High Scores And Egos: There's Always A Bigger Doodle 
The Last Moments Of GAME 
How Bad User Interfaces Are Ruining Video Games And Other Wonderful Things 
She Tried To Make Good Video Games For Girls, Whatever That Meant 
The Story Of Doodle Jump: Brotherly Love And Digital Snacks 
Sunday Comics: Dead Island Exidy’s Death Race, of 1976, might have been the first game adaptation and yeah, it was kind of lame, setting a standard for adaptations for decades to come. (It was inspired by 1975′s Death Race 2000 starring Sylvester Stallone and David Carradine). But man did it cause a stink. Players ran down stickmen with a car, eliciting screams and turning the screen into a graveyard of pedestrians. The game had no colour, no digitized sound, no blood splatter, no ragdoll physics, its violence was abstract in both audio and video, and it made 60 Minutes as a national outrage.
In my last book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, I think I claimed that the first film to commercial videogame adaptation was Death Race 2000, a 1976 arcade game based (loosely) on the 1975 cult film Death Race, in which drivers in a dystopic America circa the then-future millennium score points for people killed. The arcade game was not an officially licensed adaptation, but it was an adaptation nonetheless. It was also reviled in the media as the first example of a controversial videogame.
But In our research for a new book about the Atari VCS, Nick Montfort and I discovered that Death Race is in fact not the first film adaptation in games. That honour goes to none other than Shark Jaws, by Atari.
