Martin Amis on Space Invaders: how games criticism was born

For decades, Martin Amis's Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict's Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines – part anthropological survey of New York's arcade scene in the early 80s, part video game tips book – has remained one of the great literary curios of the 20th century. First published in 1982, it has long been out of print; even frayed and spent copies command stratospheric prices on the second-hand market. Despite accusations to the contrary, Amis maintains that he has never disowned the book, which stands awkwardly apart from his novels, screenplays, memoirs and other non-fiction. Still, while preparing this week's unexpected reissue, the publishers Jonathan Cape discovered that the original files of Invasion of the Space Invaders had been unlovingly lost; the book had to be scanned in and rebuilt, pixel-by-pixel. In doing so, a picture of a lost era emerges, along with a valuable snapshot of early critical thinking about video games. Like Updike on golf, or Foster Wallace on tennis, Amis approaches video games with an enthusiast's glee, deploying pleading prose that seeks to illuminate the subject's hold on the writer.