Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual 353

Trigger Happy

continued to improve the brutish lives of his creations by teaching them writing, astronomy, agriculture, sailing, medicine, mining and the interpretation of dreams. He also fooled Zeus into accepting the worst portion of meat from sacrificed animals: gristly bone was the gods’ due, while men kept the edible flesh.

For these and other indiscretions, however, Prometheus was punished. The malignant Zeus had him chained to a rock, where a monstrous eagle gobbled at his exposed liver every day for thirty thousand years. In the Athenian drama usually attributed to Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, the immortally pain-racked hero sums up his story: “I gave a gift to mortals, and in that giving yoked myself to fate—to this! I filled a hollow reed with fire, stolen from heaven. I gave it to mortals. It sparked them, taught them cunning, filled their need. For that, now, I pay this price, chained, staked, wide open to the sky.”

After an age of suffering, Prometheus was finally freed when Hercules shot the eagle-monster with his bow. From the surviving fragments of Aeschylus’s sequel, it appears that Prometheus and Zeus were then to enjoy something of a reconciliation. More than two thousand years later, however, Shelley rewrote the ending in Prometheus Unbound, where Prometheus,

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