Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  Within three years of Grim Fandango’s release, adventure games had faded into obscurity, kept alive only by a small-but-loyal following in mainland Europe, particularly Germany.

  Almost as surprising as the sudden death of adventure games was the emergence of first-person shooters as a new vehicle for video game storytelling around the same time. While first-person shooters had become hugely popular in North America and Europe after Doom, the genre was known for its focus on straightforward action. Most first-person shooters subscribed to Id co-founder John Carmack’s view that video game stories were as unnecessary as plots in pornographic movies and concentrated on an adrenaline-pumping gun fights instead. The few first-person shooters that tried to add more substance to their back story, such as Epic Games’ 1998 title Unreal, offered little that could be considered comparable to depth to the narratives of adventure games.

  For Epic, the story was simply there to help distinguish Unreal from the kill ’em all action of Id’s Quake II. “We wanted to make the anti-Quake,” said Cliff Bleszinski, who co-designed Unreal with James Schmalz. “We were always for years in the shadow of Id Software. We looked at Quake and what it was doing and, as much as we were fans of it, we wanted to do a counter-programme. They were doing dark, brown dungeons and we wanted to make beautiful, colourful sky cities and things like that.”[8]

  But just 20 days after Grim Fandango’s launch, Valve - a Washington state game studio - took the genre in a new direction with the release of Half-Life. Half-Life opened with 20 minutes of nothing much. Cast as scientist George Freeman, the player spent the opening minutes of Valve’s first-person shooter waiting for a monorail to transport them to the research lab they worked in. Once there they had to put on their hazmat gear and pass through a number of security checkpoints on his way to the lab where Freeman worked. Such a sedate and uneventful introduction to an action game was unheard of. Most games sought to throw players headfirst into the action with minimal amounts of build-up or scene setting, preferring a ‘here’s a gun, let’s go’ approach. But Half-Life’s 20 minutes of near inaction allowed it to convey the background to its world, plot and lead character without the need to resort to text. And even once Freeman’s experiment goes wrong opening a portal through which deadly creatures flood onto Earth, the game continued to develop the story through visual cues rather than reams of text or dialogue.

  One of the most effective was when the military arrived at the lab. Initially the player assumes they are a rescue team but when they begin executing survivors the understanding that they are there to eliminate the witnesses is conveyed instantly as part of the action. While Half-Life’s story lacked the depth of the stories offered in games such as Grim Fandango and Planescape: Torment, its ‘show don’t tell’ approach to narrative made the case for a new way of thinking about how to explain and present stories within a video game. Half-Life’s within-the-game storytelling heralded a beginning of an augmentation process that would turn first-person shooters from straightforward trigger-happy adrenaline pumping games into experiences that combined action, interactive fiction, role-playing and cinematic presentation. By the time Half-Life was released the next great leap forward for this ambitious fusion of genres was already in development at Ion Storm, the Dallas game studio formed by John Romero after his departure from Id in 1997.

  When Romero founded Ion Storm he was one of world’s premiere game designers. He had a track record for creating multi-million-selling games that sent players wild with excitement and a rock star image, complete with long waist-length black hair, to match. With such a reputation Romero quickly landed a huge publishing deal for Ion Storm. UK game publisher Eidos Interactive, empowered by the success of Tomb Raider, agreed a three-to-six game deal with Romero’s new outfit that was worth at least $13 million. “It wasn’t quite a blank cheque but it had a lot of zeroes on it,” said Jeremy Heath-Smith, an executive on the Eidos board at the time.

  With the money pouring in, Romero turned Ion Storm into his dream game studio. The company leased the glass-roofed penthouse offices of the 54-storey JPMorgan Chase Tower in Dallas and hired an expensive interior design agency to redecorate it to their tastes.[9] Romero also hired Warren Spector, a game producer who had worked on landmark titles such as Wing Commander and Ultima Underworlds: The Stygian Abyss, to head a second branch of the company in Austin, luring him to Ion Storm with the promise that he could make the game of his dreams.

  Spector’s dream game was Deus Ex, a fusion of first-person shooter and role-playing game that built on the ideas he had explored in 1994’s System Shock. Deus Ex was a PC game about terrorism that explored conspiracy theories, government bureaucracy, the nature of capitalism, access to medical treatments and genetic engineering.[10] While Romero was a maker of primal and purist games, Spector used the opportunity Ion Storm’s cash afforded him to create an ambitious, intelligent and literary game. Set in 2052, Deus Ex cast players as a United Nations counter-terrorist agent fighting the widespread terrorism of the era.[11]

  As well as exploring current affairs, Deus Ex was gave players the freedom to decide how to carry out their missions, instead of forcing them down pre-determined paths. Players could sneak into a building to steal documents or charge in all guns blazing or hack into their computer systems and turn their security guns against any guards. Each mission could be completed in different ways and the choice was the players’ alone. Some of choices made during missions also affected the game’s narrative. A gun battle that led to the death of civilians could, for example, result in the player’s character, JC Denton, being berated by his bosses. The whole approach felt revolutionary, said Sheldon Pacotti, one of Deus Ex’s scriptwriters: “What I got excited about was trying to make something real in a video game: real characters, real environments.”

  The Deus Ex team aimed to reinforce the sense that players were part of a real world with the addition of everyday objects in the game’s locations that ranged from basketballs that could be bounced to books containing readable extracts of John Milton’s 17th century poem Paradise Lost. Pacotti also paid a lot of attention to ensuring the dialogue for the game was as realistic as he could make it. “Writers go through these evolutions where they discover the basics of writing,” he said. “At the time I was discovering voice and was working hard on learning how to write a variety of different voices, so I put a lot of energy and thought into trying to make every type of character sound unique and authentic. I used the bus a lot then and I had a notepad and would write down phrases that I heard people say. There’s no way to write voice without primary source. There was one book I had that was interviews with teenage gang members in Los Angeles – just transcripts of discussions.”

  Released in 2000, Deus Ex marked another major step forward for attempts to tell stories within the context of an action game. Its grey moral choices and the appearance that the player’s decisions affected the game was a revelation at a time when linearity was the norm, even though Deus Ex’s choices were largely illusionary. “There were changes based on the decision you made but at the end of the day the players were all going to go through the same missions, so there weren’t huge diversions of the plot,” said Pacotti. “Some choices felt bigger than they might have been. There’s a point where you get confronted by one of your co-workers and told to assassinate an informant. You can choose to follow the order or you can disobey or you can actually turn and kill your co-worker. And for about a mission after that you’re a fugitive – you’ve basically committed a crime and you have to come back and report to your boss. All the conversations for that mission depend on that. It’s a little bioke and mirrors though because you’re going to go through the mission in the same way and get the same brief at the end but the mission itself is coloured differently because of this choice and hopefully that makes players feel the world is reacting to them and that they really have changed something.”

  By the time Deus Ex was published, however, Ion Storm was in serious trouble. The
Dallas office had burned through all of the money Eidos had stumped up and Romero’s own overhyped game John Romero’s Daiktana had become the butt of internet jokes and a commercial disaster. “Ion Storm spun out of control and as much as we were monitoring that it took us a while to get our arms around exactly what we were dealing with and we were dealing with an unbelievably out of control beast,” said Heath-Smith.

  While Ion Storm would eventually close down, Deus Ex’s literary and moralistic aspirations would be an important influence on other story-driven action games most notably Fallout 3, Bethesda’s 2008 reboot of the 1997 role-playing game Fallout as an action-driven role-playing game set in a vast world comparable in scale to the studio’s The Elder Scrolls games. “We knew Fallout 3 was going to be primarily first-person but would also be a role-playing game at heart with lots of systems controlling things ‘under the hood’,” said Emil Pagliarulo, lead designer and writer for Fallout 3. “It just so happens that that description also perfectly describes Deus Ex. It did what we wanted to do years earlier and did it brilliantly. It was a shooter, it was a role-playing game, it had great environments and it offered players choices that really mattered.”

  Fallout 3 took place in a world that experienced an alternative history after the end of the Second World War. Microprocessors were never invented, but laser guns were. Society, culture and fashion remained stuck in the 1950s and, most importantly of all, the Cold War did result in all-out nuclear war that turned most of the US into a inhospitable and irradiated wasteland where survivors and their descendents scratched out living under constant threat of attack from mutant beasts, bandits and slave masters. “In Fallout 3 there are really two major stories being told at the same time,” said Pagliarulo. “There’s the story of the present with the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave and all that stuff. But there’s also this story of a country that was annihilated by nuclear war. It was a very distinct world, a sort of Walt Disney-esque World of Tomorrow where you had the mores and fashions of the 1950s combined with the technology of the 25th century.”

  In line with the storytelling approach pioneered by Half-Life, Fallout 3 told the story of the world that once was by showing rather than telling; from the ruined landmarksWashington D.C. to the skeletal remains of the protestors, who had hoped to gain entry to the nuclear bunker the player’s character grew up in after the bombs fell, that still gripped placards reading ‘we’re dying out here’. “The set dressing – the dead bodies and the empty cribs – that’s the stuff that tells the story of the world that came before. The world that led to the Wasteland,” said Pagliarulo. “You can’t have one without the other and it’s that juxtaposition that makes the Fallout world so special.”

  Fallout 3 also sought to challenge players with moral choices that, in contrast to the good versus evil choices of most video games, delved into sometimes uncomfortably grey decisions. “We do require the player to make some really difficult moral decisions sometimes,” said Pagliarulo. “Using The Pitt downloadable content as an example, we force players to choose the fate of an innocent baby.[12] I think we really pushed the limits of players’ comfort zones with that.”

  Another game to use its story to explore morality was 2007’s BioShock, a Deus Ex-esque fusion of first-person shooter and role-playing game developed by Irrational Games, the creators of System Shock 2. The game took place in Rapture, an underwater Art Deco city created by business tycoon Andrew Ryan in 1946 as a libertarian paradise where the world’s greatest minds would be free from the dead hand of government that was inspired by novelist and libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged.[13] “I read the book many years ago. I was always attracted to her as a storyteller first, she was a great storyteller,” said Ken Levine, the game’s creative director who modelled Ryan on Rand and her beliefs. “She was absolutely certain of what she believed in, without a doubt, and that’s what makes for great heroes and villains. I’m frankly sacred by certainty; I never really know what the right thing to do is. I think the people that do are often bullish – they come up with the most amazing things. The fact that Rand stood up in a time where all these elements - the church, the government – were saying we’re just part of this larger thing, for her to say ‘you know what, selfishness is not a bad word, it’s ok to just be interested in your interest, why do I have a responsibility beyond that’ - that’s so brave, that’s so empowering in a lot of ways because you realise that you have all these other obligations because those people want you to do things for them. It was freeing philosophy but it’s not all right, it’s not what I live my life by.”

  In BioShock the player ends up in Rapture 14 years after Ryan and his followers sealed the doors and left the restrictions of government behind them. In the intervening years, however, Ryan’s dream of a laissez-faire society had crumbled to dust after breakthroughs in stem cell technology resulted in people giving themselves superhuman powers and turning on each other. Eventually, the widespread use of the technoloy caused the population to become increasingly mutated and insane. BioShock’s absorption of Rand’s ideas provoked a lot of discussion about whether it was a critique of libertarianism, a defence of communism or a game that aimed to question the idea of political certainty.

  “Hopefully I got people, through a video game, to talk about that kind of thing,” said Levine. “Games have been so self-limiting for so long about the topics they will take on. There’s an issue of a lack of security and I’ll put myself in here – I’ll be working on BioShock and I’ll be writing some of these pseudo-Jacobist streams and I’m thinking ‘Jesus Christ who wants to listen to this’? I’m still surprised it sold as many units as it did – three million or whatever – because it’s pretty out there topic wise. I think game developers underestimate the average gamer. Their tastes are broad; they are not a monolithic or monogamous group. They have a lot of tastes that are diverse and BioShock demonstrates that.”

  The following year, Grand Theft Auto IV, sought to bridge the divide between the open-world freedom it offered and the richer, more nuanced narratives and characters that games were increasingly embracing. The result was the anti-hero Niko Bellic, a veteran of the Yugoslavian wars of the early 1990s who moves to Liberty City in search of the American Dream. “The more we dug about and researched, the more fascinating the eastern European situation became,” said Houser. “You’ve got people who came to the US 15 years ago who may have been involved in very intense, terrifying conflicts in eastern Europe and they’ve experienced the sort of post-communism meltdown that’s taken place. Some of these people have been in wars and they all split – everyone went elsewhere.”

  The complex and torn Bellic represented one of the most emotionally rounded lead characters ever seen in a game. A man haunted by the horrors of a past he tries in vain to escape, who is both naïve about the reality of life in the US and bemused by the cultural divide. And, as the game’s story progresses, Bellic becomes a man ever more mournful of the loss of the hope he once had about his new life in America.

  But while the writing had come on in leaps and bounds, Grand Theft Auto remained primarily a game about freedom offering a redesigned Liberty City that not only delivered the expected leap in visual detail but felt more alive and more real than ever before. To create the Liberty City of Grand Theft Auto IV, Rockstar North took thousands of photographs of the virtual metropolis’s real-life inspiration, New York City, so it could rebuild the city piece by piece out of polygons. And more than any previous game in the series, Grand Theft Auto IV allowed players to enjoy just experiencing its digital city. From spending a day on the pier eating hot dogs and taking in the sights with a tourist telescope to surfing the web at one of the TW@ internet cafés dotted around the city and spending a night at a comedy club watching performances by real-life comedians such as Ricky Grevais and Katt Williams, Liberty City circa 2008 offered an unrivalled sense of freedom to explore and experience.

  Grand Theft Auto IV, which had taken a team of ar
ound 150 people four years to make, brought together the two major trends of big-budget games in 2000s – richer storytelling and player freedom – to create the video game equivalent of a James Cameron blockbuster. It sold more than 13 million copies, making it one of the biggest hits of 2008, but more than that it summed up the scale of ambition and artistry of the big budget games that had emerged during that decade.

  But as Grand Theft Auto IV and others delivered ever more expensive and bold visions of video gaming, a lo-fi counter-weight to these swaggering, globe-straddling, blockbusters was taking shape, driven by a desire to revive the artistic free-for-all that existed back in the early days of video games.

  [1]. He would eventually be named as Claude during a brief appearance in 2004’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

  [2]. David Jones, like Dailly, was one of DMA Design’s co-founders back in 1988. Keith Hamilton was the team leader and programmer on Grand Theft Auto. David Ozbourn was an artist at DMA.

  [3]. The three cities were Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas.

  [4]. Grand Theft Auto did use 3D, but its fixed overhead view was more reminiscent of 2D racing games such as Super Sprint.

  [5]. Driver, however, cast the players as an undercover cop out to win the trust of a group of gangsters by helping them evade the police rather than embracing the nihilism of Grand Theft Auto.

  [6]. Programmers Leslie Benzies, Adam Fowler and Obbe Vermeij plus artist Aaron Garbut, who had moved to DMA Design’s new offices in Edinburgh that were opened after it was bought by Rockstar Games in 1999.

  [7]. A place where, according to Aztec folklore, people went after death before embarking on a perilous four-year journey to the after world of Mictlan.