Replay: The History of Video Games (63 page)

But like many developers who used the internet to sell their creations, PopCap discovered that such theories were often based on more on video game tradition than player preferences. “One of things that is unusual about B
ejeweled
is that it is largely luck-based, but there’s nothing wrong with luck-based games they’ve just been severely underrepresented in computer games because of their birth in the arcades,” said Kapalka. “Computer games have primarily been skills-based and a lot of that has been because of their arcade roots. They all test whether you can master the game and get better at it. That’s fair enough, but the truth is in the realm of games that humans play and have played since the dawn of time games of luck have probably outnumbered games of skill.”

Bejeweled
’s flouting of video game design theory did it no harm. A decade on from its 2000 debut as
Diamond Mine
, the game had sold more than 50 million copies across the world. PopCap’s games had also tapped into an audience with markedly different backgrounds to the young male demographic targeted by most big-budget games with a 2006 survey of 2,191 players on PopCap’s website reporting that 76 per cent were women and 47 per cent were aged 50 or older.

PopCap’s confounding of industry thinking would be repeated over and over again as small, internet-based online game studios sprung up during the 2000s.
Alien Hominid
, a 2002 Flash game created by San Diego developers The Behemoth, also challenged industry assumptions. The game reinvented the run-and-gun style of shoot ‘em up pioneered by the 1987 coin-op game
Contra
, where
players world race through a 2D landscape blasting anything that got in the way. While the game style dated back years, it had largely died out by the time The Behemoth staged its revival of the genre.
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“A lot of Flash games weren’t really testing the limits of what Flash could do, so the run ‘n’ gun action of
Alien Hominid
felt pretty unique for a web game in 2002,” said Tom Fulp, co-founder of The Behemoth. John Baez, another co-founder of The Behemoth, felt that for many people the game style would feel fresh: “
Alien Hominid
has its roots in retro to be sure, but so many young kids have missed that whole part of the history of video games because they weren’t born. For many kids in 2004, realistic 3D games were all they knew, so a side-scrolling 2D shooter was a novelty.”

Alien Hominid
won a huge online following, attracting 18 million players on the Flash games website Newgrounds alone - enough to inspire The Behemoth to convert the game to the leading consoles of the day: the PlayStation 2, Gamecube and Xbox. But while the web browser games of the early 2000s paved the way for the independent games movement, it would be the arrival of online game stores in the mid-2000s that really opened the creative floodgates. The first of these platforms piggybacked its way onto PCs across the world via
Half-Life 2
, Valve’s 2004 sequel to its revolutionary first-person shooter
Half-Life
. In order to run
Half-Life 2
, PC owners were required to install Steam, an iTunes-esque application that managed their games and allowed them to buy new ones. As a result of its compulsory adoption by millions of
Half-Life 2
players, Steam became the dominant game download store on the PC.

Initially Steam only sold Valve’s own games, but in 2005 the platform was opened up to other game makers. British game designer Mark Healey’s comical marital arts title
Rag Doll Kung Fu
became the first non-Valve game released on Steam. Healey had started out in the games business as a programmer but ended up becoming a graphics artist for Peter Molyneux’s Lionhead Studios. By 2004, however, he was growing restless: “I got to that stage where I was feeling the itch to code something so I went and learned C++, which is the programming language most people use these days to make games, and the best way to learn a language is to give yourself a project. I decided I was going to do a little fighting game.”

Healey’s training project snowballed into a more ambitious and visually unique game. “The game was getting to the stage where you could just punch and kick each other,” said Healey. “I started putting platforms in and my colleague at Lionhead Alex Evans looked at it and suggested I put in rope swings and gave me a piece of code that was a simple rope simulation. I took it home and was just playing around with it really, and funnily enough one of the ropes fell onto the ground in the shape of almost-a-matchstick man. That sparked it off. I thought I could use this rope stuff to make mad characters. That was the Eureka moment.”

Healey’s fighting game turned into a chaotic multiplayer punch-up where players controlled floppy and amusing puppet-like characters that would wobble, flop and flail around the screen hoping to whack the living daylights out of each other. And after he put a link to his side project on Lionhead’s website,
Rag Doll Kung Fu
became the talk of the youthful indie games movement. “It took on a life of its own on the internet,” said Healey. “I got invited to the Experimental Games Workshop at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to show the game. So I trundled off there and in my mind it was going to be a small little room with maybe 10 people showing each other what they had done, but I turned up and it was a huge room with about 500 people in it. I totally panicked because I hadn’t prepared a proper talk or anything.”

The Experimental Games Workshop had established itself as the annual gathering of the indie game movement, a forum where the individuals and teams that were taking game creation back to the free-for-all experimentation of the early 1980s could unite. The workshop started out in 2002 as a low-key offshoot of the Game Developernference that showcased unusual lo-fi creations such as Jonathan Blow’s
Air Guitar
, which used a web cam to allow players to strum imaginary six-strings to create music, and Eric Zimmerman’s
Arcadia
, a collection of simple VCS 2600-style games that are displayed and played simultaneously.

Since that modest beginning it had grown in size and influence, serving up a mixture of the bizarre and groundbreaking to an audience of inspiration-seeking game developers and acting as an early champion of new ideas such as the tower defense mods created by players of
WarCraft III
that would later became a new game genre.

The year Healey arrived to show off
Rag Doll Kung Fu
, the indie games movement was reaching critical mass. Other demos shown that year included an early version of Blow’s
Braid
, a brain-aching platform game coated in a narrative that subverted the traditional princess-rescuing storylines of
Super Mario Bros
and revolved around manipulating time to solve puzzles. Alongside that was
Attack of the Killer Swarm
, a game put together in a day by future 2D Boy Gabler. Set on a backdrop of a faded sepia photograph of a street scene, the player controls the ‘killer swarm’ - a mass of sketchy pencil lines that could be swished around the screen and used to hurl small people wandering on the streets into the air to the accompaniment of jaunty classical music and their screams of horror.

Healey’s presentation, put together just an hour earlier, went down a storm. “I got a lot of laughs and it just so happened there were some people from Valve in the audience and they came up to me afterwards and said it’s perfect for what we want to do with Steam – sell games. I flew to Seattle the next day to meet their founder Gabe Newell and did the deal there and then. It was all a bit of a mad rollercoaster. That was the first non-Valve game they ever released on Steam, so I was a bit of a guinea pig in some ways.”

Rag Doll Kung Fu
was quickly joined on Steam by more games. Among them was
Darwinia
, an unusual real-time strategy game dressed in distinctive 1980s retro-computer graphics.
Darwinia
was the creation of Introversion, a British game studio formed in 2001 by three university friends: Thomas Arundel, Chris Delay and Mark Morris.

From the day it formed, Introversion set out to distance itself from the market-driven creations of the mainstream games business, seeking instead to revive the freewheeling games culture of the early UK games industry. “I remember growing up playing so many different and varied video games, in my case on the Spectrum and then the Amiga,” said Morris. “The games that you would have in your collection would all be quite different in form and layout – just crazy concepts. You would get games magazine cover disks and you really didn’t know what you were going to put in and play next. But by the end of the ’90s it had all become less about the innocent and child-like gaming experience and moreout the attempt to have higher-resolution graphics, like the driving games that stopped being push left and you’ll turn left, push right and you’ll turn right, into these more complicated driver sims. What we were seeing was because of the publisher-developer model and the amount of money it cost to get a game in front of the consumer, anything that was creative and didn’t fit into the publisher’s master control spreadsheets was going to get cut.”

So when Delay, the studio’s creative driving force, came up with
Uplink
, a paranoia-inducing game where players were hired by corporations to damage their rivals, frame the innocent and crash the stock market by hacking into computers, the three figured they could use the internet to bypass the publishing world. “It was 2001, so the internet had been around but probably not mainstream at that point – my parents probably weren’t wired in at that stage, but we knew that we could, as a company, handle people’s transactions over the internet,” said Morris. “We couldn’t distribute electronically, but we could ship out physical units so the view was we were going to put
Uplink
in front of the masses and if they liked it they would be able to buy it.”

Uplink
struck a nerve with the video game press, which promoted it heavily. Soon Introversion was inundated with orders and approaches from video game publishers interested in signing their surprise hit. “We were getting publisher offers for
Uplink
but they were just atrocious,” said Morris. “We were selling 30,000 units a month and publishers were saying we’ll give you $10,000. That kind of made us realise that the industry, the whole model in terms of development, in terms of creativity was just fundamentally broken at its core back then. We went on the campaign trail to a certain degree really, yelling at publishers and being very angry and trying to convince developers – not big developers but smaller ones – that there was a different way.”

Valve’s opening up of Steam made this different way even easier. “Steam allowed us to reach so many more people,” said Morris. “I actually argued not to go with Steam. I thought all we were going to do by giving Valve the opportunity to sell our games on Steam was to potentially lose some of the sales from our own website and give away some security and control. I was so wrong. The number of sales that Valve can deliver through Steam is just phenomenonal.”

The ability for indie game makers to reach audiences without the need for a publisher expanded further in 2005 when Microsoft launched its second games console, the Xbox 360. With its hard drive and wireless broadband connection, the Xbox 360 allowed users to buy and download games via its Xbox Live Arcade service that stocked games ranging from remakes of early 1980s coin-op hits and indie games to full Xbox 360 games more usually sold through shops. The following year both the Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3 consoles launched
boasting similar services of their own. The arrival of the touch-screen Apple iPhone and its accompanying AppStore in 2007 added another platform through which small developers could reach out to a mass audience via the internet. The establishment of these online game stores finally gave indie game developers the access and profile they needed to really get their work in front of potential buyers.
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Gabler and Carmel’s 2D Boy was one of the first indie developers to really reap the benefits of the new connections between player and creator that resulted from these platforms.

The pair’s first creation was
World of Goo
, a spiritual successor to Gabler’s earlier non-commercial indie game
Tower of Goo
. Like
Attack of the Killer Swarm
, Gabler created
Tower of Goo
for the Experimental Gameplay Project he helped form while a student at Carnegie Mellon University. In
Tower of Goo
players built wobbly towers by connecting blobs of slime that linked together like scaffolding. The challenge was to try and build the tallest tower possible without the structure toppling over. “It started with 100 little goo balls on a little green hill and the goal was to build a tower up to a cloud 25 metres high,” said Gabler. “People on the internet had a lot of fun with it, competing to build the tallest towers, and even sculpting things like cats and pensises. It seemed like a good idea to expand on the basic goo-construction mechanic and turn
Tower of Goo
into a bigger, more detailed
World of Goo
.”