Replay: The History of Video Games (39 page)

Backstage: An actor in full costume waits for filming to begin on the set of
Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh
. Courtesy of Andy Hoyos

19. A Library In A Fish’s Mouth

Rand Miller got his first taste of video games when he and his junior high school classmates were given a tour of the University of the New Mexico’s computer centre in Albuquerque. After being shown around the facility, Rand and his classmates got to try some of the early text-only computer games using a terminal linked up to an IBM System/360 mainframe. His classmates paid little attention, but Rand was hooked. “I was the geeky kid in school, although I played American football and musical instruments, I loved computer and science stuff. When I was young you couldn’t have a computer at home, so I was really intrigued,” he said. “We sat down for probably 15 or 20 minutes and we got to play whatever little games happened to be in the catalogue. I was a lot more intrigued than the other boys.”

The university’s computer centre was only a couple of blocks away from his school, so Rand kept returning, keen to play some more games. “I would get access to the computer by getting paper out of the trash cans where people had left their username and password printed out on the paper,” he said. “I would steal their passwords and user names and change the passwords. I had my own login and catalogue area and began to get interested in writing my own programs. The first ones I wrote were games.”

Years later as a married man living in Dallas, Texas, Rand decided to bun Apple Macintosh and started looking for some software that would interest his young daughter. The search proved fruitless. “Games were beginning to be of a higher quality but children’s software was like the dregs,” recalled Rand, who was working as a programmer at a bank at the time. “It was like, if you couldn’t make it making games, then you would just slop out crap for children. I remember having the distinct feeling that this did not mimic other markets – books in particular. A good children’s book will actually be appealing to adults as well and that’s what inspired my brother Robyn and I with
The Manhole
.”

At Rand’s suggestion, the brothers decided to create an interactive children’s book for the Macintosh. As well as reading the story, they wanted children to be able to interact with the still pictures so that when they clicked on certain objects they would hear a sound or something would happen. The first picture Robyn drew for their computerised book showed an image of a manhole and a fire hydrant. He programmed it so that when users clicked on the manhole the cover slid open and a beanstalk grew out of it. “I sat there looking at the beanstalk and the open manhole and I realised I didn’t want to turn the page,” said Robyn. “I needed to know what was at the top of the beanstalk and down inside the manhole or even inside the fire hydrant, which I began to imagine being like a house.”

The brothers never created the next page of the book. Instead they started creating pictures of what was inside the fire hydrant, down the manhole cover and up the beanstalk. “I think it came from a universal desire to explore. I think people love to explore – people wonder what’s around the next corner,” said Rand. “The ideas were just streaming out of Robyn’s mind, it was like: ‘What’s down the manhole cover?’, ‘How about a boat and an island?’, ‘Okay’, ‘And on the island I’ll stick a walrus and an elevator’.”

Riding their wave of spontaneous creativity, the pair paid little attention to process. “I just jumped in and went to work,” said Robyn. “Here’s another planet. What should it be? How about a library in a fish’s mouth?” They created worlds within worlds, moulding an unpredictable piece of software that served up a stream of constant surprises that echoed the insanity of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 children’s novel
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
. Billed as “a fantasy exploration for children of all ages”,
The Manhole
was initially released via mail order in 1988 but, in 1989, video game publisher Activision decided to re-release it on CD-ROM, a new storage medium being touted as the next big thing in computing.

Although the compact disc had been developed in the 1970s and Sony had released the first CD music player in 1982, its potential for storing data had gone unused by video game companies largely due to the lack of home computers with CD drives. By the late 1980s, however, the situation was changing. The music
industry’s efforts to get people to buy audio CDs had brought down the cost of CD drives, which were now becoming available for computers such as the Macintosh and IBM PC compatibles.
[1]
By February 1989 the first CD-based computer, Fujitsu’s FM Towns, was on sale in Japan. CD had two big attractions for the video game industry. First, CDs were cheaper to manufacture than microchipsed game cartridges. Second, CDs could store around 600 times as much data as a floppy disk and around 300 times as much as a cartridge. It was a win-win situation, publishers lowered their production costs and developers could create bigger games and use audio and video recordings in their work.

At the time developers were finding the limited storage available on floppy disks a major frustration. “It was clear CD-ROM was going to be the future of games. People like Sierra were releasing games with 10 disks – it was getting crazy,” said Bob Jacob, the co-founder of Cinemaware. The Miller brothers shared this sense of frustration. “Floppies had been insanely limiting,” said Robyn. “We shipped the original version of
The Manhole
on five floppies, which meant people had to continually switch back and forth between disks. Very annoying. It was near luxurious working within that huge amount of space. More than anything, it allowed us to make the world as big as we wanted.” Taking advantage of the format, the Millers added extra music, animations and scenes to the CD version of
The Manhole
.

The sonic potential of CD was particularly exciting for game audio programmers, who had spent most of the 1980s trying to squeeze out tunes and sound effects in machine code within miniscule amounts of memory. In the same year that
The Manhole
moved to CD, British game musician Rob Hubbard quit Newcastle-upon-Tyne for San Francisco to become Electronic Arts’ sole audio person. He had spent the past four years becoming a minor celebrity on the UK gaming scene by writing video game music on computers such as the Commodore 64. “I did a game on my own and people thought the game sucked, but they thought the audio was really good,” said Hubbard. “At that time, game music was really, really dreadful so I thought I should just try doing the audio. There wasn’t much competition. I don’t think it’s anything to do with being particularly brilliant at anything because there was hardly anybody else doing it. All you had to do was something half-decent that made a bit of sense as opposed to some of the stuff back then, which was often really, really awful.”

Electronic Arts’ San Francisco studios was a world away from the ramshackle cottage industry Hubbard left behind in the UK: “They were streets ahead in what they were doing with their thinking and were talking about the optical devices as well. It seemed like they were on the bleeding edge of what was going on.” CDs allowed video game musicians such as Hubbard the freedom to concentrate on the music rather than programming. Instead of having to write music in machine code they could now write complex scores, record real-life musicians, sample sound and use voice actors. In short, CD allowed them to stop fighting with microprocessors and focus on being creative. “CD was a radical transition for game audio,” said Hubbard. “It opened the floodgates.” It also allowed video games to include music from popular pop and rock acts. “
Road Rash
on the 3DO console was one of the first games that exploited using licensed bands. Electronic Arts struck gold because they licensed a band called Soundgarden when they were just a college band and, while they were making the game, Soundgarden became massive, really big. So they shipped
Road Rash
with these Soundgarden tunes. It basically started the whole idea of having a CD track playing while you have a game going.”

There were limits to this promised land, however. “When CD-ROM first came out, the drives were so slow that you had to plan your content well to make it work as it would come off the drive very slowly,” said Rand. “Everything had to come off the CD because the hard drives didn’t have room for much stuff, so you had to stream your music from the CD in chunks large enough that when someone clicked to a new picture in
The Manhole
, you could get the new picture and then go back to where you were streaming the music from without getting a break in the tune.”

CD also opened up new visual frontiers. As well as having the capacity to store more art, CDs could also hold short video clips that could be integrated into games. For Cinemaware, a video game studio that always wore its Hollywood aspirations on its sleeve, this was an especially appealing feature. In early 1990 NEC had decided to try and tap into the growing hype about CD games by launching the TurboGrafx-CD, a CD drive for its struggling TurboGrafx-16 console. But the company knew it needed some eye-catching games to generate interest in its CD add-on and turned to Cinemaware. In return for a CD-enhanced remake of
It Came from the Desert
, Cinemaware’s
Them!
-inspired tale of a desert town terrorised by giant radioactive ants, NEC offered to buy 20 per cent of the company. Cinemaware was quick to say yes. The company was in dire straits at the time, suffering primarily from its decision to focus on the Amiga computer that had flopped in the US despite selling well in Europe. “They saw us as a high-quality developer and at the time I was like ‘hey, getting some money for this would be good’,” said Jacob. “We did the deal and obligated a significant proportion of the resources of the company to doing development for NEC. In retrospect this was the decision that killed Cinemaware.”

Cinemaware sank $700,000 into the project, a huge investment at a time when a typical console video game cost around $150,000 to make. The development team was headed by David Riordan, the designer of the original Amiga version of
It Came from the Desert
, and also included programmer Mike Livesay and scriptwriter Ken Melville. “It was a dream project with all the filmic aspects and cool ’50s sci-fi content,” said Melville. The team filmed actors and imported them into the game where they were imposed on still photos of real-life locations to create some of the first live-action film footage seen in a video game. “I’m very proud to have been part of the team bringing motion video for the first time to a game,” said Melville. “It looked like shit, of course, but there it was. Mike had to really bust his hump to extract video and game play out of those old systems. Guys like Mike were the original game heroes who made lemonade out of lemons.”

Although the CD version had a relatively large budget, the team found the money did not stretch far when cameramen, film studios and actors had to be hired. “The
It Came from the Desert
shoots were very minimalist and low-budget,” said Melville. “They were shot in a small studio and designed to pop up occasionally as exposition. Non-interactive stuff.” The project’s budget got even tighter when Cinemaware’s financial problems finally dragged it under in 1991 before the game was finished. Under Riordan’s leadership the team completed the ga on a shoestring budget and it eventually reached the shops in 1992. But by then it was clear NEC’s bid to revive its fortunes with the TurboGrafx-CD had failed miserably.

Cinemaware’s collapse came as the video game industry was preparing for the leap to CD. Game companies started investing in recording and film studios, and exploring how the new technology could enhance their products. They adopted the language of Cinemaware, talking about interactive movies and of blurring the boundaries between Silicon Valley and Hollywood. UK publisher Psygnosis was one of the first to embrace the CD future. The Liverpool-based company, formed out of the wreckage of early 1980s game publisher Imagine, had developed a reputation for beautiful-looking games, such as
Shadow of the Beast
and
Agony,
packaged in luxurious boxes adorned with the fantastical artwork of Roger Dean, the artist famed for his album covers for 1970s prog rockers Yes. Psygnosis saw the audio-visual capabilities of CD as a chance to push its focus on presentation even further. It bought high-end computers that had once been the preserve of movie special effects teams to create stunning visuals that it filmed so they could be shown on more primitive computers via CD’s video capabilities. It also exploited its prog rock connections by hiring former Yes keyboard player Rick Wakeman to write and record a score for its flagship CD game
Microcosm
, a shoot ’em up set within the human body that was inspired by the 1966 film
Fantastic Voyage
.