All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture

by Harold Goldberg

  “What do we know about games?” asked Morhaime.

  “We don’t,” admitted Adham, undaunted. “But we can learn by doing. What do we have to lose? We’re young.”

  Morhaime’s father warned him against the foray, saying, “Be very cautious. It sounds risky.” Actually, Morhaime wasn’t the kind of nerd who would jump into anything willy-nilly. He needed to know about every detail, in addition to Adham’s constant urging. But by early 1991, Morhaime had gotten a $15,000 loan from his grandmother and put $10,000 of it into the company. The same went for Adham, who, through sheer determination and a promise to sign over 10 percent of the company, had gotten a contract from Fargo at Interplay to do videogame ports for the SNES. By February, Morhaime, Adham, and Frank Pearce, another pal from college, were building desks in a small office space on Jamboree Road in Irvine. Pearce was completely gung ho, having had a gadget geek father who worked in computer sales. His dad even had one of the first cell phones, the ones that came in an unwieldy suitcase. As a child, Pearce was a fan of Mattel’s Intellivision and played Astrosmash, the combination of Space Invaders and Asteroids, constantly as a kid. Even though he didn’t get very far, he tried his hand at coding a text-based adventure game on his Apple. Pearce’s father urged him to take the job with Adham and Morhaime, not that Frank really needed a push.

  The money for their SNES games with Interplay never came in fast enough. Cash flow problems were common—even though Adham and Morhaime didn’t pay themselves for the first couple of years. Their dating lives suffered due to seemingly endless hours in the office. At the time, they probably didn’t have money for even a cheap date; their Discover cards were maxed out with office items and payroll.

  But the excitement was still there. They were making games. Adham did much of the programming on RPM Racing (Radical Psycho Machine Racing) for the SNES, and Interplay supplied much of the graphics. There were also some boring ports to the Amiga, and Interplay contracts for chess and typing products. By the time Interplay released Silicon & Synapse’s The Lost Vikings, the dozen S&S employees had bonded on the long hours. They often sat on the floor, a frat house atmosphere abounding, eating fries and burgers, talking about games and comics and the pressures of young life, maybe shooting a Nerf gun when someone said something stupid. When Metzen joined this tightly knit crew, he thought he had found a new family, so much so that he didn’t want to go back to his house at night.

  Metzen tried to create artwork on a computer, but it was like drudgery, so precise and time-consuming that it took the fun out of drawing. His challenges with computer graphics didn’t stop the team’s first big game, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, from becoming a success when it sold more than 300,000 copies after its release in November 1994. Warcraft was probably the second big real time strategy game, a fantasy genre that mimicked the careful plotting and decision making during the fog of real-life war. It was inspired by the game Dune II, in which, à la Frank Herbert’s novels, you became an intrepid sci-fi commander who enforced a micromanaging control over your troops. You could build strong military installations and marvel at marauding giant sand worms—before you figured out how to trash them. In Warcraft, you were given quests in godforsaken fictional places like the Swamps of Sorrow, colored in green sludge like that in the Toxic Avenger movies. But you couldn’t get to the evil Orcish outpost of Kygross and its burnable huts unless you built lumber mills and fortified your Grand Hamlet. Each time you commanded an archer, one would exclaim, “Yes, my lord!” in a laughable British accent. Yet the words never failed to give you an ego boost. You trained bearded clerics to heal your wounded archers and you forged on to burn down the Orcs’ stronghold. If you failed, you would hear this sadistic chiding, “You pitiful worm, your defeat could mean our loss in the war against the humans.” If you and your troops died more than a few times, you’d grimace and yell at the screen, “Forget you, Warcraft. Forget you and your stupid war. Damn your oafish, overpowering Orcs. I won’t be back for your insults. I have better things to do. I have a life.” And the next day, there you were, trying to win again.

  It wasn’t until Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness that Chris Metzen’s impact was felt in a game. Until that time, Morhaime, Adham, and Pearce didn’t feel the need for anything more than a cursory story. In fact, Morhaime would sometimes comment, “You don’t think about the backstory of Sonic the Hedgehog or why he collects gold rings. You just want to speed through the game.” Though story had become more complex in adventure games like The 7th Guest and King’s Quest and in some role playing games, in other genres it was still given short shrift. That lack of story was one of the reasons that much of the mainstream press had stayed away from reviewing videogames with any regularity.

  Despite the long hours of game making, Metzen stayed around the office later than usual one night. Sitting at his computer, he typed up a couple of pages of backstory for the Warcraft universe. He didn’t have the guts to send it on up the chain; a colleague did it for him. Everyone at the small company seemed to appreciate the fact that Metzen could write fairly well. His short backstory document, which he thought was full of terrible prose, was a harbinger of an extraordinary change in the company culture, one that would lead his colleagues to value an immersive narrative for each game the company would publish in the future. Metzen himself was thrilled at the opportunity for more creativity. Deep inside he had wondered, “I don’t know if doing tile sets like I’m doing is the right thing for me. I like to draw with a pencil, and I think I might crash if I continue to be a computer animator. It’s just too much about the left brain.” Tile sets made up the backgrounds in the humorous side scroller Lost Vikings 2, which sported funny characters like Erik the Stout. There was no shame in doing backgrounds, but Metzen’s ideas were far beyond the kind of art that few really take the time to appreciate while jumping, stabbing, and luring monsters to their eye-popping electrocutions.

  During this time, change was coming for the young executives. Adham and Morhaime decided that their cash flow problems were just too monumental. They sold Silicon & Synapse to Davidson & Associates, the same educational software company with which the Williamses would have so much trouble during the release of Phantasmagoria and during the making of Roberta’s last King’s Quest game. Unlike the founders of Sierra, Adham and Morhaime’s experience with Davidson was a positive one. After a $10 million deal that was settled with stock and no cash, the Davidsons gave the company complete creative control—with one exception. Jan Davidson hated the name Silicon & Synapse and demanded that they change it to something more understandable. All titles in the future would be published under the more accessible, decidedly un-geeky name of Blizzard Entertainment.

  In the ensuing years, Warcraft II was a success and so was its painstakingly detailed science fiction counterpart, StarCraft. But just as StarCraft was being released, Davidson’s parent company, Cendant, had its dirty troubles with the SEC. The financial security of every employee at Blizzard was thrown into serious jeopardy. Adham, Morhaime, and Pearce were left to consider the woes of their treasured staff when the conglomerate’s stock tumbled down, down, down, like one of those Vikings who missed the ledge of a cliff. With the shares trading at $6 after plunging from a high of $42, Pearce and Morhaime felt discouraged, angered, and betrayed. Their employees had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock options, almost everything, literally overnight. Financial futures had been destroyed.

  The three founders talked about the blood, sweat, and tears, the sacrifice of time, family, and even health. Adham himself was becoming both mentally and physically weary of putting on a brave face in front of employees when times had gotten tough. He would leave Blizzard for a long sabbatical. (In the long run, however, Blizzard was able to take care of its employees—those who stuck it out and remained—with a profit sharing program that had nothing to do with the vagaries of the stock market.)

  Shortly after Blizzard was sold once again—this time to the French-based Vivendi/Universal�
��EverQuest began demanding hours upon hours from the lives of hard-core gamers everywhere. The staff at Blizzard in Irvine was not immune to its many enticements, and Adham, now back in the fold, was completely fascinated. So was one of his newer hires, Rob Pardo. Pardo originally had dreams of becoming a movie director, but he ended up managing a local Software Etc. store. After becoming a game tester, he worked his way up to producer at Interplay and was slowly moving into game design. Pardo looked at the smart but soft-spoken Adham as a game design mentor. They began to have intense, constructive discussions; but the two really began to bond when playing EverQuest together. Pardo was so fascinated by EverQuest that he became the Guild Master of Legacy of Steel, one of the gangs of guys who became über-experts at the vagaries of the game.

  Meanwhile, Blizzard was bogged down in creating a role playing game called Nomad, which had a post-apocalyptic theme and dinosaurlike monsters that were outfitted with tanklike weapons. The wow element would be that you controlled not just one person, but a complete squad of characters. Yet few were satisfied with the direction of Nomad, because none of the Nomad team was able to explain satisfactorily to the top dogs why people would want to play the game and what was special about it. It also had a new game engine, the software that made the game work, which wasn’t quite perfected.

  In mid-1999 Adham began to consider making an MMO at Blizzard. With the team, he tossed around the idea of using one of their established series as a springboard into the worlds of massively multiplayer games instead of creating a new universe from scratch. Adham and Pardo began retreating to the food court of the Fashion Island Mall in Irvine to have intense discussions.

  “Should we do StarCraft, Warcraft, or Diablo?” wondered Adham. The latter, a game based on epic throw-downs between the forces of heaven and hell, was being made at a separate office entirely, in northern California. Whatever the game would be, it would be centered in the Irvine headquarters, where it could be easily overseen. Diablo, while alluring and popular, didn’t seem to have the great depth of a StarCraft or Warcraft. And as they looked at EverQuest, which they admired to the point of drooling, they saw that that world could be improved upon.

  “There are a lot of questions to answer,” said Pardo. “What would the classes be comprised of? What about the healers; how powerful should they be? When a player dies, what is the penalty; how much of his experience does he lose? Or shouldn’t he lose any?”

  The challenges Blizzard needed to deal with seemed endless. In addition, Metzen thought the non-playable fantasy characters could be fashioned to have short but appealing tales to tell when a player engaged them. For story, he gravitated toward the mythology of Warcraft, which was not completely unlike that of his favorite comic books, like Simonson’s Thor.

  In meetings, Metzen noted that while EverQuest was really cool, its pantheon of gods wasn’t in the foreground. He felt that Blizzard could better weave the fabric of story in this world of sword and sorcery. Tales would be the lure that would lead the gamer through this endless world full of social engagement. It was story that would constantly intrigue the gamer during the otherwise often banal game process of leveling up to make your avatar stronger.

  Pearce, gruff on the outside but a sweet guy on the inside, didn’t object to a rich story by any means. But he wondered aloud if building such a massive world was the right path on which to tread. “I know everyone here likes EverQuest. But the gaming experience I’m accustomed to and have enjoyed is playing something that has a beginning and an end. I like to play something and have a goal to finish the game. An MMO doesn’t have an end. Why do I want to play this game in perpetuity?”

  But the passion for EverQuest won out quickly, and even Pearce came on board after getting sucked into playing SOE’s game. Within a month, Morhaime was on the first of a muckle of trips to Havas Interactive, the videogames arm of Vivendi, at the Universal lot. During lunch, he tried to convince members of the board to sign on to an expensive MMO based on the Warcraft franchise. While Vivendi had questions about the budget of $10 million, Morhaime came armed with projections showing that a million players would subscribe in the United States within the first year. During the presentation, he also made a good case for four million players around the world, including Europe, South Korea, and China. The Frenchmen were supportive, but dubious of those numbers. There were logical questions: Why would a company that was so successful with its strategy games move into a completely new genre? Morhaime said that MMOs were the way of the future, and the future was now. It didn’t hurt Morhaime’s cause that EverQuest had been a runaway success. And other megacorporations wanted to get on the bandwagon. Warner Bros. was spending a small fortune to publish The Matrix Online, an MMO version of the Wachowski brothers’ cryptic films. So was Sony with its LucasArts collaboration for Star Wars Galaxies. No one wanted to get left behind, including Vivendi.

  Blizzard’s goal with World of Warcraft had been the grail of game makers since the beginning of the videogame revolution. They wanted to make a game that was a challenge to master but also easy to play. Pulling that off was like the ultimate leveling up for a videogame executive. The task they faced, if they looked at it in the long run, was terrifying. A mountain of work had to be done beyond game design. The only way to go about it was to put in long hours every day and do it bit by bit.

  Metzen, art director Sam Didier, and the development team went full steam ahead with a design that included a much creepier and more sinister kingdom of Azeroth than the one seen in previous Warcraft games, one that took place in the future, during a time in which Orcs and Humans had nearly been annihilated.

  “The artwork is epic,” said Didier. “But it’s dark.…”

  “There’s something not really right,” added Metzen. Everyone agreed that the realistic future fantasy was going too far to change the treasured and familiar franchise. If fans felt there was too much change, there might be a backlash that would affect not only the MMO, but Blizzard’s sterling reputation as a whole. Instead, they decided to go with a style that was close to that of Warcraft III, with comic book–inspired artwork featuring characters that looked larger than life, godlike and epic. After Blizzard hired some MMO veterans and went into early game testing, it became clear that the quest portions of the game were what gamers enjoyed most. Once the quests were completed, the testers became uninterested. So there were more and more quests and mythic tales included as the game progressed, a veritable tsunami of work to do to keep the already-engaged nerd coming back for more—and to attract the more general gaming audience. Individual quests were varied and quick to complete, as opposed to many of the tasks in EverQuest, which were repetitive and time-consuming, especially in the early stages of the game.

  With a year to go before release, the amount of work to be finished was still enormous. Adham himself had had enough. Not only did he have to deal with the pressures of crunch time, the roller coaster ride of business dealings was getting to him. He left his day-to-day role at Blizzard to become a less-harried consultant for the company. Pardo took over the role of lead designer. While Adham’s departure was a blow, there was no time to mourn; the game itself needed nurturing. As the deadlines mounted, Pardo began to grow as a person. Blizzard staff noticed that where he used to try to play devil’s advocate to keep out ideas he didn’t think would work, he now began to look for the gem within, say, a programmer’s idea and try to keep it in.

  Still, much of the work for World of Warcraft wasn’t finished. In MMOs, customization is one of the keys to gaming paradise. But the way the various classes and races would interact wasn’t yet certain. The classes still needed personalities and features that the gamer could tailor so one character could be distinguished from another. And the way characters would fight, one against the other, had to be completely revamped. Finally, the concept of having up to one hundred players ganging up and raiding dungeons, in a larger-than-life battle you could engage in near the end of the game, was debated constantly. Blizzard
settled on a gang of forty as the maximum size.

  When World of Warcraft hit the market on the night before Thanksgiving 2005, everyone from Blizzard drove from their Irvine offices to a launch event at a Fry’s Electronics store in the nearby middle class enclave of Fountain Valley. Everyone was nervous, tense. Metzen, his heart pounding, wondered if more than a handful of people would show up. Though people had shown up for their other games, and though they all believed they had made a feature-filled entertainment, the anxiety was palpable. As Pearce drove up to the discount store, he saw a traffic jam before him. Cars were honking, backed up on the ramp all the way from the store’s entrance. There was some smoke as well.

  “Did someone have an accident?” wondered Pearce. In reality, the smoke was from a barbecue in a tailgate party. Thousands of game fans had turned out, partying while waiting for their stars to show up. Some of the team had to park as far as a mile away from the festivities. The 2,500 copies of the game they’d brought weren’t enough to go around. So they went back to the Irvine office to get some more.

  In the coming months, small bugs were found and fixed each day. Worse, just as with EverQuest, customer service was an immediate issue, with upward of 150,000 questions being asked online every day. And just as with EverQuest, servers crashed constantly.

  Fans complained a blue streak, but they still kept on gaming. Within a year, Blizzard had ballooned to 750 employees and Warcraft had amassed $250 million in sales. Two hundred million dollars was earned from subscription sales alone.