Replay: The History of Video Games (62 page)

Coffee shop coders: Ron Carmel (left) and Kyle Gabler, aka 2D Boy. Courtesy of 2D Boy

28. Magic Shooting Out Of People’s Fingers

Kyle Gabler arrived at Electronic Arts’ studios just outs
ide San Francisco full of dreams about his new life as a game designer. He would get to work with game design legend Will Wright on titles such as
The Urbz: Sims in the City
, a 2004 console-only offshoot of
The Sims
, right in the Bay Area heartland of the video game industry. At the time Electronic Arts was the largest game publisher in the world, having emerged as one of the victors of the complex web of acquisitions, mergers and closures during the 1990s, which had restructured the business into an oligopoly dominated by a small number of multinational publishers.

Back in 1990 it was still possible for a team of less than five people to create a hit game with a budget of less than $200,000. But by the early 2000s, ever-rising technological complexity and consumer expectations had made the creation of a smash hit video game a multi-million-dollar endeavour that required teams containing of dozens of programmers, artists, designers, quality assurance testers and audio specialists.

Encouraged by dot.com boom investors, who were shovelling cash into every computing-related company going in the late 1990s, and the need to grow fast to cope with the rising costs of game development, publishers began buying each other out and merging in a desperate race to become the biggest. Such was the resulting concentration of power that in 2003 Electronic Arts’ $2.48 billion annual turnover was 13 times that of Midway Games, the world’s 20th largest game publisher.

The two to three dozen publishers who dominated the games business controlled the funding of almost all game development in the early 2000s. If these companies didn’t give a game the go-ahead, that game would have little chance of ever being made, let alone marketed or distributed in the shops. And with millions at stake, publishers shied away from funding experimental and untested game ideas. Instead they bankrolled games that followed tried-and-tested styles of play and scenarios that market data suggested players were already comfortable with.

Countless experimental and off-the-wall games bit the dust as video game puishing underwent a transition similar to that experienced by Hollywood during the mid-1970s to late 1980s when studios refocused on blockbuster movies.

Among the games abandoned as a result of the changing business climate was Sensible Software’s S
ex ‘n’ Drugs ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll
, an adults-only comedy about a wannabe rock star’s outrageous sex-and-drugs-fuelled rise to stardom. “The main problem was our publisher Warner Interactive sold up to GT Interactive,” said Jon Hare, the co-founder of Sensible Software, the British game studio best known for its
Sensible Soccer
games. “GT were a Bible Belt company who couldn’t be seen to be near a game where people snorted coke and shagged people in toilets, even if it was a comedy. It is depressing when I think about it, it could have been a really groundbreaking game.”

Before joining Electronic Arts, however, Gabler had thought little about the industry’s transformation into a multi-billion dollar business where failing to make a hit game could leave publishers out of pocket to the tune of tens of millions. The reality of life as a game maker in a large corporation came as a shock. “Before I worked at Electronic Arts, I imagined the halls would be filled with tricycles and rainbows, and everyone’s office would be a ball pit and game development would be like magic shooting out of people’s fingers,” said Gabler. “It wasn’t exactly like that. It turns out humans make games by typing on keyboards and having meetings with Post-It notes and telephone calls and spreadsheets.”

Ron Carmel, a software engineer at Electronic Arts’ online game service Pogo.com, shared Gabler’s disillusionment.
[1]
They also felt, as salaried employees, detached from the success or failure of their work. The pair gravitated to each other. They would discuss their sense that game making was not the creative nirvana they always dreamed it would be. They talked about what they would do if they weren id="filepos1292135">t constrained by the pressures of big-budget projects and corporate conservatism.

Eventually they began to question whether it had to be this way. They concluded it didn’t and decided it was time to act. “Maybe it should have been obvious earlier that anybody can do those game development things out of their own bedroom or cafés and without millions of dollars, but it wasn’t,” said Gabler. “Before taking the leap towards unemployment, we calculated how long we could survive without an income. We found that by living very lightly, we would be able to survive for a little over a year. If we ran out of time, we would have to crawl back to the world of employment.”

The pair quit Electronic Arts in 2006 and became 2D Boy, a two-man indie game studio that used San Francisco coffee shops with wi-fi internet access as their offices. Five years earlier such a move would have been deemed suicidal. Without publisher support it seemed impossible to make, market and distribute a commercially viable game. But in the five years leading up to 2D Boy’s formation, the adoption of broadband internet connections had begun to erode publishers’ and retailers’ grip on access to consumers.

By the time 2D Boy formed, the internet was already having a seismic affect on other publishing industries, most notably record labels who had been dragged – kicng and screaming for the most part – into a world of downloadable music. Online music stores such as Apple’s iTunes had begun luring shoppers away from the shops, undermining the record labels’ control of the retail space. The internet also allowed artists to release and market their music online for almost no cost. The rise of the British rock band Arctic Monkeys on the back of internet word-of-mouth personified the shifting balance of power in the music business. Promoted online by their fans, the Arctic Monkeys built up a loyal following who sent their 2005 debut song
I bet you look good on the dancefloor
straight to the top of the UK charts. Publishers in the film, newspaper and book industries soon found themselves facing a similar erosion of their control of what people consumed. And video games, the most digital of all mediums, were no exception.

Video games’ shift towards online distribution began in the late 1990s with the emergence of websites where players could play games through their web browsers. Most were brief, throwaway diversions designed to drive traffic to sites that hoped to profit by selling advertising off the back of visitor numbers. By the end of the 1990s, some of these games started to attract legions of fans. The first big success was 1999’s
Moorhuhn
, a game designed to promote Johnnie Walker whiskey to German drinkers.

Created by Dutch developers Witan for German publisher Phenomedia,
Moorhuhn
challenged players to shoot down as many grouses as possible in 90 seconds. “You might even guess which competitor they had in sight,” said Thomas Daniels, the director of sales and marketing at Phenomedia. “The game was first used by promoters going into bars and letting people play on laptops. Achieving sufficient points got you a drinks voucher. You could also get a copy of the game on disc. Hardcore gamers put it online and because it was simple and fun it attracted interest and started spreading.”

Moorhuhn
became an internet sensation in German-speaking countries as millions of people logged onto websites to shoot grouses out of the sky. Within a decade of the game’s creation more than 80 million copies of the original game and its 20 online sequels and spin-offs had been downloaded across the world. Some 15 million offline
Moorhuhn
games had been bought and the quirky bird that fronted the game had been immortalised in a German TV cartoon series.
Moorhuhn
’s simple point-and-click bird-hunting was a world away from the ever more complex and involving games being created at a cost of millions by giant publishers such as Electronic Arts. And it was this simplicity that Phenomedia believed was vital to its massive success.

“One of the big differences when designing a successful game for a non-hardcore audience is complexity, especially in terms of accessibility,” said Daniels. “A good casual game is designed so that you do not have to read a manual and will ease you into the game, although they can get fairly complex or rather difficult over the course of the game. A hardcore game that gets enjoyed by hardcore gamers is usually complex in terms of things you have to take care of in the game right from the start – just think about those strategy and simulation titles.”

The spr of the internet also encouraged small game companies to start thinking about reinventing the shareware business model used by Id Software for
Doom
for the dot.com era. Sexy Action Cool was one of the first companies to try selling shareware games via the internet. The company started life as a developer of online games for sites such as Pogo.com in 2000, just as the internet boom of the late 1990s turned into bust. “It was pretty much the worst time to start an internet company, but we were pretty confident business wise,” said co-founder Jason Kapalka, who like his fellow co-founders, Brian Fiete and John Vechey, worked at Pogo.com before forming Sexy Action Cool. “We thought it was improbable we could do this as publishers, rather than developers, so we didn’t even bother to get a URL for ourselves. We called ourselves Sexy Action Cool, which was a weird inside joke from the Antonio Banderas’ film
Desperado
. There was a poster for it with a critic quote that said ‘Sexy, Action, Cool’. I thought it was the strangest thing that could ever be used in a sentence and it became an inside joke.”

Sexy Action Cool’s business plans and name quickly changed, however, when it was suggested they do a shareware version of
Diamond Mine
, a diamond-matching puzzle game they had created for Microsoft’s online game site Zone.com. “At the time it seemed like an odd choice because we were trying to make a game that people would play for free online,” said Kapalka. “The question was why would someone pay for this game when they could just play it on the Microsoft site for free? In 2000 one reason was that they couldn’t be online all the time as they won’t be able to use their phone and so maybe they’d want to play offline and the graphics would be better.”

Figuring that the name Sexy Action Cool would do little to attract the audience they wanted, the company renamed itself PopCap Games and began selling
Diamond Mine Deluxe
as a downloadable game through their website. Selling the game online offered clear advantages over the mail-order shareware approach of old. “Things like
Doom
were pre-internet,” said Kapalka. “If you wanted to buy
Doom
, you sent a cheque away and a couple of weeks later these disks came in the mail from Texas. It worked, but it was time consuming and a pain.”

Diamond Mine Deluxe
, which was later renamed
Bejeweled
, had no such delays. People could try the game online, pay for it and download it in a matter of minutes. Presented in the upbeat, colourful visuals that PopCap would make its trademark,
Bejeweled
challenged players to rearrange a grid of different diamonds by swapping adjacent diamonds to form horizontal or vertical lines of three or more of the same type. Much like
Tetris
, its simplicity belied its compulsive appeal.

Bejeweled
also challenged the status quo of game design thinking, which regarded its lack of a time limit and randomness as bad design. “The version of the game that became most popular was not timed ad you were making moves until you ran out of them and then you lose,” said. “We showed it to a professional game designer who said it had terrible game design because the game just ended randomly. There was really no way to control that, you just keep swapping until eventually the configuration didn’t give you any moves and then that was it. This guy was like ‘this is bad game design, you don’t have any control over whether you win or lose, it just randomly happens – it could happen on your second or third turn or it could go on for a long time’.”