Trigger Happy
invented to gild the cage, and then burst its bars completely.
“Wraparound” screens were soon developed, as in Asteroids (1979), where the player’s ship could, rather than bouncing off the screen edges, travel off one side of the screen and magically reappear on the other, providing increased fluidity of action. Now space was curved. Your disappearing ship would sail “over” the top and zip around the (imaginary) back instantaneously before coming “under” and rematerializing at the bottom. Topologically, the spatial arrangement of Asteroids, though it looked flat, was actually equivalent to the surface of a torus (a doughnut with a hole in the middle). While this curvature afforded the player greater freedoms of maneuverability, it also cunningly increased the sense of entrapment. For anyone who has watched their Asteroids ship career repeatedly across the screen time after time at full speed knows that there is no escape, however far you travel, from the implacable boulders.
The superficial limits of the screen were further eroded by the invention of scrolling. The term was borrowed, with
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