Journalist / Historian · Seattle Post-Intelligencer / USAToday · 1993–present · American
Steven L. Kent wrote The Ultimate History of Video Games in 2001, the most comprehensive journalistic account of the games industry's first three decades, built from hundreds of original interviews with industry participants.
Steven Kent worked as a games journalist for mainstream newspapers including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and USA Today through the 1990s, covering the games industry as a business and cultural beat for general audiences. His reporting relationships gave him access to industry executives, engineers, and designers across the industry's competitive eras, and The Ultimate History of Video Games (2001) is the product of that access: a 600-page narrative history structured around original interviews with figures including Nolan Bushnell, Minoru Arakawa, Tom Kalinske, and dozens of others who were direct participants in the events described. The book covers the period from the Magnavox Odyssey through the PlayStation 2 era, combining business history, technical context, and personal testimony in a format accessible to general readers. It remains the most frequently cited single-volume reference in English-language games history.