All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (19 page)

Landeros became excited. “But we can’t have people driving all over the place. By virtue of the technology, which is cool but still limited, we have to keep them confined to one place.” That “one place” would be a creepy old mansion. The appearance would be menacing and ominous, a look that conjured the feeling of pure evil.

The two friends made an odd pair. Devine had the long hair of an eighties heavy metal guitarist and big black-framed glasses like those that perch on Joyce Carol Oates’s nose. He was often seen wearing a bomber jacket with a smiling Mickey Mouse embroidered on the back. Landeros had a Hollywood slickness about him and often kept his cards close to his vest. He habitually wore a baseball cap and one of those silk stadium jackets so popular in the 1990s. It made him look just a little like a Hollywood director. Together, they were like a Lennon and McCartney of videogames, or at least they could have been.

At Virgin Interactive, an invigorated Devine worked like a man possessed. He cranked out a twenty-page pitch and game design document and quickly sent it over to Martin Alper, the company president. Alper responded within an hour, asking the pair to lunch at the Farmer’s Market and driving them there in his Rolls-Royce. As they all sipped grossly sweet yogurt shakes, Alper, still a little cagey, said, “I read the pitch. You really want to do this?”

Devine and Landeros eagerly nodded and said, “Yes.” Devine took a sip of his shake.

“If this is what you want to do,” Alper said, “I’m afraid I have to fire you.”

Devine nearly spewed the thick shake onto his boss. He and Landeros were completely shocked. They were director-level middle managers who liked their jobs and salaries. What had they done to deserve dismissal? Alper leaned forward and laid down the law. “It comes with some good news, too. I’m going to give you a contract to make this game.” Yet he cautioned that there was no way in the world that their horror game was going to be profitable. He said it was valuable merely as a proof of concept, as a trophy game that would display what CD-ROMs could do. Then he pounded the table with his fist and said only four people would ever buy it. Alper had some other demands, too, including a request for the two to produce a floppy disk version of The 7th Guest, a next-to-impossible task that the duo immediately pushed to the side. In addition, the pair could not establish offices beyond sixty miles from the Virgin Interactive offices. Alper felt that Devine and Landeros were too unseasoned to leave the fold completely, and he didn’t completely trust them with company money. Having said that, he agreed to provide a healthy budget for the CD-ROM, twice the $200,000 to $300,000 that Virgin usually paid for cartridge games.

Devine and Landeros broke the rules immediately. They set up shop that November in an office above a tavern more than sixty miles away—far out of state, in the small town of Jacksonville, Oregon, an old gold mining community that perhaps was best known as the home of the original Bozo the Clown. Devine had to be convinced about Oregon after stopping in rainy Ashland, which looked like a dreary logging town. But when their car pulled into Jacksonville, the rain turned to wet snow, with big, fat flakes, and the townspeople gathered around their car to sing Christmas carols. A waving Santa Claus even rode past in a sleigh. Devine saw this popular-culture onslaught
as a fortuitous sign. The two found what they saw as the perfect office as well, one with thirty-foot ceilings and a $1,000-a-month rent.

As Devine packed his boxes, the phone rang. Ken Williams, the persuasive head of Sierra On-Line, which made the King’s Quest adventure games, among others, tried to hire Devine. While his offer of royalties was less then the spoils of the first years of Sierra, when a freelance designer’s cut amounted to an astonishing 30 percent, it still neared 10 percent for games Devine would make for Williams. Devine casually took a bite of cold pizza and said, “Sorry, Ken. I’ve got my own company now.”

Trilobyte, named by Landeros after a cheeky character in an old underground comic, had only four core employees. The staff was lean, the hours long, and the camaraderie close as could be. Landeros oversaw the script writing. He also kept tabs on the director, who budgeted $25,000 for the two-day video shoot, one that included a cardboard blue screen purchased at a local flea market. During the shoot, done in the Super VHS format, one of the actors fell through the blue screen, which was then taped up. The blue screen was still ruined, and wasn’t even the right shade of blue; the marring showed up in the editing room after the shoot. Trilobyte had to hire expensive video editors to take out the frames where the tear showed. Within six months, which was the budgeted development cycle, they were running out of money—fast. The 7th Guest was becoming a microcosm of the haphazard nature of the videogame industry, still in its teething phase. Deadlines passed. Milestones were not met. And the game was not finished. Devine and Landeros were suddenly faced with a difficult reality: They had to use their own money to fund Trilobyte.

Devine began working on creating software within the CD-ROM disk that would play full-motion video. Within days he had a robust but small ninety-kilobyte player called Play that was so good, it was licensed by Autodesk, the makers of the best 3-D animation
program of the time. Then Devine figured out a way to compress the huge video files so that they would easily fit on two CD-ROMs. Video had never before been used in a game, nor had video compression. It was genius work, fueled by coffee strong enough to bore holes in a cast iron stomach. Days would pass in the blink of an eye. Surprising to Devine was Landeros’s stamina; he was no longer in his twenties or thirties, but he kept going like an old Timex watch. The royalty money from Autodesk helped everyone tread water. From the shareware version of Play, cash came in via drips and trickles; about ten copies a day on a good day meant an extra $200 for the company. During the rare moments that the duo wasn’t working together, they were watching laser discs together. When UPS delivered Stanley Kubrick’s
The Shining
, they drove to Devine’s home to watch it. When it was over, they watched it again.

Some of the furniture and house wasn’t finished, and there was some blue space where objects like paintings with moving eyes would be, but by January 1992, they had pieced together a rough demo of the game to take to the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. Once there, they asked the Virgin Interactive representative to remove a videogame version of the Monopoly board game from one of the computers so they could show their game off on a large monitor. As they put The 7th Guest through its paces, word spread throughout the show floor that full-motion video was being shown off in a game, and people swarmed to the booth. Within minutes, it was standing room only, with people peering from the outside in to view the invention. The 7th Guest was the biggest hit of the convention, and the two were treated like emerging Hollywood stars, recognized everywhere on the show floor.

On the plane back to Oregon, Devine and Landeros had mixed feelings. They were proud and elated. They felt they might have a game that would sell exponentially more than Alper’s prediction of four copies. They were also so terrifed that they felt sick to their
stomachs. Now they would have to deliver a game that was even better than the demo.

“Shit,” said Devine.

“Shit,” added Landeros.

Back in Oregon, the company couldn’t afford a proper tech department, and their computer network, which only stored five hundred megabytes, kept crashing from the weight of the sizable video editing projects. They had to make the game look like it had full-motion video; that was their hook. But the opening scene alone, in which the camera moved up an old staircase, had to be tweaked for a month before it looked like a smooth scene shot by a movie camera. The whole problem seems ludicrous today. Today, nearly everyone has QuickTime or Flash to run videos on YouTube, MySpace, or Facebook; you download trailers in seconds with three-megabytes-per-second broadband, and even waiting those seconds can seem like an eternity. But back in 1990, playing video was a novelty. Placing video into game code was a monumental hurdle to overcome, even with the help of Devine’s magic video player. Handling and compressing the data was a complex puzzle, more brain-busting than anything in The 7th Guest itself, and more horrifying, too. An hour’s worth of video took months to organize.

One day during crunch time, Alper and a few business executives flew up to Medford and drove over to the Trilobyte offices in Jacksonville. Alper was still forcing Trilobyte to create a floppy disk version of the product. Equally pressing, since the game was delayed by four months, was Alper’s need to make certain that hard work was being done. As the meeting began, Landeros suddenly excused himself. Minutes went by. At the ten-minute mark, Alper was getting more and more annoyed. Devine had no idea where his partner had gone.

“What the hell is this, some kind of negotiating tool?” complained Alper.

The minutes passed too slowly for Devine, who was now sweating. At the fifteen-minute point, Landeros returned and calmly sat down. “Where were you?” asked Devine, who had anxiously tried calming the executives to no avail.

“I’m sorry. I just got married.” Landeros explained that the only block of time he could find to get hitched was during the hours when Virgin Interactive was in town. He had gone down to City Hall to meet his betrothed, place a ring on her finger, stand for a brief ceremony, and kiss the bride. Then he got back in his car and headed back to the meeting. Alper was impressed with the work ethic, and Virgin Interactive never again demanded a floppy disk version of the scary mystery.

Once Alper departed, one of the employees got up, opened the window, and screamed to the world in vitriolic Peter Finch/
Network
fashion, “I screwed up! I screwed up!” He had made an error writing code to a CD-ROM and had to dispose of it. CD-ROMs for testing on Trilobyte’s prized $5,000 CD-ROM copier were priced at $100 each in the early nineties, and they weren’t rewritable. Making a mistake with one disk was an expensive proposition, but one that was difficult to avoid because Trilobyte needed to experiment in order to break new ground. The neighbors and passersby on Jacksonville’s streets heard the plaintive and pissed off cries all too often.

Yet there were saviors swooping down from the heavens, the first in the form of one of the more forward-thinking game companies, the second in the form of the world’s most paranoid game company. The Consumer Electronics Show buzz caught on throughout the industry, and Sega now yearned to have The 7th Guest for the CD-ROM-based Sega CD attachment to its Genesis console. The Genesis, which started slow in Japan, was on its way to becoming the bestselling game player in Europe. Sega was also releasing the first in a series of games featuring its speedy, cheeky mascot, the very blue-colored Sonic the Hedgehog. Sega approached Trilobyte with a
lucrative offer. But Nintendo, which would soon begin to lose market share to Sega, got wind of the company’s interest and preempted the deal, licensing The 7th Guest for the Nintendo Entertainment System for a staggering $500,000. However, they never planned to publish the game. Nintendo had made a Go-like strategic move to stop Sega from gaining any more ground. Trilobyte received half of those monies and Virgin the other half. Better for the ego than money was the fact that Nintendo sent superstar Shigeru Miyamoto to the little town in Oregon to see what all the fuss was about. Devine planned a grand barbecue for the Legend of Zelda maker. On a hot August day, as steaks sizzled on the grill, Miyamoto seemed happy to hang out with Devine, although the Japanese game maker was somewhat confused about where he was in the world. Through the two translators who arrived with him, Miyamoto told Devine, “I don’t think this CD-ROM technology will ever become popular. At Nintendo, we have cartridges. Cartridges cannot be broken by children. Kids will scratch and smudge these disks, making them unusable. That’s why Nintendo is sticking to cartridges.” Devine knew that CD-ROMs were the future, but he didn’t dare challenge the great Miyamoto.

The finished game was nothing like Mario or Zelda. It had moments that scared you to the point of shivering. The game opened by showing players a Victorian house on a hill, a lone bright light in one second-floor window. Below, a barren, moonlit path snaked its way to the door. Above, the midnight clouds looked like the gnarly fingers of Nosferatu, ready to grab, hold on, and choke until death came. Wind ravaged, thunder pillaged your ears, and tentacled lightning blinded. In the distance, a lone wolf cried out in pain. There was the unsettling sound of a door creaking, somewhere. And that was just the first seven seconds.

Instead of The Stranger, you meet the The Drifter Stauf, sleeping in a trench coat under a craggy hundred-year-old oak tree. An
echoing, disembodied voice tells you The Drifter was “moving from town to town, robbing a gas station here, a grocery store there—until one night …” As he steals her purse, Stauf kills a young girl coming home from choir practice because “he had nothing, no life, no possessions, no dreams.” Stauf has visions of toy making, and the toys he carves make him rich. But they might also kill children. The scene is shot in front of a blue screen, a wide shot with a static camera shooting the actors straight on, somewhat like the films of the silent movie era—crude, but effective. In a few moments, you realize that the name Stauf is an anagram for Faust. You shiver, thinking your goose bumps will pop like acne. Once inside the dark old mansion, a bony skeleton’s hand beckons, suggesting where to go for clues. Upstairs goes the shaky camera, Steadicam fashion. At the top, a ghost with long tresses floats across the wide floor planks and through the walls. It’s often written that scary games are best played with the lights off. However, even if your sixty-watt gooseneck lamp was right next to your PC, you were utterly spooked by The 7th Guest. Even better than the frights (which featured a passel of eerie toys) were the peculiar puzzles that Devine and Landeros invented for the game. Moving the blue cells in the old microscope around so that they outnumbered the green cells, which Stauf controlled, was an enigma solvable only by genius math gurus with a major in algorithms. You would curse aloud and throw your trackball mouse against the wall and then go out to the corner bar for a stiff drink.