Title: Ocho Quilates (Una historia de la Edad de Oro del software español) I: 1983-1986 & II: 1987-1992
Author: Jaume Esteve Gutiérrez
Editorial: Star-T Magazine Books
Ocho Quilates is a two-part book that covers the most prolific decade for Spain videogame scene, the era of the 8-bit computers: Amstrad, Spectrum, Commodore and MSX. A decade where many game companies were born and created games that marked our early life.
I am fully biased as I had an Amstrad PCW 8256 and I grew playing those damm hard Opera Soft, Topo Soft and Dinamic games, plus I remember the distributors back then, the magazines my parents bought me, full of those games with incredible covers and sometimes not so cool gameplay...
This books gather as much info and interviews as possible, chronologically ordering them so that we can learn what happened behind the scenes. It also sadly tells how we Spaniards got inside a bubble of rejecting the 16-bits era until it was too late and the Nintendo-SEGA duo eat our national market (also affected by piracy) and killed all spanish game dev companies with few exceptions.
Lots of references (actually hundreds of them!), lots of people mentioned, games and their history... it is the best way to keep the memories of what happened between 1983 and 1992.
If anything wrong with the book, sometimes the references are so abundant two or three are together and thus hard to click in the Kindle. And a few of them of the second book were broken (showing "attr error" instead of the ref. description).
A book you have to read if you lived that era. Nostalgia++.
. Published on