The best way to read Game Over: Throw away its jacket, emblazoned with the publisher-inspired hype "How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children." Pictured is a stylized EveryKid staring vacantly into a television's white glow. Hardly the animation real kids display when they play video games. And author David Sheff's treatment of "enslavement" is limited to a hasty chapter that concludes, in the words of Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, that "these kids are in training" for a future world of their own creation. And tear out the last two chapters as well, because while Sheff has done a good job of relating Nintendo's ascension, his attempts at defining the future of the emergent entertainment business are best left unread. It seems he kept getting fresh news releases right as he was going to press, and he found it difficult to find a place to end.
If anything, Game Over is a valentine to Nintendo, with very few critical conclusions drawn about a company that routinely terrorized developers, retailers, and competitors alike. But as a primer on one of the richest companies in the world, Game Over is a worthy read. - John Battelle
Game Over, by David Sheff, $US25, Random House: (800) 733 3000, +1 (212) 751 2600.
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