There’s a good chance that you’re already familiar with Mike Diver’s work – he’s written for publications including The Guardian, Edge and Retro Gamer and has a variety of gaming books to his name. Now he’s back with two brand-new books – The Console: 50 Years Of Home Gaming and From Coin-Ops To Table-Tops: The Essential Electronic Games Book.
Covering the history of home consoles is a pretty big task. How did you first decide you wanted to tackle that?
I think it’s as simple as realising that it was coming up to 50 years of the which obviously touched on a lot of older systems, but in more of a pick up and put down sort of way. I wanted to double down on that a little bit and go right through to nowadays, because I think stuff that I couldn’t put in around the 360 and the PS3 is really interesting. I think that is a period where those two manufacturers are really, in Microsoft’s case, building on the foundation of what they did before and in Sony’s case, kind of fumbling it to start with. I suppose unusually, they both kind of ended up on rather level pegging in terms of sales and big games. It felt very even.
