Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy User Manual
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Trigger Happy
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videogame tie-ins. Michael Crichton is also setting up
his own videogame development studio. And in 1998
Douglas Adams—who had a hand in the first
videogame based on his sci-fi comedy The Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy, a text adventure game published
by Infocom in 1985—scripted the adventure videogame
Starship Titanic before the appearance of the tie-in
novel, which he didn’t even write himself. These guys
aren’t stupid; they know which way the wind is
blowing.
The major videogame console manufacturers,
meanwhile, have epic ambitions for their little lumps of
extruded plastic. Consoles aim to be not just gaming
machines but the one-stop entertainment center in the
homes of millions. One Sony insider has been
overheard saying that the company’s aim with
PlayStation2 is to “own the living room.”
In the late 1990s, you could already play audio CDs
on a PlayStation, but that’s small beer. Sony’s
PlayStation2 plays DVE movies through your TV, and
various interface ports allow the connection of digital
video cameras for editing home movies, printers,
scanners, storage devices and much else. Playstation2
sold 980,000 units on its first launch weekend in Japan
in March 2000, and by mid-2001 Sony had shipped 15