Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual Might as well jump

Trigger Happy

Racing games not based on traditional cars are usually distinguished by the appearance of power-ups: weapons scattered along the course that can be picked up by a player and used to blow his opponents off the track. But in all categories of racer, the aim is the same: get to the finish line first. If the destructive orgy of the shoot-’em-up captures the essence of humanversus- machine competition, the racing game is the purest expression of machine-mediated human-versushuman competition. There can be no arguments about who won and who lost. You were just too slow.

Might as well jump

Around 1981, a young Nintendo apprentice designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, was asked to write something to replace the innards of Radarscope, a tedious shooter Nintendo’s American arm had unwisely stocked up on to the tune of two thousand unsellable cabinets. Miyamoto quickly, if somewhat unpredictably, designed a game featuring a fat mustachioed carpenter and a giant monkey. The carpenter, under the player’s direction, had to begin at the bottom of the screen and, jumping to avoid barrels thrown by the infuriated simian, climb ladders and move across platforms to reach the top, where he could defeat the monkey and rescue a princess. It was a far cry from the alien-

56