All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (22 page)

But Kutaragi soldiered on. He had a dream to make videogames look as good as one of his favorite movies,
Blade Runner
. Through a combination of yelling, screaming, and nose-to-the-grindstone hard work, Ken Kutaragi had fought tooth and nail to get his PlayStation up and running in Japan. Though early on Sony as a corporation did not really see the potential for a game machine, Kutaragi continued to evangelize. And none of the operating companies within Sony wanted to look after the PlayStation. Electronics didn’t really want it. Nor did any other division. But Kutaragi kept on fighting. He knew that if the PlayStation failed in the territories beyond Japan, he would be out of a job.

Understandably, Kutaragi made it one of his life’s goals to beat Nintendo at its own game. At the very least, he made it clear to the US operation that he wasn’t going to put all his eggs in one basket and
make Crash Bandicoot the face of the PlayStation. To that end, Kelly Flock, a savvy businessman who was very calculating and could hold a grudge, had another mascotlike game made by Sony itself. It was called Harry Jalapeno, and was so inferior to Crash Bandicoot that it never saw the light of day.

Yet not long before Crash Bandicoot’s release, Kutaragi still didn’t believe in the game’s potential. And he was about to make it known. At the first E3 convention, Kutaragi was approached by Mark Cerny, a former teenage Atari game maker turned Universal Interactive vice president, who was desperately searching for a hit and thought he had found it with Crash. Cerny, a soft-spoken, erudite sort, was very proud of his association with Naughty Dog and the possibilities for the marsupial, especially since he hadn’t had a million seller in decades. Since Atari, Cerny had been involved with dozens of games. His history in the industry didn’t matter to Kutaragi. For more than forty-five minutes, the Japanese inventor railed at him. Kutaragi’s words became more and more roiled. “This Crash—” He spewed the words from his mouth like he was spitting out spoiled food. “This Crash is never going to sell. It has no heart at all. The only thing to make it passable is if every plant would dance to the beat of the hearts of the animals in the game. But it does not. So this game is crap. This game is crap!” By the end of the conversation, Cerny was shaking, almost in tears.

Kutaragi and his minions in Japan may have disliked Crash, but the Americans felt it was the perfect fit for the US audience. Stolar, Cerny, and the small Universal Interactive marketing department were ready to stake their jobs on Crash. Finally, Japan caved. Even if Crash was for kids, and kids weren’t the intended audience for the PlayStation, the US executives convinced Japan that maybe, just maybe, Crash could take a substantial amount of money away from the Mario franchise.

Before Crash was placed on store shelves on August 31, 1996, advertising agency Chiat\Day, along with Andrew House and the Sony marketing department, carefully crafted an advertising campaign based on the daffy marsupial. It included a brash television commercial that would cement the bandicoot as a mascot in the minds of the American public. In the thirty-second spot, a man in a Crash Bandicoot outfit traveled to a spot outside the US offices of Nintendo in Redmond, Washington. With a bullhorn, he called out, “Hey, plumber boy, mustache man: Your worst nightmare has arrived.” As he removed a tarp from his rusty flatbed truck and revealed six monitors, all playing video of some portion of the Crash game, he bragged, “We got real time, 3-D, lush organic environments. How does that make you feel? Feel like your days are numbered?” As he was unceremoniously escorted from the property, a security guard asked if his name was Italian. “No,” said Crash. “Bandicoot. It’s an Australian name.” After the spot aired constantly on prime time TV and during football games, Sonic’s Ass was known to millions of Americans. Game magazines pitted Crash against Mario and Sonic. “Who will win the console wars?” was the question every games journalist began to ask.

While the 3DO was dying, Sega had released the CD-ROM-based Saturn console, which did not set American hearts afire due to its higher price of $399, although it did well in Japan. Nintendo’s N64, which still used cartridge games, was a fine machine but with old technology. Cartridge games cost so much more than CDs to produce that the N64 was doomed from the start. With the PlayStation’s price at a more reasonable $299, it had a fighting chance in the United States. But, wondered every Sony executive, could Crash Bandicoot raise PlayStation awareness enough so that it would help sell the console? To make Crash popular in Japan, as well, Naughty Dog made changes for Asian culture, including six hundred in-game
hints done by a Tokyo comedian, which would pop up in the game. The changes added what Gavin told Rubin was a “hideous amount of work at no small personal cost.”

If you were a music fan, the first thing that lured you to Crash was the bouncy Afro-Caribbean-influenced soundtrack by Mark Mothersbaugh, the prank-playing cofounder of eighties new wave band Devo. If the rhythm-filled music didn’t get you, the game play, inspired by Nintendo’s landmark Donkey Kong Country, did. There were boxes full of power-ups that the spinning rodent would crash into, along with jungle beasts like wild boars to ride and giant enemies to beat, including the laughing Dr. Neo Cortex, who shot death rays at you from a hovercraft. And then there was Crash himself, madcap and stalwart, almost as speedy as Sonic the Hedgehog, certainly as lovable as Mario. Nerds yearned for Crash action figures, which would eventually be produced by a company called Resaurus and become collector’s items.

Within a month of Crash’s debut, Nintendo released Super Mario 64 for its new system. The game was full of imaginative environs in which gamers could roam freely and explore the plumber’s world like never before. Nintendo would always be successful with Mario. Yet Crash was helping to sell PlayStations the world over, even in Japan, where Mario was considered a kind of miracle-making saint by gamers. What that success demonstrated was the rising power of Sony’s US PlayStation unit. It was their innovation, their marketing prowess, and their games that were responsible for the incredible success of the PlayStation, at least as much as the mother company. Though Sony had been a company that was full of warring fiefdoms, Kutaragi would be forced to see the United States as an equal partner in crime, perhaps one that would be even more powerful than the Japanese PlayStation division. Within three years, fifty million PlayStations had been sold the world over. At a Las Vegas event for Spyro the Dragon, another funny animal game à la
Crash Bandicoot, Sony Computer Entertainment COO Kaz Hirai announced that a PlayStation had been sold once every eight seconds since its debut. Sony’s little gray box would be top dog in the videogame industry for years to come. Crash Bandicoot, a silly but powerful soldier in the console wars, had helped to bloody and bow the great Nintendo.

For Sony, Gavin and Rubin would make four Crash Bandicoot games, and the series would eventually sell forty million copies worldwide. But it did not come without a cost. Rubin felt he did not really see his twenties because he had no social life. In fact, he rarely saw the light of day. By the end of the production cycle for those four Crash games, Rubin was losing his hair, not just a little, but in tufts. He was gaining weight from eating junk food. He had developed a strange rash and during his nightly five hours of sleep kept waking up with game ideas. Then he couldn’t get back to sleep. Gavin, too, had his problems—with his back and with serious carpal tunnel syndrome. The industry had aged them before their time. At one point, Gavin told Rubin that he had had only one date for the whole year because he had no time beyond coding games. And in the office, he also was tired of holding the hands of game designers who would freak out and lose it during crunch time. Gavin understood that the tight schedule could lead to breakdowns. In videogames, breakdown was the new black. But Naughty Dog was a team; there were millions of dollars at stake.
Millions
. “How dare anyone we brought in to work try to break up the team at deadline time?” he thought. “Look at Jason.” Jason would fall asleep under his desk or next to the latest Naughty Dog on its dog bed. He didn’t bitch.
That’s just how it was
. Long hours were what you signed up for.

One night during a drunken binge at a sake bar in Japan, Kelly Flock suggested that Rubin and Gavin sell the company to Sony. Not long after, Rubin took a month off to go to the mountains to muse and meditate. When he came down from the mountains, he talked
with Gavin. They had been together since childhood. They knew each other’s proclivities almost as well as twins who could sense each other’s emotions. Rubin didn’t have to say much, except to discuss other offers from Microsoft and Electronic Arts. Both agreed they had done almost all they could with Naughty Dog. Both knew that if they sold the company to Sony, it would be in the able hands of game designers the pair had mentored. They had become millionaires many times over, and selling the company would just add to their massive coffers. Sure, they would work again. But, as with the many game changers before them who cashed in their chips, it was great to know they didn’t have to.

What they had done with Crash, in spite of the early resistance from Japan, not only created a series of bestsellers. Gavin and Rubin had launched a series of bestsellers that kids liked so much that they had their parents, who often played the game with their kids, buy the Crash action figures. Kids flocked to McDonald’s for the Crash Bandicoot Happy Meal toys. Most important, though, those kids remained loyal to the PlayStation as they grew into teens. And when those Crash fans grew into young adults, they descended upon the next generation, the PlayStation 2, like vultures. In that sense, Crash Bandicoot was more central than Gran Turismo to Sony’s rise as the preeminent videogame platform in the middle nineties and on into the early twenty-first century.

They were killing it. They were sucking the life out of the most important series she had created, something millions of fans had loved for a decade and a half. Outside, it was a beautiful late day in the spring of 1998 in the Pacific Northwest, and the sun peeked out from the clouds. But it didn’t matter. In the car, it was black. This was more than just difficult; it was a nightmare. And there was very little Roberta Williams could do about it.

She drove home to Ken, her husband, the man with whom she had started it all. Then she got under the covers and she cried. Usually, she was not like this. She knew her own mind. She knew what worked. She knew how to make games, intelligent games. For God’s sake, she was a videogame pioneer. Roberta Williams had helped to turn Sierra On-Line into a billion-dollar business,
a player among players. Through the many ups and downs of their business, she had learned how to be tough.

But not this tough.

That night, she wished she could go back from 1998 to 1980, when she and Ken had first met. They were teenagers who met on a double date, just after graduating from Garey High School in Pomona, California. They both dumped their dates and fell in love. Roberta was shy, kind of a post-hippie girl who was more Emily Dickinson than Dorothy Parker. As a child, she loved to stay at home, quietly reading fairy tales and adventure novels, like Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe
. She would lie awake at night, thinking of those stories, inserting herself as a character, whisking herself away to faraway fantasy lands. She hung out in the library, too, taking home as many books as she could carry.

Roberta thought Ken, who was taller than she and a man’s man, was shy as well. But he made up for it by trying hard to be outgoing. He told Roberta he wanted to study physics. “I want to be somebody and I want to be rich,” he would say. They had deep, exciting conversations and shared the same Midwestern values. The two would marry before they were twenty.

Ken tried to study physics at Cal Poly in Pomona, but switched to computer science in his second year. Roberta yearned for a career, too. She started college. She had some jobs in which she dabbled with computers. But nothing really inspired her. She felt bad about the fits and starts. It was the height of the women’s movement, and she felt she was letting feminism down by not having a career. Then Roberta became pregnant with their first son. Those damn Midwestern values crept in; if you got married, you stayed home and raised the kids. The pair retreated to the Midwest for a while, but that experience was stifling. Back in Southern California, Ken taught himself all about computers, and when he didn’t know about a programming language for a job, he said he did anyway. If he got the job, he’d pull
all-nighters reading the technical manuals to get up to speed. And he always got up to speed.

From time to time, Ken would bring a computer terminal home so he could access the mainframe for one of his clients. There was no monitor, just a printer with a roll of paper, a keyboard, and a modem. To impress her, Ken introduced Roberta to games, including Colossal Cave, a very early adventure game by Will Crowther and Don Woods, with no graphics, just text. Made in the seventies, it was based on the world’s longest cave system, near Brownsville, Kentucky.