Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

The music industry, too, is slowly waking up to the commercial possibilities of placing an artist’s song in a videogame. British rock band Ash is rumored to have earned nearly $1,000,000 in royalties by licensing just one song to the hit driving game Gran Turismo. Gremlin’s Actua Ice Hockey 2 has a soundtrack entirely by cult post-rockers Mogwai, whose faces have also been digitized and slapped onto the team members’ heads. Trent Reznor, the man behind industrial-techno outfit Nine Inch Nails, composed the soundtrack for Quake. CDs of specially written videogame music now regularly enter the pop charts in Japan, and videogame scores are now eligible for three categories of soundtrack music in the annual Grammy Awards.

Videogames now have such a potent influence on other forms of entertainment that they raise a clutch of questions about what they really have in common with the older forms. For example, David Bowie, well known as a man with an eye for the next big thing, wrote and performed (with guitarist Reeves Gabrels) an entire concept album for the soundtrack to the 1999 videogame Omikron: The Nomad Soul. At the Los Angeles press conference to announce this collaboration, Bowie said he approached the project as

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