Trigger Happy
videogame tie-ins. Michael Crichton is also setting up his own videogame development studio. And in 1998 Douglas Adams—who had a hand in the first videogame based on his sci-fi comedy The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a text adventure game published by Infocom in 1985—scripted the adventure videogame Starship Titanic before the appearance of the tie-in novel, which he didn’t even write himself. These guys aren’t stupid; they know which way the wind is blowing.
The major videogame console manufacturers, meanwhile, have epic ambitions for their little lumps of extruded plastic. Consoles aim to be not just gaming machines but the one-stop entertainment center in the homes of millions. One Sony insider has been overheard saying that the company’s aim with PlayStation2 is to “own the living room.”
In the late 1990s, you could already play audio CDs on a PlayStation, but that’s small beer. Sony’s PlayStation2 plays DVE movies through your TV, and various interface ports allow the connection of digital video cameras for editing home movies, printers, scanners, storage devices and much else. Playstation2 sold 980,000 units on its first launch weekend in Japan in March 2000, and by mid-2001 Sony had shipped 15
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