You Can’t Call It… Stories from a life making video games a book by Warren Davis – Review By Ryan Burger

Meeting Warren a couple years ago has started out a relationship where I’ve spent some nice time with him – first talking at E3, then later in Des Moines when he was in town, and hanging out at a couple retro gaming expos. When I first met him he told me he was working on a book about his career in video games and I have been anxiously awaiting it ever since. I received a digital pre-release copy that I read through about a third of and then I finished a printed

While the title of the book talks of his Q*bert, the hugely successful arcade classic, the book goes way beyond that time in 1981 when it consumed him completely developing that amazing game. When when I first opened it up, I expected it to be maybe one half Q*bert related, even knowing what I knew of his experience that went beyond Gottlieb. Warren takes us from his first computer experienc-es in Brooklyn, NY, accessing a mainframe through a terminal at his high school to almost what he’s doing now, wrapping up near the end with stints as a Disney Imagineer and working at ILM.

Although not a professional writer, he does a great job at pulling me along to the next chapter, keeping me enticed enough that I read the majority of it over a weekend upon getting the physical book. He provides just the right amount of geekiness and code-related computer things for the video game aficionado to be intrigued, but not totally lost in the code.