Confessions Of the Game Doctor by Bill Kunkel

I admit, when I got this book, I couldn’t put it down until I had finished reading it. If you grew up in the early 80s and were into video games (like everyone else was back then), you’ll probably find the book very entertaining. Over the years, Kunkel and the other co-founders of Electronic Games magazine have had praise and respect heaped on them. Yes, their magazine was very ground-breaking and helped fuel the interest and passion of players in what was then a new field. But if you take the time to read some of their past writings (esp. their reviews), you’ll find them sorely lacking in any useful information. There’s no depth to them as far as gameplay and instead are merely pedantic, as though they were simply parroting the same descriptions you’d find in any company’s advertising. Kunkel ‘confesses’ to doing his share of excessive drug use back then, and doesn’t claim that it didn’t affect his work to some degree, but after going back and re-reading some of his past work, it’s clear it affected his writing to a shocking degree. As with any book on the subject of video games, Kunkel made his share of factual mistakes:

Pg. 10, 33 Pong came out in 1972, not 1971.
Pg. 14 No 3rd-party Odyssey2 game developers? What about Imagic and Parker Brothers? He later claimed he was unaware of them, yet the May 1983 issue (pg. 26, 27) of EG mentions Demon Attack for the O2.
Pg. 29 Claims with his “Kunkel Report” column it was the first time he could write about video games “without even a pretense of objectivity”. Anybody who’s familiar with his writings from the original run of Electronic Games magazine knows that’s simply not true, if not a downright laughable claim for him to make.
Pg. 32 Admits to EG writing reviews based on prototype versions of games (to get the scoop on their competitors). Problem with that approach was, prototypes are often not final versions of games, and many of their reviews reflected that. Check out the review of VCS Crazy Climber in the Sept 83 issue (pg 52) for one such example.
Pg. 35-36 Coin-op Pac-Man doesn’t have sound in the attract mode. When I asked Kunkel about this, he claimed the machine was modified to play in a loop. Why that would have been done, I have no idea.
Pg. 37 The court ruled that the oral consumption of pellets was proprietary to Namco’s Pac-Man, but then what of earlier “pellet” consuming maze games like Head-On? He claims it wasn’t the same. Yeah, okay…
Pg. 61 Claims Atari never licensed anybody else’s game for coin-op use. What about 1976’s F-1 (licensed from Namco) and 1982’s Kangaroo (licensed from Sun Electronics) and Pole Position (licensed from Namco)? He later claimed he forgot about them.
Pg. 110 Claims Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel’s Castle (Colecovision) “may have been among the most influential games ever created.” What about Pitfall??