Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Manic Miner (1983), the player controls a miner who must negotiate conveyor belts and killer spikes while avoiding robots, malign jellyfish, killer penguins and poisonous bushes to collect keys before his air supply runs out. In the most popular current platform game, and the closest approach yet to a true interactive cartoon, Crash Bandicoot 3, the eponymous orange marsupial rides on the back of a speeding tiger across the Great Wall of China or does battle with giant glassy-eyed men wielding sledgehammers.

But now the very term “platform game” is somewhat outdated; perhaps more appropriate is “exploration game,” which has been the defining point of platformers since Super Mario Bros. This is partly because such games have quite recently made a transition to three-dimensional rather than flat-plane representation—most effectively in the astonishing Super Mario 64 (1996)—and in the process the gameplay has necessarily changed. The old, simple lines denoting “platforms” are now solid ledges or columns made of brick, wood, earth or steel, and while essential features of the platformer are retained, such as the problem of figuring out a series of jumps to get from “here” to “up there,” there are hybrid factors

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