Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 44)

Trigger Happy
46
Happiness is a warm gun
Perhaps the purest, most elemental videogame pleasure
is the heathen joy of destruction. You’ve got your
finger hovering over the trigger, you line up an enemy
and you fire. Such is the task presented by that
venerable videogame genre, the shoot-’em-up. Space
Invaders (see fig. 1) was not the first shoot-’em-up
(Atari’s Tank preceded it in 1974, and of course
Spacewar itself involved torpedo firing), but it was
revolutionary all the same. You control a laser turret
that can move from side to side at the bottom of the
screen. Farther up, a phalanx of fifty-five evil aliens
tramps across the screen in a smug dance of death.
When they reach one side of the screen, they all
descend one space and go back the other way. Your
task is simple: fire at will, and wipe them out.
Not so simple, though, because they are raining
bombs on you. You must dodge the bombs, or let your
four shields soak up the firepower. The shields,
however, crumble with every blast and are soon shot
through with holes, offering as much protection from
the merciless army above as a white handkerchief. As
you shoot off the invaders, their colleagues do not
panic, they do not break formation; in their infinite,
ego-less confidence they just move a little faster, and
faster still. They must not reach the bottom of the