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

by Harold Goldberg

  WoW wasn’t just a hit. It was becoming a lifestyle. The reason for gamer loyalty was in the game. World of Warcraft was all about the white-water rush of adrenaline that flowed when you entered a magical land that matched your own personality. You could be as outgoing as a TV reality show host or as introspective as a literary-minded poet. You could be as casual as a bingo player or as rah-rah hard core as someone who’d finished tough games, like Zelda II or Battletoads, that hack your brain cells like a Slap Chop. The loner would gravitate toward becoming a rogue and creeping around stealthily in the shadows of trees or bridges, then attacking to steal, maim, or kill. You could be more magnanimous, a cleric who heals the fellow fallen. Whoever you were, whatever your background, you were struck by the looming Gothic architecture of the Scarlet Monastery, alluring in its size yet foreboding. You could find and collect peculiar, rare pets. You might find the Darkmoon Faire, a traveling carnival that could feel as quirky, ironic, and strange as any David Lynch movie. There, you would find a beer-drinking frog. There, perhaps inspired by the remote control cars in the Blizzard offices, were Steam Tonks, tiny vehicles equipped with bombs to blast at other Tonks. Even at the carnival, you might not be in the safest surroundings. Someone still could come up and try to kill you. You might meet Chronos, a necktie-wearing, blue-green-faced ghoul who looks like Lurch in the old Addams Family television show. Chronos might give you a quest to help him complete his zoo by searching for a boy who was raised by crocolisks, a scaly, hungry combination of crocodile and basilisk lizard. Chronos would also like you to find a murloc, one of a strange amphibious group of beings who looked somewhat like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The murloc’s peacock-rainbow coloring belied his cunning, nastier demeanor. But if you killed a murloc, his fins supposedly made a tasty broth.

  Eventually, even the darkest solitary soul with an antisocial bent would find other such nerds and join together in a guild to battle the weirdest of foes. Yes, there were dragons. But one baddie looked like an ever-growing fleshy serial killer who wielded a massive butcher knife like something out of Clive Barker’s “The Midnight Meat Train.” In the major battles, forty of you would come upon a vitriolic, drooling monster. And surely after the first few minutes, it would lay waste to all of you. Forty would lie dead, bloody, and torn on the virtual battlefield. But you kept coming back. For a while, it felt like abuse. Everyone would die, again and again. But then—the miracle. The boss would shake, quiver, and fall, giving up the ghost. “Crap. Crap. Crap. Three in the damn morning? I really need some sleep,” you would complain. Instead, you and your raiders, like thousands of others who were playing at the same time, would move on to consume a new monolith, fighting on right through until dawn. You did so because WoW wasn’t just a house of gaming. It was a welcoming home for nerds. It was in this way that World of Warcraft would sustain itself. This mystical continent of Azeroth, with its Horde and its Alliance, with its monsters and humans, with its evil and its good, had become Chris Metzen’s Ouroboros on steroids, no speed metal required.

  EverQuest popularized MMOs for the serious PC gamer. But World of Warcraft brought MMOs to EveryNerd, even to people who rarely played other games. They flocked to it to let their bad selves loose, to go wild without committing a crime, to escape from the constant boredom of suburbia, and to meet people who were like-minded, fantasy mavens who might become their real life friends. It moved into the pop culture mainstream, was featured in its own DC comic book and in a Toyota Super Bowl commercial. In an Emmy award–winning South Park episode viewed by 3.4 million people, Cartman, Lyle, Stan, and Kenny vow to defeat a griefer, a powerful, irritating player, by doing nothing but playing WoW day in and day out. Beyond the pop culture paeans, WoW became a pre–Second Life Second Life. It was where you wanted to live. It was idyllic, too, unlike Second Life. No marketing, no ads, no friends incessantly hyping their local gigs muscled in on your fantasy. Because some games now had in-game advertising, nerd purists were giving up their consoles in favor of WoW. It was such a phenomenon that Blizzard merged with Activision to form the biggest company in videogame history. Blizzard now has 12 million WoW players around the world, including China. And as of this writing, its popularity shows no signs of slowing down.

  BIOSHOCK: ART FOR GAME’S SAKE

  In the early part of the century, the videogame industry was growing as fast as pot under a grow lamp, so much so that the first-day sales of Microsoft’s manic shooter Halo 2 in 2004, at $125 million, beat the opening weekend gross for Spider-Man, which at $114 million was a record setter for Hollywood. Games generated $10 billion in revenue that year, also more than Hollywood movies. Fans, critics, and developers alike began to ask themselves, “So what else is there?” The fad had become a trend, and the trend had become culture. But beyond shooting, running, jumping, and solving puzzles, what more could be done? Well, there was popular art.

  Could videogames be considered seriously as art? Most “serious” publications didn’t think so, so much so that they wouldn’t even review games with any regularity. Games were seen the way rock ’n’ roll was in the fifties; they were dirty, sex-stinking, over-the-top with no redeeming social value, despicably lowbrow. Developers, from Mario Bros.’ Shigeru Miyamoto to Metal Gear’s Hideo Kojima, would say throughout the 2000s that the medium was still developing and should never be considered art. Others believed that the art was in the technology. And perhaps it is. According to institutions like New York’s MoMA, artifacts like Wagenfeld lamps and Gropius teapots are high art. So why can’t we say the same for the bits and bytes and the words and drawings of videogames? Some mainstream writers are coming around to the idea that games are more than just diversions. New York Times writer Seth Schiesel wrote that the height of videogame art could be seen in Ratchet and Clank Future. In fact, it was a buddy game so homoerotic, it would have driven Leslie Fiedler to amend his brilliant essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” to include the relationship of a lionlike, five-fingered cat and a creaky robot. Made for the Sony PlayStation 3, it cost nearly $30 million to make and was brimming with artwork as keen and clever as that in any Pixar movie. But games that are artful from start to finish are few and far between because, as in the mainstream comics world, game makers are often mired in arrested development. It’s difficult to find an M-rated game (for those over seventeen only) without giant-titted, Frank Frazetta–like women drawn by artists who spend months working on applications to make breasts wiggle as they do in real life. Bloggers and even G4 TV’s witty “X-Play” have compiled long stories on the history of breast physics in videogames.

  A handful of underground artists have indeed used games to espouse their popular art on a higher plane. Artist Mary Flanagan reprogrammed the software from Unreal Tournament 2003 to make Domestic, a memoirlike tale of her father being trapped in the family’s house during a fire. Anne-Marie Schleiner and her band of rebel artists invaded the violent Counter-Strike online shooter with a Velvet-Strike application, adding peace symbols and the phrase “Make Love, Not War” to the virtual walls in the game (she often was shot and killed before completing a graffito). And in early 2010, New York’s Museum of Modern Art featured Long March: Restart, an effulgent eighty-by-twenty-foot video installation by Chinese artist Feng Mengbo, which mixed a frenetic Mario-style side scroller with the history of China’s Red Army.

  But could art in games go beyond such personal ventures? Could a game that sold millions of copies be art as well? To that end, in 2007, art, technology, and literature came together to forge a horror story that became one of the decade’s bigger selling videogames. The charge was led by Ken Levine, a former writer of screen and stage plays who, in addition to games, had a passion for literature. Levine used the novels of Ayn Rand as inspiration for writing and rewriting the game’s script, which was more than sixty thousand words in length.

  I first saw BioShock at an evening event on April 20, 2007, in a crowded party room on Manhattan’s West Side. Paranoid to a fault, I d
idn’t want to wear the scummy headphones that every other writer was using to hear the sounds of the game, but even without audio, my first ten minutes with the game startled me with its dark underwater beauty, and terrified me with its gripping horror plot. When the event was over, I trudged home, wishing I could have played all night long. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept dreaming about the disturbing characters, the watery environment with its art deco building, and the brand-new videogame history to which I was privy.

  When the game finally arrived in the mail, it was a gorgeous, psychologically enthralling experience from the moment the opening sequence played. Your plane crashes. You find yourself underwater, drowning, gasping. A purse drifts by, then a locket, floating upward in waters that are cold and black. Like the character on-screen, you feel you can’t breathe. When you swim toward the surface, you see brilliant orange. It isn’t the joy of daylight, but the burning wreckage of the airplane. The ocean is full of oily water, somehow angry that fire has disturbed this blackest of nights. Further on is a tower and slippery, fog-smoked black steps illuminated by six lanterns. Under a grim-faced brass statue, a sign reads NO GODS OR KINGS. ONLY MAN. As you walk down a corkscrew of seemingly endless steps, a plaintive, instrumental version—a saxophone’s riff—of “Beyond the Sea” begins to play, for just forty-five seconds. “Haunting” is the wrong word; fear strikes you like love at first sight. It is as chemical as seeing the girl of your dreams; you know you can’t get enough. If you took an MRI of your brain’s mush at that exact moment, it might well show that the caudate section, which is responsible for cravings, had lit up. So would have the ventral tegmental, which makes dopamine, just as it might with a cocaine-like high. And that was just the beginning of BioShock and its city of Rapture. “Rapture” was so the correct word for this grisly and dazzling underwater city made by a wealthy madman drunk on his twisted dystopian ideas. He disdained the world above for its seedy politics, failed economics, and oppressive religious views. But Rapture had fallen into chaos. It was full of raccoon-eyed girls and robot monsters who had corkscrew weapons. Jack, the protagonist, injected himself constantly with a mutagen called ADAM, much like a heroin addict injects himself with junk. Beyond these grotesque creations, there were moments of Stephen King–like terror induced from the everyday, common tasks you encounter daily.

  Yet this was not the game that videogame designer Ken Levine set out to make, not originally.

  Ken Levine was born in the New York City borough of Queens, to an accountant father and a housewife mother with a penchant for attending Broadway plays. In addition to seeing plays as a child, Levine showed an early interest in games, often traveling to the Adventure Land arcade and restaurant in Flushing during trips to visit his grandmother. He was particularly attracted to electronic games, especially Maneater, which had full-motion video and in which you faced off against the Spielberg-inspired horror that was the Great White Shark. In Maneater, Atari made the fiberglass cabinet to look as if the behemoth was coming out of the floor itself—to get you. After that, if it had electricity in it and it was a game, Levine was drawn to it. Levine’s brother had also influenced his appreciation of board games by showing him Avalon Hill’s Panzer Blitz at age six. The game involved military tactics and strategy, and Levine loved it because you had to use your brain to play.

  But Levine’s appreciation became a full-blown revelation when he traveled to Connecticut to visit his sister at college. There, he found the text-based Star Trek game on a mainframe computer. He pored over the ten-by-ten-inch grid on a printout, trying to strategize, his mind all the while traveling like Captain Kirk to the Final Frontier. There, he fought Klingons as he took command of the starship Enterprise. Yes, the ship was identified only with the letter “e,” the Klingons by the letter “k,” and the stars by asterisks. But to Levine, it was a magic combination of monsters and mobility through different star sectors, an endless space opera. After the Star Trek game, life wouldn’t be quite the same. Later, when Levine became entranced by Miyamoto’s The Legend of Zelda, he played so much that he lost his first serious girlfriend to that fetching bride called game play.

  At Vassar in Poughkeepsie, New York, Levine immersed himself in literature and plays. He worked—and was fired from—various menial jobs. After he was dumped from a busboy gig at the Vassar Alumni House, his friend Paul Bartlett suggested that he check out the summer theater scene at the college. The Powerhouse Theater was a magnet for up-and-coming writers and actors. There, Levine met John Patrick Shanley, who had won an Oscar for Moonstruck and would later pen Doubt, which won the Pulitzer Prize and became the award-winning movie with Meryl Streep. He also met actors David Straithairn and Mary McDonnell. It was the perfect milieu for anyone who loved language, as Levine did, and he worked away on his own plays. Finally, his friend Bartlett convinced him to show his plays to Jon Robin Baitz (later the producer and writer for TV’s Brothers & Sisters), who was already selling his scripts to Hollywood. After reading Levine’s Waiting for Father, inspired by Arthur Miller and John Steinbeck, Baitz passed it on to Tracy Jacobs, an agent who got Levine meetings with Paramount. He was flying to Los Angeles for power meetings as a college student, and eventually got an assignment to rewrite a terrible romantic comedy called Devil’s Advocate. The movie, with singer Amy Grant attached as the star, was never made, although Levine purchased a Sega console and a VCR with the spoils of his work. After college, he moved to Los Angeles to write. But it did not work out well. Levine was still a student of literary writers like Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and John Steinbeck, along with the German expressionists who made film noir and horror films. Ken so loved the movies of Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and Alfred Hitchcock that making something less stymied him.

  “Why don’t you just come up with something commercial and pitch it?” asked Baitz.

  “If I knew what that was, I’d do it. But they want me to do comedies and I like different kinds of writers.”

  Levine left Hollywood and returned to New York City, living in downtown Manhattan as he wrote plays and founded a small company that performed them on the street, off-off-Broadway, way off. It depressed Levine when he realized that he couldn’t make a living at the craft. During this time, he was still completely fascinated by games, often making hex maps and designing games on paper—just for himself. He didn’t know exactly what a game inventor was. But he saw an ad in the back of NextGen magazine, one of the better gaming publications of the time. The ad Levine answered was for a “game inventor” at a small studio in Boston called Looking Glass Studios. Not only had it made some estimable games, like Ultima Underworld and System Shock, but the company name alluded to Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice book, making working there all the more appealing.

  “So you want to work in games?” asked Paul Neurath, who founded the studio in 1990 after working on a science fiction role playing game at Origin Systems.

  “Fuck, yeah!” enthused Levine at the interview.

  “And you worked in Hollywood writing scripts?”

  “Yeah. I rewrote a couple of things. Wrote some plays, too.”

  Neurath went on to tell Levine that the company’s Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss was a role player that allowed the first 360-degree movement in a game. He exuded delight when he spoke of the potential within Looking Glass, which employed bright minds fresh out of MIT. Neurath suggested, “You should also check out [our game] System Shock. There’s nothing quite like it. As someone who writes, you might like the story.” It was from System Shock that BioShock would eventually be born.

  Within three weeks, Levine had packed up and moved to Boston. He felt Looking Glass had hired him out of the naïve hope for convergence that was then sweeping both the film industry and the videogame industry. The idea of full-motion video that began with The 7th Guest continued with Phantasmagoria, the less admirable The Deadalus Encounter, and Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller, which starred Dennis Hopper and Grace Jones. There was talk, however brief, that inte
ractive movies like the one that Trilobyte’s Rob Landeros had made would sweep the world. Short interactive features like I’m Your Man, starring an MTV VJ, actually had releases in some theaters. The audience would press buttons on the arms of their seats to move the film through various paths toward one of a couple of canned endings. But Hollywood and games didn’t really get along in the nineties. Hollywood only appreciated linear stories. The game industry valued the bells and whistles of technology over narrative, whether it was a linear or even nonlinear story. Like arguing lovers, each industry complained the other didn’t understand it. Never the twain would meet.

  Still, Levine was the right guy at a decent company at an OK time, and he used his opportunity to the fullest. For him, Looking Glass was like college for videogames. (At the time, there were very few videogame programs and classes in colleges that helped students to get a job in the real life world. While there were the beginnings of videogame education at schools like DigiPen in Vancouver, British Columbia, which offered a two-year degree in computer animation, such institutions were few and far between. Like the many journalists and writers who had toiled at newspapers circa the 1960s and prior, Levine learned the art, design, and business of videogames by doing.)

  Yet it didn’t go swimmingly. Levine’s first assignment, a game based on the Star Trek: Voyager TV series, came to a startling halt when the product was canceled. Then Doug Church, an MIT student who was overseeing the implementation of a design document called Thief, brought Levine in to brainstorm on the story. For months, Levine prepared a film noir–like backstory for Thief: The Dark Project, the people of which were going to bear resemblances to Raymond Chandler characters—even though the steampunk-inspired game, which focused on stealth rather than shooting, would take place in the medieval era. He worked tirelessly on a mystery that would make the player feel he or she had to solve the puzzle surrounding a ghastly gravel-voiced satyr with a third eye called The Trickster. Thief is still considered to be something of a classic by many critics. More, it’s significant because Levine began to feel more comfortable with his story and writing chops as far as games were concerned. Yet after a year and a half at Looking Glass, Levine took what he knew and left with two friends to form his own company.