The Super FX chip sold millions – there was one inside every 3D game, and in Yoshi’s Island. The patent fees were low, but with such huge sales Argonaut became a wealthy company. The creation of specialist 3D graphics changed hardware for gaming. Within five years, a 3D chip of some kind would be in every console made and within a decade, almost every home computer too. ‘We invented 3D accelerators,’ says San, ‘and we have the patent for it.’
Argonaut and Nintendo grew a business together, and then grew apart. ‘After a while there became friction,’ says San. ‘Nintendo had too much say.’ As an ambitious young developer with an influx of cash, Argonaut wanted to grow and make new games. Nintendo, a company that carefully managed its properties, asked Argonaut to stay small.
Their contract hadn’t been explicitly exclusive, but there was an unspoken and tacitly enforced agreement. Argonaut gave Nintendo first refusal on any development capacity that it had, and Nintendo always had another project for the British company. When Argonaut grew quickly and the void remained unfilled, this soft agreement broke down. ‘After a while I had to say, “We’re no longer going to be exclusive to you,”’ San recalls. ‘So that was the beginning of the end. They started poaching our people. Nintendo hired some of our best people, and apologised.’
For a while, the two companies had been compatible, but their habits were always quite different. The two lead developers, Shigeru Miyamoto and Jez San, worked well together, yet they disagreed on the process of making games. ‘Argonaut were in a cut-throat world of milestones and deadlines,’ San says. ‘Miyamoto-san tinkers and tinkers until he finds something that’s fun, and then he tinkers some more.’ Miyamoto’s approach generated fantastic titles, but wasn’t plannable, and for all that San had learned in the company of geniuses, Argonaut had its own ambitions.
‘We both got a lot out of it,’ he says. ‘Nintendo got 3D, which was of a multi-multi-billion dollar value to them. We got fantastic distribution and royalties and did very well. And we got to learn how Nintendo makes games.’
Codemasters and Argonaut both changed Nintendo, for a while. Codemasters challenged its control over licences, and forced it to confront, and probably adapt, the way that it bound together technology and the law to be a gatekeeper. Argonaut gave it control of a technology that allowed it to gain ground on its rivals, both by racing ahead and pushing them back.
Perhaps these very different influences came from a similar place. Codemasters and Argonaut had each emerged from a hothouse of home coding, only a step away from a hacker culture. Both developers spent years using platforms as tools, where software and hardware were co-dependent, but autonomous. From the moment they started working with the consoles, neither felt instinctively limited by Nintendo’s timing or consent. And although they used the technology for creating the best gaming experience they could, each hacked it too, diverting the fortunes of one of the world’s most influential, and seemingly most inaccessible, games giants. It was a hard habit to break.
After Nintendo, Argonaut was hired by Philips to make a 32-bit version of the Super FX chip for a follow up to its CDi console. When the CDi flopped, the project to build its successor was cancelled with a finished product in sight. The CDi 2 head, Gaston Bastien, moved on to Apple to work on a console called Project Olive, and hired the Argonaut team again. But Apple was volatile in the nineties, and again the project was aborted. This time it was particularly irritating, as the team believed they had created a breakthrough technique, previously dismissed as impossible, for accurately mapping complex pictures onto a 3D space. ‘We’re doing this project, it’s almost finished, it’s fantastic,’ San recalls. ‘The spec pisses on the Sony PlayStation – an order of magnitude better 3D graphics. And then Apple cancel it.’ It would have been the leading console, thinks San, with Argonaut’s tricks propelling it to the next generation, years ahead of its rivals. ‘Apple could have owned the gaming space.’
Argonaut returned to games development. In the lead-up to Christmas 1997, a PlayStation game they developed called Croc: Legend of the Gobbos drew the attention of the gaming press. This was partly because, in the UK, it was released in the same week as Psygnosis’ big title, G-Police. Psygnosis had hoped that this would top the Christmas charts, but Croc pushed it into second place. Croc also benefited from a giant, worldwide advertising campaign.
But the main comment made about the game was that it was remarkably like the flagship title for the new Nintendo 64 console, Super Mario 64. Both games were 3D platformers, and the lead character in Croc had more than a passing resemblance to Mario’s sidekick, Yoshi. The controls, the main character’s languid gait, and the whole look and feel of the game seemed to be an imitation of Nintendo’s title. ‘Well,’ says San, ‘if you come second, you’re going to get accused of that.’
But the genesis of the game, of both games, is more complicated. Croc was quite intentionally Argonaut’s ‘Nintendo’ game. ‘It was everything we had learned from working with Miyamoto-san about character design and how to do 3D games,’ San says. ‘Our 3D and his characters.’
In a very different form it had been an entirely Nintendo game, designed while Argonaut’s team were working in their offices in Kyoto. ‘We actually offered it to Nintendo – we offered it to Miyamoto-san,’ San says. ‘At the time it was called Yoshi Racing, because we had put a Yoshi character in there, which looks remarkably like a Croc character, and Miyamoto was blown away.’ Argonaut had used Yoshi because they believed that only a Nintendo team, and probably only Miyamoto, would be allowed to make a Mario game.
When they parted ways, both companies continued to work on their own ideas for a 3D platform game. But Argonaut had been distracted by Philips and Apple, and was running low on cash to fund development. ‘Unfortunately, we took longer to build Croc than they took to build Mario, but then we were under-resourced and under-financed,’ San says. ‘When we finally did get the money to build it and do it, it was very successful for us, but by then we weren’t the first 3D platform game, we were the second one. And that makes a very big difference.’
So if Croc and Mario 64 look similar, it’s because they share a common heritage. Croc was once a 3D interpretation of a Mario character, and Nintendo had been shown what could be achieved in 3D by Argonaut. ‘Miyamoto bumped into me once on an escalator in a tube station,’ San recalls, ‘and he said: “Thank you for your ideas. We owe you a lot.”’
9
Lost Properties
As the games industry in Britain evolved throughout the eighties and nineties, one aspect stayed remarkably constant. From the 8-bit days onwards, the ‘sweet spot’ price for mass-market gaming platforms was between £150 and £300 – some cost more, but those machines were an indulgence of enthusiasts, or were punished with lower sales. What this number meant in real terms changed, though. In 1982, a home gaming system cost as much as a fortnight’s family holiday, but by the end of the nineties, it was only the same price as a European weekend city-break for two. Buying a games machine was never a throwaway decision, but over time it became less of a landmark purchase for households with children and more like an indulgence for young people with cash.
Yet while the price of a console had found its level, everything around it changed to keep it there: the technology, the games, the developers and, especially, the number of players – the nineties were the decade when the ‘installed base’ of users rocketed. It was not a purely British phenomenon; the market was booming in the US, across Europe, and around the world. This was the decade that computer games ‘broke through’, changing in scale, reach, and ambition.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the new mass-market appeal of games coincided with a change in image: they were starting to look professional. And the transformation wasn’t simply an outward one; the shift was industry-wide. Games were now made by teams rather than individuals, budgets ballooned, and investors looked for intellectual property as much as developer talent. Now titles were promoted through mass-market advertis
ing channels, and publishers entrenched their domination over developers. These trends fed off and amplified each other, developing symbiotically, escalating the industry in concert. But the root cause of this step change was the same as that which had fostered gaming in the eighties: new technology.
For all their developments, at the start of the new decade computer games still looked like abstractions. The graphics, no matter how detailed, were unreal, usually ‘flat’ and blocky, while the music was spartan and repetitive, and littered with angry sound effects. To the initiated a game like Zool may have been the height of craftsmanship, but to outsiders it looked unmistakably electronic. Games simply didn’t compare to ‘real’ media like films or music: they appeared primitive, even infantile, aimed at a niche audience that mainstream opinion setters often kept at bay with a barrier of scorn.
The first harbinger that games might ascend into the mainstream came in 1993, with a title called The 7th Guest. It was a product of British publisher Virgin Games’ adventure in California, where a brilliant Scottish coder met a local cinematic games artist, and they were let loose to experiment with delivering games using a brand-new medium: the compact disc.
Both the Scot, Graeme Devine, and the Californian, Rob Landeros, were neophiles – eager consumers and explorers of new technology. Devine was a former bedroom coder who had encountered little sympathy for his hobby as a schoolboy. When he bunked off to finish programming his first game, a port of the arcade racer Pole Position for Atari, he was naively honest, as he recounted in a documentary that accompanied the 7th Guest reissue. ‘I went back to school with a note saying I’d taken a week off to finish up this game. Didn’t lie, didn’t say I had the flu – which is what I should have done. I took it into school, and everyone said, “OK, you’re expelled.”’
Landeros was seventeen years older than Devine, and it was his art background that led him into the US computer industry. He worked for Cinemaware, a company famed for squeezing brief pseudo-cinematic experiences on the Amiga and ST – they were momentarily impressive, showing for instance a detailed jousting match, but were often adjuncts to more mediocre games. While earning respect for his polished artwork, Landeros was unhappy: ‘Long hours, cranking stuff out,’ he recalls. ‘I was dissatisfied with the management at Cinemaware, to put it delicately.’ When he heard that Virgin Games had acquired the budget label Mastertronic and was looking for staff in its Orange County office, Landeros didn’t hesitate to join them. He found a warm welcome there – he met Devine, who sported long hair and Scooby Doo T-shirts, and they quickly formed a partnership. ‘Graeme was head of programming at Virgin Mastertronic, and I was head of the art department,’ he says. ‘Graeme was fairly new to the States, a boy-wonder programmer from Britain, enamoured with America. We hit it off.’
Like every other developer and publisher, Virgin Mastertronic was producing games for consoles and home computers. They were delivered on cartridges or floppy discs, subtly different propositions for developers, but sharing a key constraint: size. Floppy discs fared better, as they were cheap and games could be spread across several of them. The Cinemaware games Landeros had worked on needed at least two, but even then the limits were visible on screen, with repeated sequences and static backgrounds.
But a new medium was emerging. Personal computers, prohibitively pricey for all but the wealthiest hardcore gamers, could now be fitted with ‘CD-ROM drives’ – compact disc readers that used the music CD technology for storage. Costing hundreds of dollars, the drives were expensive, and a top spec computer was needed, but a single CD-ROM could hold the same data as hundreds of floppy discs.
CD-ROMs fascinated Devine and Landeros. There were a handful of games available in the new format, but they were conventional floppy disc titles with additional bells and whistles – music, or perhaps a longer introduction – and the pair suspected that the potential of CDs had barely been touched. Each had large collections of laserdiscs, and was used to the ‘random access’ of finding any scene at any time – could there be game ideas here?
The pair’s boss at Virgin was Martin Alper, who years earlier had shepherded the Chiller game through negotiations with Michael Jackson’s lawyers. He liked their ambition, and with his blessing, Devine and Landeros flew to a string of conferences on the topic, learning all they could, meeting programmers and absorbing ideas. They enjoyed their research, perhaps too much: after the fifth junket, they had what Landeros describes as ‘an attack of conscience’, and started developing a game design.
Although CD-ROMs provided an abundance of storage for content, the pair’s ideas always revolved around a ‘capsule’ environment for the game. They were initially inspired by the claustrophobic settings of movies like The Shining and Die Hard, but the atmosphere was drawn from the TV phenomenon of that era, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, and its offbeat, relentlessly escalating mystery. ‘“Who killed Laura Palmer? Who killed Laura Palmer?” We wanted to create that sort of intrigue,’ says Landeros. Their ideas coalesced around a murder mystery set in a haunted house, a dramatic, cinematic story that was also a game. Their proposal was called Guest, a play on the 1990 movie Ghost.
Alper was more than keen. They submitted their idea at nine in the morning and by lunchtime he had agreed not only to fund the game, but also to allow them to leave to set it up as part of a new company. ‘Graeme and I returned from lunch in a state of semi-shock,’ recalls Landeros. ‘Graeme said, “Have we just been fired?”’
They hadn’t quite; they had been released to assemble everything that a game in the new medium would need. The technology was still uncharted – for most developers the challenge was to fill the storage space, and Devine and Landeros weren’t entirely clear how they could either. They founded their new company, Trilobyte, in south Oregon, and there they found a large mansion house to serve as the setting of their game. They set up a camera in each room, and filmed a 360-degree panorama around it. If nothing else, digitising this would generate a lot of data.
The results were dispiritingly poor. The footage looked pedestrian, but worse, it was juddery and blocky. CD-ROMs could hold a wealth of information, but they weren’t designed for video. The CD drives simply couldn’t read the data fast enough. The output had to be at an ugly, low resolution, and even then was subject to any mechanical pause from the CD-ROM drive.
One of Trilobyte’s artists, Robert Stein, suggested a solution: he used 3D modelling software to create a virtual room with furniture floating about it in ghostly ways. The execution was visibly better than the homemade footage, and it would be far easier to add special effects. This alone might not have been enough to overcome the technical issues without an inspired innovation by Devine: a compression/decompression routine that took the vast amounts of video data and compacted it into a far smaller size. Once compressed, it would take up less space on the disc and, vitally, transfer to the computer quickly enough to allow high-resolution images. But Devine’s real triumph was in the decompression. The data was still squashed when it arrived, but with a fast enough chip – Intel’s top-of-the-range 486 – it could be converted back into its original form in real time. He had created a way to make ‘full motion video’ stream off a humble data CD. ‘No one thought it could be done,’ says Landeros, ‘but Graeme figured it out. That was a real technological breakthrough.’
Making the game started to feel closer to making a film. Devine and Landeros’s core idea was for a ‘branched’ series of videos, where the story would advance by showing different scenes as the player progressed, like selecting chapters on a laserdisc, with the order determined by the player. But the scenes needed a plot, dialogue and actors. So they took on a professional writer, horror novelist Matthew Costello, to script the game for them. This alone was a mark of creeping professionalism; designers had previously tended to treat players to their own attempts at dialogue. The writer was supplemented with a full roster of talent, demonstrating that Trilobyte had a different order of ambititon. They hired directors,
actors, and a musician – a full film-making crew.
The live acting, computer-generated mansion and Hollywood script were brought together, and the Guest concept became The 7th Guest game. The plot concerned Henry Stauf, a rich toymaker who summoned visitors to his eerie mansion, where fiendish puzzles awaited. When each was solved, a small clip would play, illuminating more of the story – an early example of ‘cut scenes’. These vignettes showcased the game’s groundbreaking technology, but also the strange effect that live, un-interactive footage could have: sometimes it was chillingly immersive, but sometimes so cheesy the atmosphere evaporated. And it was a stop-start gaming experience with puzzles that were more like brainteasers, barely interactive and almost wholly divorced from their setting. One of them, in which letters written on soup tins had to be rearranged to form a sentence, became infamous for its lack of relevance to the plot.
But it didn’t matter. The 7th Guest would go on to sell more than two million copies, and it didn’t just sell itself – it was such a phenomenon that it also pushed the CD-ROM drives and PCs with 486 chips required to play it. Manufacturers saw their sales quadruple in the wake of the game’s release.
The 7th Guest wasn’t anywhere near the league of professional film-making, but it moved games into the same sphere – a non-gamer could look at The 7th Guest and understand it, even if they were barely impressed. And it showed something else: CD-ROMs might be a specialist market, but there was a strong demand for media-rich gaming and only large teams of well funded developers would be able to meet it. For the sequel, The 11th Hour, Devine and Landeros were given a budget of four million dollars, an unprecedented sum at the time. The financial stakes had risen and the pool of people who could afford to gamble so much was tiny. No eager amateur could fund this kind of game; there was no place for a bedroom coder here.
Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders Page 23