Jump Pad

Since the dawn of computerised racing games, there have existed small regions on the virtual speedway which propel the simulated vehicle to previously unattainable speeds. These 'velocity inducers' have been a staple in any game which doesn't take itself too seriously (with the exception of Wipeout), but the vector-assist had always been confined to the surface of the racetrack itself. Attempts to introduce this technology into the first-person-shooter (FPS) game began in the late 1980's, but due to this planar constriction, such attempts only resulted in frustrated players and declining game sales.

Relief came in 2007, when Bungie, in the development of the sweatingly-anticipated Halo 3, managed to tilt these so-called 'boost pads' at various angles to the ground, allowing gam3rs to launch into the third dimension for the first time evar.

Thanks to enterprising and entrepreneurial time traveling journalists of the Future Wars , various third-rate knock-offs were created for other, earlier games. The developers of these games shamelessly stole the moniker 'Jump Pad', so when Bungie invented the Jump Pad again during the development of Halo 3 they were forced to adopt the name 'Mancannon' to give an air of innovation to what was once going to be an innovative transport mechanism. It is worth noting at this point that Bungie are simply ignoring the fact that the Jump Pad has been around for at least a decade - this is in part due to Bungie's unwillingness to break a rather amusing causality loop. For the same reason, Bungie did not include Jump Pads in their Marathon series of games, even though the technology was anachronistically available at the time. However rightful or temporally sane, Bungie's hyping of a now well-established feature of the multiplayer FPS experience is still horribly annoying. See Hype-R-Space for more information about this trend.