

Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children is a non-fiction book written by David Sheff and published by Random House, New York in 1993.

Overview

The book details the modern history of Nintendo Company, Limited and its rise to become the most powerful electronic gaming company in the world as of 1993. The book also provides a history of the worldwide electronic gaming industry as a whole from the 1960s to the 1990s.

The book is notable in that the author extensively interviewed numerous established figures in the industry, such as Howard Lincoln, Nolan Bushnell, Shigeru Miyamoto (misspelled as "Sigeru" in the book), Alexey Pajitnov, and others, including people who spoke anonymously. Although bearing a very specific title, the book is fairly neutral; it mainly relates the history of the company while looking at both the positives and negatives of their business practices.

Portions of the book were originally published in San Francisco Focus, Men's Life, Rolling Stone, and Playboy magazines.

Revisions

Since its initial publication, Game Over has been reprinted under many different titles, although usually retaining the term "Game Over" somewhere in the title. One example is Game Over: Nintendo's Battle to Dominate Videogames.

Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World, an edition published by Vintage Press in 1994, contains a new foreword written by author David Sheff pertaining to the controversy over video game content in the early 1990s.

In 1999, a revised edition of the book titled Game Over: Press Start to Continue – The Maturing of Mario (referencing Nintendo's famous character Mario) was released. Among error corrections, photographs and new chapters written by Andy Eddy were added.

An edited version was printed by Coronet Books and given away free with the May 1999 issue of Arcade magazine.

References