All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (20 page)

Back in California, the honchos at Virgin Interactive were well aware of the heat around The 7th Guest. And they were ready to take advantage of it. Keith Greer, the company’s chief financial officer, led the charge to put a $99 sticker price on the game, which would
be a collector’s package that would include a video documentary, a small book, the soundtrack, and a bizarre box that looked as though red-eyed demons would crawl out of it, Pandora style, when it was opened. Both Devine and Landeros protested, thinking $99 was an outlandish price to pay. But they had no say in the matter. Virgin Interactive had what it felt was a genius plan, and Virgin Interactive was going to stick by it. They also were asking for a sequel, which Landeros was already working on. Just as Devine was finishing the technology for The 7th Guest, Landeros was involved in shooting the script for The 11th Hour. Without Devine’s input, filming commenced in the spring of 1993, partially at a sprawling National Guard armory in Medford, Orgeon. Even during preproduction, there was trouble. Matt Costello’s script was too long and was severely rewritten by director David Wheeler. The story, which took place sixty years after the horrific events of The 7th Guest, was steeped in sex and was much more violent. Heads exploded to reveal a gross mass of brain, eyes, and gore. Fingers were smashed. Throats were slit. Flailing, alien insects emerged from toothpaste tubes. When Devine walked onto the set, he fumed when he saw the filming of a woman in S&M gear, including a spiky leather collar. She was bare breasted as well. But Devine could do little beyond worry; filming had already commenced.

Ultimately, The 7th Guest was only about five months late, and when it was released, it became an overnight hit. The modest pressing of sixty thousand copies was gone from store shelves within days. The retailer Software, Etc. wasn’t content merely to sell the game; in a sign of sheer greed, the chain began bundling The 7th Guest with a CD-ROM drive. Virgin Interactive struggled to keep up with the demand for a game that was played by every member of the family. Along with Myst, industry analysts claimed that The 7th Guest was responsible for selling hundreds of thousands of PCs equipped with CD-ROM drives. By the time it stopped selling, more than
two million copies of The 7th Guest had been sold. For its breakthrough in technology, Trilobyte received eleven awards from multimedia organizations and magazines between 1993 and 1995. Devine and Landeros had become millionaires on paper. For a project that cost at most $750,000, the financial return for Virgin Interactive was in the stratosphere. For the time being, Trilobyte was hotter than Nintendo, which was seen by pundits to be losing its steam. Devine and Landeros were the new stars of an industry in which adventure games were the Next Big Deal. Overnight success, however, was the worst thing that could have happened to Trilobyte.

Venture capitalists began to swarm and pick at the company like turkey vultures on fresh carrion. An advisory board full of hotshots and moneymen was created. A bigger office, featuring tens of thousands of square feet and bulletproof glass, was leased and sixty employees were hired. Devine and Landeros were forced to spend a lot of time looking at financial projections and spreadsheets. Trilobyte was being groomed by Wall Street to be the next gold-mine initial public offering. Microsoft, Disney, and Fox representatives pulled up in fancy cars, thinking seriously about investing in the company or offering Devine and Landeros lucrative gigs. They proposed a Clive Barker horror game, a
Blade Runner
game, and an
X-Files
game. Trilobyte passed every time. Some analysts, who valued the company at more than $50 million, said Trilobyte was on its way to becoming a company more massive than Sega, with more reach than Nintendo. Two million sold? That was nothing, they said. The next game would do Super Mario Bros. numbers. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen became a believer, adding $5 million to Trilobyte coffers. How utterly wrong they all were.

The new video movie for The 11th Hour was the bugaboo. The director was drunk with adding camera angles he perceived to be crucial to the plot. There were long pans, close-ups, and outdoor shooting in the miserably rainy Oregon spring at a rushing dam. There
was running through the forest with a Steadicam. By the end, there were two and a half hours of video in the game. An overwhelming amount of compression work for Devine awaited. As he dug in, the pressure began to take its hold. A making-of video shows an exhausted, halfhearted Devine almost whispering his answers. In the same video, Landeros, who had gained weight from the stress, talks about how big the game will be. Yet both appear somehow sad. They don’t seem to believe their own words. At least no one fell through the blue screen this time.

The two were no longer in sync. Devine disliked the gore in The 11th Hour and became freaked out by the massive amount of work before him. The company was working on six projects at once, including a game that would take place in Antarctica and which dealt with an archaeological dig and dinosaurs. Landeros’s direction changed too; he wanted to do an interactive movie for the theaters.

Then Devine locked himself in his office. He was alone with his thoughts, too alone, trying to figure out how to compress the video, all the time knowing that technology was changing, month by month. He fretted that by the time The 11th Hour was released, it would seem old to consumers. Day after day, he kept the door to his office shut. By his own admission, he was hell to work with because to find better solutions, he would literally turn the game technology upside down every week. Charged up on caffeine, he sent e-mail missives at four a.m. He would go home, drop into bed, only to return a few hours later. The amount of change that he expected and demanded was very hard on the creative team. But he felt he constantly had to do something, to say something. He kept thinking, “Trilobyte can’t fuck up. I can’t fuck up. There’s too much at stake.”

By the end of the development cycle, Devine and Landeros were no longer speaking. For the making-of documentary, they were shot separately, not together as in The 7th Guest promotional video. Somewhere in Devine’s brain, in a deep place he could not
consciously get to, he knew he was screwing up, that Landeros was screwing up, that the whole project was doomed. By 1994, they had earned $5 million from The 7th Guest. But they were not happy or fulfilled. As The 11th Hour’s budget added up to $2 million and then some, Devine was enduring terribly painful migraine headaches.

When the game was released one year and eight months late, in 1995, it was beset by technological issues that made it difficult to install on computers; half of those who purchased the game had problems getting it to run. There were one million copies of The 11th Hour on the market, and this time, the buzz was not good. Landeros was off with director Wheeler making his sex-drenched $800,000 interactive movie called
Tender Loving Care
, a film in which the audience would answer multiple choice questions to move the story along. It was the wrong direction in which to take the already bloated company.

With The 11th Hour underperforming, Devine dreaded going to work. As he drove through the town’s pretty streets, he felt ugly and sick. He no longer wanted any part of Trilobyte. But they wouldn’t let him go. The board elected to fire Landeros and to let him keep the rights to
Tender Loving Care
. They decided to keep Devine, who was working on an online tank combat game called Assault, which could accommodate as many as twenty-four players at one time. Even though Paul Allen put more than a million dollars into the game (later renamed Extreme Warfare), it was, like the others, deadline plagued. It would never be released.

Devine lamented, “The friendship is over. I sided with the board. I didn’t side with my partner. I didn’t side with my friend. And now I feel lost.” He would be lost for many years after that. Eventually, Devine tried to sell the company to Midway, but Midway backed out at the last minute. There was nothing left to do but close the shop down. Admitted Devine, “I’m mentally exhausted, mentally ill, poor, have no money, and am literally living on money from
my parents and my wife’s parents.” For his part, Landeros felt that the real horror story was not in the game, but in real life. The company became a monster, the two friends mere puppets in the quest for financial reward. Everyone was pushing them to build a gleaming publishing empire so they could take Trilobyte public. Worse, Landeros had seen the writing on the wall: Interactive storytelling was becoming a thing of the past.

While it wouldn’t happen immediately, he was right. Games themselves were changing. While adventure games hadn’t yet peaked, gamers would soon turn away from them in favor of first-person shooters full of Nazis and monsters and bloody action. Yet Devine and Landeros (along with the Miller brothers) were responsible for making games begin to look as good as the movies. They had set the bar high. And they had made their mark, just as Myst did; games now had to look so real, you could almost smell the reeking, rotting corpse in Stauf’s mansion. Without The 7th Guest, games like BioShock and Heavy Rain, both of which rely on lifelike graphics and expertly written tales of horror, would likely not have been so frightening. Because of The 7th Guest and Myst, the future would be all about graphics that looked hyperreal, so much so that the moving pictures and artwork would tell the story better than words. The efforts of these men—and the power of the CD-ROM—also helped make the PC into a viable gaming platform in the 1990s. So now games were in the arcades and bars and bowling alleys, in the consoles in the living room and bedroom,
and
in the PCs in the den. And with the ubiquity of laptops, you could take your game on the road with you and see it in more glorious detail than with a Game Boy. Weirdly, the platforms did not cannibalize one another. They all thrived. Games were available on just about every cool tech device a nerd—and the quickly growing companies—could imagine.

But beyond its essential role in the horror genre and beyond turning families into PC gamers, the tragic, friend-ending story
of Trilobyte became a cautionary tale for all videogame changers. Once close friends whom some called the Lennon and McCartney of videogames, Devine and Landeros would not speak to each other for well over a decade. Some developers wouldn’t pay attention to Trilobyte’s fate. Many, full of haughtiness and swagger that led them to cut corners and drop deadlines, would follow a path down into the musty greed cave, just like the devilish Mammon in Book II of Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene
. But a few would listen as they raised their fingers to test the winds. They could predict the trends and, through diligence and just a little bit of dumb luck, would become millionaires many times over.

There were cornfields, cattle, and blue sky as far as the eye could see, but all the two guys in a silver Honda Accord could think of was Sonic’s Ass.

Unlike movies, which often start with a detailed story treatment, games often begin only with genre, in this case a running and jumping game called a platformer. The design on the two road-trippers’ minds that day would be heavily influenced by Sega’s existing Sonic the Hedgehog character and by a sneak preview they had seen of a game that updated the classic Miyamoto gorilla—Donkey Kong Country. As the two young designers hatched their plan, it became clear that their platformer would appear to gamers to have a huge depth of field. But there was a big challenge. Since games didn’t yet have the capacity to be 3-D, the only way they could pull this off technologically was to have
the gamer control the character from behind and fake the gamer out to give the illusion of moving down paths, roads, and rivers.

“Sonic’s Ass!” cried Andy Gavin, referring to the from-behind-the-butt perspective the gamer would have. They were somewhere deep in the plains-filled farmlands of Iowa. The crack made his co-conspirator Jason Rubin, who was driving, laugh his butt off.

For their three-day cross-country drive to Los Angeles, Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin had packed up the car in Boston with as much stuff as it could carry—along with Rubin’s barking black Lab and ridgeback mix. Unlike most guys in their twenties, Gavin and Rubin had already made it, kind of. They had some industry clout from their handful of game deals, thanks primarily to their relationship with Trip Hawkins at Electronic Arts, who published their games and acted somewhat like a mentor to them. But they had also been living in an apartment with little heat to save money. They were frantically waiting for payment for the Way of the Warrior game they had made for Hawkins’s 3DO machine. They were told the check was in the mail.