Tempest : geometries of play / Judd Ethan Ruggill and Ken S. McAllister.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ruggill, Judd Ethan, author.

McAllister, Ken S., 1966- author.

Series:

Landmark video games

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Tempest (Video game).

Video games--Design--History.

Video games.

Video games--Social aspects--United States.

Video games--Social aspects.

Video games--Design.

History.

United States.

Physical Description:

154 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2015]

Summary:

Atari's 1981 arcade hit Tempest was a "tube shooter" built around glowing, vector-based geometric shapes. Among its many important contributions to both game and cultural history, Tempest was one of the first commercial titles to allow players to choose the game's initial play difficulty (a system Atari dubbed "SkillStep"), a feature that became standard for games of all types. Tempest was also one of the most aesthetically impactful games of the twentieth century, lending it's crisp, vector aesthetic to many subsequent movies, television shows, and video games. In this book, Ruggill and McAllister enumerate and analyze Tempest's landmark qualities, exploring the game's aesthetics, development context, and connections to and impact on video game history and culture. By describing the game in technical, historical, and ludic detail, they unpack the game's latent and manifest audio-visual iconography and the ideological meanings this iconography evokes. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Reading Tempest 11

2 A Genealogy of Tempest 34

3 Contexts 48

4 Life after Tempest 75

5 Conclusion 90.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780472052691

0472052691

9780472072699

0472072692

OCLC:

915496198