Replay: The History of Video Games (24 page)

Crawford took advantage of the Macintosh’s GUI with his 1985 game
Balance of Power
, a simulation of Cold War geopolitics where players took charge of the US or USSR. “Actually, it wasn’t so much the GUI that appealed to me as the raw computational power of the Mac,” said Crawford. “I went from an Atari with an 8-bit processor and 48Kb of RAM to a Mac with a 16-bit processor and 128Kb.”

At the time of
Balance of Power
’s release the Cold War had been under way for 40 years and showed no sign of ending. If anything the aggressive and uncompromising stance of President Ronald Reagan led many to suspect that nuclear war was becoming more, not less, likely. “The militaristic rhetoric of the Reagan administration led me to fear the prospect of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union,” said Crawford. “A lot of people in those days shared that fear. It seemed as if the Cold War was heating up and might become a hot war. Ever since my student days I had tried to understand how nations could get themselves caught up in the idiocy of war. I had studied lots of military and diplomatic history and I was finally coming to understand the basic principles. I wanted to communicate those principles.”

The goal of
Balance of Power
was to defeat the rival superpower by increasing your standing among the world’s nations. Players could use diplomacy, military muscle, espionage, money or insurgency to try to bend nations to their will, but they had to avoid confrontations with the opposing superpower that could end in nuclear war. The outbreak of nuclear war ended the game with a simple message: “You have ignited a nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure.”

Crawford’s simulation sought to model global reality as closely as possible, even including obscure political science concepts such as Finlandisation – the term used to describe how Finland sought to appease the neighbouring Soviet Union during the Cold War by censoring anti-communist media and refusing to grant asylum to political refugees from the USSR. Such was the complexity hidden beneath its simple interface of pull-down menus and icons to click on that Crawford later wrote and published a book explaining its inner workings. “My hope was that players would appreciate the complexity of it all, that they would understand that military action is, in fact, occasionally desirable but it had to be used judiciously and in the context of a larger diplomatic strategy,” said Crawford. Despite its complexity and political subject matter, Balance of Power sold around 250,000 copies – a significant amount for the time.

ICOM Simulations, meanwhile, used the Mac’s GUI to rethink the text adventure. “Our idea wto do an adventure game that fitted into the Mac user interface,” said Adler. “Programs like
MacPaint
and the Mac
Finder
concentrate on mouse clicks and drags for user interface. We wanted to do the same for an adventure game. One of our ideas was ‘when in doubt, make it work the same way the
Finder
does’. Another was to choose a game with a style that fitted well with the black and white display of the Mac. That’s why we used a film noir story – we figured those movies were black and white already.”

When ICOM began work on their film noir adventure in 1984, little had changed in the way adventure games worked since they first appeared in the late 1970s. Instead of rethinking the method of interaction, adventure game specialists Infocom had concentrated on improving the writing and creating ‘feelies’ – items packaged with the game that were intended to enhance the experience. Infocom’s feelies first appeared in the company’s 1982 murder mystery
Deadline
, which came with pieces of evidence from the crime scene such as police interview notes and a photo of the murder scene. “The items in the package became a trademark of our games and were also a small anti-piracy aid as just copying the disks wouldn’t get you all you needed to solve the puzzles,” said Infocom co-founder Dave Lebling.

But core to Infocom’s efforts to stay ahead of the pack was better storytelling. To help it achieve this goal it began to working with professional authors such as Douglas Adams, who helped Infocom turn his comedy sci-fi novel
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
into a video game. “It was quite a close collaboration, not like the typical author-game designer collaboration where the author talks to the designer for an hour and then plays the game months later with PR people snapping photos to show off the ‘collaboration’,” said Steve Meretzky, the Infocom game designer who worked with Adams on
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
. “In general he was a delight to collaborate with because he understood the medium but didn’t feel as bound by its conventions as someone who’d already been working in it for several years like me. He came up with all sorts of crazy and inventive ideas like the game lying to you. On the other hand he was the world’s worst procrastinator. He would wait until the last minute and then wait another six months. As he once said: ‘I love deadlines. I especially love the whooshing sound they make as they pass by’.”

After completing
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
in 1984, Meretzky went on to write
A Mind Forever Voyaging
that, along with 1986’s
Trinity
, would mark the pinnacle of Infocom’s quest for literary excellence. Like
Balance of Power
, President Reagan inspired
A Mind Forever Voyaging
. “Reagan had just been re-elected in a landslide and I was completely horrified because I despised him and his administration,” said Meretzky. “Text adventures were such a compelling medium. While playing one you just though about the game day and night, mulling over different solutions for puzzles, so I thought that it might be a particularly effective medium for getting a message across. I wanted to show Reagan as the right-wing, war-mongering, fundamentalist-coddling, budget-exploding, wedge-driving, environment-destroying intellectual lightweight he was.”

In the game players took on the role of Perry Simm, a software program with human intelligence created to live in a computer simulation that extrapolated the effects of a government social policy that echoed Reagan’s free-market and socially conservative stance. As the players explored various simulations of the future, they watched how the policy would destroy freedom and peace in America while grappling with the ethical dilemma of what would happen to Simm when the simulation was over. While Crawford had struggled to find a publisher for his take on the Cold War, Infocom backed Meretzsky’s political critique. “A few people expressed concern about a game that might make some players angry, but Dave Lebling, who’s quite conservative, stuck up for the idea and said that perhaps someday he might want to make a game that attacked liberal principles and wanted to be free to do so,” said Meretzky.

“I am politically well to Steve’s right and very strong on free speech. He designed a good game and it was worth producing,” said Lebling. “One could imagine a sequel about the rebellion against the state set up by listening to Perry Simm and his lousy socio-economic models.”

Brian Moriarty’s
Trinity
, meanwhile, was a fantastical time-travelling adventure about
the dangers of nuclear bombs and atomic war. “I first conceived the idea of an adventure game based on the Trinity Test in 1983,” said Moriarty.
[4]
“It was inspired by a history book I’d read years before in my high school library:
Day of Trinity
by Lansing Lamont. The dramatic story of the creation of the first atomic bomb really captured my imagination for some reason. It seemed the perfect setting for an interactive story in which a character from the future finds himself facing the possibility of changing history. It was about the mystery of choice.”

But while Infocom concentrated on writing, its foremost rival – Sierra Online – had begun looking for an escape from the restrictions of text as its co-founder and lead game designer Roberta Williams became increasingly frustrated with the genre’s limitations. Sierra’s change in direction began with
Time Zone
, a $99 sci-fi adventure game spread across six double-sized floppy disks that Williams envisaged as a video game equivalent of the epic movies of Cecil B. DeMille. Having completed her epic she publicly admitted she was burnt out and couldn’t bear the thought of looking at another text adventure. So after creating a couple more adventures based on Disney licences, she made her bid for freedom with 1984’s fairytale adventure
King’s Quest
. For the game Williams ditched the Apple II so she could take advantage of the more powerful features of the PCjr, IBM’s low-cost version of its standard PC. The PCjr allowed Williams to fulfil her long-held desire to introduce animation to her games.

She also used it as a chance to reduce the reliance on textinput by letting players move the lead character around the screen using the arrow keys on the PCjr’s keyboard. But she stopped short of abandoning text altogether, requiring players to type in the usual verb-noun commands to perform actions other than moving.
King’s Quest
’s fusion of animation and adventure was a watershed moment for the genre, but it would take ICOM’s 1985 film noir game,
Déjà Vu: A Nightmare Comes True
, to finally free players from the tyranny of text commands.

Déjà Vu
dropped text input altogether. Instead of having to type in commands in the hope that the game would understand, players could click on a selection of action words and then click on the object or person they wanted the action to apply to.
Déjà Vu
’s story was no match for the works of Sierra or Infocom, but ICOM had showed the way.

By the end of the 1980s the text adventure would be on its last legs and Infocom with it, thanks to the company’s aversion to animation and GUIs. “We were very text-oriented and were happy to spend more space words than on pictures,” said Lebling. “In those days, the games with lots of graphics had very few words and we thought that the personal computer technology of the day was better suited to words. It made us somewhat hostile to graphics in general, which was a bad thing.”

Adventure games were not the only genre where designers were seeking to explore the narrative horizons of video games. Richard Garriott was also seeking to make story a central feature of his role-playing game series
Ultima
. After releasing 1983’s
Ultima III: Exodus
through his own company, Origin Systems, he got to see his fan mail for the first time. The letters shocked him. “I found it fascinating to read what people were doing in my games,” said Garriott. “People would say I bought it and really enjoyed it and after I solved the main plot I had a great deal of fun going back and killing everybody or people would write in about the shortcuts they found to achieve solutions where they did not play a good guy but won by killing all the villagers in town because it was the fastest way to advance.”

At the same time Garriott also started receiving hate mail from supporters of Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (BADD), a pressure group that claimed
Dungeons & Dragons
was spreading Satanism and was formed by Patricia Pulling, a grieving mother from Virginia who believed her 19-year-old son Irving killed himself because of the role-playing game. Pulling didn’t pick up on
Ultima III: Exodus
, which came in a box with a demon on the front, but others who agreed with her views did. “This was when the Christian right in the United States was coming out very strongly against role-playing games,” he said. “I received hate mail from religious groups describing me as the satanic perverter of America’s youth.” To Garriott it seemed that both the writers of the hate mail, and some of his fans, had misunderstood his work. “I found it so ironic and laughable,” he said. “Here I am writing games that I believe are, on the whole, quite positive and yet there’s a clearly this segment of the population so divergent from that belief./font>

Garriott decided that the fourth
Ultima
game would mark a change in direction. “I sat do
wn and thought real hard about what I could do that would reward people in the way the real world reacts,” he said. His solution was to make a game about virtue. Garriott pored over every book on philosophy and morality he could lay his hands on in a search for some simple truths that he could put at the heart of the game. He boiled down the ideas he read about into eight virtues based on three broad principles: truth, love and courage. His confidence was also boosted when he noticed that one of his favourite movies,
The Wizard of Oz
, also homed in on the same ideas with its scarecrow, tin man and lion characters. “I independently arrived at truth, love and courage but L. Frank Baum had clearly arrived at a similar conclusion,” he said.
[5]
“I was given confidence that one of my creative heroes had arrived at a very clearly parallel conclusion, so I resolved to stick with truth, love and courage.”