Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

Electronic Arts set out to bring its professional corporate style to Europe’s unwashed video game industry. Geoff Heath, who was the managing director of Melbourne House when Electronic Arts opened its European arm, remembered the US company’s arrival as a wake up call to the UK industry. “The company that really brought professionalism to the games industry was Electronic Arts,” he said. “They ran it like a business whereas prior to that we all ran these companies that made money half the time, didn’t know why we were making money and had a load of fun. Then along came Electronic Arts run by savvy MBAs who knew their subject.”

  Fusion sold poorly, but the small advance Electronic Arts gave Bullfrog to pay for its creation, provided the studio with enough time to make some headway with its next project, Populous. Populous emerged out of an isometric pictograph created by Bullfrog programmer and artist Glenn Corpes. “I thought it looked fascinating and said shall we put little people on it as if these isometric blocks were mountains,” said Molyneux. “Then there was the thing about how are people going to move around on this land?”

  Molyneux set about bringing the miniature citizens of this isometric land to life and immediately ran into problems. “The fact that I programmed it meant some of the fundamental things that programmers can do in their sleep I couldn’t do,” he said. A particular problem was getting the virtual people to navigate around walls rather than getting stuck. “I didn’t know how to do that. I tried to do it, tried to invent it myself and couldn’t and I thought ‘oh fuck it, I’ll just get the player to solve the problem for me by raising and lowering the land’. That became the game’s fundamental mechanic. Pure and utter luck. Suddenly you’re raising and lowering land with little people, ‘Ah! You must be a god’.”

  Molyneux turned Corpes’ isometric drawing into a game that put players into a deity seeking to build the number of worshippers using Old Testament-style powers to change the landscape, cause earthquakes and create volcanoes. The ultimate aim was to wipe out a rival group of people who were followers of another god. It was, said Molyneux, a game “written, designed and everything for one person: me”.

  Britain’s game publishers agreed. “Publishers kind of looked at it and went okay…thank you very much, can you get those little people shooting each other? Er, no. Can you get the mouse cursor to fire? No. Oh well, next!,” said Molyneux. One executive from Mirrorsoft, the UK game publisher owned by media mogul Robert Maxwell, exclaimed ‘who would want to play at being god?’. “I seem to remember he didn’t believe in the internet too,” said Edgar. Like Sim City, Populous’ lack of shooting, lack of defined solutions and megalomaniac experience was so unusual no one knew what to make of it. Eventually Electronic Arts agreed to publish it. “They didn’t have any games for Christmas 1989 so they said ‘ok, we’ll sign that Populous thing’,” said Molyneux. “It didn’t really feel like they wanted it, it felt like it just filled a gap for them.”

  With Populous complete and Electronic Arts on board, Molyneux braced himself for another disappointment: “I thought it would be a flop because everything in my life that I had touched up to that point had just gone awfully badly. School had gone awfully badly, then my first business, The Entrepreneur and selling disks to schools. There really wasn’t an idea of success.”

  The only hint that Molyneux’s pessimism might have been misplaced came when Electronic Arts arranged for Bob Wade, a journalist from the UK games magazine Advanced Computer Entertainment, to visit Bullfrog for a preview of the game. “I didn’t know what to do with journalists, so I thought we’ll just go out and get drunk,” said Molyneux. “We got drunk and I was dying to ask him what he thought of the game, although I was also terrified to because I was pretty sure it was going to be like everything else in my life. Evenally, after god knows how many pints, I said what did you think of Populous? He said it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played. My first thought was he must never play Populous again because he must have been on some other planet when he played it.”

  * * *

  By the time Populous was ready for release in late 1989, Sim City had been on sale for several months. Although sales were initially slow, the game ended up in the hands of a Time magazine reporter who wrote a full-page review of Wright’s groundbreaking Macintosh game.

  The review prompted a massive surge in sales and, as Sim City started appearing on other computers, the sales just kept rising. “Typically in the game market you released the game and 80 per cent of sales were in the first six months,” said Wright. “Sim City was a totally different profile. The first year did well; the second year sold a lot more, the third even more. Sim City paid for a lot of mistakes, which was great because we made a lot of mistakes with our company.”

  As well as appealing to many video game fans, Sim City also connected with an audience who would normally shun the bouncy platform, martial arts and fierce shoot ’em up games that typified the games available on the NES and in arcades. Millions became hooked on the joy of growing their own cities, although some felt Wright’s simulation was biased – particularly when it came to traffic management. “Any simulation is a set of assumptions. A lot of people thought we were really biased towards mass transit, others thought we were biased against it,” said Wright. “The interesting thing is a model like that gives you something to reflect against and, in fact, when people start to argue with the model, that’s when I think it’s been successful. When they’re playing a game like Sim City, which is really one set of assumptions, and they start arguing with those assumptions, the game has crystallised an internal model to the point where they can now argue against that model. In some sense that’s the point of it.”

  By the end of the year Populous had joined Sim City in becoming a surprise international hit. The magazine reviews lavished praise on the game and, to Bullfrog’s surprise, it seemed as if they might get some royalties from the game. “Given the reception by the press in the UK, I was expecting that we would make some money, but when the first royalty cheque came in – £13,000 as I recall – I didn’t imagine we would get much more,” said Edgar. “The second cheque was significantly larger and they just kept coming. Then the Japanese arrived and things really took off.”

  Molyneux was shocked: “Electronic Arts couldn’t manufacture enough toisfy the demand and then it was released all over the world and everybody was playing it. The publisher, David Gardener, phoned up and said ‘you are a millionaire now’ and it was like ‘my god!’. It was just this amazing moment of thinking ‘Christ, what have I done?’. I expected to sell four copies, instead it was getting close to a million within a matter of weeks.”

  Unusually, both Sim City and Populous became popular in Japan, a country that usually ignored the smattering of North American and European games that reached its shores. But it was only when Molyneux and Edgar went to Japan to do some publicity work that the scale of their success in Japan became clear. “When we arrived at the airport in Tokyo there was a TV crew there to meet us and an infinite number of magazine interviews lined up,” said Edgar. “The reaction from the press was staggering – they had all played the PC and Amiga versions.”

  Back in the UK, a bemused Molyneux became a star game designer: “The journalists at the time made this genre up. They called it a god game because they had no other way of describing it and suddenly I was attributed with creating this whole genre. I didn’t create the genre, the journalists did – I just created a game that allowed them to describe the game. We had these round tables started by the press – David Braben was there, Jez San, Archer MacLean and there was me.[2] They were all talking about assembler and machine code and how they can get the blitter to interact with the copper. I was sitting there thinking ‘shit, what are they talking about?’. It was all double dutch to me.”

  Together, Populous and Sim City gave form to a disparate game development movement that rejected the controlled, confined and directed experiences of their cinema-worshipping peers in favour of more open-ended experiences that were c
loser to toys than board games in concept and that embraced creation and construction as a play mechanic. It was an approach to video game design that had been circulating for some time, from the nation management of Utopia and the freedom of Braben’s Elite, but the success of Wright and Molyneux took these games into the mainstream of game design and encouraged other designers to start investigating the possibilities.

  One of those Wright and Molyneux inspired was Sid Meier, the co-founder of US game publisher Microprose. The Maryland publisher had carved out a lucrative niche producing military-themed simulations such as F-15 Strike Eagle, Silent Service and Gunship. But as the 1980s drew to a close, Meier started exploring ideas outside Microprose’s military comfort zone, thanks partly to the influence of Dani Bunten Berry’s Seven Cities of Gold. Inspired by the Spanish Conquistadors, Seven Cities of Gold was an epic game of explorationhat condensed the history of the discovery of the New World into a video game and sought to convey the panic of being lost in the uncharted wilderness. Seven Cities of Gold inspired Meier to create Pirates!, a open-ended game about adventure, trade, robbery and romance on the high seas in the 17th Century, and got him thinking more generally about how to make games that simplified complex scenarios.

  Shortly after completing Pirates!, Meier discovered both Sim City and Populous. For Meier, these games demonstrated how creating something could be just as fun and compelling as the destruction usually peddled by video games. Meier’s response was to devise a game that put players in control of a civilization’s journey through history. His grand vision became Civilization, an epic turn-based strategy game that offered a beguiling concoction of military conflict, diplomacy, exploration, city building, history lesson and resource management. The goal was to take a tiny tribe, ignorant of the world, and turn it into a great world power shaped by the choices and decisions of the player themselves. Core to Civilization’s appeal was its ability to make players feel as if they were writing history as they went, with centuries marked by war and instability giving way to golden ages of scientific progress before going back to high-stakes clashes with other large nations. It was an aspect that gave Civilization – more than Sim City or Populous – a narrative quality, albeit one defined by the player rather than Meier.

  Civilization would have a significant impact on strategy games, which had not moved too far beyond their tabletop origins since first appearing on home computers. Civilization’s branching technology tree, where each discovery opened up more and more options for scientific research, was a big influence on UFO: Enemy Unknown, a 1993 strategy game where players defended the earth from aliens by unlocking the secrets of alien technology and using it against them (known as X-COM: UFO Defense in North America).

  The same feature also inspired Las Vegas game developer Westwood Studios, which was working on a video game version of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune. After an argument with one of the vice-presidents of strategy game specialists SSI about the future of strategy games, Westwood’s co-founder Brett Sperry decided to use Dune to reinvent the genre. As well as Civilization, Sperry and his team drew on ideas from the Japanese console game Herzog Zwei, a strategy game where the battles hapened in real-time, and the Macintosh operating system.

  The result, 1992’s Dune II: Building of a Dynasty, fused action with strategic thinking and opened up the strategy genre to a new audience. People who once associated strategy games with slow and turgid bouts of number crunching now equated it with high-pressure action that rewarded quick, strategic thinking. The marketing description of Dune II as a “real-time strategy game” was soon adopted as the byword for the rush of similar titles that followed in Dune II’s footsteps. The real-time strategy games quickly displaced the turn-based strategy games of old and by the end of the 1990s Civilization was the only big name strategy game series that had not gone real-time.

  Video games had evolved into three broad philosophical movements. There were the action games that were forged in the cash-hungry environment of the arcades and served up instant thrills. Then there were the narrative-based, cinema-worshipping works that saw video gaming as a story-telling medium enhanced by interactivity. Finally, there were the sandbox games; the simulations that sought to entertain by giving players the freedom to experiment and the ability to create.

  These movements were not discrete, their ideas would repeatedly cross-pollinate, but each pulled games in different directions, enriching the medium with new ideas and constantly pushing back the barriers of what a video game could be.

  [1]. Braun already had SkyChase, a wireframe 3D flight sim for two players, lined up as Maxis’ debut release.

  [2]. Braben was the co-creator of Elite. San had designed the then visually impressive 3D space combat game Starglider. MacLean had created IK+, a three-player martial arts game featuring a number of cheats for players to use against their opponents that were designed to be part of the fun.

  East meets West: Alexey Pajitnov (left) and Henk Rogers in Moscow, February 1989. Courtesy of The Tetris Company

  16. A Plane To Moscow

  Alexey Pajitnov lived an unassuming existence in the early 1980s. As a mathematician in the computing department at the Moscow Academy of Science, Pajitnov spent hays programming computers fuelled by copious amounts of black coffee and cigarettes.

  “I was just a regular programmer and researcher. My lifestyle was regular for every young hacker in the world at that time,” said Pajitnov. “I worked about 11 hours a day, started relatively late and stopped around midnight or half-past midnight. Every day was no different. All the young programmers are workaholics, mostly, and I was just one of them. Nothing special, very usual.”

  His job was to research serious computing applications such as speech recognition, but when he got a spare moment he would create mathematical puzzle games on the academy’s computers for his own amusement. “I came to the game from the puzzle. From the board games, the regular board games, wooden castles and tasks and riddles,” he said. “I always considered the game more like a puzzle or mental challenge. I was fascinated by puzzles and mathematical riddles from the time I was a kid. As a kid I participated in all kinds of contests and I was in a special programme at school, so I was addicted to mathematics and mathematical tasks and puzzles. I liked the challenge.”

  One day in 1984 Pajitnov wrote a game based on Pentominoes, a puzzle he had found in a Moscow toy store. Pentominoes consisted of a collection of flat plastic shapes, each built from five squares of equal size arranged in different ways. The goal was to take them out of the box and then fit them back together within the box, rather like a jigsaw.

  Pajitnov thought Pentominoes would be more interesting as a computer game where the pieces rained down from the top of the screen into the play field, his virtual equivalent of the Pentominoes box. While the academy boasted some of the most advanced computers in the Soviet Union, they were primitive compared to the home computers available outside the communist world. Pajitnov’s work computer was an Elektronika 60, a Soviet computer based on the PDP-11 that first appeared in the US in 1970. “We were way behind,” he said. “Our best machine repeats the level of the rest of the western world about five to eight years late. The Elektronika 60 was one of the very first micro machines in Russia, almost desktop. Not very powerful but really convenient.”

  The Elektronika 60 had no graphics so Pajitnov had to construct his digital Pentominoes pieces, which he formed out of four rather than five squares[1], using punctuation marks. “I thought Pentominoes might be a very good base for two-player games,” said Pajitnov. “My original idea was that you just put the pieces on top of the field and your task is to put as much as possible in the play field. If you put in more than the other player then you win the game. But when my first prototype started working I realised that the game ended in something like 10 seconds and you didn’t have too much fun out of it.”

  Pajitnov concluded that the size of the play area was spoiling his game. “One solution was to make a
really, really long play field and scroll it through, but it was technically difficult at that time,” said Pajitnov, who also regarded play areas that did not fit on a single screen as annoying. He then noticed that once a player filled up a horizontal line in the play field it became redundant and blocked access to empty space below.

  “It just took up space and was doing nothing, so I decided to get rid of them and give more space for the game to continue,” said Pajitnov, who also dropped the two-player mode in favour of a single-player experience. Now whenever a horizontal line was filled it vanished allowing the game to continue indefinitely provided the player kept completing horizontal lines to open up space in the play area. And since the ‘pent’ of Pentominoes referred to the Greek word for five, Pajitnov called his game Tetris after tetra, the Greek word for four.

  The result was a captivating battle to keep the play area clear of pieces. “As soon as the finished prototype started working, I couldn’t stop playing. I understood the game was very addictive. I realised it was something special,” said Pajitnov. Pajitnov was not the only one entranced by his compelling creation, his colleagues were also hooked. So when the academy got its first IBM-compatible PC, shortly after the creation of Tetris, Pajitnov’s co-worker Vadim Gerasimov rewrote it on the new computer, adding proper graphics and a score counter. “As soon as this conversion was done, we gave it to our friends and it self-distributed itself very, very quickly. Like a virus,” said Pajitnov.

  Tetris spread like wildfire across the computer-equipped offices of Moscow, infuriating managers who watched their workforce spending their time playing Pajitnov’s game rather than being productive. Copies of the game began to seep beyond the city limits and spread to computer-equipped offices across the USSR and then into the communist nations of Eastern Europe.

  Tetris was clearly something special, but trying to sell it was out of the question. In 1984 Mikhail Gorbachev had yet to become the leader of the USSR and his perestroika reforms, a programme of economic liberalisation that allowed Soviet citizens to form their own businesses and would help end communist rule, were still three years away. Soviet law strictly prohibited the formation of businesses and rejected the concept of copyrights or intellectual property – nothing could be done for personal gain, everything was owned by the state.