Based on lengthy interviews with Ken Levine, Tom Bass, Susan Lewis, and Sarah Anderson, and conversations with Warren Spector, Hermen Hulst, journalist/editor Ricardo Torres, Geoff Keighley, and employees at Take-Two Interactive and Irrational Games.
1 Seth Scheisel’s piece in the October 31, 2007, edition of the New York Times went on to report glowingly that Ratchet and Clank Future was “so lushly compelling that you find yourself just staring at the screen, as if it were a movie.”
2 Brilliant game designer Warren Spector also worked on Thief: The Dark Project.
13.
THOSE MOVIES SUCK
Based on older interviews with Hironobi Sakaguchi, Frank Darabont, and John Milius, as well as recent interviews with members of Blizzard Entertainment, M. Night Shyamalan, and members of the game and movie industries who wished to remain anonymous.
1 Kenneth Turan’s Los Angeles Times review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was published on July 11, 2001.
14.
UNDER THE GUN: THE KIDS IN THE SANDBOX
AND
15.
ROCKSTAR GETS PILLORIED
Both are based in large part on interviews with Sam Houser.
It was difficult to get to Rockstar. Four months of requests to the PR department went unnoticed. It sends a clear message: Rockstar prefers to make games, not talk about them. But they needed to be in this book, so I kept trying. I sent my last book, My Life Among the Serial Killers, to Sam and Dan Houser, who passed it on to Rockstar’s terrific Jennifer Kolbe, who became my champion. After some months of postponement during the crunch time for Red Dead Redemption, a very gracious Sam Houser came through with seven hours of interviews.
These chapters are also based on conversations with others who have worked with Rockstar, and members of the Halo team and the original Doom team.
1 Sam Houser was right to be annoyed about State of Emergency. According to PSXextreme, the game did garner the most buzz and awards at E3, 2001. When it was released, however, it garnered middling reviews and was often returned to stores because of bugs. http://www.psxextreme.com/scripts/reviews2/review.asp?revID=128
2 Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (Random House, 1965), page 5.
3 Senator Lieberman’s quote is from Forbes via Reuters, “Lieberman Denounces ‘Grand Theft Auto’ Video Game,” January 25, 2004.
4 Senator Clinton announced her stance regarding the game on July 13, 2005. The words reverberated throughout the media and on videogame sites like GameSpot. http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/07/13/news_6129021.html.
5 The Coke commercial is utterly brilliant and worth watching a few times. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wt5FiZQrgM
16.
THE POPCAP GUYS AND THE FAMILY JEWELS
This chapter is based on interviews with Jason Kapulka, John Vechey, and Brian Fiete and a conversation with David Roberts, along with others at PopCap.
17.
THE THEORIST GOES GLOBAL
The chapter is based in large part on interviews with Will Wright and Jeff Braun, who were very generous with their time. It also draws from interviews with Shigeru Miyamoto, various members of the Sims and Spore teams, an older conversation with Peter Molyneaux, and an e-mail conversation with Bill Barol.
1 Bill Barol, “Big Fun in a Small Town,” Newsweek, May 29, 1989, PG. 64.
2 Martin Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” columns from Scientific American from 1956 to 1980 are collected on a 4,500-page CD-ROM that consolidates his fifteen books, published by the Mathematical Association of America (May 2005).
18.
WII NATION
Based on three interviews over the years with Shigeru Miyamoto, interviews with Howard Phillips, Trip Hawkins, and Will Wright, a conversation with Reggie Fils-Aime, older interviews with Perrin Kaplan and George Harrison, and a brief personal encounter with Lindsay Lohan. I also had conversations with other members of Nintendo of America who prefer to remain anonymous, and spoke with some people who worked with Nintendo as third-party licensees.
1 Dean Takahashi’s groundbreaking VentureBeat series on the Microsoft console is called “Xbox 360 Defects: An Inside History of Microsoft’s Video Game Console Woes,” and it began online on September 5, 2008.
2 The Nintendo statistics are from Nintendo of America.
19.
THE FUTURE
Based on interviews with Donald Mustard, Laura Mustard, Mike Capps, Mark Coates, analyst Billy Pidgeon, Cevat Yerli, Sam Houser, Will Wright, Hermen Hulst, members of the New York Videogame Critics Circle, and older interviews with game executives Peter Moore, Shane Kim, Ed Fries, and J. Allard, and writer/game director Amy Hennig.
Baer, Ralph. Videogames: In the Beginning (Rolenta Press, 2005).
Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press, 2007).
Bruck, Connie. Master of the Game: Steve Ross and the Invention of Time Warner (Penguin, 1995).
Burnham, Van. Supercade (MIT Press, 2001).
Chaplin, Heather, and Aaron Ruby. Smartbomb (Algonquin Press, 2005).
Cohen, Scott. Zap: The Rise and Fall of Atari (McGraw-Hill, 1987).
Compton, Shanna. Gamers: Writers, Artists and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels (Soft Skull Press, 2004).
DeMaria, Rusel, and Johnny L. Wilson. High Score (McGraw-Hill, 2002).
DeMaria, Rusel, and Paul Lipscombe. EverQuest: The 10th Anniversary Collector’s Edition (BradyGames, 2009).
Fawcett, Bill. The Battle for Azeroth (SmartPop, 2006).
Fell, John L. A History of Films (Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1979).
Funk, Joe. EA: Celebrating 25 Years of Interactive Entertainment (Prime, 2007).
Gibson, John M. I Am 8-Bit (Chronicle, 2006).
Guinness. Guinness World Records Gamer’s Edition (Guinness, 2008).
Halter, Ed. From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Videogames (Public Affairs, 2006).
Herman, Leonard. Phoenix, The Rise & Fall of Videogames (Rolenta Press, 2001).
Kane, Mitchell. Game Boys (Viking Adult, 2008).
Kent, Steven L. The Ultimate History of Video Games (Three Rivers Press, 2001).
King, Stephen. Danse Macabre (Everest House, 1981).
Kohler, Chris. Retro Gaming Hacks (O’Reilly Media, 2005).
Kushner, David. Masters of Doom (Random House, 2003).
Levy, Steve. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Doubleday, 1984).
Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading (Viking, 1996).
Poole, Steve. Trigger Happy (Arcade Publishing, 2000).
Saltzman, Marc. Game Design Secrets of the Sages (Brady, 2000).
Sheff, David. Game Over (Random House, 1993).
Smith, Rob. Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts (Chronicle, 2008).
HAROLD GOLDBERG has reviewed videogames for fifteen years for such publications as Wired, Entertainment Weekly, Boys’ Life, The Village Voice, and Radar, and for three years penned a widely syndicated gaming column. He has also written on a variety of other subjects for the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Esquire, New York, and Rolling Stone. In addition, Goldberg served as editor in chief of Sony Online Entertainment during the launch of EverQuest. His other books include My Life Among the Serial Killers, cowritten with Dr. Helen Morrison, and Sidney Lumet: Interviews.
All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture Page 33
