Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  The Experimental Games Workshop had established itself as the annual gathering of the indie game movement, a forum where the individuals and teams that were taking game creation back to the free-for-all experimentation of the early 1980s could unite. The workshop started out in 2002 as a low-key offshoot of the Game Developernference that showcased unusual lo-fi creations such as Jonathan Blow’s Air Guitar, which used a web cam to allow players to strum imaginary six-strings to create music, and Eric Zimmerman’s Arcadia, a collection of simple VCS 2600-style games that are displayed and played simultaneously.

  Since that modest beginning it had grown in size and influence, serving up a mixture of the bizarre and groundbreaking to an audience of inspiration-seeking game developers and acting as an early champion of new ideas such as the tower defense mods created by players of WarCraft III that would later became a new game genre.

  The year Healey arrived to show off Rag Doll Kung Fu, the indie games movement was reaching critical mass. Other demos shown that year included an early version of Blow’s Braid, a brain-aching platform game coated in a narrative that subverted the traditional princess-rescuing storylines of Super Mario Bros and revolved around manipulating time to solve puzzles. Alongside that was Attack of the Killer Swarm, a game put together in a day by future 2D Boy Gabler. Set on a backdrop of a faded sepia photograph of a street scene, the player controls the ‘killer swarm’ - a mass of sketchy pencil lines that could be swished around the screen and used to hurl small people wandering on the streets into the air to the accompaniment of jaunty classical music and their screams of horror.

  Healey’s presentation, put together just an hour earlier, went down a storm. “I got a lot of laughs and it just so happened there were some people from Valve in the audience and they came up to me afterwards and said it’s perfect for what we want to do with Steam – sell games. I flew to Seattle the next day to meet their founder Gabe Newell and did the deal there and then. It was all a bit of a mad rollercoaster. That was the first non-Valve game they ever released on Steam, so I was a bit of a guinea pig in some ways.”

  Rag Doll Kung Fu was quickly joined on Steam by more games. Among them was Darwinia, an unusual real-time strategy game dressed in distinctive 1980s retro-computer graphics. Darwinia was the creation of Introversion, a British game studio formed in 2001 by three university friends: Thomas Arundel, Chris Delay and Mark Morris.

  From the day it formed, Introversion set out to distance itself from the market-driven creations of the mainstream games business, seeking instead to revive the freewheeling games culture of the early UK games industry. “I remember growing up playing so many different and varied video games, in my case on the Spectrum and then the Amiga,” said Morris. “The games that you would have in your collection would all be quite different in form and layout – just crazy concepts. You would get games magazine cover disks and you really didn’t know what you were going to put in and play next. But by the end of the ’90s it had all become less about the innocent and child-like gaming experience and moreout the attempt to have higher-resolution graphics, like the driving games that stopped being push left and you’ll turn left, push right and you’ll turn right, into these more complicated driver sims. What we were seeing was because of the publisher-developer model and the amount of money it cost to get a game in front of the consumer, anything that was creative and didn’t fit into the publisher’s master control spreadsheets was going to get cut.”

  So when Delay, the studio’s creative driving force, came up with Uplink, a paranoia-inducing game where players were hired by corporations to damage their rivals, frame the innocent and crash the stock market by hacking into computers, the three figured they could use the internet to bypass the publishing world. “It was 2001, so the internet had been around but probably not mainstream at that point – my parents probably weren’t wired in at that stage, but we knew that we could, as a company, handle people’s transactions over the internet,” said Morris. “We couldn’t distribute electronically, but we could ship out physical units so the view was we were going to put Uplink in front of the masses and if they liked it they would be able to buy it.”

  Uplink struck a nerve with the video game press, which promoted it heavily. Soon Introversion was inundated with orders and approaches from video game publishers interested in signing their surprise hit. “We were getting publisher offers for Uplink but they were just atrocious,” said Morris. “We were selling 30,000 units a month and publishers were saying we’ll give you $10,000. That kind of made us realise that the industry, the whole model in terms of development, in terms of creativity was just fundamentally broken at its core back then. We went on the campaign trail to a certain degree really, yelling at publishers and being very angry and trying to convince developers – not big developers but smaller ones – that there was a different way.”

  Valve’s opening up of Steam made this different way even easier. “Steam allowed us to reach so many more people,” said Morris. “I actually argued not to go with Steam. I thought all we were going to do by giving Valve the opportunity to sell our games on Steam was to potentially lose some of the sales from our own website and give away some security and control. I was so wrong. The number of sales that Valve can deliver through Steam is just phenomenonal.”

  The ability for indie game makers to reach audiences without the need for a publisher expanded further in 2005 when Microsoft launched its second games console, the Xbox 360. With its hard drive and wireless broadband connection, the Xbox 360 allowed users to buy and download games via its Xbox Live Arcade service that stocked games ranging from remakes of early 1980s coin-op hits and indie games to full Xbox 360 games more usually sold through shops. The following year both the Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3 consoles launched boasting similar services of their own. The arrival of the touch-screen Apple iPhone and its accompanying AppStore in 2007 added another platform through which small developers could reach out to a mass audience via the internet. The establishment of these online game stores finally gave indie game developers the access and profile they needed to really get their work in front of potential buyers.[3] Gabler and Carmel’s 2D Boy was one of the first indie developers to really reap the benefits of the new connections between player and creator that resulted from these platforms.

  The pair’s first creation was World of Goo, a spiritual successor to Gabler’s earlier non-commercial indie game Tower of Goo. Like Attack of the Killer Swarm, Gabler created Tower of Goo for the Experimental Gameplay Project he helped form while a student at Carnegie Mellon University. In Tower of Goo players built wobbly towers by connecting blobs of slime that linked together like scaffolding. The challenge was to try and build the tallest tower possible without the structure toppling over. “It started with 100 little goo balls on a little green hill and the goal was to build a tower up to a cloud 25 metres high,” said Gabler. “People on the internet had a lot of fun with it, competing to build the tallest towers, and even sculpting things like cats and pensises. It seemed like a good idea to expand on the basic goo-construction mechanic and turn Tower of Goo into a bigger, more detailed World of Goo.”

  Working on laptops while sat in San Francisco coffee shops, the pair evolved Tower of Goo into the more rounded World of Goo. Players now, in an echo of DMA Design’s Lemmings, had to get their goo balls sucked out of each level through a pipe that they could only reach with their gooey construction projects. Each level presented a different construction challenge. It could be building a bridge across a gaping chasm or constructing a tower of goo inside a rotating washing machine drum that constantly knocked over their structures. Released on Nintendo’s WiiWare platform, Steam and through 2D Boy’s own website in late 2008, World of Goo became one of the biggest-selling indie games of the 2000s. “World of Goo has surpassed every one of our expectations,” said Gabler. “It has sold a few hundred thousand. Nintendo told us it holds the record for being in the number one spot on WiiWare for the most weeks.”<
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  The year of World of Goo’s release marked a turning point for the commercial viability of indie games. As well as World of Goo, Blow’s critically acclaimed Braid became the second-best selling game on Xbox Live Arcade in 2008. The Behemoth also scored a success with Castle Crashers, a million-selling scrolling fighting game sold through the Xbox Live Arcade that was reminiscent of Sega’s 1989 coin-op Golden Axe. By the start of the 2010s indie game development had blossomed into a diverse and eclectic movement thats reinventing old genres, exploring new frontiers of game design and often outperforming major publishers with surprise hits such as Braid. As well as trying out new forms of games and rebooting faded genres, indie game teams also began to inject their work with more personal or provocative themes.

  Introversion’s Defcon, a nuclear war sim inspired by the fictional game Global Thermonuclear War featured in the 1983 movie WarGames, turned players into a bunker-dwelling general plotting nuclear strikes on a map of the world in the hope that once the nuclear war is over you emerge victorious because you killed more people than the other side. “We didn’t release it to make a political statement, but the game does that because you’re sitting in your bunker and the data that is coming back to you is the city name and the number of people that you killed. That stark 6.2 million people dead figure,” said Morris.

  “I don’t think Defcon would ever have got commissioned by a publisher. Never in a million years. Publishers always want to be mass market they look at things and ask what is going to be the turn off in this game. How many people are we going to offend by calling it a genocide ‘em up? Why would you want to play a game that’s miserable? My response is look at all the melancholy albums that are out there and sell in massive numbers. How many weepy films? There’s absolutely no reason why games can’t evoke that same kind of slightly depressed, contemplative emotional state in the player that other mediums do.”

  Every Day the Same Dream also served up a melancholy game experience although it focused on the plight of a lone office worker to deliver what its Italian creator Paolo Pedercini described as a comment on “alienation and refusal of labour”. Set in a drab grey Art Deco cartoon world, Every Day the Same Dream presents players with their faceless office worker’s monotonous routine of dress, commute, work where only attempting to escape the tedium offers any reward. In stark contrast to most video games, Pedercini’s game was a joyless experience where even the brief respites from the tedium ultimately failed to result in the kind of escapist catharsis most games would offer for solving their mysteries.

  Others used their games to create more upbeat emotions. Thatgamecompany’s Flower, a meditative game released via the PlayStation Network in 2009, gave players control of the breeze so that they could create swirling ribbons of flower petals that swoosh across the countryside bringing life to dead fields of grass and wheat. “The idea for Flower grew organically from a number of inspirations,” said Kellee Santiago, who co-founded Thatgamecompany with Flower’s designer Jenova Chen. “One was to try and capture the feeling of being in a large flower field. To capture both the sense of beauty when you see them all, but also the visceral feeling of being up close to an individual flower. If you do a Google image search for ‘flower’ you discover photographs from people all over th world, all fascinated with this aspect of nature. Technically, it was an exciting challenge. What would happen if we took this aspect of video games that is normally an afterthought on the edge of the world – the bushes and grasses – and put it right in front and make the entire game about it?”

  By 2010 the creative boom of the indie games movement had begun to percolate upwards through the game industry, slowly but surely influencing the makers of the multi-million dollar games that helped prompt the movement’s formation. “One of the reasons I love going to the Game Developers’ Conference is to go to the independent games festival because it’s absolutely amazing,” said Cliff Bleszinski, designer of the 2006 action blockbuster Gears of War. “Look at how Portal came about.[4] It was a little independent game called Narbacular Drop and then Valve took it up, nursed it and worked with the creators and came up with one of the most amazing titles ever.”

  For Lionhead Studios’ Molyneux the ideas flooding out of the indie scene were already having an influence on his thinking about games: “Braid was a great example, not only was there that time mechanic but when you launch Braid there’s this little character on screen and straight away you’re in the game. I’ve been inspired by that. Castle Crashers putting the weapon-changing stuff in the world rather than outside the world is, I think, really good. There’s not been one example of freshness and newness, there’s like 10 going: ‘Hey you, old-codger game designers, why have you been doing it like that?’”

  As 2009 drew to a close video games stood on the crest of a new era of creativity powered by both the grand visions of leading game designers and the fizzing experimental wildness of the indie movement. Nearly 50 years had elapsed since the creators of Spacewar! became the first people to really experience what a video game was. In that half century the video game had evolved into an entertainment medium that encompassed experiences as diverse as Tetris, Grand Theft Auto IV, Wii Fit, BioShock, Pac-Man, Mortal Kombat and Every Day the Same Dream.

  Yet the creativity that had taken the primitive chess games, shoot ‘em ups, maze chases and ping-pong games of the 1960s and early 1970s and turned it not only into a huge international business, but a powerful and diverse artistic medium was showing no sign of slowing down. Far from settling into some kind of creative maturity, the video game remains an art form that still feels as if it has barely got started.

  [1]. Pogo.com is an advertising-funded website offering a wide variety of online games, including Bingo, Poker and board games such as Monopoly.

  [2]. SNK’s cartoonish Metal Slug series had kept the flame alive for run and gun games both in the arcades and on home consoles, but beyond that the genre had faded away in the early 1990s.

  [3]. Japanese indie developers had more outlets for their work. Japan’s thriving doujin scene – which is largely based around indie manga – is so popular that there are dedicated shops that will sell their games. The internet has, however, helped doujin-soft developers get their work seen beyond Japan’s shores.

  [4]. Portal was a 2007 puzzle game set in Valve’s Half-Life 2 world.

  Miscellany

  Gameography

  Hardware Glossary

  References

  Acknowledgements

  Gameography

  With the origins of video games dating as far back as the late 1940s, this overview is necessarily partial, selective and brief. Online game databases MobyGames (www.mobygames.com) and Arcade History (

  www.arcade-history.com ) provide more comprehensive listings.

  Playing games designed for obsolete platforms is fraught with difficulty, although re-releases on digital game stores such as Steam, PSN, Xbox Live Arcade and WiiWare together with retail compilations have improved matters greatly. Beyond the re-releases, there’s the second-hand market and the murky world of emulation on PCs and – to a lesser extent – Macs. Emulator software mimics old systems, allowing digital copies of games to be played. Emulation often breaches copyrightlaw.

  The syntax for the game information below is: Game title (Year released, Publisher, Developer/Designer, Platform [Recommended platform if not original], Country of origin). The information is based on the first release of the game. Where the publisher and developer are the same only one is listed.

  Welcome to the maze of twisty little passages…

  Spacewar!

  The first game built for entertainment, the two-player-only Spacewar! (1962, Tech Model Railroad Club, PDP-1, USA), is still good fun. Try it at: http://spacewar.oversigma.com

  Spacewar! directly inspired the first two coin-op games:

  Galaxy Game (1971, Computer Recreations, Bill Pitts & Hugh Tuck, Coin-op, USA): Spacewar! Xeroxed.

  Computer Space (1971,
Nutting Associates, Nolan Bushnell & Ted Dabney, Coin-op, USA): Great ’70s sci-fi cabinet, primitive game. It in turn inspired the slight but fun Tank (1974, Atari, Steve Bristow & Lyle Rains, Coin-op, USA). Tank was later remade as Combat (1977, Atari, VCS 2600, USA).

  Spacewar! also inspired the first vector graphics arcade game: Space Wars (1977, Cinematronics, Larry Rosenthal, Coin-op, USA). After that retina-searing vector graphics became a common sight in the arcades until they were cast aside around 1984. Many great moments:

  Tailgunner (1979, Cinematronics, Tim Skelly, Coin-op, USA): Wireframe 3D space fighting.

  Warrior (1979, Cinematronics, Tim Skelly, Coin-op, USA): Ghostly overhead sword duels.

  Lunar Lander (1979, Atari, Rich Moore & Howard Delman, Coin-op, USA): A tense battle against gravity. Based on Lunar Lander (1973, DEC, Jack Burness, DEC GT40, US the vector update of the text-only Lunar (1969, Jim Storer, PDP-8, USA).

  Asteroids (1979, Atari, Ed Logg & Lyle Rains, Coin-op, USA): Vector gaming’s finest moment and Atari’s biggest-selling coin-op. Enduring rock blasting.

  Battlezone (1980, Atari, Ed Rotberg, Coin-op, USA): Groundbreaking wireframe 3D tank sim.