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

by Harold Goldberg

  For Will, setting up digs on the West Coast was like being reborn. The skinny, self-effacing intellectual was psyched when he moved to the Bay Area in California, a place where technology was treated as art or, at least, artful. Inspired by the new era of personal computer gaming, Wright began to design a kind of science fiction war game on his cheap Commodore 64 in which you piloted a helicopter to save a world of islands from treacherous science fiction marauders. As you flew, you bombed the bridges, power plants, and roads below you (along with protecting your aircraft carrier from bomb-dropping enemies). Broderbund, a company perhaps best known for its interactive software for children, published it. The company let Wright know in no uncertain terms that any humans should be changed to aliens to eschew parental concerns about violence. The game became known as Raid on Bungeling Bay and featured the evil Bungelings that appeared in other Broderbund releases like Choplifter. It was not a remarkable game, nor did it push the envelope. Yet people bought more then 800,000 copies in Japan alone. Suddenly, Wright didn’t have to worry about money … for a while.

  More salient, he felt he had found his calling in life. Because Wright enjoyed constructing the minimalist terrain and architecture in the game more than making the souped-up helicopter and its exploding weapons, the game made him realize his immediate future was in simulation games, not in games of destruction. He enjoyed devising his island environments so much that he wrote the code for a mini-program to help him in the building process. But what should he do next and how should he do it? He did not possess the marketing wizardry of Nolan Bushnell or Trip Hawkins. He wasn’t even as garrulous as the generally reticent Ralph Baer. How could this introvert break into the gaming industry?

  Wright faced another obstacle in his quest to make sim games: The videogame industry, still in its infancy in the middle 1980s, had some rules from which CEOs and designers would rarely stray, perhaps because they believed their audience was primarily young and male. Games were often still viewed as nothing more than toys. So there was a child-influenced golden rule in games: They had to be about winning. In this atmosphere, Wright’s City Planner 1.0, which asked you to develop a detailed city and its accompanying infrastructure, stuck out like a sore thumb. Wright had been inspired to create the game when his neighbor, an Oakland city planner, suggested that Wright read a stack of books on city planning theory. Broderbund ordered a prototype of the game—without any pay for Wright. That was the way it worked for many freelancers back in the day. You worked primarily for royalties down the line, with nothing upfront.

  But when they saw the actual game in action (if you could call it action), the decision makers at Broderbund were perplexed.

  “How can we market this?” wondered cofounder Doug Carlston. “There’s no proper end to it. And there’s no way to win.”

  Wright countered, “It shouldn’t have to be about winning. It’s about making things. People like to make things. It’s about society, how people make communities and live in them.” He went on for some time with lucid, logical arguments. He brought up the success of LEGO and Lincoln Logs in the toy industry as analogies. Kids and adults alike loved to build. But he could not convince Broderbund.

  Carlston didn’t like to reject any designer, but he looked down and shook his head. “We don’t want to experiment this way. We don’t think people will buy it. So we can’t buy it. And we can’t put money into it.” Wright understood and appreciated the way Carlston made him feel like part of the Broderbund family even as he was rejecting his work. But, after so much time invested, he was crestfallen. He knew he owed a huge debt to Doug and Gary Carlston for giving him his big break, not to mention a direction in life. Yet he wished they shared his vision. Maybe he needed a better name for his game. City Planner 1.0 seemed too much like a college course, as dry to the uninitiated as the dozen or so city planning tomes he’d been reading. Micropolis, his other idea for the title, was already taken.

  Perhaps Wright had gotten too complex while stating his case in those meetings at Broderbund. He’d brought up a book that inspired him, MIT professor Jay Wright Forrester’s 1969 tome, Urban Dynamics. Forrester put forth an engineering theory that led him to create computer models to simulate the way cities behaved. Forrester was intrigued by information feedback, which happens “whenever the environment leads to a decision that results in action which affects the environment and thereby influences future decisions.” In other words, the many assessments that have to be made by a city can be converted into variables so city planners can simulate what might happen in everything from the economy to low income housing as a city grows or contracts. In the seventies, Forrester’s theories of system dynamics became a pop culture trend, so much so that they were even employed to predict worldwide economic havoc, mainly due to starvation, that would happen in 1981.

  Yet even after Broderbund’s rejection, Wright was hooked. He couldn’t stop thinking about his game. Luckily, at the same time in the mid-1980s, an aggressive young go-getter named Jeff Braun had had a taste of success in making and selling Calligrapher, the first color computer font program, for the Amiga. Braun wanted more. Like many before him, he had played SpaceWar!, the Asteroids predecessor, on a giant mainframe computer at UCLA and felt that the game industry was no fad. With the money he’d made from Calligrapher, Braun decided to court game developers by helping to host a series of beer and pizza parties at a friend’s apartment in Alameda. Will Wright didn’t want to go to the techie mixer, but a young neighbor goaded him into it. Once there, he sat in a corner by himself, looking uncomfortable. Braun worked the room and eventually came upon Wright. Braun brimmed with enthusiasm about fonts, so much so that Wright thought he was trying to sell him something. At the end of the oration, Wright mentioned, “I have a game that I really want to do. But nobody wants to do it. And I don’t blame them. It doesn’t fit the mold.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Braun.

  “Because there’s nothing to win. You don’t become the hero. You don’t save the world. You probably wouldn’t like it either.”

  Braun was intrigued and invited himself over to Wright’s house in Piedmont. As Wright led him into the basement to see his small tech setup, which featured a Commodore 64, he said again, “I’m pretty sure you’re not going to like this.” At first Braun watched a demonstration of another game Wright was working on, ProBots, to which he took an instant dislike. While Wright saw ProBots as an homage to graphic artist M. C. Escher and was working hard on its artificial intelligence, Braun thought it was just a run-of-the-mill matching game and “pretty ridiculous.” On the other hand, Jeff saw limitless possibilities in the city planning game. He couldn’t contain his ebullience. He wasn’t talking fonts anymore; he was talking games to anyone who would lend an ear.

  Everything looked brighter then. Just as Henk Rogers envisioned the unlimited potential in Alexey Pajitnov’s Tetris, Braun saw the potential in SimCity (the game’s new name). He and Wright went on to retrieve the rights from Broderbund and to raise $50,000 to start their new venture. To name their company, Braun decided to hold a contest, asking friends and family for a two-syllable name that meant nothing (like Kodak or Sony), but sounded good when you said it. Braun’s father won after coming up with Maxis. Wright and Braun liked the word’s techie “X” sound, and Braun loved that it really was shorthand for his mother and sister, Ma and Sis. While Wright had amassed some money from Bungeling Bay royalties, the four years it took to find a publisher took their toll; every company he and Braun met with agreed with Broderbund. Yet, in 1989, it was actually Broderbund that agreed to copublish SimCity with Maxis. Broderbund had just launched an experimental affiliate program that allowed Wright and Braun to keep 80 percent of the profits, instead of just 15 percent of the royalties, and was eager for guinea pigs. Every game would be given on consignment to Broderbund, which would distribute SimCity. Maxis would do the rest of the work, including boxing the game and manufacturing the disks.

  Initially, Wright and Maxis
sold the game themselves at Bay Area computer fairs at which they also passed out flyers. Sales were so slow that Wright himself easily handled all technical support. But then, the media came to the rescue in the form of Newsweek. Writer Bill Barol said glowingly that experiencing SimCity was “thrilling,” that it gave you “the exhilarating ability to change your environment.” When Newsweek’s photographer found Maxis to be housed in Braun’s condo, with just a few computers around a furnished apartment, he shook his head and apologized, thinking he was at the wrong address. Then he snapped a shot of the game on Braun’s computer monitor and left the fledgling operation posthaste. The publication of the full-page article was one of the first instances in which a videogame was reviewed by a major newsweekly (the first two were reviews of the interactive text adventures Zork and A Mind Forever Wandering in 1985). The SimCity review was a sign that games were slowly going mainstream and legit.

  Suddenly, Wright was the “it” designer, and SimCity became the Game of the Year. It had earned approximately $3 million by the time Christmas rolled around. As the PC version sold 500,000 copies and the Nintendo version added sales of 1.3 million more, the phone rang off the hook with requests for Wright to work on simulations. Entities as diverse as the CIA and Chevron wanted sims for their own agencies and companies. Maxis bought a small company called Delta Logic to deal with these contracts so Wright could concentrate on game making. (The business contacts didn’t amount to huge money and the deals took a long time to wangle, but SimRefinery for Chevron eventually brought in $75,000 to the coffers.)

  The hits just kept on coming for Wright. Thoughtful hits. Yes, there were SimCity sequels, which were Maxis’s bread and butter. But there was also SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony, based on the studies of the Pulitzer Prize–winning myrmecologist Edward O. Wilson. While the box featured a cute, Disney-esque ant with soulful black eyes, in the game, the player got graphically primitive ants to work together in centralized societies in an almost socialist way. By mobilizing workers, soldiers, and queen ants, you fought off the oncoming hordes of red ants and occasional arachnids. To the danceable strains of some bass-heavy funk music, you took over the yard as if it were a raging battlefield. Sometimes your ant “writhes in burning agony” when bitten by a spider. Eventually, you took over a suburban house, driving out the annoyed human owners.

  There were inevitable growing pains at Maxis, which in 1994 was readying to go public. They had $1 million in venture capital from William Janeway at Warburg Pincus, primarily because Janeway wanted to seem hip to his son who played computer games. With the money, Maxis expanded quickly, cobbling together a staff full of the inexperienced. For instance, a secretary was promoted to be head of human resources, but she didn’t have the proper training and wasn’t up to the huge challenge of managing personnel at a company in the throes of an IPO. Braun and Wright spent months and months courting venture capitalists—instead of making games. Like Landeros and Devine’s Trilobyte, Maxis incurred pressure from investors to diversify its lineup and earn big money. Along those lines, Wright worked on a game that explored the various ideas behind the Hindenburg’s tragic explosion. But the game never was released.

  Maxis went public in June 1995. Though that success placed $35 million in company accounts, it was the beginning of the end of the pure, childlike fun of game making with a small group of buddies. Just as in the later years of Atari, arrogant idiots were brought in as bosses. They knew nothing about games. While the company netted a healthy $6 million that year, there was no way it could continue on that course, because the next SimCity was years away from hitting shelves. In 1996, bean counters forced Wright and his crew to release a quartet of generally unfinished, unpolished, sometimes untested games. Life just got worse for Braun and Wright. While working on SimCopter, a programmer who was secretly annoyed that there were no gays in Maxis products surreptitiously added two guys who kissed each other—often. That did not sit well with Wright and Braun, who had made certain that Maxis did not discriminate and had health care benefits for gay partners. The employee was shown the door, but the damage was done. SimCopter had to be recalled, which hit the company’s stock hard, not to mention the harm it did to its reputation.

  By 1997, Maxis was seriously in the red; it lost $2 million. The pressure from industry analysts and stockholders was constant and tremendous. Wright himself felt a combination of utter stress, frustration, and bemusement. He kept trying to look at the troubled times objectively. “This is a learning experience, nothing more,” Wright repeated to himself. But keeping on an even keel was trying; the business sapped much of his strength and his patience.

  What had started as a lauded company now seemed to be something less, something that was joked about as having games that were a couple of steps above shovelware. When the payroll ballooned to 450 employees, many of whom the two did not know personally, Wright and Braun felt like strangers at their own company. And the stock was in a tailspin. Maxis needed serious help. Wright and Braun agreed that they were in a precarious position—their company was not big enough for them to go it alone or without a publisher, but they were not small enough to be left alone to simply do their own thing.

  Braun let it be known that Maxis might be interested in being acquired. Activision was interested. But it didn’t understand Maxis games, nor did it have the deep pockets needed to satisfy investors. There was, however, another possibility. Depending on how Wright and Braun looked at it, there was either a savior or a wolf at the door. Because it wanted to have a more diverse stable of PC games, Electronic Arts, which always seemed to be in expansion mode, offered $125 million for the troubled company. Under extreme pressure from investors, Braun and Wright agreed to the sale. But it all came at a price. EA cleaned house with alacrity, firing executives and most of the Maxis sales and marketing employees. Braun was moved from the Maxis studio in Walnut Creek to Foster City, away from any influence at Maxis. It was a shark pit, and Braun left the company within a few months, saying to Wright, “These guys are out for blood.” But EA recognized Wright’s brilliance and hired some of the country’s brightest designers to help him out. In 1999, they released SimCity 3000, starring the shoot-from-the-hip former mayor of New York City Ed Koch. By that time, Trip Hawkins was no longer involved in the company, but his edict to corral superstars for EA games had not been forgotten by what was becoming the world’s biggest videogame software maker. At the time, the crotchety Koch was a bigmouthed star with a series of bestselling books and was featured semiregularly on NBC’s Saturday Night Live. He was the perfect celebrity for SimCity 3000.

  In part, it was SimAnt that gave Wright the idea for his next series of games. But Wright was also inspired by mathemagician Martin Gardner’s game page in the back of Scientific American. Gardner, who had been a puzzle lover since his first requests to Santa as a child, wrote the column for twenty-five years, until 1981. A game called Party Planner, in which you used variables to simulate the likes and dislikes of party attendees, also fascinated Wright. He thought about it for months. As well, when Maxis was still a public company, Braun had shown Wright a 1985 Activision game for the Apple II called Little Computer People. Little Computer People was occasionally hilarious and featured a slow-moving cartoonlike character called Darren who would write you letters saying, “I have many hobbies that occupy my time.” To prove it, he watched TV, exercised, and searched for someone to live in his computer with him. Finally, Wright was impressed with John Horton Conway’s theories of cellular automata, which were espoused in The Game of Life. In his 1970s simulation game, Conway showed that you could emulate the complex patterns of the birth and death of organisms living together in society—and everything in between. All these combined to influence Wright as he dreamed up a project whose working title was Home Tactics, the Experimental Domestic Simulator. Wright later tweaked the name to the slightly more appealing Dollhouse. In Dollhouse, you controlled a human being, everything from his or her leisure time to work time. It was a mi
serable failure in focus group tests. Wright told his coworkers that it got “the worst response of any single game we’ve ever tested. Every person in the room said, ‘There’s no way I’m ever going to touch that.’ ” From that moment on, Wright harbored a distrust of focus groups (especially those that relied on people’s imaginations to fill in the blanks about specific play elements, as had been the case with Dollhouse). He would even bring up the story in future lectures and speeches. Truly, Dollhouse was a hideous name for a game. Wright wasn’t creating a toy with which only girls would play.

  Then Wright received more disappointing news, news he refused to believe. EA’s sales prognostication for the game was a mere 300,000 worldwide. In the designer’s mind, the estimate suffered from a reliance on the tried and true over the innovative and interesting. Wright complained, “If it’s something like a successful game out there, their numbers will always be equal to the success of that game. If it’s something that’s radically new, the numbers drop off substantially.”

  Eventually, the game became The Sims. EA dubbed it “a new way of life,” and gamers agreed, making it a phenomenal hit. When you first try The Sims, you likely play by the rules of society, by the straight and narrow. You go to work every day, and you do your chores when you come home. All told, you generally keep up with the Joneses. As time passes, you change. Your Sim becomes an extension of you and your passions, perhaps your need to be a slothful couch potato, a playboylike Lothario, or the lampshade-wearing drunken life of the party. And you’re thinking, “Hey. Maybe I can do the nasty in this game. That woman over there. She looks great. I mean—her eyes. I know she’s just an avatar, but that smile. Maybe it’s not about sex. Maybe it’s the big one. Maybe it’s love. Wait—this is just a damn game. Is that a Star Wars shirt she’s wearing? It MUST be love.” You might go so far as to steal a kiss from her, and be slapped upside the head for your brashness. But you keep trying. You might even try to have an illicit affair or dip in the hot tub naked with the person of your dreams.