Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 239)

Trigger Happy
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except a symbolic one: to emphasize and celebrate the
area’s gigantism of scale.
Makuhari, in its odd flatness of texture, its
aggressively rectilinear architecture and its
constellation of rosy aircraft-warning lights winking
from the buildings at night, looks just like a city out of
a videogame. It is a shrine to techno-optimism.
Walking around, you feel that for all its perfection it is
still somehow provisional, that Makuhari is in fact
waiting for the foot-dragging future to arrive before it
can flower in its full sci-fi glory. It was this district of
Chiba that led William Gibson, in his Sprawl novels, to
posit the city as his physical setting for the tales of
corporate cyber-rapacity coexisting uneasily with a
radical hacker underground.
Fittingly, Makuhari is also the location for the
biannual videogame industry festival, the Tokyo Game
Show. For more than twenty years, Japan has been the
leading center of videogame development in the world,
both technologically and artistically. So the Tokyo
Game Show is the calendar’s most important event. A
lot of what’s big in Japan now will trickle down into
Western gaming paradigms in a year or two. And the
Japanese have a very particular approach to the design