All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (36 page)

ARC wasn’t a huge hit; it had no marketing behind it. But it garnered an enthusiastic cult following, however small. That following was vocal, and it led to an e-mail that read

Vechey scratched his head. “You think he really works in the industry? He sounds too cool for school.”

Fiete snapped back, “He writes like he’s fifteen years old or something. Plus, he sounds like a dick.”

“TEN is like the biggest multiplayer gaming site in the world, though.”

“Whatever. He still sounds like a dick.”

Until that moment, the guys had held those who worked in games in high esteem in the same way a rabid music fan worships, say, the lead singer in his favorite band. They imagined that any contact from their heroes would be a godlike experience and not so hipster casual. It didn’t make sense to them that the man from TEN sounded like just another dude with an attitude. But Jason Kapulka wasn’t much older than the teens, a transplant from Vancouver, British Columbia, whose father was a park warden and whose mother worked as an elementary schoolteacher. In Vancouver on an Apple II PC, he had begun programming his own crude shooter games with odd, humorous monikers like Toxic Waste Marauder, a game where you stopped sludge from coming up from the manholes and sewers in the streets. Kapulka also penned some reviews for
Computer Gaming World
, a monthly magazine that prided itself on being the
New York Times
of gaming magazines.

“We’d like to publish ARC on TEN,” Kapulka told Fiete and Vechey in a phone call.

Greg Harper, TEN’s head of business development, called them next. He assured them there would be no pressure and lured them with a trip to San Francisco and a tour of the offices. Vechey had never been west of the Mississippi or south of Tennessee. He thought San Francisco was close to New Orleans. He and Fiete both agreed to the free trip immediately.

When the pair arrived in the Bay Area, they marveled at the bustle of Union Square, eventually strolling into the lobby of TEN. The well-dressed Harper took one look and handed them off to Kapulka because they were just gawky, geeky kids with long hair, not the kind of people Harper wanted to talk business with. They couldn’t even drink legally, which didn’t stop them from sucking down booze—until the local watering hole carded them. By the time they left San Francisco, Fiete and Vechey had made a deal with TEN to license ARC for play on its site for $45,000.

“We’re rich!” cried Fiete.

Vechey nodded, adding, “In Indianapolis, we won’t have to work for, like, ever!”

But times were changing. While ARC did well, sometimes amassing hundreds of players at a time, TEN saw the writing on the wall when it came to the increasing popularity of casual games. Without warning, Kapulka began getting directives from the higher-ups to drop some of the site’s hard-core focus and to research games like mah-jongg and bingo. “One day I’m working on Total Annihilation and the next day I’m on bingo,” a stunned Kapulka told Vechey and Fiete. Other sites, like Sony’s The Station and RealNetworks, were already licensing dozens of casual games, launching sites that aggregated everything from tic-tac-toe to Wheel of Fortune. At first, the very idea of these games made Kapulka sick to his stomach, especially bingo. There was no skill involved in bingo, just dumb luck. Then he traveled to some churches to see what the bingo crowd was all about. What he saw was groups of women having a raucous time,
drinking, playing, and being social. The experience was totally unlike the bingo games on the Web at the time, primarily single-player affairs that made you refresh your browser each time you wanted a new bingo ball to drop.

Kapulka, an avid reader and thinker, was concerned with what’s called the Third Place, which Ray Oldenburg, an urban sociologist, so succinctly espoused in his 1989 book,
The Great Good Place
. Kapulka thought, “You’ve got the home, work, and this public area where you socialize, a pub, a restaurant, a bingo hall. There’s a big difference between sitting in a bar drinking by yourself and sitting at home drinking by yourself, almost like the difference between aloneness and loneliness.” For TEN’s bingo game, he told executives, “Let’s slap on a big chat room so you have fifty people in there and it feels more alive, like a real Third Place.” Kapulka’s idea survived when TEN became Pogo and completed its transition to a casual gaming site. That didn’t mean he liked the job any more. In fact, the bureaucracy and inability to implement new games quickly made him begin to think his job sucked.

Meanwhile, Fiete and Vechey dropped out of college and moved to Seattle after getting a job with King’s Quest and Leisure Suit Larry maker Sierra On-Line, thanks to a phone interview arranged by Vechey’s aunt. Both were in awe of Sierra CEO Ken Williams, who, with his wife, Roberta, was responsible for making and publishing some of Vechey’s and Fiete’s favorite adventure games. The two began to work in the company’s burgeoning WON (World Opponent Network) online games division. But both were frustrated, especially Fiete, who often complained to Vechey, “They’re just slapping some network code onto their games and calling it multiplayer. Half the time it doesn’t work well and the other half it doesn’t work at all.”

“And they’re depending on people clicking on advertising to pay for things,” agreed Vechey. That was no way to build a business; it seemed like smoke and mirrors. And both were adamant: if you
don’t design a game to include multiplayer functions from the design document onward, it’s not going to feel right or play well. Both thought WON had already lost the battle.

It all came to a head when Fiete and Sierra cohort Brian Rothstein began to imagine a casual game called Wordox in which the player matched tiles on a grid featuring various animals. Once the tiles were matched, the screen would clear and points would be amassed. Fiete’s bosses nearly fired him for ignoring his assigned tasks. Yet after a heated discussion, the game, which was soundly designed, was put on the network. Within weeks, it was the most played game on the site, sometimes garnering forty thousand players at one time, as much human traffic as half of Sierra’s online games put together. But Fiete was disgruntled. Even though Wordox was really a hit, he only received a small bonus—a laptop—out of the deal. Frowning, Fiete grabbed an envelope and calculated on the back that Sierra was making thousands of dollars from Wordox every day. It didn’t have to be as big as the legendary ones Ken bestowed upon the early Sierra inventors like John Harris, but he wanted a real cash bonus. He told Vechey, “It’s making me kind of jaded on the whole gaming thing. I’m pretty burned out on games.”

Fiete and Vechey were becoming cynical; Kapulka already was. Like Nolan Bushnell and Graeme Devine before them, the three didn’t like the idea of making money for others, and they knew that Williams had paid staggering royalties of up to 30 percent for games back in the 1980s. The trio had learned much about the emerging online games business while at their respective positions, and they thought they could do better. Realizing that the late nineties was the Era of Start-up Mania, they put out a shingle under the moniker SexyActionCool, based on a poster for the movie
Desperado
they saw at a bus stop. The ad featured a pistol-packing Antonio Banderas dressed in black and a breathless quote from overexcited
Rolling Stone
movie reviewer Peter Travers: “Sexy. Action. Cool.”

After much discussion, the trio decided to enter the world of online pornography with a strip poker game called Foxy Poker.

“So how sexy action cool do we get?” posed Kapulka.

“I don’t know about nudity,” said Fiete. He considered what his relatives might think, what his mother might say.

“The money could be decent, though. And we could finance other projects,” said Vechey. But Vechey agreed that he, too, was uncertain about doing a game with nudity. Ultimately, they didn’t have the balls to go all the way; their poker ladies never really took off their clothing and the game didn’t include photographs of real women, just cartoons. And getting the character to strip was difficult. You had to score so many points to get the women to take off the smallest piece of clothing that it almost didn’t seem worth the effort to achieve the minor thrill. The trio didn’t like the personalities involved in the X-rated world either. Kapulka said to Fiete, “Everyone we deal with at those sites seems sleazy. They give off this vibe of extreme untrustworthiness. I don’t have any big compulsions about being family friendly, but I still feel kind of dirty fooling around with that stuff.”

Licensing wasn’t bringing in much revenue, so Vechey and Fiete cut corners on meals, eating only cheap fast food. They vowed not to travel by plane and not to pay too much for girls’ dinners when on dates. Sometimes they ate only once a day. Yet they were happy; they kept telling themselves they weren’t in the game industry to become millionaires, just to have fun, earn a living, and live life on their own terms. Kapulka was now doing artwork and design for the games, while Fiete continued to write code. Vechey admitted that he had no particular talent except for one thing: He was a guy for whom the stars always seemed to align; he’d always been lucky.

In April of 2000, Vechey was surfing the Web when he thought he’d come upon something unique in its simplicity: a crude Javascript game called Colors Game. He matched the colors. When they paired
up, the colors disappeared, only to be replaced by new colors after he refreshed the Web page. It really had him hooked. He excitedly e-mailed the link to Fiete and Kapulka.

“It’s pretty addictive,” agreed Fiete.

“Yeah, but how do you make something like this compelling enough that anyone would want to play it?” asked Vechey.

Kapulka came up with the idea of making the colors into fruit shapes. He tossed that thought away because he wanted to include seven different shapes and colors of fruits, but too many looked alike. Settling on jewels, Kapulka drew seven distinct shapes on a notepad. Along with a few other game ideas like Money Maze, Alchemy, and Atomica, they proceeded to work on and off for four months on the jewel game, constantly tightening the design and graphics. As the game ended, players were in a cave (a trope that had spread widely since the days of Colossal Cave). Thunderous roars were heard as the cave crumbled in as a kind of animated payoff for playing.

Before they went further, the team had to ascertain whether they should include a timed mode to quicken the pace and spice up the action. When showing the timer-less version to game designers, they received negative feedback, including a rude response from a Pogo executive: “This stupid thing isn’t a game at all.” More and more professional game designers offered snotty and snooty remarks. They were almost viscerally opposed to what the three were doing, seeing the jewel matching game as an example of exceptionally poor game theory.

Yet when Kapulka traveled home to Canada, he performed what he described to John and Brian as the Mom Test. He gave Roma, his mother, a laptop to play on, and he noticed that she enjoyed the game when it wasn’t timed, so much so that once or twice, he couldn’t get her away from the computer. It was strange to witness; his mother had developed a videogame jones. Kapulka speedily reported back to his partners, “When she plays it in timed mode, she doesn’t much
like it at all. When it’s not timed, she plays it a lot. She says it relaxes her. The timed mode stresses her out.”

Diamond Mine, as they christened it, was licensed to Microsoft’s MSN Gaming Zone with one caveat. The executives in charge didn’t like the name and asked its staff for various suggestions. In the end, it was named Bejeweled by a slick in-house marketer named Eddie Ranchigoda, who previously had worked at Sierra as a public relations flack. The new name didn’t go over well with the game makers.

“They’re changing it to
what
?” asked Fiete in disbelief.

“That sounds just like that crappy
Bedazzled
movie with Brendan Fraser that just came out. This sucks balls,” proclaimed Vechey. Yet within a month, more than thirty thousand people were playing Bejeweled simultaneously. Though it was a hit for Microsoft, the corporate giant paid the developers a measly $1,500 a month to carry the game. Yet because the revenue model of the nineties was about getting users to click banner ads, Microsoft had a good argument for keeping the licensing fee on the low side. Meanwhile, the trio felt they should change the name of their company to one sans the word “sexy.” They were, after all, now in the business of making family-oriented games, not something even vaguely pornographic. Still poor, they searched for a Web address for their company that wasn’t already taken—they couldn’t afford to buy a domain name from someone already using it. Jason liked the word “Pop,” for it suggested that they wanted to make popular games, not something quirky and hard-core. And they wanted something with six letters, easy to remember and easy to type. If PopFrog or PopSlap had been available URLs, they might have taken those first. But PopCap was available, and it seemed to have the right kind of feel. When Microsoft agreed to allow PopCap’s Web address to be featured on a screen before players started played Bejeweled, the three thought it would be good for business. They didn’t know how good.

None of the PopCap principals wanted to charge too much for
the game on their own website and alienate what they hoped might be potential lifelong customers. After all, the game was already free to play on the Microsoft site. The trio agreed they needed to add something valuable to the game before they charged for it. But adding fees was tricky at the time, especially for a new company, because of the big dot-com implosion of early 2000. During that period, trillions of dollars in technology market value was lost, and no one wanted to gamble on anything even remotely related to the World Wide Web. Figuring out how much to charge proved to be more difficult than choosing a name for the company, and far more difficult than making the game itself. They knew games. But they knew about as much about selling games on the Web as Mario the Plumber knew about Kenyan economic policy. The trio thought about fixing a price for each download and, after some beer, came up with $4.99 for a fuller version of Bejeweled.