Essential reading for game historians! Breakout: Pilgrim in the Microworld by David Sudnow
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I just finished reading Breakout: Pilgrim in the Microworld by David Sudnow, which was originally released in 1983 and has been reprinted by Boss Fight Books as their 22nd book, and I’ve got some thoughts.
Breakout: Pilgrim in the Microworld is basically a memoir of one man’s discovery of, and obsession with, the video game Breakout on the Atari 2600.
Unlike pretty much every other non-fiction book about video games, this one documents a truly personal story during the earliest days of Atari and arcades. Sudnow seems almost prescient about the eventual dominance of video games as an entertainment medium. Nobody else thought to think so deeply about something so many assumed was just a fleeting fad. But he did. Maybe he is the madman many book reviewers of the time said he was, but I’m so happy this madman existed.
And because this book was written prior to any sense of video game history it’s free to explore the medium with curiosity, rather than be shackled by the idea of maintaining narrative precedent and some sort of cultivated accuracy. You just cannot get a visceral, hyper-reactive snapshot of video game history like this written contemporarily. This book is absolutely unique and absolutely integral to understanding the full impact video games have had on culture. It’s that important of a book.
The prose here is quick. This is a writer writing feverishly. He focuses on his own physiology, his literal sweat and tears. Sudnow doesn’t just describe the games Breakout and Missile Command. He uses the rhythm of language to replicate the experience. You’re practically out of breath just reading the book, so imagine how he must have felt writing it and playing its subject game for hours and hours and hours under tense concentration.
Considering his aim to capture frantic nature of arcade games, though tame compared to today’s games, his descriptions can often be difficult to follow. But that’s okay because you really aren’t meant to follow every word. You’ve got to treat Sudnow’s prose like your eyes treat the individual frames of animation in a cartoon: digesting every still is impossible. You must keep pressing forward because the experience is in the ride.
Here’s an example.
LAST BALL OUT OF FIVE. Three bricks left on screen. The farthest I’d ever come. After a minute’s break to gather composure, I serve. For some twenty seconds the ball floats off the boards around the empty space of the nearly vacant terrain. A no man’s ball. I feel the attempted seduction of the long lobbing interim, a calm before the storm, the action so laid back that I’m consciously elaborating a rhythm to be ready, set, go for a slam. Then! It hits the high brick, shoots down like a whip and I’m right there on time to return. Forget about placement. Just hold on, don’t miss, keep the time right, and watch like a hawk for added rhythmic protection. The phone rings. Return, back, return, back. Another one’s gone. The caller hangs up and maybe two seconds later I get the last, by God. (Pg 41)
The entire book reads like this. Sudnow’s writing is the closest you can get to playing the game without playing the game. And this is important because, remember, at the time not everyone was familiar with games the way we are now. He’s writing like a caveman discovering fire, eager to bring his clan to civilization.
I’ve always accepted that poetry has cultural value while admitting that I don’t fully get it. This book brings me closer to understanding poetry’s value by helping me understand poetry from a non-fiction, historical perspective. This is a rare snapshot of a person documenting their experience, in near-real time, with some of the very earliest video games. No retrospective or historical documentary could do that.
He captures the arcade scene as well. The opening chapters reads like a real-time discovery of video games. For anyone not alive during the era of arcades, or for anyone who lacked the capacity to truly internalize the arcade experience, this first chapter alone is worth the price of the book. But you’ll be happy to know that the book continues working long after the first chapter, from those first moments spent questioning the arcade’s purpose, through to the final chapters where you get the sense that Sudnow, after weeks of non-stop Breakout he’s accepting a self-imposed intervention, ready to join the real world again. I wonder what Sudnow would think if he were alive today where the real world and the world of video games occupy the same space.
Breakout: Pilgrim in the Microworld is essential reading. Buy it and read it immediately.
Mentioned
- Breakout: Pilgrim in the Microworld from Boss Fight Books: https://bossfightbooks.com/collections/books/products/breakout
- Boss Fight Books review playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMKbK8vtuoicyVRhGfap2QIj5R5mWJioY
Music Credits
8bit Dungeon Level Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
