Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

environment had no characteristics of its own: it was not terrain, but simply a function of the relations between objects (such as the perilous gravitational field surrounding the sun in Spacewar) or a means by which time could pass while one object traveled across the screen (the ball in Pong), so that everything did not happen simultaneously.

This was a mode of space purer than any that exists in the real universe. Its laws produced no frictional resistance, and it offered no decorative matter to distract from the task in hand. It was a pure dream of unhindered movement and harmonious action. More modern games have diluted this primal passion in a mania of hyper-representation. Certainly it is clear that as soon as more advanced graphic systems become available in the history of videogames, it is space that gets filled up, terraformed, converted into a game object itself. Perhaps in the end there was something disturbing about the alien vacuum.

In the early flat-plane games, the boundaries of the TV screen limited the play arena to a fixed, small size, and thus limited the type of action available to game designers. (Just as in real life, a game of football requires more space than a game of tennis.) The screen was a prison. But it didn’t take long before ways were

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