Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  [6]. Chroma key screens are the blank green or blue screens used by filmmakers and TV studios to record actors or weather presenters and project them onto a computer-generated scene or weather map.

  [7]. The ideas that led to Wii Fit had been knocking around the video game business for some time. Prior to creating the Amiga computer, the Amiga Corporation developed 1982’s Mogul Maniac, a skiing game for Atari’s VCS 2600 that used the Joyboard, which let players control in-game movements by standing on it and leaning in different directions. Bandai’s 1986 pressure-sensitive Family Trainer mat controller and the music game dance mats that became popular thanks to Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution also foreshadowed the Balance Board.

  Back to the ’80s: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City resurrects the glam of Miami Vice. Rockstar Games

  27. The Grooviest Era Of Crime

  Grand Theft Auto III opened with a bang. The player’s nameless character is being transported to prison with two other convicts when the police convoy is attacked while crossing a bridge.[1] The attackers free one prisoner before fleeing, blowing up the bridge behind them in a bright flash of white. Seconds later the player is handed control. The bridge is broken in half and the burning wreckage of prisoner escort vehicles lay scattered. Only the player and the other prisoner have survived. One empty and undamaged car offers a chance to escape to freedom.

  Directed by the other criminal, the player heads to a safe house in the city. The player drives past people milling around and passing traffic; up hills, under railway bridges and along darkened streets lit by the orange glow of streetlights. As Chinatown whizzes past, a squeeze of a button switches the car radio from Debbie Harry’s Rush Rush to Double Clef FM, which is playing La donna è mobile from Giuseppe Verdi’s 1851 opera Rigoletto. The escape car screeches around corners, leaving behind dark tyre tracks and startled pedestrians. Soon the run-down looking red light district comes into view and then the barely noticeable back alley leading to the safe house.

  Dawn breaks, bleaching the sky pink and purple. Dirty clouds hover, threatening rain. A taxi hoots its horn, piercing the snatched chatter of passing pedestrians. A train rattles along the elevated tracks with a thundering noise. A passing van runs down a man in a Hawaiian shirt and knee-length shorts before speeding off in panic. Seconds later an ambulance races into view emergency lights flashing to treat the injured man whose prone body has attracted a crowd of shocked on-lookers. Just past the dual carriageway where the hit and run took place is a large river across which lies another part of the city with a Manhattan-esque sline of skyscrapers pointing to the heavens. In the far distance a plane is descending down towards an airport that must lie beyond the skyscrapers leaving a vapour trial that cuts through the dawn sky in its wake.

  This is Liberty City, the world of Grand Theft Auto III and what happens next is anyone’s guess. There’s a story to follow where you could seek work as a thug-for-hire but it’s not compulsory. You could steal a car and tour the city, see the sights and become a virtual tourist. Or you could grab that discarded baseball bat and prowl the streets beating passers-by to see how long it will be before the cops show up. Or drive off ramps to perform stunts with your car. Or take a ride on the train to get a better view of the city, visit a prostitute, or become a cab driver. Or maybe you will do all of this and more.

  Released in October 2001 with little pre-release hype, Grand Theft Auto III’s three-dimensional city teemed with life and offered a sense of freedom, openness and possibility that no other game had achieved before. Many had, of course, tried before. Not least the first two Grand Theft Auto games.

  The origins of the series date back to 1994 when Mike Dailly, a software engineer working for the research and development team at Scottish game studio DMA Design, developed a new graphics demo. The demo, Rotator, showed an isometric view city that could be rotated at will. “This was very fast and worked well, so the idea was to make a strategy game that could use it,” said Dailly. “Grand Theft Auto actually started out as a gang versus gang game. However there were problems when the team tried to implement the rendering and Bullfrog’s Syndicate Wars had just come out and done something very similar, so the idea was dropped.”

  Dailly, however, had an alternative to hand: “I had been working on a second engine called Dino. This one was based on an idea I got when watching a Sega Saturn game called Clockwork Knight being played.” Clockwork Knight was a fairly unremarkable side-view platform game in the Super Mario Bros mould. Its visuals, however, were reminiscent of a fish-eye lens. Only the objects in the centre of the screen were seen as flat; those to the left and right of the screen’s centre appeared to curve off to the sides.

  “It occurred to me that although I had a side-on engine, all I needed was to add a floor and it could be an above engine,” said Dailly. “So with sad programmer graphics I set about using the previous prototype engine as a base.”

  It didn’t take long for the DMA Design team working on the prototype Grand Theft Auto, then known as Race and Chase, to embrace Dailly’s new engine. “I showed Keith Hamilton, Did ‘Oz’ Ozbourn and Dave Jones,” said Dailly.[2] “They decided to restart Race and Chase using the new engine since it allowed far more freedom. It was simply a case of me showing Dave, Oz and Keith the new demo and 30 minutes later everyone agreed to start again. It was a good meeting.”

  Race and Chase was envisaged as a cops and robbers game. Players could be the police chasing the robbers or adopt the role of the fleeing criminal hoping to lose the pursuing squad cars. It didn’t take long before the option to be the police was dropped. “Nobody wants to be the cop, they want to be bad and that evolved into Grand Theft Auto,” said Gary Penn, who joined the Dundee-based studio as the game’s producer halfway through its development.

  The team envisaged the game’s three cities as a playground where players could go wherever they liked.[3] It was an idea heavily influenced by Elite, the open-ended 1984 space sim created by Ian Bell and David Braben. “I had worked on Frontier: Elite II and there were other people on the team who had Syndicate, Mercenary and Elite very much in their minds as well,” said Penn. “That combination definitely led to the more open structure that we condensed into, basically, Elite in a city. You take on jobs in a slightly different way but it’s incredibly similar structurally, it’s just a more acceptable real-world setting.”

  For months, however, the Grand Theft Auto project teetered on the edge of abandonment hampered by unstable code, boring action and overly complex controls. “When I joined DMA it was a mess,” said Penn. “It was a mess for years, it never moved on, it never went anywhere. It was almost canned. The publisher, BMG Interactive, wanted to can it as it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. It was no fun at all. The core of the play was fundamentally broke and it had a broken structure as well.”

  But the compelling idea of an open city to drive around was enough to keep the project alive. A renewed push to fix the game’s rickety code proved to be the turning point, allowing the team to concentrate on improving the game experience itself. Piece by piece the game came together – sometimes more by accident, than design. The way the police originally worked was just rubbish and then one day – I think it was a bug – the police suddenly became mental and aggressive because they were trying to drive through you,” said Penn. “That was an awesome moment because you got real drama where you went ‘oh my god, the police are real psycho, they are trying to ram me off the road’.”

  But on its release in October 1997, Grand Theft Auto’s key feature - thfer of a city to roam in – went largely ignored. Instead people talked about the game’s overhead viewpoint, which was seen as a 2D relic in an era when 3D was fast becoming the norm, and the subject matter.[4] Egged on by the game’s publicist Max Clifford, Grand Theft Auto was greeted with howls of outrage thanks to its embrace of criminality. Most games portrayed players as heroes regardless of their in-game actions, or at the very least victims who have been forced into carrying out criminal acts
. Grand Theft Auto offered no such veneer of respectability. The player was an amoral crook out to rob, kill and maim for personal gain and nothing more. Politicians and players alike were shocked by DMA Design’s refusal to apply any morality to the player’s actions. One reviewer called it the “most violent piece of gaming on the PlayStation” thanks to features such as the ability to mow down whole processions of Hare Krishna for extra money. In the UK Parliament, Conservative peer Lord Campbell of Croy accused the game of setting an “alarming precedent” and of glamourising crime.

  But beyond the notoriety, Grand Theft Auto was a rare example of an action game taking up the challenge presented by Elite and Will Wright’s Sim City: to create games that give players virtual ‘sandboxes’ to play in, where they created the narrative through their own actions and choices.

  Prior to Grand Theft Auto, only a handful of games had managed to come anywhere close to offering players this level of freedom. Foremost among was Bethesda Softworks’ fantasy role-playing game series The Elder Scrolls. The Elder Scrolls games handed players a vast open-ended fantasy world where the main adventure was optional and covered just a fraction of what the game could offer. In effect Bethesda offered two narratives – the one created by the developers and the one defined by players within the game’s world. “Giving players’ freedom of choice was our main goal,” said Todd Howard, the executive producer of the series. “To have the game react to you and remove as many boundaries as possible to what you can do. I think players often start a new game by trying things, asking the game ‘can I do this?’ and the more the game says ‘yes’ the better.”

  But by the start of the 2000s Grand Theft Auto was already looking outdated thanks to Driver, a 1999 driving game inspired by 1970s movies and TV shows such as The Driver and Starsky and Hutch. Driver hinged on its over-the-top car chases, but also gave players the freedom to drive around its cities as they pleased.[5] By comparison the same year’s the devfont color="rgb(0, 0, 0)">Grand Theft Auto II offered little beyond that contained the first game in the series and, thanks to the lack of sales-boosting public condemnation, it sold below expectations.

  For its third attempt at Grand Theft Auto, DMA Design tried once again to deliver on its dream of a 3D city to walk, drive and fly around. “We had tried to do a 3D city with the first one but it was definitely beyond the team’s capability at the time,” said Penn. “With Grand Theft Auto II we tried other 3D elements, but the risk was too high. It made more sense to build on what we’d established with the first one. In all there were three or four attempts to do a 3D one before Grand Theft Auto III.”

  The breakthrough came from another group of DMA Design employees who had just completed work on Space Station Silicon Valley, a 3D platform game for the Nintendo 64.[6] “They were an incredibly capable team. They had just done Space Station Silicon Valley in 3D so they had the attitude and the ability to take the 2D game and put that in 3D,” said Penn, who worked on Grand Theft Auto III for its first six months of development before leaving DMA Design. “The core team were so capable I didn’t have a doubt that it would come out – it was really a case of how long it would take because it’s such an involved thing. It’s a really fucking hard game to make. It’s a really hard game to make in 2D and really, really hard to make in 3D. So that the third one ever came out really impressed me.”

  Like Doom before it, Grand Theft Auto III reshaped the video game landscape. It proved that believable and open 3D game worlds could be created and sold millions. But while Doom’s success inspired a spate of copycats, Grand Theft Auto III faced relatively little competition largely because the challenge of creating a virtual world or city of comparable scope or vision was so difficult and expensive. Only Bethesda offered anything comparable in size and scope to DMA Design’s epic with 2002’s The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and, later, 2006’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

  But Grand Theft Auto III did encourage more games to try and maximise the freedom of choice available to players. From the open city of 2008 racing game Burnout Paradise to the uncharted solar systems of the 2007 space opera Mass Effect, many of which players could explore but most of which had no connection to the game’s primary story. Having proved the concept with Grand Theft Auto III, Rockstar North – as DMA Design was renamed in 2002 – set about applying a stronger sense of time and place to their creation in the 2002 follow up Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Inspired largely by the 1980s TV crime series Miami Vice, the city of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City transported players into a decade of pastel-coloured suits with rolled-up sleeves, hairspray, yuppie aspiration and cocaine, all accompanied with a soundtrack of ’80s pop and rock hits. Sam Houser, the game’s executive producer, described the 1980s as “the grooviest era of crime because it didn’t even feel like crime”. “You had Cuban hit men coming across and gunning people down in the street, but it was still celebrated in a sort of haze of cocaine and excess and Ferraris and Testarossas, and it was a totally topsy-turvy, back-to-front period of time,” he said.

  The game also fizzed with an acidic wit. Its lampooning took few prisoners. It took pop shots at video gaming’s past with radio ads for the Degenatron console, where every game involved a red square battling green dots. It took aim at US gun culture with Ammu-Nation, a survivalist-staffed chain store that sold everything from handguns to rocket launchers, and satirised the poodle-haired rockers of the ’80s with Love Fist, a fictional group of bare-chested, big-haired and vacuous Scottish rockers.

  While the 1980s retro chic gave Grand Theft Auto: Vice City a sense of time and place, the story remained straightforward tale of a thuggish criminal on the make. But with 2004’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Rockstar North began to move beyond the nihilistic characters that had dominated the series up to then. Inspired by Los Angeles’ gang culture of the early 1990s and set across the vast state of San Andreas, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas cast the player as CJ, an African-American anti-hero who is dragged back into the gang culture he had been trying to escape after being framed for murder by two corrupt cops. With its more involved story and willingness to touch on the racial tension that existed in California in the early 1990s, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas moved the series beyond the moral void of its earlier incarnations and embraced the growing trend among game developers to inject meaning and depth into the stories of the games they made during the 2000s.

  The end of the 1990s had witnessed a significant shift in the way stories were conveyed in games. Ever since Will Crowther first created Adventure back in 1975, storytelling in video games had been dominated by two genres: the adventure game and, to a lesser extent, role-playing games.

  As the year 2000 approached, narrative-driven games appeared to be entering a kind of golden age thanks to titles such as Jordan Mechner’s 1997 murder mystery The Last Express, which combined distinctive Art Nouveau visuals with a cinematic storytelling, Planescape: Torment, a convention-defying role-playing game that cast players as an amnesic immortal on a philosophical pilgrimage to discover what kind of person they were, and the Norwegian adventure game The Longest Journey, where the female protagonist’s quest was as much as a voyage of self-discovery as about saving the world.

  Tim Schafer’s comedy film noir Grim Fandango typified the maturation of video game storytelling. It told the story of Manny Calavera, a dead man stuck in a dead-end job as a travel agent in the Land of the Dead.[7] The adventure saw Calavera battle corruption to secure a high-speed train ticket to the afterlife for the newly deceased Mercedes Colomar within a world inspired by Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations and Art Deco design. Witty, inventive and chic, Grim Fandango in many ways marked the apex of adventure games. It won dozens of awards and gushing praise from critics the world over. But for its publisher LucasArts and others, it simply reinforced the belief that the adventure game, the crucible of video game storytelling, was past its sell-by date.

  Despite being showered with accolades, Grim Fandango sold nowhere near enough to cover the co
st of making it. And if a game as praised, inventive and memorable as Grim Fandango could not justify itself commercially, what hope was there for other, less distinguished adventure games, publishers asked themselves. As word of its commercial disappointment spread, video game companies began turning their backs on the genre.

  Most surprising of all was Sierra Online’s decision to ditch the genre it was founded on. “The people who had bought Sierra from Ken and Roberta Williams in 1996 didn’t like adventure games and looked for information that built their case,” said game designer Al Lowe, who had started work on Leisure Suit Larry 8 for Sierra just before Grim Fandango’s release. “Grim Fandango didn’t sell well and it was an adventure game. It got good reviews because it was a good game, but it was a game about death with really odd graphics. It was kind of off-putting. And then there was Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh – that was odd. There was a lot of bondage and it was a horror film, so that didn’t sell very well, so they used that as an excuse too.” Leisure Suit Larry 8 was cancelled and Lowe’s involvement with Sierra came to an abrupt end.

  Similar things were happening across the Atlantic where French game designer Philippe Ulrich was finding the tide had turned decisively against the adventure games that he had been making. “Publishing houses abandoned the genre,” said Ulrich, who co-founded adventure game specialists Cryo Interactive after quitting Infogrames in the early 1990s. “It was too expensive, too complex, you needed authors, interactive brainstorming sessions, super-duper artificial intelligence. You really had to get into bed with movie industry people. I was fired from Cryo exactlor that: ‘Phil, sorry, but you’re too old and you come up with complex and expensive games. We want to emulate Kodak and offer disposable games’. So I decided to turn to music production and succeeded in selling two million albums within a few months. But I consider the whole thing as my big failure: I did not succeed in showing the world that adventure games were a major genre.”