Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual Points of view

Trigger Happy

confined space with twenty, fifty or a hundred bloodthirsty automatons in order to save the last nuclear family on Earth. As the game’s designer, Eugene Jarvis, explained to J. C. Herz: “It was kind of about confinement. You are stuck on this screen. There’s two hundred robots trying to mutilate you, and there’s no place to hide . . . You can’t run down the hallway. You can’t go anywhere else . . . A lot of times, the games are about the limitations. Not only what you can do but what you can’t do.”28

Points of view

In 1980, Battlezone’s scientific perspective was still only one of many competing modes of representation available to the videogame designer. Games continued to perform on two-dimensional planes, scrolling in one or more directions, for years. In 1982, however, another new mode, which came to be known as “isometric perspective,” was popularized by Zaxxon (see fig. 10), a shoot-’em-up that scrolled, not simply

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28 Jarvis’s point is further backed up by the fact that nine years after scrolling and perspectival representation were invented, along came Tetris, an ultra-simple affair that featured neither, but almost instantly became the world’s most popular videogame. The modern success of Grand Theft Auto, too, has not been limited by its “old-fashioned,” top-down viewpoint.

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