All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (18 page)

If you read that description in the middle of the night in the glow of your old computer screen, it chilled you right to the marrow.

Zork eventually was picked up by a million fans and inspired six traditional paperback novels, and its success marked an auspicious beginning for the new niche. But it was Myst and The 7th Guest, games of the nineties made around the same time, that were responsible not only for a tidal wave in videogame sales, but for a meteoric rise in the sales of personal computers with CD-ROM drives. Myst was cryptic, unique, and full of a graphical splendor that was part Salvador Dalí and part Jules Verne’s
The Mysterious Island
—with a bit of the myths of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien thrown in for good measure. There was nothing to shoot. There were few words spoken by the characters. There was no linear story. The gamer wasn’t asked to be the hero. Initially, players had no idea what
the hell
was going on, what
the hell
to do, or how
the hell
to progress in Myst.

To help, there were enigmatic books in the game written by a shadowy scribe called Atrus. As you read these tomes of science fiction mystery called
The Ages
, your skin crawled. You anticipated the
adventure to come, and the game play. But you were creeped out by the unknown; these books were strange portals that let you travel to beckoning virtual worlds and solve the many puzzles.

But these books weren’t enough. Myst was generally inscrutable unless you bought a step-by-step instruction book for an extra $10 or $20. Part of the addiction to the game had to do with the human need to win and to finish things. Myst, with its 2,500 images that were like paintings and its sixty-six minutes of video, kept you coming back with its hyper-realistic and moving paintings and puzzles. Many of its twenty-six musical compositions were lulling and ambient, not blaring like the amusement park sideshow that was Super Mario Bros. Part of your mind was frantic and frustrated, trying to figure out the solutions (without the hint book), while another part prevented teeth gnashing and mouse throwing because it was being soothed by the kind of music you hear in a yoga class.

In the game, you assumed the role of The Stranger, trapped on an island, trying to solve a mystery of mammoth proportions. Just that name—The Stranger—made the game cool beyond imagination. It was the same stranger toward which many gravitated in other media, the guys on
Route 66
, Spock on
Star Trek
, Brando and Dean in the movies, the mystical Phantom Stranger and the spell-conjuring Dr. Strange in comic books, and outsiders like Jack Kerouac and David Foster Wallace in literature. In life, you may have been the outsider/stranger in ways that weren’t good. Maybe you were the nerd who was spat upon by the cool kids. Maybe you were passed over for promotions at work. But in Myst, you were the unfamiliar rambler who could be a hero even as you were isolated and alone. For once, you didn’t simply read about the stranger or watch him passively. Since The Stranger was never seen on-screen, I imagined myself as a bald man wearing the blackest of leather jackets, scuffed Doc Martens with grungy skulls etched upon them, and a menacing owl tattoo on my chest. It was, after all, the era of Kurt Cobain and
Nirvana. No wonder Myst sold so many millions of copies. It had its own alt rock coolness.

The story behind Myst is the story of young guys in a garage, making a weird indie game on faith and hope—as cheaply as they could. Tirelessly for two years, Robyn and Rand Miller and five of their pals worked out of their garages in Spokane, Washington, on the game made originally for the Apple Macintosh computer. The Millers were frugal, buying everything from video equipment to dictionaries on sale or used at flea markets. For the sound of bubbles underwater, they placed a tube in a toilet bowl, hooked up a microphone, and blew through the tube. They paid excruciatingly precise attention to detail in the artwork, story, and puzzles, which were mapped out on legal pads. They weren’t making a movie, but they referred to their computer graphics as virtual movie sets and to the software as a virtual camera.

Myst was one of the first decidedly nonviolent games for adults. The Miller brothers, who had previously made software for children, were sons of a pastor, ingrained with a moral sensibility and the commandments of the Bible. Myst itself was loosely based upon a kids’ game they had made. They didn’t want the character to die and they didn’t want him to shoot anyone. When they talked about it, Rand said to Robyn, “Violence is a big tool in storytelling and one that should not be wielded lightly. If you use violence without any point, people just get immune to it. So let’s do what we think is responsible.” Long hours in a cramped room took their toll. They were almost insane from the constant game making. They made the game harder than most any other game just because they could. Obsessed by their own stories for Myst’s mythology, they loved the idea that they were producing something unequivocally original. Both brothers felt they were creating a game for a niche audience, one that would appreciate their artistry. An old proposal for the game reveals that the Millers expected the game to sell, at most, a hundred
thousand copies. Instead, it sold nearly eight million, all on an initial investment of $300,000.

Yet the Millers’ travails paled in comparison to the pals who decided to make a game filled with live action video. Inspired by a board game and a television show, The 7th Guest and its sequel were so fraught with frights that they drove one of the game designers crazy, literally. Like Myst, The 7th Guest was responsible for selling millions of personal computers. Occasionally terrifying, always campy and over the top, The 7th Guest boldly led the way for the future of horror games. However, the making of The 7th Guest and its follow-up, The 11th Hour, showed in microcosm the rift that could develop when those who held strong ideas about movies worked side by side with those who cared more about game design.

The 7th Guest co-creator Graeme Devine was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and then moved to Crawley, a south-of-London town famous for its Stone and Bronze Age artifacts. Introduced to computers by his carpenter-turned-techie father, the super-smart nerd with the high-pitched laugh began making and disassembling computer code by the age of ten. He worked on a Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) and TRS-90, learning how graphics worked and where they were positioned in the computer’s memory. He haunted video arcades and tried to remake on his home computer science fiction space games that he loved. The graphics were nothing but black-and-white blips. But for Devine, when a ship disappeared after being hit, it was blowing into a thousand pieces as in
Star Wars
, full of explosions and fireworks that only the speculative mind could conjure.

At sixteen, he shocked Atari’s UK office with a demo for a PC
version of the popular Pole Position racing game, which he created in one night. But the teen, who had made the demo just for fun, was biting off more than he could chew when he promised Atari to make a full game. With the videogame to code and high school assignments, the deadlines accumulated. Devine told his parents that “the pressure is terrible.” It was the first instance in which he would make the mistake of putting far too much on his plate. While he loved to code, the seemingly harmless obsession would ultimately make his business dealings somewhat star-crossed.

Devine took a week off from school, and when the principal asked him where he’d gone off to, he told the truth. Rage flushed the principal’s face red, and Devine was promptly expelled. Shortly thereafter, he received a note from the new Atari owner, Jack Tramiel, the Polish-born former taxi driver who’d come from Commodore International. In no uncertain terms, Tramiel said in one paragraph that he would not be paying the 3 percent royalty rate detailed in Devine’s contract for Pole Position. Despite this experience, Devine still wanted to make games. After high school, he created his own company and found some shadowy investors and a cheap space to set up shop, only to find that his partner was on drugs. Freaked out, Devine hastily packed up his belongings and left the office to face a windy and bracing English afternoon. The investors rang him up the next day. A gravelly voice on the end of the phone threatened, “I’m gonna come down there and break your legs.” For a moment, the frozen Devine could barely speak. He began shaking as he promised to meet two goons in the office. On the next day, he spied them from the window as they parked the car outside. He was only nervous now, less timorous—because his father hid behind the door with a golf club, ready to swing at the investors’ heads.

The stairs creaked. The investors knocked on the door and stepped inside. Everyone was on edge. “Your son is a horrible person. He left us high and dry,” said one goon.

“He’s untrustworthy, a really bad person.” He took a step toward the boy.

“You’re the idiots,” growled Devine’s father. “I trust my son.” He raised the golf club. “You get the hell out of here.” He started swinging the club as a weapon, and the goons ducked to avoid the iron head. They grumbled weakly. Then they left. Devine, for some time, was still traumatized, believing they would return.

He had had his share of bad luck. But the young game maker was certain that it wouldn’t continue. Devine plodded on, working for Martin Alper at Mastertronics, a UK maker of budget game offerings priced at a couple of pounds and under. It wasn’t the most stimulating work; he was doing more porting of games to the PC. Devine headed to California after Mastertronics opened a US office in 1986. When Alper went on to work at Virgin Interactive (which in 1987 bought a 45 percent stake in Mastertronics), Devine followed. There, Devine became buddies with a young graphics wizard called Rob Landeros. Landeros had mucked around the Berkeley scene doing everything from bawdy underground comics to amazingly lifelike scrimshaw with animals and American Indian motifs. He was a “drop in, drop out” kind of college student, who told Devine he tried successfully to keep from getting a regular job and doing hard work. But Landeros felt he’d found his calling when he began to make artwork on a Commodore 64 and an Amiga computer, pixel by pixel. He would say to others that “it was like taking your first hit of LSD or peyote. Life becomes different.”

With a portfolio of artwork, a self-programmed card game, and a knack for networking, Landeros had made a name for himself in Southern California without much effort. He didn’t want to work
too
hard. He found a cushy job at Cinemaware, which was making graphically detailed, story-oriented games like Defender of the Crown. When Landeros met Devine at Virgin, their mutual interest in graphics, story, and technology—along with free trips to tech
conventions—forged a strong bond. But in New York City in 1989, a fascinating, odd idea for a game made them inseparable. Or so it seemed.

At the InterMedia Conference at the Jacob Javits Convention Center (the same place where Atari failed miserably during Toy Fair), the pair witnessed the dawn of the popularization of CD-ROM technology, CDs that could hold an encyclopedic amount of data and still have room for music and video as well. CD-ROMs were a revelation, holding six hundred times the data of floppy disks, the format to which PC game makers had previously been limited. At the show, companies like Compton’s and Microsoft showed off the massive amount of text the disk could store. CD-ROMs were indeed amazing. There was just so much there—videotaped speeches of King and JFK, interactivity, reams of text—it was an educator’s and researcher’s dream. Both Devine and Landeros wanted to make it a gamer’s dream. They began thinking about using the plastic disk to make a game movie-like in ways games had never before been.

At the Newark airport, the two brainstormed and outlined their plan, with Devine writing a few notes on a paper napkin.

“We don’t want to do Nintendo games with those blocky little pixely characters jumping around,” said Landeros.

“I agree. They’re for kids. It’s important to tell a good story. Everyone can play, but it’s more mature,” said Devine.

Landeros had been an avid board game fan for years. He suggested that the game be a version of Clue, the strategy-oriented murder solving game by Parker Brothers, first created in 1949. Landeros was also a puzzle aficionado, with a subscription to
Games
magazine and a love for Fool’s Errand, the difficult but award-winning 1987 adventure for Mac computers. Based on foreboding tarot cards, the game featured a hopeful, affable Silly Willy wandering around the countryside in medieval times. Each time he solved a puzzle, he got a piece of map leading to fourteen treasures of the Land of Tarot.
The two wanted to meld that idea somehow with their favorite TV show of the time, David Lynch’s creepy, somewhat absurdist mystery
Twin Peaks
. They spoke excitedly about the dark intelligence of
Twin Peaks
for a while. Devine wrote the show’s title down on a napkin. Then he circled it.

Said Devine, “From what we’ve seen at Intermedia, we can add little bits of video to the game.”