Join veteran gamer, video game fansite webmaster, and born storyteller, Rob Strangman as he takes you on a tour of some of the most defining moments in video game history as seen through his eyes. From the fall of Atari to the emergence of the Sony PlayStation and beyond, Rob relates tales of the adventures that were had during the golden age of gaming. Rob also discusses his experiences with importing, the ""gamer"" stereotype, and shares his opinions on the current state of gaming. While Rob may have been the original ""Virtual Caveman,"" he certainly wasn't the only one. Included here are many other stories and contributions from gamers both young and old. Also within these pages you will find interviews with many of the gaming industry's veterans: David Crane, Howard Scott Warshaw, Martin Alessi, Yuzo Koshiro, Kouichi ""Isuke"" Yotsui and more.

Competitive gaming, or esports – referring to competitive tournaments of video games among both casual gamers and professional players – began in the early 1970s with small competitions like the one held at Stanford University in October 1972, where some 20 researchers and students attended. By 2022 the estimated revenue of the global esports industry is in excess of $947 million, with over 200 million viewers worldwide. Regardless of views held about competitive gaming, esports have become a modern economic and cultural phenomenon. This book studies the full history of competitive gaming from the 1970s to the 2010s against the background of the arrival of the electronic and computer age. It investigates how competitive gaming has grown into a new form of entertainment, a sport-like competition, a lucrative business and a unique cultural sensation. It also explores the role of competitive gaming in the development of the video game industry, making a distinctive contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the history of video games. A History of Competitive Gaming will appeal to all those interested in the business and culture of gaming, as well as those studying modern technological culture.

Capcom's Keiji Inafune followed the unexpected success of Mega Man 2 with a "kitchen sink" sequel that included eight new robot masters, a canine companion, a mysterious new frenemy, and a melancholy tone that runs through the game from its soft opening notes. Mega Man 3 was the biggest, messiest, and most ambitious Mega Man game yet. But why do we hunger for twitchy, difficult platformers like Mega Man 3 decades later when the developers, the franchise, and the Blue Bomber himself have all moved on? Investigating the development of the Mega Man series alongside the rise of video game emulation, the YouTube retrogaming scene, and the soaring price of NES carts, novelist Salvatore Pane takes a close and compelling look at the lost power-ups of our youth that we collect in our attempts to become complete again.

If all sports are really about war, then rugby is a heart-thumping epic of bayonet charges and hand-to-hand fighting. In Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man, bestselling author Jay Atkinson describes his thirty-five year odyssey in the sport-from his rough and rowdy days at the University of Florida, through the intrigue of various foreign tours, club championships, and all star selections, up to his current stint with the freewheeling Vandals Rugby Club out of Los Angeles. Jay has played in more than 500 matches, for which he's suffered three broken ribs, a detached retina, a fractured cheekbone and orbital bone, four deadened teeth, and a dislocated ankle. Written in the style of Siegried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Atkinson's book explains why it was all worth it--the sum total of his violent adventures, and the valuable insights he has gained from them.

In this sweeping historical saga, you will discover the Millionaires' joys, tribulations, and deeply guarded secrets - told through the unique voices of four Club employees.

The NES Omnibus: The Nintendo Entertainment System and Its Games, Vol. 1 (A-L), covers the first half of the NES library in exhaustive and engaging detail. More than 350 games are featured, including such iconic titles asCastlevania, Donkey Kong, Double Dragon, Duck Hunt, Final Fantasy, and The Legend of Zelda. Each game, whether obscure or mainstream, is given the spotlight. In addition to thorough gameplay descriptions, the book includes reviews, memories, historical data, quotes from vintage magazines, and, best of all, nostalgic stories about many of the games from programmers, authors, YouTube celebs, and other industry insiders. The book also features more than 1,500 full-color images, including box art, screenshots, and vintage ads.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A brilliantly funny tribute to the simple pleasures of eating” (Parade) from the author of Dad Is Fat Have you ever finished a meal that tasted horrible but not noticed until the last bite? Eaten in your car so you wouldn’t have to share with your children? Gotten hungry while watching a dog food commercial? Does the presence of green vegetables make you angry? If you answered yes to any of the following questions, you are pretty pathetic, but you are not alone. Feast along with America’s favorite food comedian, bestselling author, and male supermodel Jim Gaffigan as he digs into his specialty: stuffing his face. Food: A Love Story is an in-depth, thoroughly uninformed look at everything from health food to things that people actually enjoy eating.

From New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean comes incredible stories of science, history, finance, mythology, the arts, medicine, and more, as told by the Periodic Table. Why did Gandhi hate iodine (I, 53)? How did radium (Ra, 88) nearly ruin Marie Curie's reputation? And why is gallium (Ga, 31) the go-to element for laboratory pranksters? The Periodic Table is a crowning scientific achievement, but it's also a treasure trove of adventure, betrayal, and obsession. These fascinating tales follow every element on the table as they play out their parts in human history, and in the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them. The Disappearing Spoon masterfully fuses science with the classic lore of invention, investigation, and discovery -- from the Big Bang through the end of time. Though solid at room temperature, gallium is a moldable metal that melts at 84 degrees Fahrenheit. A classic science prank is to mold gallium spoons, serve them with tea, and watch guests recoil as their utensils disappear.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year The witty and exuberant New York Times bestselling author and record-setting Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings relays the history of humor in “lively, insightful, and crawling with goofy factlings,” (Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go Bernadette)—from fart jokes on clay Sumerian tablets to the latest Twitter gags and Facebook memes. Where once society’s most coveted trait might have been strength or intelligence or honor, today, in a clear sign of evolution sliding off the trails, it is being funny. Yes, funniness. Consider: Super Bowl commercials don’t try to sell you anymore; they try to make you laugh. Airline safety tutorials—those terrifying laminated cards about the possibilities of fire, explosion, depressurization, and drowning—have been replaced by joke-filled videos with multimillion-dollar budgets and dance routines. Thanks to social media, we now have a whole Twitterverse of amateur comedians riffing around the world at all hours of the day—and many of them even get popular enough online to go pro and take over TV. In his “smartly structured, soundly argued, and yes—pretty darn funny” (Booklist, starred review) Planet Funny, Ken Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it means—or doesn’t—to be funny in it now. Tracing the evolution of humor from the caveman days to the bawdy middle-class antics of Chaucer to Monty Python’s game-changing silliness to the fast-paced meta-humor of The Simpsons, Jennings explains how we built our humor-saturated modern age, where lots of us get our news from comedy shows and a comic figure can even be elected President of the United States purely on showmanship. “Fascinating, entertaining and—I’m being dead serious here—important” (A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically), Planet Funny is a full taxonomy of what spawned and defines the modern sense of humor.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Now a major motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio By day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night he spent it as fast as he could. From the binge that sank a 170-foot motor yacht and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to the wife and kids waiting at home and the fast-talking, hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king, here, in Jordan Belfort’s own words, is the story of the ill-fated genius they called the Wolf of Wall Street. In the 1990s, Belfort became one of the most infamous kingpins in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock-chopper who led his merry mob on a wild ride out of Wall Street and into a massive office on Long Island. It’s an extraordinary story of greed, power, and excess that no one could invent: the tale of an ordinary guy who went from hustling Italian ices to making hundreds of millions—until it all came crashing down. Praise for The Wolf of Wall Street “Raw and frequently hilarious.”—The New York Times “A rollicking tale of [Jordan Belfort’s] rise to riches as head of the infamous boiler room Stratton Oakmont . . . proof that there are indeed second acts in American lives.”—Forbes “A cross between Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Scorsese’s GoodFellas . . . Belfort has the Midas touch.”—The Sunday Times (London) “Entertaining as pulp fiction, real as a federal indictment . . . a hell of a read.”—Kirkus Reviews