Kutaragi and his minions in Japan may have disliked Crash, but the Americans felt it was the perfect fit for the US audience. Stolar, Cerny, and the small Universal Interactive marketing department were ready to stake their jobs on Crash. Finally, Japan caved. Even if Crash was for kids, and kids weren’t the intended audience for the PlayStation, the US executives convinced Japan that maybe, just maybe, Crash could take a substantial amount of money away from the Mario franchise.
Before Crash was placed on store shelves on August 31, 1996, advertising agency ChiatDay, along with Andrew House and the Sony marketing department, carefully crafted an advertising campaign based on the daffy marsupial. It included a brash television commercial that would cement the bandicoot as a mascot in the minds of the American public. In the thirty-second spot, a man in a Crash Bandicoot outfit traveled to a spot outside the US offices of Nintendo in Redmond, Washington. With a bullhorn, he called out, “Hey, plumber boy, mustache man: Your worst nightmare has arrived.” As he removed a tarp from his rusty flatbed truck and revealed six monitors, all playing video of some portion of the Crash game, he bragged, “We got real time, 3-D, lush organic environments. How does that make you feel? Feel like your days are numbered?” As he was unceremoniously escorted from the property, a security guard asked if his name was Italian. “No,” said Crash. “Bandicoot. It’s an Australian name.” After the spot aired constantly on prime time TV and during football games, Sonic’s Ass was known to millions of Americans. Game magazines pitted Crash against Mario and Sonic. “Who will win the console wars?” was the question every games journalist began to ask.
While the 3DO was dying, Sega had released the CD-ROM-based Saturn console, which did not set American hearts afire due to its higher price of $399, although it did well in Japan. Nintendo’s N64, which still used cartridge games, was a fine machine but with old technology. Cartridge games cost so much more than CDs to produce that the N64 was doomed from the start. With the PlayStation’s price at a more reasonable $299, it had a fighting chance in the United States. But, wondered every Sony executive, could Crash Bandicoot raise PlayStation awareness enough so that it would help sell the console? To make Crash popular in Japan, as well, Naughty Dog made changes for Asian culture, including six hundred in-game hints done by a Tokyo comedian, which would pop up in the game. The changes added what Gavin told Rubin was a “hideous amount of work at no small personal cost.”
If you were a music fan, the first thing that lured you to Crash was the bouncy Afro-Caribbean-influenced soundtrack by Mark Mothersbaugh, the prank-playing cofounder of eighties new wave band Devo. If the rhythm-filled music didn’t get you, the game play, inspired by Nintendo’s landmark Donkey Kong Country, did. There were boxes full of power-ups that the spinning rodent would crash into, along with jungle beasts like wild boars to ride and giant enemies to beat, including the laughing Dr. Neo Cortex, who shot death rays at you from a hovercraft. And then there was Crash himself, madcap and stalwart, almost as speedy as Sonic the Hedgehog, certainly as lovable as Mario. Nerds yearned for Crash action figures, which would eventually be produced by a company called Resaurus and become collector’s items.
Within a month of Crash’s debut, Nintendo released Super Mario 64 for its new system. The game was full of imaginative environs in which gamers could roam freely and explore the plumber’s world like never before. Nintendo would always be successful with Mario. Yet Crash was helping to sell PlayStations the world over, even in Japan, where Mario was considered a kind of miracle-making saint by gamers. What that success demonstrated was the rising power of Sony’s US PlayStation unit. It was their innovation, their marketing prowess, and their games that were responsible for the incredible success of the PlayStation, at least as much as the mother company. Though Sony had been a company that was full of warring fiefdoms, Kutaragi would be forced to see the United States as an equal partner in crime, perhaps one that would be even more powerful than the Japanese PlayStation division. Within three years, fifty million PlayStations had been sold the world over. At a Las Vegas event for Spyro the Dragon, another funny animal game à la Crash Bandicoot, Sony Computer Entertainment COO Kaz Hirai announced that a PlayStation had been sold once every eight seconds since its debut. Sony’s little gray box would be top dog in the videogame industry for years to come. Crash Bandicoot, a silly but powerful soldier in the console wars, had helped to bloody and bow the great Nintendo.
For Sony, Gavin and Rubin would make four Crash Bandicoot games, and the series would eventually sell forty million copies worldwide. But it did not come without a cost. Rubin felt he did not really see his twenties because he had no social life. In fact, he rarely saw the light of day. By the end of the production cycle for those four Crash games, Rubin was losing his hair, not just a little, but in tufts. He was gaining weight from eating junk food. He had developed a strange rash and during his nightly five hours of sleep kept waking up with game ideas. Then he couldn’t get back to sleep. Gavin, too, had his problems—with his back and with serious carpal tunnel syndrome. The industry had aged them before their time. At one point, Gavin told Rubin that he had had only one date for the whole year because he had no time beyond coding games. And in the office, he also was tired of holding the hands of game designers who would freak out and lose it during crunch time. Gavin understood that the tight schedule could lead to breakdowns. In videogames, breakdown was the new black. But Naughty Dog was a team; there were millions of dollars at stake. Millions. “How dare anyone we brought in to work try to break up the team at deadline time?” he thought. “Look at Jason.” Jason would fall asleep under his desk or next to the latest Naughty Dog on its dog bed. He didn’t bitch. That’s just how it was. Long hours were what you signed up for.
One night during a drunken binge at a sake bar in Japan, Kelly Flock suggested that Rubin and Gavin sell the company to Sony. Not long after, Rubin took a month off to go to the mountains to muse and meditate. When he came down from the mountains, he talked with Gavin. They had been together since childhood. They knew each other’s proclivities almost as well as twins who could sense each other’s emotions. Rubin didn’t have to say much, except to discuss other offers from Microsoft and Electronic Arts. Both agreed they had done almost all they could with Naughty Dog. Both knew that if they sold the company to Sony, it would be in the able hands of game designers the pair had mentored. They had become millionaires many times over, and selling the company would just add to their massive coffers. Sure, they would work again. But, as with the many game changers before them who cashed in their chips, it was great to know they didn’t have to.
What they had done with Crash, in spite of the early resistance from Japan, not only created a series of bestsellers. Gavin and Rubin had launched a series of bestsellers that kids liked so much that they had their parents, who often played the game with their kids, buy the Crash action figures. Kids flocked to McDonald’s for the Crash Bandicoot Happy Meal toys. Most important, though, those kids remained loyal to the PlayStation as they grew into teens. And when those Crash fans grew into young adults, they descended upon the next generation, the PlayStation 2, like vultures. In that sense, Crash Bandicoot was more central than Gran Turismo to Sony’s rise as the preeminent videogame platform in the middle nineties and on into the early twenty-first century.
WHEN THE ADVENTURE ENDS
They were killing it. They were sucking the life out of the most important series she had created, something millions of fans had loved for a decade and a half. Outside, it was a beautiful late day in the spring of 1998 in the Pacific Northwest, and the sun peeked out from the clouds. But it didn’t matter. In the car, it was black. This was more than just difficult; it was a nightmare. And there was very little Roberta Williams could do about it.
She drove home to Ken, her husband, the man with whom she had started it all. Then she got under the covers and she cried. Usually, she was not like this. She knew her own mind. She knew what worked. She knew how to make games, inte
lligent games. For God’s sake, she was a videogame pioneer. Roberta Williams had helped to turn Sierra On-Line into a billion-dollar business, a player among players. Through the many ups and downs of their business, she had learned how to be tough.
But not this tough.
That night, she wished she could go back from 1998 to 1980, when she and Ken had first met. They were teenagers who met on a double date, just after graduating from Garey High School in Pomona, California. They both dumped their dates and fell in love. Roberta was shy, kind of a post-hippie girl who was more Emily Dickinson than Dorothy Parker. As a child, she loved to stay at home, quietly reading fairy tales and adventure novels, like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. She would lie awake at night, thinking of those stories, inserting herself as a character, whisking herself away to faraway fantasy lands. She hung out in the library, too, taking home as many books as she could carry.
Roberta thought Ken, who was taller than she and a man’s man, was shy as well. But he made up for it by trying hard to be outgoing. He told Roberta he wanted to study physics. “I want to be somebody and I want to be rich,” he would say. They had deep, exciting conversations and shared the same Midwestern values. The two would marry before they were twenty.
Ken tried to study physics at Cal Poly in Pomona, but switched to computer science in his second year. Roberta yearned for a career, too. She started college. She had some jobs in which she dabbled with computers. But nothing really inspired her. She felt bad about the fits and starts. It was the height of the women’s movement, and she felt she was letting feminism down by not having a career. Then Roberta became pregnant with their first son. Those damn Midwestern values crept in; if you got married, you stayed home and raised the kids. The pair retreated to the Midwest for a while, but that experience was stifling. Back in Southern California, Ken taught himself all about computers, and when he didn’t know about a programming language for a job, he said he did anyway. If he got the job, he’d pull all-nighters reading the technical manuals to get up to speed. And he always got up to speed.
From time to time, Ken would bring a computer terminal home so he could access the mainframe for one of his clients. There was no monitor, just a printer with a roll of paper, a keyboard, and a modem. To impress her, Ken introduced Roberta to games, including Colossal Cave, a very early adventure game by Will Crowther and Don Woods, with no graphics, just text. Made in the seventies, it was based on the world’s longest cave system, near Brownsville, Kentucky.
For Roberta, typing in her Cave commands and waiting for the computer to answer was not unlike lying awake at night and starring in her own adventures. In her mind, she would wander around underground caverns and meet a little dwarf who would shoot arrows at her. She might get stuck in some interminable maze. Gigantic snakes might block the way. Gruesome trolls would ask for money. Sometimes she typed in the word “Xxzzy,” to teleport magically to another location. Roberta died a lot while playing the game. But she always came back. Sometimes she could not stop thinking about Colossal Cave. She couldn’t stop playing, even to change the kids’ (she now had two) diapers. She couldn’t sleep, staying up all night, thinking about how to move past a dragon. What words would she type in? What was the proper logic to use to move forward?
All the while, she thought about two things. “If I’m addicted to this game, other people must be, too. And I always fancied myself as a writer. I can make a game that’s as good as Colossal Cave. Maybe I can even make it better.” While Ken was away working during the day, she mapped out a game on paper based loosely on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, the bestselling mystery novel of all time.
She called it Mystery House, and when the writing was completed two weeks later, she was proud of herself, full of a new self-esteem. Roberta was so psyched that she wanted Ken to program it. But he wanted nothing to do with it. So she did what every spouse does when there’s an abiding need to make the other partner see your point of view. She decided to get Ken drunk. At the Plank House Restaurant, the fanciest place in town, she said, “Just give me five minutes.”
Ken made a face like he didn’t want to hear about it, like the idea was silly and stupid. Really, he was interested in creating a word processing program in Fortran. He thought that was the fastest way to success. But he saw the look in Roberta’s eyes. She really meant it. And then there was the booze. He gave her the five minutes.
“Look, I don’t get obsessed over, well, anything. But if a housewife like me likes games like this, there are others, too. I have it all figured out.” She showed him everything—the design, even some rudimentary graphics she had done. The look in his eyes changed from steely and bored to mildly interested and then to raptly enthusiastic. Soon he was talking about how to program the game, even how to add her pictures to it.
Ken was on a roll, thinking he could do all the programming on the brand-new Apple II for which they had scrimped and saved $2,000. “I can write the algorithm that includes graphics,” he told her. “It hasn’t been done before, but I can do it.” He forgot all about his Fortran program.
For the next three months, they rarely got any appreciable amount of sleep. Roberta was making more drawings in black-and-white while Ken worked well into the night to code the software engine, the way the game would understand what you typed in. In a eureka moment, he was even able to add a few colors, a first for an Apple II game. Roberta felt they were really on to something big; she told friends that every pore in her body was gushing with creativity. When they were done, they had the first adventure game in the world that included graphics.
Roberta put several Mystery House disks into Ziploc bags with a Xeroxed flyer that showed the price, $24.95. Ken took their small inventory to the computer stores that were springing up around Los Angeles, doing his own distribution with some help from Roberta’s father. He would drop five games at one store, maybe ten at another. The proprietors were often dumbfounded that the game included pictures. When they saw colors, they were delighted. The Williamses’ print marketing effort included one ad. Roberta cut the words out of a magazine and pasted them together for a quarter page, $120 ad in MICRO magazine.
Mystery House’s artwork today seems undeveloped, almost as if the drawings were made with an Etch A Sketch. An evergreen outside the Victorian manse looks as much like a housedress on a pole as it did a tree. But the words remain alluring: “You are in the front yard of a large, abandoned Victorian house. Stone steps lead up to a wide porch.” What else could you do but go inside and discover the gruesome murders within as you played amateur detective? But it was more than that. If Ken could use colored lines to gussy up Roberta’s pictures in a computer game, maybe all you needed was just a little more RAM to make a full-color game. Or how about a graphics card that would deal with all the art and all the colors, shades, tones, and hues? Technologically, Ken and Roberta had opened the door to a new world of graphics, one that would in the coming years be as emotionally thrilling as seeing the Northern Lights for the first time.
Then the torrent of orders began. All Roberta did all day long was copy disks, which took about a minute each, put them in plastic bags (which Ken bought in bulk), and place them in packages for the UPS man to pick up. By August 1980, after just three months, the game had brought in $51,000. This was their wildest dream come true; they were on their way to becoming millionaires. As Roberta conceived of a new game, the two were thinking about moving to a house near the California mountains, a place near Roberta’s parents’ house, surrounded by nature for the kids to grow up around. They chose an A-frame house in Coarsegold, California, an obscure former mining town best known for its proximity to the Sierra National Forest and for its abundance of tarantulas.
From the mountains the mom-and-pop company they named On-Line Systems grew by leaps and bounds. While Mystery House sold about ten thousand copies, Roberta’s new fantasy adventure, Wizard and the Princess, sold sixty thousand at $32.95 each. At night, when the kids were asleep, she and Ken wo
uld sit outside and clink their wineglasses as they looked up at the stars, wondering aloud at their luck. By 1981, their office down the road in Oakhurst bustled with activity as Ken proselytized to potential young programmers: “This is like the gold rush. You better come up and join us. You could be a millionaire too.”
Ken lured teen hacker geniuses like John Harris to the mountains with a 30 percent royalty rate and a rent-free house in which to live. Harris, still pimply and working all through the nights like a kid possessed, would come up with a Pac-Man knockoff for the Atari 800 in just a couple of months. Ken was psyched. But when Atari sent out an industry-wide cautionary note stating it would prosecute pirates, the name was changed to JawBreaker. Pac-Man was replaced by evil-looking chomping teeth that bit into candy inspired by Life Savers. Atari still sued. Not only that, their lawyers threatened Ken with such gusto, the young entrepreneur literally vibrated from fear. Before the case went to court, Ken and Roberta settled the suit with Atari. Harris, a smart, trusting kid with groundbreaking coding chops, also made a version of Frogger for the Atari 800. But he took his code—and all of his software tools—to the Software Expo in San Diego, and while Harris casually spoke with a fan, someone ripped off the whole kit and caboodle. And he didn’t have a backup copy. It took the depressed kid a long time to recover, but he rewrote the code and Frogger succeeded. His royalties for the first month of sales were more than $35,000.
All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture Page 16