Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 134)

Trigger Happy
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references, it starred Keanu Reeves as a computer
hacker who learns that the world is something like an
enormous game of SimCity run by computers to keep
us enslaved. In its exaggeratedly dynamic kung fu
scenes, in which actors float through the air and smash
each other through walls, The Matrix contains the most
successful translations to date of certain videogame
paradigms to the celluloid medium. (This film also
reminds us that the concept of “virtual reality” is itself a
very old idea, for Descartes conceived of a malin gÉnie,
or evil demon, which, exactly like the computers in The
Matrix, caused him to have the thoughts and
perceptions he ordinarily believed to be signs of a real,
external world.)
The primary influence on The Matrix’s sort of
hyperkinetic action is still a filmic one: the Hong Kong
guns’n’kung-fu movie apotheosized by such cult
directors and performers as John Woo and Chow Yun
Fat. But the increasingly unrealistic dynamics of such
films through the late 1980s and 1990s clearly owe a lot
in turn to the rise of the videogame beat-’em-up such as
Street Fighter, and in one such film this is explicitly
acknowledged. The star of City Hunter, Jackie Chan, is
at one point knocked into an arcade beat-’em-up
machine, initiating a comic sequence in