Trigger Happy

Shoot first, ask questions later

- STEVEN POOLE

Blasting my way through Turrican Flashback, the collection of 1990s Metroid-alikes featuring the classic music of Chris Huelsbeck, I am reminded that it was a more naive era when it came to the prospect of machine intelligence. According to the first game’s scene-setting preamble, the idyllic world of Alterra has, after a “devastating earthquake”, found itself “at the mercy of the sentient AI MORDUL”, which used to help run the planet and has now become a murderous monster. Figures. So why, three decades later, is humanity trying its best to usher in that earthquake here?

In videogames, ‘AI’ was once merely a marketing word to describe simplistic ways in which enemies might try to shoot you, or fail to shoot you in ways that vaguely resembled human fallibility. Until relatively recently, the most culturally haunting influence of machine-intelligence research on games was in the question-and-answer interface of text adventures. Don Daglow, designer of 1975’s