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

by Harold Goldberg

  It was an inelegant start-up, one that was run out of the living room of Ken’s one-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, with his partners Jonathan Chey and Robert Fermier. Yet within weeks of its 1997 incarnation, they had a gig to work on a single-player version of an early multiplayer online game called Fire Team. Levine and his cohorts felt they were crazy to start a company, and that was why they called their venture Irrational Games. The trio, especially Levine, believed that everything they didn’t like about the world, they would fix through games. In the back of Levine’s mind, however, was a nagging thought. With this new control came the distinct possibility that the company could go belly-up at any time. In fact, three weeks later, Fire Team crashed and burned, and the high-flying trio was out of work. They had no money. They had little savings. And they were not the best at raising money. Worse, they had no self-created ideas for games.

  Even though they were out of cash, they were not out of luck. The three had left Looking Glass on collegial terms. So Neurath gave Irrational a small office and a check for $70,000 to start work on System Shock 2. While Looking Glass’s games generally were seen as pushing the envelope in terms of new technology and storytelling, few became the kind of hits that could lead the company to prosperity. Thief had sold more than 500,000 copies, making it the company’s bestseller. Neurath hoped that System Shock 2 would be the polished gem that would make Looking Glass a major player in the world of independent videogame developers, a game that would pass the million mark in terms of sales. Meanwhile, Levine and his camp were thrilled. “Seventy thousand dollars,” enthused Levine. “How are we going to spend all this?” In fact, the game would cost $650,000 to complete. Levine hired seven people and used some of Looking Glass’s talent as well.

  The original System Shock’s story surrounded a computer hacker in the fictional New Atlanta who illegally viewed files for a space station and was caught red-handed by a multinational company. The vice president of the company, who was somewhat devilish, snidely offered up a deal. He would let the hacker off the hook—if he hacked into SHODAN, an alluring but stuttering female AI. Reviews for that first game were stellar. Sales were disappointing.

  For System Shock 2, Levine wanted badly to meld science fiction with the horror genre. He also had some high-minded, almost literary ambitions for the game, which giant Electronic Arts would publish; he wanted it to be an homage to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. He told his able group of coders and designers, “It’s like this. You’re going up the river to this crazy place with a strange culture to see this incredibly amazing megalomaniac who’s gone off the reservation. It’s going to a dark place to meet a dark person. This happens to be in a spaceship. Whether it’s Viet Nam or Africa à la Heart of Darkness, it doesn’t matter.”

  “The thing,” said Chey, “is to scare people.”

  “Right. Scare the pants off them,” said Fermier.

  “The key is, the genie is loose. Can you put the genie back in the bottle? And what are the ramifications of that?” There was a Frankenstein’s monster element to the game as well; you couldn’t control these incredible things you created. They took on a life of their own. While there was terror in the game, it also dealt with headier themes, like the meaning of government, governing, business, and economics. The question was, Would anyone care beyond the people at Irrational and Looking Glass? Levine, who was working as lead designer and president of the company, loved that he would be responsible for the success or failure of a big project. When the first review came out in the summer of 1999 via PC Zone in the United Kingdom, System Shock 2 was called “a masterpiece of modern horror.”

  Everyone felt redeemed, and Levine, Chey, and Fermier were elated. Levine told the team, “I didn’t think anyone would like what we did. I guess we weren’t totally high when we made the thing.” Although the game received laudatory reviews, it didn’t perform to expectations. In 2000, Looking Glass Studios went out of business. Irrational went on to work on The Lost, a videogame version of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Unfortunately, The Lost was quickly canceled by the publisher, Crave Entertainment, a company that rarely could tell a good game from a bad one. But Levine kept thinking about System Shock 2, hating that he couldn’t sell anyone on the idea of a sequel.

  During the making of System Shock 2, he had learned that he didn’t really enjoy many of the business aspects of running a studio, and those included dealing with the publishers of the time. Most independent studios have love/hate relationships with their publishers, and Levine had to go to great lengths to get money for the budget and to keep Electronic Arts from messing with the creative integrity of the game. Because Electronic Arts released so many games, he also had to fight hard for attention. And that meant occasionally yelling and screaming. In his Boston office Levine would say, “It’s not always easy for the people who are writing the checks to see what’s important in the making of the game. Because, why should they? They’re looking at it from a different perspective, the bottom line. I’m like a fierce Momma Bear protecting my projects. If you don’t fight, the odds are really stacked against you. I will go to any length to protect my team.” Levine was not so unlike famous firebrand Harvey Weinstein, the once-high-flying cofounder of Miramax Films who would do just about anything to get his films noticed. But Weinstein’s flaw while at Miramax was his mistreatment of creative talent, everything from verbal abuse to throwing tantrums and chairs across the room during meetings. Levine reserved his wrath and bile for business executives. A protective Levine, as with any company president who develops games, is in fact more of a necessity than was a ruthless Harvey Weinstein in his corpulent pre–Weinstein Company period. Performers in the film industry realized early on that the business needed the work of talent agents who could be tireless advocates for their clients. But the agent class in the game industry isn’t yet well developed. While there were videogame agents at Creative Artists and William Morris at the time Irrational was planning another System Shock, the idea of getting such representation was still very much in its infancy. It was reserved for the proven superstars of gaming, not the up-and-comers with imaginative, compelling ideas. Top developers at independent studios had to be willing to lock horns with executives themselves.

  Levine, war wounds and all, was now armed with an idea and a proposal that was more than somewhat influenced by System Shock 2. In late 2000, what would eventually become BioShock was more of a role playing game than a first-person shooter. It was pitched to Codemasters, a company known for both its crappy budget titles and creditable strategy games and which had moved on to produce full-priced sports and action titles. Marketer Tom Bass heard Levine hype a version of BioShock that involved Nazis. The package also included a video that took place in the galley of an underground base, a gross amount of scurrying cockroaches, and a distant island. Removing the Germans and the island were just two of the many major changes Levine and his team made during the pitching of what everyone wanted: a blockbuster game.

  Initially, it was difficult to convince anyone to make the leap. Atari, which the French corporation Infogrames had purchased from Hasbro in 2001, thought BioShock might help to revitalize their long-tarnished brand name. But Nolan Bushnell’s old company ultimately passed. Electronic Arts listened and was intrigued. They passed too. What Levine was finding was that lower level executives at game companies were fans of System Shock 2 and knew that Irrational could produce a quality product. “But it was the damn bean counters,” he complained. The money people couldn’t see the sanity in giving the Boston company an amount of money in the low seven figures, the budget Levine was seeking. At the end of each go-round, the catch-22 was presented in no uncertain terms: Irrational had never had a breakout hit. The inference was piercing: It would never have a hit.

  At the time, Irrational was working hard on prototypes of a passel of games. There was a new version of Freedom Force, a superhero series lovingly based on the Silver Age of comic books. And there was a zombie game called Division 9,
which Irrational believed would be the most well-crafted game it had ever produced. Yet there was something about BioShock. They were getting so close, it was stay-up-all-night frustrating. Levine and his crew could taste the money. More, they could see themselves making a stellar game, one that would be remembered for its mood and attention to detail. And then the doors would slam closed. One company that never said yes yet never said no was 2K Games, part of Take-Two Interactive, the same company that had Rockstar Games and the Grand Theft Auto franchise under its purview. At the time, Take-Two was mired in a scandal that saw the Securities and Exchange Commission investigate and sue its seniormost executives for inflating revenue and falsifying business records.

  At the end of 2004, with Take-Two and other companies hesitating, Levine broke the rules by showing an unpublished, unfinished BioShock to the online press in order to tout what he felt could be one of the deepest, scariest games ever made. Irrational had put its own money into creating the small portion of the game that was demoed for the media. GameSpot, the most popular of the online videogame sites, published an unapologetically glowing article, laying out point by point why BioShock was “intriguing.” The story was a marketing department’s dream. The next day, BioShock became the talk of the industry.

  When Take-Two got wind of a rumor that Electronic Arts was about to give Levine the money to make BioShock, it stepped in to preempt any such deal, offering Irrational a little under $2 million to complete the game. Then, in late 2005, when there was talk of another publisher buying Irrational, Take-Two and 2K Games again moved quickly, purchasing the studio for $11.8 million. At the time Susan Lewis, 2K’s vice president of business development, said, “2K Games will provide additional resources and support to the Irrational team so they may continue to deliver cutting-edge games.” On the surface, it sounded like pure PR-speak, the kind of spin journalists see every day and ignore. And maybe 2K never planned on spending more than $2 million for the game. But it turned out that Lewis wasn’t just whistling “Beyond the Sea,” BioShock’s theme song. If Irrational hadn’t been acquired by Take-Two, BioShock would not have morphed into the triple-A, detail-obsessed descent into terror it ultimately became. Two things made 2K Games realize the gem they had. Game Informer, the nation’s biggest videogame magazine, with a circulation of one million, put BioShock on its cover. Then, when BioShock was shown at the bacchanal that is E3, the yearly videogame convention in Los Angeles, the game was, as Levine put it, “the belle of the ball.”

  2K Games was so thrilled that, shortly after the conference, Greg Gobbi, 2K’s vice president of product development, asked Levine, “Do you want to make this a bigger game?”

  “Fuck, yeah!” said Levine.

  “What do you need to make this bigger? The money is there.”

  BioShock would become a $15 million behemoth by the time it was done a year and a half later. Few games at the time had such high budgets. Grand Theft Auto III was one. Madden NFL Football was another. But throwing money at a game didn’t necessarily mean marketplace success. Shenmue, a Japanese-made role playing game released in 2000 for the creditable but ill-fated Sega Dreamcast console, reportedly cost $70 million to make due to its painstakingly lifelike artwork. Because of its molasses-slow pacing and lackluster Dreamcast sales, Shenmue failed miserably; those who had Dreamcast would have had to buy the game twice to make up for its staggering production budget.

  In a fascinating if wary marriage with necessity, where marketing informed game making, the Irrational team, which was growing to include a satellite office in Australia, listened closely to what the suits had to say. Sarah Anderson, 2K’s marketing vice president, was certain that the right trailer for the game would make all the difference in the world to the hard-core gaming crowd and to retailers. Game trailers, mature and violent short films used to promote a game, were becoming ubiquitous in the videogame industry. In fact, GameTrailers, a site that featured these little promotional movies, was purchased by MTV Networks for $25 million—and MTV didn’t even make games. To make the snippet Levine collaborated with an outside company called Blur. But when they saw the final product, 2K became concerned. One brief moment showed a swarm of bees emerging from a character’s arm. The scene wasn’t part of game play. It was the kind of thing that might enrage certain easily annoyed videogame enthusiasts. One cautionary example was Sony’s second Killzone, a palpitation-inducing futuristic shooter franchise for the PlayStation the idea for which came in a dream-turned-nightmare of Guerrilla Games’ Hermen Hulst. When the game was demonstrated at E3, websites and bloggers spun themselves into an angry frenzy when what had been said to be game play footage in the game’s trailer turned out to be computer graphics that closely imitated the game experience.

  Still, 2K was thrilled that the ocean itself was portrayed in the trailer with such violent, angry beauty. It dripped, flowed, gushed, and tossed you around like The Perfect Storm inside a videogame. “I always think of the water as one of the key characters in the game, one that is real,” said Scott Sinclair, the game’s art director. It’s not unusual for a game developer to say something that’s neither human nor animal is akin to a living, breathing being. It makes the designer into something mystical and mage-like. For example, each lead designer for Sony’s God of War trilogy said that blood was an important antagonist in the series. But the idea that water could be a character was especially true in BioShock because the way it engulfed your senses was so unexpectedly fear-inducing.

  When Levine asked again for more money and more time, there was some tension within the company. While everyone believed the game was groundbreaking, Levine had never spearheaded a project that was an out-of-the-box hit, one that sold in the millions. And that’s what 2K expected from the game: big money beyond covering the budget; at the highest levels of Take-Two and 2K Games, executives hoped for Halo and Madden money. Yet as the game’s development moved toward completion, BioShock’s distinctive qualities made it difficult for gamers and retailers to understand. More than one marketer at Take-Two had doubts, complaining, “There’s no log line, no pitch line you can tell someone in an elevator.”

  When he heard that grievance, Levine often retorted, “This is first and foremost a shooter.” Truth be told, it wasn’t. BioShock was its own new niche, a hybrid of role playing, shooting, horror, anxiety, terror, and the kind of literature that requires deeper thought to grasp. It was more mature, more freewheeling, more adult than System Shock 2 in every way. In conference calls between New York City and California, Tom Bass, then a senior product manager for Take-Two, felt that the way BioShock could become a megahit would be through viral marketing and the canny use of focus groups. In 2007, in the months before BioShock hit the market, the Web had not only become a tool that coaxed instantaneous responses from readers and forum trolls. It had become a tool for quick feedback for videogame executives. When there was a question regarding whether or not 2K should spend the money on an expensive collector’s edition for BioShock, they asked the game community via a petition on the BioShock website. Within twelve hours, Bass had an answer for his boss, Sarah Anderson. More than fifteen thousand fans had signed the petition virtually, providing an overwhelming yes for a fairly standard package that would include an action figure and a “making of” DVD.

  Yet even when the expanded BioShock was shown at E3, Levine, who was exhausted after days of personally showing the game in half-hour intervals, saw that some retailers remained unconvinced. Some, like the buyers at Best Buy, got it, and started calling other buyers at the chain enthusiastically. Others felt that the game might be a press darling and nothing more. Bass began hearing from store managers, and the news wasn’t good. “The game won’t sell beyond two hundred thousand copies,” they said. The game needed to sell a million to recoup its budget. A year before the game was released, Bass began visiting retailers in earnest, one by one. By the time the game premiered in August 2007, Bass had met with more store managers than he had for any other game in a decade-lo
ng career that included stints at Acclaim and Codemasters. He would travel to their offices, pull up a chair, and talk about how 2K had tested the game.

  “Everyone tests games. That doesn’t mean you’ve got a winner,” said a doubtful buyer for one of the country’s biggest retail chain stores.

  “This is one of the most tested games in history,” said Bass, leaning forward and then standing up. “There are tests almost every day. There are game play tests. There are tests for the cover. There were ten possible covers. There are tests for the likeability of the characters. There are tests for the understandability of the story. There are even tests for the demo that will go up on Xbox Live. Want more? There are focus groups, two to three every night.”

  “Yeah. So what? Everybody has focus groups.” It was true. In the years since videogames were invented, in the decades since scientists like William Higinbotham used oscilloscopes as monitors for game play, testing code incessantly on potential consumers had become a way to allay fears that tens of millions of dollars might be flushed down the toilet. Gears of War, the popular sci-fi shooter franchise from Epic Games and Microsoft, not only had focus groups; it had psychologists who attended game play sessions to analyze how players felt when they played the shooter. Microsoft now analyzes almost every game it publishes this way, including Halo.

  The reams of data collected for BioShock didn’t simply lie fallow. The marketers parsed it, then used it to refine and hone their plans for the August 21, 2007, release. It was the kind of particular information that Ralph Baer could have used when he admitted that he needed a “marketeer” to help promote himself and the Odyssey in the 1970s, and the kind that might have given Trip Hawkins pause before foisting an overpriced 3DO upon North America in the early 1990s. Irrational wasn’t thrilled by all of the marketing suggestions. But they were heartened by Sarah Anderson’s attitude. The marketing vice president seemed to get it when she told Levine, “We know we’re dealing with a core gamer, and that’s a different audience, a typically cynical audience who doesn’t like marketing for the sake of marketing. But they’re receptive to marketing that’s smart, which engages them and allows them to interact.”