Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 80)

Trigger Happy
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screen and must be rotated and laterally shifted so that
they all fit together at the bottom. When they do, the
horizontal line that they complete vanishes, and you
have a bit more breathing space. Your job is to clear all
the blocks away for as long as you can. Simple, but one
of the purest, most addictive videogame designs in
history. Where are you in the game? Nowhere. You are
pure mind, engaged in a purely symbolic struggle. As
in Space Invaders, you know that you can never win,
that eventually the blocks will descend so quickly that
the screen will be filled with a hideous jumble. Still you
try, for maybe this time you will do just a bit better.
Herein lies the demonic power, stripped naked of
graphical tinsel and story-lined misdirection, of every
videogame there is.
Family fortunes
This scoot around videogame genres is not meant to
be utterly exhaustive. But it’s a working sketch, a
snapshot. There isn’t room here for many videogames
through the years that defy easy genre categorization,
such as Deus Ex Machina, Parappa the Rapper, Skool
Daze, Nights or Ecco the Dolphin.
But one useful lesson is that the videogame
ecology is one rife with inter-species breeding: the