Trigger Happy
49
long as possible, but the war can never be won. Earth
will be invaded. And, of course, it was—by the
explosion of videogames that followed in Taito’s
trailblazing footsteps.
The late 1970s and early 1980s were the golden age
of classic shoot-’em-ups, with Asteroids, Robotron,
Defender, Galaxian, Scramble, Tempest et al. pushing
the tension envelope of this most fiery, physically
draining of videogame genres. Indeed, the extreme
simplicity of the basic concept—destroying things with
guns—is the reason why, for a few years, the shoot-
’em-up expanded the possibilities of videogame action
more than any other type of game. Throughout the
1980s, shoot-’em-ups boasted ever more dazzling
lightshows and huge varieties of offensive weapons,
while gradually replacing the static Space Invaders
arena with larger, roamable spaces. Examples such as
the Commodore 64 and Spectrum classic Uridium
(easily as compelling as any arcade shooter of the time)
required not just shooting accuracy but high-speed
inertial negotiation of solid obstacles in two-and-a-half
degrees of freedom (the extra fraction granted by virtue
of the player’s ability to flip his craft onto its side and
zip through narrow spaces).
