Trigger Happy
their market preeminence, because Sony wasn’t happy about being messed around with by the arrogant Mario machine, and decided to go it alone and muscle in on the videogames business themselves. Thus the Sony PlayStation was born. On its launch in 1995 it blew Sega’s new machine, the Saturn, out of the water. Nintendo, meanwhile, didn’t have a competitive console out until two years later: the Nintendo 64, which had a handful of brilliant games but was woefully
Apart from the odd blast in an arcade, I hadn’t thought about videogames again. Then, one summer, I was staying in a friend’s Edinburgh flat while watching more or less disastrous pieces of fringe theater at the rate of three or four a day. The odorous broom closet I was sleeping in had only one particularly interesting piece of furniture: a PlayStation. My friend introduced me to something called WipEout 2097, a fast, futuristic
Over the previous decade, it seemed, videogames had really grown up. This was an amazing, sensebattering, physically thrilling trip. Artistically, it felt
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