All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (15 page)

In the days and months that followed, all the bullshit drama and posturing was over and the contracts were signed. Tetris became
the
game to play for the Game Boy; it sold 33 million copies, and the game-playing device eventually sold nearly 120 million, and much of that had to do with Tetris. Both game heads and the mildly curious became aficionados. Even creaky President George Bush, diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat, played Tetris in his hospital room in early May 1991. A friendship between Pajitnov and Rogers remained vibrant throughout the years because they believed in Tetris with all their souls. After Rogers became richer than he had ever been, through licensing the game of falling blocks, he set Pajitnov up with money to develop more games in Russia. As Pajitnov headed to work each day via the cavernous Moscow subway, he seemed to stand taller than his sizable frame. He hired some of his friends and created an aquarium simulation that mimicked real-life DNA and made gods of those who clicked and tapped on their PC keyboards. Pajitnov wasn’t rolling in dough, but he was well off. Occasionally,
he would pinch himself, happy doing what he wanted to do. Forget the money. Pajitnov was simply satisfied that the game had affected so many millions of people in a positive way.

For the first time since Pong and Pac-Man, just as many women played the game as did men, perhaps because the game was more about organization than destruction. You’d see Tetris on TV, too, on everything from
Muppet Babies
to
The Simpsons
. There was even a Monty Python version called Drop Dead in which bodies blackened by the plague were substituted for the falling blocks. Later, Pajitnov himself was probably the inspiration for a character in Thomas Pynchon’s 2006 novel,
Against the Day
. In that fiction, Captain Igor Padzhitnoff arranges bricks in a certain pattern before dropping them on his targets.

Pajitnov watched with fascination as scientists tested people who played Tetris. Research showed that it changed the brain for the better, that play made your real life choices quicker and more efficient. All along, Pajitnov believed that playing Tetris was like singing a song inside, kind of a visual earworm. Yet the finding that Tetris helped the brain was proof to Pajitnov that it was more than just a game. It didn’t hype you up with adrenaline and make your heart beat hard. It didn’t require you to hold your breath, grit your teeth, and aim and shoot like a marksman just to win. It calmed you, just as it stimulated your brain cells to match the shapes and clear the rows. Tetris proved that nonviolent games could sell as well as the early shooters, like Space Invaders. Playing Tetris was the most peaceful experience of the bestselling games, even more so than Pac-Man. Tetris presaged the casual game revolution by almost two decades. But back then, it demonstrated early in the industry’s evolution that women would flock to gaming, stay with a game for long periods of time, and even get the same frozen fingers and knackered knuckles from indulging for far too long.

Even more than Miyamoto needed Yamauchi, Pajitnov needed
Rogers. Because of Nintendo’s stringent privacy policies, no one could hornswaggle the company for long. But Pajitnov was ensconced in a Soviet Union where everyone outside of the country seemed like an angry wolf trying to rip him off—except for Rogers. As a close pal who was both a calculating businessman and a fellow game designer, Rogers empathized with Pajitnov’s situation and stopped the stealing completely. Later, when the time was right, Rogers sold his cell phone game business for tens of millions and used that money as a partial payment to purchase all the rights from the Russians, partly in an effort to bring Tetris online for multiplayer contests. Pajitnov, who by then had emigrated to the United States, was brought on as a partner. He had finally become rich from Tetris.

Wealth didn’t matter so much to Pajitnov. He had traveled the world because of his creation, and his fans were legion. Now there are fifty variants of the game, including one for the Apple iPad. It has been downloaded digitally more than one hundred million times. People flock to new versions of Tetris—
to this day
. Its soothing, addicting game mechanics always lure new fans, and every online game site of note has a version to play. And the money continues to roll in for Pajitnov. Now, when he goes to his window in Bellevue, Washington, and looks out upon a rainy day, his mind relaxes and he still sees those mesmerizing falling blocks in front of his eyes. They are part of his essence. At that moment when the blocks fall, there is nothing else present. He is not in Russia anymore. He is not in the United States. He is transported somewhere else. He is Tetris. And he is free.

William “Trip” Hawkins III hatched a plan for world domination through games very early in his life. From the age of ten onward, the son of a San Diego marketing executive wanted to overcome people with emotion so big, so overwhelming, so heart-stirring, that when they played a computer game they would cry. Just like the movies he loved, such as
Apocalypse Now;
just like the music he rocked out to, like the Rolling Stones and the Stooges. But it was more than that. Hawkins, nicknamed Trippy by his grandmother because he was the third William in the family, wanted to make games into a new kind of life experience. Even before he graduated from high school, the plan ballooned beyond a childish yearning. By the time he got to Harvard, it was a full-blown obsession. Hawkins wanted games to move, the way Steven Spielberg said movies should. He had the stuff to do
it too, all the good looks and charm of a Golden Age movie star. And he possessed from his father the savvy saleman’s instincts and work ethic of a young Willy Loman. From his mother, an Emmy award–winning producer who founded the San Diego chapter of the National Organization for Women, he got his assertive nature. Trip Hawkins had it all.

But it almost didn’t happen. The idea for Electronic Arts, a company that would become the biggest and most influential of the computer game makers, was almost quashed. It was nearly killed at supposedly liberal-minded Harvard University in the 1970s.

On an autumn day in October 1973, when Trip Hawkins was walking past Wigglesworth Hall, he had his latest eureka moment about computer games. Hawkins realized he wanted to invent his own major. He wanted to major in strategy and applied videogame theory. He was so jolted by his concept that he began walking more quickly to an appointment with his faculty advisor. Despite his wit, his charm, and a prepared spiel he’d fashioned for the academic administrator, the professor said no. Not just no. As he showed Hawkins the door, he said, “You are wasting your time at Harvard by monkeying around with games.” So Hawkins walked past University Hall in a fit of anger. He did not, as many have done, touch the shoe of the polished bronze statue of John Harvard for good luck—for the grudging gods of luck had evaded him. He felt that Harvard didn’t want him. And if Harvard didn’t want him, he was going to drop out. He would go somewhere that more fully comprehended his plan for the big picture, somewhere that would value him as the visionary he was so certain he was. But another, more beneficent Harvard counselor saw the passion in Hawkins’s face and heard the sense Hawkins made when talking about his proposal. By the end of that meeting, Hawkins had his major, and he aced nearly every sociology and communications course and every independent study as well. For his thesis, he wrote a World War III computer simulation that
was very interactive and, perhaps, equally annoying. Part of its development had Hawkins going into students’ rooms to stir them at three a.m. to gauge how they would deal with futuristic war scenarios. In addition, he programmed his first computer game simulation on a PDP-11 computer at Harvard. It predicted that Miami would beat Minnesota 23–6 in the Super Bowl. The real score was 24–7.

Once he was out of college, however, Hawkins saw there were no takers for his particular form of passionate expertise. He felt ignored and unappreciated. But to those who would lend an ear, Hawkins would begin an oration: “There will be a revolution in computer games that will make games bigger than the movie industry. It’s coming soon. You better get on board, or you’ll be left behind.” Even those who deigned to listen looked at Hawkins suspiciously. They often responded, “Man, what the hell are you smoking?” So Hawkins returned to California and went to Stanford for an MBA. When he finished, he still couldn’t find the right job in the nascent world of games. So he took at job at Apple Computer. As employee number sixty-eight and the company’s inaugural MBA, Hawkins was the first person at Apple to tackle the job of marketing.

Within a year, Hawkins had worked his way up to an executive position at Apple. He was in the right place at the right time. Apple was the “it” company. Like Apple today, with the iPod and iPhone, the company could do little wrong. The media hyped the Apple II personal computers, and business (“an elixir for U.S. industry,” glowed the
New York Times
) and families loved the quality the technicians put into each piece of equipment. The computers, although fairly expensive, almost sold themselves, so much so that in his four years at Apple, Hawkins became a rich man with a niche he carefully carved for himself and his team: selling the computers to medium and large businesses. By 1981, the self-described computer nerd had developed the smoothest of swaggers and an indestructible
yet affable egotism that would lead him to say with a wink that he was “smarter than Bill Gates and better looking than Steve Jobs.”

When he wasn’t selling computers, he was thinking about computer games. Late into the night, when his marketing work at Apple was done, he would loosen his tie and sit down at his Apple II to map out a business plan for a new company without a name. He already had his big idea: games about sports, ones that made you feel you were inside the game, whether you were coaching or playing. Games so intense that you could smell the sweat, the confidence, and the fear. To a select few, like his understanding pal Bing Gordon, he would posit, “You know those Strat-O-Matic baseball and football games from the sixties, the ones you would play with a pencil and paper? I want to make those for the personal computer. I want them to have good graphics and I want them to be endorsed by sports celebrities. Not just celebrities—superstars. I want the superstars to be in the game. The biggest. The biggest of the big.” Each night, he continued to refine the idea, calculating a five-year plan with precise budgets and room for game designer creativity that had never before been seen in games.

In creating his own company, Hawkins was inspired by the popular nonfiction of the time, like Geoffrey Stokes’s
Starmaking Machinery
, about the rise and fall of the star-crossed Southern rock band Commander Cody. He also devoured Steven Bach’s
Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of
Heaven’s Gate,
the Film That Sank United Artists
, about the disastrous making of director Michael Cimino’s beautifully filmed western, during which the film’s budget ballooned to $44 million, at that time the most expensive film in history. Hawkins vowed to avoid the mistakes of the music and movie industries. He told potential investors, “Not only will my company become the next big media company, videogames can be artistic and the people who make them should be treated like artists.” Finally,
the Masters of the Universe involved in those long-established media companies began to believe him. Cranky, straight-shooting venture capitalist Don Valentine gave the game maker $2 million through Capital Management, the company well known for its funding of technology start-ups like Bushnell’s Atari. Hawkins had already reached into his bank account to pour $200,000 of his own savings into a company he called Amazin’ Software. The company name was like a mirror image of Hawkins himself, down-to-earth with a g-dropped gerund and full of blustering hubris. Yet Hawkins’s current reality was humble. He and the early hires were ensconced within a minuscule office given to him rent-free within the Capital Management complex.

Within six months, he had hired eleven people, including hire number seven, the brawny Bing Gordon, a failed actor who once waited tables at the New York City punk hangout Max’s Kansas City. Gordon had tried many endeavors before games, including working on a shrimp boat and, according to Hawkins, acting in a porn film. He got into games after immersing himself in a business project about the Channel F game console while studying for an MBA at Stanford, and found that he thrived making computer entertainment. But he often disagreed with Hawkins’s business decisions. Within six months, the company moved to larger digs. Office meetings, however, were invariably loud, and not merely because the employees were psyched about their endeavors. Just outside the window, roaring planes took off from a runway at the San Francisco International Airport. Yet it wouldn’t have mattered if the office had faced a garbage dump. Hawkins had the touch.