SEGA-16.com founder Ken Horowitz returns to the Swingin’ Report Show to talk about his newest book: From Pinballs to Pixels: An Arcade History of Williams-Bally-Midway! We take a look at the origins of pinball, how the industry grew out of Chicago, how the Williams company transformed over the years to become a console game developer and we talk about SEGA’s two brief entries into the pinball biz!
On this, our 100th Swingin’ Report Show, we talk to SEGA-16.com founder Ken Horowitz to talk all things SEGA, as well as his current and future book projects. Support Ken’s amazing work by picking up some of his books on Amazon and leave a review!
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On this episode of the Swingin’ Report Show, SEGA-16.com’s Ken Horowitz talks about his new book “The SEGA Arcade Revolution”. Ken walks through the history of SEGA arcade machines from the 1950s to today, highlighting key releases and discussing firsthand interviews he held with SEGA staff from the glory years.
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Playing at the Next Level: A History of American Sega Games was written by Ken Horowitz, who runs the long running SEGA-16 fansite. As a longtime Sega fan and lurker on various sites, especially before I started this blog, I was a huge fan of what Ken was doing at Sega-16. One of the biggest resources the site offers is a review for almost every single Sega Genesis game published. That’s quite the feat. While his work on getting a review for almost every single Sega Genesis game is amazing, I truly love his website because he interviews some of the most interesting people from Sega’s glory days. I first heard about the site when doing research on Sega Technical Institute, after finding his interview with Roger Hector about his time being director of the studio I started checking daily for more Sega historical content. Ever since then I have been a huge fan of the site, when I heard Ken was writing a historical Sega book we invited him on our podcast (listen to that below).
Those who remember our interview with Ken Horowitz from back in February 2016 might recall he has an upcoming book called Playing at the Next Level: A History of American Sega Games. We now know the book covering the development of numerous Sega of America games will be shipping on October 30th and you can pre-order a physical edition at Amazon.
The book will focus on the actual games Sega of America produced from 1986 to 2001, along with a behind the scenes look at the development process. Horowitz sources the many interviews he’s done over the years along with numerous new ones. Playing at the Next Level will cover roughly 40 games with up to half a dozen developers being sourced for information on the creation of each game in question. Unlike Blake J. Harris‘ Console Wars, the book features developers much more so than executives and marketing personnel.
Ken Horowitz founded the popular fan site Sega-16 in 2004, where he has interviewed, researched and written about Sega’s history ever since.
On this episode of the SEGAbits podcast, Barry and George are joined by Ken Horowitz, founder of SEGA-16.com and writer of the upcoming book Playing at the Next Level: A History of American Sega Games. Even if you don’t know his name, any SEGA fan with internet access has stumbled upon SEGA-16 to find a helpful review, interview or retrospective. Now, Ken is using his knowledge of SEGA as well as close to one hundred newly conducted interviews to create a book which looks back on the games developed by SEGA of America during the 80s and 90s.