Cinemaware sank $700,000 into the project, a huge investment at a time when a typical console video game cost around $150,000 to make. The development team was headed by David Riordan, the designer of the original Amiga version of It Came from the Desert, and also included programmer Mike Livesay and scriptwriter Ken Melville. “It was a dream project with all the filmic aspects and cool ’50s sci-fi content,” said Melville. The team filmed actors and imported them into the game where they were imposed on still photos of real-life locations to create some of the first live-action film footage seen in a video game. “I’m very proud to have been part of the team bringing motion video for the first time to a game,” said Melville. “It looked like shit, of course, but there it was. Mike had to really bust his hump to extract video and game play out of those old systems. Guys like Mike were the original game heroes who made lemonade out of lemons.”
Although the CD version had a relatively large budget, the team found the money did not stretch far when cameramen, film studios and actors had to be hired. “The It Came from the Desert shoots were very minimalist and low-budget,” said Melville. “They were shot in a small studio and designed to pop up occasionally as exposition. Non-interactive stuff.” The project’s budget got even tighter when Cinemaware’s financial problems finally dragged it under in 1991 before the game was finished. Under Riordan’s leadership the team completed the ga on a shoestring budget and it eventually reached the shops in 1992. But by then it was clear NEC’s bid to revive its fortunes with the TurboGrafx-CD had failed miserably.
Cinemaware’s collapse came as the video game industry was preparing for the leap to CD. Game companies started investing in recording and film studios, and exploring how the new technology could enhance their products. They adopted the language of Cinemaware, talking about interactive movies and of blurring the boundaries between Silicon Valley and Hollywood. UK publisher Psygnosis was one of the first to embrace the CD future. The Liverpool-based company, formed out of the wreckage of early 1980s game publisher Imagine, had developed a reputation for beautiful-looking games, such as Shadow of the Beast and Agony, packaged in luxurious boxes adorned with the fantastical artwork of Roger Dean, the artist famed for his album covers for 1970s prog rockers Yes. Psygnosis saw the audio-visual capabilities of CD as a chance to push its focus on presentation even further. It bought high-end computers that had once been the preserve of movie special effects teams to create stunning visuals that it filmed so they could be shown on more primitive computers via CD’s video capabilities. It also exploited its prog rock connections by hiring former Yes keyboard player Rick Wakeman to write and record a score for its flagship CD game Microcosm, a shoot ’em up set within the human body that was inspired by the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage.
Sierra Online were even more ambitious. The company built a dedicated film studio close to its headquarters in Oakhurst, California, and created Movie 256 – a custom-made software tool that allowed its developers to edit and import video footage for use their games. “It cost us around $1.5 million,” said Ken Williams, co-founder of Sierra. “It was a true studio with all that goes with it: sound rooms; blue-screen stage; editing bays; server rooms; etc. It was very cool.”
What the industry lacked, however, was a popular CD-based gaming system. The FM Towns had achieved cult status in Japan, but Fujitsu had no plans to bring it to North America or Europe. Commodore had come up with the $999 CDTV, an Amiga-based console that – in a break with console tradition – was designed to look like a piece of hi-fi equipment. Created under the leadership of Atari founder Nolan Bushnell and touted as a consumer electronics product rather than a console, the CDTV won support from several game publishers thanks to its Amiga-based technology, but few people bought it. Philips’ CD-i console was doing only marginally better.[2] Sega had plans to bring out a CD drive for its Genesis console in 1992, but no one knew how well it would do. Nintendo and Sony had teamed up to create a CD version of the Super NES, tentatively titled the PlayStation, but by the summer of 1991 the two companies had fallen out. With console manufacturers struggling to produce a CD system that the video game industry could unite behind, it was the IBM PC-compatible computers that came to the rescue.
During the 1980s the PC had been regarded as a video game backwater. It was a popular business machine but lacked the kind of audio-visual capabilities game players had cme to expect. This began to change in the second half of the 1980s, starting with the arrival of VGA graphic cards for PCs in 1987 and sound cards the year after.
More than any other game 1990’s Wing Commander underlined the PC’s transition from dull business machine to gaming powerhouse. Wing Commander was the brainchild of Chris Roberts, a British game designer who, like Hubbard, had quit the UK for the US’s larger games business, taking a job at Origin Systems in Austin, Texas. Inspired by the Second World War air battles between the Japanese and American forces above the Pacific Ocean, Wing Commander was a sci-fi epic that mixed non-interactive cinematic storytelling scenes with fraught space battles. For many it was the first time they had looked at a PC game and been impressed. “It was a groundbreaking product for PCs. There is a running gag that it made the PC market because all the PC manufacturers had to upgrade their product so people could play Wing Commander,” said Geoff Heath, the managing director of the game’s distributor Mindscape International.
The PC’s evolution into a popular system for video gaming was finalised in an agreement between the world’s leading computer companies including Fujitsu, Microsoft, Philips and Tandy on the 8th October 1991. The agreement set out the Multimedia PC format – a set of standards for PCs that combined CD drives with graphics and sound cards. The standard gave software developers clarity about the kind of hardware they could expect on CD-equipped home PCs and, in turn, gave hardware manufacturers the confidence to mass produce equipment such as CD-ROM drives in volumes large enough to bring down the cost significantly.
Over the next year and a half CD drive-equipped PCs made huge in-roads in the home computer market at the expense of the computers produced by Commodore, Atari and Apple. By 1993 the number of multimedia PC users had grown large enough to make CD-ROM games commercially viable. The game that made the sales breakthrough was The 7th Guest, the creation of Oregon studio Trilobyte. Part inspired by David Lynch’s TV drama series Twin Peaks, the game challenged players to solve 21 puzzles in order to discover the secret of a haunted mansion. After each puzzle was solved, the game used video clips to develop the narrative before moving onto the next challenge. Released in April 1993, the game sold more than a million copies, a huge number for a computer game and the first CD game to achieve that level of popularity.
That same year LucasArts, the rebranded Lucasfilm Games, delivered Star Wars: Rebel Assault, another million-selling CD title for the PC. Designed by Vince Lee, Star Wars: Rebel Assault used footage and sound taken from the Star Wars movies to build graphics on high-end special effects computers that, as with Psygnosis, were then turned into video clips that could play on standard home computers. The game had players flying in pre-set paths through movie-like scenes from the world of Star Wars while taking down Empire fighters. Star Wars director George Lucas later wrote to the team praising their work for taking his sci-fi story into a new medium.
The success of both these games paled, however, compared to the phenomenon that was Myst, the latest creation of Rand and Robyn Miller’s game studio Cyan Worlds, which was based in the town of Mead near Spokane, Washington. Since The Manhole, the Millers’ work had been slowly moving into more traditional video game territory. Their second game, Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel, added story and characters to the bizarre worlds conjured up by Robyn. Myst continued this journey, taking in lessons from adventure games such as Zork! and Déjà Vu: A Nightmare Comes True. The brothers, however, were at pains to distance themselves from video games. “It kind of seems silly now, but during these early products, we always rejected the term game,” said R
obyn. “It’s understandable why. Our early stuff had no real goals and the only point was exploration. We really saw very little in common with games. We always called them ‘interactive worlds’. Interviewers would refer to Myst as a game; we would politely correct them.”
Myst’s interactive world was a mysterious unpopulated island that players saw through a collection of still pictures that shunted into view like a slideshow when players moved or changed the direction they were facing. The game’s beautiful, strange and lonely island proved to be its main selling point. “We heard from tons of people that they had this sense of really being there, on those islands,” said Robyn. “People liked to turn down the lights, turn up the sound and lose themselves in the Myst world.”
Myst challenged players to learn the secret of the island’s past by solving a number of puzzles. “Our desire was to achieve something more story-like, even if it wasn’t a very substantial story,” said Robyn. “We wanted to build a narrative into the environment. That’s what attracted us to this different kind of world. We never saw the puzzles as simple mindbenders; we saw them as extensions of the story.”
But, while the Millers had incorporated more of the storytelling and puzzle elements of adventure games, they were keen to avoid many of the other trappings of video games. “We had played other games that had dead ends,” said Rand. “I remember one that took place in a city where you go down the city streets and between buildings there were alleys. We wanted to go down the alleys, but you couldn’t. So we tried to design the world so it was contained enough that you could go anywhere you felt like there was a place to go.” And, following the example of the adventure games created by LucasArts, they also rejected the use of player death as a play mechanism. “Everybody continued to do ‘die and start over’, ‘die and start over’,” said Rand. “From our point of view we were trying to mimic the real world and we decided the doesn’t do that. There are consequences from doing the wrong thing, but you don’t always have to start over. We felt like the world would be large enough that we wouldn’t have to send people back to the beginning and the puzzles were difficult enough that players felt they got enough game play without having to start over.”
For the fast-growing number of PC owners searching for something to show off the capabilities of their new CD-ROM drive, Myst’s gentle exploratory play was ideal. “We were in the right place at the right time,” said Rand. “We had come out with an application that was just primed for CD-ROM. It was a killer application because it was so safe. Anybody at any age could walk into a store and say I need some software for my 10-year-old son all the way up to my 80-year-old grandmother for my new CD-ROM drive, what do you recommend? Myst was safe.”
Prior to the game’s release in September 1993, Rand and Robyn had discussed their hopes for the game. They had designed it with the mass market in mind and Rand hoped it would sell around 100,000 copies. Rand’s hopes were surpassed within weeks. Myst topped a million sales. Then two million. Then three. Then four. And it just kept selling. “At some point the numbers stopped having meaning. It was just numbers on paper,” said Rand. Myst became the biggest-selling PC game of all time.[3]
In the wake of the commercial breakthroughs of 1993, CD games flooded the market. Most concentrated on exploiting the video capabilities of the format, a focus that had video game studios grappling with the same challenge of fusing the creative cultures of games and films that Hasbro had tried to solve during the development of never-released NEMO console. “It was kind of the ‘best of times, worst of times’,” said Jane Jensen, the designer of Sierra’s Gabriel Knight series of southern gothic horror adventure CD-ROM games. The first game in the trilogy, 1993’s Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father, used voice actors to bring the dialogue to life, but the second, 1995’s The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery, was a production closer to a Hollywood movie than a video game, utilising an army of actors, camera operators, costume designers and make-up artists. “It was fantastic to work with live actors and get a whole other dimension to the work. But it was the first time I or the producer had done it and the learning curve was pretty astronomical. We had a 900-plus page script to shoot, which was also daunting for the young director and actors,” said Jensen. The Beast Within’s gargantuan script reflected the challenge of turning films into interactive experiences. “It’s long because you need to provide different scenes for what happens when the players approach something from different angles,” said Jensen.
While the production challenge was huge, the game designers involved found working with filmmakers an exciting experience. “It was definitely a time of exploration and experimentation,” said Robyn Miller. “Developers suddenly had all this spaceand didn’t exactly know what to do with it.” French game designer Muriel Tramis spent four months on the streets of Paris filming material for Coktel Vision’s 1996 adventure game Urban Runner.[4] “I had some unforgettable moments of creativity with the director,” she said. “Him from the world of cinema with all its codes and myself from the world of 3D images, we had to find common ground, we had to invent other tracks to introduce interactivity.”
Others also took to filming games on location. “My feeling was why not film the game on sets and on location using Hollywood talent,” said Andy Hoyos, director of Sierra’s horror game Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh. “A cinematographer, a practical special effects crew for on-set horror and make-up effects was what I felt was needed to push this kind of product to the next level. As long as the budget could support incorporating these kinds of technologies and approaches that’s what I wanted to do. However, doing this meant learning the ropes of this kind of ‘movie-making’ approach, which was no easy task. Learning to make a game more like a film director was a tad painful in some ways and, consequently, the hours were long and arduous.”
Lorelei Shannon, the horror writer who designed and wrote the game, remembered the production as a terrific experience: “Pretty much everybody involved had a great time. We brought in an actual film crew and professional actors. The actors were a little bemused by having to do things like shooting ‘walkers’ – a generic loop of the character walking – but they were all pros about the whole thing. Of course due to the interactivity, it was a very long shoot and we had many hours of footage. Editing was a big job.”
On its release in 1996, Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of the Flesh immediately courted controversy due to its graphic violence, sex scenes and a gay kiss involving the player’s bisexual lead character. It was content unthinkable prior to the creation of the US age ratings system introduced in the wake of the 1993 Senate inquiry into video game violence. “We all knew we were treading on unsteady ground with such controversial material, but the feeling was that we should go for it,” said Hoyos. “I really wanted to make a ‘splash’ no matter what. Even something that might even be considered shocking. I really wanted to blow the lid off of the horror game genre.”
The game’s sex and violence was enough to prompt bans in Australia and Singapore, something Shannon welcomed. “It just added to its notoriety,” she said. “I think the main reason games get more negative press for sex and violence is because people hear the word ‘game’ and immediately associate games with children. But games are just another form of entertainment, like movies. Some movies are for kids and some are for adults.”
By 1996, however, the fusion of game design and movie making ushered in by the arrival of CD was causing a different kind of controversy as the game industry began to question the merit of the approach. Game designers started to find that the once vast capacity that CD offered had been swallowed up by hours of movie footage. So much so that games such as The Beast Within spanned six CDs. “We filledp right away,” said game designer Rob Fulop, whose CD work included Max Magic, a virtual magic set for the CD-i. “The first time you go ‘wow, it’s a million times more storage’ and then you go ‘oh, we’ve run out of it’.”
Another problem was the limitations video placed on game
designers. “We couldn’t experiment much because once you filmed these scenes you couldn’t just go and create another one,” said Fulop. “With video you can’t go ‘let’s hire the actor back and get them to do a back flip’. We couldn’t try many things like that.”
The increasingly grand cinematic visions of game designers and the inability of many of the games to deliver on interactivity eventually sparked a backlash within the specialist gaming press. Critics talked about the ‘interactive movie’ in terms that echoed the late 1970’s British punk rock movement that made its hatred of the pretensions of progressive rock acts such as Yes and Pink Floyd central to its philosophy. “Looking back on it now it seems we were a little too enamoured with this new process and didn’t spend the time polishing the quality of the game play,” said Hoyos. “But to be fair to the designer of Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh, the executives of Sierra kept whittling away at the design of the game, pairing down the actual game play to save money, until what was left was little more than an interactive movie. How they felt this was going to square with the game-playing public I’m not sure.”
By 1999 when Jensen’s Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned reached the shops, the video game industry had largely abandoned its attempts to turn games into films. Instead of the video shoots of its pre-equal, Gabriel Knight 3 used characters drawn using 3D graphics. “The company simply wasn’t going to do full-motion video, period,” said Jensen. “I was happy to give it a try and I think the game turned out really well. There are definitely some things we gained with 3D but a lot that we lost as well. It allowed for more variety of puzzles and a deeper sense of exploration but the drama and emotion of the story was harder to convey with the 3D characters, especially the love scene. I miss having the actors.”
Replay: The History of Video Games Page 33