Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

visuals of the Blade Runner city yet, welcomed these in-built visual limitations of the tech-noir genre thankfully, since it had so much else on its silicon mind.

As well as influencing hundreds of other videogames, mostly futuristic shoot-’em-ups, Blade Runner has also been made into a rather successful adventure game in its own right. But we have seen already that influential currents between the two media do not run only one way. And this turns out to be true even of Ridley Scott’s own remarkable film: one of the production designers on Blade Runner has said that his work was inspired by the cabinet art on—what else?— an arcade videogame.

But while creative aesthetic interpollination between films and videogames may have positive results, the attempt at wholesale translation from one medium to the other is usually doomed. If you make a film based on a videogame world, you instantly lose what is most essential to the videogame experience. One problem is that pleasurably unreal visual qualities will be lost. Good software simulation of grass, for instance, can, in its necessary stylization, be more aesthetically interesting than a field of real grass on film. Jeremy Smith, managing director of Core Design, is very decided on this point:

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