Replay: The History of Video Games (41 page)

Merchants of
Doom
: (left to right) John Carmack, Kevin Cloud, Adrian Carmack, Jo
hn Romero, Tom Hall and Jay Wilbur. Courtesy of John Romero

20. The Ultimate Display

In 1965 computer graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland laid down an ambitious challenge to the computer scientists at the annual International Federation for Information Processing Congress. He outlined an elaborate vision of the future, a time when computers would create “the ultimate display”. The computer display of tomorrow, he ventured, would not just look like the real world, it would feel, respond and sound like reality too. Creating that virtual reality, he argued, is what computer researchers should see as their ultimate goal.

Sutherland’s bold vision fired the imagination of computer scientists.
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They threw themselves enthusiastically into trying to create “the ultimate display”. They built head-mounted displays, helmets with computer
screens for each eye that consumed the wearers’ field of vision like a pair of hi-tech binoculars. They figured out how to construct virtual objects out of coloured polygon shapes, usually triangles, to create an illusion of 3D on 2D computer screens.
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They built electronic gloves to let people interact with these 3D worlds using their hands and designed haptic feedback devices that conveyed the sensation of touch with their vibrations.

Although some of these breakthroughs seeped out of the research labs in the form of the flight simulators for pilot training, for the first two decades following Sutherland’s landmark speech the work of virtual reality researchers went, for the most part, unnoticed.

But as the 1990s began the wider world finally latched onto the idea of virtual reality, partly as a result of talk about the development of internet and the connected world it would usher in. The virtual realities these researchers sought to create provided an easily understandable and visual representation of the global network the internet promised. “Virtual reality was a great symbol of how the internet would take over our lives,” said Jonathan Waldren, the founder of British virtual reality research company W. Industries, which later renamed itself Virtuality. “There was a lot of hype, people were being told by analysts that the internet was going to be a paradigm shift for everything in life and for a lot of people that was really bewildering.”

Virtual reality may have been a separate idea from the internet, but for a world trying to get its head around the abstract idea of what a networked world would be like, it brought the concept to life. After 20 years of being ignored, virtual reality became one of the most talked about areas of computer research. Investors pumped millions of dollars into research projects and virtual reality start-ups hoping to cash in on the new world. Journalists flocked to see the latest developments before returning with reports about how in the future we could be spending as much time in the virtual world as in the real world. TV documentaries excitedly discussed the possibility of cybersex in the virtual reality worlds that, at the time, seemed to be just around the corner. To a lot of people the polygon 3D realities being prompted by those trying to engineer these digital worlds looked a lot like a video game.

As it happened, video game makers had also been wrestling with the same problem as virtual reality researchers, namely how to make believable computer-generated 3D worlds. But while the virtual reality set focused on engineering hardware devices that could make the digital real, game developers were battling to deliver Sutherland’s immersive vision through software that would work within the limitations of mass-market computer technology.

The earliest 3D video games, such as
Tailgunner
and
Battlezone
, had relied on wireframe visuals to create an illusion of depth. It was an elegant solution given the technology available, but game developers knew the polygon 3D visuals that virtual reality researchers had been playing with would let them create far more believable worlds.

Atari became the first company to bring the technique to video games with 1983’s coin-op game
I, Robot
. Devised by Dave Theurer, the creator of
Tempest
and
Missile Command
, the game mixed shooting with platform jumping in a world that looked as if it was built out of Lego bricks.
I, Robot
not only introduced the visual approach to game players, but demonstrated the big advantages of 3D visuals by allowing players to see the action from a range of viewpoints.

Unlike the 2D graphics that were widespread at the time, 3D graphics did not need to be drawn in advance. Instead they were generated using mathematical equations and so all a game had to do to alter the player’s perspective was recalculate the position and size o each polygon relative to the player’s location in the virtual worl
d. And by using more polygons you could create more elaborate and realistic looking objects. It was easy in theory, but the more polygons you had the more calculations were needed and as the number of calculations increased so did the time it took for computers to carry out the instructions. “The maths for 3D graphics is very simple,” said David Braben, the creator of
Zarch
, a 1987 shoot ’em up for the Acorn Archimedes set above a 3D patchwork landscape of agricultural fields created out of polygons.
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“The main problem was making the graphics go fast enough for the motion to look smooth.”

Not that the challenge stopped game developers from trying. Flight simulation developers led the way, keen to inject more realism into their work, but polygon graphics soon began being used in other types of games, from 1989 racing sim
Indianapolis 500: The Simulation
to French game designer Christophe de Dinechin’s
Alpha Waves
, a 3D platform game for the Atari ST promoted by its publisher Infogrames as a dream-like relaxation experience. “
Alpha Waves
was the first full 3D platformer game,” said Frédérick Raynal, who converted the 1990 game to the PC. “Everything was moving fast on the screen and the game play was very challenging. I think Infogrames made a mistake trying sell it as a New Age brain motivating experience instead of an efficient and modern platformer.”

Others built whole worlds out of polygons, most notably
Midwinter
, Mike Singleton’s 1989 game of guerrilla warfare that took place on a large snow-covered island made up of light blue polygons. Atari Games’ 1989 coin-op driving sim
Hard Drivin’
went a step further than most in its plundering of ideas from virtual reality, combining 3D polygon visuals with variable wheel resistance and force feedback technology that had its origins in the haptic feedback hardware engineered by those chasing Sutherland’s Holy Grail.

The intertwined worlds of virtual reality and video games finally came together when Virtuality decided to bring virtual reality to the masses. Virtuality began life in the English city of Leicester where it engineered virtual reality equipment for corporate customers. “We used to work in a tiny little place in Leicester that was underground; under an old shoe factory,” said Waldren. “It was a government-run place – they were trying to get more IT companies in and we hired some rooms. It was cheap space – no cost. The idea was to build these virtual reality systems and sell them to professional development organisations.”

After doing some work for British Telecom, Virtuality joined forces with Leading Leisure, a UK firm that had created a mini-flight simulator called
The Venturer
for use in funfairs and large arcades. “The idea was that we’d build a little person simulator using virtual reality technology and link it to the flight simulator,” said Waldren. “The grand vision was we could have these simulation centres where people could be in an aircraft or exoskeleton in some kind of game environment.”
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The grand vision never happened, but Virtuality figured there was potential in making coin-operated virtual reality game machines for arcades. Virtuality’s team designed sit-down and stand-up versions of its arcade machines that boasted the head-mounted displays, 3D joysticks and glove-like controllers that symbolised virtual reality in the public mind. In October 1991 Virtuality unveiled its first game:
Dactyl Nightmare
.
Dactyl Nightmare
allowed up to four players, each using a separate Virtuality machine, to fight each other with guns and rocket launchers in a polygon 3D world while dodging aggressive pterodactyls that flew menacingly above the play area’s surrealistic chequerboard floors.

“People were just lost in that thing; they were really, really immersed,” said Waldren. “They just went over that line where they just forgot about the rest of the world.” But with each machine costing $65,000, the onus was on getting people in and out of the game as fast as possible to make it profitable for arcade operators. “That really cramped our ability to do anything of depth,” said Waldren. “Our goal was to get people in there, give them a very highly intense, intuitive experience for three to four minutes, but then you had to change over because typically there was a queue and, obviously, the operator has to get the next people in there.”

Virtuality’s games gave many people their first taste of a virtual reality experience, fuelling the belief that the future envisaged by Sutherland was almost here. Nothing could have been further from the truth. While Virtuality continued to make games until the late 1990s, including 1996’s
Pac-Man VR
, the hype surrounding virtual reality waned fast. “The equipment was too expensive and there was no good business model beyond training,” said Brenda Laurel, the former Atari Research employee who got involved in virtual reality work in the early 1990s.

Jaron Lanier, a virtual reality researcher who also started out exploring the technology during a stint at Atari Research, feels in retrospect that Virtuality’s attempts to take the technology to the public may have done more harm than good.
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“On one hand they had gone quite a bit further than anyone had at creating something that was a manufactured product and they had really worked on a business plan – this $1-a-minute experience – and that was all good,” he said. “The problem is that they were a little unrealistic about whether they were ready for primetime. I think people spent their dollar and were disappointed with the level of graphics that were possible at the time.”

This gap between the rhetoric and actuality of virtual reality was something video game designers were about to really expose. In November 1991, one month after Virtuality unveiled
Dactyl Nightmare
, a Texan game developer called Id Software released a PC game called
Catacomb 3-D
that marked a major breakthrough in video game 3D graphics.

Id began as a tight-knit group of game-loving colleagues who worked for Softdisk, a disk magazine publisher based in Shreveport, Louisiana. Popular in the 19, disk magazines provided subscribers with a floppy disk packed with articles, adverts and software for their home computers. Softdisk started out in 1981 with its monthly Apple II magazine
Softdisk Magazine
and by 1987 around 100,000 subscribers were paying $9.95 a month for the company’s disk magazines, which were now available for a variety of computer systems.

One of the programmers churning out software to tight deadlines for the firm was John Romero, an energetic and ambitious game designer who dreamed of achieving wealth and fame through his creations. He had started out selling his games to disk magazines such as
UpTime
before joining Origin Systems, the publisher of the
Ultima
series of role-playing games, in 1987. Origin was supposed to be Romero’s big break, but it turned sour.

His first project at the then New Hampshire-based firm was cancelled before it was finished and he then decided to quit to join his former boss at Origin who had left to form his own game studio, which went bust almost as soon as it started. Romero was left broke and so when Jay Wilbur, the former editor of
UpTime
who had joined Softdisk, called and offered him a job he jumped at the chance. “I could count on John. He was a machine,” said Wilbur. “When I worked at
UpTime
, he was putting out a game per month, which for me as someone buying games to put on a periodical was perfect. He’d make these great games and each one of them had double consonant titles, so it was like Wacky Wizard or Deep Dungeon or something like that.”