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Trigger Happy
213
confined space with twenty, fifty or a hundred
bloodthirsty automatons in order to save the last nuclear
family on Earth. As the game’s designer, Eugene
Jarvis, explained to J. C. Herz: “It was kind of about
confinement. You are stuck on this screen. There’s two
hundred robots trying to mutilate you, and there’s no
place to hide . . . You can’t run down the hallway. You
can’t go anywhere else . . . A lot of times, the games
are about the limitations. Not only what you can do but
what you can’t do.”
28
Points of view
In 1980, Battlezone’s scientific perspective was still
only one of many competing modes of representation
available to the videogame designer. Games continued
to perform on two-dimensional planes, scrolling in one
or more directions, for years. In 1982, however, another
new mode, which came to be known as “isometric
perspective,” was popularized by Zaxxon (see fig. 10),
a shoot-’em-up that scrolled, not simply
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28 Jarvis’s point is further backed up by the fact that nine years after
scrolling and perspectival representation were invented, along came Tetris,
an ultra-simple affair that featured neither, but almost instantly became the
world’s most popular videogame. The modern success of Grand Theft Auto,
too, has not been limited by its “old-fashioned,” top-down viewpoint.