Trigger Happy
successfully reimagined as videogame forms. And the lure of the Star Wars franchise is such that every console and computer-game platform since then has been home to a game based on the film. They have covered nearly every conceivable genre: platform, 3D shooting, role-playing—even, lamentably, beat-’emup, in Masters of Teras Kasi for the PlayStation.
One of the most seminal modern influences, not just on videogames but on all forms of science fiction, is the film Blade Runner. This is partly due to aesthetic considerations—the popular style of futuristic technoir— but for videogames it has also had, until the current generation of extremely powerful machines, a technological payoff. For the vision of neon-soaked streets at night in a skyscraper-studded, futuristic Tokyo was particularly amenable to videogames’ limited powers of representation. The nighttime setting meant the processor had less to draw, could fill large areas of the scene with black; neon lighting is gaudy and luminous in a way that computer graphics can easily imitate; and the absence of vegetation freed the machine from the very processor-hungry task of creating a convincing tree with hundreds of leaves and different shades of green. A game such as G-Police, one of the most blatant videogame homages to the
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