The art of the video game has come a long way in the past 25 years. Once upon a time, the person responsible for a game's aesthetics was a solitary programmer — often presenting characters and landscapes as little more than bits of code and coloured pixels. Nowadays, entire teams of artists work together to create cohesive, often breathtaking, works of electronic art. Thanks to the technological sophistication of highly advanced gaming system, virtually anything that can be conceived of can now be rendered in the digital universe. The Art of the Video Game is the first book to celebrate the artistry of video games, which are poised to define 21st-century entertainment, much as talking pictures revolutionized the previous century.