Dave Theurer. Tempest. 1981

Dave Theurer Tempest 1981

  • MoMA, Floor 1, 1 South

A childhood nightmare about monsters emerging from a hole in the ground inspired Theurer to bend the typical video-game playing space—the flat surface that corresponds to the screen—into a tube, so that players seem to be firing their blasters down a tunnel at alien creatures. Tempest was one of the first games designed in one-point perspective, in which objects are smaller the farther away they are, and one of the first to feature the higher-resolution color vector display, which renders graphics in lines rather than in pixels on a grid.

Gallery label from Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design, September 10, 2022–July 16, 2023
Medium
Video game software
Publisher
Atari, Inc., USA
Credit
Gift of Atari Interactive, Inc.
Object number
704.2013
Copyright
© 2023 Atari, Inc.
Department
Architecture and Design

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