Video Game History with Steven L Kent (Part Four)

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Here's a sample of the full show notes - make sure to click through and check them out.

Show Notes

This is the final part - of four - of a conversation with author and video game historian Steven L Kent, and is a collaboration between ourselves and Zoom Platform. Whilst this is an audio episode, it was originally recorded as a pair of video interviews. What we've done is cut the two video interviews into four parts and will be releasing them as audio episodes. But if you'd rather watch the first two parts as a video you'll find it here.

Don't forget to check out the other parts of the conversation:

part onepart twopart three

And all four parts of our interview with Steven can be found here.

The Final Part

In his own words, Steven describes his books as

My books are called "The Ultimate History of Video Games".

Volume 1 starts out with Abraham Lincoln and Bagatelle, and goes all the way to 2000 and sort of the collapse of the Dreamcast - or it's about to collapse, you can tell that it's faltering - PlayStation 2 has been announced and is just coming out, and Xbox has been announced.

Book two has some overlap, because there will be some people who read volume 2 without reading volume 1, so it's got a bunch of overlap. But what's interesting is that I thought I'd be able to go from 2000 to the present, but I only got to 2012. So volume three should come out around 2026.
- Steven L Kent

As with part three of our discussion, we reached out to you all - aka, the community - for questions that you would like to as Steven. And we had some doosies of questions to go through. Starting with...

2) Which Was The Best Console?

this is question 2 because the first question was asked in the previous part

Our first question was from Unaffiliated JZ and it was:

Which was the best console ever, and why was it the SNES?
- Unaffiliated JZ

And this started a wonderful conversation about the 16-bit generation, how Steven thought that it dragged on for a little too long, and which were his favourite consoles.

I think that the Super NES was a fabulous console, I really do. Head and shoulders above its competitors. And when I say "its competitors," - here I am sticking my foot in my mouth again - really, truthfully I group the 3DO and the Jaguar in with the Super NES that I do with the Saturn and the PlayStation and the N64.
- Steven L Kent

And we all tended to agree with the time periods that Steven had chosen, as it had lead to huge innovation in video games, storytelling, gameplay, and technology. Jay also mentions one of his oft-told stories from Masters of Doom, Super Mario Bros. 3, and a Cease and Desist letter from Nintendo.

3) Retro Game Collecting of the Future

Would be interesting to also know their take on what modern titles will be historically relevant in 20 years.
What does a top 10 list of games look like in 20, 30 years? Will people be clamouring for a cartridge copy of breath of the wild?
- Glanks

Which is an amazing question that looks into the future of gaming. What _will_ retro game top-tens look like in 20 years? Will we all be writing op-eds about how

Video games?! Video games?! Pah! I was there at the start. There were 256 colours, 8 bits, and two buttons on your controller. And that was all you needed
- Crotchety old Jay

4) Sequels and Weird IP

The NES had a weird streak of taking an a completely different game and slapping nintendo IP on it and calling it a sequel - what are your thoughts on this?
- MadVikingGod

Which started a conversation about the best and worst sequels that video games have ever had - including Double Dragon, Super Mario Bros., Nintendo being incredibly progressive and Capcom being accidentally progressive as a way to get around the Nintendo seal of approval.

5) What About PC?

I’d love to learn their thoughts on PC gaming history, too. A lot of coverage seems to be centred around consoles (WoW being the exception). Like, what genres of games have PC gaming to thank (MMOs being the top of the list, I’d say)?
- Tyren

Interestingly, Steven was originally planning to write two separate books:

One on the history of video game consolesOne on the history of PC video games

But the biggest barrier was that PC gaming history is so sprawling; and, quite frankly, the history of video game consoles is much more interesting.

6) The Question of Difficulty

Do you think the older games are harder, or is it that the newer games are easier?
- Squidge

And Steven came out of left-field with his answer, but is completely and utterly right with what he says. And no, his point wasn't _just_ about the fact that arcade games were designed to be played for 5-10 seconds at a time.

When Defender came out, people said, "this is impossible! There are four buttons!"
- Steven L Kent

Full Show Notes

Make sure to check out the full show notes for more discussion on the points we raise, some extra meta-analysis, and some links to related things.

What have you been playing recently? Do you agree with the anonymous review that Chief read during this episode? What would you take with you to the Thunder Plains?

Let us know on Twitter, Facebook, leave a comment on the show notes or try our brand new contact page.

Links

Here are some links to some of the things we discussed in this episode:

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