PLAY! A HISTORY OF VIDEO GAMES is a fascinating account of the strange birth and extraordinary evolution of the most important form of entertainment since the advent of television - video games.

The book is based on exhaustive research and over 140 exclusive interviews with influential people in the video game industry. The book tells the astonishing story of how the creative vision of game developers led to the emergence and emergence of one of the most popular and dynamic art forms in the world.

A visitor to Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958 looked at an oscilloscope screen and which displayed thin lines and dots, would you have thought that from all this a completely new environment with powerful creative potential would be born? Few people were sure of this in the early 1970s, when slot machines with the ringing name Pong began to appear in pubs and gaming halls. Everyone laughed in the mid-eighties at what everyone thought was a ridiculous attempt by the Japanese company Nintendo to return video games to a cultural context. By the mid-2000s, when video games overtook cinema in terms of profitability and interest, no one laughed anymore, but accepted it as a fact.

In just 60 years, video and computer games have come a fast way from the specific entertainment of scientists to a full-fledged and rapidly developing artistic environment. In his book Play! The History of Video Games, British journalist Tristan Donovan meticulously explores the path that video and computer games have taken since their inception in the post-war world. “The real story of video games is the story of human creativity, aided by technological growth,” explains Donovan himself. “The purpose of Play! is to celebrate the vitality and rich creative imagination of the most talented game creators and talk about why the development of video games has gone the way it has.” otherwise."

Donovan is not interested in the technological race around which everything that happens in the gaming environment seems to revolve, but in how, with the help of technical means, a person realizes his ideas, expanding the boundaries of the gaming environment.

The 648 pages tell in some detail the history of the formation and development of video and computer games not only in the USA and Japan, but also in Europe and Asia. Describes the origins and evolution of all major game genres. Examples of the active influence of the gaming environment on modern popular culture are given in an easy and fun way. Especially for the Russian edition, Tristan Donovan wrote an additional chapter about the modern realities of the gaming industry and its Russian part. This is the first book in Russian that studies in such detail the history of the formation and evolution of video and computer games.