BOOK SPOTLIGHT - A Brief Legal History of the Video Game (Une Brève Histoire Juridique du Jeu Video)
Geoffray Brunaux (2025); Mare & Martin; Non-Fiction, Game History
Back in 2022, Geoffray Brunaux’s titles were among the first I catalogued on the site when I began branching out into other languages. A French professor of digital and criminal law, his books take a legal lens to the industry, and they’ve always stood out to me as works I’d love to have in the collection. And thanks to the fine folks at Mare & Martin, I now have his full trilogy in hand, with the latest just released this year.
Now, the éléphante in the room, this book is written entirely in French. And while relatively short at around 140 pages (often with half a page of footnotes), you’ll need to be quite fluent to read through. Luckily, it’s 2025 and there are plenty of tools to help you along.
Une Brève Histoire Juridique du Jeu Video sets out to recount the history of the video game industry, not through sales numbers or nostalgic releases, but through the courtroom battles that helped define one of the world’s most influential entertainment sectors. Beginning with the commercial birth of gaming in 1972 and running straight through to modern disputes over celebrity likeness, cloud platforms, and global mergers, the book shows that the legal history of video games has been just as eventful as the medium itself.
Brunaux opens with the early days of Pong and the Magnavox patent wars, cases that helped courts decide what a “video game” even was. From there, he traces how each technological leap reshaped the conflicts that followed. As cartridges gave way to CDs, online play, VR, and today’s hybrid cloud systems, new questions emerged: Who truly owns the game? What happens when you mod a game? How do courts treat virtual items that have real monetary and emotional value? The book moves decade by decade, using landmark disputes to map the industry’s legal evolution.
Many of the stories will ring familiar to players, even if they never realized the courtroom stakes behind them. There’s the Donkey Kong lawsuit that threatened Nintendo’s early success, the rise of third-party developers after Atari tried (and failed) to retain its own talent, and the Game Genie case that forced judges to rethink laws for interactive mediums. Brunaux also covers controversies that spilled into pop culture headlines: Lindsay Lohan’s likeness claim in GTA V, Fortnite’s viral dance disputes, and the Hot Coffee scandal that reshaped the way games are rated.
The book doesn’t stop at the stories of yesteryear. Brunaux tackles modern flashpoints like the legality of emulators, Nintendo’s push against ROM libraries, and the multi-billion-dollar cloud gaming debate triggered by Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard. In his view, the most important fights of the next decade won’t be about characters or cartridges, they’ll be about platform dominance, streaming infrastructure, and what “ownership” means when games live on servers instead of shelves.
Une Brève Histoire Juridique du Jeu Video makes the case that gaming’s history can’t be told without its legal battles. For anyone interested in the intersection of technology and law, this book is a great (French) primer to how the video games we know today have been shaped.
You can find more about the book right here in The Video Game Library.