The book's major fault is that there are simply not 1000 video games interesting enough to celebrate. "Not enough credit is given to the diversity that now exisits within video games," writes the book's editor Tony Mott in the introduction, but you'd never know it from reading this Sears catalog of a book. I'd estimate (and I didn't give enough of a whoop to actually do a numerical count) that only one-third of the titles in the chronological listing are anything unique, and it's hard to separate them from the chaff of multiple franchise sequels and duplicated sports simulations. Three Grand Theft Auto titles in a row? Really? Are all those martial arts and auto racing games that are highlighted actually that much of evolutionary stepping stones from their predecessors that you had to feature every one of them? True visionary titles like Maniac Mansion, Facade, and Spider: the Secret of Bryce Manor get lost in the shuffle, which defeats the book's purpose stated in the introduction.
Secondly, the book's contributors simply aren't that good. They spend the beginning sections of the games of the 1970s - '90s actually APOLOGIZING for what they see as the games' supposed low-tech shortcomings when these titles, for me, are the best that were ever developed. If you can't work up the enthusiasm for what you're covering, why include in a book like this that supposedly documents the best of what the medium has to offer? In the cases of GoldenEye 007 and Shining Force III, the writers can't even be bothered to tell you the games' objectives, and the review of NHL Hockey sidetracks into a pointless digression about a favorite scene from the film Swingers.
Even worse, the writers get so bogged down in techno-babble that I got the feeling that they didn't really care if anyone outside their little club found any of it accessible or not. I own five other titles in the "1001 Before You Die" series (Songs, Albums, Comics, Books and Paintings) that are much better, and with the exception of the Paintings volume, none of them are as jargon-heavy as this one. For example: "This game is known for an interface that traded a verbal parser for system for a contextual cursor and for its early use of vector technology. The climax, meanwhile, is one of the best early displays of polygon-based game graphics." If you can get any meaning out of that, or the use of "ludonarrative dissonance" documented in another entry, this is a book for you. Perhaps a glossary would be in order. I just completed Kate Torgovnick's book Cheer! Inside the Secret World of College Cheerleaders, and while it wasn't anything I'd recommend, the author at least had the foresight to include a list of terms describing the cheerleaders' moves in the back, so I could picture what a "scorpion" or a "rewind" looked like as I read the text.
I was hoping 1001 Video Games would add something worthwhile to my library of books chronicling video game history by pointing out unique titles and updating my knowledge of current trends. Unfortunately, it is too cluttered to do that and is a disappointing decline from the high quality of the other 1001 books that I own. My final thought as I finished this behemoth of a book? Game over, finally.
Grade: C