Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 57)

Trigger Happy
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the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Manic Miner (1983), the
player controls a miner who must negotiate conveyor
belts and killer spikes while avoiding robots, malign
jellyfish, killer penguins and poisonous bushes to
collect keys before his air supply runs out. In the most
popular current platform game, and the closest
approach yet to a true interactive cartoon, Crash
Bandicoot 3, the eponymous orange marsupial rides on
the back of a speeding tiger across the Great Wall of
China or does battle with giant glassy-eyed men
wielding sledgehammers.
But now the very term “platform game” is
somewhat outdated; perhaps more appropriate is
“exploration game,” which has been the defining point
of platformers since Super Mario Bros. This is partly
because such games have quite recently made a
transition to three-dimensional rather than flat-plane
representation—most effectively in the astonishing
Super Mario 64 (1996)—and in the process the
gameplay has necessarily changed. The old, simple
lines denoting “platforms” are now solid ledges or
columns made of brick, wood, earth or steel, and while
essential features of the platformer are retained, such as
the problem of figuring out a series of jumps to get
from “here” to “up there,” there are hybrid factors