Replay: The History of Video Games (50 page)

To ensure players felt connected to the world of
Habitat
, the game allowed them to customise the looks of their digital self, decorate their virtual homes and adopt computerised pets. Even the customer service aspects of the game became part of the game world. Players could contact the system administrators with their problems via
Habitat
’s Bureaucrat in a Box, use Pawn Machines to sell the objects their digital selves owned and check the state of their virtual finances using ATMs. And to give players a sense of purpose, Lucasfilm created dozens of fun activities to participate in ranging from road rallies to games of Chess and treasure hunts.

The idea of these activities, explained Morningstar, was to ensure no matter what a player’s personal interests were there would be something within
Habitat
that appealed to them. As if this wasn’t ambitious enough, Lucasfilm also intended to allow up to 20,000 people to play in
Habitat
at once. It was an unheard of figure.
MUD
s rarely topped the 100-player mark and they didn’t even try to represent their worlds in graphics. Given the volume of traffic and the unpredictability of player behaviour, Lucasfilm and Quantum Link decided to do an initial pre-release ‘beta’ test of the game in 1986 with 500 players. Morningstar and his team started out believing that
Habitat
should function in a way similar to a theme park, creating new activities designed to keep the visitors to its virtual world entertained.

The developers spent weeks honing some of
Habitat’
s more involved quests and introduced them to the game world confident that it would keep players occupied for weeks on end. Players solved them in just a few hours. Deciding that their original centrally planned approach was doomed to failure, Lucasfilm did a u-turn and embraced a more libertarian, free-market attitude where they would be facilitators not directors. They gave players weapons and allowed them to kill each other in the hope of encouraging them to make their own fun.

That too backfired.
Habitat
became a lawless world as players gunned each other down in the streets and stole each other’s items. One player, a Greek Orthodox priest in the real world, responded by forming the Order of the Holy Walnut, a popular virtual religion that preached non-violence. In the
Habitat
town of Populopolis, players fed up with the lawlessness formed a virtual town council and elected a sheriff before launching a campaign to get Lucasfilm to grant their law enforcer of choice special powers. As a result Lucasfilm agreed to hold a referendum among players to decide what powers
Habitat
’s first police officer should have.

But before the referendum could be held,
Habitat
was shut down.
Habitat
had become a victim of its own success. Despite the challenges,
Habitat
had largely delivered on its vision but the beta test had revealed a major problem that no one foresaw. While just 500 people had access to the trial version of the game, they were playing it so much that the beta test version of
Habitat
swallowed up 1 per cent of Quantum Link’s network capacity.

Quantum Link realised that if
Habitat
matched the success of
RabbitJack’s Casino
and people played it as often as the first 500 players, its network would be unable to cope. And since increasing the network’s capacity was seriously exnsive at the time, Quantum Link and L
ucasfilm cancelled the game’s full release.
[5]

Habitat
wasn’t the only game to appear on Quantum Link that sought to push back the boundaries of video games. In 1988 the network teamed up with a writer called Tracy Reed to create
The Quantum Link Serial
, an experimental interactive fiction project that foreshadowed the fact-and-fiction-blurring alternate
-reality games that would gain prominence thanks to 2001’s
The Beast
, a promotional game for Steven Spielberg’s movie
A.I
.
[6]
Included as part of the subscription to Quantum Link,
The Quantum Link Serial
combined storytelling with online chat and email. Reed would write the story in weekly instalments after asking readers to suggest how they could be included in the tale.
The Quantum Link Serial
became one of Quantum Link’s most popular features, not least because the readers themselves had become part of Reed’s fictional world.

In 1989 Quantum Link also released the first of two games it had commissioned from Don Daglow’s Stormfront Studios. The pioneering game developer, who had created 1971’s
Baseball
and the Intellivision game
Utopia
, started working with the network after a visit from its executive vice-president Steve Case. “Steve did a tour of all the game companies looking for ways to hook up with them and get games on Quantum Link,” said Daglow. “I was at Brøderbund and he showed me what they were doing. I privately thought the Apple II was starting to fade and Brøderbund was the leading Apple II game company. I did a two-title deal with Steve for a token payment because they didn’t have any cash at that point – Quantum had 40 employees and was operating on a shoestring – to get us in the door.”

Stormfront’s first creation for Quantum Link was 1989’s
Quantum Space
, a text-only turn-based strategy game released just before Quantum Link renamed itself America On-Line (AOL).
Quantum Space
relied on the network’s internal email service. “You would get your turn reports and then you’d email back a message that had what you wanted to do in a form,” said Daglow. “The system would turn it into a string of data that would go to us and get processed.”

Stormfront’s second online game,
Neverwinter Nights
, was much more ambitious. It took the format of game publisher SSI’s series of official
Dungeons & Dragons
computer games and created an online role-playing game that, unlike the various
MUD
s, used 2D graphics rather than text. Costing between $4 to $8 an hour to play, it became one of AOL’s most profitable games as players became absorbed in its visual reresentation of the
Dungeons & Dragons
world, spending hours socialising, fighting and adventuring. As with
MUD
and
Habitat
before it,
Neverwinter Nights
once again showed how the bringing together of players often led to unexpected results, including player-organised comedy nights and poem readings as well as virtual and real marriages between players.

Daglow was not the only video game pioneer attracted to online gaming. In 1988 Dani Bunten Berry, the creator of the multiplayer strategy and trading game
M.U.L.E.
, had also begun to explore online as part of her career-long interest in multiplayer games. Bunten had always been interested in games that brought people together, an interest she put down to a childhood where playing board games with all of her family gathered around the table were some of her happiest memories. After dabbling in single-player games with
Seven Cities of Gold
and
Heart of Africa
she became an outspoken advocate for multiplayer games. At the 1990 Computer Game Developers Conference she summarised her philosophy in one snappy soundbite: “No-one on their deathbed ever said ‘I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer’.”

Her first venture into the online space was
Modem Wars
, a robot-themed war game released in 1988. Inspired by playing soldiers with her brothers as a kid,
Modem Wars
set out to avoid the complexity, pensive and lengthy experience of most strategy games with its action-based interpretation of war gaming. It foreshadowed the real-time strategy games that became popular following the release of
Dune II
, but its focus on action alienated traditional war game fans and, since few people owned modems at the time, sales were poor.

Sierra Online’s founder Ken Williams also got the online bug and in late 1991 his company began exploring the frontiers of cyberspace with The Sierra Network. “The original mission statement for The Sierra Network came from me trying to think of something my grandma could do from home,” said Williams. “I came up with a product that would be card and board games for seniors. They would be able to pick up a game and chat, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This was pre-internet, but we made it happen and it became the basis for The Sierra Network.”

Sierra’s ambition initially got the better of it. Al Lowe, the creator of the company’s popular
Leisure Suit Larry
comedy adventure games, was commissioned to create
Leisure Suit Larry 4
as a multiplayer game.
[7]
“It was a tough road to follow because we didn’t know anything about online games,” said Lowe. “Ken hired a guy who had done low-level communications software and said I want you to write what was basically a server – we didn’t call it that, we didn’t knowse terms at the time.”

After several months of struggling to figure out how to make an online
Leisure Suit Larry
, Sierra scaled back its plans. It refocused on the simpler games, such as Chess, Checkers, Bridge and Backgammon, that Williams originally envisaged and started constructing the infrastructure for the system. “At the time there was no internet,” said Williams. “We had to deploy our own national network and servers.”

The Sierra Network managed to attract around 30,000 users who paid $2 an hour to access its mix of parlour games and online chat, but the expense of running such a network meant the venture lost Sierra millions. “We figured it would take 50,000 people to make it successful,” said Lowe. “Back then 50,000 was a huge number. Not that many people owned modems back then. We had to write the code so it would deal with a 1,200-baud modem and that was pretty state of the art – it was not cheap, it cost hundreds of dollars to get a modem like that.”

Sierra eventually sold off The Sierra Network to telecoms firm AT&T in 1994. By then, however, the days of online networks such as Quantum Link were about to end. Back in 1974 a group of computer researchers working on APRAnet, the computer communications system developed back in the 1960s using military funding, began talking about creating the internet – a unified global communications network that all computer users could use. The concept became an ambition for those working in computer communications, who began creating the systems and software that could make the internet a reality. Over the next decade and a half, APRAnet evolved into the embryonic internet as communications standards were adopted and email services were connected. In 1988 the internet was opened up to the business world, allowing the formation of the first internet service providers and the following year British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee developed the concept of the world wide web, a hypertext-based system that would make the internet easy to navigate and pave the way for websites and web browsers.

The final restrictions on internet use were ditched on the 6th August 1991 when it was opened to the public for the first time. One by one, online networks such as Prodigy, AOL and CompuServe connected their systems to the internet, vastly increasing its capacity and user base. By 1994 the internet was poised to go mainstream, ushering in a communications and computing revolution that would reshape society on a global level.

One of those excited by the possibilities of internet games was Starr Long, a project manager in Origin Systems’ headquarters in Austin, Texas. “One of the technical managers, Ken Demarest, and I started mucking about with multiplayer games and looking at everything that was going on in the market,” said Long.

The pair’s journey into the online realm spanned the whole multiplayer game world. They explored AOL’s collection of online games, went on quests in the realms of
MUD
s and slaughtered people they had never met in
Doom
death matches. They talked about how exciting it would be if you could play Origin’s flagship role-playing game series
Ultima
with your friends. “We were affectionally calling it
Multima
and I became extremely passionate about multiplayer. I had this feeling that multiplayer games was what games in general were really about from the beginning,” said Long. “If you look at the oldest games, such as dice, they really were social experiences and the games provided a framework for a social experience. The internet was just beginning, it really was this new frontier – it was like ‘wow, people don’t even physically have to be in the same space anymore, they could get social experiences through the internet’.”