Replay: The History of Video Games (44 page)

Grrl gaming: The PMS Clan (co-founder Amber Dalton, centre) attend the 2006 E3 trade show in Los Angeles. Associated Press / Reed Saxon

21. We Take Pride In Ripping Them To Shreds

It should have been a coup. On the 28th May 1991, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Sony proudly revealed that it was working with Nintendo to create a version of the Super NES with an in-built CD drive. The two Japanese companies had been working together in secret on the project, tentatively titled the Nintendo PlayStation, since 1989 and with the hype about CD-ROM reaching fever pitch, Sony’s announcement should have been a highlight of the trade show.

But behind the scenes all was not well. Since agreeing to the alliance, Nintendo had become increasingly nervous about Sony’s intentions, fearing that it wanted to use the project to muscle in on the game business. Nintendo’s paranoia was justified. Ken Kutaragi, the Sony engineer who initiated the whole project, saw the partnership as the first step
to achieving his dream of getting Sony to start making game consoles. Suspecting as much, Nintendo decided to strike first. The day after Sony gave its announcement, Nintendo announced it was dropping Sony and was now working with its Dutch rival Philips instead. Sony was shocked at the public humiliation Nintendo had inflicted on it. But if Nintendo had hoped to push Sony out of the game business the move backfired. Sony’s president Nario Ohga was furious and, egged on by Kutaragi, decided to seek revenge by creating Sony Computer Entertainment, a new division headed by Kutaragi that would take Sony into the game console business. The result was the Sony PlayStation, a console that married the two biggest technological developments for video games in the 1990s: CD storage and state-of-the-art 3D graphics.
[1]

In retrospect, the coming together of CD and 3D seemed like a logical next step for consoles but, when Sony first began trying to get game makers interested in its 3D system in 1993, opinion in the video game business was divided. At the time most of the breakthroughs in 3D graphics had yet to happen.
Doom
wouldn’t be released until the end of the year and, even then, the monsters within Id’s 3D world were created using 2D images. The first 3D graphics cards for PC had yet to appear and even in the arcades – the natural home for the latest in video game technology – game developers were only just starting to explore the visual approach.

Many concluded that Sony’s promises of advanced 3D hardware within the PlayStation would simply mean the company’s console would be expensive and, therefore, unpopular. The price problem would only be emphasised later that year when, in October 1993, Panasonic launched the first game console based on Trip Hawkins’ new 3DO hardware standards. The 3DO was born from Hawkins’ belief that the dominance and power of console manufacturers such as Sega and Nintendo was bad for the video game industry. “I looked out towards the mid-1990s with the concern that the industry could not advance with cartridge systems and restrictive licenses,” said Hawkins. “The PC of the time was not a good alternative and none of the console companies had a vision that was constructive for consumers or developers.”

He concluded that there needed to be a VHS of video games: a common hardware platform for developers to create games on that would be manufactured by a range of companies rather than one corporation. And in 1991 he quit Electronic Arts, the game publisher he founded in 1982, to make the idea real by forming The 3DO Company. “The purpose of the 3DO was to advance the game industry through 3D graphics, multimedia capabilities, optical disc mass storage and liberal licensing models,” said Hawkins. “The 3DO was trying to push media back in the direction of more open and democratic licenses, where the costs are very low and nobody tells you what kind of music you can or cannot make.”

Panasonic was the first company to buy the manufacturing rights to Hawkins’ system and in October 1993 it launched its 3DO console, the FZ-1, amid widespread media fanfare. Consumers, however, baulked at the $699.95 price tag that resulted from its advanced technology. “The realisation that it was not going to be a success came in stages,” said Hawkins. “The first arrow was poor 1993 holiday sales. In 1994 it was a big set back that all the developers who had welcomed our charitable $3 license fee were flocking to competitors with bad licenses and $10 fees. It was like the collapse of a union. If developers had been able to stick together they would have had collective bargaining power and could have permanently shifted the value chain.”

One of the competitors developers were flocking to was Sony, which was finally starting to persuade the industry that it really could deliver on its promise of an advanced 3D games console with an acceptable price tag. Ironically, one of the big reasons for the shift in developer opinion was a game developed by rival console maker Sega: Yu Suzuki’s 1993 coin-op game
Virtua Fighter
.

Having pushed the use of hydraulics in coin-op video games to the max with his 1990 360º-motion air combat game
R360 - G-Loc Air Battle
, Suzuki began exploring 3D visuals after seeing Atari Games’
Hard Drivin’
. He decided to create a 3D driving game of his own but, rather than recreating the contemplative pace of Atari’s driving simulator, he set out to make an exhilarating Formula 1-style racing game. The result, 1992’s
Virtua Racing
, used an expensive graphics microprocessor created by military contractors Lockheed Martin to move its Lego-like polygons around the screen at breakneck speed. It was an impressive and popular evolution of
Hard Drivin’
, but Suzuki had bigger plans for his next 3D project.

One of the key objections to 3D graphics that developers had been raising with Sony was that while polygons worked fine for inanimate objects such as racing cars, 2D images were superior when it came to animating people or other characters.
Virtua Fighter
, Suzuki’s follow-up to
Virtua Racing
, was a direct riposte to such thinking. Released in November 1993, it featured fighters built out of polygons. The characters may have resembled artists’ mannequins but their lifelike movement turned Suzuki’s game into a huge success that exploded claims that game characters couldn’t be done successfully in 3D or that people would not warm to them.

But while it was Sega that had proven the full potential of 3D, it was its newest rival – Sony – that capitalised on it. Sega had been wary of basing its successor to the Megadrive console, the Sega Saturn, on 3D graphics and instead built a system that offered some 3D capabilities but was primarily a 2D graphics powerhouse. Sega’s caution meant that Sony had the upper hand when it came to 3D visuals. Teruhisa Tokunaka, chief executive officer of Sony Computer Entertainment, even went so far as to thank Sega for creating
Virtua Fighter
and transforming developers’ attitudes.

Soon Sony was winning over developers across the world. Japanese arcade firm Namco became Sony’s first big-name supporter when it decided to abandon Nintendo and throw its weight behind the PlayStation. Namco’s reproduction of its 3D arcade racing game
Ridge Racer
became one of the PlayStation’s flagship games when it launched in Japan in December 1994.

None of this, however, was enough to put Sega out of the race. Sega still had its bank of popular arcade hits at its disposal and was an established player in the console business. Indeed, when both the Saturn and PlayStation launched in Japan in late 1994, it was Sega who took the sales lead thanks to the home version of
Virtua Fighter
. Within months of its launch the Saturn was fast becoming Sega’s most successful console in Japan. But as 1995 continued and the battle between the two firms expanded into North America and Europe, Sega’s early lead began to slip, not least because it couldn’t match Sony’s mammoth $2 billion worldwide marketing budget for the PlayStation.

Sony was also reaping the benefits of its relationship with Namco, who gave it
Tekken
, a fighting game to rival
Virtua Fighter
, and its 1994 decision to buy UK game publisher Psygnosis. Sony used the Liverpool p
ublisher’s 1995 amphetamine-driven futuristic racing game
WipEout
to connect the PlayStation with Europe’s house music scene.
WipEout
font color="rgb(0, 0, 0)">’s soundtrack brought together some of the continent’s biggest dance acts, including The Chemical Brothers, Leftfield and Orbital, and Sony’s European marketing team deliberately aligned the PlayStation with club culture by installing PlayStation demo pods in nightclubs.
WipEout
would sell more than 1.5 million copies worldwide and helped establish the PlayStation as the first console to take Europe by storm.
[2]

Psygnosis also helped attract more game developers to the PlayStation by creating software that made it easier for other developers to create games for the system. In comparison, those working on the Saturn found themselves faced with little help in creating games for Sega’s complex machine. “Many factors caused the Saturn to do poorly, but they started with the complex system architecture of the Saturn,” said Roger Hector, general manager of Sega’s US development studio the Sega Technical Institute at the time. “It was not easy to learn to program and there were very few tools or documentation available when it came out.”

Soon game companies once loyal to Sega began to question their support for the Saturn. One of those companies was Core Design, a UK developer based in Derby that was part of the CentreGold, a video game conglomerate that had evolved out of US Gold. “Sega had been very good to me,” said Jeremy Heath Smith, the founder of Core Design. “They had transformed my company and I had made a lot of money out of Sega.”

Core Design was working on four games for the Saturn and PlayStation at the time, one of which was
Tomb Raider,
a 3D action game designed by Toby Gard. “Toby was working on
Chuck Rock Racing
– this crazy
Flintstones
-esque racing game – and he said ‘I’ve had this idea for doing Egyptian tomb-raiding type game’,” said Heath Smith. “We loved the concept because there was always going to be so much material to use. So I said let’s get
Chuck Rock Racing
out of the way and do it. We started in pretty broad strokes, which was to have a world that was within tombs that went into a fantasy world because nobody really knows what is in tombs and pyramids and things. The concept did not actually change, but month-by-month as the engine and the technology we were working on got more and more powerful, the game designers were just going bloody mad and we were able to do some amazing things with it.”

Initially Gard designed a male character for the game. “I went down to look at what he was doing and on the screen was Indiana Jones,” said Heath Smith. “I said ‘what the bloody hell’s that?’. He says ‘that’s going to be our character’. There was no way we could use that, we’d just be sued from here to the Moon and back again. So he went away and literally two weeks later he says ‘what about this one?’. I said ‘well it’s a girl, what use is that to anybody?’.”

Gard’s new creation, Lara Croft, was Indiana Jones reimagined as a busty English aristocrat whose hot pants hugged her wasp waist. She was more adolescent fantasy than feminist icon, but for video games it was a huge departure from the norm. Video games were still largely a male pursuit and asking a male audience toy as a woman still seemed like a daring move that bordered on commercial suicide. “At that stage all game characters were still big and burly men,” said Heath Smith. “There had never been a popular female character, but she did have something about her. Toby said ‘let’s just run with it and see. If it doesn’t work we’ll swap it to a guy’. It was just as ridiculous as that.”

As the game got closer to completion, Core Design knew it had created something special. Lara Croft had evolved into a distinctive hero who had potential to gain publicity and the lavish 3D world she had to explore took in caverns with vertigo-inducing drops, tropical jungles and ruined temples. The inclusion of a giant Tyrannosaurus Rex dinosaur to fight also added to the game’s wow factor. Heath Smith decided the game should debut on the Saturn first. “I just felt I could give something back to Sega by giving them a three-month exclusive and hoped it would help them with their hardware sales,” he said.