About the author
Gordon Stevenson
Gordon Stevenson has spent more than forty years collecting handheld electronic games, alongside a period owning full-size arcade machines. Across a long and varied career spanning over 30 years in the news industry for some of the UK's largest publishers, he has held a number of digital editorial and change leadership roles, including founding two dot-com startups. Despite this, he has always retained a deep affection for analogue pursuits, most notably an extensive (and ever-growing) vinyl record collection.
Over the decades, Gordon has also, more importantly, built an impressive archive of vintage electronic handheld games. This book is a natural extension of that lifelong passion, offering him the opportunity to share his private collection, unlimited enthusiasm and limited knowledge with a wider like-minded audience.
He lives near Glasgow and continues to collect vintage handheld electronic games from the 1970s and 80s, much to the ongoing frustration of his long-suffering wife, Claire.
The games featured in these pages continue to bring Gordon great joy in an increasingly digital online world. The collection is his own, and in no way exhaustive or in mint condition in many cases, but it is his hope that as you journey through the golden decade of handheld electronic gaming together, they bring you the same sense of nostalgia and enjoyment.
Press start
Every collection starts with one game. Mine started in a corner shop on stilts, with a pound note in my pocket and a red LED blinking behind a sheet of smoked plastic. This book, and the one that follows it, is my attempt to explain why that light still matters.
The Glow of the Game was always meant to be one book. Then the games kept arriving. Every time I photographed one, another surfaced: a variant, a UK re-badge, a Japanese original I had never seen. Before long there were more than two hundred and fifty machines on the shelves and far too many pages for a single binding. So the story is now told in two parts, and it splits where the story itself takes a breath.
What is here, and what isn’t
Every game in this book is one I own and have photographed myself. Where the same game appeared under different names, I have chosen one example and noted the others. Where facts are uncertain, an unconfirmed maker or a disputed year, I have said so rather than guess. If you know more, I would genuinely love to hear from you.
— Gordon Stevenson, from the Preface