Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World

A book about Nintendo's history. Written remarkably poorly. Too much attention is paid to the characters' experiences, descriptions of places, and other fluff unrelated to the matter. The Russian edition reads even harder due to cheap, yellow, almost newspaper-like paper. Which, together with the small font and small margins, causes special pain. However, the Russian version has a couple of interesting chapters about Pajitnov and the history of Tetris licensing in the West.

In 2016, you can safely skip it and not lose anything. Everything can be read in a much more convenient and accessible format in the recently released Console Wars.

Perhaps the story of buying this book is even more interesting than the book itself. Since the target audience is very specific, the Russian edition of the book was published in a limited print run of just 2,000 copies. It's no longer available for free sale. And when I really needed to buy it, I had to fruitlessly search dozens of sites. In the end, I decided to write directly to the publisher. I must say that the guys are great, they answered very quickly. Although they didn't have anything left themselves, they sent me a link to some St. Petersburg musical instrument store! And it was indeed in stock there.

It gets better, attempts to buy in this store were thwarted first by the bank card, which the store absolutely did not want to accept. Then by the manager, who kept returning the payment for reasons like "You didn't choose payment for delivery," although this simply couldn't be done on the website, etc. But after the phrase "Come on, let me give you my money," the manager left for a couple of minutes and still accepted the order. And now I have a collection of a useless but rare book for 600 Russian rubles with delivery for 800 Russian rubles.