Before the Crash: Early Video Game History (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series)

An interesting book that's more of a collection of articles from several writers. Although most pre-NES sytems are mentioned, none are discussed in any great length, and the focus of most articles is on either the early Pong-type systems or coin-op games. The title is a bit misleading, since there were 2 video game market crashes (a chapter is devoted to the first crash, but there's no real discussion pertaining to the second. And, as usual, there are a number of factual mistakes mentioned in the book:

Pg. IX,3 Tempest came out in 1981. The copyright date onscreen is 1980.
Pg. 4 The Atari VCS didn’t see breakthrough success until 1980 with the release of Space Invaders.
Pg. 5 Forgot the 7800. I, Robot came out in 1984 (had a 1983 onscreen copyright date).
Pg. 20 No, Indy 500
Pg. 54 Correct about Bushnell. Galaxy Game used an oscilloscope.
Pg. 55 Pong wasn’t exactly the same as Odyssey. It had a number of significant differences - segmented paddles, sounds, increasing ball speed, and no English. Pong instructions weren’t onscreen; they were on the control panel.
Pg. 57. Atari’s home Pong was called Pong, not “Home Pong”.
Pg. 58 Odyssey 400 was the 1st Odyssey to have true onscreen scoring. The 200 had abstract scoring.
Pg. 60 The magazine Computer & Video Games was likely the first magazine devoted to video games, ahead of Electronic Games.
Pg. 61 The VCS was already well into development by the time Warner bought Atari, and was in no way influenced or motivated by the Fairchild Channel F VES.
Pg. 64 The VCS didn’t sell for $199 everywhere in 1977 (on page 87 the book claims the price was $189.95). VCS Adventure came out in 1980, not 1979.
Pg. 69 It’s not required to bring the dot in VCS Adventure to a specific room. All that’s required is that the dot is moved to any other screen other than where it's originally located. Once moved, the bridge can be used to gain entrance to the secret room via the catacombs below it.
Pg. 70 Again, VCS Adventure was released in 1980, not 1979. Atari coin-op programmers were hiding Easter eggs in their programs. Nobody knew of Robinett’s Easter egg inside or outside of Atari, so it doesn’t matter whether or not it was in the game in 1978 because it wasn’t released or found until 1980.
Pg. 72 What’s the source of Robinett crediting Wright with first using the term Easter egg? I believe it was Electronic Games magazine who credited Wright in their first issue.
Pg. 81 Was Atari’s coin-op Pong’s success what motivated Atari to enter the home market or Magnavox’s Odyssey? There’s no source given for the claim it was the Odyssey.
Pg. 87 Again, Fairchild’s and RCA’s home systems did NOT motivate Atari to create their own cartridge-based system, as all 3 systems were released in 1977 and the VCS’s development started in 1975.
Pg. 88 No, there weren’t over 1,000 different cartridges for the VCS. Source??
Pg. 91, 103-104, 114, 117 Extra-terrestrial should be hyphenated.
Pg. 103 Several games mentioned (48 Hours, 9 to 5, Marathon Man, Trail of the Pink Panther) were never released.
Pg. 106 VCS Asteroids and Missile Command both were released in 1981.
Pg. 107 “Yars’”, not “Yar’s”.
Pg. 109 The VCS joystick has a red button, not orange. The wood veneer on the VCS system was on all models from 1977 to 1982, not 1980 to 1982.
Pg. 111 VCS Pac-Man came out in 1982, not 1981 (the onscreen copyright was 1981).
Pg. 122 Early handheld ELECTRONIC games (like Auto Race), not video games.
Pg. 128 Zaccaria’s Locomotion pinball game came out in 1981, not 1982.
Pg. 132 Stratovox had those phrases, not Berzerk. Journey coin-op came out in 1983, not 1982 and was called Journey, not Journey Escape.
Pg. 138 Computer Space is not a knockoff of Spacewar, it was merely inspired by Spacewar.
Pg. 139 Tailgunner might have been the first vector coin-op with a colored overlay and Star Castle the first vector coin-op with a multi-colored overlay. Both predate Solar Quest.
Pg. 172 Exidy’s Star Fire coin-op (1979) was the first to feature a radar screen, not Defender or Battlezone.