Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  Fearing the lawlessness would cause many of Ultima Online’s 250,000 players to cancel their subscriptions, Origin became embroiled in a desperate battle with the player killers, criminals, thieves, griefers and vigilantes who doubled as their customers. “There’s many people who say the danger is part of what made the game very, very exciting, but for many it was very challenging or a big turn off, especially when they felt like it was being abused,” said Long. “When the strong kill the weak over and over there’s nothing to be gained from that – it just humiliates the weaker character and becomes not very fun for the weaker player.”

  Over the course of 1998, Origin began a crackdown on the griefers. It turned cities into safety zones where players could not attack each other, introduced reputation scores for players so troublemakers could be spotted and avoided, and created virtual jails to lock up problem players for periods of time as punishment.

  The game industry took two important lessons away from Ultima Online. First, that the internet had finally made online games commercially viable. Second, that giving players as much freedom as possible was a recipe for disaster. The first game to apply those lessons was Sony Online Entertainment’s 1999 fantasy role-playing game EverQuest, which encouraged players to team up with each other rather than fight. It attracted more than twice as many subscribers as Ultima Online.

  The open, anything-goes vision of online games such as Ultima Online was rapidly replaced with more directed, entertainment-driven online games. Only a select few, such as Icelandic developer CCP’s Elite-inspired EVE Online, embraced the risky and unpredictable path that Origin explored. “There is a little bit of scariness about open-ended virtual worlds because of Ultima Online’s problems because, frankly, when you give people a lot of power they abuse it,” said Vogel.

  Long agreed: “It’s been shown rather clearly that there are larger audiences for more structured, linear experiences than there are for a truly open space. EverQuest did better than Ultima Online and was very structured. World of WarCraft, which is also very structured, is better than everything else ever. The audiences voted with their feet about what kind of game they preferred.”

  Released in 2004, Blizzard’s World of>, a spin-off of the US company’s fantasy-themed strategy series WarCraft, was a deliberate attempt to avoid some of the problems that had beset Ultima Online and other online role-playing games. “It was very similar to what we’ve done with some other genres,” said Rob Pardo, executive vice-president of game design at Blizzard. “We were playing lots of Ultima Online and EverQuest and really did see the potential of that genre. We felt that once you got into those games, once you got past the really steep learning curve and some of the rules that made them unappealing to a more causal core audience, they had so much immersion and stickiness. The ability to share your game socially with people had so much potential, there was a huge opportunity there.”

  Blizzard toned down the player killing of Ultima Online and EverQuest, by requiring players to be willing participants in fights with other players. It also reduced the need to keep accruing experience by killing monsters and other creatures to become more powerful. “Ultima Online and EverQuest had really long level curves – you had to work really long and hard to gain a level and there wasn’t a lot of direction, so you would have to go out and starting killing beetles or wolves or something like that until you got to a new level and could kill slightly tougher creatures,” said Pardo. “The biggest thing we did to make these games more accessible was to have a quest-driven experience from the very beginning so you would always know what you could do next and have some choices of what quest you wanted to take on. We were the first massively multiplayer online game where, from the first level all the way through to the maximum level, you would be on a quest and have things to do.”

  The popularity of World of WarCraft confirmed Blizzard’s suspicions that the difficulty of earlier online role-playing games had alienated players. By 2009 the game had racked up more than 10 million subscribers across the world. The sheer size of Blizzard’s World of WarCraft operation was mind-boggling. Some 20,000 computers were needed to run the game. Blizzard’s customer support team consisted of 2,396 people and there were a total of 13,250 copies of the game running on servers that containing in excess of 1.3 petabytes of data. In addition, Blizzard had 451 people employed full-time who constantly built new quests, art, music and sounds for the game as well as two historians who catalogued its virtual history.

  The virtual world envisaged by Bartle and Trubshaw on a primitive computer lurking on the campus of the University of Essex back in the days when home computers were still new had grown up to become a globe-straddling Goliath that brought millions of people together.

  [1]. Game masters are people appointed by the developers of massively multiplayer online games such as Ultima Online to police the virtual world on their behalf. The term originates from the name given to the person who would oversee games of Dungeons & Dragons.

  [2]. 1974’s Maze (see chapter 5) was not the only multiplayer game created during the 1970s. In 1973 John Daleske created an eight-player space combat game called Empire, which ran on terminals connected to the University of Illinois’ education-focused PLATO network. Empire underwent several updates, including 1976’s Empire IV, which allowed up to 80 PLATO users to play at once. PLATO’s online communications capabilities also made it host to some of the world’s first message boards, chat rooms, instant messaging and emoticons.

  [3]. Modem owners could also connect to bulletin board systems or BBSs. These had their own specific telephone number that the modem had to call in order to connect to the BBS, which sometimes limited the number of users at any one time to just one person. The content of BBSs ranged widely but included news updates, email facilities, the ability to exchange software and – in some cases – games to play, such as computerised versions of card games like Blackjack. Incidentally, the pre-internet situation in France was different. There the government-owned France Telecom launched the Minitel system in 1985. Minitel worked like a nationwide time-sharing computer. French citizens could get a Minitel terminal for free, plug it into their phone line and connect to Minitel in order to check weather reports and train times, read newspapers and play games such as a version of Des Chiffres et des Lettres – the French TV game show known as Countdown in the UK. Ironically, the popularity of its early exposure to online communications meant France was relatively slow to embrace the internet.

  [4]. Most virtual worlds at this time, MUDs included, were not permanent. In MUD, for example, once players had located all the treasure in the game, the game would reset the world back to its initial state with the treasures placed in new locations. Habitat’s world by comparison never stopped, it was built to last.

  [5]. Quantum Link later launched a heavily stripped-down version of Habitat called Club Caribe in 1989, which managed to attract 15,000 players at the height of its popularity. The following year Fujitsu Habitat, a remake of the original Habitat with a new look, appeared on the Japanese FM Towns computer.

  [6]. Alternate reality games tend to take the form of elaborate puzzles where players are given a few cryptic clues and usually use websites – some real, some created just for the game – and other media (such as newspaper adverts or answer phone messages) to try and solve it.

  [7]. Leisure Suit Larry began life as a graphical version of Softporn Adventure, a crude and lewd text adventure released by Sierra in 1981. But post-AIDS, Lowe felt Softporn Adventure was so out of date it should be wearing a leisure suit and turned it into a humorous adventure game about a leisure suit-wearing sleaze ball trying to charm the ladies. The first Leisure Suit Larry game came out in 1987.

  [8]. While Ultima Online had 250,000 subscribers, they could not all play online in the same world at the same time due to technical constraints. As a result players’ characters exist on copies of the game stored on entirely separate servers.

  China online: Gamer at a internet cafe in Ta
iyuan, Shanxi province. Stringer Shanghai / Reuters / Corbis

  24. Second Lives

  Japan annexed Korea on the 22nd August 1910. The fast-rising imperial power had already defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895 and done the same to the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. These military victories earned Japan the respect oher imperial powers, even prompting the formation of a ‘learn from Japan’ movement in Britain.

  Japan’s victories and new diplomatic standing gave it unopposed influence over Korea, a country that had only gained independence from China in 1897. In the five years that followed the Russo-Japanese War, Japan used its influence to dissolve the Korean army, hand itself a veto over the nation’s laws and take control of its foreign policy. And in August 1910, Japan forced the Korean government to sign an annexation treaty that officially ended Korea’s independence.

  The Japanese were harsh rulers. Those suspected of aiding rebel fighters faced execution or enslavement. In some cases, whole villages were rounded up and locked in public buildings that were then set alight as a punishment for helping dissidents. Japan also set out to erase Korea’s culture. The country’s history books were burned, the Korean language suppressed and most of the Gyeongbokgung, the Korean palace built in 1394, was demolished to make way for the Japanese governor’s headquarters.

  After Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, Korea was divided into US and USSR occupied zones. The US zone became South Korea and the Soviet Union’s zone became North Korea. One of the first laws South Korea’s government introduced was a ban on the import of Japanese goods and cultural items, a legal reflection of the understandable fury and bitterness Koreans felt towards their former occupiers.

  This law, which remained largely unchanged until the late 1990s, would have a significant influence on the video game business both in Korea and across the world. Its most noticeable impact was that it severely limited the supply of video games to South Korea in the 1980s. Japanese companies could not export their games or consoles to the country and since American and European companies were only just starting to expand into other developed nations they saw little incentive to head to the relatively poor nation of South Korea. And since home computer ownership was rare in South Korea, few Koreans attempted to build a game industry of their own.

  Those wanting to play video games had little choice but to resort to buying illegal copies of games. “Japanese movies, music, comics and games were all banned from being imported,” said Jake Song, a future game designer who got his first taste of games on a school computer. “But for the few who enjoyed games, they played illegal copies of Japanese games. It was fairly easy to buy Taiwanese clones of the Nintendo Super NES and the UFO, a device that enabled the use of illegally copied discs instead of cartridges, and it was fairly easy to get pirated software from PC bulletin board systems or the computer-related shopping districts in Seoul.”

  None of this was out of the ordinary for a mainland East Asian country in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Few game companies had any presence in the region and so the black market ruled supreme. But then in the early 1990s South Korea entered a period of rapid growth that greatly improved living standards. Sales of PCs began to rise, encouraging a few Korean companies to start releasing video games. Nearly every single one sold in low numbers. Koreans were too used to cheap or free pirated games to consider paying out for an official version. One after another, Korean publishers of retail games would give up.

  Then in 1994 the IT firm Samjung Data Service hit on a way to get Koreans paying to play while trying to think of a product that wo appeal to the small-but-growing number of Koreans buying internet-ready PCs. Samjung’s founders were a group of graduates from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in the city of Daejeon. During their time at the institute they discovered MUD, the text-only online world created by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw back in the late 1970s. The founders realised that people couldn’t easily copy an online game and, even if they managed it, they would lack the infrastructure necessary to run it. This, they concluded, was the way to sidestep the piracy problem.

  They put together Jurassic Park, a MUD of their own, and began charging players for the time they spent playing it. Jurassic Park did not become the success Samjung hoped, largely because few Koreans owned an internet-connected PC at that point, but it had showed the country’s would-be game makers the way forward. All that was needed was for internet access to become more widespread and, as luck would have it, the Korean government was about to make that happen.

  In 1995 the South Korean government announced its intention to create a “knowledge-based society” founded on widespread broadband internet access. It was a crazily ambitious project. The internet was still a new concept, slow dial-up connections were still cutting edge and here was a relatively minor Asian economy pledging to plough hundreds of millions of US dollars into building the world’s best computer communications network. But for Korean game companies the announcement was a gift. Armed with the promise of fast broadband internet access for all and the business model of Jurassic Park, Korea’s game industry gave up on retail games and prepared for a cyberspace future.

  One of the first to embrace this future was the Nexon Corporation, a company co-founded by Kim Jung-Ju in 1994 after he saw Jurassic Park. Kim’s plan was to release an online multiplayer game that used graphics rather than text. His business partner was Song, who had ended up programming business software for a living but also created text-only MUDs in his spare time. While games such as AOL’s Neverwinter Nights were already offering US game players graphics-based online games by the time Nexon formed, South Korea’s isolation meant Song and Kim were in uncharted territory as far as they were concerned. “They weren’t any terms for this genre, so we called it graphic MUD or MUG,” said Song.

  The result of Nexon’s work was Song’s 1996 game The Kingdom of the Winds / Baram Eui Nara. The Kingdom of the Winds emphasised its Korean roots. Its virtual world was based on the country’s history and mythology and its art style drew its inspiration from Korean ‘manhwa’ comic books. “Nationalism was part of what I was taught since birth and throughout my education,” explained Song. “So I think I had been compelled to make a game with a Korean theme. But after The Kingdom of the Winds I was relieved of that kind of imperative. Because I am Korean, I think even if I make a medieval European fantasy game, Korean sentiments will naturally melt into it.”

  Kingdom of the Winds was a turning point for Korean games. Its use of graphics raised the bar for every other Korean game maker – text-based MUDs would no longer cut it. It also became the first Korean game to achieve mass appeal. At its height, nearly one million people were paying a monthly subscription fee in order to play. In one fell swoop, Kim and Song had shown that South Korea was a viable games market and that Korean developers could compete on equal terms to Japanese and American companies without compromising their culture.

  But just as The Kingdom of the Winds started to take off, South Korea and the rest of mainland Asia was engulfed in economic turmoil. A loss of confidence in the Thai currency, the baht, in July 1997 sparked off a wave of investor panic that sent East Asia’s economies into freefall. The South Korean economy shrivelled by a third in the space of a year and the national debt doubled. Soon Korean workers were being laid off in their thousands.

  In theory, the crash and the resulting surge in unemployment should have strangled the country’s barely formed game industry. But rather than destroy it, the economic woe actually boosted it. Some of the newly unemployed hit on the idea of opening ‘PC bangs’, internet cafés where people could play online games. It was an appealing business prospect. The government, which accelerated its broadband drive in response to the crisis, was offering generous subsidies to internet-related business and, thanks to The Kingdom of the Winds’ success, there was a huge demand for online games. Not to mention a lot of out-of-work people with time to kill. PC bangs charged customers aroun
d $1 an hour to play and became immensely popular, encouraging more and more to spring up across the country. And as the number of people hanging out in PC bangs swelled so did consumer demand for online games. By 1998 around 3,000 PC bangs had opened across South Korea, giving millions of potential game players access to high-powered PC gaming on the cheap, and more were opening all the time. By the following year the number had risen fivefold to 15,150 and it was all thanks to two 1998 games: StarCraft and Lineage.

  StarCraft was an American real-time strategy game with a sci-fi theme that revolved around frantic battles between three distinct alien races, each of which had their own weaknesses and strengths. The game’s creators Blizzard Entertainment expected little success in South Korea. “Korea was already a market for us, but not a very big one,” said Rob Pardo, the executive vice-president of game design at Blizzard. “We didn’t localise it – you actually play the English language version over there. There were lots of things going on in Korea around the time that StarCraft came out: the growth of PC game rooms; the growth of internet connections. StarCraft came out in that time frame and captured a lot of the Kon imagination. They really like science fiction, they really enjoy that fast-paced strategic thinking and they have a very competitive gaming culture.”

  Koreans became the world’s biggest StarCraft fans. Of the 9.5 million copies of the game sold worldwide, 4.5 million were sold in South Korea. Blizzard’s video game was so popular it became a national sport. TV stations began broadcasting matches between the best players. One channel, iTV Game, even dedicated itself to broadcasting StarCraft matches to an eager audience. The professional gaming scene that StarCraft spawned in South Korea made the low-key US gaming competitions based on Doom-style death matches and 1980s arcade games look like a joke by comparison. The US’s Cyberathlete Professional League got excited when 30,000 people decided to watch the event online. But South Korea’s World Cyber Games could attract 50,000 spectators to the arena in which it took place plus hundreds of thousands more on TV and the internet, enough to persuade multinational companies, including Samsung, to pay huge amounts to sponsor the event. The World Cyber Games also had generous backing from the South Korean government, which contributed to the 2002 contest’s $350,000 prize money. The government’s support even included giving video gaming official recognition as a sport.