Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

A really successful character is not just a moneymaker for software developers, either: as we’ve seen, it enables hardware companies to sell consoles. Witness the fact that Nintendo’s N64 machine was delayed for a whole year while the finishing touches were put to the game Super Mario 64. Good characters become extremely valuable “properties” in the industry. Sega’s Megadrive took off on the back of Sonic the Hedgehog, and the massive financial success of British publisher Eidos is largely thanks to Lara Croft.

The first videogame “character” of all was Pac- Man (1980). Before this epoch-making game, the player controlled spaceships, gun turrets or other mechanical devices. Suddenly, though, the player of Pac-Man controlled a being: an animated, eating thing. The game’s designer, Toru Iwatani, says that he got the idea for Pac-Man’s form after eating a slice of pizza, and seeing the shape that was left. Then: “I designed Pac-Man to be the simplest character possible, without any features such as eyes or limbs. Rather than defining the image of Pac-Man for the player, I wanted to leave that to each player’s imagination.”

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