Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

doubt Battlezone and its ilk had some influence on William Gibson’s seminally incandescent descriptions of the Matrix (whence the 1999 film got its title). In

Neuromancer, Gibson describes this computersimulated world, where corporations are represented by “green cubes” or a “stepped scarlet pyramid,” where the landscape consists of “lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding . . .” Battlezone was the first game to draw with those familiar schoolroom objects, polygons—and in that, it prefigured the firework geometries of cutting-edge games in the late 1990s and beyond.

Battlezone was at once fantastically complex, in the demands of reaction and strategy it placed on the player, and reassuringly simple. Here was a universe devoid of clutter, eternally shiny and new. Early dreams of virtual reality were always expressed visually in wireframe graphics for these very reasons (see Tron), and now that videogame graphics have moved on to fill in the wireframe skeletons with textured surfaces, and to smooth their hard-edged outlines, the wireframe aesthetic can be seen as one of the great futurist dreams of the late twentieth century.

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