Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual Meme machines

Trigger Happy

superior to anything I had seen on the Fringe. And so, after sacrificing most of my sleep during that Edinburgh stay to improving my lap times, I decided I needed to buy a PlayStation of my own. Perhaps one day, I thought, I might even write something about videogames.

So I bought the console. And then I had to buy a few games. Soul Blade (fighting), WipEout 2097 (racing), Tomb Raider (Lara Croft)—that would do for starters. On second thought, better add V-Rally (more racing) and Crash Bandicoot (marsupial wrangling). My research had to be dutifully wide-ranging, didn’t it? Soon, I also bought the Nintendo 64, which slotted neatly on to my shelves with Super Mario 64 and 1080 Snowboarding. Now they’re joined by a Sega Dreamcast, Sony’s PlayStation2, a Nintendo GameCube, and Microsofts’s Xbox.

It hasn’t been cheap. But my experience is one that’s shared by millions of people all over the planet. Indeed, this acceleration in videogame evolution would not have been possible otherwise.

Meme machines

Videogames today are monstrously big business. Their present status has largely to do with the shift in demographics, of which I was a part. In the 1980s,

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