Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  Stormfront’s first creation for Quantum Link was 1989’s Quantum Space, a text-only turn-based strategy game released just before Quantum Link renamed itself America On-Line (AOL). Quantum Space relied on the network’s internal email service. “You would get your turn reports and then you’d email back a message that had what you wanted to do in a form,” said Daglow. “The system would turn it into a string of data that would go to us and get processed.”

  Stormfront’s second online game, Neverwinter Nights, was much more ambitious. It took the format of game publisher SSI’s series of official Dungeons & Dragons computer games and created an online role-playing game that, unlike the various MUDs, used 2D graphics rather than text. Costing between $4 to $8 an hour to play, it became one of AOL’s most profitable games as players became absorbed in its visual reresentation of the Dungeons & Dragons world, spending hours socialising, fighting and adventuring. As with MUD and Habitat before it, Neverwinter Nights once again showed how the bringing together of players often led to unexpected results, including player-organised comedy nights and poem readings as well as virtual and real marriages between players.

  Daglow was not the only video game pioneer attracted to online gaming. In 1988 Dani Bunten Berry, the creator of the multiplayer strategy and trading game M.U.L.E., had also begun to explore online as part of her career-long interest in multiplayer games. Bunten had always been interested in games that brought people together, an interest she put down to a childhood where playing board games with all of her family gathered around the table were some of her happiest memories. After dabbling in single-player games with Seven Cities of Gold and Heart of Africa she became an outspoken advocate for multiplayer games. At the 1990 Computer Game Developers Conference she summarised her philosophy in one snappy soundbite: “No-one on their deathbed ever said ‘I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer’.”

  Her first venture into the online space was Modem Wars, a robot-themed war game released in 1988. Inspired by playing soldiers with her brothers as a kid, Modem Wars set out to avoid the complexity, pensive and lengthy experience of most strategy games with its action-based interpretation of war gaming. It foreshadowed the real-time strategy games that became popular following the release of Dune II, but its focus on action alienated traditional war game fans and, since few people owned modems at the time, sales were poor.

  Sierra Online’s founder Ken Williams also got the online bug and in late 1991 his company began exploring the frontiers of cyberspace with The Sierra Network. “The original mission statement for The Sierra Network came from me trying to think of something my grandma could do from home,” said Williams. “I came up with a product that would be card and board games for seniors. They would be able to pick up a game and chat, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This was pre-internet, but we made it happen and it became the basis for The Sierra Network.”

  Sierra’s ambition initially got the better of it. Al Lowe, the creator of the company’s popular Leisure Suit Larry comedy adventure games, was commissioned to create Leisure Suit Larry 4 as a multiplayer game.[7] “It was a tough road to follow because we didn’t know anything about online games,” said Lowe. “Ken hired a guy who had done low-level communications software and said I want you to write what was basically a server – we didn’t call it that, we didn’t knowse terms at the time.”

  After several months of struggling to figure out how to make an online Leisure Suit Larry, Sierra scaled back its plans. It refocused on the simpler games, such as Chess, Checkers, Bridge and Backgammon, that Williams originally envisaged and started constructing the infrastructure for the system. “At the time there was no internet,” said Williams. “We had to deploy our own national network and servers.”

  The Sierra Network managed to attract around 30,000 users who paid $2 an hour to access its mix of parlour games and online chat, but the expense of running such a network meant the venture lost Sierra millions. “We figured it would take 50,000 people to make it successful,” said Lowe. “Back then 50,000 was a huge number. Not that many people owned modems back then. We had to write the code so it would deal with a 1,200-baud modem and that was pretty state of the art – it was not cheap, it cost hundreds of dollars to get a modem like that.”

  Sierra eventually sold off The Sierra Network to telecoms firm AT&T in 1994. By then, however, the days of online networks such as Quantum Link were about to end. Back in 1974 a group of computer researchers working on APRAnet, the computer communications system developed back in the 1960s using military funding, began talking about creating the internet – a unified global communications network that all computer users could use. The concept became an ambition for those working in computer communications, who began creating the systems and software that could make the internet a reality. Over the next decade and a half, APRAnet evolved into the embryonic internet as communications standards were adopted and email services were connected. In 1988 the internet was opened up to the business world, allowing the formation of the first internet service providers and the following year British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee developed the concept of the world wide web, a hypertext-based system that would make the internet easy to navigate and pave the way for websites and web browsers.

  The final restrictions on internet use were ditched on the 6th August 1991 when it was opened to the public for the first time. One by one, online networks such as Prodigy, AOL and CompuServe connected their systems to the internet, vastly increasing its capacity and user base. By 1994 the internet was poised to go mainstream, ushering in a communications and computing revolution that would reshape society on a global level.

  One of those excited by the possibilities of internet games was Starr Long, a project manager in Origin Systems’ headquarters in Austin, Texas. “One of the technical managers, Ken Demarest, and I started mucking about with multiplayer games and looking at everything that was going on in the market,” said Long.

  The pair’s journey into the online realm spanned the whole multiplayer game world. They explored AOL’s collection of online games, went on quests in the realms of MUDs and slaughtered people they had never met in Doom death matches. They talked about how exciting it would be if you could play Origin’s flagship role-playing game series Ultima with your friends. “We were affectionally calling it Multima and I became extremely passionate about multiplayer. I had this feeling that multiplayer games was what games in general were really about from the beginning,” said Long. “If you look at the oldest games, such as dice, they really were social experiences and the games provided a framework for a social experience. The internet was just beginning, it really was this new frontier – it was like ‘wow, people don’t even physically have to be in the same space anymore, they could get social experiences through the internet’.”

  Long pitched the idea for an online Ultima to Origin’s founder Richard Garriott, who saw the potential. Garriott asked Electronic Arts, who had bought Origin in 1992, to bankroll the project. “We went through this period of time where we tried to convince everybody that this would work, but since there was never previously a successful online game, people’s sales projections were basically zero,” said Garriott. “It took us a long time before we managed to convince Electronic Arts to give us some money to do a prototype and that was $250,000. We were already in an era where games cost many millions, so it was useless or almost useless.”

  Long and Garriott built a prototype using the isometric-view graphics of 1992’s Ultima VII: The Black Gate. The team set out from day one to turn the world of Ultima that Garriott had been designing since the late 1970s into a living, breathing world. “The idea of simulation as the foundation for the game was always there,” said Long.

  In keeping with the simulation approach, the team decided that player freedom was crucial to the game and set out to remove anything that prevented players from playing as they pleased. They created numerous professions and jobs for players to do in their virtual world, fr
om warrior and wizard to baker and glassmaker. They designed the trappings of a virtual economic system and built towns with shops and bars for people to gather in. They even built population dynamics into their digital realm. “We wanted to create this virtual ecosystem where the grass on the ground was a resource that the rabbits would consume and the wolves ate the rabbits, so if there weren’t any rabbits the wolves died off,” said Long.

  Despite the miniscule budget, Origin had a working version of their game world ready by 1996 and decided to hold a pre-launch beta test with a select few Ultima fans in order to give themselves time to fix any unseen problems. “We put up a single web page that said ‘hey we’re the Ultima development team and we’re doing Ultima Online and we’d love you to help us test it’,” said Garriott. To make sure those who signed up would actually play the game, they asked fans to pay $2 for the CD they needed to run the game.

  Since the most popular online game at the time had attracted, at most, 30,000 players, they expected hardly anyone to sign up. They were in for a surprise. “Within two or three days, 50,000 people had signed up to pay,” said Garriott. “That was the day the future changed. That was the day that this game no one knew or cared about became the most important game currently being developed at Electronic Arts or Origin. Immediately not only were the coffers opened up, but so was management oversight, much to our chagrin.”

  Since the release of Neverwinter Nights, the business model for online games had changed radically. The internet’s explosive growth had sent bandwidth costs plummeting, slashing the overheads involved in running online games. On top of that a game called Meridian 59 had provided an alternative business model for online role-playing games that eschewed the expensive hourly charges of old in favour of a set monthly subscription that allowed players to spend as long as they wanted playing.

  The brainchild of Archetype Interactive, a game studio formed by two pairs of brothers spread across the US, Meridian 59 sought to reinvent MUD using the kind of 3D graphics seen in Doom. A test run of the game in early 1996 had already caused a minor stir, attracting the interest of around 10,000 players and prompting Trip Hawkins’ The 3DO Company, which was reinventing itself as a game publisher after the failure of its 3DO console, to buy Archetype before the game had even officially launched.

  “It was essentially a visual DikuMUD,” said Rich Vogel, senior producer of Meridian 59. “It was the first game that was actually internet accessed. It wasn’t accessed by a propriety network like AOL, CompuServe or GEnie. It was the first one where if you had a web browser you could login and register. That game was such a trailblazer, we were excited to have as many people as we had on it because it was the first time anybody had done this and because the internet in 1996 was just kind of getting there then.”

  But while its 3D visuals were a first for an online role-playing game, it was Meridian 59’s payment system that was truly revolutionary. “It seemed like a reasonable idea at the time because role-playing game fans wanted to play a huge number of hours per month and with a flat monthly fee it was only pennies per hour,” said Hawkins. “Ironically, the users complained that its $9.95 a month subscription was too high.”

  Ultima Online would, Origin decided, adopt the same subscription-based business model. And since Meridian 59 attracted around 25,000 players at its peak – just half of the number of people who wanted to take part in the test of Ultima Online – Electronic Arts were convinced they had a major commercial success in the making.

  With Ultima Online set to become the biggest and most complex online game ever launched, Origin appointed a community manager to help manage the player relations in the hope of avoiding the headaches of player management that Lucasfilm had experienced with Habitat. The idea of a full-time community manager stemmed from oneof Long’s finds during his early exploration of online gaming: Air Warrior. First released in 1987 on the GEnie network, Air Warrior evolved out of a multiplayer text-only flight simulation developed by University of Virginia physics students Kelton Flinn and John Taylor back in 1977. The game recreated the air battles of the Second World War and charged players $10 to $12 an hour for a dose of dog-fighting fun. Despite the price tag, Air Warrior gained a loyal following among flight simulation enthusiasts thanks to its realistic physics and social interaction.

  By the time Long investigated the game, its 30,000-odd players had become a thriving community that would hold long debates on player etiquette and chivalry – berating cowardly players who would quit the game when they were about to get killed. “Air Warrior is a flight simulator, but in every other definition it was a massively multiplayer online game,” said Long. “Everybody was in the same space simultaneously playing together in real-time, communicating live. It was in Air Warrior that we started to realise that this was really a community and that it wasn’t just a bunch of people playing together. Ultima Online was the first game that had an official community manager as a full-time job. Before that people had facilitated communities but they were also a game designer or a programmer. Ultima Online was first to say this is a full-time job. Air Warrior’s probably the biggest contributor to that realisation for us, so it had a big influence.”

  But even with their dedicated community manager, Ultima Online was soon riddled with the kind of social problems and surprises that Lucasfilm encountered when it made Habitat. And the first victim was Origin’s carefully built virtual ecosystem. “Once we introduced the players into the equation they did what happens in the real world and wiped out everything,” said Long. “They killed all the rabbits because they were easy to kill, so all the wolves died off and then there was nothing to kill. Frighteningly like the real world, but not very fun for the new player coming in who had nothing to hunt, so we had to scale back a lot on our original ambitions for creating ecosystems.”

  The biggest problem, however, was the general lawlessness of the online version of Britannia. “We left it open for players to attack each other,” said Garriott. “We thought that’s just part of reality. People are going to have grievances that they are going to want to fight over. I didn’t have a problem with people fighting each other, but we didn’t at all anticipate the PK’ing – the player killing.”

  Within weeks of the test launch, opportunistic players were rampaging through the game world slaughtering those weaker than themselves and looting whatever items their virtual victims were carrying. Thieves lurked outside the game’s towns to rob new players as they took their first steps into Origin’s virtual world. Criminal gangs would gather at the entrance to minand wait for players who had spent hours breaking virtual rocks for gold to emerge, before pouncing on them and stealing their treasure. Angered players formed vigilante gangs that prowled the world looking for criminals to meat out mob justice. Others resorted to stripping their characters of items and clothes and wandering the world in their underpants hoping the obvious lack of possessions would keep them safe. “The problem we had was that we didn’t have enough tuning time before we released it and one of the things that needed tuning was player-versus-player combat,” said Vogel, who became Ultima Online’s producer after working on Meridian 59. “We never realised how bad it would get. I took about three months to notice.”

  The extent of the lawlessness varied depending on the server that players were logged into.[8] “It’s interesting how they developed differently,” said Vogel. “We had servers near the North East US, which were very bad servers, and then we had servers in the Midwest, which were calm and nice. The Pacific coast and the one in the North East were our worst. The way they grew up was like the broken window syndrome, because if you get a bunch of bad people in one area you’re screwed. Everything from extorting people for their money, holding them captive and teleporting them to islands to steal their money. It was just amazing. People were scared to leave the cities.”

  The players of Ultima Online soon started developing their own slang to describe the situation, which soon spread out onto the web, seeping into the lan
guage of other online games and eventually into everyday conversation. “Almost all the terminology in use today came out of Ultima Online – griefing, nerfing, killer dudes, raids – all this kind of stuff really developed out of Ultima Online,” said Vogel.

  Even direct intervention from the game’s creators did little to stop the problems. Garriott once encountered a thief robbing a new player while wandering around the game as Lord British. He caught the thief and told him not to do it again and returned the items to the victim. The thief promised not to do it again and promptly broke his word. Garriott intervened a second time only for the thief to strike a third time. “I said ok that’s it, I’ve warned you twice, you did it three times in a row so I’m about to ban you from the game forever,” said Garriott. “The thief then drops character and goes ‘Ok Richard Garriott, if that’s who you really are, I’ll have you know that I’m only playing the role as you defined it in the game. I’m playing a thief and I’m using the thieving skill that you put in the game and if you are a thief and the king of the land comes and tells you not to steal of course you’re going to tell him you won’t, before going somewhere else and getting back to thieving because that’s what you do.”

  Garriott was dumbfounded. This was his world: the murders, the violence, the chaos. It was all his and his team’s doing and his game was no longer under his full control. “I went ‘wow, that guy’s right’,” said Garriott. “So I said ‘ok, you make a very good point’ and teleported him all the way to the other side of the world where he couldn’t mess with this woman. I went off to rethink the rules and think about the fact that people are just gaming the system you provide. You can’t really blame the player killers, you can’t blame the people stealing stuff from each other, you can only blame the vision and rules and structure that you put into play. So we began to take much more care in the development of our inter-personal systems.”