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

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Format:
Book
Author/Creator:
Ruggill, Judd Ethan, author.
Contributor:
McAllister, Ken S., 1966- contributor.
Series:
Landmark video games
Digitalculturebooks
Language:
English
Subjects (All):
Tempest (Video game).
Video games--Design--History.
Video games.
Video games--Social aspects--United States.
Physical Description:
1 online resource (167 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)
Edition:
1st ed.
Place of Publication:
Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2015.
Language Note:
English
System Details:
text file
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 has since became standard for games of all types. Tempest was also one of the most aesthetically impactful games of the twentieth century, lending its crisp, vector aesthetic to many subsequent movies, television shows, and video games. In this book, Ruggill and McAllister enumerate and analyse 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.
Contents:
Contents; List of Figures; Introduction; One: Reading Tempest; Two: A Genealogy of Tempest; Three: Contexts; Four: Life after Tempest; Five: Conclusion; Appendixes; Appendix A: Relevant Software and Hardware Companies Created between 1979 and 1982; Appendix B: Arcade Machines Released between 1979 and 1982; Notes; Works Cited; Index
Notes:
Description based upon print version of record.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode
Description based on information from the publisher.
ISBN:
9780472900107
0472900102
9780472121144
0472121146
OCLC:
1049859900

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