Grace Your Bookshelf With the Ultimate Chronicle of Video Gaming
Grace Your Bookshelf With the Ultimate Chronicle of Video Gaming
The original book on the history of games updates through 2026 a massive new edition.
Available for preorder today from Press Run and shipping early next year, we’re excited to announce the launch of Phoenix Edition V by Leonard Herman.
Actually, there are two Phoenix Vs: The book is so comprehensive and enormous that we had to break it into two volumes! (Phoenix Edition V: Vol. I and Phoenix Edition V: Vol. II) Containing more than 1,150 pages total, a single-volume edition would have self-destructed down the spine the moment you cracked it open. Literally cracked. Our printers strongly encouraged us not to play with fire.
But that’s simply the nature of Phoenix. For more than 30 years, author Leonard Herman has endeavored to maintain a comprehensive document of the history of video games in book form, updating his work every few years in order to include the latest events and happenings. The previous edition (Phoenix IV) was published in late 2016 and struggled to contain its contents within a single book. It’s been an eventful decade for video games since then, and Phoenix Edition V documents everything that’s happened—in fact, Leonard is currently penning a quick addendum to account for the past few weeks’ announcements from the Sony and Xbox camps, ensuring that the book will be as up-to-date as possible when it goes to press in a few months.
When Leonard began writing the original edition of Phoenix nearly 40 years ago, the idea of “the history of video games” seemed almost laughable. The industry was barely a decade old at that point! Nevertheless, the first edition of Phoenix made its debut in December 1994, right at the first point in the medium’s history where people really began to look back and thing about the origins of video games. The Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn had just made their respective debuts in Japan, and Nintendo had only just published its final new NES release. Phoenix arrived as video games reached a crossroads in history, and the book helped fans to track and contextualize the coming generation along with the move into universal 3D graphics and action it brought with it. Both the medium and the industry around it certainly seem to be at another crossroads right now, and Phoenix Edition V once again paints a comprehensive picture of how we got here.
Phoenix takes a different approach to documenting history than most books. Although it’s not a dry, antiseptic pieces of writing—Leonard’s personal voice and opinions inform the text and weave the increasingly complex threads of events together—it also steers clear of dramatization or speculation. It also avoids interviews and commentary from the people involved, drawing information instead from published news and other verifiable sources. This fits the nature of the books; individuals inevitably recount events from their own perspectives, which can color and distort the accuracy of their anecdotes, even unintentionally. Phoenix is determinedly documentary in nature, and the author has done his best to stick to known fact.
And Phoenix Edition V certainly contains plenty of facts. All 1,150-plus pages of this two-volume set are stuffed with details that cover both the major platforms like PlayStation and Genesis in detail but also give time to forgotten or hopeless esoteric systems. Phoenix has always been the single most exhaustive and comprehensive history of home gaming ever put to paper, and Edition V brings that chronology into the present day.
While nearly all of the new material for this edition appears in Vol. II, owners of older editions of Phoenix will want to consider picking up both volumes thanks to the tweaks, corrections, and minor additions that Leonard has made to the existing material. Plus, buying both volumes together activates an automatic $10 discount on the Limited Run shop—each individual book sells for $54.99 apiece (each being a full-color 550-plus-page hardcover books in the standard-size 8x10” format), but the pair sells together for $99.99. (The discount will automatically be applied in your cart.)
We’re honored to publish this revised and massively expanded edition of the original and most complete retrospective of the history of games, featuring matching cover illustrations by Amanda Neipris and forewords by Atari hardware designer Joe DeCuir and former Atari CEO Wade Rosen. This will be the only printing of Phoenix Edition V, so make sure to grab your copy of the latest and possibly final update of the definitive chronicle of home gaming from the 1950s through 2026! Presales end August 16.