Replay: The History of Video Games (22 page)
Read Replay: The History of Video Games Online
Authors: Tristan Donovan
Ulrich’s most notable realisation of the ‘French Touch’ was 1988’s
Captain Blood
, a cinematic space adventure created with artist and programmer Didier Bouchon. The game tells the story of the space-travelling Captain Blood who must hunt down and destroy five clones of himself to stay alive. To hunt down the clones, the player must travel the galaxy and converse with aliens using Bluddian, an alien language created specifically for the game that was based on the use of 150 icons, each of which represented a word. With its H.R. Giger-inspired visuals, fractal-enhanced explosions, accompanying novella and a theme tune composed by French synthesizer musician Jean Michel Jarre,
Captain Blood
was nothing short of an epic, although its bizarreness often confused.
“I wanted to be an example and to invent new stuff that stood out,” said Ulrich. “I wanted to impress the player. I wanted the extra-terrestrials to be alive in the computer. When playing
The Hobbit
I hated the stereotyped answers such as ‘I don’t understand’ or ‘what is your name?’. The challenge was to make it intelligent. The incredible thing is that the aliens answered all questions, were funny and never repeated the same thing twice.”
During the game’s development Ere Informatique ran into financial problems and was bought by its more commercially minded rival Infogrames, which was less than keen of Ulrich and Bouchon’s strange game. “At Infogrames they bought licences and developed more classic games and it was marketing that boosted the sales,” said Ulrich. With little funding from Infogrames, the pair holed themselves up in the Landes forest in southwest France to finish the game.
“We worked ourselves to the point of exhaustion to complete
Captain Blood
. It was really tough. I covered several reams of paper with Bluddian dialog; Didier would code the programs and created the graphics. When I showed the game to Infogrames they did not understand. ‘Is that a UFO or what’? ‘You’re crazy,’ they told me. After it was released the sales people at Infogrames told me that the game was selling by the hundreds, they had never seen anything like it.”
Narrative-based games dominated France’s output during the 1980s but the French Touch could be seen in other forms of game as well such as 1985’s
L’Aigle d’Or
, a marriage of action and adventure that had an influence in France comparable to that of
Knight Lore
in the UK. The French Touch could also be seen in Eric Chahi’s gory platform game
Infernal Runner
, the French comic book visuals of strip poker game
Teenage Queen
and
North & South
, a simple strategy game based on a Belgian comic about the American Civil War.
Across the border in West Germany, however, game developers were heading in an altogether different direction, partly out of necessity. For West Germany the legacy of the Third Reich would have an important influence on the types of games the country developed. American, French, Spanish and British games regularly dealt in death and destruction with little dissent. But for a country still living in the shadow of the Nazi atrocities of the Second World War, anything that glorified violence or military conflict was frowned upon both culturally and legally. This post-war aversion to violence led to the formation of youth media watchdog the Bundesprüfstelle für Jugendgefährdende Schriften in 1954.
The watchdog’s role was to assess any media that could corrupt the nation’s young and it had two powers at its disposal. First, i
t could seek outright bans for extremely offensive content – such as Nazi propaganda and excessive violence – in the courts. Second, it could place media it considered harmful on its list of indexed media, which meant the product could only be sold to adults and could not be advertised, promoted or put on display in shops. Initially the watchdog focused on the media of the 1950s – comics, magazines, vinyl records and books – but as new forms of media, including video games, emerged these too came under its jurisdiction. Eventually the watchdog renamed itself the Bundesprüfstelle für Jugendgefährdende Medien (BPJM) to reflect its widening remit.
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On the 19th December 1984, the BPJM named the first three video games to be added to the index: Activision’s aerial combat game
River Raid
; Atari’s coin-op tank sim
Battlezone
; and
Speed Racer
, a Commodore 64 driving game that let players run over pedestrians. “
Battlezone
was indexed because of the glorification of war propagated by its content and because the board stated that the content propagated aggressive behaviour,” said Petra Meier, vice-president of the BPJM. “
River Raid
was also indexed because of content seen as a glorification of war and an enhancement of violent behaviour.” Over the years the BPJM has indexed several hundred games, largely because of violent content. “Probably 90 per cent of the games that were indexed have been indexed because of the portrayal of violence,” said Meier. “Of course as far as violence is concerned the decision of what will be considered a ‘detailed portrayal of violence’ might have undergone some change over the years.”
The threat of being indexed by the BPJM, together with a wider cultural aversion to violence, was a big disincentive to game developers thinking of producing more traditional action games, particularly in the 1980s when children and teenagers formed the bulk of video game players. “The BPJM has influenced the games produced in Germany,” said Cerat Yerli, the founder of German game studio Crytek, the makers of
Far Cry
– an action-packed first-person shooter released in 2004. “I think companies have changed the way they develop. The laws definitely have an impact on design and production. Germany is a very social country, the government takes on responsibility for social elements more than governments that are, for example, like the US. The US doesn’t really care about what elements are in your car as long as your car can drive. In Germany there is this responsibility about your car because they say it impacts social security and there are more laws. Every area of life in Germany is much more controlled socially or in law and I think Germany therefore thinks it has to take all the responsibility about entertainment or communication channels that could potentially impact culture or young people.”
West Germany’s game developers were also heavily influenced by the nation’s fondness for board games, of which it is the world’s biggest consumer per capita. Germans in particular like social board games with simple rules and economic or strategic themes such as
The Settlers of Catan
. And this, coupled with the aversion to violence, encouraged West Germany’s video game developers to start creating trading and management games. “This strand of games came out of Germany because Germans tend to have high interest in or affinity with management simulations or strategic games,” said Nils-Holger Henning, director of business development at German online games publisher Bigpoint. Yerli added: “Trading games, strategy games and manager games sum up the German style of games. There was a game in Germany called
Hanse
that was very successful.”
Based on the Hanseatic League that dominated trade along the coast of the Baltic Sea from the 13th to 17th century,
Hanse
was a trading game that along with
Kaiser
, a historically themed kingdom management game, helped establish the trading and management games as the distinctive feature of West Germany’s game business. Instead of going to war, players built their business empires or kingdoms through trade, diplomacy and careful management. In many ways the roots of these games could be seen in
The Sumer Game
, the 1969 city management game developed by American programmer Richard Merrill, but their origins had more to do with Germany’s board game market.
But while West Germany, Britain, France anpain developed distinctive styles of game, few other western European countries followed suit. This was especially surprising in Italy’s case. During the 1970s Italy had been the continent’s leading producer of video games. It had three arcade game manufacturers, although none developed their own games, and had produced some of the earliest home consoles to reach European shelves. Even in 1980 things looked good for Italy: Bologna-based coin-op manufacturers Zaccaria had decided to start making its own games starting with the shoot ’em up
Quasar
. But
Quasar
proved to be a false dawn and Zaccaria never created the video game hit it hoped to make. “Zaccaria made a great investment to develop video games in Italy, but the competition from the US and Japan was too great,” said Natale Zaccaria, the company’s co-founder. By the end of 1984 Zaccaria had given up on video games altogether. And for some inexplicable reason it would take until the start of the 1990s before another Italian game company of note emerged. “Maybe if Zaccaria was not forced to close, the programming sector of the company would have better developed and other Italian producers could have followed the example,” said Zaccaria. “Probably Italy was just missing the leading example.”
The only other European country to really have a major influence on video games in the 1980s was the Netherlands, where instead of making games, amateur programmers spent their time creating demos to show off their coding skills. The trend for demos originated in 1985 among a group of Dutch programmers from the city of Alkmaar who got their kicks from hacking into commercial games, disabling the copy protection measures and distributing free copies via the post or bulletin board systems that computer owners with modems could log on to. They called themselves The 1001 Crew and called what they did cracking.
Joost Hoing was one of the crew’s members: “We competed with other crackers around the world to crack a game fast, good and small.
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I enjoyed the fact that if you ‘won’ by doing the best crack, the whole world copied and played your version of the game and saw your name on the screen.”
As competition between crackers intensified, The 1001 Crew started adding intros to games to let the world know who cracked them. “We basically ‘tagged’ the game to show who did it,” said Hoing. “Before the game started it showed something like ‘Cracked in 1983 by 1001 Crew – Hit the Space Bar’. These intros had to be very small in size since it had to fit with the complete game. In order to show our programming skills, we created more and more impressive intros with bouncing logos, colour bars, music, etc. Again as small as possible in size.” The intro demos created by The 1001 Crew and another Dutch group called The Judges spread across Europe as computer users shared illegal copies of games the Dutch teams had cracked. “Everyone in the Commodore 64 world knew our name. We were famous,” said Hoing.
The 1001 Crew and The Judges had thrown down a gauntlet to other crackers. ‘Match this,’ their demos effectively said. Within a year dozens of demo crews had formed to do try and do just that, spending their nights cracking games and creating new demos in a programming and hacking arms race. A pan-European subculture of cracking and demo making called the demoscene had emerged. While the Netherlands was its spiritual home, the demoscene was a European-wide movement thatld be found everywhere from Scandinavia and Italy to Britain and West Germany. By the late 1980s demo crews were travelling to demoparties, weekend-long sessions of non-stop programming – a geeky version of the illegal rave parties that emerged around the same time across Europe on the back of acid house music. The demoparties were marathon contests of programming one-upmanship that culminated in individuals’ work being shown on video projectors attached to large speakers. Not that attendees spent all their time bathing in the light of their computer screens. “I went to a few but hardly touched a Commodore 64 there,” said Hoing. “We were around 18 at the time so we were more into discos, music, girls, beers, etc.”
For Europe’s game industry the demoscene was both angel and devil. On the plus side, game designers could enhance their games by plundering the numerous programming breakthroughs of the demoscene. “I know music and sprite routines from demos were used in a lot of games,” said Hoing.
Many demo makers later renounced their connections with the cracking scene and became professional game developers. By the mid-1990s the diverging interests of those interested in writing demos and those who enjoyed cracking had caused the movement to split in two. With the demoscene going legit, even more of those who cut their teeth making demos resurfaced in game studios. Finland’s Future Crew, which started making demos on the Commodore 64 in 1986, is a case in point. After the crew fizzled out in 1994 some of its members resurfaced in Finland’s leading game development companies including Remedy Entertainment, the makers of
Max Payne
, a film noir action game released in 2001 and built around impressive ‘bullet-time’ slow motion effects similar to those seen in
The Matrix
movies.
“We’re all over the place,” said Alex Evans, a British game developer who started out making demos under the name Statix before joining Peter Molyneux’s Bullfrog studio in the late 1990s. “If you’re in the games industry or in the demoscene you can see the interconnection is very, very strong. There has been a huge crossover into things like mobile and downloadable games, where you have to fit brilliant experiences into tiny spaces, which is what the demoscene has been doing for many years.”
