There were mods that would turn into full-blown commercial games.[5] One, the Autumn Tower Defense map created for the 2002 strategy game WarCraft III, even spawned a new genre – the tower defense game where players had to stop enemies crossing the map by building defensive towers with archers that shot them as they ran past. Internet games Flash Element TD and Desktop Tower Defense, both launched in 2007, honed the concept and popularised the genre.
Some mods even caused game companies major embarrassments. In 2003, Dutch hacker Patrick Wildenberg was playing around with ideas for modding the PC version of Rockstar Games’ 2004 crime game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas when he discovered a hidden sex game. Rockstar had dropped the interactive sex scene from its game prior to its release, but the difficulty of removing it from the millions of lines of computer code that formed Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, meant the company simply disabled that part of the game. Wildenberg created a mod called Hot Coffee that switched the half-finished sex game back on and released it onto the internet so players could try it.
The Hot Coffee mod appeared just as Rockstar was busy defending itself against claims that the Grand Theft Auto series had inspired a number of violent crimes in the US. Wildenberg’s mod poured petrol onto the political firestorm already raging around Grand Theft Auto. Democrat Senator Hilary Clinton demanded a Federal Trade Commission investigation and accused Rockstar of stealing children’s innocence. Rockstar’s initial claim that the sex game was nothing to do with them quickly fell apart as other hackers uncovered it in the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions of the game. For Rockstar the Hot Coffee mod was a disaster. It prompted the Australian authorities to ban Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Europe’s game age rating organisation to increase its age rating to adults only. In the US, Rockstar pulled the game from the shelves while it set about removing the sex scene entirely to try and calm down the outrage.
Despite the Hot Coffee incident, by the middle of the 2000s whole games were being designed around the idea of player content creation. British game designer Peter Molyneux’s 2005 game The Movies embraced the machinima movement to create a business simulation where players ran a movie studio but also got to create machinima films, using virtual actors and sets, that could then be uploaded them to the web.
To help deal with the expected rush of online content, Molyneux’s Lionhead Studios hired former press officer Sam van Tilburgh as a full-time community liaison officer who would vet the players’ films and manage relations with The Movies’ player community. “When you think of making movies, most players will want to create their favourite flick or even use stars they admire,” said van Tilburgh. “In the first few months of The Movies, the number of Batman, James Bond and Star Wars-titled movies was astronomical. We had to remove thousands of movies every week due to copyright infringement.”
Despite the rip offs, The Movies also spawned one of the highest-profile machinima movies created during the first decade of the 2000s: The French Democracy, a 13-minute film created by Paris resident Alex Chan. The French Democracy was Chan’s reaction to race riots that hit the French capital in November 2005. It told the story of a group of Parisians of African descent whose encounters with racism in their day-to-day lives reach boiling point when two black teenagers die while being chased by police. “It stood out because it made a point, it was a personal message about something that was relevant in the global world news coverage,” said van Tilburgh. “Alex was living in Paris and experiencing what was going on and what loads of people were only seeing through their television screens. It grabbed people’s imagination. For me that’s when video games enter the mainstream and can become art. When they convey a message that makes people discuss certain issues in their or other people’s lives.”
The integration of game and player creativity tools that The Movies sought to achieve would be taken further by Media Molecule, a UK game studio formed in 2006 by a group of former Lionhead staff. Media Molecule had formed off the back of co-founder Mark Healey’s Rag Doll Kung Fu, a crazed and amusing martial arts game featuring toy-like fighters controlled like puppets that Healey wrote in his spare time and released in 2005. Rag Doll Kung Fu was a surprise hit, but Media Molecule had a more ambitious title in mind for its debut: a game that let players make games. “Right from the start content creation was definitely one of the aspects for the game, but we didn’t really know how much it was going to be,” said Healey. “We had this slight internal struggle with ourselves. On one side it was ‘we just need to make a really good platform game and get people to make stuff as well’, on the other it was ‘this should be a totally full-on game creation kit kind of thing’.”
Sony Computer Entertainment solved the dilemma when Media Molecule went to its London offices to demo their prototype game. “We were slightly nervous about talking about the content creation too much and scaring them,” said Healey. “A part of us thought they might go for something that’s more traditional and safe, but Sony picked up on the content crion side of it. That was obviously a pivotal moment in realising this was an important part of what we were doing.”
Encouraged by Sony, Media Molecule created the PlayStation 3 title LittleBigPlanet, an incredibly powerful game creation tool capable of producing a wide variety of 2D games that hid its complexity beneath an inviting and unthreatening scrapbook visual aesthetic. “Designing the content creation aspect was a process of iteration,” said Media Molecule co-founder Alex Evans. “We started with very, very crude tools and they were basically completely physical – there was a hair dryer to melt things, a paint roller on the end of a long stick. You literally had to run around to paint. We got quite far into the project before we realised that it was not fun enough. So we had to do several about-faces, several rewrites. The physical thing was too much, so we ended up swinging too far the other way and made this incredibly complicated system. That was about a year into the three years of development; we were a third of the way through. We had already thrown it away once and now we had to throw away this very complex system. There was this stamping system, where you stamp things down to fix them in place, and that was the only fun bit of creating at the time. From that we extended the idea of stamping stuff down to the whole create mode. Everything that you create is essentially a process of stamping stuff down, smearing out shapes or cutting.”
LittleBigPlanet’s game creation system paved the way for a burst of player creativity rarely seen outside of the PC game scene. By the end of July 2009, eight months on from the game’s November 2008 debut, players had uploaded more than a million levels to LittleBigPlanet’s social networking-inspired portal where others could download and play their work. “It’s amazing, just totally amazing,” said Healey. “It’s far more prolific than I ever thought it would be. Probably the first thing I was really impressed with was the calculator thing. It’s obviously not a fun level to play or anything, but just knowing that some mad guy spent time to work out how to make a functioning calculator in the game. I was in awe of his OCD’ness. And then there were the guys who clubbed together to redo Contra, the old arcade game. It’s just unbelievable really.”
The social networking websites that inspired Media Molecule’s creation sharing system were also an important influence on Wright’s Spore, an evolution-themed game that took the player-as-creator concepts of The Sims to a whole new level. Spore put players in charge of the evolution of a lifeform from primordial zooplankton to space-travelling civilization. As well as evolutionary biology, Wright incorporated a library’s worth of scientific ideas, proven and unproven, into the game. From the visual style of electron microscope imagery and panspermia theory – the belief that life on earth began when comets brought organic matter from outer space – to the assumptions used in radio astronomer Frank Drake’s calculation that around 10,000 planets in our galaxy harbour intelligent life.
Wright hoped Spore would advance players’ undersding of evolution, although the model of the final game was closer to the concept of in
telligent design that was being used in the US to challenge attempts to teach evolutionary theory in schools. “I really just wanted to convey the idea that creatures evolved incrementally over a long period of time in response to their environment. Whether it was through selection or directed evolution was really a tactical question,” said Wright. “It is kind of ironic that in some sense Spore is showing the intelligent design thing, which is not a theological or scientific philosophy but a political tactic. If you go around asking people, even religious conservative people, nobody believes in intelligent design as it’s stated; they believe in creationism, which is different.”
The core of Spore was its simple but powerful creature-creation tool that let players mould their lifeforms into new shapes and add or remove appendages such as antennae, jaws, tails and eyes. Once created, players could load their beasts onto Sporepedia, a Flickr and Facebook-influenced website that integrated with the game. Sporepedia not only let players share their creations, but also imported the lifeforms created by other players into the game, quietly populating each player’s world with the work of others.
“With Spore one of our fundamental things was how do we make the content creation curve flatter so that everyone is participating, so that when you play Spore, whether you intend to be a content creator or not, that automatically populates on the web so almost everybody becomes a content creator,” said Wright. “A big part of that was making the tools not just easy to use, but fun to use. With The Sims we were thinking about how to make the tools easy to use. That was ok, but with Spore we thought if we can make the tools fun to play then you get a lot more output.” Spore’s fusion of content creation and social networking meant much of what players saw and interacted with in the game was created by their fellow players.
Fittingly, given its subject matter, Spore’s embrace of player-generated content underlined just how much the video game medium had changed over the years. Having begun life as a medium defined wholly by developers, video games were rapidly evolving into one that turned consumers into artists. Games had become interactive not just in terms of the experience of playing, but interactive as a medium, subject to constant reshaping, modification and extension by those who used it.
[1]. Pattern 159, for example, argued that every room in a building should have natural light on at least two sides.
[2]. Alter Ego was released in two separate editions: male and female. In keeping with the low proportion of female game players in the 1980s, the male version sold far better.
[3]. The idea of games that could record and playback the action had been knocking around for several years by 1996. It had even formed the basis for Disney Interactive’s 1992 PC flight sim Stunt Island, where players got to arrange props and cameras around the game world before taking to the skies to perform stunts that could be recorded and played back later.
[4]. Fragging is online gaming slang for killing rival players.
[5]. Canadian student Minh Le and American student Jess Cliffe’s Counter-Strike mod for the first-person shooter Half-Life was probably the biggest of these. Created in 1999, Counter-Strike was an urban showdown between two teams of players – one playing terrorists, the other a counter-terrorist squad. It became a runaway success and by the early 2000s an estimated 1.7 million people were playing it online every month.
Hey You, Pikachu!: A Nintendo fan comes face to face with the Pokémon star. Courtesy of Nintendo of America
26. All-Access Gaming
When Japan’s
newspaper readers opened their morning papers on the 21st May 1998 they were confronted with a full-page picture of a battlefield littered with slaughtered samurai. The advert posed a bold question: “Has Sega been defeated for good?”
It certainly wasn’t unthinkable. The Sony PlayStation and Nintendo 64 had crushed Sega’s Saturn console, leaving the company’s consumer division nursing losses of $242 million for the year to March 1998. But Sega already had the answer to its own question. The next day the newspapers once again showed the battlefield picture, but this time the samurai were rising to their feet to fight again. That November Sega returned to the fray with a brand new console: the Dreamcast. It would represent both a creative zenith and commercial nadir for the firm.
Sega’s internal developmenstudios pulled out all the stops for the Dreamcast. They created innovative music-games from the intergalactic dance-off Space Channel 5 to the Latin-flavoured maraca shaking of Samba de Amigo. They pioneered the use of cel-shaded graphics in the Japanese urban cool of Jet Set Radio.[1] Game designer Reiko Kodama delivered one of the best Japanese role-playing games of the early 2000s with her Jules Verne-influenced Skies of Arcadia. And Sega’s AM-2 team created Outtrigger, a rare example of a Japanese-made first-person shooter, which used the Dreamcast’s in-built modem to allow online play.
Sega also used the Dreamcast’s dial-up modem to bring the online role-playing game onto the home console with Phantasy Star Online. “The president of Sega at the time, Isao Okawa, was very vocal about the future of games being online,” said Yuji Naka, the head of Sega’s Sonic Team studio, which created Phantasy Star Online. “We chose to make an online Phantasy Star game because we thought the series was most suited to the online environment. Since it was my first attempt at such a big online game it was trial and error, we tested and re-tested and discarded a lot of things before coming up with the final product. It was a very different experience of game design and development.”
Set on the brightly coloured planet of Ragor, Phantasy Star Online was a far cry from the gloomy and dark fantasy worlds of Ultima Online and EverQuest both in terms of its visuals and in how it played. Instead of encouraging competition between players, Naka’s game encouraged players to battle Ragor’s alien monsters as a team. “I thought that in an online environment people would enjoy co-operating rather than competing and that a different approach would get players interested in the online version,” said Naka.
To help players from across the world play together, Naka developed a system that let players who spoke different languages communicate with each other using pre-defined lists of words or symbols that the game could translate instantly. As a result of Naka’s communications aids and co-operation focus, Phantasy Star Online boasted a sense of community between players that other more competitive online games from the time lacked.
Most ambitious of all, however, was Yu Suzuki’s 1999 game Shenmue. At the time of its release, Shenmue was the most expensive game ever made. Suzuki spent five years and at least $20 million realising his vision with the aid of an army of artists, programmers and musicians.[2]/font> Set in the Japanese city of Yokosuka in the mid-1980s, Shenmue cast players as Ryo Hazuki, a young man out to avenge the murder of his father. Its ambitious story hinged on not only on Hazuki’s sense of loss and anger, but also on Suzuki’s detailed recreation of 1980s Yokosuka, which provided a snapshot of a society at a cultural crossroads as the traditions of the past gave way to a new, modern vision of Japan.[3] Suzuki gave players the freedom to explore his virtual Yokosuka, taking in the sights and sounds of ’80s Japan by taking on part-time jobs, talking with residents, eating at restaurants and visiting game centres to play Suzuki’s arcade games from era.
But for all this ambition and creativity, Sega’s efforts to convince the world to buy its console failed. When Sony released its PlayStation 2 console in March 2000 sales of the Dreamcast dried up entirely. In January 2001, a defeated Sega stopped production of the Dreamcast and reinvented itself as a publisher of games for the consoles made by its former rivals.
Two months after pulling out of the console business, Sega quietly released the Japan-only Dreamcast game Segagaga, a bitter epitaph to its own fall from grace. Segagaga challenged players to do what Sega failed to do and make the Dreamcast a success. Its designer, Tetsu Okano, used the game to lampoon both the video game industry and his employer. At every step in their battle against the faceless Dogma Corporation, Segagaga lectured players on the realit
y of the video game industry. Game developers, the player is told, are “subhuman” but an unavoidable necessity. Elsewhere business advisors urge the player to sacrifice creativity, copy their rivals and remember, at all times, that video games are just product. It was a playable polemic from a designer who worried that the creativity of the video game industry was being sidelined by the pursuit of profit and that Japan was losing its position as the world’s foremost producer of video games.
On the surface Okano’s fears about the future of the Japanese game industry seemed misplaced. Japan was still the world’s biggest consumer of video games, Japanese consoles still dominated the international gaming landscape and, starting with Final Fantasy VII, the Japanese role-playing game – the most popular game genre in Japan – had become internationally successful. And then there was Pokémon.
Pokémon was an unstoppable video game phenomenon that had fanned out across the world like a tsunami following its Japanese debut in 1996. Images of Pikachu, the bright yellow tubby mouse-like creature with rosy-red cheeks that fronted the game, appeared everywhere converting children to its charms by the million. Although it started out as a video game, Pokémon had become a multimedia brand by the time it reached North America in September 1998. It was a game, an anime TV series, a trading card game and a manga comic. And, thanks to widespread merchandising, Pikachu could be found on everything from bed sheets and takeaway hot dog trays to airplanes and toy shop shelves.
Within a month of arriving in the US, Pokémon’s anime show had become the country’s most-watched children’s show. Within seven months more than 2.5 million Pokémon video game cartridges and 850,000 sets of Pokémon trading cards had been sold. On top of that the hype was already building up for Pokémon: The First Movie, an animated feature that premiered in November 1999. It would earn more than $160 million at the box office and spawn numerous sequels. By the dawn of the year 2000, the custard-coloured Pikachu was everywhere, earning adoration from kids and befuddled glances from parents.[4]
Replay: The History of Video Games Page 45