Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

bodystockinged martial arts cyborg called Psycho Mantis, comments sarcastically on the other videogames you play (by reading the memory card in your console, which contains data saved from other games). And a helpful character will tell you at one point to pull your controller out of the PlayStation and put it in the other socket, so that Psycho will no longer be able to predict your movements and kill you quickly. Such clever devices ensure that the player is a happy slave: though he has no freedom to change the story, he has a lot of freedom in the gameplay itself, where many different creative solutions can be found to the game’s problems. The unique pleasure of a videogame, after all, the one that no other medium can offer, is always going to be what happens between the episodes of the story.

The videogame industry knows just how successful this approach can be—and, increasingly, professional scriptwriters are being hired to work on high-budget productions for exactly these reasons. In the future, videogames will no doubt have much better stories, but it seems unlikely that we will be given much more freedom to change them than we already have in games like Perfect Dark, Zelda 64 or Metal Gear Solid. And above all, there will still need to be interesting

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