Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Foreword by Ed Rotberg -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Notes -- Video Games Caught Up in History: Accessibility, Teleological Distortion, and Other Methodological Issues -- Look Back in Anger: Accessibility Issues in the Computer Age -- Emulation and Technical Proficiency -- The Incomplete Object -- Teleological Illusion: From Early Cinema to Early Video Games -- Reconfiguring History -- Notes -- What's Victoria Got To Do with It? Toward an Archaeology of Domestic Video Gaming -- Back to the Future, or Pre-Positioning the Video Game Console -- The Home and the Media: Early Connections -- The Stereoscope: The First True Domestic Media Device -- A Tactile and Interactive Relationship with Domestic Media Develops -- The Boy Showman Entertains the Family -- Do It Yourself-In Good and In Bad -- Conclusion: Playing Pranks on Winky -- Notes -- Ball-and-Paddle Consoles -- Notes -- Channel F for Forgotten: The Fairchild Video Entertainment System -- History -- Channel F, From the Bottom Up -- Paradigms of Control -- Easter Eggs -- Conclusion -- Notes -- The Video Game Industry Crash of 1977 -- Early Rapid Growth -- A System on a Chip -- The Crash -- The Industry Bounces Back -- Notes -- A Question of Character: Transmediation, Abstraction, and Identification in Early Games Licensed from Movies -- Early Adventures in Movie-Game Convergence -- A Question of Character: Abstraction and Identification -- Conclusion: A Question of Character, After the Crash and Beyond -- Notes -- Every Which Way But . . . : Reading the Atari Catalog -- Nostalgia, Ephemera, and the Cultures of Gaming -- Digital Nostalgia -- Input Codes -- . . . But Loose? -- Notes -- One-Bit Wonders: Video Game Sound before the Crash -- How Sound Was Made -- How Sound Was Used.

Key Influential Games for Sound up to 1983: A Series of Firsts -- Conclusion -- Notes -- The Rise and Fall of Cinematronics -- A Quick Buck -- Space Wars, or Is It War? -- Vectorbeam and Me -- Crossed Swords -- Vectorbeam -- Crossover -- Late Nights at Cinematronics -- Last Gasps -- Another Grab Bag of Games and Legal Entanglements -- WMS Wins the Games, I Sign the Papers -- PGD, Trivia Master, and the Real End of Cinematronics -- Notes -- Color-Cycled Space Fumes in the Pixel Particle Shockwave: The Technical Aesthetics of Defender and the Williams Arcade Platform, 1980-82 -- Notes -- Coin-Drop Capitalism: Economic Lessons from the Video Game Arcade -- Sight -- Sound -- Play -- Reflect -- The Cost of Play -- Arcade as Deviant Site -- Arcades in Economic Context -- Pinball and Modernity -- Play As Training -- Computerization and Economic Upheaval -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Early Online Gaming: BBSs and MUDs -- Bulletin Board Systems -- Multi-User Dungeons -- BBSs, MUDs, and Economics -- Notes -- Appendix A: Video Game History: Getting Things Straight -- Appendix B: The Magnavox Co. v. Activision, Inc.: 1985 WL 9469 (N.D. Cal. 1985) -- Contributors -- Index -- BackCover.