None of the PopCap principals wanted to charge too much for the game on their own website and alienate what they hoped might be potential lifelong customers. After all, the game was already free to play on the Microsoft site. The trio agreed they needed to add something valuable to the game before they charged for it. But adding fees was tricky at the time, especially for a new company, because of the big dot-com implosion of early 2000. During that period, trillions of dollars in technology market value was lost, and no one wanted to gamble on anything even remotely related to the World Wide Web. Figuring out how much to charge proved to be more difficult than choosing a name for the company, and far more difficult than making the game itself. They knew games. But they knew about as much about selling games on the Web as Mario the Plumber knew about Kenyan economic policy. The trio thought about fixing a price for each download and, after some beer, came up with $4.99 for a fuller version of Bejeweled.
Despite their success, the PopCap guys were still kids who liked to party. During work hours, Vechey and Fiete would often take breaks and escape their monitors. They bought motorcycles and sped through the piney back roads of Seattle to clear their heads. As they sped, Fiete would rag on Vechey for buying a used purple Ninja 250 starter bike, mocking him with “Dude, that’s a chick bike.” As long as they got their work done, they weren’t going to worry too much about prices and marketing. Fiete and Vechey even took some time off to go to Argentina to party while Kapulka toiled in the States. Sure, sometimes they would work on games, and once, Vechey closed a licensing deal with Yahoo. But for most of the three months after they launched the site, they soaked up the sun, drank, and chatted up the local girls. Their philosophy of life wasn’t too complex: They didn’t need to get rich quick; they just wanted to live life their way, on their own terms. Yet inside they knew that the $12,000 to $15,000 a month they were bringing in from Microsoft and Yahoo wasn’t enough to run a company, at least not for very long.
Then Howard Tomlinson, an executive at Astraware who was converting the game for use on the PalmPilot portable digital assistant device, suggested that they put up a shareware version of Bejeweled on the Web. Tomlinson told Kapulka to sell the full version for $19.99. Kapulka called Vechey and Fiete explaining that Tomlinson had a theory that essentially held that if it isn’t expensive enough, people will think it’s a crappy game that’s not even worth the cheap price.
“Crap, that’s expensive,” said Vechey.
Fiete was quiet. But then, he was always somewhat reserved. But this time he had something to say. “I think we should do it. We can always lower the price later.” The full version included both the mode with a timer and the more tranquil untimed mode.
Within a month, the game brought in $35,000 from the PopCap website. The address became a kind of a viral grassroots slot machine that would not stop spewing money. Vechey kept shaking his head, saying, “Holy crap. Just holy crap!” every time he looked at the numbers. Fiete created a little app that would make a ka-ching sound when someone bought Bejeweled. At the end of the second month, it went off so much that Fiete disabled it.
The game was nonetheless pooh-poohed by game developers and critics, who said it required little skill to play. Reviewers ignored it and often refused to write about it. Yet those who didn’t care about being cool could feel a Zen peacefulness when playing, like the feeling you got when indulging in hours upon hours of Tetris. Like Tetris, Bejeweled had something that had nothing to do with skill or tension or beating the pants off other gamers. The experience of playing Bejeweled was akin to things that calm everyone in life: vegging out in front of the TV, looking at the waterfall at Yosemite National Park, sitting and watching a river flow on a summer day. And Bejeweled was right there on the computer, waiting for you when you needed a break from the stress.
The kids at PopCap soon had other successful ideas for games, like Bookworm, which was a spelling game hosted by a bespectacled worm named Lex, short for “lexicon.” Not long after came Peggle, which combined pachinko, pinballs with special changing powers, and cute characters. You even heard “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony when you cleared a level. The money just kept flowing in, primarily from women gamers, so much so that they had offers to buy the company for $60 million. But unlike Trilobyte with The 7th Guest, and scores of companies that came after them, Kapulka, Fiete, and Vechey didn’t care about taking the fast track to going public. They stayed private, hired an imaginative CEO, and methodically increased their staff to two hundred employees around the world, everywhere from Ireland to Shanghai. They licensed proprietary software to make PopCap-style games. Sometimes, when they were trapped in meeting after meeting that kept them cooped up for twelve hours, they complained about it. But behind those doors, PopCap was amassing tens of millions in investor money and slowly preparing for an IPO—if another colossal company didn’t preempt the deal by swooping down and buying the guys out.
PopCap and its groundbreakingly simple games had opened the floodgates for a nascent sub-industry. The company’s ideas for industry domination weren’t that different from Nolan Bushnell’s when he marketed Pong incessantly—even to doctors’ offices. Like Bushnell, PopCap pushed hard to have their games on every platform imaginable. Bejeweled and Peggle brought built-in cred to newer delivery systems like the cell phone, the iPad, Web browser Flash games (and games on airline flights with those horrible controllers attached by a stupid spring-loaded wire). Wherever games could be played, there was PopCap with a new port. Their seemingly overnight success encouraged the formation of dozens of small studios in garages, apartments, and student dorms, for independently made games. The venture capital coffers opened up, but the beauty of casual gaming was that the new entrepreneurs didn’t need much venture money. They saw where PopCap had gone, and they wanted to make small games that made fistfuls of money for little or no investment, too.
Each year the industry grew by leaps and bounds, to become a $3 billion force within a decade. The development costs, according to the Casual Games Association, could be as low as $50,000 (less if you paid your employees on the back end and worked out of a dorm room), a fraction of the cost of a popular console game, which was budgeted at $20 million or more. And unlike the console game making machinery, where hundreds worked on a game in almost an assembly line fashion, the casual teams were small and full of camaraderie. The risks were small enough that casual games companies could try fresh and forward-thinking games, more so than the console giants. The developers of the latter games worried about risking millions on offerings that didn’t have defined, already-existing audiences. They were often caught up in a kind of Hollywood-itis, where the idea of propping up and supporting the popular series—or making a new game with a known audience—was more vital than innovative advances in game play. The indie game visionary, however, could dive headfirst into any wild idea with gusto. If it failed, he or she could try something else, having lost only some man hours and not much money. In that sense, casual gaming harkened back to the Williamses in the early days of Sierra, when a game on a floppy disk could cause a major industry furor. (These games also spawned the sub-sub-industry of a new kind of critic who reviewed casual and browser-based games only.) Few of these nerds would reach the heights of PopCap, which was formed early on in the revolution. But they all would try to lure the female gamer. A lucky few would even hit that sweet spot, the one that brings in moms the world over along with seasoned console gamers. And even if those hardworking nerds lost a few dollars, they sure had a lot of fun—and gained a lot of experience—trying to make game.
* Some of this chapter is informed by my firsthand experience in working with the casual genre while employed at Sony Online Entertainment.
THE THEORIST GOES GLOBAL
“Will Wright is leaving.” The news reverberated throughout the videogame world on April 8, 2009.
Will Wright is gone. Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.
Just the day before, Wright had sat with his elite o
ne-hundred-member Electronic Arts team, the hardworking men and women who had developed his magnum opus, Spore, for more than half a decade. The game had sold more than two million copies since its release the previous year. After everyone had gathered, Wright spoke in measured tones, thanking the staff for their contributions over the years. The reaction to his departure ran the gamut from stunned silence to grudging understanding to shock to sadness. It was like Derek Jeter leaving the Yankees in his prime. Wright just zipped up his leather jacket, walked down the hallway, and out the door. There were no speeches from Electronic Arts honchos, no lavish dinner, no going-away party, no videogame equivalent of a gold watch. In actuality, the higher-ups at EA had known for nearly a year that the brilliant designer of SimCity and The Sims was going to leave, but they had kept it a secret from stockholders, industry analysts, and, especially, the press. Outside of the Emeryville offices, the spring weather in the Bay Area was crisp, nippy. Wright lit a Marlboro Light, and as he drove away in his black BMW M3, to his home high in the hills, he began to reflect upon his long, successful career in videogames.
In the late 1980s, the videogame industry had emerged from its stasis to become huge once again. But the majority of personal computer games had become less than exceptional, at least to Will Wright. With a mind like a vacuum cleaner that sucks up complex pop culture and scientific theories, Will Wright was the kind of guy who left no stone unturned when researching a game. If something intrigued this inquisitive generalist, he became obsessive. For instance, he read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at least ten times. Then he absorbed every bit of information he could find about the book itself. Of all the videogame changers, Wright was the truest individualist, an unusual, alternative-headed thinker who was taught to take ideas apart the way hackers analyze the code of a videogame to see how it works. And then, like the most intelligent hackers, Wright riffed on the ideas he had absorbed. If he had not been an insatiable bookworm, researcher, thinker, and scholar of human nature, the genre he helped to create would not have progressed so exponentially, so scientifically, and so beautifully.
When Wright began his work, a handful of game designers had begun to dabble in what would become known as God Games, games in which you could control the lives and fates of humans. Journalists and game makers weaned on fantasy described these games as if players had become deities themselves, perched upon the puffy-cloud-filled heavens, looking down upon their minions, deciding whether they would live their lives through free will or predestination or a combination of the two. With a tap on the keyboard, you could alter their fates, their routines, the way they moved, and the way they intermingled.
At the time, three of these game creators were doing similar things. Peter Molyneaux from the United Kingdom made Populous. While ominous music played, you built a world that included vast mountains and deep blue seas that you yourself would design. Magically, you influenced the world’s busy beings and chose whether they would be bad or good. There was even an Armageddon button to push to end everything, if you dared. Sid Meier made the Civilization series, based on highlights from the history of man. Civilization bit you hard and didn’t let go; there was even a quick lesson in evolution during the two-minute-long opening sequence. You were the unseen but powerful Great Leader, whose job it was “to unite the quarreling tribes to harness the power of the land to build a legacy that would stand the test of time, a Civilization.” Mesmerized, you traveled from the Bronze Age through the Space Age, and even constructed the world’s Seven Wonders.
But it was Wright’s games that set the stage. In Wright’s inventions the literary-minded, the sociology-minded, and the science-minded could discover fragments of their most beloved theories. In Wright’s games one could see the slow, sad suburban irony of Raymond Carver and John Cheever, and even the transcendent hope of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In that sense the moniker “God Games” was a misnomer. Wright’s creations, especially SimCity and The Sims, were more about the human condition, about evolution and about the meaning of play, than they were about simply taking the role of an omniscient being. These games were Human Games, not God Games.
Wright, an atheist, might well agree. A lanky Ichabod Crane of a man, who often wore a black lambskin leather jacket, Wright was born in Atlanta to an engineer father who attended Georgia Tech and started a profitable company that made plastic bags. Boyhood conversations with his father made young Will enthusiastically muse about science, NASA, the planets, and every child’s hope in the 1960s—to be an astronaut one day. But how Wright played as a child in solitude made him into what he is today. There was nothing he liked more than opening a colorful Revell plastic model box and putting together the pieces of a car, a tank, or a ship. Then he would sit on the couch and watch Godzilla movies in black-and-white. Thinking the movies were real because the national news was also presented in black-and-white, he hid behind the couch in utter terror, positive the scary monster was going to get him. It was only when his mother bought him a Godzilla model kit that he realized the monstrosity wasn’t going to harm him; he felt that something he made would never turn on him. Yet his mother, Beverly, had ambivalent feelings as his life beyond school became a mix of model building, board games like Panzer Blitz, and the strategy game of many future game designers, Go. “You’ll never amount to anything if you keep that up,” she would say.
But he kept on building, graduating to bigger things, constructing dioramas and model trains. His mother would just shrug. And he loved robots, not just those in his favorite sci-fi movies, like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars, but toys you could control remotely. It was his mother who gave him the creative genes. As an amateur actress and magician, she would have as many as thirty magicians over to the house to perform their tricks. Will became an ardent Harry Houdini fan, intrigued by the way the magician opened locks and seemingly controlled his audience’s emotions. Houdini was a hacker before there were computers. It was probably thanks to Beverly that Will was sent to Ashton Hall, a huge Montessori school in Atlanta. And she became both father and mother when Wright’s dad died of leukemia when Will was eight years old and the family moved to her hometown of Baton Rouge.
Wright’s major videogame influence was Miyamoto’s Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Ask any videogame designer that question, and Mario is probably one of the three answers he or she will give you. It’s de rigueur. Yet Wright’s reasoning was a bit different from the others. For Wright, it wasn’t Mario’s longing to save Princess Toadstool that captivated. Wright wasn’t thinking about the game’s simple objective: travel through eight crazy fantasy worlds and thirty-two levels to save the girl. He didn’t focus on the strange tools that Mario used, like flowers turned into weapons that would shoot fireballs. What rocked Wright was the way he could take his time to explore that mushroom- and monster-filled seriocomic universe as he encountered a variety of quirky characters. It all made him sit back and consider who the protagonist was and why fans could not turn away.
No matter how much he appreciated Miyamoto’s game design, Wright didn’t want to make platformers. He was more inspired by and attracted to an Electronic Arts game designed by Bill Budge called Pinball Construction Set. Wright loved pinball as much as any nerd anywhere. Playing pinball not only freed Wright’s mind, it made him wonder at the joys of physics and math, made him muse about the arcs and angles of the pinball itself. Budge’s Pinball was ideal for Wright. It opened a door that let him make a contraption in his very original way. More, it let him feel like he was a pioneer of sorts. For a nerd, Budge’s game was like what freshly cut logs were for a pioneer of the American West. You could make things from this software—not a cabin in the clearing, but what looked and worked like an electronic entertainment machine. You did it your way and it had your signature. You could say to your friends, “I made this. Can you beat it?” In real life, you probably couldn’t be a designer of pinball games—no matter how much you loved them. But with Budge’s game, you could live
the dream, at least on your computer screen. For Wright, it was the ultimate model kit. Forget Godzilla and plastic hot rod cars.
Figuring out what to do with his life didn’t happen easily for Wright. He didn’t want to take on the family business, which was a dead end to him and entrapping. So his mother sold the company. He didn’t quite finish college, so being an astronaut was out of the question. But he did study urban planning at Louisiana State and at the New School in New York City. Part of him still wanted to get his hands dirty, to make those models real at a real world job, like an architect … maybe. And he wanted to make games … well, maybe. But then again, he liked robots, which he could control with the Apple II computer his mother bought for him. He also loved the idea of racing cars. With a pal, he tricked out a Mazda RX-7 with an extra tank, night vision, two radar detectors, a computer system, a radar jammer, and a refrigerator. He sped across the country and was stopped late at night in Indiana for speeding at 104 mph. The shy Wright’s heart pounded as he told a gullible cop in Indiana that he was a journalist test driving a souped-up car. The cop let him pass, and Wright and his partner sped from Long Island to Southern California to win a cross-country rally. But like many students, Will still could not for the life of him figure out precisely what he wanted to do with a young, somewhat scattered and haphazard existence that led him to go to college for five years and to leave without a degree.
All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture Page 27
