Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual Final frontier

Trigger Happy

The final frontier

This is a particular kind of utopianist terraforming, where a person’s capabilities are never insufficient. But what about the purely visual imagination of videogame worlds? Whereas the Battlezone universe was in its day shockingly new, today’s environments are much more instantly recognizable. They draw on only a few basic templates. There is the blasted, neonlit Blade Runner cityscape; the dank metal corridors with exposed piping, steam vents and unpredictable lighting are straight from Alien; steel catwalks and pools of orange molten metal ring that Terminator bell. Cute, unthreatening worlds in primary colors come straight from animated cartoons—hardly surprising, then, that there is an exodus of talent from traditional animation into the videogame industry.

There is a certain amount of interbreeding among these types, of course. Just as we saw earlier that many games opt for interfaces of a deliberately technonostalgic design, so the very environments in games like Quake III, Turok: Rage Wars, Tomb Raider

IIIor Unreal mix hi-tech steel and electric light with architecture of a deliberately archaic grandeur: vaulted stone archways and sweeping staircases. In this way

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