Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

rewind; we’ve gone too far.8 True, I have a certain fondness for Vanguard, a game I could happily clock as

anine-year-old on a family vacation in Wales (you could shoot in four directions and the beepy tunes were evil mind-limpets). Clearly, however, Goldeneye, a first-person shooter for the Nintendo 64 console which lets you play the role of James Bond, is a much better game.

One genre that certainly refutes this nostalgiatinged argument is the racing game. In most sorts of videogame, “feel” is at base more important than fancy graphics or speed for its own sake. But in the racing game, graphics and speed are part of the “feel.” Every increase in technological power enhances the genre’s unique pleasure: the feeling of hurling a vehicle around

arealistic environment at suicidal velocities. Conversely, because of this intimate relationship between hardware base and software superstructure, a racing game has very often been used as a seductive showcase for new technology: the Sony PlayStation was the mouth-watering machine of the future on its release, just because of the unprecedented speed and solidity of one of its first releases, Ridge Racer. That

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8 “Video Killed the Radio Star” (1979) by Buggles, a deathless masterpiece of popular song, the KindertÖtenlied that on the one hand revels in modernist sonic synthesis but on the other mourns the passing of the 1970s and of youth itself.

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