Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

points it dead ahead along the central axis of vision, rather than across the body; the videogame gun, however, is moved over to one side so as not to obscure the center of the screen, where most of the action takes place, and a separate aiming cursor (usually small crosshairs) is provided for accuracy of shooting.

The makers of Wolfenstein went on to release the far more successful Doom, which added floor and ceiling textures as well as external locations, and then Quake, which further enhanced the illusion of a solid environment with solid, polygonal monsters. Suddenly, videogame space was inhabited, occupied by the enemy.

And it was all done with geometry. The triangles and oblongs of Battlezone are the same objects that make up a level of Half-Life (1998), only in the latter they are massively more numerous, and the surfaces are filled in. So why did polygons become the ubiquitous virtual bricks of videogames? Because, whatever the interesting or eccentric devices that had been thrown up along the way, videogames, as with the strain of Western art from the Renaissance up until the shock of photography, were hell-bent on refining their powers of illusionistic deception.

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