Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 372)

Trigger Happy
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videogame environment as a whole is perfectly
coherent.
If this cannot be accomplished at the moment for
recreations of large “real” environments like Tokyo,
owing to the data intensiveness problem, that in itself
should be a good reason for videogames to develop
their architectural imagination in much more creative
ways. Even when it is possible to recreate a real
environment, we still don’t want it to be too real. Sam
Houser describes the design process of skateboarding
game Thrasher: Skate and Destroy (1999) in this way:
“All the levels in the game are based on real-world
locations. The testers saw one level and said, ‘Wow,
that’s China Banks!’—which is a big place in San
Francisco which is now banned, but it’s one of the
world-famous meccas that any skateboarder knows
about.” But even so, the virtual China Banks was
deliberately not made completely accurate, because
then the gameplay would have been boring. “It’s quite
hard to take a real-world location that in skateboarding
may be good for one rail that everyone rides, but
you’ve got to make the whole level fun,” Houser
explains. So the digital China Banks features a host of
invented extra curves and ramps. It’s even better than
the real thing.