Hi everyone,

If you're considering answering this, please bear in mind our 20-year rule - posts discussing games more recent than 1997 will be removed.

Thanks!

A good introduction to scholarship on video game history is probably the Routledge Companion to Videogame Studies (Routledge, 2014, edited by Mark J.P. Wolf, Bernard Perron). It's, as the name suggests, more or less a list of the way video games are approached by various fields of scholarship, separated by chapters written by individual authors, along with chapters on individual aspects and genres of video games. When it comes to the history of video games particularly it has several relevant chapters (Artefacts, Artificial Intelligence, Emulation, Design), although most of it is mostly focused on approaching the subject matter of video games as art critics.

Sadly the historiography of video games is still fairly thin. There is a tonne of research done on video games and the effect of playing them in the field of psychology, especially educational and child psychology, and the aforementioned critical approaches. Video games as a subject are mostly approached as a cultural subject matter, not a historical one.

There is however quite a bit of interesting history of video games on Youtube, covered from several different angles. Lazy Game Reviews provides mostly short videos, giving short reviews of various PCs (and the occasional odd console), along with histories of various interesting and weird tech companies. He also runs a series called oddware in which he reviews and discusses hardware oddities. Kim Justice has quite a few videos, often long and thoroughly researched, mostly focusing on British/European companies and gaming culture. Stuff like her five part series on Peter Molyneux and her video on the ZX Spectrum Magazine Cover Tape Wars are incredibly comprehensive and cover parts of video gaming history that often gets overlooked in the usual focus on American and Japanese companies. Finally there's The 8-Bit Guy whose videos mostly focus on the aspect of restoring old PCs and similar hardware. They're a very interesting source on the technological development of personal computers. Now, that doesn't mean that YouTube is the be-all end-all go to for video game history. The vast majority of content creators on YouTube produce very little that's actually in-depth enough, in stead focusing on short listicle-style videos mostly just meant for quick consumption.

One tool that I can definitely recommend when researching video games yourself is Archive.org. It has an incredible wealth of primary sources such as advertisements and manuals, and even archives of defunct video game magazines. These primary sources are also generally fairly well catalogued in terms of publication details and such.

Very little on an actual scholarly level. As u/Skiosmagus mentioned, most such study is being done on the level of psychological effects, not of history. It's too new a subject matter for historians (which that warning up there is all too eager to point out!). We're not even to the 50th anniversary of Atari.

While many of the people mentioned above are worth checking out, not a lot of them are scholarly. Most don't even cite their sources which is extremely bad if you're trying to actually inform people. I'll give you a rundown on people worth checking out in the field. Keep in mind that I maintain contact with and know a lot of these people because I am a researcher myself. If you want to see my blog, I'll link it too.

Jimmy Maher: Great writer and archivist. His work is based on print resources, interviews, and even going to view some of the personal collections at the Strong Museum in Rochester New York (which is a resource worth looking in to). His focus is on computer games, namely those which have evolved our sense of narrative in games. He's vaguely chronological in his blog, centering around major topic/companies. He is also a consultant on the Smithsonian's oral history project.

Alex Smith: A great friend of mine currently doing probably the best researched work on the history of video games to date. Alex, as he goes through in his podcast, is very serious about putting rigor into the field. He's been to the ends of the Earth tracking down people and resources, which has inspired me to do the same. Specifically, he wants to draw in perspectives from those not usually interviewed for books like Ultimate History of Video Games, primarily business people who tend to be looked down upon from a creative perspective. You can learn a lot about his mindset by reading the blog and listening to the podcast.

Marty Goldberg and Curt Vendel: Writers of the book Atari Inc. Business is Fun and intense archivists. They have preserved loads of Atari items which have informed their research and assisted the homebrew community. They are a little cagey on exactly where their resources come from and there are some faults in their particular history methods, but there's still a lot to be gained from their insights.

Keith Smith: Arcade archivist and writer. Currently writing a book called All in Color for a Quarter which I have a preview copy of. It's a dense, scholarly work that is going to open up new doors in the field. It's based on tons of primary source magazines and interviews that take a long time to comb through and he has found links that make for an incredible story per chapter. He puts a good rigor forwards as well while at the same time presenting all sides to any inconsistency that may pop up.

Ed Fries: Former worker at Microsoft on the Xbox, now documenting the technical aspects of 1970s arcade machines. I love his posts for the insights they provide on the hardware. Through his searches he's discovered some very cool things about these arcade machines including the 'first' Easter Egg and some variations to the game Gran Trak 10. His next project is Gun Fight, the first microprocessor game, which I've provided an interview for.

Benj Edwards: Journalist and archivist. While most of his work has been disseminating video game magazine scans, he has done a couple of very good retrospective articles on very early games and game hardware. He's uncovered the work behind the Fairchild Channel F, the Virtual Boy, and Chuck E Cheese. These are mostly oral histories, not really rigorously researched, but still absolutely invaluable pieces.

Florent Gorges: French book author and journalist. It's hard to tell how much Gorges really has unique resources on. He claims to have been into the "Nintendo archives" but what exactly that entails is unclear. Point of fact, he's a collector who's worked with a Japanese individual named Isao Yamazaki to write a series of (small) history books on Nintendo that pull in some great perspective that wasn't available in the seminal work Game Over by David Sheff. He's also written a biographical book on the creator of Space Invaders, Tomohiro Nishikado. The largest barrier to reading his work is that only two books are available in (rather poor) English and the rest is in French (he himself speaks fine English, the translation is just rough). Use a little elbow grease though and you can get some great stuff out of it.

These scholars mostly exist in the independent field. Even Mark J P Wolf mentioned above really isn't so much concerned with history as sociology. I find the books he edits quite hard to parse, even understanding their content. Video Games Around the World is alright, though he admits to it being inconsistent in the book itself. The field is still developing on an academic level and I hope that some of the work we've been doing outside of academia will eventually trickle in.