There’s a fantastic-looking book currently on Kickstarter, all about the weird and wonderful world of tabletop electronic games.

From Coin-Ops to Table-Tops: The Essential Electronic Games features some gorgeous photography of a wide selection of electronic tabletop games from the 1970s and 1980s, like Grandstand’s Scramble and the Pac-Man ‘tribute’ Puck Monster.

These little LED versions of arcade games used to be everywhere. I personally have fond memories of playing Grandstand’s Astro Wars in the 1980s, a barely disguised rip-off of Taito’s Space Invaders that had some killer (read: very loud) sound effects. Computers and consoles were expensive, so if you wanted arcade games in your home on a modest budget, these electronic games were pretty much your only option. But they all disappeared at some point in the 1990s, as handheld consoles like the Game Boy gradually took their place.

It’s brilliant that someone has gone to the trouble of cataloguing all of these beauties and giving them the love they deserve. Electronic games like Astro Wars were a really important segment of the gaming industry in the early days, but now they’ve all but been forgotten, and they rarely get mentioned in books about video-game history.

From Coin-Ops to Table-Tops is being written by Mike Diver, who I met for the first time at Develop in Brighton this year, and who has penned a number of other video-game books – not least the excellent Retro Gaming: A Byte-Sized History of Video Games, which I have on the shelf right next to me. I can’t wait to read this new one from him – although the Kickstarter needs to get over the line first. The campaign for From Coin-Ops to Table-Tops is now in its final few days, and as I write, it’s just shy of its £25,000 goal.

I would LOVE to see this campaign succeed. Here’s the link for the Kickstarter, go and have a look for yourself – but hurry!

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