Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

extraordinary worldwide success. Over six days in August 2000, the PokÉmon Yellow game sold a million copies across Europe. A survey of British teenagers found that they were more likely to recognize Pikachu, the cute yellow mascot of the PokÉmon franchise, than Tony Blair, the cute pink mascot of the British government. Worldwide, PokÉmon grossed $15 billion over the year, and Nintendo continued to manufacture 2,000 GameBoys every hour. With their crude, two- dimensional graphics, the PokÉmon games nonetheless managed to fascinate an enormous number of people in

away that any number of cutting-edge 3D engines failed to do. This is entirely attributable to two virtues of good games identified in Trigger Happy: a sophisticated engine of semiotic play, and a collection of welldesigned and likeable characters.

One of the few left-field successes of 2000 was a game that, essentially, rendered the PokÉmon concept in a more humorous, adult and pseudo-“realistic” style. The Sims, the new work from Will Wright, the author of SimCity, requires the player to manage a household full of gorgeously animated people who seem to have their own autonomous wills. They flirt, fight, clean up,

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