All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (28 page)

A handful of underground artists have indeed used games to espouse their popular art on a higher plane. Artist Mary Flanagan reprogrammed the software from Unreal Tournament 2003 to make Domestic, a memoirlike tale of her father being trapped in the family’s house during a fire. Anne-Marie Schleiner and her band of rebel artists invaded the violent Counter-Strike online shooter with
a Velvet-Strike application, adding peace symbols and the phrase “Make Love, Not War” to the virtual walls in the game (she often was shot and killed before completing a graffito). And in early 2010, New York’s Museum of Modern Art featured
Long March: Restart
, an effulgent eighty-by-twenty-foot video installation by Chinese artist Feng Mengbo, which mixed a frenetic Mario-style side scroller with the history of China’s Red Army.

But could art in games go beyond such personal ventures? Could a game that sold millions of copies be art as well? To that end, in 2007, art, technology, and literature came together to forge a horror story that became one of the decade’s bigger selling videogames. The charge was led by Ken Levine, a former writer of screen and stage plays who, in addition to games, had a passion for literature. Levine used the novels of Ayn Rand as inspiration for writing and rewriting the game’s script, which was more than sixty thousand words in length.

I first saw BioShock at an evening event on April 20, 2007, in a crowded party room on Manhattan’s West Side. Paranoid to a fault, I didn’t want to wear the scummy headphones that every other writer was using to hear the sounds of the game, but even without audio, my first ten minutes with the game startled me with its dark underwater beauty, and terrified me with its gripping horror plot. When the event was over, I trudged home, wishing I could have played all night long. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept dreaming about the disturbing characters, the watery environment with its art deco building, and the brand-new videogame history to which I was privy.

When the game finally arrived in the mail, it was a gorgeous, psychologically enthralling experience from the moment the opening sequence played. Your plane crashes. You find yourself underwater, drowning, gasping. A purse drifts by, then a locket, floating upward in waters that are cold and black. Like the character on-screen, you feel you can’t breathe. When you swim toward the surface, you see
brilliant orange. It isn’t the joy of daylight, but the burning wreckage of the airplane. The ocean is full of oily water, somehow angry that fire has disturbed this blackest of nights. Further on is a tower and slippery, fog-smoked black steps illuminated by six lanterns. Under a grim-faced brass statue, a sign reads
NO GODS OR KINGS. ONLY MAN
. As you walk down a corkscrew of seemingly endless steps, a plaintive, instrumental version—a saxophone’s riff—of “Beyond the Sea” begins to play, for just forty-five seconds. “Haunting” is the wrong word; fear strikes you like love at first sight. It is as chemical as seeing the girl of your dreams; you know you can’t get enough. If you took an MRI of your brain’s mush at that exact moment, it might well show that the caudate section, which is responsible for cravings, had lit up. So would have the ventral tegmental, which makes dopamine, just as it might with a cocaine-like high. And that was just the beginning of BioShock and its city of Rapture. “Rapture” was so the correct word for this grisly and dazzling underwater city made by a wealthy madman drunk on his twisted dystopian ideas. He disdained the world above for its seedy politics, failed economics, and oppressive religious views. But Rapture had fallen into chaos. It was full of raccoon-eyed girls and robot monsters who had corkscrew weapons. Jack, the protagonist, injected himself constantly with a mutagen called ADAM, much like a heroin addict injects himself with junk. Beyond these grotesque creations, there were moments of Stephen King–like terror induced from the everyday, common tasks you encounter daily.

Yet this was not the game that videogame designer Ken Levine set out to make, not originally.

Ken Levine was born in the New York City borough of Queens, to an accountant father and a housewife mother with a penchant for attending Broadway plays. In addition to seeing plays as a child, Levine showed an early interest in games, often traveling to the Adventure Land arcade and restaurant in Flushing during trips to
visit his grandmother. He was particularly attracted to electronic games, especially Maneater, which had full-motion video and in which you faced off against the Spielberg-inspired horror that was the Great White Shark. In Maneater, Atari made the fiberglass cabinet to look as if the behemoth was coming out of the floor itself—to get you. After that, if it had electricity in it and it was a game, Levine was drawn to it. Levine’s brother had also influenced his appreciation of board games by showing him Avalon Hill’s Panzer Blitz at age six. The game involved military tactics and strategy, and Levine loved it because you had to use your brain to play.

But Levine’s appreciation became a full-blown revelation when he traveled to Connecticut to visit his sister at college. There, he found the text-based Star Trek game on a mainframe computer. He pored over the ten-by-ten-inch grid on a printout, trying to strategize, his mind all the while traveling like Captain Kirk to the Final Frontier. There, he fought Klingons as he took command of the starship
Enterprise
. Yes, the ship was identified only with the letter “e,” the Klingons by the letter “k,” and the stars by asterisks. But to Levine, it was a magic combination of monsters and mobility through different star sectors, an endless space opera. After the Star Trek game, life wouldn’t be quite the same. Later, when Levine became entranced by Miyamoto’s The Legend of Zelda, he played so much that he lost his first serious girlfriend to that fetching bride called game play.

At Vassar in Poughkeepsie, New York, Levine immersed himself in literature and plays. He worked—and was fired from—various menial jobs. After he was dumped from a busboy gig at the Vassar Alumni House, his friend Paul Bartlett suggested that he check out the summer theater scene at the college. The Powerhouse Theater was a magnet for up-and-coming writers and actors. There, Levine met John Patrick Shanley, who had won an Oscar for
Moonstruck
and would later pen
Doubt
, which won the Pulitzer Prize and became
the award-winning movie with Meryl Streep. He also met actors David Straithairn and Mary McDonnell. It was the perfect milieu for anyone who loved language, as Levine did, and he worked away on his own plays. Finally, his friend Bartlett convinced him to show his plays to Jon Robin Baitz (later the producer and writer for TV’s
Brothers & Sisters
), who was already selling his scripts to Hollywood. After reading Levine’s
Waiting for Father
, inspired by Arthur Miller and John Steinbeck, Baitz passed it on to Tracy Jacobs, an agent who got Levine meetings with Paramount. He was flying to Los Angeles for power meetings as a college student, and eventually got an assignment to rewrite a terrible romantic comedy called
Devil’s Advocate
. The movie, with singer Amy Grant attached as the star, was never made, although Levine purchased a Sega console and a VCR with the spoils of his work. After college, he moved to Los Angeles to write. But it did not work out well. Levine was still a student of literary writers like Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and John Steinbeck, along with the German expressionists who made film noir and horror films. Ken so loved the movies of Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and Alfred Hitchcock that making something less stymied him.

“Why don’t you just come up with something commercial and pitch it?” asked Baitz.

“If I knew what that was, I’d do it. But they want me to do comedies and I like different kinds of writers.”

Levine left Hollywood and returned to New York City, living in downtown Manhattan as he wrote plays and founded a small company that performed them on the street, off-off-Broadway, way off. It depressed Levine when he realized that he couldn’t make a living at the craft. During this time, he was still completely fascinated by games, often making hex maps and designing games on paper—just for himself. He didn’t know exactly what a game inventor was. But he saw an ad in the back of
NextGen
magazine, one of the better gaming publications of the time. The ad Levine answered was for
a “game inventor” at a small studio in Boston called Looking Glass Studios. Not only had it made some estimable games, like Ultima Underworld and System Shock, but the company name alluded to Lewis Carroll’s classic
Alice
book, making working there all the more appealing.

“So you want to work in games?” asked Paul Neurath, who founded the studio in 1990 after working on a science fiction role playing game at Origin Systems.

“Fuck, yeah!” enthused Levine at the interview.

“And you worked in Hollywood writing scripts?”

“Yeah. I rewrote a couple of things. Wrote some plays, too.”

Neurath went on to tell Levine that the company’s Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss was a role player that allowed the first 360-degree movement in a game. He exuded delight when he spoke of the potential within Looking Glass, which employed bright minds fresh out of MIT. Neurath suggested, “You should also check out [our game] System Shock. There’s nothing quite like it. As someone who writes, you might like the story.” It was from System Shock that BioShock would eventually be born.

Within three weeks, Levine had packed up and moved to Boston. He felt Looking Glass had hired him out of the naïve hope for convergence that was then sweeping both the film industry and the videogame industry. The idea of full-motion video that began with The 7th Guest continued with Phantasmagoria, the less admirable The Deadalus Encounter, and Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller, which starred Dennis Hopper and Grace Jones. There was talk, however brief, that interactive movies like the one that Trilobyte’s Rob Landeros had made would sweep the world. Short interactive features like
I’m Your Man
, starring an MTV VJ, actually had releases in some theaters. The audience would press buttons on the arms of their seats to move the film through various paths toward one of a couple of canned endings. But Hollywood and games didn’t really
get along in the nineties. Hollywood only appreciated linear stories. The game industry valued the bells and whistles of technology over narrative, whether it was a linear or even nonlinear story. Like arguing lovers, each industry complained the other didn’t understand it. Never the twain would meet.

Still, Levine was the right guy at a decent company at an OK time, and he used his opportunity to the fullest. For him, Looking Glass was like college for videogames. (At the time, there were very few videogame programs and classes in colleges that helped students to get a job in the real life world. While there were the beginnings of videogame education at schools like DigiPen in Vancouver, British Columbia, which offered a two-year degree in computer animation, such institutions were few and far between. Like the many journalists and writers who had toiled at newspapers circa the 1960s and prior, Levine learned the art, design, and business of videogames by doing.)

Yet it didn’t go swimmingly. Levine’s first assignment, a game based on the
Star Trek: Voyager
TV series, came to a startling halt when the product was canceled. Then Doug Church, an MIT student who was overseeing the implementation of a design document called Thief, brought Levine in to brainstorm on the story. For months, Levine prepared a film noir–like backstory for Thief: The Dark Project, the people of which were going to bear resemblances to Raymond Chandler characters—even though the steampunk-inspired game, which focused on stealth rather than shooting, would take place in the medieval era. He worked tirelessly on a mystery that would make the player feel he or she had to solve the puzzle surrounding a ghastly gravel-voiced satyr with a third eye called The Trickster. Thief is still considered to be something of a classic by many critics. More, it’s significant because Levine began to feel more comfortable with his story and writing chops as far as games were concerned. Yet after a year and a half at Looking Glass,
Levine took what he knew and left with two friends to form his own company.

It was an inelegant start-up, one that was run out of the living room of Ken’s one-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, with his partners Jonathan Chey and Robert Fermier. Yet within weeks of its 1997 incarnation, they had a gig to work on a single-player version of an early multiplayer online game called Fire Team. Levine and his cohorts felt they were crazy to start a company, and that was why they called their venture Irrational Games. The trio, especially Levine, believed that everything they didn’t like about the world, they would fix through games. In the back of Levine’s mind, however, was a nagging thought. With this new control came the distinct possibility that the company could go belly-up at any time. In fact, three weeks later, Fire Team crashed and burned, and the high-flying trio was out of work. They had no money. They had little savings. And they were not the best at raising money. Worse, they had no self-created ideas for games.

Even though they were out of cash, they were not out of luck. The three had left Looking Glass on collegial terms. So Neurath gave Irrational a small office and a check for $70,000 to start work on System Shock 2. While Looking Glass’s games generally were seen as pushing the envelope in terms of new technology and storytelling, few became the kind of hits that could lead the company to prosperity. Thief had sold more than 500,000 copies, making it the company’s bestseller. Neurath hoped that System Shock 2 would be the polished gem that would make Looking Glass a major player in the world of independent videogame developers, a game that would pass the million mark in terms of sales. Meanwhile, Levine and his camp were thrilled. “Seventy thousand dollars,” enthused Levine. “How are we going to spend all this?” In fact, the game would cost $650,000 to complete. Levine hired seven people and used some of Looking Glass’s talent as well.

The original System Shock’s story surrounded a computer hacker in the fictional New Atlanta who illegally viewed files for a space station and was caught red-handed by a multinational company. The vice president of the company, who was somewhat devilish, snidely offered up a deal. He would let the hacker off the hook—if he hacked into SHODAN, an alluring but stuttering female AI. Reviews for that first game were stellar. Sales were disappointing.