Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  Pinball Construction Set on the other hand used the memory and save features of computers to let people design and play their own pinball tables. Together with the same year’s Lode Runner, a platform game with a level-creation tool, it pioneered the idea of allowing players to create game content – a concept that would be taken further by games such as Quake and LittleBigPlanet. Pinball Construction Set’s creator Bill Budge came up with the idea after spending some time working for Apple: “The people at Apple liked to go and play pinball at lunch – it was a big fad at the time. The engineers would spenme perfecting their moves on these pinball machines – typical obsessive-compulsive programmer behaviour. I would go with them and watch. It occurred to me you could make a pinball game on the Apple II.” The result was 1981’s Raster Blaster, a pinball game based on a single table, that Budge released through his own company BudgeCo. He then figured that a pinball game that let people create new tables would be even better and. thanks to his time at Apple, he knew exactly how the table-creation element should work. “I was watching the Macintosh develop and I was really familiar with the Lisa. That introduced me to the graphical user interface and how cool all that was,” he said. “I thought you could do a lot of the same stuff on the Apple II.”

  The Lisa, and its still-in-development successor the Macintosh, were Apple’s latest computers. Both used a new approach to computer interfaces: the graphical user interface or GUI. The concept of the GUI dated back to 1950 when electric engineer Douglas Engelbart concluded that computers would be easier to use if people interacted with them via television screens rather than keyboards, punch cards or switches. But in an era where computers and television were still so new, his ideas were dismissed as bizarre and unrealistic. Then the Cold War intervened.

  In August 1957 the Soviet Union launched the first successful intercontinental ballistic missile and on the 4th October that same year launched the world’s first artificial satellite Sputnik 1 into orbit. The next step was obvious: putting nuclear warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles. The US government responded by forming the Advanced Research Projects Agency (APRA) to bankroll research to help the US regain its technological superiority over its superpower rival. And in 1964 APRA decided to fund Engelbart’s research to the tune of $1 million a year. Using the money Engelbart created the GUI, the basis of almost every computer since the mid-1990s. He invented the mouse, the idea of windows that users could reshape and move around the screen, designed the word processor, came up with the concept of cutting and pasting, and devised icons that could be pointed at and clicked on using the mouse. In short, he produced the template for modern GUIs such as Microsoft Windows and Mac OS.

  In 1973 the Xerox PARC research institute in Palo Alto used Engelbart’s ideas to come up with the Alto, one of the earliest GUI computers. Xerox did little to turn the Alto into a commercial product, but when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs paid a visit to the facility he saw the potential of the GUI. Apple’s first attempt at a GUI-based computer, the Apple Lisa, went on sale in 1983. It introduced Engelbart’s concepts to a wider audience but its high price – $9,995 – meant it was a commercial failure. The following year, however, Apple tried again with the Apple Macintosh. Unlike the Lisa, the $1,995 Macintosh made an immediate and lasting impact. For those used to the unfriendly and intimidating computers of the late 1970s and early 1980s it was a liberating moment.

  “The human interface of a computer as we know it today, with windows and a mouse, was new to the world of personal computers when the Lisa and Mac came out,” said Darin Adler, a programmer at Illinois game developers ICOM Simulations. The Macintosh also led a revolution in computer design as Apple’s rivals began to create GUIs for their next generation home computers.[3] The Macintosh was also a big influence on game designers, many of whom saw GUIs aay to make more complex games easier to understand. Its influence was such that Computer Gaming World journalist Charles Ardai argued that video games were undergoing a process of ‘Macintoshization’. “GUIs served to regularise the interface and make it a bit more indirect,” said Crawford. “Most games had direct interfaces: push the joystick left and your player moved left. GUIs moved us a bit further towards abstraction by putting some of the verbs onscreen as buttons or menus. This in turn greatly expanded the size of the verb list that we could present to the player.”

  Crawford took advantage of the Macintosh’s GUI with his 1985 game Balance of Power, a simulation of Cold War geopolitics where players took charge of the US or USSR. “Actually, it wasn’t so much the GUI that appealed to me as the raw computational power of the Mac,” said Crawford. “I went from an Atari with an 8-bit processor and 48Kb of RAM to a Mac with a 16-bit processor and 128Kb.”

  At the time of Balance of Power’s release the Cold War had been under way for 40 years and showed no sign of ending. If anything the aggressive and uncompromising stance of President Ronald Reagan led many to suspect that nuclear war was becoming more, not less, likely. “The militaristic rhetoric of the Reagan administration led me to fear the prospect of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union,” said Crawford. “A lot of people in those days shared that fear. It seemed as if the Cold War was heating up and might become a hot war. Ever since my student days I had tried to understand how nations could get themselves caught up in the idiocy of war. I had studied lots of military and diplomatic history and I was finally coming to understand the basic principles. I wanted to communicate those principles.”

  The goal of Balance of Power was to defeat the rival superpower by increasing your standing among the world’s nations. Players could use diplomacy, military muscle, espionage, money or insurgency to try to bend nations to their will, but they had to avoid confrontations with the opposing superpower that could end in nuclear war. The outbreak of nuclear war ended the game with a simple message: “You have ignited a nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure.”

  Crawford’s simulation sought to model global reality as closely as possible, even including obscure political science concepts such as Finlandisation – the term used to describe how Finland sought to appease the neighbouring Soviet Union during the Cold War by censoring anti-communist media and refusing to grant asylum to political refugees from the USSR. Such was the complexity hidden beneath its simple interface of pull-down menus and icons to click on that Crawford later wrote and published a book explaining its inner workings. “My hope was that players would appreciate the complexity of it all, that they would understand that military action is, in fact, occasionally desirable but it had to be used judiciously and in the context of a larger diplomatic strategy,” said Crawford. Despite its complexity and political subject matter, Balance of Power sold around 250,000 copies – a significant amount for the time.

  ICOM Simulations, meanwhile, used the Mac’s GUI to rethink the text adventure. “Our idea wto do an adventure game that fitted into the Mac user interface,” said Adler. “Programs like MacPaint and the Mac Finder concentrate on mouse clicks and drags for user interface. We wanted to do the same for an adventure game. One of our ideas was ‘when in doubt, make it work the same way the Finder does’. Another was to choose a game with a style that fitted well with the black and white display of the Mac. That’s why we used a film noir story – we figured those movies were black and white already.”

  When ICOM began work on their film noir adventure in 1984, little had changed in the way adventure games worked since they first appeared in the late 1970s. Instead of rethinking the method of interaction, adventure game specialists Infocom had concentrated on improving the writing and creating ‘feelies’ – items packaged with the game that were intended to enhance the experience. Infocom’s feelies first appeared in the company’s 1982 murder mystery Deadline, which came with pieces of evidence from the crime scene such as police interview notes and a photo of the murder scene. “The items in the package became a trademark of our games and were a
lso a small anti-piracy aid as just copying the disks wouldn’t get you all you needed to solve the puzzles,” said Infocom co-founder Dave Lebling.

  But core to Infocom’s efforts to stay ahead of the pack was better storytelling. To help it achieve this goal it began to working with professional authors such as Douglas Adams, who helped Infocom turn his comedy sci-fi novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy into a video game. “It was quite a close collaboration, not like the typical author-game designer collaboration where the author talks to the designer for an hour and then plays the game months later with PR people snapping photos to show off the ‘collaboration’,” said Steve Meretzky, the Infocom game designer who worked with Adams on The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. “In general he was a delight to collaborate with because he understood the medium but didn’t feel as bound by its conventions as someone who’d already been working in it for several years like me. He came up with all sorts of crazy and inventive ideas like the game lying to you. On the other hand he was the world’s worst procrastinator. He would wait until the last minute and then wait another six months. As he once said: ‘I love deadlines. I especially love the whooshing sound they make as they pass by’.”

  After completing The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy in 1984, Meretzky went on to write A Mind Forever Voyaging that, along with 1986’s Trinity, would mark the pinnacle of Infocom’s quest for literary excellence. Like Balance of Power, President Reagan inspired A Mind Forever Voyaging. “Reagan had just been re-elected in a landslide and I was completely horrified because I despised him and his administration,” said Meretzky. “Text adventures were such a compelling medium. While playing one you just though about the game day and night, mulling over different solutions for puzzles, so I thought that it might be a particularly effective medium for getting a message across. I wanted to show Reagan as the right-wing, war-mongering, fundamentalist-coddling, budget-exploding, wedge-driving, environment-destroying intellectual lightweight he was.”

  In the game players took on the role of Perry Simm, a software program with human intelligence created to live in a computer simulation that extrapolated the effects of a government social policy that echoed Reagan’s free-market and socially conservative stance. As the players explored various simulations of the future, they watched how the policy would destroy freedom and peace in America while grappling with the ethical dilemma of what would happen to Simm when the simulation was over. While Crawford had struggled to find a publisher for his take on the Cold War, Infocom backed Meretzsky’s political critique. “A few people expressed concern about a game that might make some players angry, but Dave Lebling, who’s quite conservative, stuck up for the idea and said that perhaps someday he might want to make a game that attacked liberal principles and wanted to be free to do so,” said Meretzky.

  “I am politically well to Steve’s right and very strong on free speech. He designed a good game and it was worth producing,” said Lebling. “One could imagine a sequel about the rebellion against the state set up by listening to Perry Simm and his lousy socio-economic models.”

  Brian Moriarty’s Trinity, meanwhile, was a fantastical time-travelling adventure about the dangers of nuclear bombs and atomic war. “I first conceived the idea of an adventure game based on the Trinity Test in 1983,” said Moriarty.[4] “It was inspired by a history book I’d read years before in my high school library: Day of Trinity by Lansing Lamont. The dramatic story of the creation of the first atomic bomb really captured my imagination for some reason. It seemed the perfect setting for an interactive story in which a character from the future finds himself facing the possibility of changing history. It was about the mystery of choice.”

  But while Infocom concentrated on writing, its foremost rival – Sierra Online – had begun looking for an escape from the restrictions of text as its co-founder and lead game designer Roberta Williams became increasingly frustrated with the genre’s limitations. Sierra’s change in direction began with Time Zone, a $99 sci-fi adventure game spread across six double-sized floppy disks that Williams envisaged as a video game equivalent of the epic movies of Cecil B. DeMille. Having completed her epic she publicly admitted she was burnt out and couldn’t bear the thought of looking at another text adventure. So after creating a couple more adventures based on Disney licences, she made her bid for freedom with 1984’s fairytale adventure King’s Quest. For the game Williams ditched the Apple II so she could take advantage of the more powerful features of the PCjr, IBM’s low-cost version of its standard PC. The PCjr allowed Williams to fulfil her long-held desire to introduce animation to her games.

  She also used it as a chance to reduce the reliance on textinput by letting players move the lead character around the screen using the arrow keys on the PCjr’s keyboard. But she stopped short of abandoning text altogether, requiring players to type in the usual verb-noun commands to perform actions other than moving. King’s Quest’s fusion of animation and adventure was a watershed moment for the genre, but it would take ICOM’s 1985 film noir game, Déjà Vu: A Nightmare Comes True, to finally free players from the tyranny of text commands.

  Déjà Vu dropped text input altogether. Instead of having to type in commands in the hope that the game would understand, players could click on a selection of action words and then click on the object or person they wanted the action to apply to. Déjà Vu’s story was no match for the works of Sierra or Infocom, but ICOM had showed the way.

  By the end of the 1980s the text adventure would be on its last legs and Infocom with it, thanks to the company’s aversion to animation and GUIs. “We were very text-oriented and were happy to spend more space words than on pictures,” said Lebling. “In those days, the games with lots of graphics had very few words and we thought that the personal computer technology of the day was better suited to words. It made us somewhat hostile to graphics in general, which was a bad thing.”

  Adventure games were not the only genre where designers were seeking to explore the narrative horizons of video games. Richard Garriott was also seeking to make story a central feature of his role-playing game series Ultima. After releasing 1983’s Ultima III: Exodus through his own company, Origin Systems, he got to see his fan mail for the first time. The letters shocked him. “I found it fascinating to read what people were doing in my games,” said Garriott. “People would say I bought it and really enjoyed it and after I solved the main plot I had a great deal of fun going back and killing everybody or people would write in about the shortcuts they found to achieve solutions where they did not play a good guy but won by killing all the villagers in town because it was the fastest way to advance.”

  At the same time Garriott also started receiving hate mail from supporters of Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (BADD), a pressure group that claimed Dungeons & Dragons was spreading Satanism and was formed by Patricia Pulling, a grieving mother from Virginia who believed her 19-year-old son Irving killed himself because of the role-playing game. Pulling didn’t pick up on Ultima III: Exodus, which came in a box with a demon on the front, but others who agreed with her views did. “This was when the Christian right in the United States was coming out very strongly against role-playing games,” he said. “I received hate mail from religious groups describing me as the satanic perverter of America’s youth.” To Garriott it seemed that both the writers of the hate mail, and some of his fans, had misunderstood his work. “I found it so ironic and laughable,” he said. “Here I am writing games that I believe are, on the whole, quite positive and yet there’s a clearly this segment of the population so divergent from that belief./font>

  Garriott decided that the fourth Ultima game would mark a change in direction. “I sat down and thought real hard about what I could do that would reward people in the way the real world reacts,” he said. His solution was to make a game about virtue. Garriott pored over every book on philosophy and morality he could lay his hands on in a search for some simple truths that he could put at the heart of the game. He
boiled down the ideas he read about into eight virtues based on three broad principles: truth, love and courage. His confidence was also boosted when he noticed that one of his favourite movies, The Wizard of Oz, also homed in on the same ideas with its scarecrow, tin man and lion characters. “I independently arrived at truth, love and courage but L. Frank Baum had clearly arrived at a similar conclusion,” he said.[5] “I was given confidence that one of my creative heroes had arrived at a very clearly parallel conclusion, so I resolved to stick with truth, love and courage.”

  Garriott also resolved to track players’ behaviour in the game to assess how virtuous they were rather than simply encouraging players to build up numerical attributes, as was the norm in role-playing games. “I tried to think of very rational, not necessarily terribly obvious ways where if people played the game with an eye towards being good the game would reward them, and if they deviated from that way the game would not,” he said. “For example, I would set a test where, if you ran into a creature that was evil and weaker than you and you ran away, I called you a coward. On the other hand if you faced it, whether or not you lived, I gave you greater valour. But if you walked away from a wolf or something that wasn’t evil I did not deduct your valour because I do not feel it is a courageous thing to go kill a wild animal that goes for you because it happens to be looking for food.”