I just read The Ultimate History of Video Games. This was the can’t-put-it-down book of my vacation. It labels itself as telling the history “from Pong to Pokemon” and it delivers! If you ever played PacMan (no joke – its shape was inspired by the pizza the programmer was eating) or looked for the secret room in Adventure*, you will love this book. You can read about the many court battles, the college students who hacked their way to greatness, and the reason Sega dropped out of the video-game race. This book will make you crank up your Stella emulator and play Space Invaders until the cows come home. *As soon as we got home, I had to find that hidden room again. I had done it way back in 6th grade (thank you, Keith Prior!) but I didn’t remember how. If you want to find it too, check out the links below. linkage: the Stella emulator plays games from the Atari 2600 on your computer. Atari Age is a great site where you can read the manuals and see screenshots of almost every Atari game. Hours of surfing fun. Instructions to finding the secret room in Adventure are here