Reading

The book has three layers: the 1978 original, a brief 1985 update, and a more substantial 2022 one. The accretion does something historiographical. Each pass lets Leaf revisit his earlier claims, correct what time has disproved, adjust what had previously been legally neutered, and register how public perception of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys has shifted across four decades. You can watch the consensus reorganise itself around the man, edition by edition. For a fully paid-up Brian Wilson acolyte like me, it’s about as comprehensive as the literature gets. Forty-four years is a long time to keep returning to one man. Leaf makes a good case for why it was worth it.

I picked this up expecting another corporate history and got something more affectionate. MacDonald, the Guardian’s games editor, has covered Nintendo for long enough to be in the story herself: there’s a lovely passage about queuing for the Wii at Gamescom 2006, calling her parents from the hall to try to explain it. The book is at its best on the through-line that limitations beget creativity: Koji Kondo writing the Zelda title theme in an all-nighter after the team realised Ravel was still in copyright; the D-pad emerging from the constraints of the Game & Watch; Mario’s mustache existing because pixels couldn’t render a mouth.

The Iwata material is the heart of it. His 2004 line about the industry being on a dead end (“Nintendo is called ‘conservative’ and ‘quiet’ nowadays, so we hope to show our nature as an innovator”) frames everything that followed, from the DS through to the Switch. The hidden tribute to him in the Switch’s OS, accessed by recreating the Nintendo Direct hand gesture on the date of his death, is the kind of detail MacDonald is alert to throughout.

Game development, she notes, has gone from a band to an orchestra. So has the writing about it.

Arnold-Foster offers a cultural history that traces nostalgia’s journey from a fatal medical diagnosis (a homesickness severe enough to kill C17th Swiss mercenaries) to the soft, wistful feeling we recognise today. She is compelling on nostalgia’s medical past, but earns contemporary relevance by showing how the emotion was gradually weaponised by advertisers, politicians and an industry happy to sell the feeling back to us. She’s admirably even-handed on its political use: the left have our own sentimental golden ages (the heydays of the NHS and BBC) as well as its recent association with the dreaded MAGA and Brexit. Her argument that nostalgia is rooted in selective, reconstructive memory gives the book genuine rigour. Occasionally the sweep outruns the depth, but as an introductory history of a feeling that quietly shapes how we vote, buy and remember, it’s illuminating.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​