Le Breton and Gille were not the only French game designers taking games in a more highbrow and consciously artistic direction. Muriel Tramis, an African-Caribbean woman who grew up on the French-Caribbean island of Martinique, was also exploring the medium’s potential. She left Martinique for France in the 1970s to study engineering at university and, after several years working in the aerospace industry, became interested in the potential of video games and joined Parisian game publisher Coktel Vision. She decided her own heritage should be the subject of her debut game Méwilo, an 1987 adventure game written with help from another former Martinique resident Patrick Chamoiseau, one of the founding figures of the black literary movement Créolité. “The game was inspired by the Carib legend of jars of gold,” explained Tramis. “At the height of the slave revolts, plantation masters saved their gold in the worst way. They got their most faithful slave to dig a hole and then killed and buried him with the gold in order that the ghost of the unfortunate slave would keep the curious away from the treasure.”
In the game the player took on the role of Méwilo, a parapsychologist who travels to the Martinique city of Saint-Pierre in 1902 to investigate reports of a haunting, just days before the settlement’s destruction at the hands of the Mount Pelée volcano. “This synopsis is a pre-text for visiting the city and discovering the daily economic, political and religious life of this legendary city,” said Tramis. The game’s exploration of French-Caribbean culture won Tramis a silver medal from the Parisian department of culture – making it one of the first games to receive official recognition for its artistic merit.
Tramis and Chamoiseau probed the history of slavery further in 1988’s Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness. Set once again in the French Caribbean, the game casts the player as a black slave on a sugar cane plantation who must lead an uprising against the plantation’s owner. Freedom mixed action, strategy and role-playing into what Tramis summed up as a “war game”.
“Fugitive slaves, my ancestors, were true warriors that I had to pay tribute to as a descendant of slaves,” she said. “At the time I made the game, these stories were not known because they were hidden. Today the official recognition of slavery as a crime against humanity has changed the world, people are aware now. I could talk through the game at a time when the subject was still painful. It was my duty to remember. A journalist wrote that this game was as important as Little Big Man has been in film for the culture of American Indians. I was flattered.”
Tramis and Froggy’s attempts to elevate video games beyond the simple thrills of the arcades formed part of a wider search during the 1980s amongst French game developers for a style of their own. Unlike their counterparts in the UK, France’s game industry had been slow to develop. In the UK the instant success of Clive Sinclair’s computers had acted as a catalyst for the thousands of games spewed out by bedroom programmers, but France lacked a clear market leader. Only in 1983 did systems such as the British-made Oric-1 and French Thomson TO7 finally start to emerge asad omputers of choice.[3]
Until then the French had flirted with a bewildering range of contenders from the ZX81 and Apple II to home-grown systems such as the Exelvision EXL100 and Hector. But once the Oric-1, TO7 and, later and most successfully, the Amstrad CPC, gained a sizeable following, game publishers started to form with Loriciels, Ere Informatique and Infogrames leading the way in 1983. Within months of their formation, however, the country’s video game pioneers started asking themselves what defined a French game and how they could set themselves apart from the creations of American and British programmers. A summer 1984 article in Tilt reported how French game designers, having cut their teeth on simple arcade games, now wanted to create something more personal, more rooted in reality, more French. Inevitably, opinion was divided about what this meant in practice, but many homed in on strong narratives, real-life settings and visuals inspired by the art of France’s vibrant comic book industry. Text adventures provided the natural home for such content. “Back then the adventure game was king,” said Tramis. “There were many more scenarios with literary rich universes and characters. There was a ferment of ideas and lots of originality. France loves stories.”
The focus on real-world scenarios reflected France’s relative disinterest in fantasy compared to the British or Americans. “I have always wanted to base my titles on a historical, geographical or scientific reality,” said Bertrand Brocard, the founder of game publisher Cobra Soft and author of 1985’s Meurtre à Grande Vitesse, a popular murder mystery adventure game set on a high-speed French TGV train. “The TGV was still a novelty then as it had been running for less than two years and it was something ultra-modern. At the time the driver would announce to the passengers: ‘We have just reached 260 kilometers per hour’. Nowadays it goes at 300 kilometres per hour with no announcement. The player had two hours of travel between Lyon and Paris to solve the mystery and arrest the culprit, who could not escape from the train during the journey.”
Other Cobra Soft games reflected current affairs. Among them were Dossier G.: L’Affaire du Rainbow-Warrior, a game inspired by French intelligence service’s sinking of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior ship in 1985, and Cessna Over Moscow, a 1987 game inspired by Mathias Rust – the West German pilot who flew a light aircraft into the Soviet Union and landed in Red Square to the USSR’s embarrassment that same year. For Brocard, however, the French style was more a reflection of the personal interests and tastes of the small group of companies and individuals who were making games rather a reflection of France itself. “Game production in France was not very extensive,” he said. “When video games started in France, production involved such a small number of people that chance, I think, led things in certain directions. To my mind this issue of the ‘French touch’ is associated with Ere Informatique and the charisma of Philippe Ulrich. He is an artist through and through. He had managed to ‘formalize’ this difference.”
Ulrich was the co-founder of Ere Informatique and, like Le Breton, he was a musician before he was a game designer. “In 1978 I published my first music album with CBS, Le Roi du Gasoil; I often slept in the Paris Métro at that time,” he said. “I wanted to cut a second album with more electronic music. To that effect I took to soldering together my own rhythm boxes. When Clive Sinclair put his ZX80 on the market, I emptied my piggy bank to buy one. I could barely believe the hallucinating results I got after coding my first lines of BASIC.”
Ulrich threw himself into learning all he could about his new computer, digesting 500-page guides to the inner workings of machine code on the ZX80’s Z80 microprocessor. His first machine code game was a version of the board game Reversi, which he swapped the rights to in exchange for a 8Kb memory expansion pack for his ZX80. Soon after he met Emmanuel Viau, another aspiring game designer, and the pair decided to form their own publishing house: Ere Informatique. Like others on the French games scene, Ulrich wanted to give his work a distinctive style but, unlike his peers, he had one eye firmly on the larger UK market. “In France, authors would create games related to their culture, while the bulk of our market was the United Kingdom, so I came up with a vague concept of world culture,” he said. Ulrich wanted Ere Informatique’s games to have international appeal – something of a no-no amongst France’s cultural elitists – while retaining a French flavour: “Our games didn’t have the excellent game play of original English-language games but graphically their aesthetics were superior, which spawned the term French Touch – later reused by musicians such as Daft Punk and Air.”
Ulrich’s most notable realisation of the ‘French Touch’ was 1988’s Captain Blood, a cinematic space adventure created with artist and programmer Didier Bouchon. The game tells the story of the space-travelling Captain Blood who must hunt down and destroy five clones of himself to stay alive. To hunt down the clones, the player must travel the galaxy and converse with aliens using Bluddian, an alien language created specifically for the game that was based on the use of 150 icons, each of which represent
ed a word. With its H.R. Giger-inspired visuals, fractal-enhanced explosions, accompanying novella and a theme tune composed by French synthesizer musician Jean Michel Jarre, Captain Blood was nothing short of an epic, although its bizarreness often confused.
“I wanted to be an example and to invent new stuff that stood out,” said Ulrich. “I wanted to impress the player. I wanted the extra-terrestrials to be alive in the computer. When playing The Hobbit I hated the stereotyped answers such as ‘I don’t understand’ or ‘what is your name?’. The challenge was to make it intelligent. The incredible thing is that the aliens answered all questions, were funny and never repeated the same thing twice.”
During the game’s development Ere Informatique ran into financial problems and was bought by its more commercially minded rival Infogrames, which was less than keen of Ulrich and Bouchon’s strange game. “At Infogrames they bought licences and developed more classic games and it was marketing that boosted the sales,” said Ulrich. With little funding from Infogrames, the pair holed themselves up in the Landes forest in southwest France to finish the game.
“We worked ourselves to the point of exhaustion to complete Captain Blood. It was really tough. I covered several reams of paper with Bluddian dialog; Didier would code the programs and created the graphics. When I showed the game to Infogrames they did not understand. ‘Is that a UFO or what’? ‘You’re crazy,’ they told me. After it was released the sales people at Infogrames told me that the game was selling by the hundreds, they had never seen anything like it.”
Narrative-based games dominated France’s output during the 1980s but the French Touch could be seen in other forms of game as well such as 1985’s L’Aigle d’Or, a marriage of action and adventure that had an influence in France comparable to that of Knight Lore in the UK. The French Touch could also be seen in Eric Chahi’s gory platform game Infernal Runner, the French comic book visuals of strip poker game Teenage Queen and North & South, a simple strategy game based on a Belgian comic about the American Civil War.
Across the border in West Germany, however, game developers were heading in an altogether different direction, partly out of necessity. For West Germany the legacy of the Third Reich would have an important influence on the types of games the country developed. American, French, Spanish and British games regularly dealt in death and destruction with little dissent. But for a country still living in the shadow of the Nazi atrocities of the Second World War, anything that glorified violence or military conflict was frowned upon both culturally and legally. This post-war aversion to violence led to the formation of youth media watchdog the Bundesprüfstelle für Jugendgefährdende Schriften in 1954.
The watchdog’s role was to assess any media that could corrupt the nation’s young and it had two powers at its disposal. First, it could seek outright bans for extremely offensive content – such as Nazi propaganda and excessive violence – in the courts. Second, it could place media it considered harmful on its list of indexed media, which meant the product could only be sold to adults and could not be advertised, promoted or put on display in shops. Initially the watchdog focused on the media of the 1950s – comics, magazines, vinyl records and books – but as new forms of media, including video games, emerged these too came under its jurisdiction. Eventually the watchdog renamed itself the Bundesprüfstelle für Jugendgefährdende Medien (BPJM) to reflect its widening remit.[4]
On the 19th December 1984, the BPJM named the first three video games to be added to the index: Activision’s aerial combat game River Raid; Atari’s coin-op tank sim Battlezone; and Speed Racer, a Commodore 64 driving game that let players run over pedestrians. “Battlezone was indexed because of the glorification of war propagated by its content and because the board stated that the content propagated aggressive behaviour,” said Petra Meier, vice-president of the BPJM. “River Raid was also indexed because of content seen as a glorification of war and an enhancement of violent behaviour.” Over the years the BPJM has indexed several hundred games, largely because of violent content. “Probably 90 per cent of the games that were indexed have been indexed because of the portrayal of violence,” said Meier. “Of course as far as violence is concerned the decision of what will be considered a ‘detailed portrayal of violence’ might have undergone some change over the years.”
The threat of being indexed by the BPJM, together with a wider cultural aversion to violence, was a big disincentive to game developers thinking of producing more traditional action games, particularly in the 1980s when children and teenagers formed the bulk of video game players. “The BPJM has influenced the games produced in Germany,” said Cerat Yerli, the founder of German game studio Crytek, the makers of Far Cry – an action-packed first-person shooter released in 2004. “I think companies have changed the way they develop. The laws definitely have an impact on design and production. Germany is a very social country, the government takes on responsibility for social elements more than governments that are, for example, like the US. The US doesn’t really care about what elements are in your car as long as your car can drive. In Germany there is this responsibility about your car because they say it impacts social security and there are more laws. Every area of life in Germany is much more controlled socially or in law and I think Germany therefore thinks it has to take all the responsibility about entertainment or communication channels that could potentially impact culture or young people.”
West Germany’s game developers were also heavily influenced by the nation’s fondness for board games, of which it is the world’s biggest consumer per capita. Germans in particular like social board games with simple rules and economic or strategic themes such as The Settlers of Catan. And this, coupled with the aversion to violence, encouraged West Germany’s video game developers to start creating trading and management games. “This strand of games came out of Germany because Germans tend to have high interest in or affinity with management simulations or strategic games,” said Nils-Holger Henning, director of business development at German online games publisher Bigpoint. Yerli added: “Trading games, strategy games and manager games sum up the German style of games. There was a game in Germany called Hanse that was very successful.”
Based on the Hanseatic League that dominated trade along the coast of the Baltic Sea from the 13th to 17th century, Hanse was a trading game that along with Kaiser, a historically themed kingdom management game, helped establish the trading and management games as the distinctive feature of West Germany’s game business. Instead of going to war, players built their business empires or kingdoms through trade, diplomacy and careful management. In many ways the roots of these games could be seen in The Sumer Game, the 1969 city management game developed by American programmer Richard Merrill, but their origins had more to do with Germany’s board game market.
But while West Germany, Britain, France anpain developed distinctive styles of game, few other western European countries followed suit. This was especially surprising in Italy’s case. During the 1970s Italy had been the continent’s leading producer of video games. It had three arcade game manufacturers, although none developed their own games, and had produced some of the earliest home consoles to reach European shelves. Even in 1980 things looked good for Italy: Bologna-based coin-op manufacturers Zaccaria had decided to start making its own games starting with the shoot ’em up Quasar. But Quasar proved to be a false dawn and Zaccaria never created the video game hit it hoped to make. “Zaccaria made a great investment to develop video games in Italy, but the competition from the US and Japan was too great,” said Natale Zaccaria, the company’s co-founder. By the end of 1984 Zaccaria had given up on video games altogether. And for some inexplicable reason it would take until the start of the 1990s before another Italian game company of note emerged. “Maybe if Zaccaria was not forced to close, the programming sector of the company would have better developed and other Italian producers could have followed the example,” said Zaccaria. “Probably Italy was just missing the leading example.”
The only other European country to really have a major influence on video games in the 1980s was the Netherlands, where instead of making games, amateur programmers spent their time creating demos to show off their coding skills. The trend for demos originated in 1985 among a group of Dutch programmers from the city of Alkmaar who got their kicks from hacking into commercial games, disabling the copy protection measures and distributing free copies via the post or bulletin board systems that computer owners with modems could log on to. They called themselves The 1001 Crew and called what they did cracking.
Replay: The History of Video Games Page 18