For all of the video game fans out there, whether you like old-school gaming, classic arcades, or even newer computer gaming, this book is a wealth of knowledge for understanding where some of the most iconic games got their start.

Without games like Q*bert, we wouldn't have the games we do today.

I really enjoyed reading this and learning more about the industry and the games.

I loved this book so much and now I'm sad I'm finished with it. If you love retro gaming, I'm sure you'll love it too. It's just that the guy who wrote the book seems to be one of those people you can't help falling in love with as you read. You just kind of want to actually know them and hang out with them, cause they're just so wholesome. The last such book for me was the memoir of the Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins (Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey).

But of course, it's not just that the author's vibe is lovely, the story itself was lovely to read. I happen to adore pinball and while the story was not about pinball, those industries intersected a lot at the time, so it was remarkably interesting to get a glimpse into the same offices of those legendary pinball companies. I guess I should find me some pinball nonfiction next.

I thank the publisher for giving me a free copy of the ebook in exchange to my honest review. This has not affected my opinion.

Warren Davis' "Creating Qbert and Other Classic Video Arcade Games" is a fun trip down memory lane. Revisit the neon-lit, coin-clinking world of 1980s and 1990s video arcade games. Davis, the creative genius behind the iconic Qbert, takes us on an amusing journey through the heart of the video game industry during its golden age.

With humor and insight, Davis shares anecdotes from his days as a designer and programmer at the industry's pioneering giants like Gottlieb, Williams/Bally/Midway, and Premiere. The ensemble of individuals he acquaints us with resembles a roster of gaming luminaries, featuring Eugene Jarvis, Ed Boon, and Jeff Lee, among others.

While Davis created Q*bert, he also made significant contributions to groundbreaking technology that reshaped the gaming landscape. His digitizing system, used in games like Mortal Kombat, allowed for realistic imagery, marking a turning point in the industry. His work on Exterminator introduced a novel joystick that detected both omni-directional movement and rotation, a true innovation at the time.

The book also reveals his experiences with iconic titles like NBA Jam, Revolution X, and Joust 2 -- like a backstage pass to the creative process and technical wizardry that brought these games to our lives!!

Davis' memoir is an engaging and entertaining read no matter if you are a nostalgic gamer reliving the era of arcades or a curious newbie eager to learn about the pioneers of the gaming world. "Creating Q*bert" is a tribute to a bygone era, a covenant to innovation, and is perfect for anyone who ever chased high scores in dimly lit arcades. Grab your quarters and prepare for an adventure through the pixelated wonderland of classic arcade games.

"A journey through the joysticks and pixels of gaming history."

"Unleash your inner gamer."

"An arcade odyssey -- Relive the golden age of video games."

"Exploring the mind of a gaming visionary."

"Gaming magic unveiled -- A look behind the screen."

"Nostalgia-infused gaming chronicles by a legendary creator."

"Coin-op classics and cutting edge innovation."

"Pixelated dreams and digital adventures."

"From pixels to pixels -- A tale of gaming evolution."

This memoir is Warren Davis' history with technology and his foray into creating video games, including the classic game, Q*bert. It was a bit "in the weeds" about the technical specs of the creation of the video game division in a pinball game company and the creation of Q*bert itself. (And this is coming from a family who has worked in the games industry for 30 years.). I was interested in Davis' story and the history of the development of the games division, but overall the book wasn't all that engaging. I would have enjoyed hearing more about Davis' history as an actor and improv actor, or more detail about the games industry at that time. The storyline in this book might be more interesting to those who really enjoy the technical details of the game, and unfortunately I am not one of those people. I think it's worth a borrow from the library and a skim, but I don't know that I'd necessarily evangelize this book as one of the best video game histories.

I, as previously mentioned in my review of John Romero’s forthcoming memoir, Doom Guy, adore nostalgia-drenched stories about the video game industry. It just feels good to read about these types of things in this dark, modern world of pandemics and political unrest. I knew before reading the first page of Warren Davis’s Creating Q*Bert and Other Classic Video Arcade Games that it would be delightful.

Davis, despite a bit of self-deprecation about his recollection ability in the introduction, seems to remember a great deal about his career in video games. Readers get an in-depth account of his creation of Q*Bert, co-creation of Us Vs. Them, and the work he put in on unreleased games like USSA. He also goes into detail about the innovative tools he designed for video digitization. All these stories are told in quite an engaging way without getting too bogged down in technospeak. There is SOME technospeak, but not enough to cause someone to yawn, regardless of how tech savvy they are.

Creating Q*Bert mostly focuses on Davis’s work in the arcade arena; however, you get details about his acting career, improv training, and his family life. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the early days of arcade gaming.

In the early 1980's, I was all about hanging out in the arcades on the weekends with my high school buddies - unloading quarters into those bright and colorful consoles to have some fun. Q*bert was one of my go-to games, even though I was not super good at it. For this reason, I was instantly attracted to Warren Davis' story.

Right from the start of his narrative, I totally connected with Davis. In the introduction, he talks about why he got into programming and his reasons very much mirrored my own in the early 80's when I decided to go to college to study computer science. I remember the wild enthusiasm that programming used to bring me. When that fire is there, designing and coding is a creative release, a joy. When that spark burns out, it becomes drudgery.

Having spent several decades in the software business myself, I found the details of the development, testing and release of Q*bert to be very engaging. It took me back. For those familiar with the field, this will resonate. However, I can also see it appealing to those completely unfamiliar with the process. Davis' delivery is entertaining and approachable, making sure to breakdown the technical details in easy-to-follow terms.

The rest of his career, bouncing from company to company and project to project, was relatable as well. Not every idea becomes a cultural icon but as noted, even some of the lesser hits are still fondly remembered by those that enjoyed them. I also appreciated that he kept pursuing his passions wherever they took him.

To begin with, I must say that I am not huge into video games or know much about the industry. However, I was drawn to this book from the appeal of learning more about the creative process of making them, and especially with such limiting technology. So, I decided to give it a go and was pleasantly surprised!

This book is written with so much personality and gives much insight into the technology of the time and different company relations that I had no clue about until reading, and all this historical and relational background was hugely helpful to me in envisioning everything that was talked about and I greatly appreciated that since I am very out of the loop with this kind of stuff.

The descriptions of his experiences and the way that he goes about telling it are, in my opinion, very vivid and really makes his life story come to... well, life! I really connected with his experiences. I laughed, had fun, got frustrated, and felt a range of other emotions as I was reading this recount of his experiences.

I would highly recommend this book to any videogame nerds that I know! However... I knocked off a star because, if we get into the more technical side of the book formatting, this ARC definitely needs more revisions before it releases to the general public.

This next part of the review will detail Kindle PDF specific issues of the ARC version that is provided by Netgalley,

So, a few issues with the PDF I received:
• Some punctuation errors, especially in some hyphenated words, and I spotted one sentence that didn't have a period at the end.
• BIG issue with the images. This might just be because I was reading the PDF on my Kindle, but regardless, it's something that might need to be revised for any future digital releases. Whenever there were images in a chapter, it would often cause sentences to cut off in the middle and have the image taking up a whole page or so, and then the rest of the same sentence would begin again either on the next page or the page after that. There was one in particular that was jarring because discussion about Q*bert had already passed and he was recalling a different game when, in the middle of a paragraph, there were suddenly about ten pages of images of Q*bert in different stages and things of that nature. By the time I looked through all the pictures I forgot that they have been placed in the middle of a sentence about an unrelated paragraph so it was incredibly jarring. Not sure what all that was about, but those images definitely need to be moved over to a more appropriate section of the book.
• Another, separate issue with the images. In all, I'm pretty sure there were two images that were missing. I could tell because there's always a description of the image in small bold font directly underneath, but there were two places that had descriptions with no image attached.

Surprisingly interesting, at first I thought it was going to be something completely different and just about the games but after being upset about that I actually kept reading and was happily surprised about the book I got.