Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  Nintendo and Sega weren’t the only people in the games business divided by the controversy. The game developers who worked on Mortal Kombat and Night Trap were also divided over how to react to the row their creations had started. “I felt like we were being attacked by a bunch of people who were mostly ignorant of what they were attacking,” said Tobias. “Watching the news coverage at the time, you’d think that Mortal Kombat was created by some evil corporation. Anyone who knew me or Ed personally knew that our intentions weren’t anything other than ensuring our players were having fun.”

  Rob Fulop, who had designed Night Trap while it was still part of Hasbro’s NEMO project, found the experience harder. “The scandal was kind of silly and it was also deeply embarrassing because friends of mine, my parents, and my girlfriend didn’t really get games. All they knew was a game that I had made was on TV and Captain Kangaroo said it was bad for kids,” he said. “I fell out with my girlfriend because I thought it was completely bullshit.”

  But while he thought the inquiry was nonsense, after nearly 15 years of game making, Fulop had begun to worry about the message video games were sending out to children. “I grew up in a generation where you watched TV, that’s all we did. TV was basically 30-minute stories and always had a happy ending. Whatever the problem, in half an hour the problem was worked out,” said Fulop. “You tell that story to kids 20 million times and they grow up believing everything will work out. That was my generation. You believed everything would work out because of TV. Now think of video games – the message is no matter what you do you always lose. You never ever, ever, ever, ever win. Once in a million you win, but most of the time you never win. Unless you can find the cheat, so what does that teach you? I think that’s created a whole different culture – a very fatalistic ‘what’s the point?’ attitude. It’s a personal philosophy, I don’t know if it’s true or not.”

  The controversy surrounding Night Trap and the reaction of his family and friends inspired Fulop’s next game: “I decided that the next game I made was going to be so cute and so adorable that no-one could ever, ever say it was bad for kids. It was sarcastic. It was like what’s the cutest thing I could make? What’s the most sissy game I could turn out?”

  A shopping mall Santa Claus gave him the answer. “I would go at the end of the year to see Santa Claus at the stores and he would tell me exactly what kids wanted,” said Fulop. “He knows better than anyone because his job all day is to ask them what they want. You want to know what’s going to sell, go talk to Santa. I did that every year. I went that year and he said the same thing that was popular every year was a puppy and has been for the last 50 years.”

  Fulop’s plan to make an adorable game and children’s Christmas wishes for puppies came together to form 1995’s Dogz: Your Computer Pet, one of the first virtual pet games.[3] Dogz installed an enthusiastic cartoon puppy on the player’s computer that was housed within a playpen window but could be stroked or taught to do tricks. Fulop’s goal was to make players grow attached to their virtual puppy: “The dogs follow your mouse and they can’t wait to be petted, you do a mouse click and they come running over, it was their biggest excitement. People get attached to pets because they need you. You’re needed. You come home and this thing is in your face…if you’re not there you know it’s going to be very unhappy or it could die. I don’t think a virtual pet is any different.”

  Fulop’s company PF Magic played on this attachment to encourage sales of the game. “It was sold the same way real puppies are sold,” said Fulop. “We’ll give it to you for 10 days and then ask for it back. You give a puppy to a kid and ask for it back five days later – see what he says. In sales this is called the puppy dog close. We gave you five days’ worth of food and after five days you ran out of food and if you want more food you’ve got to call us and give us $20 and we’ll give you a lifetime’s supply of food, otherwise your puppy dies or you have to delete it. And who can delete it? It’s cruel, it’s a little puppy and you won’t feed it.”

  Fulop’s ploy worked like a dream and Dogz became a huge success, eventually becoming the starting point of the long-running Petz series of virtual pets.

  * * *

  With evidence about the relationship between video game violence and real-life behaviour inconclusive, the Senators closed the hearing by telling the video game industry to return to Washington on 4th March 1994 to report on its progress with creating an age rating system.[4]

  In the three months between the hearings and the industry’s return to the Senate, the US video game industry reorganised itself. The country’s leading game companies quit the Software Publishers Association and formed the Interactive Digital Software Association headed by veteran Washington lobbyist Douglas Lowenstein. After several weeks of rows, the industry also created the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB). The ESRB’s job was to manage the industry’s new age-ratings system. Sega also stopped distributing the Sega CD version of Night Trap in January, although America’s leading toy stores Toys R Us and Kay-Bee Toys had already stopped stocking it because of the Senate hearings.[5]

  The game industry came out of the controversy with more than just a lesson in how to handle politicians. It had also learned that violence and controversy sells. Sales of Mortal Kombat and Night Trap soared during the hearings. Night Trap in particular had gone from a poorly selling Sega CD title to a game that was selling 50,000 copies a week at the height of the row. When Zito’s Digital Pictures released Night Trap on the PC to coincide with Halloween 1994, its advertising campaign embraced the scandal: “Some members of Congress tried to ban Night Trap for being sexist and offensive to women (Hey. They ought to know).”

  Arcade game makers Strata, which also got a ticking off in the hearings, stuck its middle finger up to Washington within months of the hearings by launching Blood Storm, a Mortal Kombat clone featuring even more extreme violence and a hidden character that had Lieberman’s head so players could beat up the Democrat Senator.

  Lieberman’s attempt to challenge video game violence failed. If anything the changes that resulted from his intervention made video game violence more acceptable, as the age ratings system would identify violent or controversial games as for adults not children, helping game publishers defend themselves against future accusations of peddling violence to children. And with an age ratings system in place Nintendo no longer felt compelled to filter out the violence from games released on its consoles. When Acclaim launched Mortal Kombat II on the Super NES, the fatalies and blood remained in place. “The inquiry didn’t impact anything,” said Tobias. “We were content with the M for mature on our packaging. Developers and publishers fell in line, accepted the ratings system and developed games according to the need of the product.”

  The Senate hearings had actually made it safer for video game developers to create violent games, not harder.

  [1]. CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, were a UK pressure group. Raid Over Moscow also caused controversy in Finland, where a member of the country’s parliament prompted a debate about whether its sale should be allowed.

  [2]. These racist and anti-Semitic games were not released commercially, but distributed for free and, apparently, quite widely. One newspaper poll of Austrian students reported that 22 per cent of students had encountered these games, which included concentration camp manageent games and quizzes testing how Aryan the player was. The Bundesprüfstelle für Jugendgefährdende Medien banned seven such games between 1987 and 1990.

  [3]. Bandai’s portable virtual pet the Tamagotchi came out shortly after Dogz in 1996. Created by Aki Maita, the electronic toy became a global sensation similar in scale to the Rubik’s Cube. Tens of millions were sold worldwide.

  [4]. The evidence is still inconclusive. As Bryon’s 2008 report for the UK government noted: “It would not be accurate to say that there is no evidence of harm but, equally, it is not appropriate to conclude that there is evidence of no harm.” She added: “The research evidenc
e for the beneficial effects of games is no more convincing than the work on harmful effects.”

  [5]. The bigger selling Mortal Kombat, however, remained on sale.

  Backstage: An actor in full costume waits for filming to begin on the set of Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh

  . Courtesy of Andy Hoyos

  19. A Library In A Fish’s Mouth

  Rand Miller got his first taste of video games when he and his junior high school classmates were given a tour of the University of the New Mexico’s computer centre in Albuquerque. After being shown around the facility, Rand and his classmates got to try some of the early text-only computer games using a terminal linked up to an IBM System/360 mainframe. His classmates paid little attention, but Rand was hooked. “I was the geeky kid in school, although I played American football and musical instruments, I loved computer and science stuff. When I was young you couldn’t have a computer at home, so I was really intrigued,” he said. “We sat down for probably 15 or 20 minutes and we got to play whatever little games happened to be in the catalogue. I was a lot more intrigued than the other boys.”

  The university’s computer centre was only a couple of blocks away from his school, so Rand kept returning, keen to play some more games. “I would get access to the computer by getting paper out of the trash cans where people had left their username and password printed out on the paper,” he said. “I would steal their passwords and user names and change the passwords. I had my own login and catalogue area and began to get interested in writing my own programs. The first ones I wrote were games.”

  Years later as a married man living in Dallas, Texas, Rand decided to bun Apple Macintosh and started looking for some software that would interest his young daughter. The search proved fruitless. “Games were beginning to be of a higher quality but children’s software was like the dregs,” recalled Rand, who was working as a programmer at a bank at the time. “It was like, if you couldn’t make it making games, then you would just slop out crap for children. I remember having the distinct feeling that this did not mimic other markets – books in particular. A good children’s book will actually be appealing to adults as well and that’s what inspired my brother Robyn and I with The Manhole.”

  At Rand’s suggestion, the brothers decided to create an interactive children’s book for the Macintosh. As well as reading the story, they wanted children to be able to interact with the still pictures so that when they clicked on certain objects they would hear a sound or something would happen. The first picture Robyn drew for their computerised book showed an image of a manhole and a fire hydrant. He programmed it so that when users clicked on the manhole the cover slid open and a beanstalk grew out of it. “I sat there looking at the beanstalk and the open manhole and I realised I didn’t want to turn the page,” said Robyn. “I needed to know what was at the top of the beanstalk and down inside the manhole or even inside the fire hydrant, which I began to imagine being like a house.”

  The brothers never created the next page of the book. Instead they started creating pictures of what was inside the fire hydrant, down the manhole cover and up the beanstalk. “I think it came from a universal desire to explore. I think people love to explore – people wonder what’s around the next corner,” said Rand. “The ideas were just streaming out of Robyn’s mind, it was like: ‘What’s down the manhole cover?’, ‘How about a boat and an island?’, ‘Okay’, ‘And on the island I’ll stick a walrus and an elevator’.”

  Riding their wave of spontaneous creativity, the pair paid little attention to process. “I just jumped in and went to work,” said Robyn. “Here’s another planet. What should it be? How about a library in a fish’s mouth?” They created worlds within worlds, moulding an unpredictable piece of software that served up a stream of constant surprises that echoed the insanity of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 children’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Billed as “a fantasy exploration for children of all ages”, The Manhole was initially released via mail order in 1988 but, in 1989, video game publisher Activision decided to re-release it on CD-ROM, a new storage medium being touted as the next big thing in computing.

  Although the compact disc had been developed in the 1970s and Sony had released the first CD music player in 1982, its potential for storing data had gone unused by video game companies largely due to the lack of home computers with CD drives. By the late 1980s, however, the situation was changing. The music industry’s efforts to get people to buy audio CDs had brought down the cost of CD drives, which were now becoming available for computers such as the Macintosh and IBM PC compatibles.[1] By February 1989 the first CD-based computer, Fujitsu’s FM Towns, was on sale in Japan. CD had two big attractions for the video game industry. First, CDs were cheaper to manufacture than microchipsed game cartridges. Second, CDs could store around 600 times as much data as a floppy disk and around 300 times as much as a cartridge. It was a win-win situation, publishers lowered their production costs and developers could create bigger games and use audio and video recordings in their work.

  At the time developers were finding the limited storage available on floppy disks a major frustration. “It was clear CD-ROM was going to be the future of games. People like Sierra were releasing games with 10 disks – it was getting crazy,” said Bob Jacob, the co-founder of Cinemaware. The Miller brothers shared this sense of frustration. “Floppies had been insanely limiting,” said Robyn. “We shipped the original version of The Manhole on five floppies, which meant people had to continually switch back and forth between disks. Very annoying. It was near luxurious working within that huge amount of space. More than anything, it allowed us to make the world as big as we wanted.” Taking advantage of the format, the Millers added extra music, animations and scenes to the CD version of The Manhole.

  The sonic potential of CD was particularly exciting for game audio programmers, who had spent most of the 1980s trying to squeeze out tunes and sound effects in machine code within miniscule amounts of memory. In the same year that The Manhole moved to CD, British game musician Rob Hubbard quit Newcastle-upon-Tyne for San Francisco to become Electronic Arts’ sole audio person. He had spent the past four years becoming a minor celebrity on the UK gaming scene by writing video game music on computers such as the Commodore 64. “I did a game on my own and people thought the game sucked, but they thought the audio was really good,” said Hubbard. “At that time, game music was really, really dreadful so I thought I should just try doing the audio. There wasn’t much competition. I don’t think it’s anything to do with being particularly brilliant at anything because there was hardly anybody else doing it. All you had to do was something half-decent that made a bit of sense as opposed to some of the stuff back then, which was often really, really awful.”

  Electronic Arts’ San Francisco studios was a world away from the ramshackle cottage industry Hubbard left behind in the UK: “They were streets ahead in what they were doing with their thinking and were talking about the optical devices as well. It seemed like they were on the bleeding edge of what was going on.” CDs allowed video game musicians such as Hubbard the freedom to concentrate on the music rather than programming. Instead of having to write music in machine code they could now write complex scores, record real-life musicians, sample sound and use voice actors. In short, CD allowed them to stop fighting with microprocessors and focus on being creative. “CD was a radical transition for game audio,” said Hubbard. “It opened the floodgates.” It also allowed video games to include music from popular pop and rock acts. “Road Rash on the 3DO console was one of the first games that exploited using licensed bands. Electronic Arts struck gold because they licensed a band called Soundgarden when they were just a college band and, while they were making the game, Soundgarden became massive, really big. So they shipped Road Rash with these Soundgarden tunes. It basically started the whole idea of having a CD track playing while you have a game going.”

  There were limits to this promised land, however. “When CD-ROM fir
st came out, the drives were so slow that you had to plan your content well to make it work as it would come off the drive very slowly,” said Rand. “Everything had to come off the CD because the hard drives didn’t have room for much stuff, so you had to stream your music from the CD in chunks large enough that when someone clicked to a new picture in The Manhole, you could get the new picture and then go back to where you were streaming the music from without getting a break in the tune.”

  CD also opened up new visual frontiers. As well as having the capacity to store more art, CDs could also hold short video clips that could be integrated into games. For Cinemaware, a video game studio that always wore its Hollywood aspirations on its sleeve, this was an especially appealing feature. In early 1990 NEC had decided to try and tap into the growing hype about CD games by launching the TurboGrafx-CD, a CD drive for its struggling TurboGrafx-16 console. But the company knew it needed some eye-catching games to generate interest in its CD add-on and turned to Cinemaware. In return for a CD-enhanced remake of It Came from the Desert, Cinemaware’s Them!-inspired tale of a desert town terrorised by giant radioactive ants, NEC offered to buy 20 per cent of the company. Cinemaware was quick to say yes. The company was in dire straits at the time, suffering primarily from its decision to focus on the Amiga computer that had flopped in the US despite selling well in Europe. “They saw us as a high-quality developer and at the time I was like ‘hey, getting some money for this would be good’,” said Jacob. “We did the deal and obligated a significant proportion of the resources of the company to doing development for NEC. In retrospect this was the decision that killed Cinemaware.”