About this item
A complete, illustrated history of video games--highlighting the machines, games, and people who have made gaming a worldwide, billion dollar industry/artform--told in a graphic novel format. Author Jonathan Hennessey and illustrator Jack McGowan present the first full-color, chronological origin story for this hugely successful, omnipresent artform and business. Hennessey provides readers with everything they need to know about video games--from their early beginnings during World War II to the emergence of arcade games in the 1970s to the rise of Nintendo to today's app-based games like Angry Birds and Pokemon Go. Hennessey and McGowan also analyze the evolution of gaming as an artform and its impact on society. Each chapter features spotlights on major players in the development of games and gaming that contains everything that gamers and non-gamers alike need to understand and appreciate this incredible phenomenon.
About the Author
Can't imagine your life without fiction? Can't imagine your life without nonfiction? Then you're a lot like me. I often find nothing more entertaining than some scrupulously researched historical account; and no better learning experience than a thoroughly made-up-from-whole-cloth story.
So I read (and write) both - often in deep dives into the fascinating backgrounds of everyday people and everyday things. And I marvel constantly at the many ways how writing efforts in one genre inspire, sharpen, and elevate the quality of work in the other. Whatever knack for storytelling I might be said to have makes my books on history like The U.S. Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation more captivating, engaging, and accessible. And at the same time, I plow the best of the best of my research discoveries into the characters, settings, themes, and scenarios of my narrative material. If you check out my time-travel-turned-inside-out epic, Epochalypse, I hope you'll agree you would have to look pretty hard for a more fully realized and diverse milieu in the time travel story universe.
I was born to a military family on a U.S. Army base in New England and raised, like many, in a town steeped in American history. This I only came to fully appreciate as an adult when I came boomeranging back to an interest in politics, actual people, and the real world after an extended, hazy interregnum of fantasy novels, gaming, comic books, video games, and anime. When not writing or reading I'm heavily into cycling (preferably for transportation or travel rather than speed) , films, hunting for seasonal waterfalls in the nearby California foothills (with or without a pocket full of podcasts) , chasing down hard to find craft sodas, or swooning over vintage graphic design in some slightly downtrodden but capacious Midwestern antique mall.
Find out more at jonathanhennessey.com, where you can join an email list for respectfully infrequent and non-invasive updates about new projects and releases.
