Video Game History with Steven L Kent (Part One)

First, Our Thanks

We would like to issue our thanks to both Steven L Kent and to Jordan Freeman of Zoom Platform. Steven was willing to sit with us and discuss his books, and the history of video games for several hours. And Jordan was kind enough to connect us to Steven, and to help arrange the interview. We are grateful to both Steven and Jordan for their time and patience.

Players

Squidge

Jay

Steven L Kent

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Show Notes

This is part one

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

as edited by Jay and Squidge

you’ll find an embedded player here:

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

Part One of Four

In his own words, Steven describes his books as

Steven L Kent:

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.

A Sense of Discovery

Jay mentioned that the sense of discovery related to technology may be lost on the younger generations via a story about when he and Squidge got their first NES:

Jay:

It’s December 26th, 19-mumble-mumble, and we’ve gotten up early… Dad walks in with a present under his arm, and it’s a NES.

And it’s the memory of opening up the box and saying, "Oh, what’s this?" because we’d never even seen a video game console before. And it being a family activity that we’re discovering what the contents of this box are, together.

And I remember so vividly. We had Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt on the cartridge. I remember fumbling my way into starting Super Mario Bros. and suddenly I’m controlling a cartoon. It’s not a video game, because it looks like a cartoon to me.

And I was talking to someone the other day about this…

The “someone” was Jay’s appearance on the Gamerhood Podcast, where he talked about being a gamer and a father.

Video Game Commercials

When discussing Crash Bandicoot, Steven brings up a fantastic commercial for Crash Bandicoot which was filmed in the parking lot of the Nintendo US headquarters. Here is that commercial:

Which lead us on to the “Michael” commercial for PS3:

Our Zoom-Platform Game Suggestions

We’d love to suggest some of our favourite titles that are available on Zoom Platform

seeing as how they helped with putting this episode together

as such, here are some of our favourites:

External Links of Interest

• Support us on Ko-Fi
• Our Facebook page
• Us on Twitter
• Steven on Penguin Random House
  • The Ultimate History of Video Games volume 1
  • The Ultimate History of Video Games volume 2
• Zoom Platform
• Our suggested titles from Zoom Platform’s catalogue:
  • Squidge:
    • Moto Racer 2
    • Rogue Trooper
    • Z: The Game
  • Jay:
    • Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee
    • Cannon Fodder
    • Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition
• Jay’s appearance on the Gamerhood Podcast

Music

Links to the music used in the podcast can be found below. Definitely check them out, because they're amazing tracks by awesome musicians.

• Intro music is Among The Stars, from the Cosmos Music Pack by Muz Station Productions
• Spoiler Break music is Spectrum (Subdiffusion Mix) by Foniqz (BandCamp)
• Pallet Cleanser music is Breath Deep Breath Clear (Wu Chi) by Siobhan Dakay
• Outro Music is I N e e d Y o u 私の側て by G.H (removed from BandCamp)