How to Beat the Video Games

Now this is a piece of retro gaming history. While not the first book written describing strategies for winning in the arcade, Michael Blanchet was among the earliest authors putting pen to paper and explaining the ins and outs of video games as he saw them. A recent college graduate, he worked in an arcade by day, dispensing both quarters and tips for fellow gamers, and picking up strategies from his regular customers. It didn't take long for him to realize there was a thirst for this kind of knowledge, and after winning top marks in an arcade gaming tournament for his performance in Battlezone, he got noticed by an agent for Simon & Schuster. They were looking for a book about arcade games, since "Mastering Pac-Man" by Ken Uston and "How to Master the Video Games" by Tom Hirschfeld had both become recent best-sellers. Blanchet said he had some ideas he'd been kicking around, and the result was the publication of this book in 1982, which reportedly sold over 80,000 copies.

Blanchet was able to parlay the success of this book (and its successor, "How To Beat Atari, Intellivision, and Other Home Video Games") into a regular newspaper column which ran twice a week up until the industry crashed, at which point Blanchet left video games journalism and moved on to the next phase of his life.

Your Retromags Goddess is pleased as punch to be able to bring you this awesome piece of early video game history as her first scan for 2024.