Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy User Manual
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Trigger Happy
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he would a film, “to provide an emotional heart to the
game.” And it doesn’t stop there: the rock star’s
involvement extends to being a digitized character in
the game itself.
Videogames also extend their silvery tentacles into
the worlds of film and books. Star Wars director
George Lucas has had his own videogames division,
the widely respected LucasArts, for many years; Sega
put up a chunk of the budget for David Cronenberg’s
movie eXistenZ; and in summer 2001, Japanese
software giant Square released Final Fantasy: The
Spirits Within, an $80 million computer-generated
feature film based on its enormously successful Final
Fantasy games, with voices provided by Hollywood
stars Steve Buscemi, James Woods and Donald
Sutherland. Amazingly, videogames now compete
directly with movies in terms of financial returns. Over
the six-week Christmas 1998 period in the United
States, one videogame, Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda:
Ocarina of Time, grossed $160 million, well outpacing
the most popular film, Disney’s A Bug’s Life.
Meanwhile, thriller novelist Tom Clancy now
writes scenarios for videogames produced by his own
company, Red Storm, so that eventually his paperbased
products may be demoted to the status of