All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (43 page)

“OK. Fifty million dollars,” joked Donald.

But in three weeks, there were talks, serious talks, at Epic’s Raleigh, North Carolina, headquarters, with Mark Rein, Epic’s cofounder, and Mike Capps, the company president. Capps, an army brat who was a child hacker, was a former professor at Monterey’s Naval Postgraduate School. While there, Capps also proposed and worked for the military on the America’s Army shooter, which became a well-regarded recruitment tool. Reins and Capps knew that others at the Game Developers Conference had approached the brothers to buy Chair. They wondered if it was the right time to strike.
*

By the time Epic considered acquiring Chair, Bleszinski had become
a superstar of gaming. His Gears of War, informed by the classic Battlefield 1942, took place in a scary, desperate world in which chaos fought against order. In the military science fiction story, the macho Marcus Fenix was pitted against The Locust Horde, a hulking race of seven-foot-tall monstrosities hell-bent on genocide. The Gears of War series, with twelve million games sold, rivaled the success of Halo and had earned Epic enough money to buy anything or anyone it wanted. Its success made Epic one of a handful of very influential studios.

Epic did not know that the offers from other companies seemed to the Mustards like more of what Majesco had to offer with Advent Rising: Everyone required delivery on deadline whether or not the work was finished. After various springtime meetings with Ryan Holmes and the Mustards, in which Chair detailed its accomplishments in other media with the
Empire
series, Capps would ask Rein, “Like, who are these kids? They really have balls, not to mention a great sense of design.” Following a trip to Utah to make certain that the ten-person Chair team was in good working order, Epic was impressed enough to make an offer. Significantly, Epic offered Chair complete creative control, thus freeing the Mustards from the specter of another Advent Rising disaster in which they’d be forced to rush a broken game onto the market. By late May 2008, Chair had been sold to Epic for more than the $8 million Chair had originally envisioned. And Epic had the finances and the cojones to tell any publisher to stick their deadlines up their butts if the game wasn’t ready. Publishers would have to wait until Shadow Complex met Epic’s high standards. (Epic’s games weren’t perfect, but they had far fewer burps and hiccups than other shooters.)

Microsoft was eventually chosen to publish the game, perhaps because of its frighteningly futuristic, statistics-based game testing laboratories in Redmond, Washington. These high-tech labs, formed in 1998, were used to great advantage for Halo and Gears of
War, although, as Capps would tell the Mustards, the whole process seemed “a little
Clockwork Orange
because you’re basically wiring people up.”
*

When Halo 3 was under the microscope at Microsoft’s testing lab, the early version was so confounding to play that testers couldn’t find their way out of the tree-filled canyon area in the first moments of the game. The research that was accumulated resulted in a change for the better. Video cameras recorded the habits of every gamer. Cameras zoomed in on faces, then on the hands using the controller as the ups and downs of game play were dutifully recorded. At the same time, the team of twenty-five psychologists and researchers, watching from behind a one-way mirror, interpreted every move, blink, and facial expression. This is truly the focus-testing of the future. The audio is key as well: Game testers talked about every move they made, and their constant chatter was recorded and analyzed. Every year, eight thousand testers lumber into this laboratory, people of all ages, paid only in games or with a Windows operating system. They spent six hours a day in this usability lab with Shadow Complex and Microsoft’s researchers, who noted dozens of game play stats about each user, from how they were feeling as they played to where they died.

As reams of data flowed back to the Mustards in Utah, Capps and Rein told the brothers that tweaking a game per the testing lab’s recommendations could increase sales by as much as 100 percent. So the Mustards fixed, for example, a problem with an ice blue lake, because people were swimming deep underneath and not moving
forward. Testers nosed around for too long, and to their dismay, their character gasped, breathed in water, and drowned. To remedy the situation, the lake was made shallower and the on-screen character was given more time to hold his breath before dying. Finally, a subtle beam of sunlight directed gamers to the shore on the opposite side, where a small, spiderlike robot shot at the gamer, unremittingly. You shot back, splashed your way out of the water, and moved on to the next breathless moment of adventure.

As they pored over the constant stream of metrics from Microsoft, there were some suggestions the Mustards ignored. Hard-core shooter fans kept saying, “Make it more like Halo,” or “Make it more like a shooter.” The game really wasn’t about shooting; it was about exploration, about building central character Jason Flemming’s powers by having him crawl through dank caves and squeeze through air-conditioning ducts to find power-ups scattered like treasure in nooks and crannies. The Mustards also discovered a little-known but stunning fact about the shooter genre: Only 25 percent of players of marquee offerings like Halo and Gears of War actually completed the game.

“We have to do much better than that,” said Donald in a meeting.

“Bring it up to at least fifty percent,” agreed Geremy.

Everyone at Chair agreed that their game had to appeal to two kinds of videogame players. Throughout the decade, especially since the Wii’s ubiquity, there had been a seismic shift in the market toward what both Epic and Chair called the “visual tourist,” the person who wanted to check out the experience, but stopped playing once he or she felt the frustration of failure over and over again. Super Metroid itself could be very unforgiving, at a time when many games were ball-busters. The Mustards felt being killed and starting again was punishment, not entertainment. They wanted every player to finish the game in less than fifteen hours. Their tip of the hat to the
hard-core gamer who enjoyed the deeper challenge was to add certain goals that were very hard to accomplish—for instance, playing the game all the way through, without dying once.

When all was said and done, it worked amazingly well. Shadow Complex was released in August 2009, and more than 200,000 gamers downloaded the 835-megabyte package at $15 each. The game didn’t work just because you had to eliminate hundreds of enemies. These sci-fi soldiers, guards, and robotic monstrosities were merely navigational roadblocks on a thrilling trek through the odd, ultraconservative world of evildoers called The Restoration. They were so archly to the right that they would have made Sarah Palin seem liberal. And as you progressed from room to room and from cave to cave and swam beneath that lake, you were enticed to continue because regular guy Flemming evolved in strength and confidence every step of the way, as you peeled back the world’s secrets like layers of onion skin. As you gathered an assortment of weapons and explosives, you began to learn more about a conspiracy that sometimes left you aghast. When you looked outside the window in real life, you might have thought, “Geez, is that guy on the street one of them? He looks so suspicious with that bulky ski parka. Is there a bomb under there? Crap. Is this guy the real Restoration? Is this the beginning of a new civil war?” You were grabbed by the balls by both story and play, neither of which would let go. Shadow Complex was that effective.

The ending, which was full of fire-filled explosions, an oversized spaceship, and a saw-that-coming-a-mile-away twist on the story of the protagonist’s oddly lipped girlfriend, was not as gripping as the game play leading up to the epilog.
But oh, that game play
. You could almost smell the pine trees and feel the mist that sprayed from the waterfalls. In an underground war complex, you battled all manner of well-armored creeps and angry knee-high robots shooting foam that made you immobile for seemingly endless seconds while
a soldier took aim at your not-quite-tough-enough armor. But the true joy of Shadow Complex was searching the hidden recesses for little treasure chests after you finished the initial mission. They were hidden deep in mountain caves or at the very tops of ceilings on obscured ledges that were treacherous to get to, even with your jetpack. All the while you had to be wary of sudden mishaps, like stumbling upon a fast treadmill that pushed you into nuclear reactors. Zap: you were killed by burning. You became nothing but cinders and ashes.

Shadow Complex was the way of the future: a small game that made money for a big company. Epic executives estimated that Chair, after its success with Shadow Complex, was worth three to four times the amount Epic paid for it initially. And a giant megacorporation like Microsoft was proud to have Shadow Complex in its stable of downloadable games, because it added a cachet of brilliance beyond the usual fare. It was part of a master plan for Microsoft that ultimately paid off; in 2010, the landmark Xbox Live service on which multiplayer games are played became a billion-dollar-a-year industry in itself. The magic behind this new form of game was, of course, its new means of distribution. With downloadable games, a developer didn’t need a game disk, manual, box, or space on a store shelf. Such games would not see a Grand Theft Auto kind of return, but the monetary rewards weren’t chump change, either.

Whether next year’s or next decade’s games will have colossal or infinitesimal budgets, whether they’ll be mind-bogglingly high-tech or appear humbly in our browser windows, it’s undeniable that gaming has already changed our lives and our culture. Blockbuster TV shows and movies are influenced by the action sequences in videogames—every week. But beyond the braggadocio and hype, beyond being
trivial playthings that are mere toys for some, there is real depth in about 10 percent of each year’s releases, and that’s akin to the best of our major movies and TV programs. Sony’s Heavy Rain proved that a serial killer story could be influenced by the subtler, sinister human emotions à la Raymond Carver. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, with its nineteenth-century penny dreadful influence on a story surrounding Marco Polo’s lost treasure, let you feel as though you were in a melodramatic movie with all the spills and thrills of an Indiana Jones adventure.

So these are more than toys, as educator and game designer Ian Bogost suggests in his book
Persuasive Games
. Games can have their own kind of rhetoric—not oratory, but a procedural rhetoric that lures us into thinking and changing our points of view. So-called serious games with low budgets are used in politics, education, and medicine not to make money or to be played by millions. Rather, they attempt to convince stricken children, say, that a kind of cancer can be defeated with chemotherapy. One question to mull in the future, beyond ideas for technology like holographic play, may be whether serious games can become subsets of more commercial games. Could a game like Gears of War take time to slip in some of the makers’ inspirations from real war battles, kind of like a battle history–fueled featurette in a DVD? Could a portion of Madden take time in a mini-game or in coaching mode to help us better understand football plays themselves? And what if, in a series like Sony’s brilliant God of War, which waters down the Greek myths, there was a section in which you could enjoy snippets of
Bulfinch’s Mythology
? It sure would make games far more acceptable to the nabobs who say that they are throwaway ephemera. You could say, “Screw them, I just want to play,” and you would mostly be right; but adding such stuff in a seamless way might well make the game a deeper experience. In the opening scenes of Rockstar’s ambitious cowboy epic, Red Dead Redemption, you see John Marston, the game’s ultra-cool but scarred
protagonist, who’s perhaps named after a fifteenth-century poet/satirist, board a train to a dusty, nowhere town. Quiet and alone, he sits listening to the nearby passengers, including bigoted old women who talk about politics. Then, a teen girl tries to school a Luddite preacher about the coming technology that includes airplanes. Man will never do that, replies the preacher. “Flying is for the angels.” It’s an understated history lesson of a time when the United States was in utter transition in everything from politics to religion to technology. And it doesn’t stick out painfully because it’s done with wit. It’s entertaining, but it’s delicately stirred into the Rockstar recipe of Palahniuk-esque anarchic energy and social commentary. And it all works better than similar scenes in, say, Martin Scorsese’s
Gangs of New York
, which tries to shoehorn history into the drama and often fails in the process. But game makers also have to stop falling back on the idea that the games industry is still in its infancy, a childhood that must be given a cultural pass even if its creations are full of cliché design and childish writing. The industry is not a baby anymore. Games have transformed from curiosities to a conquering form of mass entertainment. Do it thoroughly and thoughtfully or don’t do it at all.