Review | Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Missile Command: Martin Amis’ ode to video games reissued

Invasion of the Space Invaders by Martin Amis, Pub. Jonathan Cape

4 stars

In 1982, already the author of four novels, Martin Amis published a fizzy, swaggering non-fiction book about arcade games. Soon out of print and expunged from his official bibliography ever since, it became a legendary text, fetching enormous second-hand prices and consulted tremblingly by an elite band of researchers in copyright libraries.

Now, it’s no longer all that embarrassing to declare an intellectual interest in video games, so the book has been reissued. But is it a historical curio or something more?

In the first third of the book, Amis casts a hungry sociological eye over the now almost vanished culture of the arcades, gorgeously illustrated by large colour photographs. He tries out the neologism “vidkids” for their denizens, and slathers on the hyperbolic Project Fear.