Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  Not that Hollywood and Silicon Valley necessarily gelled. “Since game and movie production had never before been merged, we had to blaze all the contractual, licensing and ego trails,” said Melville. “Hollywood folks had a huge attitude about us Silicon Valley geeks. They treated us at first like commercial clients – shoot our Bubble Yum advert spot, that kind of thing.”

  As well as shooting the footage, the NEMO team also faced the challenge of getting every scene to line up to ensure continuity. “There was a timeline drawing on the walls that spanned the entire hallway, top to bottom, that showed all the connections and scenes and how they matched up,” said Rubin. “It was incredibly complex.”

  Hasbro lavished $20 million on developing its VHS games console and hopes were high amongst the team that it would be a success. “The idea of an actual guy talking smack directly to you based on your performance was, for the times, mind-bending,” said Melville. “Our main competitor, Nintendo, was producing blocky little cubes at the time. We would have lit ’em up like a sewer rat. We did a focus test once and after a little kid had played some of our games and various characters were talking to him face-to-face, he turned to our host and asked in deep wonder: ‘How do it know?’.”

  The NEMO was set to launch in January 1989 as the Control-Vision but, just three months before its debut, Hasbro pulled the plug. Ultimately Hasbro could not get the figures to add up. The NEMO would have cost $299, far more than rival consoles and, with its games costing millions to develop, Hasbro concluded it could never make enough profit to justify the venture. “It was too expensive to make these things. You had to make a movie,” said Fulop. “Look at Sewer Shark, we shot that in Hawaii. The console cost a lot too, it was a loss-making thing, would break a lot and the games, while they worked fine, they weren’t that replayable.”

  The NEMO was a write-off, but it did test out the idea of Hollywood and Silicon Valley working together, a practice that would become increasingly common from the 1990s onwards, and furthered game designers’ understanding of how video games could absorb ideas from film. “In interactive you have to write very minimalistically. You have to get to the next decision point fast, you had to edit for that lightning pace, the player has no interest in waiting around,” said Melville. “For instance, I had John Dykstra editing the stuff we shot in Hawaii, but it was too slow. It constantly needed to be upcut. I took over and finished it to get that fast cut edge that John, as a movie guy, couldn’t possibly understand not being a gamer. Hasbro was really the first time gaming notions, the real needs of gamers, were given full shrift in a Hollywood production environment. We invented the system of merging the two highly disparate cultures.”

  Yet while many game developers began pushing for more cinematic, story-driven experiences, a rival camp were pulling in the opposite direction and seeking to free players from the constraints of designers’ visions.

  [1]. Activision co-founder Larry Kaplan started the Amiga Corporation as Hi-Toro in 1982 and recruited Miner. Kaplan, however, quit shortly after its formation and, by the end of 1982, the company had been renamed the Amiga Corporation.

  [2]. Bushnell first returned to the video game industry in 1983 with Sente, a producer of cartridge-based coin-op machines. The appeal of the approach was that when players grew tired of a game, arcades could just insert a new cartridge to change the game rather than buying a whole new machine. It was an idea that would later become widespread, but Bushnell was forced to sell Sente after his Chuck E Cheese pizza restaurant chain ran into financial trouble. Senate’s buyer Midway failed to exploit the full potential of the idea, which Japanese coin-op makers eventually adopted to great success.

  [3]. Short for ‘Never Ever Mention Outside’.

  [4]. A horror game where the player has to protect a slumber party of teenage girls from attacking vampires.

  [5]. The futuristic shoot ’em up that was to be the NEMO’s flagship title.

  The Entrepreneur: British game designer Peter Molyneux

  15. Ah! You Must Be A God

  In 1984 Will Wright and Peter Molyneux made their debuts as game designers. In time, their work would define an alternative vision of video gaming to the narrative-driven cinematics of Lucasfilm Games and Cinemaware. But in 1984 the two designers were worlds apart.

  Born on 20th January 1960, Will Wright was an American raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and Baton Rogue, Louisiana. He was a voracious reader obsessed with model making and robots, a love that led him to video games. “What got me into games were robots,” he explained. “I was building robots as a teenager, weird mechanical things out of random parts. I bought my first Apple II computer to connect to my robots, to control them. Some of the very first computer games were coming out and they were basically simulations. I got fascinated with simulations as a form of modelling, so I started writing simple simulations of my robots and got fascinated with artificial intelligence and simulation.”

  One piece of software in particular captured Wright’s imagination: Life. Created in 1970 by the British mathematician John Conway on a PDP-7 computer, Life sought to demonstrate how complexity could emerge from very simple rules. The program displayed a screen divided into a grid of cells. At the start of the ‘game’, the user set the initial conditions by deciding how many cells to bring to life. After that the program ran itself by following three simple rules: (1) live cells with 2 or 3 live neighbours survive; (2) live cells with fewer than 2 neighbours die, as do those with 4 or more neighbours; (3) ‘dead’ cells with 3 live neighbours come to life.

  Despite their simplistic nature, these three rules created often-mesmerising animated patterns that generally moved towards some kind of stable system over time. Conway’s creation fascinated Wright: “It’s so extraordinary because the rules behind it are so simple but the behaviours so complex. It’s like Go in that a lot of people I know lost major chunks of their life in both these endeavours. There is some underlying aspect that they capture about reality and complex systems in that they arise from incredibly simple rules and interactions. It became a major design approach: put together simple rules to create complex behaviour. That was a huge inspiration for me.”

  While fascinated with Life, Wright’s debut video game – Raid on Bungeling Bay – showed little of its influence. Raid on Bungeling Bay was a Commodore 64 shoot ’em up where players controlled a helicopter as it flew around an archipelago trying to bomb military factories. “I was trying to find things on the Commodore you couldn’t do on the Apple II,” said Wright. “The Commodore 64 had these graphic features that were advanced for what it was and you could have this big scrolling window on a larger world. I also always loved helicopters. I designed that game around the technology, around what you couldn’t do on the Apple II.”

  Released by Brøderbund, a game publisher based in San Rafael, California, Raid on Bungeling Bay sold poorly on the Commodore 64. “There was a lot of piracy. Everyone had a copy but I only sold 20,000 to 30,000 copies,” said Wright. “Luckily for me it was one of the first American games licensed into the Japanese market on the Nintendo Entertainment System. It sold about a million units in Japan and, back then, the terms you got from publishers were pretty generous. I earned enough from that game to live on for several years.”

  Molyneux’s first taste of the video game business could not have been more different. Born on 5th May 1959 in the English town of Guildford, just to the south west of London, Molyneux hated school and had a vague dream of becoming a successful businessman. His first attempt at running his own company was a disaster. “It was based on this ridiculous business idea of selling floppy disks to schools. We put software on the floppy disks and sold it to them, the unique thing is you get this free software,” he said. “Of course the floppy disks were quite expensive because people could buy them enormously cheap from Taiwan or something and they only needed the software once. A school would order 10 disks to get the software when, to make the business work, I needed them to order 10,000.”
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  For his next business venture, Molyneux decided to join the early 1980s boom in British video games with a business simulation called The Entrepreneur. Confident that his mail order game would be a huge success, Molyneux took out adverts in game magazines and warned the Royal Mail to expect a flood of orders. “I thought it was going to be the greatest success ever,” he said. “In those days I didn’t think in any sensible way. I very much floated around in the stream of life going ‘hey let’s do business stuff, let’s do The Entrepreneur’. If I’d thought about it properly I wouldn’t have made a business sim, I would have made a Space Invaders clone like everybody else. My contemporaries were working on what people really wanted and I was doing what people didn’t want.”

  Molyneux sold just two copies of The Entrepreneur and his business collapsed. He decided to give up on games and focus on making business software.

  While Molyneux was watching his businesses turn to dust, some 5,300 miles to the west Wright was using his earnings from Raid on Bungeling Bay to explore the potential he saw in that game’s level editor. “While building Raid on Bungeling Bay I had to build lots of other programs to help me,” he said. “One let me scroll around the world and place buildings and roads on these little islands. I had more fun with that than flying the helicopter around it.” Free from the immediate pressure of having make a living and intrigued with his world-building tool, Wright began experimenting. “At first it was just a toy for me, I was making my editor more and more elaborate and thought it would be cool for the world to come to life, so I started researching books on urban dynamics, traffic and things like that,” he said. “I came across Jay Forrester, who was kind of the father of system dynamics.”

  Forrester was an electrical engineer who helped build some of the first computers in the early 1950s at Massachuts Institute of Technology. In 1956 he became a professor at MIT’s management school and began exploring how he could apply his knowledge of electrical systems to other kinds of systems. His work gave birth to the field of system dynamics, where computer models or simulations are used to examine social systems and predict the implications of changes to complex systems such as cities. “He was one of the first people who simulated a city on a computer, except in his simulation there was no map it was just numbers – population level, number of jobs – kind of a spreadsheet,” said Wright. Wright combined Forrester’s theories with the living system of Life to bring the conurbations he built using his enhanced world-building tool to life.

  Another influence was Wright’s brief spell at a Montessori school as a young child: “Montessori is part of what’s referred to as constructivist education, using toys that are creative to help kids learn geometry and math. Things I took from it were (a) rather than educate someone, I’d rather inspire and (b) I think that self-directed learning is much more powerful than if you lead someone on a leash.”

  Finally Wright added an interface based on the Macintosh operating system and Apple’s computer art package MacPaint in particular. “Probably the biggest inspiration was MacPaint – you have your tools, your canvass and you grab the tools and draw them. I always thought of MacPaint as the underlying architecture for it,” said Wright. He began to think his experimental plaything could work as a game. “I found when I was reading all these books that simulating it on a computer was more interesting than reading it in a book. It bought the whole subject to life for me,” he said. “I started to think other people might like it. I didn’t think it would have a broad appeal, maybe architects or city planner types but not average people.”

  Despite feeling his audience would be planning and social science experts, he avoided making his game too deep a simulation: “It’s a caricature of how a city works. We’re really emphasising things such as gentrification. You elect these truisms in city planning.” Wright called the game that was evolving out of his experiments Micropolis and approached Brøderbund to see if they would be interested in releasing it. They weren’t. ‘How do you win or lose?’, the baffled publisher asked. ‘You don’t’, replied Wright, ‘you just build and manage your city and see what happens’. Until then games were all about winning and losing, a video game with no goal, no purpose and no recognition of success or failure was just unthinkable.

  “They were expecting more of a traditional game out of it. I wanted it to be more open-ended, more of a toy,” said Wright. “Because we weren’t formally defining success, the first thing players had to think about was what kind of city did they want to create. What is success? Is it a big city? Low crime? Low traffic? High-land value? This puts more meaning into that possibility space.” Wright found other publishers thought the same about his unusual Commodore 64 game, but decided to continue refining his virtual town planning game anyway. Then in 1987 Wright met Jeff Braun at a party. Braun wanted to get into the games business and was looking for games to publish. Wright told him about Micropolis and invited him to come and see it. Braun loved it. The pair formed Maxis and decided to make Micropolis its second release.[1] But with the Commodore 64 losing ground in the home computer market, they decided to convert the game to the Macintosh, Atari ST and Amiga. And at the suggestion of a friend they changed its name to Sim City.

  Maxis asked Brøderbund to be its distributor. Don Daglow, the Brøderbund producer who handled the talks with Maxis, saw the appeal of Sim City, not least because he had ventured into similar territory with 1982’s Utopia while working as a game designer for the Mattel Intellivision console. “Utopia was a counterpoint to the action and sports games,” said Daglow. “We thought, let’s do something that has educational value that is covert rather than overt: a strategy game. I pitched it and, bless them, Mattel’s marketers and executives approved it. There was a tradition of simulation games and playing simulations that weren’t games that existed on the mainframes in the ’70s. You ran them and a bunch of numbers appeared and that was what influenced me on Utopia.”

  Utopia, which was a two-player game, put players in charge of an island and challenged them to score points by keeping their citizens happy through the building of hospitals and developing industry. To try and sabotage their rival, players could also fund rebel activities on their island. The game sold less well than Mattel’s arcade and sports games, but did gain widespread press attention. “We went to the Consumer Electronics Show in 1982 and I got a call from my wife in the hotel on the second day,” said Daglow. “She said the morning paper had a front-page article about the new video games with Utopia as the lead story in the article. It was the game that got the press attention.”

  So when Maxis approached him with Sim City, Daglow saw the appeal and gave them a distribution deal. “Clearly Utopia and Sim City come from the same spirit. They’re both city sims. I signed the distribution deal for Sim City for Brøderbund. The fact that I did is probably no coincidence.” It had taken five years for Wright to turn his world-building tool into Sim City, but by 1989 the game was finally ready for release.

  * * *

  While Wright spent 1984 to 1989 crafting his city simulator, Molyneux spent his time battling to make ends meet. His early optimism about his entrepreneurial ideas had evaporated. Everything he touched, it seemed, went wrong. His business software company was struggling and housed in dismal offices. “The office w so shit,” said Molyneux. “We were using the sink as a toilet, it was unbelievably scummy.”

  Then, out of the blue, he got a call from Commodore, who wanted to give his business software company – Taurus – a bunch of Amiga computers. It transpired that Commodore was actually trying to get hold of another software company called Torus, but for Molyneux Commodore’s erroneous gift was a rare flash of good fortune. Molyneux and his business partner Les Edgar initially created a database product for the Amiga, but shortly afterwards they decided to move into video game development and renamed their company Bullfrog. “My daughter Louise had a thing about frogs and Bullfrog seemed like the sort of daft name a games company might have,” said Edgar. “At the time we we
re still reeling from the shock of the cost of supporting our Amiga database product, and with increased competition from other, larger publishers in that space, we had to do something. The game arena seemed attractive because development times were short, costs were low, support was not necessary and results were fairly instantaneous. If you screwed up, you could start another game without massive losses.”

  Bullfrog managed to get some work converting Firebird’s Gauntlet clone Druid II: The Enlightenment to the Amiga and then persuaded Electronic Arts to publish its first original game: the 1988 vertically scrolling shoot ’em up Fusion. Bullfrog’s game became one of the first to be published by Electronic Arts’ new European operation that had opened in Slough, a London satellite town not far from Guildford.

  “Europe was still in the earlier ‘cottage industry’ or ‘import’ phase because there had never been an indigenous phenomenon like Atari or Nintendo, which had educated Japanese and American consumers and retailers on what to do,” said Electronic Arts’ founder Trip Hawkins of the company’s expansion into Europe. “Retail promotion was lagging in sophistication and needed more direct support from major publishers. There were unfair trade practices in many countries. In Germany you could only get into half the stores because two competing distributors had divided up inappropriate retail exclusives and would then insist on game exclusives as well, so your game was either in the first or second distributor’s half of the stores and the consumer could only see half the games in their store.”