All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture

by Harold Goldberg

  To help, there were enigmatic books in the game written by a shadowy scribe called Atrus. As you read these tomes of science fiction mystery called The Ages, your skin crawled. You anticipated the adventure to come, and the game play. But you were creeped out by the unknown; these books were strange portals that let you travel to beckoning virtual worlds and solve the many puzzles.

  But these books weren’t enough. Myst was generally inscrutable unless you bought a step-by-step instruction book for an extra $10 or $20. Part of the addiction to the game had to do with the human need to win and to finish things. Myst, with its 2,500 images that were like paintings and its sixty-six minutes of video, kept you coming back with its hyper-realistic and moving paintings and puzzles. Many of its twenty-six musical compositions were lulling and ambient, not blaring like the amusement park sideshow that was Super Mario Bros. Part of your mind was frantic and frustrated, trying to figure out the solutions (without the hint book), while another part prevented teeth gnashing and mouse throwing because it was being soothed by the kind of music you hear in a yoga class.

  In the game, you assumed the role of The Stranger, trapped on an island, trying to solve a mystery of mammoth proportions. Just that name—The Stranger—made the game cool beyond imagination. It was the same stranger toward which many gravitated in other media, the guys on Route 66, Spock on Star Trek, Brando and Dean in the movies, the mystical Phantom Stranger and the spell-conjuring Dr. Strange in comic books, and outsiders like Jack Kerouac and David Foster Wallace in literature. In life, you may have been the outsider/stranger in ways that weren’t good. Maybe you were the nerd who was spat upon by the cool kids. Maybe you were passed over for promotions at work. But in Myst, you were the unfamiliar rambler who could be a hero even as you were isolated and alone. For once, you didn’t simply read about the stranger or watch him passively. Since The Stranger was never seen on-screen, I imagined myself as a bald man wearing the blackest of leather jackets, scuffed Doc Martens with grungy skulls etched upon them, and a menacing owl tattoo on my chest. It was, after all, the era of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. No wonder Myst sold so many millions of copies. It had its own alt rock coolness.

  The story behind Myst is the story of young guys in a garage, making a weird indie game on faith and hope—as cheaply as they could. Tirelessly for two years, Robyn and Rand Miller and five of their pals worked out of their garages in Spokane, Washington, on the game made originally for the Apple Macintosh computer. The Millers were frugal, buying everything from video equipment to dictionaries on sale or used at flea markets. For the sound of bubbles underwater, they placed a tube in a toilet bowl, hooked up a microphone, and blew through the tube. They paid excruciatingly precise attention to detail in the artwork, story, and puzzles, which were mapped out on legal pads. They weren’t making a movie, but they referred to their computer graphics as virtual movie sets and to the software as a virtual camera.

  Myst was one of the first decidedly nonviolent games for adults. The Miller brothers, who had previously made software for children, were sons of a pastor, ingrained with a moral sensibility and the commandments of the Bible. Myst itself was loosely based upon a kids’ game they had made. They didn’t want the character to die and they didn’t want him to shoot anyone. When they talked about it, Rand said to Robyn, “Violence is a big tool in storytelling and one that should not be wielded lightly. If you use violence without any point, people just get immune to it. So let’s do what we think is responsible.” Long hours in a cramped room took their toll. They were almost insane from the constant game making. They made the game harder than most any other game just because they could. Obsessed by their own stories for Myst’s mythology, they loved the idea that they were producing something unequivocally original. Both brothers felt they were creating a game for a niche audience, one that would appreciate their artistry. An old proposal for the game reveals that the Millers expected the game to sell, at most, a hundred thousand copies. Instead, it sold nearly eight million, all on an initial investment of $300,000.

  Yet the Millers’ travails paled in comparison to the pals who decided to make a game filled with live action video. Inspired by a board game and a television show, The 7th Guest and its sequel were so fraught with frights that they drove one of the game designers crazy, literally. Like Myst, The 7th Guest was responsible for selling millions of personal computers. Occasionally terrifying, always campy and over the top, The 7th Guest boldly led the way for the future of horror games. However, the making of The 7th Guest and its follow-up, The 11th Hour, showed in microcosm the rift that could develop when those who held strong ideas about movies worked side by side with those who cared more about game design.

  The 7th Guest co-creator Graeme Devine was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and then moved to Crawley, a south-of-London town famous for its Stone and Bronze Age artifacts. Introduced to computers by his carpenter-turned-techie father, the super-smart nerd with the high-pitched laugh began making and disassembling computer code by the age of ten. He worked on a Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) and TRS-90, learning how graphics worked and where they were positioned in the computer’s memory. He haunted video arcades and tried to remake on his home computer science fiction space games that he loved. The graphics were nothing but black-and-white blips. But for Devine, when a ship disappeared after being hit, it was blowing into a thousand pieces as in Star Wars, full of explosions and fireworks that only the speculative mind could conjure.

  At sixteen, he shocked Atari’s UK office with a demo for a PC version of the popular Pole Position racing game, which he created in one night. But the teen, who had made the demo just for fun, was biting off more than he could chew when he promised Atari to make a full game. With the videogame to code and high school assignments, the deadlines accumulated. Devine told his parents that “the pressure is terrible.” It was the first instance in which he would make the mistake of putting far too much on his plate. While he loved to code, the seemingly harmless obsession would ultimately make his business dealings somewhat star-crossed.

  Devine took a week off from school, and when the principal asked him where he’d gone off to, he told the truth. Rage flushed the principal’s face red, and Devine was promptly expelled. Shortly thereafter, he received a note from the new Atari owner, Jack Tramiel, the Polish-born former taxi driver who’d come from Commodore International. In no uncertain terms, Tramiel said in one paragraph that he would not be paying the 3 percent royalty rate detailed in Devine’s contract for Pole Position. Despite this experience, Devine still wanted to make games. After high school, he created his own company and found some shadowy investors and a cheap space to set up shop, only to find that his partner was on drugs. Freaked out, Devine hastily packed up his belongings and left the office to face a windy and bracing English afternoon. The investors rang him up the next day. A gravelly voice on the end of the phone threatened, “I’m gonna come down there and break your legs.” For a moment, the frozen Devine could barely speak. He began shaking as he promised to meet two goons in the office. On the next day, he spied them from the window as they parked the car outside. He was only nervous now, less timorous—because his father hid behind the door with a golf club, ready to swing at the investors’ heads.

  The stairs creaked. The investors knocked on the door and stepped inside. Everyone was on edge. “Your son is a horrible person. He left us high and dry,” said one goon.

  “He’s untrustworthy, a really bad person.” He took a step toward the boy.

  “You’re the idiots,” growled Devine’s father. “I trust my son.” He raised the golf club. “You get the hell out of here.” He started swinging the club as a weapon, and the goons ducked to avoid the iron head. They grumbled weakly. Then they left. Devine, for some time, was still traumatized, believing they would return.

  He had had his share of bad luck. But the young game maker was certain that it wouldn’t continue. Devine plodded on, working for Martin Alper at Mastertronics, a U
K maker of budget game offerings priced at a couple of pounds and under. It wasn’t the most stimulating work; he was doing more porting of games to the PC. Devine headed to California after Mastertronics opened a US office in 1986. When Alper went on to work at Virgin Interactive (which in 1987 bought a 45 percent stake in Mastertronics), Devine followed. There, Devine became buddies with a young graphics wizard called Rob Landeros. Landeros had mucked around the Berkeley scene doing everything from bawdy underground comics to amazingly lifelike scrimshaw with animals and American Indian motifs. He was a “drop in, drop out” kind of college student, who told Devine he tried successfully to keep from getting a regular job and doing hard work. But Landeros felt he’d found his calling when he began to make artwork on a Commodore 64 and an Amiga computer, pixel by pixel. He would say to others that “it was like taking your first hit of LSD or peyote. Life becomes different.”

  With a portfolio of artwork, a self-programmed card game, and a knack for networking, Landeros had made a name for himself in Southern California without much effort. He didn’t want to work too hard. He found a cushy job at Cinemaware, which was making graphically detailed, story-oriented games like Defender of the Crown. When Landeros met Devine at Virgin, their mutual interest in graphics, story, and technology—along with free trips to tech conventions—forged a strong bond. But in New York City in 1989, a fascinating, odd idea for a game made them inseparable. Or so it seemed.

  At the InterMedia Conference at the Jacob Javits Convention Center (the same place where Atari failed miserably during Toy Fair), the pair witnessed the dawn of the popularization of CD-ROM technology, CDs that could hold an encyclopedic amount of data and still have room for music and video as well. CD-ROMs were a revelation, holding six hundred times the data of floppy disks, the format to which PC game makers had previously been limited. At the show, companies like Compton’s and Microsoft showed off the massive amount of text the disk could store. CD-ROMs were indeed amazing. There was just so much there—videotaped speeches of King and JFK, interactivity, reams of text—it was an educator’s and researcher’s dream. Both Devine and Landeros wanted to make it a gamer’s dream. They began thinking about using the plastic disk to make a game movie-like in ways games had never before been.

  At the Newark airport, the two brainstormed and outlined their plan, with Devine writing a few notes on a paper napkin.

  “We don’t want to do Nintendo games with those blocky little pixely characters jumping around,” said Landeros.

  “I agree. They’re for kids. It’s important to tell a good story. Everyone can play, but it’s more mature,” said Devine.

  Landeros had been an avid board game fan for years. He suggested that the game be a version of Clue, the strategy-oriented murder solving game by Parker Brothers, first created in 1949. Landeros was also a puzzle aficionado, with a subscription to Games magazine and a love for Fool’s Errand, the difficult but award-winning 1987 adventure for Mac computers. Based on foreboding tarot cards, the game featured a hopeful, affable Silly Willy wandering around the countryside in medieval times. Each time he solved a puzzle, he got a piece of map leading to fourteen treasures of the Land of Tarot. The two wanted to meld that idea somehow with their favorite TV show of the time, David Lynch’s creepy, somewhat absurdist mystery Twin Peaks. They spoke excitedly about the dark intelligence of Twin Peaks for a while. Devine wrote the show’s title down on a napkin. Then he circled it.

  Said Devine, “From what we’ve seen at Intermedia, we can add little bits of video to the game.”

  Landeros became excited. “But we can’t have people driving all over the place. By virtue of the technology, which is cool but still limited, we have to keep them confined to one place.” That “one place” would be a creepy old mansion. The appearance would be menacing and ominous, a look that conjured the feeling of pure evil.

  The two friends made an odd pair. Devine had the long hair of an eighties heavy metal guitarist and big black-framed glasses like those that perch on Joyce Carol Oates’s nose. He was often seen wearing a bomber jacket with a smiling Mickey Mouse embroidered on the back. Landeros had a Hollywood slickness about him and often kept his cards close to his vest. He habitually wore a baseball cap and one of those silk stadium jackets so popular in the 1990s. It made him look just a little like a Hollywood director. Together, they were like a Lennon and McCartney of videogames, or at least they could have been.

  At Virgin Interactive, an invigorated Devine worked like a man possessed. He cranked out a twenty-page pitch and game design document and quickly sent it over to Martin Alper, the company president. Alper responded within an hour, asking the pair to lunch at the Farmer’s Market and driving them there in his Rolls-Royce. As they all sipped grossly sweet yogurt shakes, Alper, still a little cagey, said, “I read the pitch. You really want to do this?”

  Devine and Landeros eagerly nodded and said, “Yes.” Devine took a sip of his shake.

  “If this is what you want to do,” Alper said, “I’m afraid I have to fire you.”

  Devine nearly spewed the thick shake onto his boss. He and Landeros were completely shocked. They were director-level middle managers who liked their jobs and salaries. What had they done to deserve dismissal? Alper leaned forward and laid down the law. “It comes with some good news, too. I’m going to give you a contract to make this game.” Yet he cautioned that there was no way in the world that their horror game was going to be profitable. He said it was valuable merely as a proof of concept, as a trophy game that would display what CD-ROMs could do. Then he pounded the table with his fist and said only four people would ever buy it. Alper had some other demands, too, including a request for the two to produce a floppy disk version of The 7th Guest, a next-to-impossible task that the duo immediately pushed to the side. In addition, the pair could not establish offices beyond sixty miles from the Virgin Interactive offices. Alper felt that Devine and Landeros were too unseasoned to leave the fold completely, and he didn’t completely trust them with company money. Having said that, he agreed to provide a healthy budget for the CD-ROM, twice the $200,000 to $300,000 that Virgin usually paid for cartridge games.

  Devine and Landeros broke the rules immediately. They set up shop that November in an office above a tavern more than sixty miles away—far out of state, in the small town of Jacksonville, Oregon, an old gold mining community that perhaps was best known as the home of the original Bozo the Clown. Devine had to be convinced about Oregon after stopping in rainy Ashland, which looked like a dreary logging town. But when their car pulled into Jacksonville, the rain turned to wet snow, with big, fat flakes, and the townspeople gathered around their car to sing Christmas carols. A waving Santa Claus even rode past in a sleigh. Devine saw this popular-culture onslaught as a fortuitous sign. The two found what they saw as the perfect office as well, one with thirty-foot ceilings and a $1,000-a-month rent.

  As Devine packed his boxes, the phone rang. Ken Williams, the persuasive head of Sierra On-Line, which made the King’s Quest adventure games, among others, tried to hire Devine. While his offer of royalties was less then the spoils of the first years of Sierra, when a freelance designer’s cut amounted to an astonishing 30 percent, it still neared 10 percent for games Devine would make for Williams. Devine casually took a bite of cold pizza and said, “Sorry, Ken. I’ve got my own company now.”

  Trilobyte, named by Landeros after a cheeky character in an old underground comic, had only four core employees. The staff was lean, the hours long, and the camaraderie close as could be. Landeros oversaw the script writing. He also kept tabs on the director, who budgeted $25,000 for the two-day video shoot, one that included a cardboard blue screen purchased at a local flea market. During the shoot, done in the Super VHS format, one of the actors fell through the blue screen, which was then taped up. The blue screen was still ruined, and wasn’t even the right shade of blue; the marring showed up in the editing room after the shoot. Trilobyte had to hire expensive video editors to take
out the frames where the tear showed. Within six months, which was the budgeted development cycle, they were running out of money—fast. The 7th Guest was becoming a microcosm of the haphazard nature of the videogame industry, still in its teething phase. Deadlines passed. Milestones were not met. And the game was not finished. Devine and Landeros were suddenly faced with a difficult reality: They had to use their own money to fund Trilobyte.

  Devine began working on creating software within the CD-ROM disk that would play full-motion video. Within days he had a robust but small ninety-kilobyte player called Play that was so good, it was licensed by Autodesk, the makers of the best 3-D animation program of the time. Then Devine figured out a way to compress the huge video files so that they would easily fit on two CD-ROMs. Video had never before been used in a game, nor had video compression. It was genius work, fueled by coffee strong enough to bore holes in a cast iron stomach. Days would pass in the blink of an eye. Surprising to Devine was Landeros’s stamina; he was no longer in his twenties or thirties, but he kept going like an old Timex watch. The royalty money from Autodesk helped everyone tread water. From the shareware version of Play, cash came in via drips and trickles; about ten copies a day on a good day meant an extra $200 for the company. During the rare moments that the duo wasn’t working together, they were watching laser discs together. When UPS delivered Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, they drove to Devine’s home to watch it. When it was over, they watched it again.

  Some of the furniture and house wasn’t finished, and there was some blue space where objects like paintings with moving eyes would be, but by January 1992, they had pieced together a rough demo of the game to take to the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. Once there, they asked the Virgin Interactive representative to remove a videogame version of the Monopoly board game from one of the computers so they could show their game off on a large monitor. As they put The 7th Guest through its paces, word spread throughout the show floor that full-motion video was being shown off in a game, and people swarmed to the booth. Within minutes, it was standing room only, with people peering from the outside in to view the invention. The 7th Guest was the biggest hit of the convention, and the two were treated like emerging Hollywood stars, recognized everywhere on the show floor.