4 electric sheep – Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy User Manual

Page 117

Advertising
background image

Trigger Happy

119


4

ELECTRIC SHEEP



A specter is haunting Tinseltown. We have seen how
successful videogames already compete in financial
terms with the figures grossed by Hollywood
blockbusters. And one increasingly popular term of
praise for a certain sort of exploration videogame is to
say that it is like an “interactive film.” On the summer
1999 release of Silent Hill, a horror videogame in
which you play the character of a man searching a
deserted American town for his missing daughter, one
journalist claimed that this game “fully exploited” the
developments toward “fully interactive cinema.” The
media buzz is that cinema and videogames are on
convergent paths. If this is true, Hollywood ought to be
worried that videogames are going to swallow it whole.

Some of the world’s best videogame developers

happily admit that they lean heavily on styles of action

Advertising