Trigger Happy

which Chan, dazed by the blow, imagines his assailant as different digitally generated characters from the videogame itself, finally winning the fight in the virtual world and so in the real one. Videogames repaid the compliment with Tekken 3 (1998), which contains, although the makers Namco explicitly deny this, playable characters that look as if they might be heavily influenced by Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan himself.

For their part, films have been very successful in influencing the look of certain types of videogame. The first great film tie-in (still only one of a handful today) was the videogame Star Wars (1983), a threedimensional space shoot-’em-up that abstracted elements from certain battle scenes in the film and turned them into simple game objectives. The most impressive visual aspect of these action sequences in the film was the shower of red and green laser bolts, and it is these that were most easily translated into early videogame graphics, while John Williams’s pompously brilliant score, mixed with high-pitched R2–D2 wibbles, pumped from the arcade speakers. The game did not replicate the movie, but stole those parts of the movie (the action sequences) that could be

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Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual