Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

dispensation of characters, in order to uncover more text than is currently viewable on the open section. We are now all familiar with the process of smoothly scrolling down a word-processing document or Web page: videogames got there first.

Early scrolling games were mostly of the vertical shoot-’em-up genre. Rather than sit waiting for aliens to come knocking at one’s defenses, as in Space Invaders (1978), the player was in constant motion, rushing forever upward on a long, linear strip of space, dodging and fighting enemies along the way. But most revolutionary was a type of space delineated by the combination of horizontal scrolling with a variation on the wraparound concept.

This idea in fact featured in one of the earliest scrolling games, Defender (1980 [see fig. 9]), for many reasons a classic of radical design, in which the player’s ship is free to fly left or right, or simply to hover, spitting lasers at the evil hordes. When the ship is in motion, it remains in the center of the screen; everything else scrolls by to give the illusion of movement. But fly far enough in one direction and the player approaches the original starting point, from the opposite direction. Horizontally, then, the play area is finite but unbounded.

209