Text

Tempest : geometries of play

---

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 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.

---

Availability

No copy data

Detail Information

Series Title

-

Call Number

794.8 RUG t

Publisher

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press., 2015

Collation

xi, 154p. " ill.

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780472072699

Classification

794.8

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

-

Subject(s)

Video games--Design
Video games--Social aspects

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

by Judd Ethan Ruggill and Ken S. Mcallister

Other version/related

File Attachment

Comments

---

You must be logged in to post a comment