Replay: The History of Video Games (32 page)
Read Replay: The History of Video Games Online
Authors: Tristan Donovan
Civilization
would have a significant impact on strategy games, which had not moved too far beyond their tabletop origins since first appearing on home computers.
Civilization
’s branching technology tree, where each discovery opened up more and more options for scientific research, was a big influence on
UFO: Enemy Unknown
, a 1993 strategy game where players defended the earth from aliens by unlocking the secrets of alien technology and using it against them (known as
X-COM: UFO Defense
in North America).
The same feature also inspired Las Vegas game developer Westwood Studios, which was working on a video game version of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel
Dune
. After an argument with one of the vice-presidents of strategy game specialists SSI about the future of strategy games, Westwood’s co-founder Brett Sperry decided to use
Dune
to reinvent the genre. As well as
Civilization
, Sperry and his team drew on ideas from the Japanese console game
Herzog Zwei
, a strategy game where the battles hapened in real-time, and the Macintosh operating system.
The result, 1992’s
Dune II: Building of a Dynasty
, fused action with strategic thinking and opened up the strategy genre to a new audience. People who once associated strategy games with slow and turgid bouts of number crunching now equated it with high-pressure action that rewarded quick, strategic thinking. The marketing description of
Dune II
as a “real-time strategy game” was soon adopted as the byword for the rush of similar titles that followed in
Dune II
’s footsteps. The real-time strategy games quickly displaced the turn-based strategy games of old and by the end of the 1990s
Civilization
was the only big name strategy game series that had not gone real-time.
Video games had evolved into three broad philosophical movements. There were the action games that were forged in the cash-hungry environment of the arcades and served up instant thrills. Then there were the narrative-based, cinema-worshipping works that saw video gaming as a story-telling medium enhanced by interactivity. Finally, there were the sandbox games; the simulations that sought to entertain by giving players the freedom to experiment and the ability to create.
These movements were not discrete, their ideas would repeatedly cross-pollinate, but each pulled games in different directions, enriching the medium with new ideas and constantly pushing back the barriers of what a video game could be.
[
1
]. Braun already had
SkyChase
, a wireframe 3D flight sim for two players, lined up as Maxis’ debut release.
[
2
]. Braben was the co-creator of
Elite
. San had designed the then visually impressive 3D space combat game
Starglider
. MacLean had created
IK+
, a three-player martial arts game featuring a number of cheats for players to use against their opponents that were designed to be part of the fun.
East meets West: Alexey Pajitnov (left) and Henk Rogers in Moscow, February 1989. Courtesy of The Tetris Company
16. A Plane To Moscow
Alexey Pajitnov lived an unassuming existence in the early 1980s. As a mathematician in the computing department at the Moscow Academy of Science, Pajitnov spent hays programming computers fuelled by copious amounts of black coffee and cigarettes.
“I was just a regular programmer and researcher. My lifestyle was regular for every young hacker in the world at that time,” said Pajitnov. “I worked about 11 hours a day, started relatively late and stopped around midnight or half-past midnight. Every day was no different. All the young programmers are workaholics, mostly, and I was just one of them. Nothing special, very usual.”
His job was to research serious computing applications such as speech recognition, but when he got a spare moment he would create mathematical puzzle games on the academy’s computers for his own amusement. “I came to the game from the puzzle. From the board games, the regular board games, wooden castles and tasks and riddles,” he said. “I always considered the game more like a puzzle or mental challenge. I was fascinated by puzzles and mathematical riddles from the time I was a kid. As a kid I participated in all kinds of contests and I was in a special programme at school, so I was addicted to mathematics and mathematical tasks and puzzles. I liked the challenge.”
One day in 1984 Pajitnov wrote a game based on
Pentominoes
, a puzzle he had found in a Moscow toy store.
Pentominoes
consisted of a collection of flat plastic shapes, each built from five squares of equal size arranged in different ways. The goal was to take them out of the box and then fit them back together within the box, rather like a jigsaw.
Pajitnov thought
Pentominoes
would be more interesting as a computer game where the pieces rained down from the top of the screen into the play field, his virtual equivalent of the
Pentominoes
box. While the academy boasted some of the most advanced computers in the Soviet Union, they were primitive compared to the home computers available outside the communist world. Pajitnov’s work computer was an Elektronika 60, a Soviet computer based on the PDP-11 that first appeared in the US in 1970. “We were way behind,” he said. “Our best machine repeats the level of the rest of the western world about five to eight years late. The Elektronika 60 was one of the very first micro machines in Russia, almost desktop. Not very powerful but really convenient.”
The Elektronika 60 had no graphics so Pajitnov had to construct his digital
Pentominoes
pieces, which he formed out of four rather than five squares
[1]
, using punctuation marks. “I thought
Pentominoes
might be a very good base for two-player games,” said Pajitnov. “My original idea was that you just put the pieces on top of the field and your task is to put as much as possible in the play field. If you put in more than the other player then you win the game. But when my first prototype started working I realised that the game ended in something like 10 seconds and you didn’t have too much fun out of it.”
Pajitnov concluded that the size of the play area was spoiling his game. “One solution was to make a really, really long play field and scroll it through, but it was technically difficult at that time,” said Pajitnov, who also regarded play areas that did not fit on a single screen as annoying. He then noticed that once a player filled up a horizontal line in the play field it became redundant and blocked access to empty space below.
“It just took up space and was doing nothing, so I decided to get rid of them and give more space for the game to continue,” said Pajitnov, who also dropped the two-player mode in favour of a single-player experience. Now whenever a horizontal line was filled it vanished allowing the game to continue indefinitely provided the player kept completing horizontal lines to open up space in the play area. And since the ‘pent’ of
Pentominoes
referred to the Greek word for five, Pajitnov called his game
Tetris
after tetra, the Greek word for four.
The result was a captivating battle to keep the play area clear of pieces. “As soon as the finished prototype started working, I couldn’t stop playing. I understood the game was very addictive. I realised it was something special,” said Pajitnov. Pajitnov was not the only one entranced by his compelling creation, his colleagues were also hooked. So when the academy got its first IBM-compatible PC, shortly after the creation of
Tetris
, Pajitnov’s co-worker Vadim Gerasimov rewrote it on the new computer, adding proper graphics and a score counter. “As soon as this conversion was done, we gave it to our friends and it self-distributed itself very, very quickly. Like a virus,” said Pajitnov.
Tetris
spread like wildfire across the computer-equipped offices of Moscow, infuriating managers who watched their workforce spending their time playing Pajitnov’s game rather than being productive. Copies of the game began to seep beyond the city limits and spread to computer-equipped offices across the USSR and then into the communist nations of Eastern Europe.
Tetris
was clearly something special, but trying to sell it was out of the question. In 1984 Mikhail Gorbachev had yet to become the leader of the USSR and his perestroika reforms, a programme of economic liberalisation that allowed Soviet citizens to form their own businesses and would help end communist rule, were still three years away. Soviet law strictly prohibited the formation of businesses and rejected the concept of copyrights or intellectual property – nothing could be done for personal gain, everything was owned by the state.
But even if the legal system had allowed Pajitnov to sell
Tetris
, there was no one to buy it. While cheap mass-market computers could be found in homes in many industrialised democracies, such technology was only accessible to a small cabal of computer researchers in the USSR and the Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe. The few people who did have home computers usually obtained them at great expense and personal risk on the black market. The Hungarian authorities, for example, estimated that there were 30,000 home computers in Hungary by early 1985, 90 per cent of which arrived through unofficial channels. Czechoslovakian Marek Spanel got his introduction to computers thanks to the black market. His first computer, a Texas Instruments TI-99/4, was smuggled into the country and bought by his parents in 1985 – six years after the computer’s US lah and four years after it went out of production. “My brother Ondrej and I were probably the only users of that type of computer in the entire country at the time,” said Spanel, who went on to form Prague-based game developers Bohemia Interactive.
There were no shops to buy games from, so people had to rely on illegal copies of Western games shared among a clandestine network of home computer owners or, like Spanel, learn how to make their own. “In the mid-’80s computers were rare and people wrote games for fun and distributed them for free as selling them was forbidden,” recalled Serge Orlovsky, president of Nival Interactive, a Moscow-based game development studio that formed in 1996.
While home computers were rare, there were a few coin-op video games that had started to appear in the arcades of communist countries around the time that Pajitnov created
Tetris
. East G
ermany’s
Poly Play
was one of the earliest and is believed to have first appeared in 1985
[2]
.
Poly Play
was created by VEB Polytechnik, a state-owned electronics company based in Chemnitz, which was then known as Karl-Marx-Stadt. Encased in functional wood panelling, it looked more bookcase than an arcade game and offered players a choice of 10 games including slalom skiing game
Abfahrtslauf
, deer hunting title
Hirschjagd
and
Hase und Wolf
– a maze chase featuring the wolf and rabbit characters from the popular Soviet TV cartoon
Nu, pogodi!
.
Poly Play
was mainly seen in youth hostels and the exclusive holiday homes run by East Germany’s powerful trade union federation, the Freier Deutscher Gewerkschafsbund. It was often set up so it was free to play.
Poly Play
’s technology, however, was years behind that of the arcade games available across the border in West Germany. Its visuals looked closer to the first colour arcade games that appeared in the West in 1979.
