All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (24 page)

The time for Ziploc bags had long since ended. Budgeted at $4 million, Phantasmagoria would be Sierra’s costliest game, one that would take four years to make. If you were a reporter at the time, you
might dine with Roberta in Seattle, and she would expound upon the making of the game. It was like making a real movie, she would say. There were eight hundred scenes and a 550-page script, which she had written. There were Screen Actors Guild performers cast in the roles and a top-notch casting director, too. The Gregorian choir that sang in Latin included 135 people. There was so much video, it would take up seven CD-ROM computer disks. Myst and The 7th Guest had moved PC computer games into new territory by adding snippets of video and by helping to make CD-ROM drives de rigueur. But Phantasmagoria came at the very peak of the adventure game’s popularity. So Roberta stuffed in two hours of video, as much as a Hollywood movie. “Turn out the lights when you play it,” Roberta would say, “and light some candles. This game is going to scare the bejesus out of you.”

When it was released in July 1995, the horror game was criticized for being derivative. The movie-like introduction appeared to have been cribbed from
The Twilight Zone
. Horror fans could see elements of
The Shining
here and bits of
A Nightmare on Elm Street
there. There was even a grimace-filled nod to serial killer Ed Gein (the inspiration for Hitchcock’s
Psycho
) when the crazed protagonist’s husband dons a human scalp and hair. Roberta had felt that art director Andy Hoyos, who collaborated on script ideas, wanted to add things that were too violent, so she’d put the kibosh on some of the bloodier suggestions. Beyond that, the adventure tale itself moved too slowly before you encountered the scares. And, in a bid to lure the new game player, Sierra had made the game’s puzzles too easy.

Yet it could induce terror. During its monstrous rape scene, Phantasmagoria creeped you out. And the tension was palpable when a giant horned demon chased the stalwart though panicked heroine through the Victorian manse. The creepiness came to a head when
the creature, sharp talons at the ready, ripped her face in two. But it was the portrayal of sexual violation in the game that led chains like CompUSA to ban it.
*

The controversy and the mixed reviews didn’t hurt sales of Phantasmagoria very much; priced at $70, it went on to sell more than a million copies in its first six months. If you added together the sales of all the other Sierra games in 1995, they wouldn’t have matched those of Roberta’s adult horror offering. She had reached the highest of videogame heights, and so had Ken, whose days were filled with managing the various companies Sierra now owned. Even as Sierra was adding early Internet multiplayer abilities to some of their games, Ken and Roberta were getting tired. It was especially evident with Ken, who had always liked the technology that made games run more than the games themselves.

In 1996, they sold Sierra On-Line for a mammoth $1.5 billion in stock to CUC International, a company known primarily for its shopping service. CUC became Cendant. Ken and Roberta, who still owned 60 percent of Sierra when it was sold, became filthy rich on paper.

Then, in April 1998, Cendant became embroiled in the biggest accounting scandal of the time; during 1996 and 1997, it had inflated income by $500 million. Cendant stock plummeted to about 15 percent of its market high, and both the CEO and vice chairman were sentenced to a decade in jail. Cendant’s game division began pumping out really horrible games. Ken left the company, feeling completely disenchanted. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen that CUC was run by such scurrilous individuals.

Roberta, on the other hand, was still obliged contractually to finish
King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, the eighth in the landmark adventure series. There were problems from the get-go. Sierra was now overseen by another Cendant acquisition, a conservative Christian edutainment software company called Davidson & Associates. The Davidsons, especially former schoolteacher Jan, looked down on the Williamses in the way a wary parent might look down on the punky teenager who comes to date the pure-as-snow daughter. Roberta told people that the Davidsons believed Phantasmagoria was immoral, something that would ruin the nation’s youth, who might go on rampages of violence in imitation of what they’d witnessed. If the Davidsons had been fully behind Phantasmagoria—which had still been on shelves and selling steadily at the time of the CUC acquisition—Roberta believed it would have sold far more during its retail life span.

Roberta tried to hold back her feelings, but she felt sick inside. At times she was livid; she no longer had true control over her work, in particular the next installment of the King’s Quest series. As Roberta worked on her script and puzzle ideas, another team worked on theirs. When it came down to it, she felt like she wasn’t being listened to. When it was crunch time, Roberta saw that the graphics were subpar. Worse, Mask of Eternity hadn’t been aggressively tested for bugs. In the end, the last King’s Quest was a mishmash of styles. Critics gave it the worst reviews of any game in the series.

That was why she was in bed, crying, that afternoon in 1998.

Deep down, she realized that times had changed. It was now a console world, one Sony controlled with the PlayStation, with racing games like Gran Turismo and with Crash Bandicoot. PC games like Roberta’s had had their time in the sun, but now they were becoming old-fashioned.

Friends in the business had cautioned her, “Once you sell the company, get out. And don’t look back.” Finally, in late 1998, she heeded the wise suggestions of her peers. Now that King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity was on the shelves, she could leave. Soon she would
sail the world with Ken in a twin engine Nordhavn 68 yacht called
Sans Souci
. She would begin writing an Alex Haley–like novel about her Irish roots. Roberta Williams would have a new life, sans souci, and she would try not to look back.

She would never make another game.

Sierra certainly grew big, but it also grew bloated. It had a computer game in every genre imaginable, and even had its hands in releasing productivity software for the home office. Even so, Sierra did not change with the times. So freaked out were Ken and Roberta by the fall of Atari that they never worked with consoles again, even when the PC was no longer a go- to platform for gamers. That was a mistake because videogame companies need to be agile enough to stay ahead of the trends. Still, their core games were a cut above the rest when it came to writing, and that was key. It would be nearly another decade before writing in games would deepen again. But Roberta was also the
only
woman game company founder who consistently made creditable, bestselling series. The fact that she has not made another game is troubling. Women certainly have made strides in game making over the years. For instance, Jade Raymond produced the Assassin’s Creed series for Ubisoft, and Amy Hennig directed and wrote the Uncharted series, influenced by the old penny dreadful novels and Indiana Jones, for Sony. Both have been massive bestsellers that consistently receive stellar review scores. But sadly, no woman since Roberta has had such a long-running impact on games and on game companies. Decades later, Sierra still represents the high point for women in videogames.

While everyone from Ralph Baer to Ken and Roberta Williams to Ken Kutaragi envisioned a world of online games, it wasn’t until the late nineties that the general gaming population became interested. On one gray day at Sony’s midtown Manhattan headquarters an all-hands meeting made everyone present a small part of a new kind of game. Within days, a select group was beta testing EverQuest, which would become one of the more popular massively multiplayer online role playing games.
*

MMOs (massively multiplayer online games) feature the
most communicative, expansive game play ever devised. Thousands of happy, rabid nerds can play online at once. The idea was revolutionary. You hustle over to your favorite game store, buy the game, and install it on your PC. Then with your modem you connect online with throngs of people who are of the same mind. All these people want to level up and become powerful wielders of magic or they want to be healers, peaceful helpers. But more, each one has an impact on the way the game evolves. As a social group, you all create a sprawling, somewhat chaotic city of fantasy, full of paladins, rogues, wizards, trolls, and shamans. The choices are like riches to a nerd, and they include a wide array of customized powers and physical features for your avatar. With friends, you set forth on dramatic adventures to kill dragons and other beasts, and then you bore everyone who isn’t playing the game with what you firmly believe to be vast accomplishments. As you play, you suspend disbelief and ignore the occasional errors, like the egregiously bad grammar and spelling in the text, knowing that it’s a work in progress. The problems will always be fixed over time. And then there will be new problems. It really is like a city online.

But Sony had needed to be pulled kicking and screaming into the world of PC gaming. The germ of the idea came from John Smedley, a longtime Dungeons & Dragons fan whose childhood dream was to make that game into a computer role playing game. At nineteen, the San Diegan son of a naval officer was a college dropout, already making great money in the videogame industry. The optimistic, nerdy Smedley had toiled away at Sony Imagesoft, learning the rosters and minutiae of all things puck-related for the ESPN National Hockey Night game. While he did the job well, he hated it, spending his free time instead on a proposal for a game that included orcs and elves and dragons. In January 1994, he gave the proposal to Rich Robinson, the head of Sony Imagesoft development. Robinson, who was more interested in collaborating with established properties like
Mickey Mouse, Dracula, Frankenstein, and the awful Last Action Hero, didn’t get it and passed on the idea quickly. In the meantime, Smedley continued to be an enthusiastic gamer who spent way too many of his dollars playing online role playing games at home. During just one month in 1993 he spent $600 playing CyberStrike, a graphically low-tech combat game in which up to sixteen giant walking robots blasted one another to smithereens via General Electric’s early online service, GEnie. (Back then in the early nineties, you were charged an hourly rate for time online.) He would not give up on his dungeons or his dragons, pushing on various occasions to get the powers at Sony to move forward with an online game for the PC, somewhat à la Ultima Online, but with more distinct, more human-looking graphics. But with the success of the PlayStation all over the world, no one would listen. Finally he met with Kelly Flock, now head of the PlayStation sports division called 989 Studios. After the slew of meetings for which Sony is famous before it moves forward, Smedley convinced Flock to go ahead with a
Lord of the Rings
–style online game. To that end, in early 1996, Smedley hired two young game designers who had already worked on their own online sword and sorcery game in 1993. War Wizard, which was released as shareware, was invented by Brad McQuaid and Steve Clover for their small company, MicroGenesis. Graphically, it was no
Mona Lisa
, but the online game did offer its cult following the ability to aim and shoot at portions of an opponent’s body, giving the enemy a mortal wound that would hinder him from retaliating.

Smedley briefed McQuaid and Clover on what was generically called Online Adventure Game. At the same time, Flock had secured the assent of Terry Tokunaka, the CEO for the PlayStation business in the United States. His primary mandate was “Don’t spend a lot of money.”

Making Online Adventure Game would be a colossal, multifarious undertaking. Even though Smedley’s team had the auspices of
Sony as a kind of all-seeing, all-knowing Yoda, there were reasons for all to be daunted. Not the least of their worries was finding a way to program what was essentially an online country, miles long and wide, in a way that seemed like a 3-D experience, light-years beyond CyberStrike. Moving through this world would feel fresh and real, like walking through actual pastures, bogs, forests, giant lakes, and mountains. If they did it right, Dungeons & Dragons–type characters would come to life and gleam with the varied personalities of the people who controlled them.

While Smedley and Flock continued to get flack from those above about doing a PC game and not a PlayStation game, McQuaid and Clover spent a month working on an eighty-page game concept document that was so detailed, it had computer-generated maps and artwork within. Clover came up with the game’s name in a flash. After a few godawful suggestions, the name EverQuest flowed out during a morning drive to the Sony offices in San Diego. The name was a stroke of genius. Not only did it flow off the tongue, it said simply and precisely what the game would be: a series of quests that, due to planned game expansion packs, would never really end. If it worked, it would be a gold mine for Sony. If EverQuest failed, Sony calculated that it would probably fire the twelve-man team Smedley had hired, and lose $800,000, which translated to thousands of man hours that could have been used making a PlayStation game. Development took much longer than was projected, in part because Sony decided to make their own proprietary software to create the orcs’ and elves’ world online. In addition, the infrastructure needed servers and customer service representatives on the phone to answer questions—requiring a nightmare of organization and research.