Trigger Happy
long as possible, but the war can never be won. Earth will be invaded. And, of course, it was—by the explosion of videogames that followed in Taito’s trailblazing footsteps.
The late 1970s and early 1980s were the golden age of classic shoot-’em-ups, with Asteroids, Robotron, Defender, Galaxian, Scramble, Tempest et al. pushing the tension envelope of this most fiery, physically draining of videogame genres. Indeed, the extreme simplicity of the basic concept—destroying things with guns—is the reason why, for a few years, the shoot- ’em-up expanded the possibilities of videogame action more than any other type of game. Throughout the 1980s, shoot-’em-ups boasted ever more dazzling lightshows and huge varieties of offensive weapons, while gradually replacing the static Space Invaders arena with larger, roamable spaces. Examples such as the Commodore 64 and Spectrum classic Uridium (easily as compelling as any arcade shooter of the time) required not just shooting accuracy but high-speed inertial negotiation of solid obstacles in two-and-a-half degrees of freedom (the extra fraction granted by virtue of the player’s ability to flip his craft onto its side and zip through narrow spaces).
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