Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

references, it starred Keanu Reeves as a computer hacker who learns that the world is something like an enormous game of SimCity run by computers to keep us enslaved. In its exaggeratedly dynamic kung fu scenes, in which actors float through the air and smash each other through walls, The Matrix contains the most successful translations to date of certain videogame paradigms to the celluloid medium. (This film also reminds us that the concept of “virtual reality” is itself a very old idea, for Descartes conceived of a malin gÉnie, or evil demon, which, exactly like the computers in The Matrix, caused him to have the thoughts and perceptions he ordinarily believed to be signs of a real, external world.)

The primary influence on The Matrix’s sort of hyperkinetic action is still a filmic one: the Hong Kong guns’n’kung-fu movie apotheosized by such cult directors and performers as John Woo and Chow Yun Fat. But the increasingly unrealistic dynamics of such films through the late 1980s and 1990s clearly owe a lot in turn to the rise of the videogame beat-’em-up such as Street Fighter, and in one such film this is explicitly acknowledged. The star of City Hunter, Jackie Chan, is at one point knocked into an arcade beat-’em-up machine, initiating a comic sequence in

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