Techno-industrial celebration, misinformation echo chambers, and the distortion cycle.

An Introduction to the History of Games International Conference proceedings

Résumé

What is the object of video game history? If we are to believe many of the journalistic accounts published in the last 20 years, the answer to that question appears to be painfully obvious. In his foreword to Roberto Dillon’s The Golden Age of Video Games (2011), Atari co-founder Ted Dabney presents us with the following statement:

There is a lot of controversy over who invented the first ‘video game’ […] Some say it was Ralph Baer while others say it was Nolan Bushnell. The truth is, it was Thomas Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray in 1947. The real question should be ‘Who created the video game industry?’ Nolan and I get the credit for that one (2011: ix).