Running Press publishes John Sellers’ non-fictional recap of the video game industry’s early landmark titles, “Arcade Fever” (initially announced as “Arcade Planet”). Focusing almost entirely on coin-op games from the 1970s and 1980s, and illustrated with emulator screen shots and game cabinet artwork, the book is subtitled “The Fan’s Guide to the Golden Age of Video Games”. Its irreverent tone is less scholarly than some of the other books on the same topic published around this time. 
Story: Originally titled Arcade Planet in early sales materials (compare the original and final covers), Arcade Fever is an irreverent, never-too-serious look back at the video game era’s greatest boom, the early 80s, fueled by the arcade game craze. Now, I know a thing or two about this subject myself, having written almost a book’s worth of material in the form of theLogBook.com’s own Phosphor Dot Fossils section, so I’m a bit of a stickler when it comes to accuracy (even though I myself have gotten it wrong from time to time, sometimes spectacularly). And in Arcade Fever, ’80s trivia expert John Sellers, who has created questions for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? as well as writing ’80s trivia books of a more general nature, proves that he’s got a good grasp of the quarter-munching hits (and misses) of old.
Review: Sellers’ text is amusing, observant, and conveys both the essence of the games and the author’s estimate of a given game’s place on the “cool” scale. Each article is accompanied by MAME screen shots aplenty, as well as some gorgeous photos taken by Steve Belkowitz at the well-stocked traveling Videotopia retro-gaming exhibit. The photos, which really bring out the long-forgotten beauty of many games’ controls, cabinet art and design work, put “Arcade Fever” on a plane above Van Burnham’s “Supercade”, a book that a lot of us assumed would be the definitive history work on classic arcade games. Anyone could’ve slapped a bunch of MAME screen shots together with a bit of commentary and called it a book. Sellers goes the extra mile, offering some pop-culture context for the years covered.
Not that this doesn’t have its downside; occasionally that commentary goes a little overboard (jeez, was Pooyan really that bad?) and there are a few places where I feel like it would’ve been better to squeeze in a couple more game reviews. Extraneous features like the “glossary” at the back – much of which is the author’s invention – and pieces on video game characters’ fashion flubs and video game-inspired movies that thankfully didn’t happen…well, your mileage may vary, but I tend to skip those sections whenever I pick up “Arcade Fever”.
Overall, “Arcade Fever” impresses as a nice, somewhat cursory history of the arcades about 20 years ago – back when the games were fun – and is aimed at those who are casual fans of that era, not die-hard game collectors. And that, ultimately, is the book’s greatest strength.
Year: 2001
Author: John Sellers
Publisher: Running Press
Pages: 160 pages
Book review by Earl Green