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

by Harold Goldberg

  The Sims would become one of EA’s most popular games, eventually selling more than six million copies. It would become beloved by millions of women gamers, who would proudly outnumber male players by two to one. It would also be the first game to have its own official Visa credit card. The Sims was a brand. Riffing on McDonald’s signs, EA even sent out press releases saying, “10 million people served.”

  Bubbling beneath the surface of The Sims were heady theories about computer science, popular culture, psychology, and education. By combining these theories just right, Wright was like experimental molecular gastronomist Ferran Adria, the famed Spanish chef who mixed contrasting tastes together to delight the daring foodie. For instance, if Wright hadn’t attended one of Maria Montessori’s schools, which taught self-sufficiency in education, The Sims might not have been so enthralling. Wright was a firm believer in the ability of a person to educate himself at his own pace. All he needed, according to Montessori, was the basic materials to build his own path of learning in a nonlinear format. At its core, that’s what The Sims was about: your own style, which is not like someone else’s, got you through life in the simulation. Individuality beckoned. Wright wanted those who indulged in The Sims to imagine this was their own world, one in which they had a creative stake in the outcome, just like when they were kids and reimagined Gunsmoke, Miami Vice, or The Brady Bunch in the backyard.

  Wright believed that people would play The Sims in their own mind even when they had no access to the game, just as they would relive a movie or book they had enjoyed. In movies, you might ask, What if Harry Potter kissed Hermione early on in the series? What if Batman’s parents were still alive? What if the James Bond women were only evil and never good? Stellar story experiences are deconstructable into little pieces that evoke a great variety of game play. Conversely, the most memorable playtime experiences are “generative”: They can take us through the looking glass to a nearly endless variety of stories.

  Like life in the best of times, The Sims is an exercise in balancing material needs with social needs. Yet it includes the full range of human emotions. Most games address base feelings like fear, aggression, and violence very well. But it’s in Wright’s (and Peter Molyneaux’s) games that you get a sense of human compassion, empathy, even reflection. Partly, this is due to Simlish, the gibberish that the Sims use to talk. Simlish is never understandable, so the player ends up interpreting what the characters are saying. That projected story can be the subject of endless speculation. The danger, of course, is that some people take better care of their Sims, their virtual selves, than they do their real life selves.

  To The Sims, Wright also added what he distilled from some of his favorite fiction, like Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, in which the pioneering inhabitants of a planet used Barbie-ish toys called Perky Pats and a drug called Can-D to make themselves believe they lived the sex- and love-filled lives of dolls. Wright wasn’t exactly saying that his game was love and that love was the drug, although he wasn’t denying it. He was saying that “in a lot of ways, that’s what we do in games, allow people to project themselves into these worlds.”

  Wright’s next signature game, Spore, was on the other hand criticized as overly ambitious. For six years, Wright oversaw an ever-growing design team that was trying to make a simulation, a real-time strategy game, and a first person game that led to a kind of massively multiplayer experience. Every creature you created in this game of evolution had its own animation, and the combination of parts made each character move with its own personality. While it took a seemingly endless half hour to install on your computer, the first experience as a young cell under the sea was peaceful and sublime … and harrowing when another cell tried to eat you. But when you find your girlfriend cell and hearts bubble up around you, you’re hooked by the cuteness. Adding a poison puff appendage to your cell, you could survive, even thrive, and swim happily to land. Spore was an enticing look at evolution that you controlled. You become master or mistress of your own planet and then move into the galaxy to conquer parts unknown. Then you upload the experience that amazed you to the Spore website, to share it with the like-minded online. And you can choose tens of thousands of other people’s planets to download and play in. It seemed that you needed a completely extra or separate existence to live in this game world. But it was not the blockbuster that Electronic Arts had hoped it would be after the long years of production. Sales of the collector’s edition, with a making-of DVD and an art book, were lackluster; the price went from $80 to $40 to $20. Nonetheless, the game without the extraneous extras sold more than two million copies and spawned various expansion packs along with a kids’ series called Spore Heroes, a far more mainstream version with easier, more traditional game play.

  As a designer, Wright succeeded because he didn’t copy other games and because he didn’t go with the trends. He was not an imitator. He was an innovator, in part because he had interests beyond videogames, compulsive interests. He was able to take these multifaceted tenets from other disciplines, streamline them, and make them accessible to the public at large. Like Spielberg in film, Miyamoto in games, or David Foster Wallace in books, he knew humans better than we know ourselves.

  Wright didn’t think of such things as he stepped into his car and sped away from the Emeryville offices. He didn’t have that kind of ego. Instead, Will Wright just left. The game world would never be the same. The greatest living American game designer had left the building.

  He wasn’t idle for long. Even as Wright was preparing to leave EA, he was thinking of the next, new thing. In his start-up company, Stupid Fun Club, Wright took two people from EA with him to a five-thousand-square-foot space so a small, intimate group could work on the convergence of movies, games, TV, and social networks. While he was secretive about the exact content, he made a deal with the Science Channel to work on TV programs that would have online and game aspects. Another deal, with Al Gore’s Current TV, the Creation Project, was a fascinating idea that had the Web community creating plotlines for a show. It seems clear that Wright has set his sights on merging games with TV. His challenge now is greater than ever: to pull it off in the old medium where structures for shows like sitcoms haven’t changed in forty years. TV is a place where they don’t understand Simlish, just old-guard gibberish. But who knows? In five years maybe Will Wright will become as well known as J. J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, or David Chase in television circles.

  But there was a greater, more wide-ranging concern to be reckoned with when Wright left EA. In a videogame world where it’s becoming more and more difficult and financially hazardous to do something that’s big and new, a young, brilliant game maker will rarely (if ever) get the chance that Will Wright got, to make something newfangled that tens of millions will play. If a young version of Will Wright approached a big company today with the fascinating idea of making a game that you couldn’t win, it just wouldn’t get the green light. In fact, he probably would be laughed at. That is indeed sad, far more affecting and depressing than having your computer crash and your Sim wiped out of his or her virtual existence.

  WII NATION

  By the mid-2000s, videogames had become a mainstay of nerd popular culture and were grudgingly accepted by the nation’s media elite. To complement the pop art medium, which was expanding its boundaries monthly, there needed to be a new kind of videogame executive, affable but tough-minded, personable but full of bluster—especially since a landmark console was about to be introduced throughout the world. Reggie Fils-Aime was perfect for the role, for he had guts, swagger, smarts, and a gift of gab. It was as though Ron Popeil, that slick but smiling pitchman of late night TV infomercials, was selling a videogame console.

  Although Nintendo was as recognizable as Disney as a company, it had never had a face beyond Mario in the United States, never had a go- to person who had style, if not grace. In the past, Nintendo would depend on occasional appearances by Miyamoto, certainly a smilingly enthusia
stic superstar developer, but one who always needed a translator during interviews. Similarly, Nintendo in the United States had never been known for flash, had never been known to promote the hip, cool lifestyle that the Xbox and PlayStation executives felt was essential to their marketing plans. When Sony would hire Beck or the Foo Fighters for its parties, Nintendo would go a quiet jazz route with Diana Krall or George Benson. That all changed in 2004, when Nintendo decided to remake its image with a brand-new gaming box, code-named Revolution. The very name had the whole industry abuzz. What did the box do? How would Nintendo make a Revolution, especially after the decidedly cartridge-based Nintendo 64 and the low-tech GameCube, which used half-sized CDs as media? Sony executives like Kaz Hirai secretly laughed when they heard what the Revolution was all about. Sony marketing guys like Andrew House felt that the PlayStation 2’s dominance was unassailable. And their upcoming behemoth of a PlayStation 3 had WiFi, Bluetooth, Blu-ray movie technology, everything a technology-loving gamer could want in a machine. Nintendo couldn’t come back. It was in third place in the Console Wars, a sluggish, dawdling turtle struggling against the sleek racing cars of Gran Turismo.

  To introduce the machine at the E3 trade show, Nintendo had hired this new personality who was in charge of sales and marketing. In the past, a fairly staid George Harrison (not the Beatle) would hit the stage, armed with facts and figures. Harrison was an intelligent guy who cut a gentlemanly figure. But to say Harrison was the life of the party would be like saying George W. Bush’s favorite book was Infinite Jest. It just was not true and it never would be. Reggie Fils-Aime, on the other hand, shocked the world’s media and game developers, who had gathered in Hollywood to witness the magic.

  Backstage, Fils-Aime was pumped up. He would make no mistakes, he promised himself. This was The Big Show, and there was no room for error. As his pulse quickened, the Haiti-born executive was introduced to the media that had come to Los Angeles from all over the world. The former Pizza Hut marketer strode onto the stage with the confident gait of Bill Clinton. From a teleprompter, he read an unforgettable speech that was one of the most energetic in videogame history. Fils-Aime must have taken one of those executive training classes for public speaking as well; he kept moving his hands when he hit his primary talking points, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. “Voilà,” said his fingers, as if they were throwing off magic dust. Reggie’s unwavering deep voice told the crowd all about the new console’s wow factors. The audience was spellbound from the get-go as he proclaimed, “My name is Reggie. I’m about kicking ass. I’m about taking names, and we’re about making games.”

  Fils-Aime talked a big talk. The release of the Wii console, no longer dubbed Revolution, would not be just another console launch. It would change the nature of gaming. It would be so momentous that everyone would want to play, not just kids, not just adults, but grandparents, too. He stood straight and tall as his voice boomed. “Our strategy is based on one core belief: that the next step in gaming is bringing gaming back to the masses.… It is literally that simple—appealing to current gamers as well as broadening that industry to new gamers, people who today don’t even consider themselves in the gaming industry.” What Fils-Aime had to say on that early Los Angeles morning was not original, nor was it particularly thoughtful. But the way he said it, with a combination of awe, aggression, friendliness, and self-assuredness, made the media prick up their ears and nod their heads in approval. Fils-Aime knew very little about videogames, except to say that he played Nintendo with his kids. It didn’t matter.

  Overnight, Reggie became the face of the New Nintendo in America. Within days of his debut in the videogame industry, he was seen as neither a nerd nor a marketing wonk. He was treated as a celebrity, a businessman entertainer who was full of power and puffery. Yet Reggie knew how to keep secrets. In subsequent interviews with the media, he kept to the Nintendo ethos of never saying too much, never giving anything away. Often, the confident executive said nothing at all of substance. But through a combination of passion and glittering generalities, he always seemed to have said something of gravitas. Reporters couldn’t even get a game release date or a game release month out of Reggie. But that was so Nintendo. Even before Bill Gates made institutionalized paranoia one of the prime tenets of Microsoft philosophy, Nintendo had been suspicious of every other competing company in the world—whether it made playing cards or videogames. You couldn’t get a job at Nintendo in Japan or in the United States if you had loose lips when it came to company secrets. Even after many Nintendo of America executives had left the company, they refused to talk about their time in Redmond. It was as though the Nintendo console itself could grow killing hands that would seek them out and choke the life out of them if they did spill the beans.

  Everywhere he went, from G4TV to the Today show, Reggie extolled the brilliance of the Wii and its motion-controlled Wii remote as if to say, “Look, Ma, no wires. Just move your arms and hands and you control it all.” It became the Gospel According to Reggie. It should not have been an easy sale. Nintendo was down to third in sales because of the GameCube, a toy-looking square thing with a lunchboxlike carrying handle, which was the worst of the three big game consoles when it came to graphics. And the Wii should have been seen as a stupid name. Indeed, it sounded like a lisping Elmer Fudd had a hand in the marketing when all Nintendo honchos began to refer to the wireless remote control as the Wiimote. Snarky reviewers everywhere began to make sex jokes about the change of the console’s name from Revolution to Wii: “Play with my Wii.” “Touch my Wii.” “I love my Wii.”

  But Reggie was right: the remote and the console would become a worldwide tsunami that left nothing but gaming glee in their wake. The new machine was all about simplicity, about refining old wireless technology into a system so easy to use that sexagenarians would be able to play without much instruction. Yes, Nintendo used the old adage espoused by Game & Watch designer Gunpei Yokoi so many years ago: “The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply.” Unlike the Sony and Microsoft consoles, there was nothing cutting edge about the chips in the Wii. There was no Blu-ray technology to play DVDs. Unlike the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, there was no concentration on filmlike graphics that were supposed to give the movie industry a run for its money. The only nod to techies in the Wii was the wireless online capabilities. Nintendo would not even have a game that would be playable online for some time after the console’s introduction. What you would be able to do online immediately was to download old, sometimes hard-to-get Nintendo and Sega games, a library of classic games that would grow by three to five games each week. Nintendo fans would purchase these gems by the thousands.

  As it turned out, none of the shortcomings mattered one iota. Nintendo was about to find the ultimate sweet spot, with a mix of tried-and-true tech and something that felt new to the heartland of America. A low-tech chip didn’t matter. State-of-the-art graphics didn’t matter. Play mattered. A wireless controller mattered. Remember the way writerly raconteur Jean Shepherd waxed rapturous in A Christmas Story when the hapless Ralphie finally receives his coveted BB gun? That’s how Nintendo hoped middle-class American kids and their parents would feel en masse when they opened and played the Wii on Christmas morning. Their hopes would be answered in spades.

  But first, Nintendo had to get the Wii on the shelves. Just one year before the launch, it was not an easy sell for the company. In early 2006, they began to formulate a $200 million marketing plan that focused on families and not gamers. Perrin Kaplan, a crabby but hardworking marketing executive at Nintendo since the GameCube days, already expected that jokes would be made about the Wii name. She didn’t care. Nor did Reggie. The Wii would be pitched to the American public not as a luxury, but as something as essential as food. You had to have it. Like the healthiest food, it would help you to live right. The name Wii said, “Forget them, those executives with the high-tech b
oxes who yearn for the eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old hard-core gamer.” The Wii, posited Reggie, was about the rest of us, the silent majority who’d left games when they became all about shooting and violence. This wasn’t Doom or Columbine or Grand Theft Auto. This was a gaming experience for us, Nintendo would say. The Wii wasn’t about me-ness. It was about we-ness. Those who bought the Wii would come together in a tight social network that was all-inclusive. Nintendo targeted the blogosphere, particularly the so-called mommy blogs, and the moms loved it and the word spread virally across the Web. The philosophy was as cult-y as anything Mary Kay could have imagined. But like the cosmetics company, its popularity would go beyond a small sect of believers. Nintendo preachers physically went to the houses of moms who had invited other moms to house parties of about thirty people, many of whom were bloggers as well. Nintendo would bring Wiis, and they would deal with the wires and the setup, too. They might even bring some food. At the end, people would order two or three Wiis each. Then, they would blog about the party. Had the company done this for journalists, the writers would have thought they were being bought. But the mommy bloggers loved getting things for free, for they had not been schooled in the rules of ethics and journalism, which were now being blurred by the excited amateur writers who would post at length on Blogger. They weren’t part of a machine pushing the hard sell, either; they were part of something special and magical, we-ness in all its warm, fuzzy glory. It was the new videogame religion in which those who were lucky enough to get a Wii (for Nintendo had faked a shortage to enhance its desirability) would sermonize this gospel to others, especially the unfortunates who weren’t converts.