All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (10 page)

Frye began the Pac-Man project when his boss called him into a meeting and announced that two games required attention posthaste. Both Pac-Man and Defender had to go out the door in a matter of months, and both Frye and Larry DeMar were up for the gigs. DeMar worked on the brain-curdling Defender arcade game with former pinball machine designer Eugene Jarvis. Earnest and thoughtful, DeMar didn’t believe Pac-Man could be made on the 2600. He told Frye that every dot on the screen that the pizza-shaped character hungrily chomped was considered an additional graphical element, which would eat up precious memory. When DeMar chose to help design Defender, Frye took on the monumental task of squeezing Pac-Man onto a cartridge, even though the cartridge might not have enough free data to do the landmark game justice.

As with other employees ensconced in the crunch-time depths of Atari’s offices, Frye’s work was sometimes fueled by pot and then cocaine, partly because the Pac-Man deadline was extraordinarily tight, partly because it was simply part of the try-anything culture of debauchery at the time. Some have written that Frye threatened to quit unless he received a bump in pay to do the game. But Frye did nothing of the kind. He simply wanted to do the job. He told
others, “I just want to trip out on the technology.” Frye loved coding the game, and the art of programming moved him. He slept in the office to meet the deadline. Every night, he dreamed in code. Sometimes, he solved problems while he slept. When he was awake, he was embracing of Atari up-and-comers, like the teenage Mark Cerny, who was working on Marble Madness for the arcades, the first physics-based game, one in which you nervously guided a ball with surgical precision through maze upon maze. During their rare breaks, Frye invited Cerny into his truck, tossed him a beer, and put the Atari office culture into perspective. Sometimes Frye bitched a blue streak; sometime he philosophized. But it all made the young Cerny feel part of the gang, not an outsider. (Cerny would become such a vital force in videogames that he would be inducted into the industry’s Hall of Fame decades later. But without Frye’s friendship amid the ulcer-inducing politics of Atari, he might have given up on games altogether.)

When Pac-Man was released, it was plagued by an annoying flicker. Frye told those who would listen around the office that the four ghosts (humorously nicknamed Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde) who chased Pac-Man were supposed to be transparent. Whatever the case, Frye was one of the first game designers to get a piece of the action with management’s new “enhanced compensation package,” something developers at the company had lobbied for incessantly. It was only about .30 of 1 percent of each $30 cartridge, about 10 to 15 cents on each game. Atari made twelve million units, and each cost about $2.50 to make. They sold seven million copies of the game and earned about $15 per cartridge. Still, executives at the company considered it a disappointment. Frye also complained that if you were a writer, you’d get at least 5 percent in royalties. He didn’t receive anything near 5 percent. Still, the cranky programmer earned a million dollars from Pac-Man royalties alone in 1982.

Sadly, Frye failed to report the income properly to the feds, an
understandable mistake for a young programmer still very green when it came to life experience. The IRS got to him, eventually discovering an illegal tax shelter Frye’s accountant had created, and came down on him hard.

At least in a small way, Atari had tried to do right by some of its employees (like Frye) with a royalty package. But it was already too late. Atari became known in the industry as a game maker that would cut corners on its games. The problems with Pac-Man sales proved that in-house designers and programmers, even good ones like Frye, weren’t being given enough time to complete even the best games. And employees were still leaving in droves. The games were symptomatic of a larger problem: half-assedness across the board. Atari was cracking from the inside out. Corruption and stealing by high-flying sales representatives around the world was becoming more and more prevalent. The current president, Ray Kassar, flew to New York City in a private jet, his preferred means of travel. Armed with a presentation for Warner executives that was full of Greek god–like hubris, Kassar estimated that Atari would earn $2 billion a year and bring in revenues of $6 billion by 1986. He was betting wildly, believing that Atari could sustain the huge profits of 1982, during which the company brought in $2 billion in revenue for Warner. Kassar was never without a limo, and he was flying so high that Atari’s 1982 fete for salesmen was held in Monte Carlo, not the usual staple, California.

In late August 1982, one Warner executive discovered that hundreds of thousands of games were sitting, undistributed and unsold, in a Milwaukee warehouse. But Warner executive Manny Gerard, who was often the most boisterous and self-confident of the entertainment company’s honchos, palliated the situation for everyone, including Steve Ross. He constantly reminded all those within earshot that Atari had a lock on 80 percent of the market. Ross wasn’t so sure. Now more than ever, he considered Atari a flash in the pan.
So Ross quietly had begun selling nearly sixty thousand shares in the company when it hovered in the stratosphere at nearly $60 a share.

On December 8, 1982, after horrible earnings were reported to the public, the stock plummeted. As in the tale of the Terraces of Purgatory in Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, the avaricious, the slothful, and the gluttonous were purged—most of them. No eyes were sewn shut, and no one had to lie prostrate on the ground, but new Atari owner Jack Tramiel, formerly president of Commodore International, butchered the staff from two thousand to a few hundred. Tramiel, a Pole who was formerly a taxi driver, had worked his way up the ladder through sheer cutthroat tenacity. At Atari, he began to focus the remaining staff on making the Atari 1040ST. It could play games, yes, but also would supposedly rival the popular Apple II PC. Tramiel, who had remade his image into a dashing fellow who was cut from cloth finer and fancier than many of Atari’s fascinating nerds, was nonetheless a follower, not an innovator. He was doomed to fail because he was playing catch-up.

Atari’s brain drain was embarrassing, but the executives at the company refused to notice. Meanwhile the top minds, now at Activision, created stellar games for the Atari consoles with an entrepreneurial energy not seen since Bushnell, Dabney, and Alcorn had come together to form Syzygy. Activision not only pushed the envelope; it invented a whole new genre with designer David Crane’s quickly but not haphazardly designed Pitfall!, a captivating game in which you played Harry, a Tarzan-like adventurer who swings from the trees and dashes through caves in 255 screens of constant mayhem. You became breathless as you avoided giant, scorpion-ridden holes and famished crocodiles, all the while searching for thirty-two treasures—in a frantic twenty minutes.

That success was upsetting for Atari, which had become a place where deadlines came and went without being met. Worse, software was pushed to market before being refined and perfected, à la the
E.T. discomfiture. But Atari was hardly alone in its failures. In the wake of the gaming gold rush Atari had created, crapware was released
hundreds of times
by dozens of companies, so much so that the gamer couldn’t really trust the hype that preceded a game’s introduction. There were too many consoles and too many games released by too many companies to sustain a boom. In addition to Channel F, for example, there were machines from Bally, Mattel, Emerson, Tandy, and Coleco. In fact, Coleco left the industry entirely. Imagic decided not to go public on the day before its IPO. Many of the consoles and games that remained languished on shelves and in warehouses. Dozens of the little guys with tiny staffs of a dozen or less were forced to shutter their doors, although Activision and a handful of other companies stayed afloat by making games for the personal computer, which was on its way up in terms of popular awareness and afford-ability. It wasn’t just the videogame industry that suffered a severe contraction. Stagflation struck the entire country; the inflation in late 1982 was nearly 11 percent, and nine million people were looking for work. The most brutal recession since the Great Depression was a tough time all around, but the game companies were hit the hardest.

So Atari’s time in the sun was over. And because of its gigantic failure, the whole videogame world crashed and burned. It was as though games had been a trend and nothing more. When Atari fell, no one wanted to take a chance on games—not investors, not retail chains, not consumers. In retrospect, the collapse does not diminish what Atari had done for popular culture. Videogames were now part of everyone’s vocabulary and Pac-Man was even the subject of an irritating song called “Pac-Man Fever” that made the
Billboard
Top Ten. Nolan Bushnell’s persona set the stage for other videogame entrepreneurs who learned it was OK to be full of Bushnell brag, bluster, and bull. The arcade scene, created by the release of Pong in the small Bay Area bar, would continue to be a force once the industry recovered. The cool hangout aspect of arcades, however,
began to diminish in the mid 1990s. The VCS didn’t die because of the crash, either. It survived because a small but passionate niche of gamers still bought Atari cartridges. Straightforward and utilitarian, the machine made games easy for everyone to use. You just popped in a cartridge, grabbed your joystick, and gritted your teeth for the roller coaster ride of your life. Actually, a very weakened Atari still made games for the VCS until 1992.

But with E.T., Atari was confronted with a tough lesson from which they really did not learn. Games are not about slapping a badly rendered movie poster on a piece of plastic in return for a slick licensing deal. While film can influence the artistic process, games are about intricately, lovingly designed computer code. Those in charge, whether it was Ross or Tramiel or any of the businessmen who took the reins, knew nothing of how precisely to keep the business going, about how and when to release a new console, about when a new game could help to sell an older console, about when stodgy technology could be made to look as elating as new technology, or about how to market to the media the heroic individuals who invented games.

Yet a company in Japan knew. They seemed to know it instinctively, even though in the real life game of international business, they could be the worst kinds of bullies.

As a boy, he was not yet considered a genius. He was simply a curious, round-faced kid with an artistic bent, one of millions in Japan. He loved exploring, once finding himself in a cave within Flour Mountain, not far from his home. Inside, the kid with the wide, open smile was as nervous and gunned up as Tom Sawyer, as he wandered alone in the half darkness, among the stalactites and drops of water that echoed eerily on the limestone floor. On treks with the Boy Scouts, he loved watching the flora and fauna high on Mount Rokko, as the thick forest gave way to a shimmering lake. Awestruck, he took it all in, bending down to examine mushrooms and squirrels and flowers. At the time, he knew nothing of videogames, for videogames had not yet been invented. Nor did his family own a TV set. But he did love to invent his own toys, like his own driving game based on an electronic one he
had seen at an entertainment center. He re-created the game at home with a belt and a steering wheel. And he was obsessed by making model airplanes, sometimes blowing them up with firecrackers.

If he knew of Nintendo at all, it was through the company’s most popular item at the time, an old-school deck of cards used to play hanafuda. They were flower cards representing each of the year’s twelve months. Sometimes they were used for gambling, but also for a variety of card matching games. More than cards, young Shigeru Miyamoto was fascinated by the outdoors, by every nook and cranny in his small town of Sonobe, a suburb of fifteen thousand people in the Funai District of Kyoto. Near him for inspiration were the caves and waterfalls of Ruri Canyon and the ruins of a sprawling 350-year-old castle.

As with Ralph Baer, the showman in Miyamoto staged puppet shows. His father, a strict schoolteacher, didn’t encourage this artistic side. Instead, he wanted Miyamoto to keep his nose to the grindstone in all his class work. But his mother encouraged drawings and paintings inspired by the outdoors and movies. He loved the movies of the day, like Disney’s feature-length animated classics, everything from
Peter Pan
to
Snow White
, from
Fantasia
to
Alice in Wonderland
. He also went gaga over the famous monsters of filmland, like King Kong and Godzilla. Shigeru Miyamoto was Every Kid, the kind you watch in the Spielberg movies. And he kept that childlike sense of wonder close to his soul as he aged. As an adult, he was able to communicate that amazement, if not verbally, then through artwork and through story. Uncannily, he would be able to touch the souls of children of every race throughout the world. And he would do this over and over again.