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

by Harold Goldberg

  “I don’t want to trip you up with story conversations this early. But what would you do with World of Warcraft?” asked Metzen.

  Raimi, who actually did play a lot of WoW and worked on a character to an impressive Level 72, knew that there were as many as one hundred different linear stories in the MMO. Trying to tackle them all would be an exercise in madness. “I think it’s about theme first,” replied Raimi. “It’s about why war is so unceasing in this unique world. Why do these cultures keep on fighting? What is it about their nature that never lets them live in peace? And what common values do these characters share with the people who will watch this film?”

  Metzen left the meeting sure that Raimi was the perfect person to helm the World of Warcraft movie. Raimi was on board and Blizzard was thrilled. And yet the question remained: Even if the money could be raised for the film, and even if the film was expertly shot and edited, would discriminating WoW fans feel the final product was genuine?

  Steven Spielberg, an avid gamer who loved the classic The Syndicate, and who was so juiced about games that he let Dream-Works Interactive produce a dozen PC games for five years in the 1990s, including three middling reimaginings of Jurassic Park, never saw fit to take a videogame to the big screen. Spielberg’s friend John Milius, the jocular Apocalypse Now screenwriter, also worked on one of Electronic Arts’ Medal of Honor games. While he enjoyed the experience, even as the game was being released he shook his head and said that videogames do graphics well, but they don’t do story well. He indicated that Spielberg felt the same way. If Spielberg won’t touch videogames because of what’s seen as their inherent lack of story, the future of videogames as box office victories isn’t bright. It’s a genre full of poorly made movies, like the Milla Jovovich series Resident Evil. Resident Evil, the game franchise, is a series in which your very soul seems possessed by its zombies and general tenor of impending doom. The movies, on the other hand, are predictable and poorly acted. And you can say the same thing about every movie made from a videogame.

  If you were to drive the circuitous roads high up into the Hollywood Hills, where the wealthier folk reside, you’d come across a fancy but somewhat hidden abode. Inside, children would be playing videogames. Outside, you’d sit on an expensive chaise lounge at a lavish Labor Day barbecue. The glamorous home overlooking Los Angeles belongs to the most significant maker of television movies in the world. He made Brad Pitt into a movie star, and he discovered Hilary Swank as well. As the smell of grilling burgers and chicken wafted through the unusually clean air, the producer would walk over to an area far from the pool, the only place the many children could not get to with their water blaster guns. The producer, who is whip smart and affable as a host but tough and savvy as a businessman, would sit down nearby. He would look out over downtown Los Angeles and then look you straight in the eye, asking, “Did videogames really earn more money than movies last year?”

  If you knew a little bit about videogames, you would nod enthusiastically and say, “And they’re going to make more money this year. Some of the games cost upward of twenty-five million dollars to make. Sometimes they sell, like, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of games.”

  The producer would shake his head, unbelieving, and there would be just the merest hint of fear in his eyes. He would look over to his young son, who is blasting with water as many young girls as he can find at the party and who, like every son there, cares more about games than movies. “I could make four TV movies for twenty-five million dollars.” And as you listened, you would think, “Nice, but they wouldn’t take you on the same trip to the same places that just one videogame would.” He would shake his head again, get up, and walk off, returning to tend the food on the barbecue. Maybe, just for a moment while he was shaking his head, he believed he was in the wrong business.

  But perhaps television is where some of the videogames should go, to become TV movies at HBO or Showtime. If executives kept the budgets and expectations low, hired an up-and-coming director with heart and knowledge of the industry, one who worked hard and carefully, then a success might well come seemingly out of nowhere. Then again, if one, just one, of the videogame movies in theaters became a blockbuster, the lemminglike producers in Hollywood would fall over themselves to imitate that success. And some, the conscientious ones, would even try to do better than make money. They might try to make a movie that meant something beyond action; they might try to make a movie that was memorable beyond the genre. You can dream, can’t you?

  UNDER THE GUN: THE KIDS IN THE SANDBOX

  They were nerds, but nerds of a different stripe, the kind that often felt severely out of place, even among other outcasts. The Houser brothers were not computer geeks. They didn’t code games in their bedrooms in their spare time. They weren’t geniuses of math or whizzes of computer science. They didn’t want to take apart a game to see how and why the code worked. And they would grow up to become outsiders in a business full of computer whizzes and egotistical suits.

  As angst-ridden teens, they sometimes felt they didn’t even understand each other. At age fifteen, Dan Houser stood on the balcony of his parents’ house in London, angry at his brother Sam. Sam, two years older, walked by below. Like a character out of an action movie, Dan leaped down onto his brother and started whaling on him. Sam was down, but not out. He fought back, hitting Dan with such force that Sam broke his hand.

  “Enough is enough. This is bollocks!” yelled Walter Houser, breaking up the fracas. Their jazz-playing father, who toiled as a lawyer by day, had seen this kind of scenario too many times as the boys were growing up. And the boys knew it too. They were becoming too mature for childish fisticuffs. After all, how could they keep hurting each other when both were ambitious and both had big plans? Sam, the assertive one, wanted to start his own record company. Dan, the athletic one, wanted to be a writer or a journalist. At the time, they had no idea they would do these things together and create a sea change in the world of videogames.

  Both were taught to stick up for what they wanted from an early age. In the Houser household, you had to tussle for a bigger portion of steak or to watch your favorite TV show. That boisterous, scrappy quality would serve the brothers well when the world seemed to be against them. At the prestigious St. Paul’s School, the two would fight back when the other kids gossiped about their actress mother Geraldine Moffat when the classmates saw her on TV in the sometimes brutal British gangster film Get Carter. The beautiful Moffat spent much of the film naked, and the next day Sam and Dan would be mercilessly teased. They could have wimped out and wilted in the face of their aggressors. Instead, Sam, initially embarrassed, saw it as an opportunity to curry favor with the cooler kids at school, who ultimately left the brothers alone. That is what their stubborn, loving parents had instilled in them, a relentless ability to remain self-reliant, confident, aggressive, and argumentative when they needed to state their cases, fight for their causes, and win.

  During their formative years, they devoured popular culture like one of those over-the-top, ghost-sucking vacuum cleaners in Nintendo’s Luigi’s Mansion. As kids, the brothers played Action Man, the English version of G.I. Joe, together. They watched movies like Apocalypse Now and The Long Good Friday with Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren. They grooved to the music of the late seventies and early eighties. And they played games with zeal. Sam in particular enjoyed the Sinclair Spectrum, manufactured by Sir Clive Sinclair, a tough eccentric who also produced one of the first inexpensive pocket calculators in 1972. The Sinclair was a tiny, inexpensive computer with rubber keys that often broke, but man, when Sam loaded something like Jet Pac or Underwurlde, with their lurid colors and tough game play, he was transported elsewhere to the point of elation. Another game, Elite, would later serve as a template for the open world genre Rockstar would help to pioneer.*

  The kids at Sam’s school would have bags full of the inexpensive or pirated games to sell and trade. As children of the videogame age, the brothers loved games as
much as they loved film and music. Sam would go from playing Pong and Space Invaders to spinning the latest seven-inch by ABBA or Bowie. To Sam and Dan, no medium was lesser or greater. Games could in fact be popular art in their eyes. And unlike anyone before or after them, they would soon meld together movies, music, and games in a magical, satirically evil brew.

  Sam also immersed himself in games made for every console he could find and haunted the local fun festivals in search of arcade machines to play. But he always would return to the Sinclair, enjoying code that was transferred to the computer via a cassette tape and eagerly waiting to play during the long ten minutes it took to load onto the system. He loved the games from British publisher Ultimate, which later became Rare (the company that would make Donkey Kong Country and a dozen other memorable games). Perhaps the brothers were most thrilled about life’s possibilities when their father took them on the weekends to Ronnie Scott’s, the legendary jazz venue that in its heyday was akin to the best New York clubs, like the Blue Note. There, the seductive world of jazz unfolded before their eyes as the world’s greatest players would gig and then come to the Houser home in southwest London to hang. Sam and Dan appreciated jazz more than they were fans of the music. Mostly, they loved the trappings of it—the clothes, the varied characters, and the stories of musicians’ lives on the road in the United States. They were entranced by the glamour of it all. Fashion as a release from the mundane would return to inform their games.

  More than jazz, it was hip-hop that had Sam intrigued. To him, there was nothing better than the way Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin meshed like brothers to fuse rock, metal, and rap at Def Jam Recordings. Sam mooned about the medium, had his mother sew Def Jam patches on his sweatshirt, memorized all the lyrics, and saved up his pounds for a time when his father would take him to the promised land, New York City. When the time came, in 1988, Sam unleashed himself on the city like a whirlwind. He shopped Orchard Street on the Lower East Side for leather puffers and Air Jordans, both of which were so rare in the UK, they were like gold. At dinner with his father and German record executive Heinz Henn, Sam peppered Henn with questions: “Why is everyone in the record industry so old? Why don’t you have young people working in this business?” For the rest of the dinner, he argued persuasively about what he could do for BMG. Henn whispered to Walter, “Your son is an utter lunatic. But he has some good ideas.”

  Soon, Houser had a gig as an intern at BMG. He quickly moved up the ladder there, while at the same time commuting to London University. He sometimes worked for Simon Cowell, who long before American Idol was scheming to jump-start the European boy band trend. With Take That, a pop group that spawned English solo artist Robbie Williams, Houser toured and taught himself to shoot video. His footage became a bestselling behind-the-scenes video. Sam was earning a mere 120 pounds a week, but he told Dan that the job gave him a sense of pride that no amount of money could buy. In his spare time, he was wowed by the games of the time—Myst, The 7th Guest, and the utterly insane, creepy, Flannery O’Connor–esque offerings by the cult band the Residents, Freak Show and Bad Day at the Midway (which featured Dixie’s Kill-A-Commie Shooting Gallery, Lottie the Human Log, and Dagmar the Tattooed Dog Woman). As the CD-ROM trend became the big deal of the nineties, Sam pushed his way into BMG’s multimedia department to work on odds and ends, in everything from David Bowie’s Jump (not a great moment in multimedia) to the Le Louvre museum CD-ROM (an artful tour de force). But the suits of BMG were somewhat late to the party, and multimedia was expensive to produce. They wouldn’t be in the game for long.

  BMG was working with a gem of a game company out of Scotland called DMA Design. The DMA team, led by David Jones, was contracted to make four games. But they couldn’t seem to make their deadlines. Sam saw BMG producer after producer let go because he or she couldn’t get DMA to finish its games. When tapped for that role, Sam found he had the talent to persuade the game designers to bite the bullet and finish—on time. Sam told his brother, who was still in college, “If the game isn’t coming together properly, I’ll apply focus, drilling it in and pushing it through. I don’t lay down the law. I’ll just go in with enthusiasm and energy and do it in a pleasant but aggressive way. I don’t take no for an answer. I don’t do it by being difficult. I do it by putting the right effort in.”

  In the middle of 1997, a decision was made to shutter the BMG games division. Dan, whom Sam had convinced to come to BMG to localize games, was as bummed as Sam. Nonetheless, Dan was beginning to hone his creative skills, researching and writing hundreds of new questions for the popular You Don’t Know Jack, a mix of television game show kitsch and trivia. After some begging, BMG allowed Sam and two executives to travel through Europe and the United States to try to sell the games unit. To various companies, they proposed a $9.5 million package deal that would include BMG Interactive’s assets, rights to games and multimedia projects. At every meeting they took, Sam felt out of place, as if he were from a different planet. He didn’t speak the same language as the suits from THQ or Electronic Arts. Luckily, Sam hit it off with Ryan Brant, the brash young CEO of a new game company called Take-Two Interactive. Take-Two bought BMG Interactive and offered to make Sam the head of the games division. But at his moment of triumph, Sam suffered from a serious case of cold feet. Fear sucker punched him: Could he do the job right? Should he leave his mates and parents in England? “New York is a different world,” he thought, “and I don’t want to exit my comfort zone. Here, I’m not paid that well, but I get nice seats on planes, the best hotels, and all these other perks.”

  Sam asked Brant, “Can I do two weeks in London and two weeks in New York City?”

  Brant would have none of it. “Don’t fuck around. Get over to New York or do something else.”

  In Manhattan, Houser went from the accoutrements of a megacorporation to the fits and starts of a small company. There was no cushy office, just a large and creaky attic space in New York’s Soho district. And there was the culture shock to deal with. Manhattanites whizzed by as they walked like they were on a combination of speed and coke. Early on, he told Dan, “What the fuck am I doing here? Take-Two isn’t even in the top twenty-five game publishers. They’re nobodies. All they have is a few corporate guys and a bunch of accountants. That’s it.” Despite his doubts, Sam dug in hard at Take-Two, building the publishing infrastructure, the game development teams, and the marketing and public relations units. He was insatiable in his need to prove he could do the job right.

  More important than getting the business up to snuff was the popular culture trend that Sam and Dan saw on the horizon. They had this strange, innate ability to see gaming’s future, a prescience that would inform everything they would do in games. Part of this wacky ESP was informed by the outstanding releases of the time. During 1997 and 1998, some landmark games were launched. Tim Schafer’s Grim Fandango melded droll humor, ideas about death, and film noir mystery into a richly detailed adventure game. Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Final Fantasy VII was arguably the very height of slightly strange role playing games done Japanese style. And Half-Life proved that imaginative eeriness and high-concept sci-fi paranoia could be brought to a PC game. There was a buzz on the street about all these games that was at once idyllic, fanatical, and adoring. But Sam and Dan looked beyond games as they sat in the loftlike attic and brainstormed. They believed, in the parlance of Monty Python, that it was time for something completely different. For inspiration, they looked to the swaggering attitude the US division of Sony displayed in promoting the PlayStation. Even Crash Bandicoot, pooh-poohed as just a funny animal, had guts and dynamism in that anti-Nintendo commercial. Beyond an admiration for Sony’s marketing prowess, the Housers had early word of the elegant-looking PlayStation 2, which would be released in two years. They felt that the PlayStation 2 and the vast amount of storage space available on the DVDs it used would change everything in the game industry. Characters could have nuance in their personalities. Graphics, detailed and lifelike, woul
d be closer to the movies. The PS2 would change their lives.

  Beyond hardware, the change they saw was about a groundswell of emotion within the nation’s youth. Sam said to Dan, “The way a seventeen-year-old is talking about and relating to games is the way I was feeling about rock ’n’ roll and hip-hop when I was their age. When I look at the other companies, they’re made up of toy or technology people. Where is that company that is standing up, representing games, showing that they’re rock ’n’ roll and that they’re willing to push the boundaries?”

  Dan agreed, adding, “It’s like they’re not proud enough of their games.”

  Sometimes the brothers could still be argumentative and downright disagreeable with each other. But this time, Dan was on the same page. There was a huge need for a gaming company with a real edge, said Dan. “There’s a massive disconnect going on here. It shouldn’t be the way it is. There’s definitely a hole that can be filled.”

  They were gunned up and couldn’t stop brainstorming. Sam said, “Let’s create our own company that has its own attitude, its own image, so that like Def Jam, when you see the logo on the box, you’ll know that it’s a quality product.”

  Some companies did indeed have the attitude, but it wasn’t quite enough in the Housers’ eyes. A certain kind of punky pride came from within the culture that made first and third person shooters—and within the games themselves. By the mid-1990s, when Intel scientists engineered processing chips that made computers zoom, zoom, zoom like a Porsche 911 CT3, the graphics had become more expansive, extroverted, unrestrained—and so had the game designers. If you didn’t know game culture, you might have thought that John Carmack and John Romero, the makers of Doom, were delinquents, bad boys who would hurt you and cut you and then tie your cat by the tail to a telephone wire. But gamers knew they could free them from suburbia’s banality as they shot vile Nazis in Wolfenstein 3D and destroyed the dangerous Pain Elemental that shot burning, horned skulls in Doom.