Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

except a symbolic one: to emphasize and celebrate the area’s gigantism of scale.

Makuhari, in its odd flatness of texture, its aggressively rectilinear architecture and its constellation of rosy aircraft-warning lights winking from the buildings at night, looks just like a city out of a videogame. It is a shrine to techno-optimism. Walking around, you feel that for all its perfection it is still somehow provisional, that Makuhari is in fact waiting for the foot-dragging future to arrive before it can flower in its full sci-fi glory. It was this district of Chiba that led William Gibson, in his Sprawl novels, to posit the city as his physical setting for the tales of corporate cyber-rapacity coexisting uneasily with a radical hacker underground.

Fittingly, Makuhari is also the location for the biannual videogame industry festival, the Tokyo Game Show. For more than twenty years, Japan has been the leading center of videogame development in the world, both technologically and artistically. So the Tokyo Game Show is the calendar’s most important event. A lot of what’s big in Japan now will trickle down into Western gaming paradigms in a year or two. And the Japanese have a very particular approach to the design

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