Trigger Happy
56
Racing games not based on traditional cars are
usually distinguished by the appearance of power-ups:
weapons scattered along the course that can be picked
up by a player and used to blow his opponents off the
track. But in all categories of racer, the aim is the same:
get to the finish line first. If the destructive orgy of the
shoot-’em-up captures the essence of humanversus-
machine competition, the racing game is the purest
expression of machine-mediated human-versushuman
competition. There can be no arguments about who
won and who lost. You were just too slow.
Might as well jump
Around 1981, a young Nintendo apprentice
designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, was asked to write
something to replace the innards of Radarscope, a
tedious shooter Nintendo’s American arm had
unwisely stocked up on to the tune of two thousand
unsellable cabinets. Miyamoto quickly, if somewhat
unpredictably, designed a game featuring a fat
mustachioed carpenter and a giant monkey. The
carpenter, under the player’s direction, had to begin
at the bottom of the screen and, jumping to avoid
barrels thrown by the infuriated simian, climb
ladders and move across platforms to reach the top,
where he could defeat the monkey and rescue a
princess. It was a far cry from the alien-
