Video games have been with us for over 50 years. While home consoles are still a relatively youthful invention, the creation and development of gaming traces its roots back to the 1950s. I sat down with Harold Goldberg, author of All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How 50 Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture, to discuss his new book and his views on adapting it to cultural and historical studies on an academic level.

Gaming's cultural impact is profound, and All Your Base Are Belong to Us gives the key to understanding how it shifted from a hobby to a new entertainment industry.

Could you give us a little recap about what your book is about?

Harold Goldberg: The book is a narrative history of video games that takes us from its origins with Tennis for Two at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island to what I think might be the future with possibly holographic games. The underlying connector is how games change pop culture, so it's not really a complete encyclopedia. It's more like a record of the games I thought would move the industry along to eventually become popular art of some sort.

That's a good point. This isn't a complete history, but it is touching upon great landmarks in gaming history. I was particularly fascinated by the founding of Atari.

Do you think to appreciate games, beyond their enjoyment factor, gamers should be looking into these stories?

HG: I wrote the book for gamers first, and people who are probably playing now. Say someone just picks up Call of the Dead and they say, "Well, where did that come from?" I think if you pick up my book you'll get an inkling about how games became such huge pop culture phenomenon.

What I see with this zombie version of Call of Duty is a change where people from other media are flocking to games, so in that particular DLC you'll see Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Robert Englund, George Romero -- people you recognize from film and television, and I think that's the way it should be. It's a long-winded answer, but I think if you read this book you'll not only be much more knowledgeable about games but understand how we got to Call of Duty, Red Dead Redemption, and things like that.

If the study of games evolves, should it be part of the curriculum for communications, history, and cultural anthropology students?

HG: I think so. Whenever I go to the Game Developer's Conference (GDC) and sit in on panels and sessions, I feel this great absorption of knowledge for all kinds of area of study. I think it's happening now. One of my favorite references is Nina Fefferman at Rutgers who studies disease. She studied the virus in World of Warcraft to help her students understand how real-life diseases affect us.

So games shouldn't be their own category of study but rather a tool used by several fields?

HG: I think there should be a focused study on gaming itself, but I also feel that these other disciplines should be, and clearly are, using it in their own fields.

You painted a much more positive picture of the ELORG and Tetris situation than the documentary Tetris: From Russia with Love and made it seem a little more hopeful.

HG: In life I'm cynical but hopeful, and I feel that was my take on it and most of the book. While I don't feel it's a fanboy essence, I do think it's important to be generally hopeful and perhaps show people who have negative feelings about the game industry how wonderful and creative it can be.

In that same story, you didn't focus much on the Atari aspect of the situation. Was it a conscious choice not to go into the war between Nintendo and Atari?

HG: My goal was to show the story's effect on pop culture and to deal with the ups and downs of game makers. I thought that if I went too much into legal cases, it would throw folks off of the story I wanted to tell. I think each of those cases can be a book itself.

Do you think you would cover any of these ideas in further depth, later on?

HG: It's conceivable. All those chapters made me want to write more, and I felt for each decade of gaming there could have been a really good book written. I think that a lot of those stories could be books or even movies. I wouldn't spend money on making them, but I think that other people would.

I think at some point the RockStar story, if the brothers ever decide to write a book, will be really compelling. The Atari story will probably be made into a movie at some point, as well as the 7th Guest part that tell us a lot about how games were made at that time and the emotional rollercoaster of the people involved.

What were some of the things you wish you could cover in this book but just couldn't get access to?

HG: It was really hard to get into RockStar, and that took many months, but I finally did. But I wasn't able to do that with Valve, and I really felt Steam and Orange Box all should have been in the book. But the contact I had just wanted to do an email interview with was Gabe Newell. I tried very hard, and passionately, to explain why everyone else was talking on the phone or in person, but he just stopped answering my emails.

That would have been very interesting to read. Unfortunately, Valve is known for being very tight-lipped about things.

HG: Yeah. I think Geoff Keighley did a very fine job on his Portal 2 app, but I wanted do something with a slightly different take that gives us more about the history of the company and where their ideas came from.

At my university, many professors are open to bringing in outside sources, and one of my history courses was very focused on the history of technology and its influence on culture. Can your book be used in such a way that people could take it and get a perspective on gaming even if they aren't actively involved?

HG: I do think so. It would work well in a classroom. I've been asked in the last few weeks to speak at a couple of universities. I don't know if that will actually happen, but both in the U.S. and Canada, people have asked.

I think the book would work well with a curriculum. It's made for a more general audience, but the ideas are suited for pop culture or sociology classes.