Replay: The History of Video Games (60 page)
Read Replay: The History of Video Games Online
Authors: Tristan Donovan
Like
Doom
before it,
Grand Theft Auto III
reshaped the video game landscape. It proved that believable and open 3D game worlds could be created and sold millions. But while
Doom
’s success inspired a spate of copycats,
Grand Theft Auto III
faced relatively little competition largely because the challenge of creating a virtual world or city of comparable scope or vision was so difficult and expensive. Only Bethesda offered anything comparable in size and scope to DMA Design’s epic with 2002’s
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
and, later, 2006’s
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
.
But
Grand Theft Auto III
did encourage more games to try and maximise the freedom of choice available to players. From the open city of 2008 racing game
Burnout Paradise
to the uncharted solar systems of the 2007 space opera
Mass Effect
, many of which players could explore but most of which had no connection to the game’s primary story. Having proved the concept with
Grand Theft Auto III
, Rockstar North – as DMA Design was renamed in 2002 – set about applying a stronger sense of time and place to their creation in the 2002 follow up
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
. Inspired largely by the 1980s TV crime series
Miami Vice
, the city of
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
transported players into a decade of pastel-coloured suits with rolled-up sleeves, hairspray, yuppie aspiration and cocaine, all accompanied with a soundtrack of ’80s pop and rock hits. Sam Houser, the game’s executive producer, described the 1980s as “the grooviest era of crime because it didn’t even feel like crime”. “You had Cuban hit men coming across and gunning people down in the street, but it was still celebrated in a sort of haze of cocaine and excess and Ferraris and Testarossas, and it was a totally topsy-turvy, back-to-front period of time,” he said.
The game also fizzed with an acidic wit. Its lampooning took few prisoners. It took pop shots at video gaming’s past with radio ads for the Degenatron console, where every game involved a red square battling green dots. It took aim at US gun culture with Ammu-Nation, a survivalist-staffed chain store that sold everything from handguns to rocket launchers, and satirised the poodle-haired rockers of the ’80s with Love Fist, a fictional group of bare-chested, big-haired and vacuous Scottish rockers.
While the 1980s retro chic gave
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
a sense of time and place, the story remained straightforward tale of a thuggish criminal on the make. But with 2004’s
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
, Rockstar North began to move beyond the nihilistic characters that had dominated the series up to then. Inspired by Los Angeles’ gang culture of the early 1990s and set across the vast state of San Andreas,
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
cast the player as CJ, an African-American anti-hero who is dragged back into the gang culture he had been trying to escape after being framed for murder by two corrupt cops. With its more involved story and willingness to touch on the racial tension that existed in California in the early 1990s, G
rand Theft Auto: San Andreas
moved the series beyond the moral void of its earlier incarnations and embraced the growing trend among game developers to inject meaning and depth into the stories of the games they made during the 2000s.
The end of the 1990s had witnessed a significant shift in the way stories were conveyed in games. Ever since Will Crowther first created
Adventure
back in 1975, storytelling in video games had been dominated by two genres: the adventure game and, to a lesser extent, role-playing games.
As the year 2000 approached, narrative-driven games appeared to be entering a kind of golden age thanks to titles such as Jordan Mechner’s 1997 murder mystery
The Last Express
, which combined distinctive Art Nouveau visuals with a cinematic storytelling,
Planescape: Torment
, a convention-defying role-playing game that cast players as an amnesic immortal on a philosophical pilgrimage to discover what kind of person they were, and the Norwegian adventure game
The Longest Journey
, where the female protagonist’s quest was as much as a voyage of self-discovery as about saving the world.
Tim Schafer’s comedy film noir
Grim Fandango
typified the maturation of video game storytelling. It told the story of Manny Calavera, a dead man stuck in a dead-end job as a travel agent in the Land of the Dead.
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The adventure saw Calavera battle corruption to secure a high-speed train ticket to the afterlif
e for the newly deceased Mercedes Colomar within a world inspired by Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations and Art Deco design. Witty, inventive and chic,
Grim Fandango
in many ways marked the apex of adventure games. It won dozens of awards and gushing praise from critics the world over. But for its publisher LucasArts and others, it simply reinforced the belief that the adventure game, the crucible of video game storytelling, was past its sell-by date.
Despite being showered with accolades,
Grim Fandango
sold nowhere near enough to cover the cost of making it. And if a game as praised, inventive and memorable as
Grim Fandango
could not justify itself commercially, what hope was there for other, less distinguished adventure games, publishers asked themselves. As word of its commercial disappointment spread, video game companies began turning their backs on the genre.
Most surprising of all was Sierra Online’s decision to ditch the genre it was founded on. “The people who had bought Sierra from Ken and Roberta Williams in 1996 didn’t like adventure games and looked for information that built their case,” said game designer Al Lowe, who had started work on
Leisure Suit Larry 8
for Sierra just before
Grim Fandango
’s release. “
Grim Fandango
didn’t sell well and it was an adventure game. It got good reviews because it was a good game, but it was a game about death with really odd graphics. It was kind of off-putting. And then there was
Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh
– that was odd. There was a lot of bondage and it was a horror film, so that didn’t sell very well, so they used that as an excuse too.”
Leisure Suit Larry 8
was cancelled and Lowe’s involvement with Sierra came to an abrupt end.
Similar things were happening across the Atlantic where French game designer Philippe Ulrich was finding the tide had turned decisively against the adventure games that he had been making. “Publishing houses abandoned the genre,” said Ulrich, who co-founded adventure game specialists Cryo Interactive after quitting Infogrames in the early 1990s. “It was too expensive, too complex, you needed authors, interactive brainstorming sessions, super-duper artificial intelligence. You really had to get into bed with movie industry people. I was fired from Cryo exactlor that: ‘Phil, sorry, but you’re too old and you come up with complex and expensive games. We want to emulate Kodak and offer disposable games’. So I decided to turn to music production and succeeded in selling two million albums within a few months. But I consider the whole thing as my big failure: I did not succeed in showing the world that adventure games were a major genre.”
Within three years of
Grim Fandango
’s release, adventure games had faded into obscurity, kept alive only by a small-but-loyal following in mainland Europe, particularly Germany.
Almost as surprising as the sudden death of adventure games was the emergence of first-person shooters as a new vehicle for video game storytelling around the same time. While first-person shooters had become hugely popular in North America and Europe after
Doom
, the genre was known for its focus on straightforward action. Most first-person shooters subscribed to Id co-founder John Carmack’s view that video game stories were as unnecessary as plots in pornographic movies and concentrated on an adrenaline-pumping gun fights instead. The few first-person shooters that tried to add more substance to their back story, such as Epic Games’ 1998 title
Unreal
, offered little that could be considered comparable to depth to the narratives of adventure games.
For Epic, the story was simply there to help distinguish
Unreal
from the kill ’em all action of Id’s
Quake II
. “We wanted to make the anti-
Quake
,” said Cliff Bleszinski, who co-designed
Unreal
with
James Schmalz. “We were always for years in the shadow of Id Software. We looked at
Quake
and what it was doing and, as much as we were fans of it, we wanted to do a counter-programme. They were doing dark, brown dungeons and we wanted to make beautiful, colourful sky cities and things like that.”
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But just 20 days after
Grim Fandango
’s launch, Valve - a Washington state game studio - took the genre in a new direction with the release of
Half-Life
.
Half-Life
opened with 20 minutes of nothing much. Cast as scientist George Freeman, the player spent the opening minutes of Valve’s first-person shooter waiting for a monorail to transport them to the research lab they worked in. Once there they had to put on their hazmat gear and pass through a number of security checkpoints on his way to the lab where Freeman worked. Such a sedate and uneventful introduction to an action game was unheard of. Most games sought to throw players headfirst into the action with minimal amounts of build-up or scene setting, preferring a ‘here’s a gun, let’s go’ approach. But
Half-Life
’s 20 minutes of near inaction allowed it to convey the background to its world, plot and lead character without the need to resort to text. And even once Freeman’s experiment goes wrong opening a portal through which deadly creatures flood onto Earth, the game continued to develop the story through visual cues rather than reams of text or dialogue.
One of the most effective was when the military arrived at the lab. Initially the player assumes they are a rescue team but when they begin executing survivors the understanding that they are there to eliminate the witnesses is conveyed instantly as part of the action. While
Half-Life
’s story lacked the depth of the stories offered in games such as
Grim Fandango
and
Planescape: Torment
, its ‘show don’t tell’ approach to narrative made the case for a new way of thinking about how to explain and present stories within a video game.
Half-Life
’s within-the-game storytelling heralded a beginning of an augmentation process that would turn first-person shooters from straightforward trigger-happy adrenaline pumping games into experiences that combined action, interactive fiction, role-playing and cinematic presentation. By the time
Half-Life
was released the next great leap forward for this ambitious fusion of genres was already in development at Ion Storm, the Dallas game studio formed by John Romero after his departure from Id in 1997.
When Romero founded Ion Storm he was one of world’s premiere game designers. He had a track record for creating multi-million-selling games that sent players wild with excitement and a rock star image, complete with long waist-length black hair, to match. With such a reputation Romero quickly landed a huge publishing deal for Ion Storm. UK game publisher Eidos Interactive, empowered by the success of
Tomb Raider
, agreed a three-to-six game deal with Romero’s new outfit that was worth at least $13 million. “It wasn’t quite a blank cheque but it had a lot of zeroes on it,” said Jeremy Heath-Smith, an executive on the Eidos board at the time.
With the money pouring in, Romero turned Ion Storm into his dream game studio. The company leased the glass-roofed penthouse offices of the 54-storey JPMorgan Chase Tower in Dallas and hired an expensive interior design agency to redecorate it to their tastes.
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Romero also hired Warren Spector, a game producer who had worked on landmark titles such as
Wing Commander
and
Ultima Underworlds: The Stygian Abyss
, to head a second branch of the company in Austin, luring him to Ion Storm with the promise that he could make the game of his dreams.
Spector’s dream game was
Deus Ex
, a fusion of first-person shooter and role-playing game that built on the ideas he had explored in 1994’s
System Shock
.
Deus Ex
was a PC game about terrorism that explored conspiracy theories, government bureaucracy, the nature of capitalism, a
ccess to medical treatments and genetic engineering.
Deus Ex
cast players as a United Nations counter-terrorist agent fighting the widespread terrorism of the era.
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