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

UMPEBC University of Michigan Press eBooks Open Access Available online

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Format:
Book
Author/Creator:
Ruggill, Judd Ethan, author.
McAllister, Ken S., 1966- author.
Contributor:
Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.
Series:
Landmark video games
Digital culture books
Digitalculturebooks
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.
Genre:
Electronic books.
Physical Description:
1 online resource.
Place of Publication:
Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2015.
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 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.
Description based on information from the publisher.
ISBN:
9780472121144
Access Restriction:
Open Access Unrestricted online access

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