Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  The rise of 3D graphics techniques would sweep away the era of the interactive movies much like the punks brought the heyday of the prog rockers to a sudden halt. And fittingly, it was a team of rebellious young game designers who plastered their back-to-basics action games in gore, swastikas and industrial metal that would deliver the killer blow.

  [1]. The IBM PC was not a standard computer system. Keen to get a low-priced business computer on the market fast, IBM built its PC using widely available hardware rather than creating its own technology. This meant other manufacturers could reproduce the PC without fear of legal action by using the same hardware, which they started doing within a year of the PC’s 1981 launch. Microsoft, which wrote the PC-DOS operating system for IBM’s PC, also helped the makers of clone machines by allowing them to buy the same software under the MS-DOS name. Eventually the sales of IBM PC-compatible computers would far outstrip the sales of IBM’s own brand system.

  [2]. There were actually several types of CD that could be used for video games competing to become the standard format in the early 1990s. The CD-ROM format focused on data storage while Philips’ CD-i format was primarily designed for storing video. To confuse matters further, some were even touting digital audio tape (DAT) as a superior alternative to CD since it held twice as much data as a CD. CD-ROM won the day.

  [3]. Until The Sims beat its record in 2002.

  [4]. A 1996 adventure game set in Paris in which the player took on the role of an American journalist framed for murder.

  Merchants of Doom: (left to right) John Carmack, Kevin Cloud, Adrian Carmack, Jo

  hn Romero, Tom Hall and Jay Wilbur. Courtesy of John Romero

  20. The Ultimate Display

  In 1965 computer graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland laid down an ambitious challenge to the computer scientists at the annual International Federation for Information Processing Congress. He outlined an elaborate vision of the future, a time when computers would create “the ultimate display”. The computer display of tomorrow, he ventured, would not just look like the real world, it would feel, respond and sound like reality too. Creating that virtual reality, he argued, is what computer researchers should see as their ultimate goal.

  Sutherland’s bold vision fired the imagination of computer scientists.[1] They threw themselves enthusiastically into trying to create “the ultimate display”. They built head-mounted displays, helmets with computer screens for each eye that consumed the wearers’ field of vision like a pair of hi-tech binoculars. They figured out how to construct virtual objects out of coloured polygon shapes, usually triangles, to create an illusion of 3D on 2D computer screens.[2] They built electronic gloves to let people interact with these 3D worlds using their hands and designed haptic feedback devices that conveyed the sensation of touch with their vibrations.

  Although some of these breakthroughs seeped out of the research labs in the form of the flight simulators for pilot training, for the first two decades following Sutherland’s landmark speech the work of virtual reality researchers went, for the most part, unnoticed.

  But as the 1990s began the wider world finally latched onto the idea of virtual reality, partly as a result of talk about the development of internet and the connected world it would usher in. The virtual realities these researchers sought to create provided an easily understandable and visual representation of the global network the internet promised. “Virtual reality was a great symbol of how the internet would take over our lives,” said Jonathan Waldren, the founder of British virtual reality research company W. Industries, which later renamed itself Virtuality. “There was a lot of hype, people were being told by analysts that the internet was going to be a paradigm shift for everything in life and for a lot of people that was really bewildering.”

  Virtual reality may have been a separate idea from the internet, but for a world trying to get its head around the abstract idea of what a networked world would be like, it brought the concept to life. After 20 years of being ignored, virtual reality became one of the most talked about areas of computer research. Investors pumped millions of dollars into research projects and virtual reality start-ups hoping to cash in on the new world. Journalists flocked to see the latest developments before returning with reports about how in the future we could be spending as much time in the virtual world as in the real world. TV documentaries excitedly discussed the possibility of cybersex in the virtual reality worlds that, at the time, seemed to be just around the corner. To a lot of people the polygon 3D realities being prompted by those trying to engineer these digital worlds looked a lot like a video game.

  As it happened, video game makers had also been wrestling with the same problem as virtual reality researchers, namely how to make believable computer-generated 3D worlds. But while the virtual reality set focused on engineering hardware devices that could make the digital real, game developers were battling to deliver Sutherland’s immersive vision through software that would work within the limitations of mass-market computer technology.

  The earliest 3D video games, such as Tailgunner and Battlezone, had relied on wireframe visuals to create an illusion of depth. It was an elegant solution given the technology available, but game developers knew the polygon 3D visuals that virtual reality researchers had been playing with would let them create far more believable worlds.

  Atari became the first company to bring the technique to video games with 1983’s coin-op game I, Robot. Devised by Dave Theurer, the creator of Tempest and Missile Command, the game mixed shooting with platform jumping in a world that looked as if it was built out of Lego bricks. I, Robot not only introduced the visual approach to game players, but demonstrated the big advantages of 3D visuals by allowing players to see the action from a range of viewpoints.

  Unlike the 2D graphics that were widespread at the time, 3D graphics did not need to be drawn in advance. Instead they were generated using mathematical equations and so all a game had to do to alter the player’s perspective was recalculate the position and size o each polygon relative to the player’s location in the virtual world. And by using more polygons you could create more elaborate and realistic looking objects. It was easy in theory, but the more polygons you had the more calculations were needed and as the number of calculations increased so did the time it took for computers to carry out the instructions. “The maths for 3D graphics is very simple,” said David Braben, the creator of Zarch, a 1987 shoot ’em up for the Acorn Archimedes set above a 3D patchwork landscape of agricultural fields created out of polygons.[3] “The main problem was making the graphics go fast enough for the motion to look smooth.”

  Not that the challenge stopped game developers from trying. Flight simulation developers led the way, keen to inject more realism into their work, but polygon graphics soon began being used in other types of games, from 1989 racing sim Indianapolis 500: The Simulation to French game designer Christophe de Dinechin’s Alpha Waves, a 3D platform game for the Atari ST promoted by its publisher Infogrames as a dream-like relaxation experience. “Alpha Waves was the first full 3D platformer game,” said Frédérick Raynal, who converted the 1990 game to the PC. “Everything was moving fast on the screen and the game play was very challenging. I think Infogrames made a mistake trying sell it as a New Age brain motivating experience instead of an efficient and modern platformer.”

  Others built whole worlds out of polygons, most notably Midwinter, Mike Singleton’s 1989 game of guerrilla warfare that took place on a large snow-covered island made up of light blue polygons. Atari Games’ 1989 coin-op driving sim Hard Drivin’ went a step further than most in its plundering of ideas from virtual reality, combining 3D polygon visuals with variable wheel resistance and force feedback technology that had its origins in the haptic feedback hardware engineered by those chasing Sutherland’s Holy Grail.

  The intertwined worlds of virtual reality and video games finally came together when Virtuality decided to bring virtual reality to the masses. Virtuality began life in the Engl
ish city of Leicester where it engineered virtual reality equipment for corporate customers. “We used to work in a tiny little place in Leicester that was underground; under an old shoe factory,” said Waldren. “It was a government-run place – they were trying to get more IT companies in and we hired some rooms. It was cheap space – no cost. The idea was to build these virtual reality systems and sell them to professional development organisations.”

  After doing some work for British Telecom, Virtuality joined forces with Leading Leisure, a UK firm that had created a mini-flight simulator called The Venturer for use in funfairs and large arcades. “The idea was that we’d build a little person simulator using virtual reality technology and link it to the flight simulator,” said Waldren. “The grand vision was we could have these simulation centres where people could be in an aircraft or exoskeleton in some kind of game environment.”p>

  The grand vision never happened, but Virtuality figured there was potential in making coin-operated virtual reality game machines for arcades. Virtuality’s team designed sit-down and stand-up versions of its arcade machines that boasted the head-mounted displays, 3D joysticks and glove-like controllers that symbolised virtual reality in the public mind. 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. “That really cramped our ability to do anything of depth,” said Waldren. “Our goal was to get people in there, give them a very highly intense, intuitive experience for three to four minutes, but then you had to change over because typically there was a queue and, obviously, the operator has to get the next people in there.”

  Virtuality’s games gave many people their first taste of a virtual reality experience, fuelling the belief that the future envisaged by Sutherland was almost here. Nothing could have been further from the truth. While Virtuality continued to make games until the late 1990s, including 1996’s Pac-Man VR, the hype surrounding virtual reality waned fast. “The equipment was too expensive and there was no good business model beyond training,” said Brenda Laurel, the former Atari Research employee who got involved in virtual reality work in the early 1990s.

  Jaron Lanier, a virtual reality researcher who also started out exploring the technology during a stint at Atari Research, feels in retrospect that Virtuality’s attempts to take the technology to the public may have done more harm than good.[4] “On one hand they had gone quite a bit further than anyone had at creating something that was a manufactured product and they had really worked on a business plan – this $1-a-minute experience – and that was all good,” he said. “The problem is that they were a little unrealistic about whether they were ready for primetime. I think people spent their dollar and were disappointed with the level of graphics that were possible at the time.”

  This gap between the rhetoric and actuality of virtual reality was something video game designers were about to really expose. In November 1991, one month after Virtuality unveiled Dactyl Nightmare, a Texan game developer called Id Software released a PC game called Catacomb 3-D that marked a major breakthrough in video game 3D graphics.

  Id began as a tight-knit group of game-loving colleagues who worked for Softdisk, a disk magazine publisher based in Shreveport, Louisiana. Popular in the 19, disk magazines provided subscribers with a floppy disk packed with articles, adverts and software for their home computers. Softdisk started out in 1981 with its monthly Apple II magazine Softdisk Magazine and by 1987 around 100,000 subscribers were paying $9.95 a month for the company’s disk magazines, which were now available for a variety of computer systems.

  One of the programmers churning out software to tight deadlines for the firm was John Romero, an energetic and ambitious game designer who dreamed of achieving wealth and fame through his creations. He had started out selling his games to disk magazines such as UpTime before joining Origin Systems, the publisher of the Ultima series of role-playing games, in 1987. Origin was supposed to be Romero’s big break, but it turned sour.

  His first project at the then New Hampshire-based firm was cancelled before it was finished and he then decided to quit to join his former boss at Origin who had left to form his own game studio, which went bust almost as soon as it started. Romero was left broke and so when Jay Wilbur, the former editor of UpTime who had joined Softdisk, called and offered him a job he jumped at the chance. “I could count on John. He was a machine,” said Wilbur. “When I worked at UpTime, he was putting out a game per month, which for me as someone buying games to put on a periodical was perfect. He’d make these great games and each one of them had double consonant titles, so it was like Wacky Wizard or Deep Dungeon or something like that.”

  Shreveport was a long way away from video gaming’s spiritual heartland of Silicon Valley. The city was built on the back of oil and gas but, in the mid-1980s, the industry collapsed leaving behind a legacy of racial tension, double-digit unemployment rates, high levels of homelessness and gang crime. The offices in the downtown skyscrapers that once symbolised Shreveport’s wealth sat empty and disused buildings in the city centre were boarded up. Despite being told he would be able to make games at Softdisk, Romero spent his time converting the company’s existing programs so they could be put on its IBM PC compatible magazine Big Blue Disk in a monotonous nine-to-five working environment. One day in 1990 Romero cracked and confronted Softdisk’s owner. Romero told him that Softdisk should make a game subscription disk for PC owners and, if the company didn’t, he would quit.

  “I was tired of writing programs for Big Blue Disk and wanted to make games full time,” said Romero. Softdisk’s boss agreed and Gamer’s Edge, a disk magazine for PC gamers that came out once every two months, was born, with Romero at the helm. To supplement the Gamer’s Edge team, Romero brought in Adrian Carmack, a Softdisk artist fond of drawing dark and disturbing images part-inspired by the pictures of injured and diseased people he saw while working in the photo archives of a Shreveport hospital, and the unrelated John Carmack, a fiercely intelligent and talented programmer recommended to Romero by Wilbur, who was charged with overseeing tusiness end of the Gamer’s Edge project.

  “John Carmack submitted an overhead-view dungeon crawl game to me to buy for Softdisk,” said Wilbur. “It was magnificent. I would have loved to have purchased it but couldn’t because of the parameters of what I could do on the disk. So I said: ‘Hey John, this is awesome but it’s too large. Can you do something small?’. He came back with this tennis program that had accurate physics – Pong with physics and an isometric view. It was brilliant. It was like ‘oh my god, this guy’s got something going on here that’s beyond what we can do’. He is clearly up there as one of the best. He is a monster at what he does.”

  Another Softdisk employee, Tom Hall, was the last member of the gang. Hall was not part of the Gamer’s Edge team but he loved games and would regularly contribute ideas. On the evening of 19th September 1990, Hall and John Carmack stayed late at work fooling around with game ideas and working out how to make a PC game scroll smoothly. That night Carmack cracked the problem. “Over that night they developed a perfect – and when I’m talking perfect, I mean pixel-by-pixel – rendition of the first level of Super Mario Bros 3,” said Wilbur.

  The pair stayed at work until 5am recreating Nintendo’s hit game before heading home. On Romero’s desk they left a floppy disk containing their creation, which they named Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement after the video game character created by Romero who they had used in
place of Mario, with a note saying ‘load me’. Romero was stunned as were the rest of the Gamer’s Edge crew. Romero saw the potential immediately: this was their ticket out of Softdisk. “We started piling in the next morning and they showed it to us and we were like ‘my god, that’s perfect, this is Mario 3’,” said Wilbur, who got in touch with Nintendo to see if they would be interested in a PC version of their game. They were not. “I contacted my friends at the legal end of Nintendo who said: ‘We have no desire to exploit this property outside of Nintendo’s hardware’.”

  As luck would have it, around the time that Nintendo turned them down, a man called Scott Miller got in touch with Romero. Miller was the founder of Apogee, a Dallas-based game publisher specialising in selling titles via shareware. Shareware was an alternative to the mail order or retail distribution methods used by most software publishers, and was dreamt up by Andrew Fluegelman, the founding editor of PC World magazine. 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 i 10 users paid up.

  Miller liked the shareware concept, but noticed that while people paid for applications or utilities they rarely paid for games. He started wondering why and whether there was a way to solve the problem. “Shareware games did not make money before I formed Apogee,” he said. “The reason was because shareware game authors – and there weren’t many – made the mistake of releasing their full game as shareware, giving no incentive for players to send them money. I decided to try a new method: release an episode rather than a full game and then sell the remaining episodes.”