Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  [1]. Nintendo did, however, miss the option for players to microwave a hamster in the game. Only after the first 250,000 copies had gone out to retailers did Nintendo spot it. Jaleco was told to remove the option if it wanted to have any additional copies manufactured.

  [2]. US companies also contributed to their own downfall. Many were dismissive of the Japanese. They believed that the Japanese could not match the technology and innovation of Americans. They were utterly wrong. By 1987, 95 per cent of the world’s 100 million video recorders were Japanese despite the video recorder being a US invention.

  [3]. An incident unintentionally reflected in the Japanese fighting game Final Fight, where players get to smash up a car with a Toyota-esque badge between levels.

  [4]. This came not long after Sony’s 1989 buy out of Columbia Pictures and Matsushita’s purchase of MCA in 1990.

  [5]. The Bitmap Brothers was a London-based team of game designers that presented themselves as leather-jacketed and shade-wearing rock stars and gained a strong following in Europe. They took advantage of the extra power of the Amiga and Atari ST to serve up flashy, rave music-enhanced, visual feasts such as Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe, a violent futuristic sports game, and the Bomb the Bass-soundtracked shoot ’em up Xenon 2: Megablast.

  [6]. Nintendo eventually released it outside Japan in 1993 as Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels. The US Super Mario Bros 2 was released in Japan as Super Mario USA in 1992.

  Rotoscoped: Jordan Mechner turns footage of his brother David into frames of animation

  . Courtesy of Jordan Mechner, www.jordanmechner.com

  14. Interactive Movies

  Mitchy saw it all. She watched Atari grow from scrappy pioneer into corporate behemoth. She witnessed the birth of the Atari VCS 2600 and the hours spent designing the innards of the Atari 400 and 800 home computers. Now she was a spectator to the creation of a next-generation home computer that would help reshape of the future of video games. Mitchy didn’t know what was going on, she was, after all, just a dog. But her owner Jay Miner, the computer engineer behind the developments Mitchy witnessed, took his pet cockapoo everywhere. As Miner slaved over schematics and toyed with microchip designs, Mitchy would sit patiently by his side waiting for attention.

  Miner had quit Atari in 1982 after the company refused to fund his dream of creating an advanced home computer based on Motorola’s advanced 68000 microprocessor. Miner took his ideas to the Amiga Corporation, a Californian start-up bankrolled to the tune of millions by a group of dentists from Florida[1]. The company embraced Miner’s vision and gave him the money and resource he needed to turn it into reality.

  As a huge fan of flight simulations, Miner made it his goal to build a system that would be home to the cream of the genre. With Mitchy at his side, Miner designed graphics chips that could simultaneously display thousands of colours, at a time when 16 colours on screen at once was a serious challenge. His graphics technology could also update the display independently of the microprocessor, a feature far beyond the abilities of the era’s best arcade machines and that meant his computer would not get bogged down by the demands of processing its advanced visual capabilities. Miner also built a sound chip that put the sonic capabilities of every other home computer available at the time to shame.

  Impressed by Miner’s work, his former employers Atari snapped up the rights to the still-in-development computer on 21st November 1983. When the Amiga Corporation began to show off Miner’s computer, the Amiga, in public it was met with a mixture of disbelief and barely contained excitement among game designers. Some believed it was a fraud while others salivated at the very thought of what they could create using Miner’s audio-visual powerhouse. Atari, however, was in no state to enjoy the moment and by the summer of 1984 Commodore founder Jack Tramiel was poised to take over the ailing firm’s computer division.

  The thought of working for Tramiel horrified the Amiga Corporation; it had already gained first-hand experience of Tramiel’s abrasive business style during talks about selling the rights to Miner’s computer and wanted nothing to do with him. Desperate to escape its Atari deal, the company formed an alliance with Commodore, which had ousted Tramiel at the start of the year. Commodore bought Amiga out of its deal with Atari just days before Tramiel’s takeover was completed in July 1984. The Atari Amiga would now become the Commodore Amiga.

  Bob Jacob, an agent representing game and software designers, was one of the first people to see the finished version of the Amiga, a few months prior to its official release in 1985. “It was 1984, I got a call from a company called Island Graphics that had a contract to develop three graphics programs for the Commodore Amiga,” he said. “This company and Commodore had a falling out, so Island wanted to place the project elsewhere. I went up to see them and I had never seen an Amiga before. It was really cool. After seeing the Amiga I figured things were going to be different and I wanted to take a more direct approach to game development.”

  Inspired, Jacob and his wife Phyllis formed Master Designer Software in January 1986 with the intention of using the Amiga to “rethink what a computer game could be”. Jacob decided his game studio would not look to existing video games for inspiration but to the hills of Hollywood. “I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to give people a movie-like experience,” said Jacob. “I became obsessed by the idea of trying to create games that had the mood-altering quality of an arcade game but had a story and some minor role-playing game aspects. What I really liked about arcade games was that when I was playing them I couldn’t think about anything else, I couldn’t think about my problems – it took up all my attention. It definitely became a mood-altering experience. At that time I thought computer games were very crude. They were really slow. A lot of them had keyboard interfaces, ugly graphics; a whole host of elements that served to really kick you out of the experience.”

  Jacob wanted his company to address these flaws of vidgames without sacrificing the emotional power of action games. “If I had a breakthrough creatively it was the idea that I wanted action but I didn’t want action by itself,” he said. “I wanted the action element of success or failure to branch the story, to move things along. Action for a purpose. I wanted to create a different feeling.”

  Jacob homed in on the idea of using movies as the basis for his new breed of video game and decided Master Designer Software would release its games under the name Cinemaware. Cinemaware’s first release was November 1986’s Defender of the Crown, a ‘knights in shining armour’ game set in medieval England. Its action scenes paid homage to the 1952 film Ivanhoe and its strategy elements drew on the world conquest board game Risk, but it was the game’s lush visuals and cinematic presentation that made it stand out. “Defender of the Crown was a phenomenon,” said Jacob. “It was the first game that showed the power of the Amiga graphics. It was beautiful. At the time the Amiga had a lot of games that were essentially Commodore 64 ports that really didn’t show off the ability of the hardware. Literally every person who owned an Amiga at that point bought that game, we had almost 100 per cent sell through.”

  Cinemaware followed Defender of the Crown with further attempts to explore Jacob’s fusion of cinematic storytelling and video game action with titles such as gangster film-inspired King of Chicago, the ’40s sci-fi serial pastiche Rocket Ranger and the ’50s b-movie ode It Came from the Desert. “Bob Jacob really wanted to put characters into the games,” said Ken Melville, who wrote the script for It Came from the Desert. “So you saw these real breakthrough notions like King of Chicago and Defender of the Crown where characters were right on the screen talking to you. Cinemaware was really the first to bring actual characters and story elements into direct interaction with the player.”

  Cinemaware’s movie influences ran deeper than just surface presentation and storytelling however. Hollywood’s movie development processes would also inform its approach to game development. “We would have story meetings, we would flow chart the game and come out with storyboards
,” said Jacob. “The games we were doing were different to the games other people were doing at the time. We really had to figure out where we were going with the game. We were doing games that had storytelling and role-playing and action and this and that and the other thing. If we didn’t know where we were going it would be a disaster and that forced us into a level of oversight that was rare at the time.”

  Cinemaware blazed the trail for the concept of ‘interactive movies’ – narrative-driven games where cinematic storytelling was as important as play – but others were not far behind. Across the world game designers, empowered by new machines such as the Amiga, were starting to examine what they could learn from the craft of filmmaking.

  The games of aspiring screenwriter Jordan Mechner, for example, drew heavily on the visual language of cinema. His 1984 debut, the martial arts title Karateka, imported the camera techniques of silent film using rotoscoping, cross-cutting and tracking shots to convey its simple girlfriend-rescuing story without resorting to text. Karateka became a hit, but Mechner was unsure whether to continue with video games, torn between his desire to be a filmmaker and his success in the game industry. “There’s no guarantee the new game will be as successful as Karateka or that there will even be a computer games market a couple of years from now,” he wrote in his journal in July 1985. Although plagued with doubt, Mechner eventually settled on completing his second video game: the Arabian Nights-themed action title Prince of Persia.

  Mechner once again raided the toolkit of cinema. He bought a video camera and filmed his brother David running and climbing around a New York City parking lot so he could make the player’s character move in a realistic way. He spent hours watching the duel between Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in the 1938 movie The Adventures of Robin Hood to work out how the in-game swordfights should look and he drew on the storytelling techniques of silent movies to explain the story through the on-screen action and character movement. Released in 1989, Prince of Persia’s cinematic presentation and attention to visual detail turned it into a major video game series that was still going strong 20 years after its debut.

  Game designers were not the only ones exploring what video games could learn from the movies. Film director George Lucas had also started to explore the intersection between movie and video game. The Star Wars director created a game development studio within his Lucasfilm production company in 1982 after Atari gave him $1 million in return for having first refusal on releasing whatever he did with the money. Instead of creating games based on Star Wars or Indiana Jones, as Atari probably hoped, Lucas used the money to create a studio whose mission was to develop original game franchises of its own. But while encouraged to find its own creative voice, the game studio’s output reflected many of the production values of Lucasfilm the movie studio.

  In keeping with Lucasfilm’s reputation for special effects, Lucasfilm Games sought to mirror the high standards of Lucas’ movie work by creating games that excelled both visually and, unusually for the time, sonically. “The importance of music and sound effects had been overlooked in earlier video games as it was in movies until productions such as Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark signalled a new artistic awareness in the industry,” said Peter Langston, the head of Lucasfilm Games, at the 1984 launch of the firm’s debut games Ballblazer and Rescue on Fractulus!. “We’re very satisfied with the successful role that music and special effects play in making both games a total sensory experience for the player.” Lucasfilm Games also devoted a huge amount of effort to detailing the game worlds it built. During the making of Rescue on Fractulus!, a sci-fi game set in fractal-generated canyons that players had to fly around in order to rescue stranded spacemen, Lucasfilm built life-sized spaceship models and even selected a colour for the uniform of the game’s unseen hero in order to deepen their understanding of how the game world should feel.

  Lucasfilm Games’ cinematic parentage really came to the fore when it started making adventure games. Lucasfilm’s entry into the adventure genre began when one of its programmers, Ron Gilbert, came up with an alternative to text input that fused the mouse-based interface of ICOM Simulations’ Déjà Vu: A Nightmare Comes True with the animated visuals of Sierra’s text adventures King’s Quest and Leisure Suit Larry. Gilbert and artist Gary Winnick used the format to create 1987’s typing-free adventure game Maniac Mansion, a parody of horror b-movies where a group of teenagers end up in a dangerous location and become separated before being killed one by one.

  Lucasfilm followed Maniac Mansion with a run of adventure games that used the same approach from slapstick swashbuckler The Secret of Monkey Island, movie tie-in Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade and the ethereal fantasy of Loom – a game set in a dream-like world inspired by Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. “There wasn’t any distinct message I was trying to communicate with Loom,” said its creator Brian Moriarty. “It was more like a mood I was trying to sustain, a dreamy, melancholy feeling like that evoked by the music for Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake ballet.”

  As its roster of adventure games grew, Lucasfilm became more and more interested in applying the techniques of cinematography, moving from the largely static scenes of Maniac Mansion to the panning cameras and close ups of The Secret of Monkey Island. As Doug Glen, the general manager of Lucasfilm Games, said in 1991: “There’s a whole area of cinematography – cutting, panning, zooming and so on – yet to be properly exploited in games.”

  The integration of movie techniques into games was not just a US trend. Delphine Softwarhe Parisian game studio set up by French music label Delphine Records, was also exploring how to make games more cinematic. After some initial success making adventure games such as Cruise for a Corpse, which used a similar interface to that created by Lucasfilm, it came out with Another World, a superb action game about a computer programmer transported to an alien world.

  Created by Eric Chahi, Another World echoed the Prince of Persia model, using character animation to tell the story visually. Where Chahi differed from Mechner was his focus on capturing the pace of movies in his game. “What I really learned with this game, and what was a lot more important than the cinematographic aspect, was to create a game rhythm, moments of relaxation, of tension,” he said. “I wanted to bring into a game an immersive, cinematic feeling. I think it succeeded because there was a good balance between the cut scenes, which were punctuations rather than sequences, just a plan inserted at the right moment. It was not like what they do now [2009] where they feed in sections of film unconnected with the game play.”

  The game’s opening where the player is chasing through the alien world by a large black beast demonstrated the approach. The beast is seen lurking in the background as the player starts to explore the alien landscape. Then, suddenly, the game cuts to a brief scene showing the roaring beast jumping into front of the player’s character, before switching back to the action and the ensuing chase. Chahi also brought Another World’s distinctive flat sharp-edged visual style, inspired by comic book artwork, to the fore by removing the kind of information that usually littered game screens. There was no score, no lives, nothing but the game itself. “I was fed up of score because it was nonsense,” he explained. “It was in conflict with the universe of Another World. I wanted a visceral implication of the player, no distraction other than the world itself. No artificial motivation, which score is. Score’s a capitalistic view of game play, no?”

  The cinematic exploration of Chahi, Mechner, Lucasfilm and Cinemaware were dwarfed in size, however, by the work being carried out by Hasbro and Axlon in the late 1980s. Axlon was the latest business venture of Atari founder Nolan Bushnell.[2] Formed in 1988 with Tom Zito, Axlon’s big idea was to make a console that ran games stored on VHS videocassettes rather than cartridges. Toy makers Hasbro embraced the idea and teamed up with Axlon to develop the system, which they codenamed NEMO.[3] The NEMO team read like a video gaming who’s who. There was Bushnell, Spacewar! co-creator Steve Russell, Imagic�
�s Rob Fulop, Cinemaware’s Melville, Activision’s David Crane and a gaggle of former Atari coin-op employees including Steve Bristow and Owen Rubin.

  The decision to use VHS as a storage medium was based on technology that allowed videotape to be divided into several tracks, only one of which would be shown on scree at any one time. The approach gave game makers the chance to use real-life film footage in their titles rather than computer-generated graphics, although the system lacked the ability to rewind or pause the tape during play. “The tape was always running, so you can’t sit there and wait for the user to decide left or right,” said Fulop. “That worked on laserdisc, a laser can always jump, but this thing was always running and that’s why we made a game like Night Trap – there’s a house with cameras all over the place and you jump between each one.[4] That was designed to work on tape and the system worked; the story’s moving and you would just move where you viewed the action from.”

  The need to use film footage in the NEMO’s games required game developers and filmmakers to work in unison. “We had a $4 million budget for Sewer Shark, which was unheard of at the time,” said Melville.[5] “We built huge, elaborate sets, had a big film crew, actors, sound stages, location shoots – the whole ball game. We hired John Dykstra, the guy who had literally made Star Wars via his insane special effects, and he had his top guys build all the tunnels and rats and everything – all practical, motion-control work. Meticulous, expensive, serious Hollywood sci-fi movie production values. This was the real first marriage of Hollywood and gaming.”