Creating Q*bert … and Other Classic Video Arcade Games
By Warren Davis
Santa Monica Press, 2022

Classic video game designer Warren Davis admits right up front in his new book Creating Q*bert that plenty of potential readers won’t have any idea what the title of the book means. He writes that when he tells people that he designed and programmed Q*bert, he typically gets one of three responses: “OH MY GOD! YOU MADE Q*BERT! I LOVE THAT GAME!” “Oh, that’s nice,” or “What’s Q*bert?” 

In 2022, that third reaction might be the ruling one but for one thing: there’s currently a wave of very palpable and very monetizable (not to mention very annoying) nostalgia for all things ‘90s. This “growing phenomenon of retro-gaming nostalgia,” as Davis puts it, extends even to humble arcade video games; hence this little entertaining little book from Santa Monica Press. 

Davis asserts right at the outset that he’s not purporting to write a history of video games, but whether he likes it or not, he can’t help it: he’s lived that history. As he mentions, although video games are ubiquitous now, when he was a kid there were no video games and scarcely any computers for popular use. When Davis first began to realize that those computers might actually be used for fun, he had no choice but to be a trailblazer. 

The video game world Davis describes at the start of his even theoretical career will strike his youngest readers, who, one suspects, aren’t the main demographic fueling the resurgence of retro gaming nostalgia, as terrifying stone-knives-and-bearskins stuff. Large and very lucrative careers can be made today by specializing in any of four dozen niches of game production, from background design to the minutiae of motion capture. Not so in Ye Olden Days:

When I started, if you wanted to create a game, you were one of three things: a programmer, an artist, or a sound designer. No one was just a game designer – you had to have at least one other useful skill. Sure, there were other important tasks, hardware design most critically. But as far as the creative teams went, that was it. 

The necessary warning attending this book will also be its strongest selling point to its target audience: as Davis himself admits, this is very much an  “under the hood” account. The author’s proudest accomplishments involve primitive coding and circuit boards. True, there are brushes with celebrity, as when Aerosmith spends some time in the studio during the production of Revolution X (Davis is star struck, but even his smiling account can’t avoid giving an impression of arrogance and alcohol). But mostly this is the unassuming — and oddly effective — story of a young nerd who quite literally built the future he wanted. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.