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Trigger Happy
45
And then a little-known Japanese Pachinko
manufacturer called Taito rode in to the rescue. Their
extraordinary new arcade game was the seed of the
modern era. Within a few months of its 1978 release in
Japan, the game had caused a nationwide shortage of
the coin required to play it. Twenty thousand cabinets
were sold the next year in America, and over its
lifetime the game grossed $500 million. It was called
Space Invaders.
Art types
Videogames today are a broad church. I’m using
the term “videogames” to encompass arcade games,
homeconsole games, and computer games. The
bewildering array of different forms and styles could
lead a casual observer to think that the only thing all
these games have in common is a microprocessor. In
fact, all such games share crucial low-level qualities.
As with any form, videogame genres mutate and
shift over history. If they never exactly die, they can
sleep for a long time, while other, newer types spring
up to take their place. Furthermore, few modern
videogames slot neatly into very discrete categories.
But I’ll start mapping out this confusing terrain by
identifying certain families of videogame.