All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (27 page)

“There are a lot of questions to answer,” said Pardo. “What
would the classes be comprised of? What about the healers; how powerful should they be? When a player dies, what is the penalty; how much of his experience does he lose? Or shouldn’t he lose any?”

The challenges Blizzard needed to deal with seemed endless. In addition, Metzen thought the non-playable fantasy characters could be fashioned to have short but appealing tales to tell when a player engaged them. For story, he gravitated toward the mythology of Warcraft, which was not completely unlike that of his favorite comic books, like Simonson’s
Thor
.

In meetings, Metzen noted that while EverQuest was really cool, its pantheon of gods wasn’t in the foreground. He felt that Blizzard could better weave the fabric of story in this world of sword and sorcery. Tales would be the lure that would lead the gamer through this endless world full of social engagement. It was story that would constantly intrigue the gamer during the otherwise often banal game process of leveling up to make your avatar stronger.

Pearce, gruff on the outside but a sweet guy on the inside, didn’t object to a rich story by any means. But he wondered aloud if building such a massive world was the right path on which to tread. “I know everyone here likes EverQuest. But the gaming experience I’m accustomed to and have enjoyed is playing something that has a beginning and an end. I like to play something and have a goal to finish the game. An MMO doesn’t have an end. Why do I want to play this game in perpetuity?”

But the passion for EverQuest won out quickly, and even Pearce came on board after getting sucked into playing SOE’s game. Within a month, Morhaime was on the first of a muckle of trips to Havas Interactive, the videogames arm of Vivendi, at the Universal lot. During lunch, he tried to convince members of the board to sign on to an expensive MMO based on the Warcraft franchise. While Vivendi had questions about the budget of $10 million, Morhaime came armed with projections showing that a million players would
subscribe in the United States within the first year. During the presentation, he also made a good case for four million players around the world, including Europe, South Korea, and China. The Frenchmen were supportive, but dubious of those numbers. There were logical questions: Why would a company that was so successful with its strategy games move into a completely new genre? Morhaime said that MMOs were the way of the future, and the future was now. It didn’t hurt Morhaime’s cause that EverQuest had been a runaway success. And other megacorporations wanted to get on the bandwagon. Warner Bros. was spending a small fortune to publish The Matrix Online, an MMO version of the Wachowski brothers’ cryptic films. So was Sony with its LucasArts collaboration for Star Wars Galaxies. No one wanted to get left behind, including Vivendi.

Blizzard’s goal with World of Warcraft had been the grail of game makers since the beginning of the videogame revolution. They wanted to make a game that was a challenge to master but also easy to play. Pulling that off was like the ultimate leveling up for a videogame executive. The task they faced, if they looked at it in the long run, was terrifying. A mountain of work had to be done beyond game design. The only way to go about it was to put in long hours every day and do it bit by bit.

Metzen, art director Sam Didier, and the development team went full steam ahead with a design that included a much creepier and more sinister kingdom of Azeroth than the one seen in previous Warcraft games, one that took place in the future, during a time in which Orcs and Humans had nearly been annihilated.

“The artwork is epic,” said Didier. “But it’s dark.…”

“There’s something not really right,” added Metzen. Everyone agreed that the realistic future fantasy was going too far to change the treasured and familiar franchise. If fans felt there was too much change, there might be a backlash that would affect not only the MMO, but Blizzard’s sterling reputation as a whole. Instead, they
decided to go with a style that was close to that of Warcraft III, with comic book–inspired artwork featuring characters that looked larger than life, godlike and epic. After Blizzard hired some MMO veterans and went into early game testing, it became clear that the quest portions of the game were what gamers enjoyed most. Once the quests were completed, the testers became uninterested. So there were more and more quests and mythic tales included as the game progressed, a veritable tsunami of work to do to keep the already-engaged nerd coming back for more—and to attract the more general gaming audience. Individual quests were varied and quick to complete, as opposed to many of the tasks in EverQuest, which were repetitive and time-consuming, especially in the early stages of the game.

With a year to go before release, the amount of work to be finished was still enormous. Adham himself had had enough. Not only did he have to deal with the pressures of crunch time, the roller coaster ride of business dealings was getting to him. He left his day-to-day role at Blizzard to become a less-harried consultant for the company. Pardo took over the role of lead designer. While Adham’s departure was a blow, there was no time to mourn; the game itself needed nurturing. As the deadlines mounted, Pardo began to grow as a person. Blizzard staff noticed that where he used to try to play devil’s advocate to keep out ideas he didn’t think would work, he now began to look for the gem within, say, a programmer’s idea and try to keep it in.

Still, much of the work for World of Warcraft wasn’t finished. In MMOs, customization is one of the keys to gaming paradise. But the way the various classes and races would interact wasn’t yet certain. The classes still needed personalities and features that the gamer could tailor so one character could be distinguished from another. And the way characters would fight, one against the other, had to be completely revamped. Finally, the concept of having up to one hundred players ganging up and raiding dungeons, in a larger-than-life
battle you could engage in near the end of the game, was debated constantly. Blizzard settled on a gang of forty as the maximum size.

When World of Warcraft hit the market on the night before Thanksgiving 2005, everyone from Blizzard drove from their Irvine offices to a launch event at a Fry’s Electronics store in the nearby middle class enclave of Fountain Valley. Everyone was nervous, tense. Metzen, his heart pounding, wondered if more than a handful of people would show up. Though people had shown up for their other games, and though they all believed they had made a feature-filled entertainment, the anxiety was palpable. As Pearce drove up to the discount store, he saw a traffic jam before him. Cars were honking, backed up on the ramp all the way from the store’s entrance. There was some smoke as well.

“Did someone have an accident?” wondered Pearce. In reality, the smoke was from a barbecue in a tailgate party. Thousands of game fans had turned out, partying while waiting for their stars to show up. Some of the team had to park as far as a mile away from the festivities. The 2,500 copies of the game they’d brought weren’t enough to go around. So they went back to the Irvine office to get some more.

In the coming months, small bugs were found and fixed each day. Worse, just as with EverQuest, customer service was an immediate issue, with upward of 150,000 questions being asked online every day. And just as with EverQuest, servers crashed constantly.

Fans complained a blue streak, but they still kept on gaming. Within a year, Blizzard had ballooned to 750 employees and Warcraft had amassed $250 million in sales. Two hundred million dollars was earned from subscription sales alone.

WoW wasn’t just a hit. It was becoming a lifestyle. The reason for gamer loyalty was in the game. World of Warcraft was all about the white-water rush of adrenaline that flowed when you entered a magical land that matched your own personality. You could
be as outgoing as a TV reality show host or as introspective as a literary-minded poet. You could be as casual as a bingo player or as rah-rah hard core as someone who’d finished tough games, like Zelda II or Battletoads, that hack your brain cells like a Slap Chop. The loner would gravitate toward becoming a rogue and creeping around stealthily in the shadows of trees or bridges, then attacking to steal, maim, or kill. You could be more magnanimous, a cleric who heals the fellow fallen. Whoever you were, whatever your background, you were struck by the looming Gothic architecture of the Scarlet Monastery, alluring in its size yet foreboding. You could find and collect peculiar, rare pets. You might find the Darkmoon Faire, a traveling carnival that could feel as quirky, ironic, and strange as any David Lynch movie. There, you would find a beer-drinking frog. There, perhaps inspired by the remote control cars in the Blizzard offices, were Steam Tonks, tiny vehicles equipped with bombs to blast at other Tonks. Even at the carnival, you might not be in the safest surroundings. Someone still could come up and try to kill you. You might meet Chronos, a necktie-wearing, blue-green-faced ghoul who looks like Lurch in the old
Addams Family
television show. Chronos might give you a quest to help him complete his zoo by searching for a boy who was raised by crocolisks, a scaly, hungry combination of crocodile and basilisk lizard. Chronos would also like you to find a murloc, one of a strange amphibious group of beings who looked somewhat like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The murloc’s peacock-rainbow coloring belied his cunning, nastier demeanor. But if you killed a murloc, his fins supposedly made a tasty broth.

Eventually, even the darkest solitary soul with an antisocial bent would find other such nerds and join together in a guild to battle the weirdest of foes. Yes, there were dragons. But one baddie looked like an ever-growing fleshy serial killer who wielded a massive butcher knife like something out of Clive Barker’s “The Midnight Meat Train.” In the major battles, forty of you would come upon a
vitriolic, drooling monster. And surely after the first few minutes, it would lay waste to all of you. Forty would lie dead, bloody, and torn on the virtual battlefield. But you kept coming back. For a while, it felt like abuse. Everyone would die, again and again. But then—the miracle. The boss would shake, quiver, and fall, giving up the ghost. “Crap. Crap. Crap. Three in the damn morning? I really need some sleep,” you would complain. Instead, you and your raiders, like thousands of others who were playing at the same time, would move on to consume a new monolith, fighting on right through until dawn. You did so because WoW wasn’t just a house of gaming. It was a welcoming home for nerds. It was in this way that World of Warcraft would sustain itself. This mystical continent of Azeroth, with its Horde and its Alliance, with its monsters and humans, with its evil and its good, had become Chris Metzen’s Ouroboros on steroids, no speed metal required.

EverQuest popularized MMOs for the serious PC gamer. But World of Warcraft brought MMOs to EveryNerd, even to people who rarely played other games. They flocked to it to let their bad selves loose, to go wild without committing a crime, to escape from the constant boredom of suburbia, and to meet people who were like-minded, fantasy mavens who might become their real life friends. It moved into the pop culture mainstream, was featured in its own DC comic book and in a Toyota Super Bowl commercial. In an Emmy award–winning
South Park
episode viewed by 3.4 million people, Cartman, Lyle, Stan, and Kenny vow to defeat a griefer, a powerful, irritating player, by doing nothing but playing WoW day in and day out. Beyond the pop culture paeans, WoW became a pre–Second Life Second Life. It was where you wanted to live. It was idyllic, too, unlike Second Life. No marketing, no ads, no friends incessantly hyping their local gigs muscled in on your fantasy. Because some games now had in-game advertising, nerd purists
were giving up their consoles in favor of WoW. It was such a phenomenon that Blizzard merged with Activision to form the biggest company in videogame history. Blizzard now has 12 million WoW players around the world, including China. And as of this writing, its popularity shows no signs of slowing down.

In the early part of the century, the videogame industry was growing as fast as pot under a grow lamp, so much so that the first-day sales of Microsoft’s manic shooter Halo 2 in 2004, at $125 million, beat the opening weekend gross for
Spider-Man
, which at $114 million was a record setter for Hollywood. Games generated $10 billion in revenue that year, also more than Hollywood movies. Fans, critics, and developers alike began to ask themselves, “So what else is there?” The fad had become a trend, and the trend had become culture. But beyond shooting, running, jumping, and solving puzzles, what more could be done? Well, there was popular art.

Could videogames be considered seriously as art? Most “serious” publications didn’t think so, so much so that they wouldn’t even review games with any regularity. Games were seen the
way rock ’n’ roll was in the fifties; they were dirty, sex-stinking, over-the-top with no redeeming social value, despicably lowbrow. Developers, from Mario Bros.’ Shigeru Miyamoto to Metal Gear’s Hideo Kojima, would say throughout the 2000s that the medium was still developing and should never be considered art. Others believed that the art was in the technology. And perhaps it is. According to institutions like New York’s MoMA, artifacts like Wagenfeld lamps and Gropius teapots are high art. So why can’t we say the same for the bits and bytes and the words and drawings of videogames? Some mainstream writers are coming around to the idea that games are more than just diversions.
New York Times
writer Seth Schiesel wrote that the height of videogame art could be seen in Ratchet and Clank Future. In fact, it was a buddy game so homoerotic, it would have driven Leslie Fiedler to amend his brilliant essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” to include the relationship of a lionlike, five-fingered cat and a creaky robot. Made for the Sony PlayStation 3, it cost nearly $30 million to make and was brimming with artwork as keen and clever as that in any Pixar movie. But games that are artful from start to finish are few and far between because, as in the mainstream comics world, game makers are often mired in arrested development. It’s difficult to find an M-rated game (for those over seventeen only) without giant-titted, Frank Frazetta–like women drawn by artists who spend months working on applications to make breasts wiggle as they do in real life. Bloggers and even G4 TV’s witty “X-Play” have compiled long stories on the history of breast physics in videogames.