Tempest: Geometries of Play (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780472052691)

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.

Author: Judd Ethan Ruggill,Ken S. McAllister
ISBN-10: 0472052691
ISBN-13: 9780472052691
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Language: English
Published: 08/27/2015
Pages: 168
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.50d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2016