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  3. Tempest: Geometries of Play

Tempest: Geometries of Play

Judd Ethan Ruggill and Ken S. McAllister
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  • Contents

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.
  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • Dedication
  • Acknowledgments
  • 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
Citable Link
Published: 2015
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license
ISBN(s)
  • 978-0-472-05269-1 (paper)
  • 978-0-472-07269-9 (hardcover)
  • 978-0-472-90010-7 (open access)
Series
  • Landmark Video Games
Subject
  • Cultural Studies
  • Media Studies:New Media

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Fig. 1. Different arcade machine form factors

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Fig. 2. Play screen

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Fig. 3. Shooter

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Fig. 4. Flipper

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Fig. 5. Tanker

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Fig. 6. Spiker

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Fig. 7. Fuseball

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Fig. 8. Pulsar

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Fig. 9. Skill-Step from Tempest Tubes

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Fig. 10. Assortment of technical documents

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Fig. 11. Operator-Information Display

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Fig. 12. Self-Test

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Fig. 13. Spinner

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Fig. 14. Tempest cabinet/side art aliens (Tempest © 1981 Atari Interactive. All Rights Reserved. Tempest is a trademark owned by Atari Interactive, Inc. Use of Tempest images and trademark are provided under license by Atari Interactive, Inc.)

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Fig. 15. 1980s arcade images (Arcade images found at the “Growing Up In Arcades: 1979–1989” Flickr group and used with permission from Rich Wiebke [richie 59].)

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Fig. 16. 1980s arcade images (Arcade images found at the “Growing Up In Arcades: 1979–1989” Flickr group and used with permission from Rich Wiebke [richie 59].)

13030180.0001.001-00000017.jpg

Fig. 17. 1980s arcade images (Arcade images found at the “Growing Up In Arcades: 1979–1989” Flickr group and used with permission from Rich Wiebke [richie 59].)

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Fig. 18. Bally/Midway auxiliary show monitor

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Fig. 19. Atari Tempest for 2600 prototype cart (Image used by kind permission of Matt Reichert, atariprotos.com.)

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Fig. 20. Atari Tempest for 2600 prototype box art (Image used by kind permission of Matt Reichert, atariprotos.com.)

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