Digital Resistances - Digital Culture - page 162

could be played through the television. At first the game fared badly
on account of the poor sale record of Odyssey . Then, fortunately for
Atari, Sears Roebuck ordered a large number of units, assuring its
success. It also led to other companies developing home video
game units, some of which were cartridge-based, allowing different
games to be played with the same unit. In Taito, a Japanese

company started to produce arcade games using microchip techno-
logy, rather than hardwired solid-state circuits. One of their games,
Space Invaders , when imported to Europe and the

1977

became hugely
popular and set new standards for such games. Games such as
Pong , Space Invaders and those that followed in its wake, anticipated
the arrival of ubiquitous cheap graphical computing by nearly a
decade. For many people they would represent their first experience
of digital technology as a visual and aural medium, and indeed of
digital technology altogether. The microchip, which made many
such games possible, would, within little more than a decade, make
computing using graphical environments a commonplace of most
people's lives. In the '

us

s, for the want of anything better, the image
of the video game acted as a metonym for the burgeoning comput-
erization of society and started to appear in mainstream media
as such.
Disney, then at a low point in its fortunes as a company, was
rattled by the success of video and computer games, which in
turn threatened its dominance of cartoon-style entertainment. This,
along with the possibilities for animated film-making offered by
computing, led Disney to release Tro n (

70

), which exploited both
computer graphics and the popularity of video games (illus.

1982

). The
plot features Jeff Bridges as a games programmer who is somehow
sucked into the stylized interior of a computer belonging to a corpo-
ration which has stolen some of his ideas, and which is also bent on
world domination. There, under a new identity, he meets other
entities in this 'space', who tell him about the Master Control Pro-
gram, which he must fight in a series of video-game like encounters,

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