Among the tests Garriott set players was a blind shopkeeper where, after buying goods, players could short change the sightless woman. “If players left a multiple of any kind she would accept it and let you walk out. She wouldn’t make any comment about it whatsoever,” said Garriott. “But even though she didn’t say anything, the computer records the fact that you’re a lying, cheating, thieving bastard. Much later in the game you need to go back to the same woman to get a major clue. If you had been short changing her, she’d go ‘I’d love to help the avatar, this guy on the path of virtue, but you’re the most dishonest, thieving scumbag I’ve ever met so I’m not telling you’. All of those tests I tried to set up in the same way so you were never told immediately whether that was the right or wrong thing to do. It only happened over time as your behaviour accumulated.”
The result, 1985’s Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, was a major departure from every other role-playing game created up until that point. Its moral backbone and quest for enlightenment added a new dimension to the Ultima series. It also saw Garriott make a concerted effort to move away from the traditional Tolkien-inspired worlds of other fantasy games for one of his own design. Garriott and his colleagues worried the change in direction would anger players. “It was so different to every other game that had come out I was sincerely worried that no one would like it and no one would understand it,” said Garriott. “I even had people in my own office who would express very specific doubts.”
To Garriott’s relief, Ultima IV became the series’ biggest seller by a long way. The fan mail also showed that players had embraced the change. One letter in particular stuck in Garriott’s mind: “This mother wrote me a letter and said: ‘My daughter was actually having personal life issues with some of the issues you brought forth in your game. Your game showed her cause and effect that is completely appropriate even in the real world. My daughter has grown through this and I just wanted to write you a letter expressing that I, as a parent, recognise that fully and appreciate it. I’m touched by the work you’ve done’.”
By the end of 1986 it was clear that video games were no longer moral vacuums. From the morality play of Ultima IV, to the political commentary of A Mind Forever Voyaging and the economic and social allegory of M.U.L.E., game designers were discovering hidden depths to their medium thanks to the move to home computers. The early 1980s industry crash had ushered in a new richness to the video game.
* * *
Change was also happening outside the home as coin-op game designers adjusted to the post-crash world of fewer arcades and fewer players. “1982 and ’83 were very difficult years for Exidy and the overall amusement industry as a whole,” said Howell Ivy, a game designer at the American coin-op manufacturer. “The industry needed a change. The strategies were the development of new, faster, better game systems.”
The coin-op video game companies that had survived the shake-out focused on their big advantage over home systems: hardware. Unlike the makers of home games, coin-op designers could decide what technology suited their games rather than having to work within the limitations of the popular platforms. It was an advantage arcade game makers pushed hard to keep people coming to the arcades. They offered graphics and sound that no home computer or console could match, designed elaborate cabinets and built controllers designed specifically for their games.
Exidy’s 1983 game Crossbow, for example, handed players a pretend crossbow that they could use to shoot on-screen enemies and revived interest in light gun games.[6] Soon the arcades shook to the sound of gunfire as players got to blast terrorists, zombies and criminals with a variety of plastic guns thanks to games such as Operation Wolf, Beast Busters and Virtua Cop.
Atari Games’ Ed Logg, meanwhile, used cabinet design to emphasise the social advantages of the arcade with his 1985 fantasy shoot ’em up Gauntlet. “The idea for ers ="rgb(0, 0, 0)">Gauntlet came from two major sources,” said Logg. “My son was heavily into Dungeons & Dragons at the time and he wanted me to do a Dungeons & Dragons game so bad. The other thing that came along was a computer game called Dandy. It was a four-player, co-operative-style game. I melded the two ideas together to form Gauntlet.” The result was a game that had the trappings of Dungeons & Dragons with its warriors, wizards and monsters but was actually a shoot ’em up set in a large maze.
Logg’s stroke of genius, however, was creating a cabinet that let up to four people play at once as a team. Gauntlet became the social hub of the arcades, a game that brought players together. People could join in games at any point simply by inserting a coin and so complete strangers ended up playing together. For arcade operators it was the kind of cash cow they hadn’t seen since the glory days of the early 1980s, thanks largely to its ability to take money from four people at once. At the height of its popularity, the average Gauntlet machine was raking in an estimated $900 a week.
Logg’s cabinet design, however, looked tame next to the work of Sega’s Yu Suzuki, a Japanese game designer who came to prominence in the wake of the crash. Suzuki enhanced his games with cabinets that resembled fairground rides. His 1985 motorbike racing game Hang-On marked the start of a five-year exploration of the intersection between video games and theme park rides. Hang-On’s cabinet was a replica motorcycle with a screen mounted into the windshield. Players steered by leaning left or right to tilt the motorbike and used the handlebars to accelerate and brake. In the wake of its success Suzuki pushed the idea even further with 1986’s Out Run, a car driving game inspired by his love of the film The Cannonball Run, a 1981 comedy about an illegal race across the US.
Armed with a video recorder, camera and notepad, the sports car-loving Suzuki went on a two-week driving tour of Europe to gather information for his game. While visiting Monaco during this trip, he spotted the most desirable supercar of the 1980s: a Ferrari Testarossa. Then and there he decided that would be the car would be the focus of Out Run. Suzuki made Out Run a celebration of driving and an ode to ’80s cool with its fast supercar, open road and a blonde-haired girlfriend in the passenger seat. There was even a virtual in-car stereo offering four synthesizer-heavy pop tunes that blared out as the player zoomed through scenery inspired by Suzuki’s European tour. And while the need to reach your destination within a tight time limit meant players had to drive fast, Out Run was about the joy of driving rather than the racing.
Suzuki’s final touch was a box-like cabinet designed to look like the inside of a car that used hydraulics to shake and move in line with the on-screen action. When Out Run was shown for the first time at a Japanese trade show in October 1986, the excited crowds left many struggling to get a glimpse. It went on to become one of the most popular driving games of the 1980s. Suzuki’s experiments in cabinet design eventually reached their pinnacle in 1990 with R360 – G-Loc Air Battle, a gigantic arcade game that put players in a replica jet fighter cockpit capable of spinning and rotating through 360 degrees.
The developments in cabinet design and graphics technology helped keep people coming to the arcades, which stabilised at a turnover of between $2 billion and $3 billion a year in the US shortly after the crash. The leaps forward in technology also tempted Eugene Jarvis, the creator of early 1980s arcade hits such as Defender, back into the games business. “I could see that technology was evolving beyond the pixel-based artwork of the ’70s and early ’80s towards 3D animation, motion capture, digitization, you name it. The video game field was about to explode in a technological big bang enabling immersive and rich gaming as never before seen.”
Jarvis rejoined his former employer Williams and set to work on his comeback game: Narc, an ultra-violent ode to Reagan’s war on drugs. “Narc was the war on drugs to the limit,” said Jarvis. “The player characters Max Force and Hitman were on a mission to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. Although you could bust drug dealers and send them to jail, it was much more fun to blow them to bits with a rocket launcher or roast them in a glorious flamethrower BBQ. Let’s face it, drug dealers ena
ble the destruction of more lives than any disease in our society. It’s about time they got their due instead of a suspended sentence.”
Aside from its brutal ‘say no’ message, Narc was also notable for being one of the first games to use digitization, a technique that allowed game designers to record film or sound and import it into their work allowing big improvements in visuals and audio. “The cool thing about digitized imagery is that you can work directly with actors, costumes, locations and directly digitize imagery into the game,” said Jarvis. “It enables amazing photorealistic quality and you can capture all the nuances and lighting and skilled character acting and dialogue.”
When Narc arrived in the arcades in 1988, however, the dark ages of interactive entertainment referred to by Electronic Arts’ Gordon were over. And it was all thanks to a Japanese toy company that single-handedly brought video games back from the brink.
[1]. Electronic Arts’ promotion of its game designers as artists was short lived. “Even though we got some publicity, it didn’t really catch on with the public,” said Hawkins. “For consumers it was really more about which games were fun and not who made them and why. As a resu the approach was phased out over time and the products became bigger brands than the artists.”
[2]. They had to be. Home computers at the time were intimidating. There were no windows or mice, just a > prompt and a flashing cursor impatiently waiting for the user to type in commands in computer language, usually BASIC.
[3]. This post-Mac generation included the Acorn Archimedes, Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. The IBM PC and its compatibles eventually caught up thanks to the success of the third version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, which was released in 1990.
[4]. The Trinity Test was the first nuclear explosion, which was carried out near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on the 17th July 1945.
[5]. The author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the 1900 children’s novel that the film was based on.
[6]. Light gun games pre-date video games. The first was the Seeburg Ray-O-Lite, a duck-shooting electro-mechanical coin-op game released in 1936. The Magnavox Odyssey’s Shooting Gallery game, which came with a toy rifle, was the first video game to use the idea.
Family Computer: Two Japanese children pla
y Nintendo. Reuters / Corbis
12. A Tool To Sell Software
They made an odd couple. On one side of the desk sat Hiroshi Yamauchi, the 49-year-old chairman of Nintendo – a Japanese toy firm that started out in 1889 making playing cards. He was a hard-nosed businessman with a single-minded desire to turn the business he inherited from his grandfather into a global giant. His raw ambition was evident from the moment he took charge of Nintendo in 1949. His first act was to stamp his authority on the firm by firing his cousin, the only relative employed by Nintendo, before sacking every manager loyal to his grandfather.
On the opposite side of the desk was Shigeru Miyamoto, a banjo-playing daydreamer straight out of college whose shaggy shoulder-length hair was out of keeping with the neat style expected of Japanese businessmen. As a child Miyamoto had dreamt of becoming an entertainer, a puppeteer or a cartoonist and he shuddered at the thought of becoming a ‘salaryman’, one of corporate Japan’s downtrodden drones. He hoped life at a toy company would be better.
Nintendo’s stern boss told Miyamoto, who landed the interview because his father knew a friend of Yamauchi’s, to go away and return with an idea for toy. Miyamoto returned brandishing a colourful coat hanger made out of soft wood and decorated with pictures of animals drawn in bright acrylic paint. Metal hangers could hurt a child, explained the young designer. Impressed, Yamauchi gave Miyamoto a job as a graphic designer. It was 1977 and, although neither man yet knew it, together they would redefine both the business and the content of video games.
Miyamoto joined Nintendo at a crucial moment. Under Yamauchi’s direction the company was in midst of its second attempt to enter the video game business. Nintendo’s first attempt had ended in failure. In 1975 it released EVR Race, a coin-op horse race betting game designed by Genyo Takeda, only to find the game’s use of videotape footage meant the machine was prone to breaking down and needed regular maintenance.
Now Yamauchi hoped to achieve video game success by releasing two home Pong consoles: the Color TV Game 6 and Color TV Game 15. While the US had caught the home Pong bug back in late 1975, home video games were still new to Japan. Prior to 1977 the only game console on the market was toy firm Epoch’s TV Tennis, a repackaged version of the Magnavox Odyssey.
Nintendo’s timing could not of been better: 1977 saw a succession of home Pong consoles launched by companies such as Bandai, Hitachi and Epoch that got Japan excited by the chance to play video games at home. Nintendo was one of the victors in the Japan’s home Pong wars. The Kyoto toy firm sold more than a million of its Color TV Game consoles making it a high-profile player in Japan’s emerging video game industry. At the time Japan’s game business was largely focused on the domestic market, even the big guns – Taito and Sega – concentrated on winning over Japanese arcade-goers rather than reaching a global audience. Namco, the country’s other big coin-op video game company, didn’t even have a development team of its own. Instead it concentrated on reaping the rewards of having the rights to bring Atari’s coin-op games into Japan.
There was little reason to think Japan’s video game industry might become a serious challenger to US companies such as Atari and Bally Midway. Post-war Japan may have gone from vanquished enemy to a successful exporter of manufactured goods, but its cultural influence had lagged far behind its growing economic power. For North Americans and Europeans, Japanese cinema meant Godzilla, which despite a cult following was regarded as something of a joke. And while the work of director Akira Kurosawa had directly inspired the Hollywood films Star Wars and The Magnificent Seven, few people knew about his influence. Manga comics and anime, meanwhile, were rarely – if ever – seen outside Asia.
But then came Taito’s Space Invaders, a made-in-Japan global phenomenon that gave the nation’s game companies a newfound sense of self-confidence. Suddenly the idea of competing with Atari on the global stage seemed a real possibility rather than a pipedream. Namco responded by starting to design its own games, Nintendo re-entered the coin-op game business and Taito opened a US office. Space Invaders’ enormous earnings confirmed Yamauchi’s belief that Nintendo’s future lay in video games. He ordered his staff to throw out their old ideas and concentrate on devising bold new video game products that would give Nintendo the edge over its rivals.
Gunpei Yokoi was first to respond. Yokoi was Nintendo’s toy-maker-in-chief, a creative genius whose inventive toys had sustained the company through the 1970s.[1] One evening on his commute home, he saw a bored businessman passing the time by playing with a pocket calculator that had a liquid crystal display (LCD). A portable video game, Yokoi figured, would be a much more enjoyable way to pass the time. Inspired, he set about designing such a device. Yokoi’s approach to creating his portable game followed his personal design philosophy: the “lateral thinking of withered technology”. The concept, he explained, involved shunning the latest technology and finding new uses for “mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply”.
The result was the Game & Watch, a low-cost handheld LCD game that doubled as a digital watch. Nintendo released the first Game & Watch, the juggling game Ball, in April 1980 to instant success. Over the next 11 years, Nintendo would sell more than 30 million of the dozens of Game & Watch titles it released. The year after Ball’s release, Miyamoto’s debut game Donkey Kong confirmed Nintendo’s new status as a member of Japan’s video game elite alongside Taito, Sega and Namco.
Yamauchi’s desire for business success was far from satisfied, however. Although he had managed to turn Nintendo into one of the world’s biggest video game companies in just a few years, Yamauchi wanted to dominate the whole industry. And to achieve this, he decided that Nintendo would build a cartridge-based video
game console for the Japanese market in an attempt to replicate the massive success the Atari VCS 2600 had in North America. In 1982, the year Yamauchi set his sights on Atari-esque levels of success, Japanese sales of home Pong consoles had melted away but no cartridge-based console had managed to electrify the nation’s video gamers. Bandai had just abandoned its SuperVision 8000, Japan’s first cartridge-based console, in order to launch the Japanese version of Mattel’s Intellivision. Bandai’s main rival, Epoch was touting the Cassette Vision, which launched in 1981 with tree-felling action game Kikori no Yosuka as its flagship title, but sales were slow.
While the console market had slowed to a crawl, sales of home computers produced by the likes of NEC and Fujitsu were accelerating, encouraging the formation of Japan’s first video game publishers. Among the first was Koei, a software company founded by the husband a wife team of Yoichi and Keiko Erikawa. Koei kicked off their move into game publishing in 1981 with the release of The Battles of Kawanakajima, a historical strategy game set in feudal Japan. Koei would go on to make its name with its games based on Chinese and Japanese history, particularly the Nobunaga’s Ambition strategy series that began in 1983, but its most influential release was 1982’s Night Life.
Night Life wasn’t even a game. It was a computerised sex guide for the NEC PC-8801 computer offering advice on sexual positions complete with primitive black and white line drawings and a menstrual cycle tracker. Its commercial success, however, spawned a whole new genre of video game: bishojo gemu.
Literally translated as ‘pretty young girl games’, bishojo games emerged when several companies sought to capitalise on the success of Night Life by fusing the interactivity of video games with the stories and art of bishojo manga comics. These comics, which are widely available in Japan and openly read in public, focused on young school-age girls and, while not always, are often pornographic in nature.[2] At its most extreme, bishojo manga offered readers access to unrestricted sexual fantasies including violent rape and paedophilia. The games at the pornographic end of bishojo, known as eroge, were no less explicit. Within a year of Night Life’s launch, Japanese game publishers were releasing games such as Lolita Syndrome, an Enix game that included a section where players throw knives to tear the clothes off pre-pubescent girls.
Replay: The History of Video Games Page 21