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Trigger Happy
201
3D.”
26
Where two planes of an object meet, a line is
drawn, but the planes themselves have no surface, no
solidity. Every object is drawn from simple geometrical
objects such as triangles and rectangles. These are
generally known as “polygons.”
Wireframe 3D caught on after Battlezone, and
several arcade classics borrowed this technology while
making the leap from pervasive green to full color,
most notably Star Wars and, in excelsis, Tempest,
whose abstract pyrotechnics drove one of the greatest
shoot-’em-up games ever conceived.
The peculiar ascetic attraction of wireframe
graphics (whose apotheosis coincided with the last days
of vector displays, but persisted after they had gone, as
raster monitors now had sufficient pixel resolution to
draw pretty straight-looking diagonals) enabled the
player to concentrate purely on the action in a defiantly
alien, unreal and still featureless arena. For many
people growing up on these machines, the pinpoint
glowing geometries of these worlds became a new
metaphor for the terrain of the imagination—the
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26 The first 3D wireframe computer animation had actually been created
nearly two decades previously, by Edward Zajac, an engineer working at
Bell Labs, as part of an experiment to see whether an orbiting satellite could
be stabilized so that one of its surfaces always faced Earth.