Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  While others dabbled in a veneer of surrealism, Croucher’s agit-prop games continued to push back the boundaries reaching their zenith with Deus Ex Machina, a work so unusual it is debatable whether it really could be called a video game. Inspired by E.M. Forster’s 1909 short story The Machine Stops and the ‘seven ages of man’ described in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Deus Ex Machina told of a future where an all-powerful computer controls the world and all births are genetically engineered to the machine’s ideal. But after a mouse dropping contaminates the computer’s fertilisation system, a mutant embryo forms. The player’s role is to protect the embryo from the Defect Police, the computer’s eugenic enforcers, by playing a series of seven abstract mini-games that represent the seven ages of man. “I thought that by the mid-1980s all cutting-edge computer games would be like interactive movies with proper structures, real characters, half-decent original stories, an acceptable soundtrack, a variety of user-defined narratives and variable outcomes,” he explained. “I thought I’d better get in first and produce the computer game equivalent to Metropolis and Citizen Kane before the bastards started churning out dross.” Deus Ex Machina included an audio cassette that contained the game’s soundtrack, which mixed story-setting voiceovers from British TV celebrities such as Doctor Who actor Jon Pertwee and comedian Frankie Howerd, as head of the Defect Police, and strange songs about a sperm fertilising an egg while dreaming of fish and chips. “When I was a kid I was very frightened by Frankie Howerd’s performances on the radio and it was a cathartic experience to hire him for the day and order him to kill babies,” said Croucher. “Originally I wanted TV astronomer Sir Patrick Moore to play the part of the sperm. Now that would have been utterly surreal.”

  While many dabbled in the surreal, the two most significant games to emerge from the UK at this time were unconnected to the heady experimentation of Minter, Smith and Croucher. One of these was Knight Lore, a game written by Chris and Tim Stamper, the founders of Leicestershire-based Ultimate Play The Game. Knight Lore built on the ideas first explored in Atari’s VCS 2600 game Adventure, which reinterpreted the exploration and puzzle-solving of text adventures within the context of an action game, by combining them with the axonometric visuals pioneered by arcade games Zaxxon and Q*bert.

  The visual approach had already made it onto the Spectrum via Ant Attack, where players rescued people trapped in a M.C. Escher-inspired city overrun with giant ants, but the Stampers’ cartoon visuals and addition of adventure game elements inspired many British game developers. “As soon as I saw Knight Lore and had picked my jaw up from the floor, I knew I had to use a similar system. It looked fabulous,” said Jon Ritman, one of the many game designers who followed the Stamper brothers’ lead in producing what the British game press called ‘arcade adventures’. After creating the Knight Lore-inspired Spectrum title Batman, Ritman teamed up with artist Bernie Drummond to create Head Over Heels, an intersection of British surrealism and the arcade adventure genre. The game revolved around the puzzle-solving adventures of two symbiotic creatures, but came dressed in a world that fused Disney and Dali. There were stairs constructed out of sleeping dogs, toy rabbits that gave special powers and Prince Charles Daleks, which welded the big-eared head of the heir to the British throne to the body of the robotic aliens from Doctor Who. Ritman put the game’s strangeness down to Drummond: “Mad visions just leak out of his head.”

  The other important game to emerge from the UK in the first half of the 1980s was Elite, a 1984 BBC Micro game written by Cambridge University students Ian Bell and David Braben. Elite evolved out of Braben’s efforts to create a space combat game that used wireframe 3D visuals similar to those used in vector arcade games. Previous attempts to take the space combat games into the third dimension had rarely lived up to the promise of the idea. Vector games such as Tailgunner and Star Wars had restricted players to manning the guns rather than piloting their virtual spacecraft. Star Raiders, a 1979 game for the Atari 400 computer, offered movement but used flat sprites that changed in size to give an illusion of a 3D world. “There were a few sprite-based shooting games that implied a 3D effect, where the sprites were made to get bigger and smaller, and you centred the sights on them, but these were very different,” said Braben. Braben’s space combat game, however, was visually more exciting and closer in spirit to Atari’s 3D tank warfare game Battlezone. While the visuals Braben produced were technically impressive, the rudimentary space game he created with it seemed too limited to keep players excited for long. So Braben joined forces with Bell, who had already had a couple of his games publed, to turn it into a better game. After further tweaks failed to counter the eventual boredom of relentless space battles, they decided they needed to add more for the player to do.

  “We had a clear idea of what we were trying to do, which is to put a framework around space combat to make it compelling, but it took quite a lot of thought and discussion to work out exactly how we would do it,” said Braben. One of the first additions were space stations where players could relive the spacecraft docking sequence from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. But what would players do once they had docked in the space station? Braben and Bell decided to let them upgrade their spacecraft with better guns but this immediately raised the question of how players would get these upgrades. Money, the pair concluded. Another question immediately emerged: How would players earn money?

  Ideas spilled forward. Players could trade goods between space stations in different parts of the universe or carry out odd jobs or earn bounties from killing space pirates or mine asteroids for minerals. “The idea of score equals money seemed utterly logical, especially as we had settled on trading as the way the player was grounded in the game,” said Braben. “Very quickly we contextualised the additional sources of money – so the reward for shooting a ship became bounty and so on. This was at the time of the Miner’s Strike and somehow a dog-eat-dog mentality for the game felt appropriate.”

  The idea of being a space-age trucker had already been explored by a few trading games, such as 1974’s Star Traders – a text game for mainframe computers – and 1980’s Galactic Trader on the Apple II, but neither Bell and Braben knew of their existence. “To my knowledge there were no space trading games. The main way games influenced me, at least, was in terms of what I didn’t want in a game,” said Braben. “I felt games had got into a bit of a rut, always with three lives, a score that went up in 10s with a free life at 10,000 and a play time aimed at 10 minutes or so. I strongly felt games didn’t have to be that way. There were some text adventure games with a much longer play life and a story and this contrast showed other approaches were possible.”

  Bell and Braben spent two years making Elite in-between their university studies, perfecting the game’s mix of combat, moneymaking, ship-upgrading and intergalactic trading to create a game where players could make their own way and decide their own priorities. The player began the game with 100 credits and a basic spacecraft but from then on the universe was their oyster. They could be a hero, a space pirate, a miner, an entrepreneur, a gun for hire or simply head out into the void and explore the stars. Elite’s world in a box opened up a new avenue for game designers to explore: the concept of open-ended worlds where players decide what to do and where to go, rather than being required to complete pre-decided goals in worlds that restricted their choices.

  Elite, Knight Lore, Deus Ex Machina and Jet Set Willy typified the atmosphere of creativity and opportunity that powered the early UK games industry, which for most of the early 1980s was still an unstructured cottage industry. “People could afford to take risks, the barriers to entry were really low,” said Penn. “Literally anyone in their bedroom who had half a brain and some passion could make something and get it in the hands of people. There was a lot of inventiveness, not all of it necessarily good. That was part of the joy of being around in that period – the amount of innovation that was going on was quite something.”

  The energy of the UK
market at this time also encouraged the growth of video game industries in Spain and Australia.

  Spain had also embraced the ZX Spectrum, exposing the Spanish to many of the games being released in the UK while giving the Iberian nation’s ambitious game companies the chance to sell their work to the much larger pool of British players. For companies like Madrid’s Dinamic, the UK game business showed the way forward. “Imagine and Ocean were our idols,” said co-founder Victor Ruiz, referring to the UK’s two biggest game publishers around the time of Dinamic’s formation in 1984. Dinamic and rivals such as Opera Soft and Indescomp would make Spain a leader in European game development in the 1980s, thanks to visually impressive games such as the Rambo-inspired Army Moves and the bank-robbing action game Goody. Looks were a big focus for many Spanish games.

  “The visuals and graphic effects are very important in video games and we paid special attention to them,” said Pedro Ruiz, the director of Opera Soft. “At the end of the day, a video game is a visual experience and some spectacular graphics can make up for a game that is not particularly good. We wanted to develop games that got people hooked and were hard to play – sometimes too hard – and to use the latest technologies available at the time.”

  The high point for Spanish games in the 1980s was Paco Menéndez’s Knight Lore-inspired La Abadía del Crimen, which Opera Soft published in 1988. “It was inspired by a novel, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. We got in contact with the writer so we could give the game the same name as the novel, but received no reply. This is why we changed the title,” said Pedro Ruiz. “It was not an arcade-type game of skill, but a game of intelligence.” Set in a medieval monastery, the player takes the role of a Franciscan monk who must solve a series of murders while carrying out religious duties. “The game was special both in terms of the result and how it was made,” said fellow Opera Soft employee Gonzalo Suárez, who left the Spanish movie business to make games starting with 1987’s Goody. “La Abadía del Crimen was a graphic adventure but with a freedom of movement unknown until that time with a recreation of the abbey in isometric graphics that far outstripped the production kings of the time like Ultimate.” Never released outside Spain, La Abadía del Crimen was a commercial disappointment that only achieved the recognition it deserved years later.

  The UK market also proved crucial to Australia. Having watched the rise of the ZX80, Milgrom and his wife Naomi Besen returned to their native Australia in December 1980 with a plan to start Beam Software, a business that would create games for the UK market that Melbourne House would publish. “At the very beginning the idea was not to develop software, but rather to develop content for computer books,” said Milgrom. “Then one day I thought more about the concept of publishing and I realised that there was very little difference between developing material and putting that content onto paper or onto a cassette tape.”

  Beam Software became the focal point for the Australian game industry. It recruited graduates from the University of Melbourne’s computing courses and rapidly expanded off the back of hits such as its million-selling text adventure remake of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.[3]

  Soon almost every would-be game developer in Australia was moving to Melbourne to join the swelling ranks of Beam Software. “We were doubling in staff every year for almost eight years. Every three years we had to move offices,” said Milgrom. “People from all over Australia would write to us and come over for interviews. You have to understand we were offering people a job. In the UK a lot of people were doing it as a hobby, but you couldn’t do that from Australia because there was no means of distribution. You couldn’t just expect your games to be sold as there’s no major market in Australia. They could move over to the UK, but it made a lot more sense to come and work for us.”

  Off the back of Beam Software’s hit games, Melbourne House ditched book publishing and became one of the UK’s largest game publishers of the 1980s. The talent that built Beam would go on to create the bulk of the Australian games industry. “One of the things I am especially proud of is that Beam effectively started the games industry in Australia,” said Milgrom. “Almost all of the development studios in Australia since then were started by ex-Beam employees or have been substantially staffed by ex-Beam employees.”

  Powered by Sinclair’s cheap computers, the UK’s bedroom programmers had turned their country into a hotbed of experimental game design, inspired developers in Spain and laid the foundations for the Australian industry at the same time. But the UK was not the only European country forging new ground in video games.

  [1]. Europe’s console manufacturers, however, rapidly lost ground to US-designed consoles after the arrival of the Philips Videopac G7000 the following year. The G7000, the European name for the Magnavox Odyssey2, proved almost as popular as the Atari VCS 2600 in Europe.

  [2]. The ZX80 used cassettes to store and load programs. While the US was already starting to move away from cassette storage by the early 1980s, computers withk drives were rare in the UK until the latter half of the decade, mainly due to cost.

  [3]. The Hobbit introduced several new concepts to text adventures, including characters that would carry out actions and make decisions independently of the player, a marked change from the usually static worlds of these games. It also assigned physical properties to the various objects in the game. “The puzzles were based on using those properties,” said Milgrom. “But it also meant that some totally unintended things could be done by the players because the physics of the environment allowed it to happen, such as tricking Thorin to get in the chest and locking him in.”

  Froggy Software: (left to right) Clotilde Marion, Jean-Louis Le Breton and Tristan Cazenave. Courtesy of Jean-Louis Le Breton

  10. The French Touch

  Paris was a war zone. Egged on by the Vietnam War and the rebellious rhetoric of the Situationist International, thousands marched on the city streets demanding revolution.[1] They spray painted slogans onto the city’s walls: ‘DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE’, ‘IMAGINATION IS SEIZING POWER’, ‘MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR’ and ‘BOREDOM IS COUNTER-REVOLUNTIONARY’.

  They constructed makeshift barricades out of parked cars and started fires. They battled with France’s quasi-military riot police, the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, which sought to suppress the uprising with tear gas and beatings with batons. The protestors responded by hurling bottles, bricks and paving stones ripped up from the streets. France’s trade unions sided with the protestors and encouraged wildcat strikes across the nation in a show of solidarity. The government had lost control and France teetered on the brink of revolution. For a few days in May 1968 it looked as if the motley coalition of students, trade unions, Trotskyites, anti-capitalists, situationists, anarchists and Maoists would win their fight for revolution. Ultimately they did not. In early June, the protests died out thanks to a combination of government capitulation and renewed crackdowns on the protestors.

  But the failed revolution inspired many. Among them was Jean-Louis Le Breton, a Parisian teenager whose worldview was shaped by the idealism of the revolutionaries who took to the streets that May. “I was 16 in ’68 and part of the protests in Paris,” he said. “I spent most of my time in the Latin Quarter with other students. Our teachers were on strike and we had a lot of discussions. We thought we could change the world. It was both a period of political consciousness and of utopia. We used to mix flower power with throwing cobblestones at policemen. Many things changed after ’68: women could wear trousers, radios and TV felt more free and able to criticise the government.” During the late 1970s and early 1980s Le Breton explored his desire to challenge the status quo via music. He experimented with synthesizers in his band Dicotylédon before delving into avant-garde rock ’n’ roll wth another act, Los Gonococcos. Then in 1982 he found a new outlet. “Los Gonococcos split in 1982 and I exchanged my synthesizers for the first Apple computer delivered in France, the Apple II,” he said. “At that time, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were presented
as two guys working in their garage – such a pleasant image in opposition with IBM. I found that programming in BASIC was easy and fun and I could imagine a lot of amusements with this fascinating machine. It was possible to take power over computers and bring them into the mad galaxy of my young and open mind.”

  Le Breton had played video games before but didn’t like them: “I’ve never been interested in playing games. The first game I played was a game that took place in Egypt – I don’t remember the title. I was interested by the fact that you could move the character, but it was no fun. Too many fights. Not for me.” But after playing Sierra’s illustrated text adventure Mystery House, he decided to write a game of his own. “The graphics and scenario of Mystery House were such bad quality that I thought I could easily produce the same kind of game,” he said. The result was 1983’s Le Vampire Fou, the first text adventure written in French. “You had to enter the castle of Le Vampire to kill him before he killed you,” said Breton. “It was the kind of game that made you crazy before you could find the right answer.”

  Le Breton earned nothing from Le Vampire Fou. Its publisher Ciel Bleu – an importer of Canadian educational software – went bust shortly after its release. With Ciel Bleu gone, Le Breton teamed up with his friend Fabrice Gille in 1984 to form his own game publishing company Froggy Software, which summed up the essence of its games as ‘aventure, humour, décalage et déconnade’.[2] From their base in Le Breton’s home, an old bar in the 20th district of Paris, the pair dreamed big. “We felt both like modern young people and artisans. The ideas of the games came out of our brains and were directly translated into the computer. I was personally happy to use the computer in a literary way. I thought we should not let computers be only in engineers’ hands,” said Le Breton. The spirit of May 1968 lurked within Froggy’s DNA. “May 1968 surely had an influence on the way we started the company, with a completely free and open state of mind and a bit of craziness. We wanted to change the mentalities, the old-fashioned way of thinking. Humour, politics and new technologies seemed to be an interesting way to spread our state of mind,” said Le Breton. Almost all of Froggy’s games were text adventures, but with their humour and political themes they were a world away from the fantasy and sci-fi tales that typified the genre in the UK and US. Même les Pommes de Terre ont des Yeux offered a comic take on South American revolutionary politics. La Souris Golote revelled in puns about cheese. The sordid murder mystery of Le Crime du Parking touched on rape, drug addiction and homosexuality while Paranoïak had players battling against their character’s smorgasbord of mental illnesses. Le Breton’s efforts prompted French games magazine Tilt to dub him the Alfred Hitchcock of gaming.