Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual Art types

Trigger Happy

And then a little-known Japanese Pachinko manufacturer called Taito rode in to the rescue. Their extraordinary new arcade game was the seed of the modern era. Within a few months of its 1978 release in Japan, the game had caused a nationwide shortage of the coin required to play it. Twenty thousand cabinets were sold the next year in America, and over its lifetime the game grossed $500 million. It was called Space Invaders.

Art types

Videogames today are a broad church. I’m using the term “videogames” to encompass arcade games, homeconsole games, and computer games. The bewildering array of different forms and styles could lead a casual observer to think that the only thing all these games have in common is a microprocessor. In fact, all such games share crucial low-level qualities.

As with any form, videogame genres mutate and shift over history. If they never exactly die, they can sleep for a long time, while other, newer types spring up to take their place. Furthermore, few modern videogames slot neatly into very discrete categories. But I’ll start mapping out this confusing terrain by identifying certain families of videogame.

45