Trigger Happy
221
Wireframe 3D was a nice start, but now it’s old hat.
Real tanks don’t look like that. In two dimensions, you
join the dots; in three dimensions, you join the lines. It
was time to color in the surfaces, and in the early 1990s
game types such as aircraft combat simulators, driving
games and more tank games began to do this, while
polygonal animated human forms first appeared in
videogames with the martial arts game Virtua Fighter.
Remember: a polygon (“many sides”) is any flat shape
drawn with straight lines. A triangle, a square, an
icosahedron—they are all polygons. Easy to draw.
Easy, with a powerful chip, to draw an awful lot of
them.
The bloody, rotting zombies in House of the Dead 2
(see fig. 11) are constructed from many differently
shaded and shaped triangles, which foreshorten and
morph when the figure moves exactly according to the
rules of scientific perspective. The play of virtual light
31
off these baroque constructions gives them the
appearance of solid objects in space in a way that flat
graphic drawings (sprites) never accomplished. Shading
of light and dark on a flat, static surface (for instance,
in a painting) is sufficient to suggest depth
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31 Another coinage by William Gibson, in his novel of that name (New
York: Bantam Books, 1994).
