All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (2 page)

And videogames have correspondingly become an unstoppable force in popular culture, one that constantly influences other forms of entertainment. From
30 Rock
to
South Park
, videogames are the subject of crucial plot points and full episodes. Even more important, they have changed the way blockbuster action films and TV programs are shot. Cars that blow up in
Transformers
roll toward you, coming at you like they’re alive, like something out of Need for Speed or Burnout Paradise. Car commercials feature the characters and monsters in World of Warcraft. Beverage ads are informed by Grand Theft Auto. Sonic the Hedgehog and Pikachu are featured balloons in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, flying high and proud next to Spider-Man and Buzz Lightyear. Mark Ecko designed a full line of clothing devoted to Halo. And the phenomenon is worldwide. You can even buy a box of Pokémon-branded milk in Thailand.

How and why did this happen? As a journalist, I’ve watched the growth for two decades now. I’ve seen the cycles come and go. I’ve seen the Nintendo dominance end and begin again, more powerful than before. But as the trends come and go, I keep thinking about the big riddle of videogames: How did we get here? How did videogames rise to take over popular culture? I’ve watched in amazement as the videogame industry, like that Energizer bunny, keeps going and going. How does it get bigger every year, even as mainstream media continue to turn up their noses at videogame culture? (And isn’t that utterly idiotic? Why aren’t games reviewed alongside books, movies, and pop music?)

Those questions have always fascinated me, but another process—that of an individual game’s creation—only really captured my imagination when I worked for two years as editor in chief of Sony Online Entertainment. There, I was witness to the fascinating if sometimes daunting way games were made. I helped with the words to many games and I helped test them too, including the massively multiplayer online role playing game of elves and ogres, EverQuest, often called EverCrack because of its insanely addictive nature. I was absolutely intrigued by the creation of games, utterly entranced by even the smallest nugget about, yes,
how
they were made, but even more,
why
they were made. There was nothing better than being inside that womb of knowledge. I felt the same way at VH1, where I wrote the daily GameBreak blog and worked on Viacom papers full of techspeak to help the company soldier forward during the casual game revolution. After those experiences, when a game struck me as ingenious—a cut or two above the rest—I wanted to know all about it and the people who imagined it. Questions for the game makers would drop into my head like those constantly falling blocks in Tetris. What could the game have become if you didn’t have to worry about sales? What did you fight to retain when those heavy-handed executives from the megacorporation chimed in with
their say? Overall, why did the game work? Why did it tickle and charge my neurons, axons, receptors, and thalamus, making me completely and utterly bliss out? Was it because the game itself was a triumph of the craft or because I could feel comfortable living in the game’s world? Was my nerdy perception exactly on par with the game makers’? Or did the game permit my own imagination to grow and flourish in ways that I previously believed only books and music could? And finally, when a game was really terrific, when it grabbed my heart and soul just like Alice Sebold did with
The Lovely Bones
or Joseph Conrad with
Heart of Darkness
, why could I not stop playing?

There have been other books about videogames, books that talk about facts, money, and technology, books that personalize the experience of gaming, books that detail trends, books that simply tell you how to play a game. I’ve read many and have enjoyed some of them. But there have been few books that, to rephrase Robert Frost, began with delight and ended in wisdom, few books that led me to feel those completely exciting aha moments of creation and camaraderie, of theorizing and implementation, of process and panic, of wild success and looming deadline doom, that I know from experience go into making the finest games. Most of all, there have been none that convincingly told me how we got here.

That’s what I’ve tried to capture in these pages. You will find out how the world of game making profoundly affected those artists and craftspeople who made Super Mario Bros., Pong, Myst, Spore, EverQuest, BioShock, Shadow Complex, and more—and not always in a positive way. Each of these changed videogames forever, and the untold facts, fascinating anecdotes, and heretofore buried details about these pieces of popular art tantalized me. But I also wanted to explore the larger question: How in the pantheon of games did each of these help the medium evolve enough to keep you and me excited for all these decades, these crazy fifty years?

I don’t try to look at every moment of videogame history in
these pages. And I won’t I look at every great videogame franchise. For that way lies madness … and redundancy. Instead, I’ve chosen to detail some moments of supreme discovery and utter failure by the brilliant inventors and craftspeople who gave innovation, personality, and even drama to an industry that altered my life (and, when you think about it, made a big difference in yours, too).

If you know games, you know what I mean. If you don’t, I hope that, in the course of reading these chapters, you will feel it like I so often feel it, with surprise, pleasure, panic, awe, goose bumps, and exhilaration.

On a freakin’ cold, windy fall Friday, the 7:39 a.m. commuter train rolled through Queens, frozen wheels squeaking and moaning. I passed indistinguishable tall apartment complexes with ratty balconies like something out of Gears of War. As the city morphed into the equally indistinguishable suburban sprawl of Long Island, bleary-eyed reverse commuters checked their BlackBerries, ready for the week to end.

But forget their sour faces. I was going to visit the Brookhaven National Laboratory, where Dr. William Higinbotham made the first videogame—more than fifty years ago. Higinbotham’s Wikipedia entry doesn’t reveal much about the origin of his game, Tennis for Two. Mainly, it tells readers that his son, William Higinbotham Jr., thinks his father didn’t want to be remembered primarily for creating a game. The party line was that he really wanted to be remembered for his work in nuclear nonproliferation. Fair enough. But that begs the question, Why did Higinbotham take time to make a game at all? No one forced him to design relays and transistors in such a way that he could hook them up to a big $200,000 Systron Donner 3300 computer, which his instrumentation department had used mainly for multifarious mathematical calculations. Not the government, not the lab, not his department. No, Higinbotham did it himself with the aid of lab technician Bob Dvorak. They took three weeks to make it work and two more days to work out the bugs. So what was it about the scientist that made him want to entertain others by making a game on a five-inch screen?

Higinbotham most likely did not know that at least two attempts at videogames had already been made. In 1948, Greenville, South Carolina, physicist and TV pioneer Thomas T. Goldsmith teamed up with Estle Ray Mann to patent and make a very rudimentary experiment that shot missiles—well, light rays that mimicked missiles—across an oscilloscope’s screen. The Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device used eight vacuum tubes and a radarlike display. But Goldsmith was more interested in the Washington, DC, TV station he owned and in producing the classic
Captain Video
TV series, so nothing ever came of the patent. Four years later, Cambridge PhD candidate Alexander S. Douglas became enamored with a giant, seemingly unwieldy computer created for the university. With its hundreds of vacuum tubes emitting firefly-like light within a dingy laboratory, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator looked like something out of the 1931 movie
Frankenstein
. Douglas was entranced with the computer and added a tic-tac-toe game called Noughts and Crosses to his thesis about how humans interact with computers. It was the first computer game to use primitive graphics and can still be downloaded from the Web today.

Yet neither of these games made the step forward that’s needed to create a satisfying communal gaming experience: the ability to hang out, play together, and maybe even understand your friends better from that play.

Two hours later, I found myself sitting in the Energy Department shuttle from the Ronkonkoma train station to the forested 5,300-acre property of the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Around me, a half dozen young scientists, all bearded, all bespectacled, listened to the youngest’s idea for a new medical imaging technique. As the
scientists chattered, the shuttle turned onto the grounds themselves. Dozens of wild turkeys lurked on the grass, their blue snoods ugly as they gobbled.

Brookhaven is full of old one-story wooden buildings and drafty barracks from its days as an army encampment in the 1940s. But around the campus, there are a few new buildings of soaring, undulating glass, twenty-first-century designs that look like they were informed by architect I. M. Pei. Inside one such building, public relations people tied helium-filled balloons to metal folding chairs and railings as old and young employees and visitors gathered around to look at a greasy old Magnavox Odyssey, the original PlayStation with the Gran Turismo racing simulation, a Wii with Wii Sports Bowling, and a few other mementos from videogame history. But an essential jewel was found where a smaller crowd of curious employees gathered. There it was on a folding table, a few more helium balloons heralding its birthday. It was merely an ancient oscilloscope, its graphics board on display within a Plexiglas box. The instrumentation people had cheated a little to re-create the device. Gone was the six-foot-high Donner analog computer. Instead, Tennis for Two was attached to a Dell desktop hidden by a tablecloth. They had linked this re-creation to a fancy big screen, high definition TV—as if you needed such a thing to enhance its old-fangled graphics.

The visuals were rudimentary, merely a green dot on the screen and a small block in the middle to represent a net. There was a welded stainless steel box to take into my hands, upon which was a single button to press and from which heavy wires led to the signal box. The primitive thing appeared otherworldly on the fifty-inch Samsung screen. That was when my nerd heart started beating, my mouth grew dry, and I found it somewhat difficult to take air. It was as if Tennis for Two were a living, breathing celebrity, an old-time star slightly Botoxed up to make it appear new again. And that green color was seductive. Green symbolizes everything videogames are
made of, the life-and-death struggle, the yin and yang of heroism and evil, for green in various cultures means hope, rebirth, death, and envy. The color meant immortality in ancient Egypt (Osiris, the god of the afterlife, had skin tinged with green). It is the suit color of Shigeru Miyamoto’s Link from The Legend of Zelda, the color of the camouflage gear of Metal Gear’s ultra-macho Solid Snake. Green is perfect for games.

In videos presented online, Tennis for Two seemed to have a bright green tinge, but perhaps because of the streaming sunlight in the new Brookhaven building, the bouncing ball now had a rich jade hue, the color of a shining emerald. Each time the ball made its way to my side of the scope, I pressed the plastic button on the old-fashioned controller and the magnets in relays clicked loudly. I was able to angle the shots by twisting a plastic knob that aimed the blip on the screen.

Just before a few members of the press arrived, Higinbotham Junior, slightly wary but affable, stood before the game with Charlie Dvorak, the son of the lab technician who had actually made the machine full of circuits, capacitors, relays, and a mishmash of wires. Both were around fifty years old, and both had a look of pride and occasional glee as they played Tennis for Two. As they volleyed the dot, it left handsome trails on the screen and the relays clicked and clacked. Dvorak asked, “Can you imagine if your father patented this with my father? Things would be a lot different. We’d be on easy street. We’d be millionaires living in Montana somewhere.”