Replay: The History of Video Games (31 page)

Then, out of the blue, he got a call from Commodore, who wanted to give his business software company – Taurus – a bunch of Amiga computers. It transpired that Commodore was actually trying to get hold of another software company called Torus, but for Molyneux Commodore’s erroneous gift was a rare flash of good fortune. Molyneux and his business partner Les Edgar initially created a database product for the Amiga, but shortly afterwards they decided to move into video game development and renamed their company Bullfrog. “My daughter Louise had a thing about frogs and Bullfrog seemed like the sort of daft name a games company might have,” said Edgar. “At the time we were still reeling from the shock of the cost of supporting our Amiga database product, and with increased competition from other, larger publishers in that space, we had to do something. The game arena seemed attractive because development times were short, costs were low, support was not necessary and results were fairly instantaneous. If you screwed up, you could start another game without massive losses.”

Bullfrog managed to get some work converting Firebird’s
Gauntlet
clone
Druid II: The Enlightenment
to the Amiga and then persuaded Electronic Arts to publish its first original game: the 1988 vertically scrolling shoot ’em up
Fusion
. Bullfrog’s game became one of the first to be published by Electronic Arts’ new European operation that had opened in Slough, a London satellite town not far from Guildford.

“Europe was still in the earlier ‘cottage industry’ or ‘import’ phase because there had never been an indigenous phenomenon like Atari or Nintendo, which had educated Japanese and American consumers and retailers on what to do,” said Electronic Arts’ founder Trip Hawkins of the company’s expansion into Europe. “Retail promotion was lagging in sophistication and needed more direct support from major publishers. There were unfair trade practices in many countries. In Germany you could only get into half the stores because two competing distributors had divided up inappropriate retail exclusives and would then insist on game exclusives as well, so your game was either in the first or second distributor’s half of the stores and the consumer could only see half the games in their store.”

Electronic Arts set out to bring its professional corporate style to Europe’s unwashed video game industry. Geoff Heath, who was the managing director of Melbourne House when Electronic Arts opened its European arm, remembered the US company’s arrival as a wake up call to the UK industry. “The company that really brought professionalism to the games industry was Electronic Arts,” he said. “They ran it like a business whereas prior to that we all ran these companies that made money half the time, didn’t know why we were making money and had a load of fun. Then along came Electronic Arts run by savvy MBAs who knew their subject.”

Fusion
sold poorly, but the small advance Electronic Arts gave Bullfrog to pay for its creation, provided the studio with enough time to make some headway with its next project,
Populous
.
Populous
emerged out of an isometric pictograph created by Bullfrog programmer and artist Glenn Corpes. “I thought it looked fascinating and said shall we put little people on it as if these isometric blocks were mountains,” said Molyneux. “Then there was the thing about how are people going to move around on this land?”

Molyneux set about bringing the miniature citizens of this isometric land to life and immediately ran into problems. “The fact that I programmed it meant some of the fundamental things that programmers can do in their sleep I couldn’t do,” he said. A particular problem was getting the virtual people to navigate around walls rather than getting stuck. “I didn’t know how to do that. I tried to do it, tried to invent it myself and couldn’t and I thought ‘oh fuck it, I’ll just get the player to solve the problem for me by raising and lowering the land’. That became the game’s fundamental mechanic. Pure and utter luck. Suddenly you’re raising and lowering land with little people, ‘Ah! You must be a god’.”

Molyneux turned Corpes’ isometric drawing into a game that put players into a deity seeking to build the number of worshippers using Old Testament-style powers to change the landscape, cause earthquakes and create volcanoes. The ultimate aim was to wipe out a rival group of people who were followers of another god. It was, said Molyneux, a game “written, designed and everything for one person: me”.

Britain’s game publishers agreed. “Publishers kind of looked at it and went okay…thank you very much, can you get those little people shooting each other? Er, no. Can you get the mouse cursor to fire? No. Oh well, next!,” said Molyneux. One executive from Mirrorsoft, the UK game publisher owned by media mogul Robert Maxwell, exclaimed ‘who would want to play at being god?’. “I seem to remember he didn’t believe in the internet too,” said Edgar. Like
Sim City
,
Populous
’ lack of shooting, lack of defined solutions and megalomaniac experience was so unusual no one knew what to make of it. Eventually Electronic Arts agreed to publish it. “They didn’t have any games for Christmas 1989 so they said ‘ok, we’ll sign that
Populous
thing’,” said Molyneux. “It didn’t really feel like they wanted it, it felt like it just filled a gap for them.”

With
Populous
complete and Electronic Arts on board, Molyneux braced himself for another disappointment: “I thought it would be a flop because everything in my life that I had touched up to that point had just gone awfully badly. School had gone awfully badly, then my first business,
The Entrepreneur
and selling disks to schools. There really wasn’t an idea of success.”

The only hint that Molyneux’s pessimism might have been misplaced came when Electronic Arts arranged for Bob Wade, a journalist from the UK games magazine
Advanced Computer Entertainment
, to visit Bullfrog for a preview of the game. “I didn’t know what to do with journalists, so I thought we’ll just go out and get drunk,” said Molyneux. “We got drunk and I was dying to ask him what he thought of the game, although I was also terrified to because I was pretty sure it was going to be like everything else in my life. Evenally, after god knows how many pints, I said what did you think of
Populous
? He said it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played. My first thought was he must never play
Populous
again because he must have been on some other planet when he played it.”

* * *

By the time
Populous
was ready for release in late 1989,
Sim City
had been on sale for several months. Although sales were initially slow, the game ended up in the hands of a
Time
magazine reporter who wrote a full-page review of Wright’s groundbreaking Macintosh game.

The review prompted a massive surge in sales and, as
Sim City
started appearing on other computers, the sales just kept rising. “Typically in the game market you released the game and 80 per cent of sales were in the first six months,” said Wright. “
Sim City
was a totally different profile. The first year did well; the second year sold a lot more, the third even more.
Sim City
paid for a lot of mistakes, which was great because we made a lot of mistakes with our company.”

As well as appealing to many video game fans,
Sim City
also connected with an audience who would normally shun the bouncy platform, martial arts and fierce shoot ’em up games that typified the games available on the NES and in arcades. Millions became hooked on the joy of growing their own cities, although some felt Wright’s simulation was biased – particularly when it came to traffic management. “Any simulation is a set of assumptions. A lot of people thought we were really biased towards mass transit, others thought we were biased against it,” said Wright. “The interesting thing is a model like that gives you something to reflect against and, in fact, when people start to argue with the model, that’s when I think it’s been successful. When they’re playing a game like
Sim City
, which is really one set of assumptions, and they start arguing with those assumptions, the game has crystallised an internal model to the point where they can now argue against that model. In some sense that’s the point of it.”

By the end of the year
Populous
had joined
Sim City
in becoming a surprise international hit. The magazine reviews lavished praise on the game and, to Bullfrog’s surprise, it seemed as if they might get some royalties from the game. “Given the reception by the press in the UK, I was expecting that we would make some money, but when the first royalty cheque came in – £13,000 as I recall – I didn’t imagine we would get much more,” said Edgar. “The second cheque was significantly larger and they just kept coming. Then the Japanese arrived and things really took off.”

Molyneux was shocked: “Electronic Arts couldn’t manufacture enough toisfy the demand and then it was released all over the world and everybody was playing it. The publisher, David Gardener, phoned up and said ‘you are a millionaire now’ and it was like ‘my god!’. It was just this amazing moment of thinking ‘Christ, what have I done?’. I expected to sell four copies, instead it was getting close to a million within a matter of weeks.”

Unusually, both
Sim City
and
Populous
became popular in Japan, a country that usually ignored the smattering of North American and European games that reached its shores. But it was only when Molyneux and Edgar went to Japan to do some publicity work that the scale of their success in Japan became clear. “When we arrived at the airport in Tokyo there was a TV crew there to meet us and an infinite number of magazine interviews lined up,” said Edgar. “The reaction from the press was staggering – they had all played the PC and Amiga versions.”

Back in the UK, a bemused Molyneux became a star game designer: “The journalists at the time made this genre up. They called it a god game because they had no other way of describing it and suddenly I was attributed with creating this whole genre. I
didn’t create the genre, the journalists did – I just created a game that allowed them to describe the game. We had these round tables started by the press – David Braben was there, Jez San, Archer MacLean and there was me.
[2]
They were all talking about assembler and machine code and how they can get the blitter to interact with the copper. I was sitting there thinking ‘shit, what are they talking about?’. It was all double dutch to me.”

Together,
Populous
and
Sim City
gave form to a disparate game development movement that rejected the controlled, confined and directed experiences of their cinema-worshipping peers in favour of more open-ended experiences that were closer to toys than board games in concept and that embraced creation and construction as a play mechanic. It was an approach to video game design that had been circulating for some time, from the nation management of
Utopia
and the freedom of Braben’s
Elite
, but the success of Wright and Molyneux took these games into the mainstream of game design and encouraged other designers to start investigating the possibilities.

One of those Wright and Molyneux inspired was Sid Meier, the co-founder of US game publisher Microprose. The Maryland publisher had carved out a lucrative niche producing military-themed simulations such as
F-15 Strike Eagle
,
Silent Service
and
Gunship
. But as the 1980s drew to a close, Meier started exploring ideas outside Microprose’s military comfort zone, thanks partly to the influence of Dani Bunten Berry’s
Seven Cities of Gold
. Inspired by the Spanish Conquistadors,
Seven Cities of Gold
was an epic game of explorationhat condensed the history of the discovery of the New World into a video game and sought to convey the panic of being lost in the uncharted wilderness.
Seven Cities of Gold
inspired Meier to create
Pirates!
, a open-ended game about adventure, trade, robbery and romance on the high seas in the 17th Century, and got him thinking more generally about how to make games that simplified complex scenarios.

Shortly after completing
Pirates!
, Meier discovered both
Sim City
and
Populous
. For Meier, these games demonstrated how creating something could be just as fun and compelling as the destruction usually peddled by video games. Meier’s response was to devise a game that put players in control of a civilization’s journey through history. His grand vision became
Civilization
, an epic turn-based strategy game that offered a beguiling concoction of military conflict, diplomacy, exploration, city building, history lesson and resource management. The goal was to take a tiny tribe, ignorant of the world, and turn it into a great world power shaped by the choices and decisions of the player themselves. Core to
Civilization
’s appeal was its ability to make players feel as if they were writing history as they went, with centuries marked by war and instability giving way to golden ages of scientific progress before going back to high-stakes clashes with other large nations. It was an aspect that gave
Civilization
– more than
Sim City
or
Populous
– a narrative quality, albeit one defined by the player rather than Meier.