Maxwell and his father were furious when he discovered how Rogers and Nintendo had grabbed the rights they thought were theirs. The Maxwells were well connected with the Gorbachev regime and decided to use political influence to try and scupper Nintendo’s deal. “They put pressure on the Politburo. That pressure came down on the ministry and Belikov, who had made the decision to go with me rather than Kevin Maxwell,” said Rogers. “Belikov thought he was a dead man. Nobody talked to him. It was like he had a disease or something. He was like an untouchable.”
Government officials turned up at Belikov’s offices unannounced and rifled through Elorg’s files searching for evidence to use against him. The Elorg director feared he was under KGB surveillance. As a former Communist Party official he knew full well what he was up against: “I was afraid because I understood that it was like trying to stop a tank with your hands. They had switched on that soulless state machine, which is totally uninterested in any reasons.”
Luckily for Belikov, communism was fading fast and Gorbachev’s reforms were already changing attitudes in Moscow. Eventually the Kremlin decided that ministries such as Elorg should be free to make decisions independently and the soulless state machine was switched off.
For Pajitnov, the success of Tetris brought him little wealth, but it did give him and his family a new future. In 1991 he moved to Seattle to open his own video game company and later joined Microsoft to make puzzle games such as Hexic. And when Elorg’s rights to Tetris expired in 1996 he teamed up with Rogers to form The Tetris Company, a business dedicated to managing the global rights to Pajitnov’s game and exploiting its on-going appeal. In particular Tetris has reaped the benefits of the growth of mobile phone games, selling more than a 100 million copies on myriad models. “It’s amazing and very strange for me. I didn’t expect it to live that long,” said Pajitnov. “But then the game did not change too much and the human brain remained the same so I don’t see any reason why the game should be less popular.”
By the time Pajitnov left Moscow for Seattle, the communist regimes of Eastern Europe had come crashing down; their demise hastened by Gorbachev’s economic and political reforms. Although these countries were now free of communism, its legacy proved hard to shake off. It was a legacy that would have profound implications for video game development in the former Eastern Bloc. Decades of communist rule had left the economies of the Eastern Europe in tatters and these nations spent the 1990s making an often-traumatic metamorphosis into free market economies. Those that tried to make a living creating games faced not only a hostile economic climate, but also rampant piracy and a lack of home computer owners to sell to. In communist times piracy was the only way computer owners could get hold of games, but in the new capitalist world this cultural inheritance only undermined efforts to build a video game industry. “There was nothing in the way of software on sale under communism and 99 per cent of games were pirated,” said Spanel, who formed Czech game company Bohemia Interactive in 1999. “It is still a big problem and there is still the mentality that games are free.”
The economic problems facing Eastern Europe and the high levels of piracy also dissuaded western game companies from investing in the region. “Our countries were seen as part of the socialist bloc and, after the Iron Curtain fell, time had to pass before people realised the bad image was no longer true,” said Gábor Fehér, managing director of Hungarian game studio Digital Reality. Console manufacturers made no attempt to expand into the new democracies, figuring that the impoverished population could not afford to buy expensive luxuries such as video game consoles. As a result, Eastern Europeans saw little of the video game consoles that were common in Japaand the West beyond a few shops where people could play Sega Megadrive and Super Nintendo games on a pay-per-minute basis. The only consoles on sale were illegal clones such Steeler Company’s Dendy, a Russian copy of Nintendo’s Famicom. The absence of consoles meant home computers became the de facto game platform for the former communist nations of Eastern Europeans. At first low-cost ZX Spectrum clones that ran a Russian operating system called TR-DOS proved popular, but by the mid-1990s people switched over to PCs as price reductions and increased wages made these affordable.
These factors, along with a lack of people with the skills needed to make video games, slowed the growth of Eastern European game studios to a crawl. It would take until the late 1990s before a games industry of any significance formed. Only a few of the video games created during the immediate post-communism period stood out. Filler, a 1991 abstract colour-matching game created by Russian programmer Dmitry Pashkov, was one of the few to reach an international audience after French publisher Infogrames released it as 7 Colours in Western Europe.
But as home computer sales in the former communist bloc increased towards the end of the 1990s, more and more game studios began to form. These ambitious new companies wanted to make their mark on the international stage, not just in their homelands. They wanted to show the world that the former communist bloc had more to offer than Tetris. Their emergence coincided with a change in attitude towards Eastern Europe among western game publishers. Although the growing sales of games in the region helped change attitudes, saving money was the primary motive. By the turn of the century, the cost of creating video games was soaring into the millions and big-league game publishers hoped Eastern Europe’s pool of cheap talent could help cut costs. The interest from western game firms further fuelled the formation of Eastern European game studios as more and more amateur programmers went professional hoping to make it big in the video game industry.
And when Czech game studio Illusion Softworks’ military action game Hidden & Dangerous became a million-seller in 1999, any lingering doubts about Eastern European studios’ ability to deliver vanished. Illusion Softworks’ breakthrough was followed by a succession of hit games from Eastern Europe including Ukrainian strategy game Cossacks: European Wars and Bohemia’s intense military combat simulation Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis. Although these games appealed globally, the legacy of communism still lingered within the subject matter of the games forged in Eastern Europe and Russia.
Operation Flashpoint drew on designer Spanel’s experience of communism. It cast the player as a frontline soldier who is part of a NATO attempt to counter a fictional military rebellion against Gorbachev shortly after his rise to power in 1985. “We’ve experienced communism from the inside and now live outside it and so we know what both are like and this influenced the story of Operation Flashpoint,” said Spanel.
Unlike most military games, Operation Flashpoint showed warfare without the glamour of Hollywood heroism. The full-on assaults that typified other military games would almost always result in death in Operation Flashpoint; planning, discipline and patience were a necessity. Spanel’s game also left players in the dark about the overall state of the conflict, instead there were simply the orders and need-to-know information provided from on high. It was war at its most unheroic, paranoid, confusing and dangerous. There was no room for Rambos in this game.
Spanel was not alone in drawing on his nation’s history for inspiration. IL-2 Sturmovik, a flight simulation designed by Russian game studio 1C: Maddox Games, recreated the air battles between Soviet and Nazi forces in the Second World War usually overlooked by western flight sims. Ukrainian studio GSC Game World, meanwhile, looked to the fenced-off zone surrounding the exploded Chernobyl nuclear reactor that lies 110 kilometres from their Kiev offices. They used this unpopulated zone and the ghostly abandoned city of Pripyat, which lies within the area, as the template for the irradiated world of its 2007 first-person shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl.
By the mid-2000s, Eastern European studios had completed their journey from communism to globally successful video game creators. But while the move to making games for a global audience resulted in British and French game designers playing down their national influences, Eastern Europe’s games made few concessions to US audiences. Having fought for years to
free themselves from communism, Eastern Europe’s game developers were not about to hide their cultural distinctiveness. That desire to ensure Eastern European culture was not extinguished was the real legacy of communist attempts to erase the national identities of the countries once under its control.
[1]. Pajitnov also reduced the number of different shapes from Pentominoes’ 12 to just seven.
[2]. No official records confirming exactly when the Poly Play machine launched appear to have survived the fall of communism in East Germany.
[3]. Again there is no clarity about the exact year of release, although it is certainly some point in the 1980s prior to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.
[4]. A company headed by Gábor Rényi, the son of Peter Rényi, who was the deputy editor of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party newsper Népszabadság.
[5]. Atari Games had refused to sign up to Nintendo’s NES licensee system and the two firms were engaged in a number of tit-for-tat legal spats about Nintendo’s control of the NES market. Atari Games wasted millions promoting, developing and manufacturing its unreleased version of Tetris.
Sonic boom: Sega’s blue hedgehog captivated millions. Pitchal Frederic / Corbis Sygma
17. Sega Does What Nintendon’t
Sega’s prospects looked bleak. The arcade game giant’s attempts to challenge Nintendo with its Master System console had ended in disaster. And now its latest home console, the Megadrive, had bombed in Japan.
When it launched in October 1988, Sega was hopeful that the Megadrive, which was based on the technology used in the company’s coin-op games, would make serious inroads into Nintendo’s dominance of the Japanese market. Despite boasting conversions of popular Sega arcade titles such as the fighting game Golden Axe and the second instalment of Yuji Naka’s role-playing game series Phantasy Star, the Japanese had snubbed the Megadrive. Embarrassingly even NEC’s PC Engine, a NES rival launched in 1987, was outselling Sega’s flashy new system.[1]
Confident that its superior hardware would win out in the end, Sega shrugged off Japan’s apathy towards its new console and pressed ahead with the 1989 launch of the Megadrive in North America, where the system would be called the Genesis. Few analysts believed Sega could succeed in North America. 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. The TurboGrafx-16 sold so little in the US that NEC abandoned its plans to bring the console to Europe. NEC’s low sales were compounded by the lack of game development support for the TurboGrafx-16 outside Japan. As a result, many of the games on NEC’s console were titles designed for a Japanese audience and were ill-suited to the American market, such as Kato-chan and Ken-chan, a Super Mario Bros-esque romp starring a popular Japanese comedy duo who farted, defecated and urinated their way through the game.[2]
Sega, at least, had its popular coin-op games to fall back on, but getting other companies to go against Nintendo and back the Genesis was an uphill struggle. Even a licensee deal offering more favourable terms failed to persuade big-name publshers to support the Genesis. Michael Katz, the head of Sega of America whose primary goal was to make the Genesis popular in the US, had faced similar problems before.
Prior to joining Sega, Katz had been in charge of marketing Atari Corporation’s 7800 ProSystem, its unsuccessful attempt to challenge the NES. “Atari couldn’t get the hot arcade titles,” said Katz. To try and plug the gap, Katz arranged for the hottest home computer game titles to be converted to the 7800 ProSystem. The approach failed. Katz decided to try a different approach for the Genesis. “I thought we should go after personality licences, especially in sports,” said Katz. “It was very hard to get support from third-party publishers for the Genesis. That’s one of the reasons we needed strong personality licences, because then we could woo guys into doing a football or baseball or basketball game because they knew we had a good personality licence attached that would give it good volume and they would know we were going to put good amounts of TV behind it.”
First on Katz’s shopping list was Joe Montana, the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers and one of the most valuable American football players at the time. Sega paid $1.7 million for the rights to create American football video games bearing the sports star’s name for the next five years and hired Mediagenic, the company formerly known as Activision, to create its Joe Montana Football game. It was to be Sega’s flagship Christmas game for the Genesis. “Sega needed a football game and fast. We saw the beginning of what looked like one at Mediagenic so I asked if they could do it for us and we paid them a lot of money,” said Katz.
With Joe Montana Football under way, Katz formulated a marketing plan designed to take Nintendo head on. 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’.”
But within a month of the Genesis’ August 1989 launch, Sega discovered its crucial Christmas game was in trouble. “Each month we were checking on the game, but we weren’t doing a very good job of checking it and/or we were being deceived,” said Katz. “Mediagenic weren’t nearly as far ahead on the game as we thought they were. We found out in September that the game wasn’t going to be finished. I was in a bind. I owed Joe Montana $1.7 million and we were counting on a game for Christmas.”
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] “I would watch games on TV and then want to go outside and run around and pretend to be my sports heroes. Then I wanted to be them in Strat-O-Matic, but I couldn’t get that many of my friends excited about it because it was too complicated. When I saw my first computer I realised I could put all the computation and administrative stuff in the computer and just put nice graphics on a TV screen. I figured the more we made it look like TV the more people would be able to relate to it.”
Sports games had come a long way since the early 1970s, when text-only statistical sims and Pong clones disguised as sports titles ruled. By the early 1980s, advances in graphics technology had encouraged game designers to explore new ways of representing sport in video games. Some experimented with views from the stands, such as Texas Instruments’ Indoor Soccer, or bird’s eye views of the pitch as in Atari Football, but more game designers took their inspiration from TV sports coverage.
Don Daglow and Eddie Dombrower were among the first to follow the example of TV with their 1983 Intellivision game World Series Baseball, which fused the statistical backbone of Daglow’s text-only Baseball with action viewed from TV-inspired angles. “Sports simulations started with no graphics, so we started to get the maths and the simulation part right first because that was all we had,” said Daglow. “Then game designers started integrating graphics and had to explore the trade-off between mathematical accuracy and graphical display. On World Series Baseball we started imitating TV coverage. That game came out of wanting to mimic the way television covered baseball and watching a baseball game one day and realising I knew how to make the Intellivision do that.”
The viewpoint
s used in TV coverage had significant advantages, said Daglow: “TV coverage has always experimented with trying to find the best camera angle that gives you the best close up, but still lets you follow the action, because the players are recognisable rather than specks in the field. It’s the best trade off between showing the action and portraying human beings.”
As the 1980s progressed, game designers continued to explore the fusion of mathematical simulation and TV presentation pioneered by Daglow and Dombrower. And, as game makers sought to increase the realism of their sports games, they began to include real-life sports stars, starting with Electronic Arts’ 1983 basketball game Julius Erving and Larry Bird Go One-on-One, and more managerial elements such as training your virtual sportspeople.[4] These ideas and more came together in Daglow and Dombrower’s Earl Weaver Baseball. As well as bearing the name of and design input from the former Baltimore Orioles manager, the 1987 Amiga game simulated baseball in incredible statistical detail while also pushing the TV-style coverage to new heights with slow-motion instant replays and computerised commentary. “Earl Weaver was a case where machines had become more powerful,” said Daglow. “It was originally conceived for the Amiga and we now had the power to do split screen so we could show the batter and the pitcher on one side of the screen and the field on the other, so you could actually see the players in detail.”
The leap in visual capabilities also meant Daglow and Dombrower had to pay attention to the skin colour of the baseball players. “When you had four colours to choose from everybody is going to look the same and no-one’s going to think anything about it,” said Daglow. “But when you get to the point when you’ve got that many colours and that big a human figure, you can’t have an African-American pitcher and a white pitcher look the same. At the time I was concerned because I felt anything else was going to be disrespectful and that there could be negative feedback. Ironically, we ended up getting tremendous support from the community precisely for having acknowledged race in a game. At the time I felt we were taking chances, but I ended up feeling very proud of the responses we got.”
Replay: The History of Video Games Page 29
