Replay: The History of Video Games (55 page)

While, like
Little Computer People
, Favaro’s experimental game gained no more than a cult following it did touch many people’s lives. “I have received hundreds of letters and emails from people saying that playing
Alter Ego
was a life-changing experience for them,” said Favaro. “That’s fine and flattering, but I never intended it to be that way. I am always shocked when people talk about how much they’ve learned about themselves from playing
Alter Ego
.”

The poor sales of
Little Computer Peopl
e and
Alter Ego
largely killed off similar experiments and boded ill for
The Sims
. With no backing from Maxis’ management and a little funding, Wright continued to work on his doll’s house game even though there seemed little prospect it would be released. In 1997, however, the prospects for Wright’s project changed dramatically.

The turning point was Electronic Arts’ decision to buy Maxis. “Electronic Arts was doing due diligence, deciding whether to buy our company or not,” said Wright. “They were originally thinking about buying Maxis for
Sim City
, but some of the Electronic Arts executives saw
The Sims
and went ‘what’s this?’ because we didn’t even tell them we were working on this project. They got very excited by it.” Keen to see
The Sims
released, Electronic Arts bought Maxis and immediately handed Wright the money and larger team he needed to complete the game.

By the time Electronic Arts came to the rescue, Wright had developed the game’s concept further in response to Id Software’s 1996 first-person shooter
Quake
.
Quake
had marked the end of the Romero-Carmack partnership that had taken Id Software to the apex of the video game industry, but it also marked a significant step forward for the modding ideas the pair first pioneered in
Doom
. It came with its own programming language –
QuakeC
– that allowed players to not only create maps for players to fight in but offered enough flexibility for them to build whole new games on the back of the
Quake
engine.
QuakeC
accelerated the growth of the modding culture that Id had already encouraged with
Wolfenstein 3D
and
Doom
. By the end of 1996, within a few months of
Quake
’s launch, a team of three fans had produced one of the first mods to gain recognition as a great game in its own right:
Team Fortress
.

Designed as a multiplayer game
Team Fortress
divided players into competing teams composed of soldiers of different abilities who battled each other in a number of matches such as paintball-style ‘capture the flag’ missions and escort games where one team has to guide a VIP through the level while fending off assassination attempts from the opposing team.
Team Fortress
became one of the most popular mods ever made and by 1999 professional game developers Valve had teamed up with its creators to remake it as a commercial game.

Quake
also introduced another feature that, to Id’s surprise, would spawn another outbreak of player creativity. Since death matches had proved to be a highlight for many fans of
Doom
, Id thought its players might enjoy the option to rewatch their games afterwards and added a game-record feature to
Quake
.
[3]

It didn’t take long for
Quake
fans to find an alternative use for the record feature. A group of players called The Rangers were first to tap into the feature’s hidden potential. “We had an internet relay chat channel of our own and had many members and non-members alike sitting there chatting one night,” said Heath Brown, a co-founder of TRangers who played online as ColdSun. “At the time we were making videos of our skills to show the masses and a member named Sphinx jokingly said ‘we should create a movie or something’. He laughed as if the thought was silly, but several of us went silent as the wheels began turning. I felt a chill go up my spine. I’m a very creative individual and I thought this would be a cool way to show some of my stories and ideas to people.”

The Rangers set about trying to use
Quake
’s record function to create a brief test movie that they called
Diary of a Camper
, a 100-second short telling the story of the killing of a ‘camper’ – the term used in online games to refer to players who camp out in advantageous positions on a game map. They decided t
he camper in the film would be
Quake
designer John Romero. “Back then we actually played every day on the Id Software
Quake
servers doing beta tests and fragging other elite clans that hung out on those servers with the developers typing messages in the console.
[4]
John Romero left Id to make
Diakatana
and at the time there was some hard feeling from those of us close to Id,” explained Brown.

Diary of a Camper
’s story was paper-thin and The Rangers never intended it to be anything more than an experiment; a way to see if the idea of making a movie within
Quake
was possible. Despite its primitive nature, The Rangers put the recording online while they got to work on their first proper
Quake
movie:
Ranger Gone Bad
. To their shock,
Diary of a Camper
became a sensation among
Quake
players. “Our website went crazy,” said Brown. “Suddenly there were a lot more
Quake
players wanting to join the clan. There was excitement to see what we would do next and even a little jealousy and mean comments from other clans who said we weren’t
Quake
players, just movie makers.”

Diary of a Camper
acted as a proof of concept for thousands of
Quake
players who realised that with the recording feature and the power of
QuakeC
they had a miniature animation studio within their game that allowed them to harness of the infinitely flexible 3D world of
Quake
to create films. Soon hundreds of people were using
Quake
as a desktop movie studio. Eventually someone coined a name for the burgeoning game movie scene: machinima. “We called them
Quake
movies,” said Brown. “Machinima must have been termed by someone more educated than a bunch of game junky
Quake
-addicts. Great name though.”

Machinima blossomed into a global movement, aided in its growth by game developers who started adding features to their games that were designed to make the production of such movies easier. “The machinima community has really turned into something special,” said Brown. “The work being done now is titanic in comparison to what we did. They even have an awards ceremony each year, just like the Oscars.”

The explosion of modding and machinima within
Quake
and later first-person shooters, had a direct influence on Wright’s approach to
The Sims
, which, thanks to its house building, already had player creativity at its heart. “I was really impressed looking online at games where players were going in and getting more creative involvement,” said Wright. “I came across the
Quake
community that was doing custom skins and machinima. We just loved the idea that players could modify almost any part of the game and so we made these tools to make it easier for them. What with
The Sims
being about a doll’s house in some sense, we wanted players to feel that almost anything in there could be at some level modified.”

While
Quake
encouraged players to redesign their gun-wielding space marine characters, Wright’s team created tools that allowed players to create new clothes for their sims and design new wallpaper patterns.
The Sims
team became hooked on the idea of breaking down some of the barriers that used to exist between player and creator. As well as creating tools so players could make their own content for the game, the team – at the suggestion of Luc Barthelet, who Electronic Arts had put in charge of Maxis after the takeover – linked up with
Sim City
fans online to exchange ideas about the game and spread the word. “
The Sims
was our first effort to build a community and help build it rather than let it accidently happen,” said Wright. “We did a lot of things with the community that really paid off and were kind of experimental.”

Wright’s team carried out live demos of the game over the web and asked viewers to suggest what should happen next in the hope of conveying what people would be able to do in the game while gaining some insight into how people would play it. “We had the game running and twice a second it would send a screenshot online. Players would ask can you make them do this? They were remotely playing the game through us to get a sense of how open ended the game was,” said Wright. “Most of these fan sites were really starved of content, but because we were sending out these images, they were capturing them and using them to build up parts of their website. For example ‘Here’s the whole story about how
The Sims
go to the bathroom’ based upon these screenshots they were capturing. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, but we got the original few hundred people to very much be the evangelists for the next 1,000 people and the next 10,000.”

By the time
The Sims
launched in February 2000, the internet buzz that began with those fan demos was at fever pitch. Some fans had even spent the weeks leading up to the launch designing clothes and wallpaper patterns for their sims-to-be, using tools released by Electronic Arts in advance of the game itself. “
The Sims
was a success from day one, mainly because of the community we built before,” said Wright.

The Sims
’ mix of creativity, voyeurism and humanity tapped into an audience far beyond that of normal video games. It displaced
Myst
as the biggest-selling PC game of all time and estimates suggest more than half of the people who bought
The Sims
were women – a huge proportion for a traditionally male-dominated entertainment media.

The way players used
The Sims
was also unusual, but reflected the trend towards user-generated content seen in
Quake
and other first-person shooters. “People used the game to tell stories,” said Wright. “It was something we anticipated, but it was even more successful than we thought. You could take screenshots and add text to tell stories. We put a feature in so by clicking on one button in the game it would upload to the web on our server, where anyone could read your story. That was far more popular than we thought it would be – before we knew it we had 100,000 stories.”

For many of the players who created photo stories using
The Sims
, the game became a means of self-expression. “Inherently
The Sims
is a toy and people play with it and, at some point, they get wrapped up in the characters and start directing the story,” said Wright. “There’s a transition from open play to more directed narrative, for some people it goes from a form of entertainment to a form of self-expression. Most of the stories have some message to convey. There was one woman who wrote about how her sister was in an abusive relationship and how she managed to get out of it eventually. You feel she wanted to write that story because she wanted other people to realise they could get out of these relationships. This is the kind of person who would probably never write a book or short story or anything else, but she has, with
The Sims
, been able to convey this message that really had a strong resonance with her to a wider group.”

Quake
and
The Sims
took the concept of games that encouraged user-generated content into the mainstream of video gaming. The blurring of the boundary between player and creator would have a powerful influence on the development of video games during the 2000s. Every first-person shooter on the PC began to include modding features and by the late 2000s it had even spread onto consoles via shooters such as 2007’s
Halo 3
.
The Sims 2
sought to develop player storytelling by including machinima-influenced video making tools.