Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 218)

Trigger Happy
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points it dead ahead along the central axis of vision,
rather than across the body; the videogame gun,
however, is moved over to one side so as not to obscure
the center of the screen, where most of the action takes
place, and a separate aiming cursor (usually small
crosshairs) is provided for accuracy of shooting.
The makers of Wolfenstein went on to release the
far more successful Doom, which added floor and
ceiling textures as well as external locations, and then
Quake, which further enhanced the illusion of a solid
environment with solid, polygonal monsters. Suddenly,
videogame space was inhabited, occupied by the
enemy.
And it was all done with geometry. The triangles
and oblongs of Battlezone are the same objects that
make up a level of Half-Life (1998), only in the latter
they are massively more numerous, and the surfaces are
filled in. So why did polygons become the ubiquitous
virtual bricks of videogames? Because, whatever the
interesting or eccentric devices that had been thrown up
along the way, videogames, as with the strain of
Western art from the Renaissance up until the shock of
photography, were hell-bent on refining their powers of
illusionistic deception.