Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 16)

Trigger Happy
18
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
racing) and Crash Bandicoot (marsupial wrangling).
My research had to be dutifully wide-ranging, didn’t it?
Soon, I also bought the Nintendo 64, which slotted
neatly on to my shelves with Super Mario 64 and 1080
Snowboarding. Now they’re joined by a Sega
Dreamcast, Sony’s PlayStation2, a Nintendo
GameCube, and Microsofts’s Xbox.
It hasn’t been cheap. But my experience is one
that’s shared by millions of people all over the planet.
Indeed, this acceleration in videogame evolution would
not have been possible otherwise.
Meme machines
Videogames today are monstrously big business.
Their present status has largely to do with the shift in
demographics, of which I was a part. In the 1980s,