This new indie world, however, has forced freelance game makers to be their own marketers. Like it or not (and who would truly like it?), they must learn how to promote their products so that they don’t become lost in an industry that increasingly relies on highly paid publicists to sound the trumpet call a year or more before the game is on the market. If you’re not a creative self-marketer in today’s indie world, you’re dead, no matter how ingenious your game may be.
Kurt Vonnegut once said to a group of eager writing students, “Probably all of you are good enough to make it as writers. But it’s likely that only one of you has what it takes to endure the constant rejection.” It’s the same with today’s independent inventors. In a world in which there are more than fifty thousand games for the iPhone alone, a designer has to find a way to cry boisterously above the fray, “Play mine! Play mine!” It’s what Ken Williams did when he hauled his butt from store to store to sell the wares that Roberta had placed in Ziploc bags.
If game makers can’t stomach that arduous task, the job at the big company beckons, with its assembly line for action-filled games that have gargantuan budgets. They’ll be paid generally well, drink a lot of coffee, and stay up all night when deadline time encroaches on sleep time. They will be implementing someone else’s vision, and very few will ever know their names. Yet they will be living under the auspices of an agile industry that is forever in flux, forever changing with the trends and fads, forever creating its own history, every day and hour by hour.
One game in particular has bridged the gap between hard-core and casual gamers, between indie company and megacorporation, and between art and commerce.
In early 2005, Chair Entertainment was founded by two brothers who had almost megalomaniacal ideas. As the ten- and eight-year-old kids of an environmental engineer and an opera singer, Donald and Geremy Mustard planned to take over the world—as pro football players for the Denver Broncos. The two did everything together, from playing with toys like G.I. Joe, to reading books like Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and A Princess of Mars. By the time they got to high school, their plans had grown loftier. They fell in love with computer graphics and wanted to make the next Jurassic Park movie. Donald was always drawing comics, and Geremy had a mind for the technical. Beyond movies, both had loved games ever since they fell head over heels for one of the best Nintendo games, Super Metroid. They dreamed about the game all the time, for it made them feel like they were in their own science fiction movie. Donald spent his hours drawing Samus, the ever-helmeted female character, and her varied armor, which worked miracles like James Bond’s gadgets. The Mustards were completely hooked on games by the time Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Final Fantasy VII hit the stands in 1997. Its movie-like graphics made FF VII one of the decade’s most lauded games. The Mustards scraped together all of their money (which was supposed to be for college) to buy FF VII and a PlayStation. In their haste to get the game home, they forgot to purchase a memory card and had no way of saving their progress. And they were totally out of cash.
“Let’s just play it through,” said Geremy, wired PlayStation controller in hand, ready for a sleepless weekend.
At first, Donald looked at him like he was crazy. Then he thought about it out loud. “The characters, the graphics. It’s all here. You’re right. Let’s do it.” The Mustards didn’t stop playing for thirty-six hours, until the game was done. So well honed was the branching story that they nearly shed a tear when Aeris, the protagonist’s upbeat, cheerful love interest, was impaled and died in the movie-filled role playing game. From then on, it was games, not movies, that got them going. They felt they had a brand-new map for world domination—except they didn’t know exactly what kind of game they wanted to make.
After graduating from Brigham Young University, Donald Mustard convinced Todd Sheridan, the CEO of GlyphX, the Orem, Utah, video production company at which he worked, to go with his grand idea for a science fiction shooter called Advent Rising. The movie-like game would feature a pesky race of aliens called The Seekers, who were out to exterminate humanity. Epic Games, a maker of everything from platformers featuring rabbits to a fast-paced and frightening shooter called Unreal, liked the demo enough to license their sophisticated videogame creation program to Mustard and GlyphX. While companies like Electronic Arts expressed interest in publishing the game, Majesco, a revitalized company out of New Jersey that had just gone public and had $70 million in its coffers, put up most of the $3.5 million budget. Majesco should have concentrated on putting more money into its two games with potential, Advent Rising and the humor-filled Psychonauts. Instead, it never put quite enough money into any of the dozens of games it published, and the money the Mustards had wasn’t enough to finish the ambitious game properly, even with a staff that expanded from eight people to thirty-five. When Advent Rising came out three years later, in May 2005, some of it was just plain broken. The TV screen would sometimes freeze on a video frame, and the Xbox would whir and whiz as if in the throes of a mechanical black plague. Then the system would shut down and restart. Plans for a trilogy were canned by Majesco, which wanted nothing more to do with the Mustard brothers. The feeling was decidedly mutual.
The Mustards licked their wounds for a while, but they still harbored a hope for “world domination,” albeit on a smaller level. Smartly, they eschewed efforts to make the Big Game, their version of the Great American Novel, right away. Instead, they decided to move into the relatively fresh genre of downloadable games. With a small game, they could employ a tiny staff of diligent workers, with no behemoth of a corporation breathing down their necks. They could take their time. They could polish their game until it was nearly flawless. They kept their business plan in the family and approached their uncle, Ryan Holmes, for help. Holmes was a tough, semiretired moneyman who liked to play golf and invest in real estate more than anything else in the world.
“Why would I want to do this?” he asked.
Carefully and enthusiastically, they explained that the next big thing was in downloadable games, not just simple casual games like Uno or Jeopardy!, but games that would attract the people who played Halo and Gears of War. Holmes, who was schooled at Stanford as an engineer, had a soft spot for cool, nerdy technology. As the brothers spoke, he became cautiously optimistic. After their spiel, Holmes began to believe that downloadable games could well be the next trend.
Donald ended with a zinger: “The main thing we want to do is leverage our ideas for games in other media. They could be books, or even comic books, and then movies, too.”
“We really want to elevate the medium,” said Geremy. Both brothers believed that games should be considered art and the best way to do it was to bring well-rounded, finished ideas to other media—even prior to a game’s release.
Holmes came on board with plans to build the company up and sell it. The Mustards and Holmes went to work. On paper, they valued their company at around $8 million and received about $2 million in investment capital, which the Mustards felt would get them through a couple of years with a staff of eight people—if they were frugal enough. Unlike the Williamses with Sierra or Trilobyte’s Devine and Landeros, their angel was close at hand and involved. He was part of the family, someone who would guide them and not rip them off. They called the new entity Chair Entertainment, a moniker based on Plato’s theory of forms. According to Plato, when you identify something as a “chair,” you’re looking at its ultimate “chairness,” a philosophy of perfection in your mind that may never be attained in real life. Chairness was the Mustards’ goal: to make something as close as they could to the perfect videogame they believed was possible.
Their first game, a multiplayer side scroller called Undertow, cost $350,000 to make and was programmed by Geremy alone. Finished in just ten months, Undertow took place underwater, in a flourishing fantastical ocean world in which Captain Nemo and an Atlantis that emerged from an icy crypt were portrayed with gusto and pithy quotes from D. H. Lawrence. Because of its multiplay
er functionality, which allowed up to sixteen people to play at once, the game went straight to number one on the Xbox Live bestseller lists in late November 2007, although it didn’t stay there for long. Undertow certainly didn’t break any records for sales, but it was a critical hit. The brothers had also proven that Epic’s Unreal software, which would soon let the Mustards insert realistic-looking artwork and program a sharper artificial intelligence than in Undertow, could be used as the backbone for smaller, more casual games. Unreal wasn’t just for BioShock or Gears of War anymore. Developers with teams as tiny as one person started lining up to license the software, and Epic’s bean counters rubbed their hands together.
Then, while he was mowing his lawn in Pleasant Grove, Utah, a lightbulb went on in Donald’s head. He remembered how much he’d enjoyed playing with G.I. Joes with Geremy back when they were kids. For a moment, he could even see the action figures on the lawn, ready to combat COBRA, the dominant, technically advanced evildoers. As he cut the grass, he began to conceive of a game in which a low-tech military drudge fights against a very well-funded enemy, a science fiction game not set in a fantastical world but in a realistic and modern setting. Donald felt that hard-edged realism was the way to go. There would be a primordial forest, rushing waterfalls, and craggy caves to explore. And deep beneath a lake, a maze-like, high-tech underground compound would lie, helmed by an angry madman commander hell bent on fomenting a new civil war in the United States.
Donald contacted science fiction writer Orson Scott Card, who had worked on the Advent Rising script. Card listened closely as Mustard described his story. Donald made it clear that he would prefer the idea to be a book before it became a videogame. Like the Mustards, Card liked the notion that videogames could, at some point down the line, be elevated to the status of popular art. He informed Tor, his publisher, that he wanted to flesh out the Mustards’ outline and make it into a novel. As he thought about it more and more, Card believed the germ of a story would really become his ticket to not one, but a series of bestsellers. More energized than ever, Donald and Holmes took their pitch to Hollywood. There, they were utterly misunderstood. Studio after studio warmed to the idea, but after all the ass-kissing and back-slapping and lunch-doing, they all wanted to put their videogame directors and writers on the project to make it all action and little else. Mustard protested that Empire (now the name of the book) was about story first and videogame-like action second. From most movie executives, he received scrunched up faces or blank stares. Strangely, Joel Silver, the boastful action movie producer of the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon series, appeared to understand the concept immediately. An option deal was struck with Silver and Warner Bros. in October 2006.
With the movie and book deals under control, Geremy and Donald concentrated on making a game they called Shadow Complex, whose story would be a bridge between Card’s first two Empire tomes. They wanted it to feel like Super Metroid. In other words, playing would be like exploring a great corn maze full of astonishment at every turn. But since there was no design literature about Super Metroid, the eight members of Chair spent a month playing it, all the time deconstructing it and thinking about how it could be made modern for a 2009 audience. Then, like old school Shigeru Miyamoto with Donkey Kong, they mapped out the game on paper before attempting to code a computer demo with the Unreal engine. In February 2008, they took a short, action-filled trailer of Shadow Complex to the bustling Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Early in its history, the GDC had been a fairly staid networking event for employees of game companies. By 2009, the event had as much buzz as E3, the yearly videogame convention in Los Angeles. Word about the game spread as quickly as the potent strain of the flu that infected convention-goers on the show floor. Chair’s rapidly pieced together prototype looked spectacular on the little screen of an iPhone. Thankfully, no one asked to see it on a bigger display. Blown up on a television or even a laptop monitor, it would have failed to impress—because the graphics were nowhere near complete. Yet it made Cliff Bleszinski, the designer behind Gears of War and an ardent fan of Super Metroid, joke to the Mustards, “This is so good, we’re gonna buy you out. We’re gonna buy you out tomorrow.”
“OK. Fifty million dollars,” joked Donald.
But in three weeks, there were talks, serious talks, at Epic’s Raleigh, North Carolina, headquarters, with Mark Rein, Epic’s cofounder, and Mike Capps, the company president. Capps, an army brat who was a child hacker, was a former professor at Monterey’s Naval Postgraduate School. While there, Capps also proposed and worked for the military on the America’s Army shooter, which became a well-regarded recruitment tool. Reins and Capps knew that others at the Game Developers Conference had approached the brothers to buy Chair. They wondered if it was the right time to strike.*
By the time Epic considered acquiring Chair, Bleszinski had become a superstar of gaming. His Gears of War, informed by the classic Battlefield 1942, took place in a scary, desperate world in which chaos fought against order. In the military science fiction story, the macho Marcus Fenix was pitted against The Locust Horde, a hulking race of seven-foot-tall monstrosities hell-bent on genocide. The Gears of War series, with twelve million games sold, rivaled the success of Halo and had earned Epic enough money to buy anything or anyone it wanted. Its success made Epic one of a handful of very influential studios.
Epic did not know that the offers from other companies seemed to the Mustards like more of what Majesco had to offer with Advent Rising: Everyone required delivery on deadline whether or not the work was finished. After various springtime meetings with Ryan Holmes and the Mustards, in which Chair detailed its accomplishments in other media with the Empire series, Capps would ask Rein, “Like, who are these kids? They really have balls, not to mention a great sense of design.” Following a trip to Utah to make certain that the ten-person Chair team was in good working order, Epic was impressed enough to make an offer. Significantly, Epic offered Chair complete creative control, thus freeing the Mustards from the specter of another Advent Rising disaster in which they’d be forced to rush a broken game onto the market. By late May 2008, Chair had been sold to Epic for more than the $8 million Chair had originally envisioned. And Epic had the finances and the cojones to tell any publisher to stick their deadlines up their butts if the game wasn’t ready. Publishers would have to wait until Shadow Complex met Epic’s high standards. (Epic’s games weren’t perfect, but they had far fewer burps and hiccups than other shooters.)
Microsoft was eventually chosen to publish the game, perhaps because of its frighteningly futuristic, statistics-based game testing laboratories in Redmond, Washington. These high-tech labs, formed in 1998, were used to great advantage for Halo and Gears of War, although, as Capps would tell the Mustards, the whole process seemed “a little Clockwork Orange because you’re basically wiring people up.”*
When Halo 3 was under the microscope at Microsoft’s testing lab, the early version was so confounding to play that testers couldn’t find their way out of the tree-filled canyon area in the first moments of the game. The research that was accumulated resulted in a change for the better. Video cameras recorded the habits of every gamer. Cameras zoomed in on faces, then on the hands using the controller as the ups and downs of game play were dutifully recorded. At the same time, the team of twenty-five psychologists and researchers, watching from behind a one-way mirror, interpreted every move, blink, and facial expression. This is truly the focus-testing of the future. The audio is key as well: Game testers talked about every move they made, and their constant chatter was recorded and analyzed. Every year, eight thousand testers lumber into this laboratory, people of all ages, paid only in games or with a Windows operating system. They spent six hours a day in this usability lab with Shadow Complex and Microsoft’s researchers, who noted dozens of game play stats about each user, from how they were feeling as they played to where they died.
As reams of data flowed back to the Mustards in Utah, Capps and Rein told th
e brothers that tweaking a game per the testing lab’s recommendations could increase sales by as much as 100 percent. So the Mustards fixed, for example, a problem with an ice blue lake, because people were swimming deep underneath and not moving forward. Testers nosed around for too long, and to their dismay, their character gasped, breathed in water, and drowned. To remedy the situation, the lake was made shallower and the on-screen character was given more time to hold his breath before dying. Finally, a subtle beam of sunlight directed gamers to the shore on the opposite side, where a small, spiderlike robot shot at the gamer, unremittingly. You shot back, splashed your way out of the water, and moved on to the next breathless moment of adventure.
As they pored over the constant stream of metrics from Microsoft, there were some suggestions the Mustards ignored. Hard-core shooter fans kept saying, “Make it more like Halo,” or “Make it more like a shooter.” The game really wasn’t about shooting; it was about exploration, about building central character Jason Flemming’s powers by having him crawl through dank caves and squeeze through air-conditioning ducts to find power-ups scattered like treasure in nooks and crannies. The Mustards also discovered a little-known but stunning fact about the shooter genre: Only 25 percent of players of marquee offerings like Halo and Gears of War actually completed the game.
“We have to do much better than that,” said Donald in a meeting.
“Bring it up to at least fifty percent,” agreed Geremy.
Everyone at Chair agreed that their game had to appeal to two kinds of videogame players. Throughout the decade, especially since the Wii’s ubiquity, there had been a seismic shift in the market toward what both Epic and Chair called the “visual tourist,” the person who wanted to check out the experience, but stopped playing once he or she felt the frustration of failure over and over again. Super Metroid itself could be very unforgiving, at a time when many games were ball-busters. The Mustards felt being killed and starting again was punishment, not entertainment. They wanted every player to finish the game in less than fifteen hours. Their tip of the hat to the hard-core gamer who enjoyed the deeper challenge was to add certain goals that were very hard to accomplish—for instance, playing the game all the way through, without dying once.
All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture Page 31
