Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual 201

Trigger Happy

3D.”26 Where two planes of an object meet, a line is drawn, but the planes themselves have no surface, no solidity. Every object is drawn from simple geometrical objects such as triangles and rectangles. These are generally known as “polygons.”

Wireframe 3D caught on after Battlezone, and several arcade classics borrowed this technology while making the leap from pervasive green to full color, most notably Star Wars and, in excelsis, Tempest, whose abstract pyrotechnics drove one of the greatest shoot-’em-up games ever conceived.

The peculiar ascetic attraction of wireframe graphics (whose apotheosis coincided with the last days of vector displays, but persisted after they had gone, as raster monitors now had sufficient pixel resolution to draw pretty straight-looking diagonals) enabled the player to concentrate purely on the action in a defiantly alien, unreal and still featureless arena. For many people growing up on these machines, the pinpoint glowing geometries of these worlds became a new metaphor for the terrain of the imagination—the

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26 The first 3D wireframe computer animation had actually been created nearly two decades previously, by Edward Zajac, an engineer working at Bell Labs, as part of an experiment to see whether an orbiting satellite could be stabilized so that one of its surfaces always faced Earth.

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