All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (26 page)

Just prior to the job interview, Metzen stopped at the local
Kinko’s to photocopy his work. In the line, comic book artist Rob Liefeld, who was so famous that he had done a TV commercial, smirked as he glanced at Metzen’s art. Chris was crestfallen. “Why’d he have to do crap like that?” he thought. “I didn’t do anything to him.”

As he walked through the doors of Chaos, Metzen believed he was heading into the belly of a fledgling comic book company. But around the office of the game company, he saw what could only be described as a kind of nerd heaven. The walls were filled with nerdily demonic posters for Iron Maiden alongside action-filled posters of Superman and Wonder Woman. An adult sat on the floor, playing with a remote controlled car. Metzen’s heart swelled and he became emotional. It all felt like home. He told those who interviewed him that he would do anything to work there, including washing the floors. Metzen was hired on the spot as an artist—for the same $8 an hour he got at the loading dock.

It didn’t matter. Chris was going to be part of a small community that was full of people like him. He was going to do it right. He was going to make a difference there. Videogames? He didn’t know much about them and never had a SNES or an Atari. But he could learn, right?

That is precisely what the founders of Chaos Studios themselves had done. Allen Adham was a true videogame nerd who could be heard talking in his soft-spoken but enthusiastic way about making videogames pretty much throughout his college days at UCLA’s Irvine campus. Adham got his start in the industry testing games for his friend Brian Fargo, who worked at a tiny game company called Boone. When Boone went belly-up, Fargo invited Adham to code games during summer vacations at his new company, Interplay. It was at Interplay that Adham really got the videogame creation bug. Because of Fargo’s just-do-it work ethic, Adham felt he could start his own company. It wasn’t magic. It just took balls.

Then Adham met Mike Morhaime, a smart electrical engineering student with a nasal voice, who had been playing games since childhood when his father got him a $299 Bally Professional Arcade System, the console with the wacky thumb controls that looked like one of those
Jeopardy!
game-show buzzers. Morhaime also subscribed to a newsletter that sent him code through the mail, even one for pinball, which he loved typing into his computer to make a real game. In college, Adham and Morhaime would often ditch class and head to the video arcade to play games. After graduation, Adham kept trying to get Morhaime on board for his new company. He didn’t have venture capital. He didn’t have any backers. But he met with Morhaime and his father to try to convince both of them.

“What do we know about games?” asked Morhaime.

“We don’t,” admitted Adham, undaunted. “But we can learn by doing. What do we have to lose? We’re young.”

Morhaime’s father warned him against the foray, saying, “Be very cautious. It sounds risky.” Actually, Morhaime wasn’t the kind of nerd who would jump into anything willy-nilly. He needed to know about every detail, in addition to Adham’s constant urging. But by early 1991, Morhaime had gotten a $15,000 loan from his grandmother and put $10,000 of it into the company. The same went for Adham, who, through sheer determination and a promise to sign over 10 percent of the company, had gotten a contract from Fargo at Interplay to do videogame ports for the SNES. By February, Morhaime, Adham, and Frank Pearce, another pal from college, were building desks in a small office space on Jamboree Road in Irvine. Pearce was completely gung ho, having had a gadget geek father who worked in computer sales. His dad even had one of the first cell phones, the ones that came in an unwieldy suitcase. As a child, Pearce was a fan of Mattel’s Intellivision and played Astrosmash, the combination of Space Invaders and Asteroids, constantly as a kid. Even though he didn’t get very far, he tried his hand at coding a
text-based adventure game on his Apple. Pearce’s father urged him to take the job with Adham and Morhaime, not that Frank really needed a push.

The money for their SNES games with Interplay never came in fast enough. Cash flow problems were common—even though Adham and Morhaime didn’t pay themselves for the first couple of years. Their dating lives suffered due to seemingly endless hours in the office. At the time, they probably didn’t have money for even a cheap date; their Discover cards were maxed out with office items and payroll.

But the excitement was still there. They were making
games
. Adham did much of the programming on RPM Racing (Radical Psycho Machine Racing) for the SNES, and Interplay supplied much of the graphics. There were also some boring ports to the Amiga, and Interplay contracts for chess and typing products. By the time Interplay released Silicon & Synapse’s The Lost Vikings, the dozen S&S employees had bonded on the long hours. They often sat on the floor, a frat house atmosphere abounding, eating fries and burgers, talking about games and comics and the pressures of young life, maybe shooting a Nerf gun when someone said something stupid. When Metzen joined this tightly knit crew, he thought he had found a new family, so much so that he didn’t want to go back to his house at night.

Metzen tried to create artwork on a computer, but it was like drudgery, so precise and time-consuming that it took the fun out of drawing. His challenges with computer graphics didn’t stop the team’s first big game, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, from becoming a success when it sold more than 300,000 copies after its release in November 1994. Warcraft was probably the second big real time strategy game, a fantasy genre that mimicked the careful plotting and decision making during the fog of real-life war. It was inspired by the game Dune II, in which, à la Frank Herbert’s novels, you became
an intrepid sci-fi commander who enforced a micromanaging control over your troops. You could build strong military installations and marvel at marauding giant sand worms—before you figured out how to trash them. In Warcraft, you were given quests in godforsaken fictional places like the Swamps of Sorrow, colored in green sludge like that in the Toxic Avenger movies. But you couldn’t get to the evil Orcish outpost of Kygross and its burnable huts unless you built lumber mills and fortified your Grand Hamlet. Each time you commanded an archer, one would exclaim, “Yes, my lord!” in a laughable British accent. Yet the words never failed to give you an ego boost. You trained bearded clerics to heal your wounded archers and you forged on to burn down the Orcs’ stronghold. If you failed, you would hear this sadistic chiding, “You pitiful worm, your defeat could mean our loss in the war against the humans.” If you and your troops died more than a few times, you’d grimace and yell at the screen, “Forget you, Warcraft. Forget you and your stupid war. Damn your oafish, overpowering Orcs. I won’t be back for your insults. I have better things to do. I have a life.” And the next day, there you were, trying to win again.

It wasn’t until Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness that Chris Metzen’s impact was felt in a game. Until that time, Morhaime, Adham, and Pearce didn’t feel the need for anything more than a cursory story. In fact, Morhaime would sometimes comment, “You don’t think about the backstory of Sonic the Hedgehog or why he collects gold rings. You just want to speed through the game.” Though story had become more complex in adventure games like The 7th Guest and King’s Quest and in some role playing games, in other genres it was still given short shrift. That lack of story was one of the reasons
that much of the mainstream press had stayed away from reviewing videogames with any regularity.

Despite the long hours of game making, Metzen stayed around the office later than usual one night. Sitting at his computer, he typed up a couple of pages of backstory for the Warcraft universe. He didn’t have the guts to send it on up the chain; a colleague did it for him. Everyone at the small company seemed to appreciate the fact that Metzen could write fairly well. His short backstory document, which he thought was full of terrible prose, was a harbinger of an extraordinary change in the company culture, one that would lead his colleagues to value an immersive narrative for each game the company would publish in the future. Metzen himself was thrilled at the opportunity for more creativity. Deep inside he had wondered, “I don’t know if doing tile sets like I’m doing is the right thing for me. I like to draw with a pencil, and I think I might crash if I continue to be a computer animator. It’s just too much about the left brain.” Tile sets made up the backgrounds in the humorous side scroller Lost Vikings 2, which sported funny characters like Erik the Stout. There was no shame in doing backgrounds, but Metzen’s ideas were far beyond the kind of art that few really take the time to appreciate while jumping, stabbing, and luring monsters to their eye-popping electrocutions.

During this time, change was coming for the young executives. Adham and Morhaime decided that their cash flow problems were just too monumental. They sold Silicon & Synapse to Davidson & Associates, the same educational software company with which the Williamses would have so much trouble during the release of Phantasmagoria and during the making of Roberta’s last King’s Quest game. Unlike the founders of Sierra, Adham and Morhaime’s experience with Davidson was a positive one. After a $10 million deal that was settled with stock and no cash, the Davidsons gave the company complete creative control—with one exception. Jan Davidson
hated the name Silicon & Synapse and demanded that they change it to something more understandable. All titles in the future would be published under the more accessible, decidedly un-geeky name of Blizzard Entertainment.

In the ensuing years, Warcraft II was a success and so was its painstakingly detailed science fiction counterpart, StarCraft. But just as StarCraft was being released, Davidson’s parent company, Cendant, had its dirty troubles with the SEC. The financial security of every employee at Blizzard was thrown into serious jeopardy. Adham, Morhaime, and Pearce were left to consider the woes of their treasured staff when the conglomerate’s stock tumbled down, down, down, like one of those Vikings who missed the ledge of a cliff. With the shares trading at $6 after plunging from a high of $42, Pearce and Morhaime felt discouraged, angered, and betrayed. Their employees had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock options, almost everything, literally overnight. Financial futures had been destroyed.

The three founders talked about the blood, sweat, and tears, the sacrifice of time, family, and even health. Adham himself was becoming both mentally and physically weary of putting on a brave face in front of employees when times had gotten tough. He would leave Blizzard for a long sabbatical. (In the long run, however, Blizzard was able to take care of its employees—those who stuck it out and remained—with a profit sharing program that had nothing to do with the vagaries of the stock market.)

Shortly after Blizzard was sold once again—this time to the French-based Vivendi/Universal—EverQuest began demanding hours upon hours from the lives of hard-core gamers everywhere. The staff at Blizzard in Irvine was not immune to its many enticements, and Adham, now back in the fold, was completely fascinated. So was one of his newer hires, Rob Pardo. Pardo originally had dreams of becoming a movie director, but he ended up managing a local Software Etc. store. After becoming a game tester, he worked
his way up to producer at Interplay and was slowly moving into game design. Pardo looked at the smart but soft-spoken Adham as a game design mentor. They began to have intense, constructive discussions; but the two really began to bond when playing EverQuest together. Pardo was so fascinated by EverQuest that he became the Guild Master of Legacy of Steel, one of the gangs of guys who became über-experts at the vagaries of the game.

Meanwhile, Blizzard was bogged down in creating a role playing game called Nomad, which had a post-apocalyptic theme and dinosaurlike monsters that were outfitted with tanklike weapons. The wow element would be that you controlled not just one person, but a complete squad of characters. Yet few were satisfied with the direction of Nomad, because none of the Nomad team was able to explain satisfactorily to the top dogs why people would want to play the game and what was special about it. It also had a new game engine, the software that made the game work, which wasn’t quite perfected.

In mid-1999 Adham began to consider making an MMO at Blizzard. With the team, he tossed around the idea of using one of their established series as a springboard into the worlds of massively multiplayer games instead of creating a new universe from scratch. Adham and Pardo began retreating to the food court of the Fashion Island Mall in Irvine to have intense discussions.

“Should we do StarCraft, Warcraft, or Diablo?” wondered Adham. The latter, a game based on epic throw-downs between the forces of heaven and hell, was being made at a separate office entirely, in northern California. Whatever the game would be, it would be centered in the Irvine headquarters, where it could be easily overseen. Diablo, while alluring and popular, didn’t seem to have the great depth of a StarCraft or Warcraft. And as they looked at EverQuest, which they admired to the point of drooling, they saw that that world could be improved upon.