Trigger Happy
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doubt Battlezone and its ilk had some influence on
William Gibson’s seminally incandescent descriptions
of the Matrix (whence the 1999 film got its title). In
Neuromancer,
Gibson describes this
computersimulated world, where corporations are
represented by “green cubes” or a “stepped scarlet
pyramid,” where the landscape consists of “lines of
light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and
constellations of data. Like city lights, receding . . .”
Battlezone was the first game to draw with those
familiar schoolroom objects, polygons—and in that, it
prefigured the firework geometries of cutting-edge
games in the late 1990s and beyond.
Battlezone was at once fantastically complex, in the
demands of reaction and strategy it placed on the
player, and reassuringly simple. Here was a universe
devoid of clutter, eternally shiny and new. Early dreams
of virtual reality were always expressed visually in
wireframe graphics for these very reasons (see
Tron
),
and now that videogame graphics have moved on to fill
in the wireframe skeletons with textured surfaces, and
to smooth their hard-edged outlines, the wireframe
aesthetic can be seen as one of the great futurist dreams
of the late twentieth century.
