The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World

by Steven Kent

  Of the droves of games that flooded the market during the first years of multimedia, three stood out as the kind of “killer applications” needed to launch new technologies. The first was Myst, a game that was funded by a Japanese video game publisher called Sunsoft.

  Myst was the creation of Rand and Robyn Miller; brothers who had moved to Spokane, Washington, to start up a game development company called Cyan Studios. They had sold a handful of games prior to coming up with an idea for a surrealistic adventure with elaborate puzzles. They needed funding, however. One of the first companies they approached was Activision; but they were turned down. Then they ran into Sunsoft.

  We hooked up with Sun, which is a Japanese company, in 1991. They said, “We want a big epic CD-ROM product,” and we said, “We’re ready. We’ll tell you what we need.”

  They funded it well. It ended up that they funded half of the project. It cost more than what we thought; but at the time, we had a relationship with Broderbund as well. When we showed Myst to Broderbund, they just fell in love with it.

  —Rand Miller, cofounder, Cyan Studios

  As a video game company, Sun Soft cared little about PC rights. The way the final contract was laid out, Sun Soft gave the Millers $350,000 in exchange for the console rights and went on to release Myst on 3DO, Jaguar CD, PlayStation, and Saturn. None of those versions sold particularly well, but Sun Soft’s investment still paid for itself in less than one month. Working with Broderbund, the Millers released their game for Macintosh and it became a runaway hit. In 1994, Broderbund released a PC version. It became a hit, too. Myst went on to become the first CD-ROM game to sell over one million units. It remained on the computer game’s bestsellers list for three years. Broderbund eventually sold four million copies of the game.

  While Myst started out on Macintosh, then migrated to PC, the next multimedia blockbuster went in the opposite direction. The 7th Guest, the Virgin game that was licensed by Nintendo, brought a similar mixture of puzzle-solving and exploration to PCs. As a showcase for technology, The 7th Guest was a masterpiece. It featured a photo-realistically rendered virtual haunted house with live-action video of actors portraying ghosts. With far less puzzles than Myst and not nearly as visually appealing, The 7th Guest did not enjoy the same long-lasting success, and critics would later pan it. “A lot of people bought it, and a lot of people bought hardware just so they could play it,” game designer Graeme Devine would later say in defense of his game.

  The third game, and the one that has had the most long-lasting impact on the gaming world, was Doom, a first-person perspective game in which players stepped into the head of a marine who shoots everything he sees, as he works his way toward a confrontation in the depths of Hell.

  Doom was a true team effort, created by a group of young computer enthusiasts who had started a company called id Software. Formed on February 1, 1991, id consisted of John Romero, the well-known creator of dozens of computer games and a legend among hardcore gamers; John Carmack, a somewhat otherworldly but brilliant programmer with a nearly unequaled ability to create incredibly complex graphics engines; Adrian Carmack, a talented artist with a gift for bringing gore and horror to life; and Tom Hall, the main designer of Commander Keen, id’s first product and a game that helped establish the company’s reputation.

  Romero first came across the idea of 3D games when he called an old friend at Looking Glass, a company that was designing a game called Ultima Underworld. Intrigued by the concept, he brought it up with John Carmack to see if it would be possible for them to create a similar game.

  John talked with some of the Looking Glass people and they were saying that they were doing a texture-mapped game. I said I could do that, and the next month—we were doing games every month—I did Catacombs 3D, which was our first 3D game. It was about running around in dungeons with trolls and stuff.

  —John Carmack, cofounder, id Software

  In 1992, id released its first hit game, Wolfenstein 3D. The game took its name from an Apple II game created by a man named Silas Warner. Players viewed Wolfenstein 3D through the eyes of a commando shooting his way through a labyrinth filled with Nazi soldiers, SS men, vicious dogs, and eventually, Adolf Hitler. Although it was an exciting game with great graphics, part of Wolfenstein’s popularity sprang from its shock value. In previous games, when players shot enemies, the injured targets fell and disappeared. In Wolfenstein 3D, enemies fell and bled on the floor.

  With Wolfenstein, the shock was only half of the attraction. The main draw was the super-fast 3D rendering engine and movement. Most of the raves came from the pure adrenaline rush of speeding at 70 frames per second through corridors and mowing down Nazis.

  —John Romero, cofounder, id Software

  id games were distributed via a unique method called “shareware.” The idea was that consumers could download the first section of the game for free from the Internet or order it by mail. If they liked the game, they could purchase the rest of it by contacting the publisher. Shareware offered small companies the chance to market their games and computer tools without having to compete with larger, more powerful companies for retail shelf-space. In the case of Wolfenstein 3D, the game was broken into three separate missions, the first of which was available as shareware. id and Apogee, the firm that marketed id’s early games, maximized profits by creating several Wolfenstein games at once—the basic three missions, The Nocturnal Missions, and the Spear of Destiny missions, which were sold as a retail product.

  Wolfenstein 3D was a trilogy; it had three episodes. That’s sort of a shareware thing. Then we did Spear of Destiny, which is a retail version of Wolfenstein. It was a completely new adventure but with the Wolfenstein engine.

  —John Romero

  id’s next hit, and the first game published under the id label, was Doom. It took John Carmack six months to create the graphics engine, with Tom Hall leading the game and map designs. Partway through the project, however, Hall left and John Romero took over, programming DoomEd—the game’s map editor, while at the same time doing programming and map design. When the project was complete, everyone in the company knew they had a sure-fire hit. Not only did Doom have more gore than Wolfenstein 3D, it was decorated with Satanic symbols and populated with demons, images that thrilled gamers but infuriated critics of the gaming industry. Since it was originally released as shareware, however, the critics did not notice it until a few months after its release. In the meantime, Doom created a phenomenon unlike any PC game before or after it.

  We put out a press release in January of 1993 saying what our next game (Doom) was going to have in it. From January to December, all of 1993, the entire Internet thing was really growing and we had newsgroups about Doom already…. before the game was out.

  So we’d leak out a little bit more information. There would be an alpha that would leak or a beta that would leak, and people just started going nuts. So when the game was released, it crashed the University of Wisconsin’s computers two times because there were so many people hitting it for Doom. … We just knew that when the game came out [in stores], that this was it. This thing was great.

  —John Romero

  Doom set a precedent for computer games. It established the 3D first-person shooter genre, a popular style of gaming that would top the bestseller lists for years. Though it was not the first first-person shooter, it set the standard by which such games as Duke Nukem 3D, Jedi Knight, Unreal, and Descent would be judged. Doom also brought attention to shareware, validating it as a viable means of software delivery and establishing the idea of free demonstration copies as a marketing method.

  Doom also demonstrated the entertainment power of multiplayer games. One of the game’s better options was “death match,” a mode in which players could hunt each other in teams instead of going after demons and monsters. Doom would become a lightning rod in later years. It would become a focal point for those who wanted to regulate or end the perceived stranglehold that the largest companies hel
d over the entire interactive entertainment industry. Even as id completed its game, powerful forces were gathering in Washington, D.C. The gaming industry was about to come under an attack that would be felt from Redwood City, California, to Redmond, Washington.

  * Okamoto did not design Final Fight. By the time he began work on the project, he had already been promoted to producer.

  * Genesis never amassed a significant install-base in Japan. Sega Enterprises CEO Hayao Nakayama may have allowed Tom Kalinske to drop the price and change the game that came with the console, but he had no intention of following Kalinske’s example. Though Mega-Drive sales would increase briefly with major events such as the release of the new Sonic The Hedgehog game, Sega remained a distant third behind NEC and Nintendo throughout the 16-bit generation.

  * It should be noted that NEC was not the only straggler in the market at that time. SNK, a leading arcade company, released a 24-bit console called NeoGeo in 1990. NeoGeo was a name familiar to arcade goers, as SNK’s coin-operated NeoGeo was popular with arcade owners.

  NeoGeo was expensive. The base unit, which came with only a controller, sold for $399—$200 more than the Super NES. The full set, which included a game and two controllers, sold for $599, and additional cartridges (which had the exact same code as the arcade game) routinely sold for $200.

  ** Sega CD was the name of the American version of Mega-CD.

  * Shinobu Toyoda was the vice president of licensing at Sega of America and the executive who worked most closely with Japan.

  * In truth, Macintosh computers were much more suited for gaming than PCs. Macintosh monitors had slightly higher resolution than standard PC monitors and Apple computers did not have all of the compatibility problems that still haunt PCs.

  Unfortunately, former Apple president Michael Spindler did not want people to see Macintosh as a gaming computer and did nothing to encourage companies to make games for them.

  Moral Kombat

  I have been a parent for 16 years, a wife for 20, a teacher in Royal Oak, Michigan, for 23, and a woman since the day I was born. Let me tell you, in all of my labels and all of the hats I wear, I find that so extremely offensive, and the only words you can say to the manufacturers and shareholders of the company is, “shame on you.”1

  —Marilyn Droz, Congressional testimony, expert witness, 1993 Joint Hearings

  Roses are red, Violets are blue, So you had a bad day, Boo hoo hoo.

  —Public letter to Tom Kalinske, Howard Lincoln, former chairman, Nintendo of America

  A Van Damme Big Game

  Ed Boon worked on six pinball games at Williams before moving into coin-operated video games. The first two video games he worked on were arcade-style football simulations—High Impact and Super High Impact. John Tobias began his time at Williams working with Mark Turmell, creator of Smash TV, NBA Jam, Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game, and NFL Blitz and almost unquestionably America’s last significant arcade game designer. Tobias worked on Turmell’s team as he created Smash TV and Total Carnage—games that revived the same basic double-joystick gameplay that Eugene Jarvis originally created for Robotron 2084. Having just finished recent projects, both men were available in 1990 when the call went around Williams for a fighting game to compete with Street Fighter II. Boon and Tobias teamed up to do it.

  To make their game stand out from the flood of Street Fighter II imitators, Boon and Tobias decided that they would use digitized graphics rather than traditional animation. Having already manufactured Narc and Terminator 2, Williams had the technology to create the game, and Atari had already proved that such a game could be made, with Pit Fighter. In designing their game, Boon and Tobias wanted to make their combatants as large as possible, while still being small enough to move around the screen freely. They also wanted to attach their game to a known personality, someone who fit the image of the kind of fighting they would show in their game. Martial-arts movies were enjoying a resurgence of popularity at the time, and Boon and Tobias believed that attaching their game to either Aikido master Steven Segal or European star Jean Claude Van Damme would attract players. This, however, proved unlikely. Segal, who had made quite a stir with Above the Law and Hard to Kill, had already agreed to appear in another game. When they contacted Van Damme’s agent, he told them that his client, the self-professed “Fred Astaire of Karate” who had recently starred in such movies as Kickboxer and Bloodsport, was in discussion with Sega.

  Rather than look for an older or lesser-known martial artist, Boon and Tobias decided to create an entire universe of their own. They created an elaborate mythology with complex characters fighting each other for the chance to represent Earth in a battle against an evil monster in a cosmic tournament that would decide the fate of humanity. The entrants in this tournament were as colorful as the tournament itself. There was Liu Kang, the strong and silent Bruce Lee–type; Raiden, the god of thunder; two mystic ninjas—Scorpion and Sub-Zero; a female special forces agent named Sonya Blade; a gangster with a metal plate covering part of his face, named Kano; and a movie star named Johnny Cage.

  Johnny Cage was just kind of a play on the whole Van Damme thing. I mean, when Van Damme didn’t pan out, we kind of still had this role that was slowly being created, and we just thought, well …

  —Ed Boon, game designer, Williams/Bally/Midway

  If one lesson from Street Fighter II was not lost on Boon and Tobias, it was the importance of hidden moves. In the ten short months it took to create the game, they fashioned layer upon layer of special moves and hidden secrets. By the time their game appeared in arcades, it contained special characters, moves, and ways of ending the fights.

  Reptile was a last minute idea. Someone came up with the idea of doing a green [ninja] as opposed to the red (Scorpion) and blue (Sub-Zero), and having him be this hidden feature that is seen very rarely. We knew that the rumors were running kind of rampant about the game and as a last ditch effort we just threw Reptile in, saying, “Let’s make this come out very rarely so only a few people will see it.” We hoped that the people who saw it would talk about it with a lot of conviction; but since no one else would have seen it, everybody would kind of call them liars. You wouldn’t know if somebody was telling the truth or not if you said, “There’s a guy, a green ninja, and you fight him at the bottom of the pit.”

  The things that had to happen to make Reptile come out were so rare…. You had to have flawless victories as you defeated opponents, do a fatality, and something had to fly in front of the moon. It was a very rare occurrence that all three things happened, but they happened.

  —Ed Boon

  Boone and Tobias named their game Mortal Kombat. The name probably referred to the background story about mortals entering a fighting tournament against beings from another dimension; but critics would later say that it came from the game’s “fatality” moves. Each match in Mortal Kombat was for the best of three falls. When a combatant was defeated the second time, he or she would stand in a swaying stupor for a few seconds, allowing the victor to finish the match with special signature moves called “fatalities.”

  Other fighting games had this thing where you would get dizzy, and the other guy would get a free hit on you, and you had to accept the fact that you were going to get hit. We hated the idea of being the guy who’s dizzy, but it was great to be the guy who was walking up to go beat the crap out of him, so we moved that to the end of the fight where damage was already done. We had this dizzy animation, and then at one point somebody suggested, “Let’s make it gruesome.” And everything just kind of built on that. It became a huge part of the game. We didn’t know that was going to be such a big attraction. It just happened.

  —Ed Boon

  Fatalities ranged from Kano wrenching his opponents’ hearts out of their chests to Scorpion pulling out their spines and skulls. These were not the kind of graphic cinematic sequences you might see in a movie—they were fast with a splash of animated blood and no kinds of incisions. Knowing how to perform
Mortal Kombat’s fatalities became a sign of prestige around arcades because they were not easily executed. Once you won the fight, you had to get within range of your opponent and then know special combinations of joystick moves and buttons to punch. When the game first came out, some arcade goers would stand around watching other people, in the hope of catching a glimpse of one of the fatalities.

  At the time, we thought these button and joystick combinations were going to be so hard to do that nobody would ever figure them out. I think the first time we put Mortal Kombat out at a test location, in that first weekend somebody found it.

  —John Tobias, former game designer, Williams/Bally/Midway

  The fighting game craze had already revived the arcade business when Williams began shipping Mortal Kombat. The game was an instant hit, easily eclipsing Street Fighter II in overall popularity with American audiences.

  At the time that Mortal Kombat was released, Acclaim Entertainment had a contract for the exclusive rights to the home-console versions of Williams arcade games. The partnership would prove very profitable for both companies. Under cofounder Greg Fischbach’s leadership, Acclaim had set up the biggest and best sales networks of any of Nintendo’s third parties.

  Acclaim put great quantities of effort and money into the Mortal Kombat license, creating a $10 million marketing campaign and stocking nearly $40 million worth of inventory. Acclaim’s designers created authentic versions of Mortal Kombat, complete with all of the special moves, for both Genesis and Super NES.* Super NES, with its multiple processors, was particularly well suited for Mortal Kombat, and the game looked and moved very much like the arcade game. It was not, however, tailor-made for Nintendo’s entertainment standards.