Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

products, at least until its X-Box console arrives in 2001.)

Spacewar sprang so fully formed into the microcosmos that it took a very long time for other games to catch up. Its structure offered many of the virtues that are still essential features of videogames: simple rules with innumerable combinational possibilities; the competitive urge to destroy your opponent’s spaceship; the pleasure of mastery over a well-defined, consistent system; the challenge of reacting instantly to craft governed by inertial physics; and the sensual buzz of playing with animated patterns of light. The game is remarkably similar to Asteroids, an arcade machine that appeared some seventeen years later.

Having briefly considered trying to sell this curio, Russell and his team decided that no one would want to buy it, so they gave away the source code to anyone who was interested. Within a few years it was everywhere, a benign virus, an unstoppable meme, eating up time all over the world on government, military and scientific mainframes. And if you can’t beat them, join them: in the end, Digital Equipment Corporation used the game as a centerpiece for commercial demonstrations of their computer. In the

39