Trigger Happy
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extraordinary worldwide success. Over six days in
August 2000, the PokÉmon Yellow game sold a million
copies across Europe. A survey of British teenagers
found that they were more likely to recognize Pikachu,
the cute yellow mascot of the PokÉmon franchise, than
Tony Blair, the cute pink mascot of the British
government. Worldwide, PokÉmon grossed $15 billion
over the year, and Nintendo continued to manufacture
2,000 GameBoys every hour. With their crude, two-
dimensional graphics, the PokÉmon games nonetheless
managed to fascinate an enormous number of people in
a way that any number of cutting-edge 3D engines
failed to do. This is entirely attributable to two virtues
of good games identified in
Trigger Happy
: a
sophisticated engine of semiotic play, and a collection
of welldesigned and likeable characters.
One of the few left-field successes of 2000 was a game
that, essentially, rendered the PokÉmon concept in a
more humorous, adult and pseudo-“realistic” style. The
Sims, the new work from Will Wright, the author of
SimCity, requires the player to manage a household full
of gorgeously animated people who seem to have their
own autonomous wills. They flirt, fight, clean up,
