Nerd Thoughts | They Create Worlds: Volume 1

I sort of did this for the book Game Over by David Sheff when I finished it back in December of 2024. I’m going to dub it ‘Nerd Thoughts’ since I don’t want to use up too much of my incredible creativity coming up with one-liners for the titles every time. I think that moniker is pretty fitting for all of these anyway.

For a while I’ve been wanting to read They Create Worlds by Alexander Smith. The accompanying podcast made its way into my life while I was at Drexel University after taking a video game history course taught by Adrian Sandoval. Ever since that course, I’ve been hooked on learning more about the history of video games, especially from the perspectives of business and consumer trends; the ebbs and flows, the rises and falls. The endeavor taken on by Smith to write the most correct history of events in the games industry to date that spans the three relevant markets for the time period (computer, arcade, and home console gaming) speaks to me very personally.

I think the approach of Smith to discuss those three separate markets is what makes They Create Worlds such a fabulous read. The well-structured chapters continuously bring the reader to a point of feeling that they understand what’s going on until Smith introduces another big factor or player in the industry. The next chapter often steps back in history once more and brings the reader through a lot of the same time periods again with new context, new names, new games, and even more understanding. The prevailing result after the final page is not the memorization of all of these elements from every decade and chapter, but rather a firm grasp on the chronology of the most significant games and trends, the evolution of the technology that birthed an industry, and the grand causes and effects that have rippled through the history of the medium.

My reading of They Create Worlds itself has occurred at a fascinating point in the history of games. In April, 2026, so many headlines fixate on the crumbling of the video games industry. Through the early 2020s, video games experienced an unprecedented boom during an unprecedented time of pandemic and pandemonium. Companies couldn’t wait to take full advantage of the potential earnings and growth. The visual that sticks in my head (although probably not the perfect analogy) is a group of people who want so badly to cross a chasm via a bridge that’s still being built. So they decide to try crossing it while construction is still in progress. Their eagerness sends them over the edge into the chasm. Today, it’s hard to know for sure if we’ve reached the bottom of the chasm or are still falling.

When things leveled out, companies projections failed, investors got scared, and money stopped flowing in multiple ways. Lack of money flow means bottom lines need to shrink. So for years now, the headlines have told the story of studio closures, layoffs, a reduction in junior talent, etc. This can easily lead to the thinking of this being a gamepocalypse of some kind or the foretelling of one.

What’s interesting about Smith’s research is how it tells the story of a struggling industry where this pattern repeats: new circumstances (perhaps a new technology or a pandemic), followed by individuals or companies taking advantage, followed by tremendous increases in sales, followed by a large push to keep momentum going, followed by financial difficulties when it can’t be done, followed by some sort of collapse. The number of times Smith describes Atari being on the brink of total disaster despite record sales of Pong, Breakout, the Atari VCS, or Asteroids left my head spinning. It rang so true to the climate of game developers today. I mentioned in my last blog post addressing what I believe to be the causes of layoffs how Battlefield 6 managed to sell an estimated 20 million units in the last three months of 2025 only for Electronic Arts to turn around a few more months later and institute a round of layoffs across Battlefield teams. While I don’t believe that to have been because EA is in dire straights the way Atari is estimated to have been throughout the ‘70s, it feels familiar.

This really confirmed for me how young the video game industry truly is. According to Smith, it’s hard to say that there even was truly an industry to speak of through 1982 (the year up to which the events of the first volume take place). That means that if we were to assume an industry began to form around the mid-’80s, the industry is a mere 40 years old; it can’t even pull out of its 401k yet without penalties; it’s ripe for a midlife crisis; it may not have even found love yet (although it’s been in an on-and-off relationship with the film and television industries for some time now); it’s just starting to enter the era of complaining about “kids these days.”

Bottom line, I think there’s a good chance that after 100 years of the video game industry, today and the 1980s will end up lumped together to represent a tumultuous time during which the video game industry was still trying to get its footing. And that process gets longer and longer as technology continues to evolve, changing how the industry works. It will definitely get longer the more that the industry embraces the repetition of mistakes made by video game businesses.

Anyway, back to my experience reading the book.

The full title of the book is They Create Worlds: The Story of the People and Companies That Shaped the Video Game Industry, Volume I: 1971-1982, and that at times made it very difficult to stomach the long stretches during which the book covered topics that were not directly related to video games and were actually before the given time period. I understand why Smith did this. Essentially, 1971 was the birth of video games as a business. However, it felt misleading at first when I had to read about Alan Turing for the 3 millionth time, the evolution of pinball, details of other coin-operated amusements, the growth in popularity of war gaming, and details about what felt like every computer invented pre-1970 for an estimated 30% of the book before getting to discuss video games very much at all. Of course, these are fundamental foundations to how video games came to be, and I’m not discounting the importance of those topics by any means. That first part of the book did feel like a slog, nonetheless.

I also occasionally found myself reading several pages and not knowing what the book was talking about because my mind glazed over under the bombardment of an endless listing of names of companies, people, computer models, video games, and sales figures. Many of these details didn’t inform my understanding of the history very much, so I lost interest. Like the pre-1970 information I mentioned before, though, these names are not lacking in importance. They are important parts of the overall timeline, and it just so happens that they aren’t important parts of my understanding.

Thankfully, these elements that made the book hard to read at points didn’t ruin my enjoyment of learning about the early years of video games. Thank you, Alexander Smith!