Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

view, as if you were actually there. (There had been previous attempts at perspective in games, notably in Night Driver, which used moving white blocks on a black screen to evoke cats’ eyes and side bollards on a road, and in Star Raiders [1979], a rudimentary 3D space shoot-’em-up, but Battlezone provided an environment where the player had complete freedom of movement over the ground in any direction.) And Battlezone was also the defining moment of a style of graphic representation whose influence is still felt, even in the most modern games of the new millennium.

The ghostly images of enemy tanks and flying saucers were drawn in vector graphics. Whereas a television screen or a modern computer monitor is a “raster” display, consisting of hundreds of horizontal arrays of dots that are drawn one at a time, so that a diagonal line on screen always looks “stepped,” vector screens enabled a perfectly straight line to be drawn between any two points on the screen. Battlezone’s universe was one of sharp-edged perfection.

But the most immediately noticeable thing about the game now is that its tanks and mountains are drawn only in luminous outline. You can see right through everything. This method became known as “wireframe

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