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Trigger Happy VIDEOGAMES AND THE ENTERTAINMENT REVOLUTION by Steven Poole
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Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................ 8 1 RESISTANCE IS FUTILE ......................................10 Our virtual history....................................................10 Pixel generation .......................................................13 Meme machines .......................................................18 The shock of the new ...............................................28 2 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES ............................
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Out of control.........................................................109 4 ELECTRIC SHEEP ...............................................119 The gift of sound and vision ..................................122 CinÉ qua non? ........................................................130 Camera obscura......................................................142 You’ve been framed...............................................153 5 NEVER-ENDING STORIES.................................161 A tale
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Power tools ............................................................276 Veni, vidi, lusi........................................................282 Get into the groove.................................................291 You win again........................................................298 9 SIGNS OF LIFE.....................................................307 I am what I eat........................................................308 Deep in conversation............................
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Trigger Happy ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Eat pixels, sucker: this book grew out of an orphaned article to which Stuart Jeffries kindly gave a home. I am grateful to everyone who agreed to be interviewed: Paul Topping, Richard Darling, Jeremy Smith, Olivier Masclef, Nolan Bushnell, Terry Pratchett and Sam Houser. David Palfrey saved crucial passages of the manuscript from themselves. Jason Thompson phlegmatically suffered innumerable defeats at Tekken 3 and Gran Turismo, but turned th
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Trigger Happy factual errors, and to Cal Barksdale and Danielle A. Durkin for their work on the U.S. edition. Trigger Happy owes much to the incisive attentions of its editor, Andy Miller: il miglior fabbro. Any infelicities or errors that remain I acknowledge mine. Readers are invited to email comments for future editions to: trighap@hotmail.com. 9
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Trigger Happy 1 RESISTANCE IS FUTILE Our virtual history In the beginning, the planet was dead. Suddenly, millions of years ago, arcane spontaneous chemical reactions in the primeval ooze resulted, by a freak cosmic chance, in the first appearance of what we now call “the code of life.” Formed in knotty binary strings, each node representing information by its state of “on” or “off” and its place in the series, the code grew adept at replicating in ever more complex struc
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Trigger Happy (in geological terms) videogames crawled out on to the shore, developed rudimentary eyes and legs, and gradually began to conquer Earth. Biologically speaking, early videogames were, as they are today, radically exogamous—that is to say, they did not replicate by breeding with each other, but with “humans,” a preexisting carbon-based life form whose purpose was, and still is, unknown but seemingly providential. If the videogame managed to impart particularly intense p
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Trigger Happy But nothing could be certain in the great evolutionary game. Some seemingly successful species found it impossible to adapt swiftly enough to catastrophic changes in the environment, and died out. They were the dinosaurs. (By copying their “code” and letting it gestate under laboratory conditions, however, we can actually bring these fossils to life again, and let them roam happy, if confused, in virtual amusement parks.) Nor was this evolution a gradual and inexorabl
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Trigger Happy story unfolds of how we came to be the planet’s masters. Remember, humans, it’s not how you play the game that counts, it’s whether you win or lose. >Player 1 Ready 0101111111010101001111101010111111110101010011 0011111100101010001000000101010100000011111100101110 1010010000101000111101001010100100101010010110111 Pixel generation Like millions of people, I love videogames. I also love books, music and chess. That’s not unusual. For most of my generation, videog
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Trigger Happy don’t replace the old. Film did not replace theater. The Internet did not replace the book. Videogames have been around for thirty years, and they’re not going away. When I was ten years old, my parents bought me a home computer. It was a ZX Spectrum, brainchild of the celebrated British inventor Sir Clive Sinclair (this was before he went on to create the savagely unsuccessful electric tricycle called the C5). The entire computer, which was a contemporary of the Amer
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Trigger Happy cassette, and I would swap copies and hints with my schoolfriends.) For many years, the myriad delights that videogames offered were a reliable evening escape, their names now a peculiarly evocative roll call of sepia-tinged pleasures: Jet Pac, Ant Attack, Manic Miner, Knight Lore, Way of the Exploding Fist, Dark Star . . . Then I decided, at the age of sixteen, to put away childish things. So I bought a guitar and formed a skate-punk heavy-metal band. While I was awa
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Trigger Happy Already by this stage a great number of teenagers were more interested in videogames than in pop music. And Nintendo and Sega inspired fanatical loyalty. They were the Beatles and Stones of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Nintendo was the Beatles: wholesome fun for all the family, with superior artistry but a slightly “safe” image; Sega, on the other hand, were the snarling, street-smart gang, roughing it up for the hardcore videogame fans. As videogaming culture grew
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Trigger Happy their market preeminence, because Sony wasn’t happy about being messed around with by the arrogant Mario machine, and decided to go it alone and muscle in on the videogames business themselves. Thus the Sony PlayStation was born. On its launch in 1995 it blew Sega’s new machine, the Saturn, out of the water. Nintendo, meanwhile, didn’t have a competitive console out until two years later: the Nintendo 64, which had a handful of brilliant games but was woefully under-s
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Trigger Happy superior to anything I had seen on the Fringe. And so, after sacrificing most of my sleep during that Edinburgh stay to improving my lap times, I decided I needed to buy a PlayStation of my own. Perhaps one day, I thought, I might even write something about videogames. So I bought the console. And then I had to buy a few games. Soul Blade (fighting), WipEout 2097 (racing), Tomb Raider (Lara Croft)—that would do for starters. On second thought, better add V-Rally (more
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Trigger Happy videogames were indeed mainly a children’s pursuit, but now games cost between twenty and fifty dollars and are targeted at the disposable income of adults. The average age of videogame players is now estimated to be twenty-eight in the United States; one 2000 survey reported that 61 percent of all U.S. videogamers are eighteen and over, with a full 42 percent of computer gameplayers and 21 percent of console 1 gameplayers thirty-six years of age or older. More and m
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Trigger Happy renting movies. Total videogame software and hardware sales in the United States reached $8.9 billion, versus $7.3 billion for movie box-office 2 receipts; $6.6 billion of the videogame receipts were from software sales, retail and online. How did this strange invasion happen? How did this stealthy virus insinuate itself into so many homes? Well, one company has done more than any other over the last six years to stake out videogames’ huge place in adult popular cultu
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Trigger Happy the Prodigy and Underworld clamoring to provide tracks for the sequel. Sony had a PlayStation room built in London superclub the Ministry of Sound, and got its logo onto club flyers all over the country. Soon PlayStation was happily associated with dance culture, with enthusiastic support from early adopters such as the band Massive Attack, who had bought theirs while on tour in Japan. Control of the soundtrack to the third game in the series, 1999’s Wip3out, was hande
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Trigger Happy successful company in any industry in 1999. It has sold more than sixteen million copies worldwide of the first three games in the series. Add a conservative estimate for sales of the fourth installment, Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, and Lara’s getting close to becoming a billion-dollar babe. Lara is such a recognizable icon that she now advertises other products, appearing, for example, in computer-generated television commercials for Lucozade and Nike. Generatio
