Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 198)

Trigger Happy
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view, as if you were actually there. (There had been
previous attempts at perspective in games, notably in
Night Driver, which used moving white blocks on a
black screen to evoke cats’ eyes and side bollards on a
road, and in Star Raiders [1979], a rudimentary 3D
space shoot-’em-up, but Battlezone provided an
environment where the player had complete freedom of
movement over the ground in any direction.) And
Battlezone was also the defining moment of a style of
graphic representation whose influence is still felt, even
in the most modern games of the new millennium.
The ghostly images of enemy tanks and flying
saucers were drawn in vector graphics. Whereas a
television screen or a modern computer monitor is a
“raster” display, consisting of hundreds of horizontal
arrays of dots that are drawn one at a time, so that a
diagonal line on screen always looks “stepped,” vector
screens enabled a perfectly straight line to be drawn
between any two points on the screen. Battlezone’s
universe was one of sharp-edged perfection.
But the most immediately noticeable thing about
the game now is that its tanks and mountains are drawn
only in luminous outline. You can see right through
everything. This method became known as “wireframe