Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

don’t replace the old. Film did not replace theater. The Internet did not replace the book. Videogames have been around for thirty years, and they’re not going away.

When I was ten years old, my parents bought me a home computer. It was a ZX Spectrum, brainchild of the celebrated British inventor Sir Clive Sinclair (this was before he went on to create the savagely unsuccessful electric tricycle called the C5). The entire computer, which was a contemporary of the American Commodore Vic-20, was about half the size of a modern PC keyboard, and it plugged into a normal television. It was black, with little gray squidgy keys and a rainbow stripe over one corner. Tiny blocky characters would move around blocky landscapes lavishly painted in eight colors, while the black box beeped and burped. It was pure witchcraft. But the magic wasn’t simply done to me; it was a spell I could dive into. I could swim happily in this world, at once mysterious and utterly logical, of insubstantial light.

Doubtless my parents imagined the Spectrum would be educational. In a way it was, for very soon I was an expert at setting exactly the right recording levels on hi-fi equipment to ensure a perfect copy of a hot new game. (In those days, videogames came on

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