# Replay ## Metadata * Author: [Tristan Donovan](https://www.amazon.com/Tristan-Donovan/e/B005BKG3VE/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1) * ASIN: B003VRZH2U * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003VRZH2U * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U) ## Highlights Finally, a note on terminology. I’ve used the term ‘video game’ throughout this book with the occasional use of ‘game’ when there is no risk of confusion with other forms of game such as board games. I chose video game in preference to other terms for several reasons: it remains in every day use, unlike TV game or electronic game; it is broad enough to encompass the entire medium unlike ‘computer game’, which would exclude games, such as Atari’s Pong, that did not use microprocessors; and terms such as ‘interactive entertainment’, while more accurate, have failed to catch on despite repeated attempts over the years. — location: [73](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=73) ^ref-38357 Useful to look at the history of use cases going back a few decades on google ngram to see if there are cycles. --- Like the Chess programmers, Samuel wanted to create a Checkers game that could defeat a human player. He completed his first Checkers game in 1952 on an IBM 701; the first commercial computer created by the company, and would spend the next two decades refining it. By 1955 he had developed a version that could learn from its mistakes that caused IBM’s share price to leap 15 points when it was shown on US television and by 1961 Samuel’s programme was defeating US Checkers champions. — location: [161](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=161) ^ref-6285 --- The technological breakthroughs made during the Second World War had brought down the cost of manufacturing TV sets and US consumers now had money to burn after years of austerity. In 1946 just 0.5 per cent of households owned a television. By 1950 this proportion had soared to 9 per cent and by the end of the decade there was a television in almost 90 per cent of US homes. — location: [168](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=168) ^ref-7651 --- In 1947, the pioneering TV network Dumont became first to try and explore the idea of allowing people to play games on their TV sets. Two of the company’s employees – Thomas Goldsmith and Estle Mann – came up with the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device. — location: [173](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=173) ^ref-37751 --- By the end of 1967 the Brown Box was nearing completion and had attracted the interest of TelePrompter Corporation, a cable TV company that saw it during a visit to Sanders. Sanders’ position as a military contractor meant it couldn’t just start making Baer’s toy, so the hope was that TelePrompter would buy the rights to produce it. But after two months of talks, cash-flow problems at TelePrompter resulted in the talks being abandoned. And since neither Baer nor Sanders had any idea who else might want to buy the rights, the Brown Box was left to gather dust. — location: [299](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=299) ^ref-22517 --- And it was during one of these Spacewar! sessions in 1966 that Tuck remarked that if only they could make a coin-operated version of the game they would get rich. With computers still hugely expensive and large, the idea was little more than a daydream. But then, in 1969, the Digital Equipment Corporation unveiled the $20,000 PDP-11. At that price, Pitts thought, a coin-op version of Spacewar! might be possible: “I called Hugh up and said we could now build one of these things.” — location: [350](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=350) ^ref-46039 --- After graduating in 1968, Bushnell became an engineer for Ampex Corporation, a company best known for its breakthroughs in audio and video recording technology. While working there he read about the Data General Nova, a computer that cost $3,995, and immediately thought again of Spacewar!. — location: [376](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=376) ^ref-50895 --- A few weeks later, in September 1971, Galaxy Game, the first coin-operated video game, made its debut at the Tresidder Union. From the moment it was switched on the machine attracted a crowd. “We had people 10-deep, packed around the machine trying to look over each other to watch the guys play the game,” said Pitts. The generous approach to charging meant Galaxy Game earned nowhere near enough to justify its cost, but the game’s popularity encouraged Pitts and Tuck to persevere. — location: [429](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=429) ^ref-3371 --- In November 1971, two months after the launch of Galaxy Game, the first Computer Space machine was installed at the Dutch Goose bar near the Stanford University campus. Its black and white TV screen sat encased in colourful and curvy fibreglass that could have come straight from the set of the 1968 sci-fi film Barbarella. Computer Space screamed the future and to Bushnell’s delight the drinkers at the Dutch Goose seemed to like it. “The Dutch Goose was the first location where we tested Computer Space and it did fantastically well. What we didn’t realise is that it had a very high percentage of college students,” said Bushnell. With the initial test having gone well, Nutting Associates pushed ahead with the production of Computer Space hoping to woo arcade operators with its revolutionary technology and lack of moving parts.[3] Nutting Associates produced more than 1,500 Computer Space units expecting a smash hit, but the reaction away from student bars proved less favourable. “When we put it in a few working man’s beer bars it did no money,” said Bushnell. “It didn’t do anything because it was too complex.” — location: [443](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=443) ^ref-22298 --- Sanders demoed the Brown Box to the television manufacturers who dominated the US market at the time: General Electric; Magnavox; Motorola; Philco; RCA; and Sylvania. “When we demonstrated to these companies in ’69 everyone of them went ‘that’s great’, but nobody would offer a dime except RCA and when we worked out the agreement we said we couldn’t live with that and walked away,” said Baer. — location: [483](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=483) ^ref-36697 --- In January 1971, Magnavox signed a preliminary deal with Sanders and began work on turning the Brown Box into a marketable product. Magnavox redesigned the casing for the machine and briefly renamed it the Skill-O-Vision before settling on the Odyssey. — location: [489](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=489) ^ref-36737 --- The Brown Box’s collection of seven games was built up to 12 titles including the maze-chase game Cat & Mouse, an educational title called States! and the Ping-Pong game developed back in 1967. The rifle game that convinced Sanders to keep the project alive became the sold-separately Shooting Gallery add-on for the Odyssey. — location: [491](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=491) ^ref-18707 --- Magnavox then decided to add paper money, playing cards and poker chips to enhance the games and plastic overlays that attached to the TV screen to make up for the Odyssey’s primitive visuals. And with so much packed in with the game console, the $19.95 price tag Baer originally hoped for became $99.95. Baer was appalled: “I saw the box and out comes 10,000 playing cards, paper money and all this crap. I just knew nobody’s ever going to use this stuff.” With the enhancements in place Magnavox set a launch date of August 1972 for the world’s first games console, — location: [495](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=495) ^ref-53500 --- Dabney and Bushnell agreed to invest $250 each in the company to incorporate it only to find that another company already had the Syzygy name. Bushnell turned to his favourite game – the Japanese board game Go – for inspiration and suggested the company’s new name should be Atari, a term from Go — location: [508](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=508) ^ref-58240 --- similar to check in Chess. Dabney agreed and on 27th June 1972 Atari Incorporated was born. — location: [510](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=510) ^ref-22246 --- The customers at Andy Capp’s had gone crazy for Pong, people had even begun queuing outside the bar waiting for it to open just so they could play the game. — location: [531](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=531) ^ref-24703 --- With options drying up, Atari decided to make the game itself. It was a big leap for the young firm: it had next-to-no money, no production line and no links with arcade machine distributors. Bushnell was nervous about the move but figured the game’s simple design meant it would be easy to build. Atari gambled everything on its first run of Pong machines. “Our first run was 11 units, which was 100 per cent of the money that we had,” said Bushnell. Each machine cost $280 to make but sold for $900. — location: [539](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=539) ^ref-18247 --- By now word about Pong had spread through the arcade business. “We had distributors all over the country who were just screaming for the units,” said Bushnell. Atari needed a proper production line fast if it was going to meet the soaring demand for Pong, but lacked the cash needed to set up a proper manufacturing facility. So Bushnell headed to the banks to ask for a credit facility. The banks were, however, disinterested – put off by Bushnell’s long hair and the dubious image of the amusements business, which had become linked in the public mind with gangsters and gambling. — location: [547](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=547) ^ref-17736 --- So when Bushnell asked banks for a loan to help build his amusements machine business, they showed him the door. Eventually Bushnell persuaded the bank Wells Fargo to lend Atari $50,000 on the back of an order for 150 Pong machines. It was less than Atari had hoped for, but enough to get a production line going. — location: [563](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=563) ^ref-32662 --- Pong soon went global. In Japan, Taito, an amusements manufacturer built off the back of jukeboxes, peanut vending machines and crane games, looked at Pong and produced Elepong – the first Japanese arcade game. French billiards table makers René Pierre jumped on the Pong bandwagon with Smatch and in Italy, Bologna-based pinball company Zaccaria entered the digital age with TV Joker, a Pong copy produced under licence from Atari. “In 1972, Pong arrived in Italy and it was a great success,” — location: [580](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=580) ^ref-61623 --- By September 1974 an estimated 100,000 coin-operated video games were in operation across the US, raking in around $250 million a year. For the amusements business, long shamed by being connected to gambling and gangsters, the video game offered a new start, attracting a new demographic to the arcades. “For years, our games – pinballs, shuffle alley, pool – appealed mainly to, you know, the labouring class. Now with the video games you have a broader patronage,” Howard Robinson, the manager of an Atlanta coin-op distributor, told The Ledger newspaper in September 1974. “A lot of lounges will take a video game that never would have let a pinball machine in the door.” — location: [598](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=598) ^ref-465 expanding market in the 70s --- It should be noted that at this time, and throughout most of the 1970s, ‘TV games’ was the more common term. The term ‘video game’ eventually came to the fore later in the 1970s and the term ‘TV game’ faded away in the early 1980s. ‘Computer games’ were also sometimes talked about but, since most video games did not use microprocessors before the late 1970s, it’s a misleading term. As Ralph Baer put it: “People began calling them computer games. They weren’t. There were no computers!” — location: [615](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=615) ^ref-24595 worth checking for these terms on google ngram viewer --- firms. In the early 1960s, Ikeda Hayato, the Japanese prime minister who played a crucial role in the nation’s post-Second World War economic success, had introduced laws that restricted the activities of foreign companies in a bid to protect Japanese businesses. On top of this, Japanese coin-op distributors refused to work with the cocky American business. — location: [694](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=694) ^ref-40651 Comparable to china today? --- Atari Japan was sold to Nakamura Manufacturing, a Japanese coin-op manufacturer and distributor formed in 1955 by Masaya Nakamura that would rename itself Namco in 1977. — location: [715](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=715) ^ref-10037 --- But the implications of the microchip for video games did not end there. As the mid-1970s turned in the late 1970s, the arrival of a new type of microchip – the microprocessor – would reshape not just the video game business but also the very nature of what and how people played.[4] — location: [819](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=819) ^ref-41354 --- [3]. Invented in the late 1950s, integrated circuits – also called microchips – allowed the discrete components that used to form electronic circuits to be shrunk and flattened onto a silicon chip. The result was a massive breakthrough in electronics. Integrated circuits were not only much smaller but were easy to mass produce (the chips could essentially be printed en masse), used less electricity and were more reliable. — location: [832](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=832) ^ref-1630 --- a result. Bally asked Dave Nutting Associates to redesign the game using Intel’s 8080 microprocessor. Using a microprocessor turned the video game development process on its head. No longer would engineers armed with soldering irons build games out of hardware. Instead computer programmers would write the game in software that told the flexible hardware of microprocessors how the hardware should work. "TTL logic was a hard-wired system, to make a change in game play meant redoing the circuit. Once we established the microprocessor hardware system all game logic was done in software,” said Nutting. — location: [900](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=900) ^ref-8982 --- Bally’s RAM order was a major purchase. Nutting estimated it swallowed up around 60 per cent of the memory chips available in the world at the time. Wolverton needn’t have worried though. Gun Fight became a popular arcade game and soon every video game manufacturer was looking at how they could use microprocessors in their products, Nishikado included: “Quite frankly I thought the play of Gun Fight was not really good and in Japan my version of Western Gun was better received. But I was very impressed with the use of the microprocessor technology and couldn’t wait to learn this skill. I started analysing the game as soon as I could.” The days of TTL video games were finished. — location: [916](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=916) ^ref-48801 --- There was no underlying motivation or thoughts in creating the first controversial video game. It was created out of necessity and defence of our own product licensing.” The media and public, however, didn’t agree and Death Race provoked the first major moral panic over the content of a video game. — location: [935](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=935) ^ref-14180 --- With Bushnell keen to see Breakout put into production, Bristow handed the job of developing the game to Steve Jobs, a young hippy who had taken a technician’s job at Atari so he could earn enough money to — location: [967](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=967) ^ref-54948 --- Jobs asked his friend Steve Wozniak for help, offering to give him half of the bonus payment. Wozniak, a technical genius who worked for the business technology firm Hewlett Packard, agreed. “Wozniak spent his evenings working on a prototype for Breakout and he delivered a very compact design,” said Bristow. Wozniak slashed the number of integrated circuits in half and netted Jobs a bonus worth several thousand dollars. — location: [973](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=973) ^ref-8686 --- Despite its user-unfriendliness, thousands of computer hobbyists bought an Altair and set about building hardware and writing software for the system, which was powered by the same microprocessor used in Gun Fight. Among them were Paul Allen and Bill Gates who wrote a version of the programming language BASIC for the Altair and formed Microsoft to sell it. — location: [998](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=998) ^ref-48425 --- Shepperd, meanwhile, was making games for the system. “I designed and built a new video subsystem integrated into the Altair,” he said. “I got it working and coded up a few very simple games. — location: [1000](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1000) ^ref-14312 --- “We had a terminal that printed at 30 characters per second on paper 80 characters wide. It would print a new line every two seconds. It was so fast it took our breath away. When you’ve never seen it before it’s like magic – speed doesn’t enter into it.” This lack of speed, however, ruled out the creation of action games similar to those in the arcades. Instead, computer programmers had little choice but to make turn-based games. The vast majority of these games were incredibly crude. — location: [1078](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1078) ^ref-25022 Similar to todays blockchain gaming world where games are crude because pf tech --- Soon players could take part in Wild West shoot outs in Highnoon, take command of the USS Enterprise in Star Trek, manage virtual cities in The Sumer Game, search for monsters that lurked within digital caves in Hunt the Wumpus and try to land an Apollo Lunar Module on the moon in Lunar. The action in all these games took place turn by turn, with the text describing the outcomes of each player decision pecked out slowly on teleprinters. — location: [1085](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1085) ^ref-35865 --- To make the game easy for his children to play he decided that, like Eliza, it should let players use everyday English and got the game to recognise a small number of two-word verb-noun commands such as ‘go north’ or ‘get treasure’. Crowther hoped this ‘natural language’ approach would make the game less intimidating to non-computer users. — location: [1111](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1111) ^ref-8974 --- The result, Adventure, was a giant leap forward for text games. While Hunt the Wumpus let people explore a virtual cave and Highnoon had described in-game events in text, none had used writing to try and create a world in the mind of players or let them interact with it using plain English. Yet while his daughters loved the game, Crowther thought it was nothing special. After completing Adventure in 1976, he left it on the computer system at work and headed to Alaska for a holiday. — location: [1115](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1115) ^ref-1944 --- When Thompson ended up leaving NASA Ames to join MIT’s Dynamic Modelling team in early 1974, he brought Maze with him. “Maze was based on a graphical maze-running game, Greg had brought from NASA Ames. We decided it would be much more fun if multiple people could play it and shoot each other,” Lebling said. The pair reworked Maze again so that up to eight people could play it at once. They created computer-controlled ‘robot’ players to make up the numbers when there weren’t enough real players and let players send each other text messages during while playing. — location: [1162](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1162) ^ref-7382 --- “We actually played it a few times with colleagues on the West Coast, though ARPAnet was rather slow and the lag was horrible. Maze became so popular that the management of our group tried to suppress it,” said Lebling. — location: [1170](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1170) ^ref-58502 --- He showed the prototype to his friend Steve Jobs, who had just returned from his trip to India. Jobs suggested they form a company to sell it to other computer enthusiasts and on 1st April 1976 they formed Apple Computer. The company produced more than 150 hand-made Apple Is but, by the time it went on sale in the summer of 1976, Wozniak was already close to completing work on a better computer that could appeal to a wider audience: the Apple II. — location: [1219](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1219) ^ref-7886 --- Being the canny businessman he was, Jobs saw that the Apple II was a machine that would appeal to more than just technically minded computer geeks and started searching for an investor who could help put it on the shop shelves throughout the US. — location: [1230](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1230) ^ref-20830 --- By the time the Apple II finally started rolling off the production line, however, Commodore had already got its home computer on the market. The $599 Commodore PET was an all-in-one system that fused keyboard, monitor, tape cassette player and computer together in curvy beige plastic. Despite its monochrome visuals, the PET attracted $3 million of pre-orders - enough to make it an instant success. — location: [1243](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1243) ^ref-17232 --- By 1981 the Apple II had claimed 23 per cent of the US home computer market compared to Tandy’s 16 per cent and Commodore’s 10 per cent. — location: [1248](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1248) ^ref-52011 --- But while most people agreed computers were the future, few had any idea what households would do with them. — location: [1250](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1250) ^ref-16362 Similr to the blockchain space today --- It turned out that early home computers would be used almost exclusively for one purpose alone: playing video games. — location: [1254](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1254) ^ref-43937 Again same as blockchain today --- Adams was not alone. Across the US, business-naive computer enthusiasts were beginning to write games they hoped to sell to the growing ranks of home computer owners. Few had any idea they were building an industry. They copied their games onto cassette tapes or 5.25-inch floppy disks on their own computers. — location: [1285](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1285) ^ref-15038 --- Unlike Adams and Infocom, Roberta decided that text alone would not do her game justice and insisted Ken allowed her to include black and white line drawings that illustrated each location alongside the text, despite the memory limitations of the Apple II. This refusal to bend to the technology at a time when most game makers built their creations around their programming skills would come to define Roberta’s approach to game design. — location: [1318](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1318) ^ref-12639 --- Text adventures, however, were not the only games making a splash with home computer users. Flight simulators also made the transition. Flight simulations had always lived a double life somewhere between training and entertainment. — location: [1334](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1334) ^ref-33736 --- One of these users was Bruce Artwick, a physics student and pilot. When the first home computers arrived Artwick believed other amateur pilots would jump at the chance to have a flight sim in their own home. He formed his own software company SubLogic and wrote Flight Simulator, the first home computer flight sim, which debuted on the Apple II in early 1978. Flight Simulator sought to replicate reality as closely as the Apple II could, using real-life physics and offering a wide range of planes, from crop dusters through to fighter jets, to fly. — location: [1347](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1347) ^ref-3765 --- Recreations of tabletop war games were another regular sight in the early days of home computers. As with Dungeons & Dragons, the motivation behind transferring these to computers was mathematical. Tabletop war games had evolved out of Kriegsspiel, a game created for the Prussian army in the 18th century as a military training aid for its officers. Kriegsspiel became a national obsession. Sets with detailed figurines of soldiers were sent to every military division, the Kaiser attended tournaments and the original 60-page rulebook was later enhanced with data from real conflicts. When Prussia won the Six Weeks War against Austria in 1866 and defeated France in 1870’s Franco-Prussian War, the country thanked Kriegsspiel for its victories. Impressed, rival nations quickly adopted the game including Japan, which credited its success in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 to Kriegsspiel. — location: [1354](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1354) ^ref-42417 --- Crawford’s answer to the lack of vision exercised by the early war game creators was Tanktics, a tank versus tank war game he created in 1977 on a IBM 1130 computer at his workplace - the University of California. “I was playing board war games and I was acutely aware of the absence of the fog of war, which I consider to be crucial to simulation of warfare,” he said.[4] “I considered that computers could solve the problem. I don’t think people fully appreciated just how big a leap this was. Most had become accustomed to the absence of fog of war and took full knowledge for granted. They didn’t like the idea of fog of war.” — location: [1372](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1372) ^ref-55078 --- Eastern Front 1941 introduced the idea of real-time conflict into the war game. Tabletop war games were turn based and most computer war games had blindly followed suit. — location: [1381](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1381) ^ref-15763 --- His 1980 follow-up to Alakabeth, Ultima: The First Age of Darkness became an even bigger success, selling around 50,000 copies, but Garriott soon had competition. In 1981 a company called Sir Tech released a rival role-playing game called Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord that offered better graphics and had players leading a party of adventurers — location: [1440](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1440) ^ref-59831 --- rather than the lone hero of Garriott’s games. It outsold Garriott’s game by more than two to one, and soon the competition between role-playing game makers became intense as they tried to outdo each other with new features. — location: [1444](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1444) ^ref-56817 --- By the time Ultima III: Exodus arrived in 1983, home computer game publishing was starting to look like a proper business. The number of computer owners had grown massively and so had the number of games being released. — location: [1452](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1452) ^ref-48591 --- Yet as the 1980s dawned, no-one was paying much attention to the games packaged in Ziploc bags on computer store shelves as they were too busy looking at the arcades and the new generation of game consoles that were about to send the US video game crazy. — location: [1455](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1455) ^ref-42000 --- Atari founder Nolan Bushnell was well aware of the problem: “We were getting ready to do the 2600, which required a lot of cash and we just didn’t have a lot of cash.” — location: [1498](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1498) ^ref-62455 --- Then, as it started examining alternatives, Atari received the news it feared most: another company had come up with exactly the same idea and was close to launching its system. That company was Fairchild Semiconductor, a Silicon Valley electronics component manufacturer had intended to use its new F8 microprocessor as the basis of its console: the Fairchild Channel F. — location: [1500](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1500) ^ref-30023 --- Lawson sold his game to a company called Major Manufacturing who tested it out on the customers of a pizza parlour in Campbell, California.[1] “Fairchild heard I was doing it and said ‘look we have a concept: we’d like to go into games ourselves’,” said Lawson. Like many other microchip manufacturers in the 1970s, Fairchild had decided to move into the consumer electronics market. “The semiconductor industry would put more and more into an integrated circuit and, when you do that, you get to a point where the only thing that’s left to do is put power into it,” said Lawson. “They finally went ‘to heck with this’. Why should they do all this engineering, all this development, so someone else can turn around and put it in a case?” — location: [1513](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1513) ^ref-50050 Semiconductor companies getting into gaming. Similar to Nvidia today? --- Fairchild did not have the market to itself for long, however. Shortly after the Channel F reached the shops, TV set manufacturer RCA announced it was going to release its own cartridge-based console in early 1977: the RCA Studio II. — location: [1539](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1539) ^ref-31310 --- Warner decided to buy Atari and in October 1976 paid $28 million for the company, turning Bushnell into a multi-millionaire in the process. — location: [1550](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1550) ^ref-26577 --- But even though the opposition crumbled, sales of the 2600 in Christmas 1977 were a disappointment. Manufacturing delays meant few of the consoles reached the shelves in time for Christmas and only a few hundred thousand 2600s had been sold by early 1978 — location: [1569](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1569) ^ref-48301 --- Matters were not helped by the excitement surrounding a new type of video game: the handheld electronic game. — location: [1573](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1573) ^ref-64870 --- In 1977 it was these, not the new generation of video game consoles, that were topping Christmas lists across the US. Toy company Mattel kickstarted the handheld games craze in 1976 when one of its marketing directors – Michael Katz – came up with the idea for a portable electronic game. “It was the mid-’70s – a time when pocket calculators were a new product and were getting smaller and smaller and less expensive,” said Katz. "Everyone had to have a little handheld calculator. I said to Richard Channing, Mattel’s director of preliminary design: ‘Can you design a new type of game that uses LED technology similar to that in a calculator but that could be portable, battery powered and the size of a handheld calculator?’ He went away and came back with the prototype of what was the first handheld game – an obstacle avoidance game where LEDs were coming down at you. You were at the bottom of the screen and had to try and avoid them and make your way to the top.” — location: [1574](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1574) ^ref-17879 --- Annoyed and angry at what he saw as stupidity on Warner’s part, Bushnell went into the meeting with fire in his belly. “The Warner board, and Manny particularly, just didn’t want to hear the fact that the 2600 was obsolete and I didn’t choose my words very well. I said: ‘The 2600 is obsolete. It’s a piece of shit’.” — location: [1658](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1658) ^ref-977 Warner comms taking over the strategic direction of Atari was probably a factor in its inability to keep up with the fast changing industry. --- The change from Bushnell to Kassar was dramatic, said Atari coin-op engineer Howard Delman: “Nolan understood the value of his engineers. He knew that we were the engine propelling the company. We were like kids in a candy store playing with fabulous technologies and doing things that no-one had ever done before. Under Warner and Kassar, the attitude changed significantly. The new engine propelling Atari was the marketing department and profit became the most important goal.” Not that this stopped the coin-op division from carrying the torch for Bushnell’s vision of Atari as a company of fun. “Apple were next door to us and one night some of our guys went over and painted worms on the big Apple sign. The next day Steve Jobs and all them were all upset about it,” said Anglin. “It was like ‘hey come on guys, have a sense of humor’.” — location: [1688](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1688) ^ref-34837 --- Like the invaders within its virtual world, Space Invaders conquered Japan within weeks of its launch in July 1978. Children, teenagers and adults alike flocked to the arcades to join the battle against the alien threat. Pachinko parlours, bowling alleys and even grocery stores reinvented themselves as dedicated Space Invaders arcades. Cafés swapped their tables for Space Invaders cocktail cabinets. Novelty pop act Funny Stuff took the invasion onto the airwaves with Disco Space Invaders, a hit single backed with dance moves inspired by the jerky movements of Nishikado’s aliens. Within three months of its launch, Space Invaders had gobbled up so many ¥100 coins it brought Japan to a standstill, preventing people from buying subway tickets or using public telephone boxes. A panicked Bank of Japan responded by ordering an investigation of Taito, which would sell more than 100,000 Space Invaders machines in Japan alone. Nishikado, however, paid little attention to the fuss his game was causing: “I don’t remember being particularly happy or pleased at the time. I was more concerned with the low quality of the hardware for this game and was concentrating my efforts on creating better hardware.” — location: [1759](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1759) ^ref-19942 --- The impact of Space Invaders could also be seen in the US sales figures for coin-op games. In 1978 the business generated revenues of $472 million, slightly down on the previous year’s $551 million. In 1979 the figure had more than tripled to $1,333 million – with Space Invaders accounting for a large proportion of that total. — location: [1778](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1778) ^ref-53999 --- Bally was determined to make a profit on every console sold. “What really killed us was being more expensive – like double what the VCS went for,” said Fenton. The citizens of New Jersey also delivered the console an unintentional blow, said Dave Nutting. In 1978 the state’s voters backed a law allowing casino gambling in Atlantic City. The vote turned the East Coast city into a new Las Vegas and for Bally, which also made fruit machines, it was a major business opportunity. “Bill O’Donnell was the president of Bally and his dream was for Bally to get into owning and operating casinos,” said Nutting. “He now had the financial resources, from Bally’s incredible success in the commercial video game market, and now had the place. Bally lost interest in pursuing the consumer market and decided to abandon the project.” The Professional Arcade was sold off to a group of small businessmen who relaunched it as the Astrocade only to watch it fade into oblivion. — location: [1788](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1788) ^ref-62784 --- The only support Averett got was technical help from his wife and criticism from the kids in his neighbourhood, who he used as play testers. “It was as brutal as you might imagine – kids don’t mince words,” he said. The Odyssey2 would eventually crawl past the million sales mark and did well in Europe where Philips released it as the Videopac G7000, but the lack of corporate support ensured the console never came close to matching the sales of the VCS. — location: [1824](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1824) ^ref-5741 --- But just as Mattel was gearing up for its assault on Atari, Manny Gerard had a brainwave. “The single best thing I ever did at Atari was go over to the coin-op building one day in 1979,” said Gerard. “They had a coin-op version of Space Invaders and they’re all playing it. I walked back across the street to Kassar’s office and I said ‘I’ll tell you what I want Ray – take the fucking Space Invaders, send it up to consumer engineering, engineer it for the 2600 and licence the name, and if you can’t licence the name steal the game play’. He looked at me and said ‘oh my god, why didn’t I think of that?’. I said ‘Because you’re too busy running the company’.” Atari moved quickly, bought the rights off Taito and, in January 1980, released Space Invaders on the 2600. Any question marks about Atari’s hold on the console market melted away. “It was the Space Invaders cart that blew the 2600 to the Moon,” said Gerard. — location: [1837](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1837) ^ref-13476 --- They interviewed fresh-faced game designers who boasted about how they had spent royalty cheques and bonus payments worth tens of thousands of dollars on a celebrity lifestyle of fast cars and flash pads. And they wrote about the new ‘pinball wizards’ – the hot-shot players who were the masters of the arcades. — location: [1879](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1879) ^ref-21791 --- Everyone wanted a piece of video games, from the movers and shakers of Washington D.C. to the studio bosses of Hollywood. Star Wars director George Lucas set about forming a games division at his company Lucasfilm. Walt Disney Pictures sought to cash in with Tron, a film about a man trapped inside a video game that was touted as a summer blockbuster. — location: [1884](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1884) ^ref-55302 --- Quaker Oats, Parker Brothers, 20th Century Fox and Thorn EMI formed video game divisions. McDonald’s started serving Atari-themed burger meals where “thanks to McDonald’s and Atari, the old-fashioned TV dinner is being replaced by an exciting video-dinner that could make you a winner”. And if a burger, fries and shake were too much, you could snack on a packet of Universal Foods’ Pretzel Invaders. In Washington D.C., a group of young Democrats – including future presidential candidate Al Gore – became known as the Atari Democrats for their support for giving tax breaks to high-tech industries rather than older manufacturing industries such as steel and cars. — location: [1888](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1888) ^ref-39166 --- CBS pushed Buckner & Garcia to make a whole album of songs about video games as quickly as possible to capitalise the success of their novelty single. — location: [2076](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2076) ^ref-61175 --- The album sold nearly a million copies and made Buckner & Garcia stars of the video game boom. They appeared on TV shows such as the Dick Clark-presented chart show American Bandstand and a special Pac-Man Fever day on MTV, an exciting new TV channel dedicated to music videos that had started broadcasting in August 1981. — location: [2088](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2088) ^ref-6470 --- Atari, more by fluke than design, had found itself the holder of the exclusive rights to make Pac-Man on home consoles and computers thanks to a $1 million deal signed in 1978 when Namco had no hit games to its name. Atari couldn’t believe its luck. For a relative pittance the company had gained control of the biggest game of the past decade. In April 1982, Pac-Man arrived on the VCS 2600 sending sales of the console through the roof. — location: [2092](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2092) ^ref-24521 --- The Pac-Man cartridge confirmed the 2600’s utter dominance of the home games market. The 2600’s lead over its nearest rival, the Mattel Intellivision, was now approaching 20 million units. — location: [2099](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2099) ^ref-50587 --- Atari had pretty much stopped worrying about rival consoles, it was now more concerned about the video game companies that had started releasing 2600 games to cash in on the captive audience Atari had built up with its console. — location: [2101](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2101) ^ref-51218 --- We noticed that four of the designers in a department of 30 were responsible for over 60 per cent of sales. — location: [2113](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2113) ^ref-45089 --- Furious at Kassar’s dismissal of their arguments, the four quit Atari a few days later. With help from former music industry executive Jim Levy and $750,000 of venture capital investment the four rebels formed Activision, a company that would create and publish games for the 2600. — location: [2121](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2121) ^ref-44685 --- Adventure’s concealed message was one of the earliest ‘easter eggs’ – a hidden secret within a video game for players who search carefully enough to discover them. — location: [2155](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2155) ^ref-41407 --- In 1981 Activision had achieved sales of $6.3 million, in 1982 this soared to $66 million. — location: [2175](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2175) ^ref-64900 --- But Activision didn’t just inspire Atari employees to walk. It also encouraged companies unconnected to Atari to start releasing 2600 games, creating new rivals such as Quaker Oats’ U.S. Games division, Xonox and Fox Video Games. — location: [2195](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2195) ^ref-24133 --- It had spent $75 million promoting its products in 1982, more than Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. Its sales were more than five times that of Warner’s film and music businesses and 70 per cent of Warner’s profits came from Atari. As a consequence Warner’s share price ballooned from just under $5 a share in 1976 to $63 in 1982. — location: [2199](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2199) ^ref-33164 --- And with cinema ticket and record sales being hit as teenagers swapped vinyl and the silver screen for the electronic thrills of the arcade, the video game looked unstoppable. In the 48 months since Space Invaders’ release, the video game had conquered North America. Its relentless ascent marked the biggest revolution in entertainment since the arrival of the TV set. And then, suddenly, everything fell apart. — location: [2203](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2203) ^ref-16927 --- “Surgeon General sees danger in video games,” reported the Associated Press news agency while The News & Observer in North Carolina ran a cartoon called Koop-Man, showing Dr Koop’s bearded and open-mouthed head chasing a worried-looking Pac-Man. Dr Koop immediately released a statement emphasising that his comments were not government policy: “The comments represented my purely personal judgment and was not based on any accumulated scientific evidence. Nothing in my remarks should be interpreted as implying that video games are, per se, violent in nature or harmful to children.” The surgeon general’s views did, however, echo widespread concerns about video games. — location: [2245](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2245) ^ref-48536 --- By 1981 these fears were resulting in action as communities across the US attempted to suppress video game arcades. From New York and Texas to Florida and Milwaukee, arcades were being hit with new restrictions and, in a few places, outright bans. — location: [2254](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2254) ^ref-56084 --- But those clamouring for a clampdown need not have worried, because just 28 days after Dr Koop’s speech, the video game bubble burst. And it was Atari that brought the boom to a swift end. On the afternoon of the 7th December 1982, Atari announced its expected growth figures for the fourth quarter of the year. Up until then, investors had been led to expect growth of around 50 per cent thanks to the new Atari 5200 console and the release of the E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial game on the VCS 2600. Instead, Atari slashed its growth prediction to between 10 and 15 per cent. Investors were shocked. The share price of Atari’s parent company Warner Communications collapsed by more than 30 per cent. Atari’s announcement crushed investor confidence in the prospects of video games. The investors who had bankrolled the rapid expansion of the business pulled their money out and North America’s video game industry imploded. — location: [2270](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2270) ^ref-17900 --- During the next two years, many of the companies that built the business would be destroyed or left as shrivelled wrecks. Atari received much of the blame for the crash, but the causes were far more complex and multi-faceted than the failings of one company. — location: [2276](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2276) ^ref-41601 --- The sheer volume of arcades that opened added to the problems, spreading the finite audience for video games too thin for any arcade operator to make a living. Desperate for customers, some arcades began offering eight rather than four goes per dollar on their video games – reducing income even further. “Too many arcades had opened,” said Day. “They were taking customers away from each other at the same time that more and more people were investing in home game systems. — location: [2286](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2286) ^ref-39956 --- “You had a player base that lived for the challenge and were becoming more and more highly skilled. So you had to up the ante with each game to continue the challenge and thrill the players,” said Eugene Jarvis, the designer of Defender. — location: [2296](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2296) ^ref-55036 --- Dedicated video game players thrived on the ever-greater challenges thrown at them, but the mainstream audience, upon whom the boom was built, found them too demanding, poor value for money and not much fun. The final blow that felled the arcades was the growth of home console ownership, which sucked players out of the arcades. In 1981 the coin-op video game business in the US peaked with annual sales of $4,862 million, in 1984 sales had nearly halved to $2,500 million. — location: [2304](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2304) ^ref-43444 --- The home console market’s fall was not far behind, however. The success of Activision, the company formed by four ex-Atari employees to make VCS 2600 games, had encouraged dozens of other businesses to follow suit. These companies churned out poor-quality games in the hope of making a fast buck from the excitement surrounding video games.[1] “Activision was the main cause of the crash – although indirectly,” said Activision co-founder David Crane. "We showed that you didn’t have to spend $100 million to produce a game console to make money in video games. In one six-month period 30 new companies sprang up trying to duplicate our success.” — location: [2308](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2308) ^ref-18389 --- The volume of games and the dubious quality of many of them started to put customers off. “There was way too much product, some of it inappropriate,” said Manny Gerard, the Warner Communications’ vice-president who oversaw Atari. “The single greatest failing was built into the 2600 from the very beginning, although nobody understood it at that point, which was we couldn’t control the software for our system. People were putting out cartridges for the 2600 – one was called Custer’s Revenge.” — location: [2313](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2313) ^ref-17352 --- With so much dross clogging up the shelves, sales stalled and retailers found themselves lumbered with piles of unsold games. Shops did what shops do with unsold goods – they discounted them in the hope of getting rid of the excess stock. Soon games that once sold for $30 could be bought for less than $10. Retailers also stopped ordering new games, causing cartridges to pile up in video game companies’ warehouses. These warehouses full of unsellable games were a ticking time bomb for the video game business. “We predicted the crash. I remember saying that ‘none of these new companies will be in business in a year’,” said Crane. “What we didn’t realise is that each company already had a million game cartridges in their warehouse when they went under. It was the sale of these games by liquidators that flooded the market. The liquidators bought them out of bankruptcy for $3, sold them to retailers for $4 and the retailers put them in barrels at the front of the store for $5. When dad went in to buy junior the latest Activision game for $40, he saw that he could be a hero and get eight games for the same money. Sales of new games went to near zero.” — location: [2328](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2328) ^ref-51145 --- Companies such as Activision and Atari had no choice but to slash their prices to shift the cartridges now building up in their own warehouses. A vicious cycle from which no company could escape had begun. — location: [2336](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2336) ^ref-14204 --- The Colecovision, created by toy company Coleco, arrived in August 1982 in a blaze of publicity. It was more advanced than the Atari 5200 and, most importantly, came with a copy of Nintendo’s hugely popular Donkey Kong. — location: [2349](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2349) ^ref-37678 --- Miyamoto’s distinctive characters and bizarre love triangle plot – told in short animated sequences reminiscent of a silent movie – were revolutionary. The game’s jumping action and platform-based levels were equally influential, establishing a new genre of game: the platform game. — location: [2364](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2364) ^ref-4884 --- Following the game’s success, Nintendo changed Jumpman’s name to Mario in honour of its US landlord Mario Segale, who had agreed to give the company’s struggling US arm more time to pay its rent prior to Donkey Kong’s release. — location: [2367](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2367) ^ref-52457 --- By Easter 1983, more than a million Colecovisions had been sold off the back of Donkey Kong. The release of an adaptor that allowed VCS 2600 games to be played on the Colecovision spurred sales on even further. — location: [2373](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2373) ^ref-9940 --- Not all the problems affecting the video game industry were of its own making. The US had been in a deep recession and by December 1982 one in 10 American adults were out of work. Petrol prices were also rising, eroding households’ disposable income even further. “The gasoline shortage just sapped money away from kids,” said Gerard. “If you’re an average kid and the way you get around America is in your car and suddenly gasoline prices go nuts, which they did, that hurt.” — location: [2378](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2378) ^ref-62204 --- On top of that, the video game console had lost its position as the most exciting thing in home entertainment to the video cassette recorder, or the VCR for short. The VCR reinvented television, giving people control over what they watched and when for the first time. “It was a major thing,” said Rob Fulop, a programmer at game publisher Imagic. “All of a sudden you could see a movie at home whenever. It was amazing. Kids were watching and taping movies, computer games weren’t what they did anymore.” — location: [2382](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2382) ^ref-1628 --- The final blow came from the home computer manufacturers who became embroiled in a bitter price war just as the console market hit the skids. — location: [2388](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2388) ^ref-1014 --- Commodore’s engineers built the VIC-20, a colour computer that cost just $299.95, and launched it in 1980. The VIC-20 was an attack on two fronts. It undercut Commodore’s computer rivals by hundreds of dollars, forcing them to slash their prices. — location: [2402](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2402) ^ref-19591 --- Texas Instruments responded in 1981 by replacing the overpriced TI-99/4 with the $525 TI-99/4a, a home computer designed for the mass market. The war was on. — location: [2406](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2406) ^ref-8780 --- “In 1982 no one was buying computers for the software, other than for games or something like that,” said Bob Yannes, who would help design the Commodore 64, — location: [2413](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2413) ^ref-42836 --- In November 1983, having lost $100 million in the second quarter of the year alone trying to keep the TI-99/4a alive, Texas Instruments threw in the towel and shut its home computer operation. — location: [2421](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2421) ^ref-31343 --- The computer wars delivered another nail in the coffin of home consoles. “Home computers replaced home video games,” said Chris Crawford, a member of Atari’s corporate research team at the time. — location: [2424](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2424) ^ref-43075 --- Home computers did not, however, offer the big profits game makers were used to. While computer games were cheaper to produce, the market was smaller, the sale price lower and games stored on floppy disks were easier to copy illegally than cartridges. — location: [2429](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2429) ^ref-64094 --- By the time Major Havoc finally made it to the arcades in November 1983, the arcade and console game industry was in ruins. Few had seen the crash coming. Bill Grubb, the president of Imagic, started 1983 boasting to the press about his plans to spend $10 million advertising the company’s games that year. By the end of the year Imagic was mortally wounded. “We thought the boom would go on forever,” said Fulop. “Like any hot thing, the people who are there assume it’s going to go on forever. And especially when you’re young, you can’t imagine anything would change. It was a total shock. I still haven’t got over it.” — location: [2483](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2483) ^ref-20432 --- “It was pretty fun, but was released after the event horizon was crossed by the industry into the black hole of the mid-’80s. It really seemed that the industry was done. Every possible game had been invented and all creativity was exhausted. Just like the Hula-Hoop, Pet Rock and disco crazes of earlier eras, it was over. I thought I would recycle myself with an MBA and get a regular job.” — location: [2507](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2507) ^ref-65217 --- For those who stayed behind, hopes that the situation would improve faded fast. “People weren’t aware of the speed or magnitude of the crash. Once a company gets big, there’s a feeling that ‘we can do no wrong’. I certainly was taken by surprise at the velocity of events,” said Atari’s Crawford. “We kept scaling back and thinking ‘this time we’ve gotten on top of the problem’ and things just kept getting worse.” — location: [2510](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2510) ^ref-56532 --- The crash devastated the home console market: it peaked in 1983 with US sales of $3,200 million before withering away to a $100 million-a-year industry in 1986. As the money disappeared, many of the companies that had built the video game business during the 1970s and early 1980s disappeared. Magnavox, the company that released the first game console, cancelled the release of its Odyssey 3 system and left the business. Mattel, the birthplace of handheld gaming, gave up on the Intellivision after losing tens of millions in 1983. Adventure International, the company that brought text adventures to home computers, vanished after risking everything betting on Texas Instruments’ bid to conquer the personal computer market. — location: [2547](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2547) ^ref-4725 --- Coleco gave up on the Colecovision after getting burned in the home computer market and decided to concentrate on its Cabbage Patch Kids line of dolls. Arcade giant Bally Midway’s video game revenues plunged by 60 per cent and it responded by shutting down Dave Nutting Associates, the company that pioneered the use of microprocessors in video games. — location: [2553](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2553) ^ref-51988 --- Atari was transformed from one of the biggest business success stories ever seen into one of the biggest disasters in corporate history – losing so much money so fast that it threatened to bring down the whole of Warner Communications. Warner desperately tried to save its ailing cash cow. It cancelled the long-held plan to move Atari into a purpose-built campus in Silicon Valley. It moved the manufacturing arm to Hong Kong and fired thousands of employees. It fired Atari president Ray Kassar, slashed marketing budgets and cancelled research and development projects. And when all of this failed to stem the losses, Warner broke Atari in two. — location: [2556](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2556) ^ref-62955 --- As per the deal with Spielberg, Atari flooded the shops with five million E.T. cartridges that Christmas. “Most of them came back from the retailers,” said Kassar. It was a financial disaster and Kassar took the flak. “I was fired,” he said. “They tried to blame me for the E.T. fiasco. Somebody had to be the fall guy and it wasn’t going to be Steve, he was chairman of Warner. Somebody had to be the fall guy and it was me.” — location: [2578](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2578) ^ref-58759 --- On 29th September 1983, concrete was poured over the crushed remains of Atari’s golden age that filled the landfill site. The video game was dead and quite literally buried. — location: [2587](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2587) ^ref-55000 --- The Irish government pulled out all the stops to lure Atari to the rural town. It tracked down a suitable building and offered Atari Ireland tax-free status for several years. Atari’s decision to make Tipperary its home was a welcome boost for a country blighted by poverty and unemployment. “In those days Ireland was really bad – 40 per cent unemployment. Tipperary didn’t even have a stop light in it,” said Anglin. “We hired local people. They were the most loyal, most hardworking guys you have ever seen in your life. I guess when you’ve got 14 other guys waiting for your job it’s a pretty good incentive.” — location: [2643](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2643) ^ref-12042 --- The ZX80 was the machine that the UK’s legions of would-be computer enthusiasts had been waiting for. “Machines like the Commodore PET and Apple II were a bit too far out of reach for the average interested school kid to buy,” said Jeff Minter, a Basingstoke teenager who had fed his interest in home computers by making games on his school’s Commodore PET until the ZX80 arrived. “Uncle Clive gave us affordable computing for the first time in the shape of the ZX80.” — location: [2693](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2693) ^ref-25497 --- One of the first people to make an impact with a mail order game was Kevin Toms, a programmer from the seaside town of Bournemouth, who in 1981 released Football Manager on Sinclair's follow-up to the ZX80, the ZX81. The game evolved out of a board game Toms had designed about running a soccer club that was part inspired by Soccerama, a 1968 board game about football management. “The board game started when I was about 11 years old and I did several iterations right through into my twenties,” said Toms. “I used to cut up cereal packets to try out ideas on and I remember buying blank card decks from [stationers and bookstore chain] WH Smith.” — location: [2700](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2700) ^ref-42665 --- Toms’ three editions of Football Manager would go on to sell close to two million copies across a number of computer formats and create a video game genre that is still a top-seller today. — location: [2713](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2713) ^ref-54724 --- A total of 226 British-made Spectrum games were released in 1982 alone. The following year the number of games released soared to 1,188 and the number of companies making them rocketed from 95 to 458. “The games industry was being dragged along on the back of the Sinclair Spectrum, which was a thousand times more successful than Sinclair expected it to be,” said Everiss, who sold Microdigital to hi-fi chain Lasky’s in 1981 off the back of the rising interest in home computing. “He thought people would be cataloguing their stamp collections on the back of it. The fact that the Spectrum became 99 per cent used for game playing took him by surprise.” — location: [2746](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2746) ^ref-6307 --- The taste for strangeness became so widespread that ‘British surrealism’ became a loose stylistic movement that decorated familiar game concepts in the outlandish imaginations of their creators. Yet despite the psychedelic trappings, the movement was more influenced by Monty Python than hallucinogenic drugs. “A lot of us in the nascent games biz grew up watching Monty Python on telly and I think that probably inspired a lot of the ‘British surrealism’ you saw in a lot of games,” said Minter. — location: [2783](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2783) ^ref-44923 --- Off the back of Beam Software’s hit games, Melbourne House ditched book publishing and became one of the UK’s largest game publishers of the 1980s. The talent that built Beam would go on to create the bulk of the Australian games industry. “One of the things I am especially proud of is that Beam effectively started the games industry in Australia,” said Milgrom. “Almost all of the development studios in Australia since then were started by ex-Beam employees or have been substantially staffed by ex-Beam employees.” Powered by Sinclair’s cheap computers, the UK’s bedroom programmers had turned their country into a hotbed of experimental game design, inspired developers in Spain and laid the foundations for the Australian industry at the same time. But the UK was not the only European country forging new ground in video games. — location: [2913](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2913) ^ref-26812 --- They constructed makeshift barricades out of parked cars and started fires. They battled with France’s quasi-military riot police, the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, which sought to suppress the uprising with tear gas and beatings with batons. The protestors responded by hurling bottles, bricks and paving stones ripped up from the streets. France’s trade unions sided with the protestors and encouraged wildcat strikes across the nation in a show of solidarity. The government had lost control and France teetered on the brink of revolution. For a few days in May 1968 it looked as if the motley coalition of students, trade unions, Trotskyites, anti-capitalists, situationists, anarchists and Maoists would win their fight for revolution. — location: [2941](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2941) ^ref-50001 --- During the late 1970s and early 1980s Le Breton explored his desire to challenge the status quo via music. He experimented with synthesizers in his band Dicotylédon before delving into avant-garde rock ’n’ roll with another act, Los Gonococcos. — location: [2952](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2952) ^ref-31548 How did music change with the ntroduction of microchips? --- The game’s exploration of French-Caribbean culture won Tramis a silver medal from the Parisian department of culture – making it one of the first games to receive official recognition for its artistic merit. — location: [2994](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2994) ^ref-12890 --- But once the Oric-1, TO7 and, later and most successfully, the Amstrad CPC, gained a sizeable following, game publishers started to form with Loriciels, Ere Informatique and Infogrames leading the way in 1983. — location: [3011](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3011) ^ref-19764 --- Ulrich wanted Ere Informatique’s games to have international appeal – something of a no-no amongst France’s cultural elitists – while retaining a French flavour: “Our games didn’t have the excellent game play of original English-language games but graphically their aesthetics were superior, which spawned the term French Touch – later reused by musicians such as Daft Punk and Air.” — location: [3045](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3045) ^ref-45917 --- Narrative-based games dominated France’s output during the 1980s but the French Touch could be seen in other forms of game as well, such as 1985’s L’Aigle d’Or, a marriage of action and adventure that had an influence in France comparable to that of Knight Lore in the UK. The French Touch could also be seen in Eric Chahi’s gory platform game Infernal Runner, the French comic book visuals of strip poker game Teenage Queen and North & South, a simple strategy game based on a Belgian comic about the American Civil War. — location: [3066](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3066) ^ref-54442 --- On the 19th December 1984, the BPJM named the first three video games to be added to the index: Activision’s aerial combat game River Raid; Atari’s coin-op tank sim Battlezone; and Speed Racer, a Commodore 64 driving game that let players run over pedestrians. “Battlezone was indexed because of the glorification of war propagated by its content and because the board stated that the content propagated aggressive behaviour,” said Petra Meier, vice-president of the BPJM. “River Raid was also indexed because of content seen as a glorification of war and an enhancement of violent behaviour.” Over the years the BPJM has indexed several hundred games, largely because of violent content. “Probably 90 per cent of the games that were indexed have been indexed because of the portrayal of violence,” said Meier. “Of course as far as violence is concerned the decision of what will be considered a ‘detailed portrayal of violence’ might have undergone some change over the years.” — location: [3085](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3085) ^ref-16661 --- West Germany’s game developers were also heavily influenced by the nation’s fondness for board games, of which it is the world’s biggest consumer per capita. Germans in particular like social board games with simple rules and economic or strategic themes such as The Settlers of Catan. And this, coupled with the aversion to violence, encouraged West Germany’s video game developers to start creating trading and management games. — location: [3104](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3104) ^ref-14935 --- By the end of 1984 Zaccaria had given up on video games altogether. And for some inexplicable reason it would take until the start of the 1990s before another Italian game company of note emerged. “Maybe if Zaccaria was not forced to close, the programming sector of the company would have better developed and other Italian producers could have followed the example,” said Zaccaria. — location: [3124](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3124) ^ref-8779 --- Many demo makers later renounced their connections with the cracking scene and became professional game developers. By the mid-1990s the diverging interests of those interested in writing demos and those who enjoyed cracking had caused the movement to split in two. With the demoscene going legit, even more of those who cut their teeth making demos resurfaced in game studios. Finland’s Future Crew, which started making demos on the Commodore 64 in 1986, is a case in point. — location: [3153](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3153) ^ref-63275 --- Up until Imagine, the industry had been a kitchen-table industry. Imagine was the first UK company to have things like a sales team, marketing people. We were the first to do multi-lingual packaging. — location: [3178](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3178) ^ref-18361 --- Most excessive of all was Imagine’s decision to pour huge sums of money into developing Bandersnatch and Psyclapse, which it described as the first ‘mega-games’. These games would come with hardware add-ons that, Imagine claimed, would enhance the abilities of home computers such as the Spectrum and usher in a new era in video games. It was not to be. In July 1984 Imagine went bust, its money drained away by over-expansion, the slow progress on developing the mega-games and falling sales due, at least in part, to piracy. The implosion was captured blow-by-blow by a BBC TV documentary crew who had set out to tell the story of Imagine’s success, but instead recorded its very public demise. — location: [3185](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3185) ^ref-53973 --- Imagine weren’t the only company to bite the dust around that time. The number of UK companies publishing Spectrum games peaked at 474 in 1984. The following year just 281 remained and by 1988 the number had tumbled to just 101. — location: [3192](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3192) ^ref-34718 --- The middle ground of companies that released full-price original games steadily lost ground, unable to compete on price or recognition. “At one stage we tried to launch a mid-price range and were just stuck in the middle. It was difficult, you had to be in one camp or the other,” said David Darling, who founded Warwickshire-based budget game publisher Codemasters with his brother Richard in 1985. — location: [3198](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3198) ^ref-38210 --- The same was starting to happen in France. Infogrames, whose founders were laughed at by French venture capitalists when they asked for investment back in 1983, swallowed up Cobra Soft as well as Ere Informatique. Meanwhile, Guillemot Informatique, a leading distributor of computer equipment based in Montreuil, launched a game publishing business called Ubisoft in 1986 that quickly expanded across Europe. — location: [3201](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3201) ^ref-29350 --- Both Infogrames and Ubisoft would go on to become multinational gaming giants. — location: [3204](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3204) ^ref-13656 --- The European industry was growing up. Companies merged, expanded, created marketing teams and professionalised. Soon the games business was dominated by companies such as Ocean, Infogrames and US Gold, a UK publisher that rose to prominence converting American games onto home computers that were popular in Europe. — location: [3206](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3206) ^ref-59544 --- Sticking rigidly to his plan, Hawkins quit Apple on New Year’s Day 1982 and set about forming Electronic Arts. Hawkins’ vision for Electronic Arts echoed the old Hollywood studio system that emerged in the 1920s, with its plan to control game development, publishing and distribution. Electronic Arts would make games on multiple platforms, package them in boxes not plastic bags, and distribute them direct to retailers. It would also promote its game designers as if they were movie directors – artistic visionaries of the new era of interactive entertainment. The company’s publicity materials set out its ‘games as art’ rhetoric: “We are an association of electronic artists united by a common goal. The work we publish will be work that appeals to the imagination as opposed to instincts for gratuitous destruction.” Other publicity materials asked “can a computer make you cry?” and promised games that would “blur the traditional distinctions between art and entertainment and education and fantasy”.[1] — location: [3258](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3258) ^ref-60753 --- “We entered the dark ages of interactive entertainment. The five years between 1982 and 1987 were hard, hard, hard. Each Christmas, all the experts at leading newspapers reminded potential customers that the video game business had died with Atari and would never return.” — location: [3272](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3272) ^ref-36575 --- The differences between the hardware of computers and consoles, meanwhile, required game designers to rethink their work. Controls shifted from joysticks to keyboards. Games moved from being stored on microchips in cartridges to floppy disks. “You had long load times, a lot more memory and higher resolution visuals than you did on video game consoles,” said Don Daglow, who became a producer for Electronic Arts after Mattel abandoned the Intellivision console. — location: [3277](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3277) ^ref-30336 --- Home computer users were also a different type of consumer compared to the console owners game companies grew up with. They were older, more educated and more technically minded.[2] “The video games before the crash were all specifically directed at young people, while computer games were directed at an older audience,” said Chris Crawford, who became a freelance game designer after Atari’s implosion. — location: [3284](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3284) ^ref-24519 --- The differences in hardware and consumer tastes led game designers to move away from action games towards more cerebral, complex and slower forms of game. “Games prior to the crash sought to appeal to the mass market, but post-crash games became increasingly geared towards dedicated game players who wanted complexity and this further alienated the non-hardcore audience,” said David Crane, co-founder of game publisher Activision. — location: [3288](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3288) ^ref-41559 --- Most of Electronic Arts’ debut games reflected this new era of complexity. Foremost among these games were M.U.L.E. and Pinball Construction Set. M.U.L.E. was a computerised multiplayer board game based on supply and demand economics that cast players as colonisers of a faraway planet, trying to scratch out a living. Its transgender creator Dan Bunten, who later became Dani Bunten Berry after a sex change, drew inspiration from Monopoly and Richard Heinlein’s novel Time Enough for Love, a sci-fi retelling of the trials of America’s old west pioneers. — location: [3291](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3291) ^ref-31295 --- In August 1957 the Soviet Union launched the first successful intercontinental ballistic missile and on the 4th October that same year launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit. The next step was obvious: putting nuclear warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles. The US government responded by forming the Advanced Research Projects Agency (APRA) to bankroll research to help the US regain its technological superiority over its superpower rival. — location: [3319](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3319) ^ref-39939 --- The Macintosh was also a big influence on game designers, many of whom saw GUIs as a way to make more complex games easier to understand. Its influence was such that Computer Gaming World journalist Charles Ardai argued that video games were undergoing a process of ‘Macintoshization’. — location: [3336](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3336) ^ref-50663 --- “In general he was a delight to collaborate with because he understood the medium but didn’t feel as bound by its conventions as someone who’d already been working in it for several years like me. He came up with all sorts of crazy and inventive ideas like the game lying to you. On the other hand he was the world’s worst procrastinator. He would wait until the last minute and then wait another six months. As he once said: ‘I love deadlines. I especially love the whooshing sound they make as they pass by’.” — location: [3381](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3381) ^ref-17339 --- Garriott pored over every book on philosophy and morality he could lay his hands on in a search for some simple truths that he could put at the heart of the game. He boiled down the ideas he read about into eight virtues based on three broad principles: truth, love and courage. His confidence was also boosted when he noticed that one of his favourite movies, The Wizard of Oz, also homed in on the same ideas with its scarecrow, tin man and lion characters. — location: [3448](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3448) ^ref-37818 Abolitiom of man comes to similr conclusions --- By the end of 1986 it was clear that video games were no longer moral vacuums. From the morality play of Ultima IV, to the political commentary of A Mind Forever Voyaging and the economic and social allegory of M.U.L.E., game designers were discovering hidden depths to their medium thanks to the move to home computers. The early 1980s industry crash had ushered in a new richness to the video game. — location: [3480](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3480) ^ref-21298 --- with cabinets that resembled fairground rides. His 1985 motorbike racing game Hang-On marked the start of a five-year exploration of the intersection between video games and theme park rides. Hang-On’s cabinet was a replica motorcycle with a screen mounted into the windshield. Players steered by leaning left or right to tilt the motorbike and used the handlebars to accelerate and brake. — location: [3514](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3514) ^ref-37763 --- When Narc arrived in the arcades in 1988, however, the dark ages of interactive entertainment referred to by Electronic Arts’ Gordon were over. And it was all thanks to a Japanese toy company that single-handedly brought video games back from the brink. — location: [3549](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3549) ^ref-11205 --- On one side of the desk sat Hiroshi Yamauchi, the 49-year-old chairman of Nintendo – a Japanese toy firm that started out in 1889 making playing cards. He was a hard-nosed businessman with a single-minded desire to turn the business he inherited from his grandfather into a global giant. — location: [3575](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3575) ^ref-62973 --- Nintendo was one of the victors in the Japan’s home Pong wars. The Kyoto toy firm sold more than a million of its Color TV Game consoles making it a high-profile player in Japan’s emerging video game industry. At the time Japan’s game business was largely focused on the domestic market, even the big guns – Taito and Sega – concentrated on winning over Japanese arcade-goers rather than reaching a global audience. Namco, the country’s other big coin-op video game company, didn’t even have a development team of its own. Instead it concentrated on reaping the rewards of having the rights to bring Atari’s coin-op games into Japan. — location: [3597](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3597) ^ref-4695 --- Space Invaders’ enormous earnings confirmed Yamauchi’s belief that Nintendo’s future lay in video games. He ordered his staff to throw out their old ideas and concentrate on devising bold new video game products that would give Nintendo the edge over its rivals. Gunpei Yokoi was first to respond. Yokoi was Nintendo’s toy-maker-in-chief, a creative genius whose inventive toys had sustained the company through the 1970s.[1] One evening on his commute home, he saw a bored businessman passing the time by playing with a pocket calculator that had a liquid crystal display (LCD). A portable video game, Yokoi figured, would be a much more enjoyable way to pass the time. — location: [3612](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3612) ^ref-59473 --- Miyamoto’s debut game Donkey Kong confirmed Nintendo’s new status as a member of Japan’s video game elite alongside Taito, Sega and Namco. — location: [3625](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3625) ^ref-14813 Top game companies of the 80s --- While the console market had slowed to a crawl, sales of home computers produced by the likes of NEC and Fujitsu were accelerating, encouraging the formation of Japan’s first video game publishers. Among the first was Koei, a software company founded by the husband and wife team of Yoichi and Keiko Erikawa. — location: [3635](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3635) ^ref-49315 --- While Japanese home computer game makers set about devising new video game genres, Nintendo was gearing up for the launch of its new console. Yamauchi had ordered its designer Masayuki Uemura to create a console that was not only a year ahead of the competition in technology but also a third of the price of the Epoch Cassette Vision. Uemura’s original design for what he called the Family Computer, or Famicom for short, came with a modem, a keyboard and a disk drive, but in order to meet Yamauchi’s price point demands he was forced to throw away most of the features. The end result was a simple cartridge-based console with a controller that took its cues from the cross-shaped directional pad used in the 1982 Game & Watch incarnation of Donkey Kong. — location: [3704](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3704) ^ref-42236 --- The goal, he explained, was not to make money from selling the Famicom itself but from selling games over and over again to those who bought it. “It is really just a tool to sell software,” he told retailers, before highlighting the attractive profit margins to made from selling Famicom game cartridges. — location: [3714](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3714) ^ref-54464 --- Instead of trying to expand rapidly to meet consumer demand, he opened up the Famicom to other game publishers. In return for allowing them to make games for the lucrative, game-starved captive audience it had built up, Nintendo wanted cash upfront to manufacture the cartridges, a cut of the profits from sales and the right to veto the release any game.[6] Many baulked at Nintendo’s demands, but the lure of fast-growing Famicom audience was just too enticing. — location: [3722](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3722) ^ref-1394 --- Hudson Soft watched their debut Famicom release – Roadrunner, a Japanese version of the US platform game Lode Runner – make its way into a million Japanese homes. With those kind of sales it didn’t take long for Japan’s other leading game publishers to agree to Nintendo’s conditions. By 1985 Nintendo had given 17 companies licences to make games for the Famicom. — location: [3729](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3729) ^ref-43145 --- Sakaguchi was introduced to role-playing via US games. “My first experience of role-playing games came when I played the English version of Wizardry and Ultima on the Apple II,” he said. “I was not attracted by the story of the early Wizardry, but I liked the system and worldview.” His response to Dragon Quest was Final Fantasy, a darker game with an undercurrent of angst as opposed to the more light-hearted adventuring of Horii’s game. — location: [3794](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3794) ^ref-21134 --- Miyamoto professed to a “fundamental dislike” of their emphasis on pre-defined stories and level-based advancement. Not that this stopped Miyamoto from raiding the genre for inspiration. His 1986 game The Legend of Zelda adapted many of the conventions of role-playing into an action game format. — location: [3809](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3809) ^ref-3918 --- The home computers that once seemed to be creeping ahead were now relegated to the sidelines, destined to be dominated by the bishojo titles that Nintendo would not allow on its console. The Japanese public had also ignored the Master System despite Sega’s hopes that its popular coin-op games, such as the ninja-themed Shinobi, might help it challenge Nintendo. — location: [3829](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3829) ^ref-47613 --- Nintendo had turned the Japanese game industry into a client state. Its licensees were willing slaves to Nintendo’s will: told how many games they could release, when they could release them and required to hand over a cut of the money they made from every game. Yamauchi’s insatiable desire for business expansion and Miyamoto’s wide-eyed creations had turned Nintendo into Japan’s most powerful video game company. — location: [3833](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3833) ^ref-39237 --- Everything seemed stacked against Nintendo, but then Arakawa noticed something that all the business analysts with their heads buried in profit-and-loss accounts had paid little attention to: the kids of America were still playing video games. They were playing them on home computers and they were still pumping quarters into coin-op game machines. The players, he concluded, were not bored of games as a concept, just the average or substandard ones. — location: [3882](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3882) ^ref-31545 --- “The entire US game industry thought the NES was a big step backwards. Worse, the licence agreement was completely draconian and reduced a publisher to being a captive developer with no control over its business.” — location: [3891](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3891) ^ref-47160 --- Yamauchi refused. He rejected the verdict of the focus groups, declaring market research to be a waste of time and money. He told Arakawa to focus on making the NES a success in one American city before going national. Nintendo chose New York City, which was seen as the toughest city to crack in US. The reasoning was that if Nintendo could sell the NES to New Yorkers, it could sell it to anyone. Yamauchi gave Arakawa and his team $50 million to bankroll their assault on the Big Apple. The key staff from Nintendo’s Seattle headquarters packed their bags and moved to New Jersey to work around the clock and make the NES a Christmas 1985 success story. Nintendo offered money-back guarantees to retailers, spent millions on advertising and showed off the Zapper and R.O.B. to shoppers in malls across the city. By Christmas Eve the NES was on sale in more than 500 New York stores. The push worked. That Christmas New Yorkers bought 90,000 NESs. The majority of the retailers recruited thanks to the money-back guarantee, agreed to continue stocking the console and its games. — location: [3904](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3904) ^ref-30519 --- In between the digital guitars, prototype CD-Video players and black-and-white video phones on display were enough video games to prompt Popular Mechanics’ correspondent to remark: “I could have sworn it was 1983.” Other reporters agreed. The Milwaukee Sentinel described it as “one of the biggest comebacks ever”. Fortune credited Nintendo with “single-handedly” reviving the games business. Few in the business would have disagreed. “Nintendo came out of nowhere. — location: [3934](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=3934) ^ref-23078 --- By 1989 Nintendo products accounted for 23 per cent of all toys sold in the US. Macy’s and Toys R Us devoted whole sections of their stores to Nintendo, shrines to the new messiah of video gaming. Nintendo Power, Nintendo’s promotional magazine, became the US’s biggest-selling children’s magazine with a monthly circulation in the region of five million copies. — location: [4012](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4012) ^ref-50007 --- Nintendo’s success did, however, make it a target for Americans upset about the growing influence of Japan on the US – a concern that peaked at the end of the 1980s when the NES was at its zenith. After defeating it in the Second World War, the US set about turning Japan into a democratic free market outpost in Asia. The US bankrolled improved infrastructure, helped Japan gain membership of international trade associations and encouraged US companies to share technology with the Japanese. It also sought to make it easier for Japanese companies to sell their products in the US by reducing trade barriers and agreeing a fixed exchange rate between the yen and the dollar. Japan, meanwhile, introduced protectionist laws that kept foreign firms out of Japan and helped kill off Atari Japan. — location: [4018](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4018) ^ref-7993 --- By the end of the 1970s Japan was being described as an “economic miracle” and, aided by low wages, Japanese corporations were making massive in-roads into the US market at the expense of American manufacturers. Many Americans hated this. They saw Japan’s protectionism and the US’s openness as an unequal arrangement that was destroying American companies and jobs.[2] — location: [4024](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4024) ^ref-60366 --- The US car industry was more than a collection of businesses to Americans; it was a symbol of national economic virility. So as Japanese companies made in-roads at the expense of iconic companies such as General Motors and Ford, the anger boiled over. There were incidents of people smashing up Toyotas, while others made patriotic appeals for people to buy American motors.[3] Wild-eyed commentators compared Japan’s economic success in the US to a “second Pearl Harbour”. — location: [4030](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4030) ^ref-8331 --- Nintendo found itself the latest focus of anti-Japanese sentiment. A poll conducted at the time found 61 per cent of Americans wanted the Japanese out of Major League Baseball. When news of the row reached Japan, Yamauchi found himself being criticised by the Japanese for inflaming American ill feeling. Japan was well aware of anti-Japanese sentiment in America at the time. One Japanese company, SystemSoft, even responded with a video game called Japan Bashing, where, as the Americans, the player’s goal is to change Japan by trying to make the Japanese eat wheat or to stop hunting whales. — location: [4042](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4042) ^ref-52137 --- Nintendo faced other sources of criticism as well. Its huge success prompted accusations that the company was engaging in monopolistic practices that stifled competition. However, the attempts to challenge Nintendo on these grounds in the courts came to nothing. Health campaigners, meanwhile, blamed Nintendo for making American kids fat. The National Coalition on Television Violence released figures in November 1988 suggesting 83 per cent of NES games were violent in nature. — location: [4048](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4048) ^ref-4847 The tide shifted, rightly or wrongly, against nintendo. You have to wonder if tencent will experience the same. --- Provenzo finished his book Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo off his own back and sent it to Harvard University Press. “I sent it in on a Thursday and I got a telephone call, which was very unusual, on Monday morning,” he said. “The editor basically said this is a breakthrough book.” In his book Provenzo accused many of the NES games he examined of promoting aggression and containing racist and sexist stereotypes. His work marked the start of academic study of video games, but it was not the kind of conclusion the game industry, and Nintendo especially, wanted to hear. “The game industry was extremely hostile afterwards,” he said. “Nintendo of America’s publicity office and legal office were intimidating enough that the original title of the book was going to be The World According to Nintendo, which is the Nintendo motto, but the publisher decided they didn’t want to take the risk.” — location: [4061](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4061) ^ref-30689 --- For Nintendo, the failure to conquer Europe made little difference, as the incredible success of Super Mario Bros 3 underlined. Nintendo marketed the game in much the same way as a movie studio might nurture hype about its latest blockbuster film, spending months building consumers’ anticipation to fever pitch. The pre-publicity effort included the 1989 feature film The Wizard, a Universal Studios picture about three kids who go to California to take part in a video game tournament. Essentially a 100-minute-long Nintendo advert, The Wizard gave Super Mario Bros 3 a starring role. Nintendo also joined forces with McDonald’s to offer Mario Happy Meals in its US stores to coincide with the game’s February 1990 launch. It was a marketing operation of a scale unheard of for a single game. — location: [4142](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4142) ^ref-18521 --- Super Mario Bros 3 became, both critically and commercially, the culmination of Nintendo’s journey from unknown Japanese toy maker to global video game giant. The game sold more than 17 million copies worldwide, grossing around $550 million – more than Steven Spielberg’s film E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. In 1990 the Q Score survey measuring the popularity of celebrities and brands reported that Mario was now more famous and popular than Mickey Mouse. Miyamoto became a world-famous game designer, even attracting the attention of former Beatle Paul McCartney and Spielberg, both of whom travelled to Kyoto to meet him. Nintendo, meanwhile, became the focus of business acclaim and anxiety. In 1989 the Japanese Economic Journal named Nintendo as Japan’s most profitable company ahead of both Toyota and Honda. Nintendo’s average employee was earning the company $1.5 million of profit a year. Apple Computer’s president Michael Spindler went so far as to name Nintendo as the company he feared most during the 1990s. The business acumen of Yamauchi and the creative abilities of Miyamoto had turned the laughing stock of 1984 into one of the world’s most formidable companies. — location: [4160](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4160) ^ref-34344 So similar to tencent today --- Nintendo’s success reconfigured the games industry on a global level. It brought consoles back from the dead with its licensee model, which became the business blueprint for every subsequent console system. It revitalised the US games industry, turning it from a $100 million business in 1986 to a $4 billion one in 1991. Nintendo’s zero tolerance of bugs forced major improvements in quality and professionalism, while its content restrictions discouraged the development of violent or controversial games. The NES also put Japanese games at the centre of the world’s video game industry. Japan was seen as having the best game makers and instead of looking to California, game players started looking to the Japanese archipelago for the next amazing game. — location: [4170](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4170) ^ref-36229 --- When the Amiga Corporation began to show off Miner’s computer, the Amiga, in public it was met with a mixture of disbelief and barely contained excitement among game designers. Some believed it was a fraud while others salivated at the very thought of what they could create using Miner’s audio-visual powerhouse. Atari, however, was in no state to enjoy the moment and by the summer of 1984 Commodore founder Jack Tramiel was poised to take over the ailing firm’s computer division. — location: [4219](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4219) ^ref-9260 --- “So you saw these real breakthrough notions like King of Chicago and Defender of the Crown where characters were right on the screen talking to you. Cinemaware was really the first to bring actual characters and story elements into direct interaction with the player.” Cinemaware’s movie influences ran deeper than just surface presentation and storytelling however. Hollywood’s movie development processes would also inform its approach to game development. “We would have story meetings, we would flow chart the game and come out with storyboards,” said Jacob. “The games we were doing were different to the games other people were doing at the time. We really had to figure out where we were going with the game. We were doing games that had storytelling and role-playing and action and this and that and the other thing. If we didn’t know where we were going it would be a disaster and that forced us into a level of oversight that was rare at the time.” — location: [4256](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4256) ^ref-37323 --- Released in 1989, Prince of Persia’s cinematic presentation and attention to visual detail turned it into a major video game series that was still going strong 20 years after its debut. — location: [4280](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4280) ^ref-36874 --- The cinematic exploration of Chahi, Mechner, Lucasfilm and Cinemaware were dwarfed in size, however, by the work being carried out by Hasbro and Axlon in the late 1980s. Axlon was the latest business venture of Atari founder Nolan Bushnell.[2] Formed in 1988 with Tom Zito, Axlon’s big idea was to make a console that ran games stored on VHS videocassettes rather than cartridges. Toy makers Hasbro embraced the idea and teamed up with Axlon to develop the system, which they codenamed NEMO.[3] The NEMO team read like a video gaming who’s who. There was Bushnell, Spacewar! co-creator Steve Russell, Imagic’s Rob Fulop, Cinemaware’s Melville, Activision’s David Crane and a gaggle of former Atari coin-op employees including Steve Bristow and Owen Rubin. — location: [4340](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4340) ^ref-26378 --- The NEMO was set to launch in January 1989 as the Control-Vision but, just three months before its debut, Hasbro pulled the plug. Ultimately Hasbro could not get the figures to add up. The NEMO would have cost $299, far more than rival consoles and, with its games costing millions to develop, Hasbro concluded it could never make enough profit to justify the venture. — location: [4372](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4372) ^ref-59508 What if they saw it as a first step in an evolutionary process towards a new innovative way to play games? Instead they didn't like the project level economics. A shame. --- One piece of software in particular captured Wright’s imagination: Life. Created in 1970 by the British mathematician John Conway on a PDP-7 computer, Life sought to demonstrate how complexity could emerge from very simple rules. The program displayed a screen divided into a grid of cells. At the start of the ‘game’, the user set the initial conditions by deciding how many cells to bring to life. After that the program ran itself by following three simple rules: (1) live cells with 2 or 3 live neighbours survive; (2) live cells with fewer than 2 neighbours die, as do those with 4 or more neighbours; (3) ‘dead’ cells with 3 live neighbours come to life. — location: [4414](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4414) ^ref-59980 --- Wright told him about Micropolis and invited him to come and see it. Braun loved it. The pair formed Maxis and decided to make Micropolis its second release.[1] But with the Commodore 64 losing ground in the home computer market, they decided to convert the game to the Macintosh, Atari ST and Amiga. And at the suggestion of a friend they changed its name to Sim City. — location: [4487](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4487) ^ref-42803 --- “Typically in the game market you released the game and 80 per cent of sales were in the first six months,” said Wright. “Sim City was a totally different profile. The first year did well; the second year sold a lot more, the third even more. Sim City paid for a lot of mistakes, which was great because we made a lot of mistakes with our company.” — location: [4578](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4578) ^ref-25703 --- By the end of the year Populous had joined Sim City in becoming a surprise international hit. The magazine reviews lavished praise on the game and, to Bullfrog’s surprise, it seemed as if they might get some royalties from the game. “Given the reception by the press in the UK, I was expecting that we would make some money, but when the first royalty cheque came in – £13,000 as I recall – I didn’t imagine we would get much more,” said Edgar. “The second cheque was significantly larger and they just kept coming. Then the Japanese arrived and things really took off.” — location: [4591](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4591) ^ref-12258 --- Together, Populous and Sim City gave form to a disparate game development movement that rejected the controlled, confined and directed experiences of their cinema-worshipping peers in favour of more open-ended experiences that were closer to toys than board games in concept and embraced creation and construction as a play mechanic. It was an approach to video game design that had been circulating for some time, from the nation management of Utopia and the freedom of Braben’s Elite, but the success of Wright and Molyneux took these games into the mainstream of game design and encouraged other designers to start investigating the possibilities. — location: [4611](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4611) ^ref-34803 --- Shortly after completing Pirates!, Meier discovered both Sim City and Populous. For Meier, these games demonstrated that creating something could be just as fun and compelling as the destruction usually peddled by video games. Meier’s response was to devise a game that put players in control of a civilization’s journey through history. His grand vision became Civilization, an epic turn-based strategy game that offered a beguiling concoction of military conflict, diplomacy, exploration, city building, history lesson and resource management. The goal was to take a tiny tribe, ignorant of the world, and turn it into a great world power shaped by the choices and decisions of the player themselves. Core to Civilization’s appeal was its ability to make players feel as if they were writing history as they went, with centuries marked by war and instability giving way to golden ages of scientific progress before going back to high-stakes clashes with other large nations. It was an aspect that gave Civilization – more than Sim City or Populous – a narrative quality, albeit one defined by the player rather than Meier. — location: [4628](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4628) ^ref-11582 --- The real-time strategy games quickly displaced the turn-based strategy games of old and by the end of the 1990s Civilization was the only big name strategy game series that had not gone real-time. — location: [4657](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4657) ^ref-25139 --- Video games had evolved into three broad philosophical movements. There were the action games that were forged in the cash-hungry environment of the arcades and served up instant thrills. Then there were the narrative-based, cinema-worshipping works that saw video gaming as a story-telling medium enhanced by interactivity. Finally, there were the sandbox games; the simulations that sought to entertain by giving players the freedom to experiment and the ability to create. — location: [4659](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4659) ^ref-47643 --- NEC, despite mild success in Japan, had come unstuck in the US when it attempted to challenge Nintendo’s NES with the TurboGrafx-16 console, the North American version of the PC Engine. — location: [4998](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=4998) ^ref-41730 --- Even a licensee deal offering more favourable terms failed to persuade big-name publishers to support the Genesis. — location: [5006](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=5006) ^ref-41131 Publishers also dont want to upset sttus quo --- He decided to position the Genesis as a console for teenage boys, figuring that the children who grew up playing cheery and cute Nintendo games would want something more edgy now they were entering puberty. The Genesis would, he decided, be pitched as the console Nintendo owners “graduated” to, an argument Sega’s line-up of arcade hits and sports games was well placed to reinforce. Katz then decided to ram the message home with an advertising campaign that attacked Nintendo directly. “The Japanese would never do competitive commercials,” said Katz. “They thought they were in bad taste in terms of business ethics, but we convinced them that was what we needed since we were against Nintendo. So it became ‘Sega does what Nintendon’t’.” — location: [5022](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=5022) ^ref-35612 --- With time running out, Katz turned to Electronic Arts for help. Since its formation back in 1982, Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins had aspired to make the company a leading producer of sports games. “My personal desire to make authentic sports simulations was the primary reason that I founded Electronic Arts in the first place,” said Hawkins, whose interest in sports games stemmed from his love of Strat-O-Matic’s dice-based sports games.[3] — location: [5031](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=5031) ^ref-38398 --- In the same year that TV Sports Football came out, Hawkins tried once again to realise his dream of making the best sports video games with John Madden Football, an American football title endorsed by the former Oakland Raiders coach turned sports commentator. Electronic Arts’ first effort, created on the Apple II, was a dud. Compared to the showbiz trappings of TV Sports Football and the depth of Earl Weaver Baseball it was an underwhelming effort that only offered full-size teams because Madden himself intervened when he discovered that the developers planned to make it a six- or seven-a-side game. — location: [5075](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=5075) ^ref-40687 --- Up to that point Electronic Arts had focused on home computers. It distrusted Nintendo’s dominance of the console market and had made minimal effort to expand into the NES game business. “Part of Trip Hawkins’ original founding vision was that the future of gaming would be on PCs, not consoles,” said Hector. “At the time I joined Electronic Arts, they were committed to this strategy and to speak otherwise was heresy.” — location: [5093](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=5093) ^ref-55321 Ea became such a massive publisher eventhough they didnt participate in the nintendo boom --- The Genesis version of John Madden Football would become a defining moment in sports games – a shift away from the overt statistical modelling of Earl Weaver Baseball towards a more action-based experience where the mathematical elements subtly enhanced the action rather than dominated it. John Madden Football’s marriage of action and simulation became the template for the majority of sports titles that followed it. — location: [5117](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=5117) ^ref-26226 --- Sonic the Hedgehog arrived in the US in June 1991, a few months ahead of Nintendo’s Super NES. It became an instant success, giving Genesis owners a Mario of their own. Genesis sales rocketed both in North America and Europe ensuring there was no way Nintendo could recapture the level of dominance it had enjoyed in the days of NES. — location: [5153](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=5153) ^ref-16709 --- The next few years would see Nintendo and Sega engaged in a bitter battle for consumer attention, hoping to grab that extra slice of market share. Exclusive games were their weapons. — location: [5163](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=5163) ^ref-31011 --- Nintendo’s exclusive deal with Capcom proved to be a major coup that prevented Sega’s console from carrying two of the most popular arcade games of the early 1990s. — location: [5205](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=5205) ^ref-6224 --- The clash between Nintendo and Sega, together with the more advanced technology of the new 16-bit consoles, raised consumers’ expectations of video game quality and drove up the cost of game development. And as development costs grew, the game industry began to think more carefully about what types of games would sell, rather than giving game developers free reign. “Back in the 8-bit days, literally anything you thought of you’d just do it because there was such little cost – you could make a game for $3,000,” said Perry. “But then, when you start to get into 16-bit, prices went up because the development was more expensive: there’s more work to be done, more graphics to draw and that started to get people more serious about the whole thing, a bit more careful. You didn’t quite go with the crazy ideas anymore, you were thinking about what’s actually going to sell.” — location: [5214](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=5214) ^ref-30965 --- The video game industry, fuelled by the quality arms race between Sega and Nintendo, was growing up. — location: [5235](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=5235) ^ref-59579 --- Having agreed to create Midway’s answer to Street Fighter II, the pair started debating how they could make their game – Mortal Kombat – stand out from Capcom’s landmark game. “A big goal of mine was to differentiate the visual qualities of Mortal Kombat from any of the other ‘fighting’ products out there. It was important for players to look at Mortal Kombat and know immediately that it was, at the very least, different,” said Tobias. — location: [5300](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=5300) ^ref-47051 --- The Senate hearings had actually made it safer for video game developers to create violent games, not harder. — location: [5492](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=5492) ^ref-45858 --- CD had two big attractions for the video game industry. First, CDs were cheaper to manufacture than microchip-based 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. — location: [5554](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=5554) ^ref-5039 --- 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. — location: [5611](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=5611) ^ref-62678 --- Nintendo and Sony had teamed up to create a CD version of the Super NES, tentatively titled the PlayStation, but by the summer of 1991 the two companies had fallen out. — location: [5633](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=5633) ^ref-1953 --- For the fast-growing number of PC owners searching for something to show off the capabilities of their new CD-ROM drive, Myst’s gentle exploratory play was ideal. “We were in the right place at the right time,” said Rand. “We had come out with an application that was just primed for CD-ROM. It was a killer application because it was so safe. Anybody at any age could walk into a store and say I need some software for my 10-year-old son all the way up to my 80-year-old grandmother for my new CD-ROM drive, what do you recommend? Myst was safe.” — location: [5695](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=5695) ^ref-29175 --- In October 1991 Virtuality unveiled its first game: Dactyl Nightmare. Dactyl Nightmare allowed up to four players, each using a separate Virtuality machine, to fight each other with guns and rocket launchers in a polygon 3D world while dodging aggressive pterodactyls that flew menacingly above the play area’s surrealistic chequerboard floors. “People were just lost in that thing; they were really, really immersed,” said Waldren. “They just went over that line where they just forgot about the rest of the world.” But with each machine costing $65,000, the onus was on getting people in and out of the game as fast as possible to make it profitable for arcade operators. — location: [5858](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=5858) ^ref-47003 --- In 1982 Fluegelman created a communications software program called PC-Talk but, instead of seeking a publisher, he decided to use it for an economic experiment. He gave it away and asked people to send him a cheque if they liked it. Despite having the option of not paying, hundreds of users paid up leaving Fluegelman swamped by cheques. His trust-based experiment inspired a movement. By 1988 the estimated turnover of the shareware software market was somewhere between $10 million and $20 million in the US alone, even though, on average, only one in 10 users paid up. — location: [5933](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=5933) ^ref-51239 Like Free-to-play today, where paying users subsidize the rest. --- Before Wolfenstein 3D game developers would build the systems and tools they needed to make their games themselves. After Wolfenstein 3D they had a choice. Instead of creating their own game engine they could buy Id’s technology, and focus on being creative. By 2005 the idea of buying in technology would be so commonplace in game development that dozens of companies, specialising in making software that did everything from 3D graphics to generating the leaves on virtual trees, had emerged. — location: [6024](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=6024) ^ref-64152 --- Doom inspired a flood of first-person shooters that fuelled demand among PC gamers for 3D graphic cards. These hardware add-ons contained graphics processing units (GPUs): fast microprocessors dedicated to doing the maths needed to create realistic 3D visuals that would further accelerate gaming’s move into three dimensions. Ironically, GPUs were a by-product of the virtual reality research that had faded from popular interest by the end of the 1990s. “Cheap 3D graphics hardware is what enabled the current explosion of video games,” said Warren Robinett, the former Atari game designer who later moved into a virtual reality research. — location: [6113](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=6113) ^ref-16819 --- 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. — location: [6193](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=6193) ^ref-27646 --- 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. — location: [6219](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=6219) ^ref-25328 --- Mattel, of course, had no shortage of brands, most famously its iconic Barbie dolls. Mattel Media made Barbie the focus of its attempts to bring video games to girls. One of its first releases was 1996’s Barbie Fashion Designer. “Andy Rifkin, who’d been a toy inventor for years and headed development for Mattel Media, had an eight-year-old daughter named E.J. who wanted to be able to design clothes for Barbie on her computer,” said Martin. “He came up with the idea of the fashion show and the printed clothing; my team made the production work in a girl-friendly way.” — location: [6311](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=6311) ^ref-14395 --- The likes of Tomb Raider, WipEout, Metal Gear Solid, Gran Turismo and Silent Hill were perfect reflections of the image Sony sought to give the PlayStation – that it was not a kids’ toy but a desirable piece of consumer electronics. — location: [6496](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=6496) ^ref-36953 --- As well as changing the balance of power in the game industry, Sony had reshaped society’s attitudes to video games with its efforts to reach a more mature audience. Video games now had a popular culture relevance that seemed unimaginable just a few years earlier. — location: [6540](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=6540) ^ref-6622 --- The arcades no longer looked like the natural location for the latest in game technology. Their role as social gathering places was also fading thanks to the emergence of the internet. — location: [6623](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=6623) ^ref-39125 --- And as interest waned in arcade video games so did arcade operator profits. In 1994, when the PlayStation came out in Japan, the annual sales of coin-op games in the US were $1,570 million. In 1998 this had dropped to $1,129 million and in 2002 it was just $523 million.[1] — location: [6633](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=6633) ^ref-47694 Good example of business model being thrust to the side superseeded by a better deductive tinkering process combining social and physical technology in new ways --- On top of that a game called Meridian 59 had provided an alternative business model for online role-playing games that eschewed the expensive hourly charges of old in favour of a set monthly subscription that allowed players to spend as long as they wanted playing. — location: [7142](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=7142) ^ref-2013 Subscription play --- The players of Ultima Online soon started developing their own slang to describe the situation, which soon spread out onto the web, seeping into the language of other online games and eventually into everyday conversation. “Almost all the terminology in use today came out of Ultima Online – griefing, nerfing, killer dudes, raids – all this kind of stuff really developed out of Ultima Online,” said Vogel. — location: [7206](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=7206) ^ref-47836 --- One of the first to embrace this future was the Nexon Corporation, a company co-founded by Kim Jung-Ju in 1994 after he saw Jurassic Park. — location: [7373](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=7373) ^ref-2422 --- The World Cyber Games also had generous backing from the South Korean government, which contributed to the 2002 contest’s $350,000 prize money. — location: [7422](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=7422) ^ref-42127 --- China’s communist government responded by adopting a dual personality when it came to video games. Its nationalistic side, uneasy with the number of Chinese people playing foreign games, decided to spend $1.8 billion over five years on supporting the development of 100 home-grown online games. — location: [7534](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=7534) ^ref-64450 --- China’s most invasive attempt to control the influence of video games was the anti-addiction system it introduced in 2007. The system monitors how long people play and if they exceed three hours in a day the game switches off or important features are disabled. This tracking software, which companies are required by law to include in their online games, is also linked to individuals’ national ID numbers so the authorities can pinpoint those it regards as playing too much. Originally the system was intended to cover every player of online games but, after objections from adult gamers, the Chinese only applied it to under 18s. China got the idea from South Korea, which introduced a very similar system in 2004 amid growing public concern about young people’s obsession with online games. — location: [7554](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=7554) ^ref-31460 --- Microsoft managed to sell 24 million Xboxes, almost entirely in North America and Europe, just ahead of the 22 million Gamecubes sold by Nintendo.[5] Nintendo’s defeat led to speculation that the Kyoto giant may end up going the way of Sega, swapping console making for publishing. As a dedicated video game company, Nintendo lacked the sprawling business interests of Sony and Microsoft to fall back on and, while Pokémon was keeping the Kyoto firm profitable, it was hard to imagine Pikachu could carry the company indefinitely. The situation forced Nintendo’s new president, Satoru Iwata, who replaced Hiroshi Yamauchi in 2002, to rethink the company’s whole approach to console and game design. — location: [8033](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=8033) ^ref-47594 --- The DS experiment confirmed Nintendo’s hunch that the expensive battle to provide players with the most technologically advanced games was a zero sum game. The rush for technical complexity and depth had narrowed the audience for video games. The next move was to apply those lessons to its next home console, which Nintendo had appropriately codenamed the Revolution. — location: [8058](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=8058) ^ref-48702 --- “The industry places more value on the look and complexity of a game than it does on the amount of fun a person has while playing,” Iwata wrote in Nintendo’s 2005 annual report. “In today’s world people are busy and the time and energy required to play games are seen as a burden. This is why more people are now saying ‘video games are not for me’ before they begin to play.” — location: [8061](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=8061) ^ref-50610 --- By late 2009, Nintendo had sold close to 68 million Wiis. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 had both sold around half that amount. Nintendo’s decision to break from the pack had taken them back to the top of the video game tree and prompted Sony and Microsoft to start developing motion controllers of their own. — location: [8141](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=8141) ^ref-55804 --- Like Doom before it, Grand Theft Auto III reshaped the video game landscape. It proved that believable and open 3D game worlds could be created and sold millions. But while Doom’s success inspired a spate of copycats, Grand Theft Auto III faced relatively little competition largely because the challenge of creating a virtual world or city of comparable scope or vision was so difficult and expensive. — location: [8301](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=8301) ^ref-34971 --- The end of the 1990s had witnessed a significant shift in the way stories were conveyed in games. — location: [8334](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=8334) ^ref-45755 --- Almost as surprising as the sudden death of adventure games was the emergence of first-person shooters as a new vehicle for video game storytelling around the same time. — location: [8372](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=8372) ^ref-19689 --- Grand Theft Auto IV, which had taken a team of around 150 people four years to make, brought together the two major trends of big-budget games in 2000s – richer storytelling and player freedom – to create the video game equivalent of a James Cameron blockbuster. — location: [8531](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=8531) ^ref-61039 --- 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. — location: [8598](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=8598) ^ref-57062 --- 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. — location: [8608](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=8608) ^ref-26630 Is it a similar situation today which large publishers --- 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. — location: [8722](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=8722) ^ref-50553 --- But by the end of the ’90s it had all become less about the innocent and child-like gaming experience and more about 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.” — location: [8775](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=8775) ^ref-8048 --- As 2009 drew to a close video games stood on the crest of a new era of creativity powered by both the grand visions of leading game designers and the fizzing experimental wildness of the indie movement. — location: [8874](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=8874) ^ref-42834 ---