All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (21 page)

Now they were heading to Universal Pictures to work for the studio’s new videogames unit. They’d been lured by a three-game deal and a cushy space on the Universal lot, right near Steven Spielberg’s office. Life was going to be good for the hardworking pair.

Rubin and Gavin had met as tweens in 1982, at a weekend Hebrew school in Virginia, near Washington, DC. Once they discovered they both were fascinated by computers and games, they congregated in the back of class and discussed computer programming manuals and how to hack games so they could get them for free. The friendship continued. The two loved talking about making games, their small piracies, and how they subverted the system. They made a good team, so much so that their mothers couldn’t get them off the phone even after six-hour-long bull sessions. Rubin had a knack for drawing and a gift of gab; Gavin was a magician when it came
to programming. With a pal, Mike Goyet, who had amassed $130, they began a teenage enterprise they called Jam (for Jason, Andy, and Mike) Software. Since Mike didn’t do anything much to help out, they booted him from the company within months. But Gavin and Rubin kept on going. They were so obsessed that they headed to a local video arcade with a cheesy camera and photographed dozens of Punch Out!! screens so they could program their own version of the wacky boxing game on their home computers.

Between 1984 and 1987, Gavin and Rubin made three games together, an educational title called Math Jam, a sports title called Ski Crazed, and an adventure called Dream Zone. None really pushed the envelope, but they worked. All were sold to a somewhat shady Midwestern outfit that Rubin felt was created as a tax writeoff for, well, someone.

But this venture with Universal—it wasn’t CBGB’s anymore; as the Talking Heads sang in “Life During Wartime,” they ain’t got time for that now. The road trip to the big time was thrilling in the way that many places can be when you’re just passing through. But it was nothing compared to the excitement of the game they had in mind. The two couldn’t stop talking about the first thing they would pitch to the movie company’s game division. “Hey, maybe it could be a movie, too,” enthused Rubin. If the pitch worked, they surmised, the game would probably be perfect for Trip Hawkins’s 3DO machine or for a new system that Sony was about to release in Japan called the PlayStation (the US debut would come about a year later). Publishing on the ill-fated 3DO system, which wasn’t selling well, was then considered nearly akin to everyone in a videogame studio committing hara-kiri. The pair would counter that the 3DO might be flopping, but that was because it was way ahead of its time. It was still a pretty cool machine. While they didn’t drink all of the Trip Hawkins Kool-Aid, they saw Hawkins as a visionary. That’s what Gavin and Rubin told people when they asked. After all,
Hawkins had given the two their first real shot at gaming stardom, in the late 1980s. Both kids could see that Hawkins was up-front and candid, and one of the more honest businessmen they had met in the videogame industry. Their relationship with Hawkins began when they cold-called EA as the principals of a new company called Naughty Dog and talked their way into a $15,000 advance. The two then developed an Apple IIGS game called Keef the Thief, about a blond-maned kid who was a master thief and who met richly imagined characters, like a musician called The Cross-Eyed Demon of Death, who played for your dark satisfaction a tune dubbed “The Demon’s Dirge.”

At the time, the two knew that Hawkins had a team hard at work reverse engineering the Sega Genesis. Gavin actually saw the process in action, in a big, sterile-looking room at Electronic Arts. Thick cables came out of a Sega Genesis and into a computer. Shocked, Gavin said to Hawkins, “There’s no way you’re not reverse engineering here.”

When Gavin told the company founder that he and Rubin had a perfect role playing game for the Genesis, the usually loquacious Hawkins took time to listen. It was a big game, one of the biggest RPGs ever, explained Gavin. He called the game “Ultima on steroids,” a bold statement considering that Richard Garriott’s Ultima II was so sprawling, it came on two computer disks. But Gavin continued, “You would have seven magicians to work with, not just one, and over one hundred spells to wield. You can control tornadoes and ride dinosaurs, too.” As Gavin outlined the hundred or so characters and quests, Hawkins warmed to the idea. Gavin also felt Hawkins might give Naughty Dog a contract in exchange for their silence about EA’s highly illegal process of reverse engineering. Gavin was right. He and Rubin guaranteed their silence, and Rings of Power went full steam ahead. In the end it was so big that the cartridge needed a battery inside to make it work. Ultimately,
it sold a respectable sixty thousand copies, but it could have done much more business, at least according to Rubin. Rubin sometimes lamented to Gavin that Madden was taking up all the time at the factory with which EA contracted to make its games. Because of the football game’s popularity, scheduling the manufacturing of Rings of Power cartridges was placed on the back burner, so far back that many would never be made.

Once they were ensconced in Los Angeles and developing games for the movie company, the two Naughty Dogs moved forward with the game project they dubbed “Sonic’s Ass.” In September 1994, at the Cafe Del Sol near the Universal lot, Gavin riffed on what the antagonist would be even before they had a main character. As he downed lobster ravioli, he changed his voice to that of an evil mad scientist and said, “I am Dr. Cortex, Dr. Neo Cortex.” Rubin loved the idea. Gavin told the others present that there was a kind of secret sauce to game making, a tight combination of game play, graphics, and technology. The art sells it, he said, and the technology makes it happen. Without game play that’s new, it’s not fun. But it can’t be so difficult that it becomes daunting. In the game, the plan was for you to run and jump through a jungle world full of artwork so lush, you could smell the exotic flora. But who would their funny animal protagonist be and of which species? More important, could they pull it off for Sony, the company that offered the best deal for the game? After all, the forthcoming PlayStation was rife with hardware challenges, to put it subtly.

Inspired by the Looney Tunes of their youth, Naughty Dog hired two experienced animators who had worked on Hanna-Barbera cartoons and Disney’s
DuckTales
series to draw pen-and-ink prototypes for their character. Rubin, with his male model good looks, turned out to be a genius at communicating with the people who wrote the checks, while Gavin refined his MIT-schooled tech chops so that few other game designers could touch him. Both were armed
with an almost enyclopedic knowledge of games. At first, their character was going to be a wombat called Willy. But when they came across the word “bandicoot” in a travel guide to the South Pacific, they became enamored of the marsupial’s exotic-sounding name. In a meeting with the animators, Rubin announced, “We’re going to own that name, bandicoot. When people think of that word, we want them to think of the character in the game, not the animal.”

Gavin added, “Think of him as bold, clever, willful, good-natured, and gung-ho, but not the brightest bulb on the planet.” Yet Gavin and Rubin knew that the way the bandicoot looked would have to be informed by the limitations of the PlayStation. The machine’s graphics chip did not produce enough resolution for the detail Rubin wanted in the marsupial body. Crash’s bottom-heavy frame had to be orange because all of the other available colors were being used for backgrounds on the island in which the animal dwelled. He would wear brown gloves, too, because the digits in Crash’s orange hands would get lost when they moved in front of his orange body. The early tool kit Sony sent to Naughty Dog was easy to work with. However, the software was barely usable for the technologically forward-thinking game that Gavin had in mind—especially because it contained a graphics bug. In addition, the unrefundable rental fee that Sony charged for the tool kit was an astounding $70,000, for a package that included a blue console and game making software. Although it was expressly forbidden, Gavin took the PlayStation apart and reverse engineered it so that he didn’t have to use Sony’s software.

“Oh my God,” said Rubin, stunned when he saw the results.

“Mind-bogglingly better, right?”

Due to the nature of their deal with Universal Studios, the movie company tried to keep Naughty Dog away from the powers at Sony, perhaps because of a fear that the duo would jump ship. But they did eventually meet. When Kelly Flock, a Sony executive who
had done a stint at LucasArts, saw a demonstration of the game, he was floored.

“How the hell did you do that?” Flock wondered aloud. Gavin confessed that he had gone into the PlayStation to make it work to his specifications.

“Hold on,” said Flock. “How are you getting all that data into the system? How many times will the game access the CD-ROM drive?”

Gavin got out a pen and paper to make some calculations. “About one hundred and forty thousand times.”

Flock was not amused. “That’s not good. The life expectancy of the PlayStation is eighty thousand hits. It’s a guarantee that this game will break the PlayStation.” Nonetheless, Flock knew the game could be huge, even a Mario Killer. At the time, few, if any, games being made for the PlayStation in the United States could do graphics the way Crash Bandicoot did. Flock did nothing to daunt the game makers. Instead, he encouraged them to finish quickly. As with the dozens of other companies Sony was signing up to make games, Sony offered Universal a royalty rate of at least 10 percent. Meanwhile, engineers in Japan were working on increasing the life span of the all-important CD-ROM drive. They did their job well, and Crash was deemed safe for the system.

What Naughty Dog did not fully realize at the time was the intense power struggle going on within Sony Computer Entertainment in the United States. Of the three executives in the running to head the US division, none seemed to know precisely how to deal with the cultural and business machinations of those who were in charge in Tokyo. When a US executive pitched an idea for the PlayStation hardware, it didn’t fly. He was told flatly, “No.” The Japanese executives had already given their stamp of approval to even the smallest detail. Suggestions were not appreciated. Sony sorely needed an American executive who could understand Japanese culture
and who could foster an essential company-wide trust and comity. Finally, Bernie Stolar, a gregarious entrepreneur with wide and varied management skills—including a stint as president of Atari—was brought in to run the American division. Stolar had thrived in the game milieu beyond Atari, beginning in 1980 with an arcade game called Deep Death (later renamed Shark Attack). Stolar hired a diminutive, quick-thinking Brit from Wales called Andrew House, who was tapped to lead the marketing charge. The race to release the PlayStation in the United States—and to try to beat Nintendo into submission—was on.

Sales of the Japanese version of the PlayStation, which was released in early December 1994, were brisk; 300,000 machines were purchased in its first thirty days on the market. Yet the initial slate of games was not of the jaw-dropping variety. The driving game Ridge Racer was creditable with its integration of a Galaxian arcade game, which, if you won, let you unlock and drive any of twelve souped-up cars. But it was nothing completely new. Sony still needed a game to differentiate itself in North America when the PlayStation hit those shores within a year. Even when the PlayStation was unveiled at the first E3 convention in Los Angeles in May 1995, with a $4 million booth and an appearance by Michael Jackson, Sony showed off games from Japan and England like the fighting game Tekken and the anti-gravity, vertigo-inducing racing game WipEout. To truly rule the videogame world, Sony needed to present the US market with a compelling, American-made product.

Yet there was resistance from Japan regarding how precisely to raise the awareness of potential PlayStation buyers in America, especially on the part of the father of the PlayStation, Ken Kutaragi. Kutaragi’s mandate was to have games made by Sony itself become the bestsellers. To that end, Sony in the United States made Twisted Metal, a freewheeling demolition derby game featuring a grinning clown character called Calypso, who was as insanely creepy as a
serial killer. But games that came in from the outside, like Universal’s Crash Bandicoot, were secondary in his mind. And he hated the idea that Crash Bandicoot might be a mascot for the PlayStation. To Kutaragi, the PlayStation wasn’t a toy like Nintendo’s products. And it wasn’t just for kids like Nintendo was, either. The PlayStation didn’t just play games. It played music CDs as well. Therefore, in Kutaragi’s mind, the PlayStation was more versatile than the other consoles ever were. When Kutaragi looked at Sony, he saw the Walkman. The Walkman didn’t attach its essence to any one artist, not even to superstar Michael Jackson, Sony’s biggest artist at the time. Such a folly would have been disastrous to the Walkman’s continuing success with every other artist and record company in the world. So there was no way that Crash Bandicoot would be the face of the PlayStation. It wasn’t that Kutaragi hated the strange-looking marsupial from Naughty Dog completely. But perhaps because it reminded him of a nasty Nintendo debacle, he seemed to have a special place of disdain for the game in his heart.

Kutaragi’s work with the maker of Mario games showed him to be an unbridled maverick who was concerned with creativity that would push videogame technology forward. Still, the problem with Nintendo presented itself in the late eighties, after Kutaragi had worked with Sony making early digital cameras. Kutaragi, an über-smart engineer with a high-pitched voice, who spoke English well, was a force of nature within a company that played everything by the book. In 1988, when Kutaragi discovered that Nintendo needed a sound chip for the next Nintendo game system, he surreptitiously began work on the project—without the knowledge of Sony’s higher level executives. Yet he wasn’t fired. Because his work was considered so valuable to Sony, he was let off with a stern warning. Through sheer, commandant-like persistence, he convinced Sony CEO Noria Ohga to fund a collaboration with Nintendo called the Super NES CD-ROM drive. The machine would be able to play both
cartridges and CD-ROMs. Sony struck a sweet deal with Nintendo to be the only maker of the latter media. Nintendo, which at first loved the idea, started to sour on it when Hiroshi Yamauchi began to believe Nintendo would lose a share of the market to the electronics behemoth if they were in bed together. Kutaragi as well would create the sound chip that the Nintendo machine would use—also to be manufactured by Sony. When Sony announced the PlayStation at the Consumer Electronics Show in June of 1991, word of a landmark agreement between the two companies was greeted with shock and amazement. Within twenty-four hours, Nintendo issued a press release that stated it would partner with Philips, a serious Sony foe, for its CD-ROM drive. In essence, it had broken its contract with Sony. Kutaragi was at his wit’s end; he not only had lost a lucrative contract for his employer, he had lost face as well. Sony never made that particular version of the PlayStation, and Nintendo didn’t make a CD-ROM drive for the SNES, either. Ultimately, the partnership was a failure, probably because the two companies were too competitive to work together in anything that resembled harmony.