All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (30 page)

“Everyone tests games. That doesn’t mean you’ve got a winner,” said a doubtful buyer for one of the country’s biggest retail chain stores.

“This is one of the most tested games in history,” said Bass, leaning forward and then standing up. “There are tests almost every day. There are game play tests. There are tests for the cover. There were ten possible covers. There are tests for the likeability of the characters. There are tests for the understandability of the story.
There are even tests for the demo that will go up on Xbox Live. Want more? There are focus groups, two to three every night.”

“Yeah. So what? Everybody has focus groups.” It was true. In the years since videogames were invented, in the decades since scientists like William Higinbotham used oscilloscopes as monitors for game play, testing code incessantly on potential consumers had become a way to allay fears that tens of millions of dollars might be flushed down the toilet. Gears of War, the popular sci-fi shooter franchise from Epic Games and Microsoft, not only had focus groups; it had psychologists who attended game play sessions to analyze how players felt when they played the shooter. Microsoft now analyzes almost every game it publishes this way, including Halo.

The reams of data collected for BioShock didn’t simply lie fallow. The marketers parsed it, then used it to refine and hone their plans for the August 21, 2007, release. It was the kind of particular information that Ralph Baer could have used when he admitted that he needed a “marketeer” to help promote himself and the Odyssey in the 1970s, and the kind that might have given Trip Hawkins pause before foisting an overpriced 3DO upon North America in the early 1990s. Irrational wasn’t thrilled by all of the marketing suggestions. But they were heartened by Sarah Anderson’s attitude. The marketing vice president seemed to get it when she told Levine, “We know we’re dealing with a core gamer, and that’s a different audience, a typically cynical audience who doesn’t like marketing for the sake of marketing. But they’re receptive to marketing that’s smart, which engages them and allows them to interact.”

The marketing budget for BioShock was between 10 and 15 percent of revenue projections. It was a healthy amount of cash, but not as large as the huge stash for other marquee games, like Grand Theft Auto and Halo. In the months before the game’s release, 2K began spending its money wisely, creating a BioShock website and community that allowed hard-core gamers before its release to connect to the
ideas behind the most minute details of the game. And when they wrote about it on message boards, it was like the gamers were salivating over the rarest of truffles. The community wasn’t as hard-core as the people who frequented community sites for World of Warcraft or even EverQuest. But it would be a tough audience to please. If the game disappointed, there would be instant furor online. Sales would tank immediately.

Meanwhile, despite the travails of the manic deadline period, the designers had the rare luxury of time to approach perfection. The difference between a middling game and a truly transformative experience is often extra months to polish the rough edges. Mistakes were made, but there was time allotted to fix them. It was the first time that Irrational had had the opportunity to make a game really shine.

Throughout February 2007, Levine called meetings in Boston to concentrate on some of the focus group issues. After watching evening focus groups from behind a mirror, Irrational employees would return to the office to start to work on the suggestions that were being made. But one morning meeting just six months before the game’s debut was different. There were giant changes afoot regarding the beginning of the game. BioShock originally started at the shadowy lighthouse, not with a plane crash dropping the player into the blackened depths of a sea eerily illuminated by fire. But the people in focus groups didn’t quite understand what was going on at the lighthouse or who the main character was supposed to be. Levine sat at the head of a conference table and talked about that character, Jack. “There are silly but important things like his job in the real world. Where did he come from? What can we do to address that? Why don’t we show him on the plane, give a tiny bit of exposition, have him sitting on the plane, smoking a cigarette, and we’ll learn just a bit about his family. It will be just a moment, but there’s a lot
of exposition because there’s a lot more to it that you learn about later on. What artist do we have who can build an airplane?”

One artist raised his hand. A lone individual, though talented, wasn’t enough, however. It was clear they would have to outsource. But the first company to which they sent the project came back with work that was merely passable. It was money down the drain. Everyone at the studio was crestfallen and, worse, nervous. The deadline was looming, and Irrational didn’t have a huge amount of resources remaining in the coffers. Yet both the marketing people at 2K and the creative department at Irrational agreed that the opening had to include their best work—even though the staff still had to finish their other tasks, like testing for bugs. Levine and his producers changed the schedule to accommodate the extra work. “How much does it cost?” asked Levine rhetorically. “Well, it ain’t free. And the faster you want to do something, the more expensive it is.”

All told, the opening sequence alone took the equivalent of two years in man hours to complete. In addition to the Boston studio, designers at 2K Australia in Canberra and at 2K Shanghai in China built the old propeller-driven, fifties-era airplane. Stephen Alexander and his team created the aircraft’s interior and some human animation, which showed no face, just two thin-looking hands and a cigarette, its smoke traveling in crooked tentacles through the cabin. (If you looked closely, you could see that an Irrational Games business card had been placed in Jack’s wallet.) Then, there’s the sobering line: “They told me, ‘Son, you were born to do great things.’ You know what? They were right.” With screams in the background, the plane crashes and the dreadfulness of being trapped underwater begins.

Through all this, Levine kept writing and rewriting. Levine knew that the videogame industry was still too young to understand completely how writing works. In his office, he would say, “If you work on a play or a movie, they say to write and rewrite, right? In
games, you’re lucky if you can get the first draft done right. They expect you to write a draft and throw it over the fence and the dev team makes a game out of your story. Or they take your story and adapt it to the game.”

Until BioShock, the art of writing had been given little respect in the majority of videogames. Other than the prose that flowed during the adventure game era, there was no heritage of even mildly literary writing in games. The standard was just a notch above “The president’s daughter has been kidnapped. Are you a bad enough dude to get her back?” Even today, game designers expect that words won’t mean much in any game because high-resolution graphics and interacting with enemies rule the roost. Therefore, they postulate, a script doesn’t deserve much effort. As head of Irrational, Levine was able to convince everyone at Take-Two that if writing mattered to him, it should matter to them, too. But in BioShock there were hundreds of actors, production people, and animators, such that each change in writing involved exponential amounts of new work. Take-Two and 2K may have rolled their eyes with each request for more money, but the checks still came, even as the expenses cascaded in heavy sheets just like the game’s anthropomorphic waters.

Levine also learned lessons from the ABC Network’s smartly plotted, long-running
Lost
TV show. He became engrossed in the series, taking it apart, learning how to pace a mystery over time and applying that to BioShock. In an odd confluence of plotting, Levine’s original plan for BioShock in 2000 revolved around a plane crashing on an island, although the game design document involved a religious cult that dwelled there. Both were classic story tropes based on Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe
and both got their heroes to a place rife with the unknown via the modern day equivalent of a shipwreck, a plane crash. Levine had also been influenced by Stephen King’s novels and his book on writing in his quest to answer the question, Although everyone can dream up a monster, how do you make that
monster, in this case BioShock’s Big Daddy and Little Sister, impactful and meaningful in a modern context? King’s writing taught Levine that horror is really about the fear of loss—losing your family, losing your job, and finally, losing your humanity. In BioShock, the characters are terrifying because they are living representations of loss. They have lost their minds or lost their daughters or lost their livelihoods or lost their dreams. Early on you meet a demented, haunted-looking woman with a baby carriage. The moment is as affecting as seeing someone having a heart attack on a city street. That was why BioShock got under people’s skin. It could have happened to you. It wasn’t just a monster coming out of a primordial swamp with tentacles ready to grab, suck, and chomp. BioShock didn’t just play with the eyes; it played with the mind, the dark crevices where you hide things away from your closest friend or relative.

As the deadline approached, Levine became nervous about the animated TV spot for BioShock that showed no game play whatsoever, just CGI graphics with a bit of the “Beyond the Sea” music behind it.

“I don’t know,” he told Tom Bass in the hall outside a small room where one of the focus groups was to take place. “It’s risky. We could alienate hard-core gamers.”

Bass tried to be empathetic. “Tonight, we’re going to show the TV spot followed by a game demo. If it doesn’t resonate, we’ll do a spot with game play.”

Levine nodded. After the game and commercial were shown to the focus group, the moderator came out, shaking his head. Levine feared the worst. “I’ve never seen something like this,” he said. “When we put the two together, the commercial and the game
demo, we have everyone saying they’ll buy the game. One hundred percent.”

Irrational and 2K really knew they had a hit on their hands when a free downloadable demo with forty-five minutes of game play appeared on the Xbox Live Arcade on August 12, 2007. They knew that any game could die on the basis of a badly coded demo, and they had spent months refining what they would reveal to fans. In the end, the healthy amount of gaming on the demo, announced on
Game Head
, Geoff Keighley’s late-night Spike TV cable show, was a surprise to viewers. Fans moved with such hurricane-like speed to their game consoles that the whole Xbox Live network was blown offline for a while. Within a week, a million people had played the free portion of BioShock. It was simply one of the most unsettling, goose bump–inducing console game experiences ever offered in a demo.

By the time the game was released and through the fall, 2K Games had mounted more marketing campaigns than its lean ten-person staff had ever before engaged in. They had ensnared the hard-core crowd. Then they targeted with print ads the mid-core crowd, the people who read
Wired
but didn’t follow the game scene religiously. They also scheduled television ads to run on the Fox Network’s
24
and during football games, both on Sunday with the NFL and on Saturday with college games. In the end, BioShock sold more than four million copies. Sales almost compared with the landmark Halo: Combat Evolved, which sold 5.5 million, so good that 2K was talking about the game as a franchise that could last for a decade or more. But Levine didn’t want any part of the sequel or novelizations or movie option deals. BioShock 2, much less thrilling, would be made elsewhere. Eventually, Levine would find sufficient inspiration to propose a completely new BioShock, set far above the undersea world of Rapture, high up in the clouds, in a sprawling city called Columbia. The new game, BioShock Infinite, would be loosely based on the political and economic events of the 1893 Chicago
World’s Fair (and perhaps on Erik Larson’s
The Devil in the White City
).

With the literary writing, the painstaking, detailed graphics, and the carefully constructed dramatic arcs of each level, Levine and Irrational Games had set the bar high, not only for games, but for games as popular art. Even if the art world’s hard-core Realists would protest that it did not fit their strict definition of art, the Relativists and even the Objectivists would probably agree that it did. BioShock affected your emotions through words, music, pictures, and video. It not only was skillful, it was created by masters of the craft.

Renoir once said, “I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.” BioShock succeeded in expressing those emotions. It made people who eschewed videogames see the art in an entertainment that dealt with profound ideas and twisted emotions. Reviewers singled out the writing and the literary allusions to Ayn Rand. They made analogies to Stephen King because of the successful tension that built to horror as you progressed through the levels. BioShock expressed its ideas clearly and deftly, like the best movies, music, and books. It was art for game’s sake and it opened up a whole new realm of possibilities—proof of the concept that art and commerce could successfully and happily coexist in the world of videogames.