Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 363)

Trigger Happy
365
valleys and rivulets. Block by block, the ground is
raised and lowered; edges are smoothed off.
Only then, when the landscape is shaped in three
dimensions, do the artists start to color it in, choosing
from a palette of colors and textures (endless pages of
sun-bleached grass, clover patches, subtly different
shades of rock) that are simply painted on to the
wireframe model. Meanwhile, other artists have been
fashioning animals out of their digital version of the
Promethean clay. A cow is fashioned from a
geometrical skeleton, painstakingly animated through
hundreds of frames, and then “skinned”—not flayed,
but given a skin, a colorful cartoon cowhide that is
wrapped over the wireframe model. Now the
worldbuilder simply chooses the incantatory menu
option “Place Object”: the cow is sucked out of its
virtual womb, fully formed, and dropped into the field.
With no apparent signs of confusion or disorientation,
the bovine simply starts padding around the grass,
enjoying a nonexistent sun. Inside the game: life, of a
sort.
A world can’t be built in isolation. Every facet of
the videogame development process is organically
interrelated with the requirements of the others. For this
game, an artist explains, “The early levels are all