The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (71 page)
Authors: Steven Kent
Although Mega-CD, which would arrive in the United States in 1992 as Sega CD, had a more powerful processor and handled more colors than the Genesis processor, the single-spin CD-ROM drive was meant only to expand the size of games. Genesis and Super NES cartridges generally ranged in size from 8 to 16 megabits, but a single CD-ROM could hold 640 megabytes—320 times more data. With over 600 megabytes of storage, Sega CD could play games with digitized video. Before the company could launch the new medium, however, Sega would need games to support it. As luck would have it, several suitable games already existed.
Nintendo also announced plans to manufacture a CD-ROM drive. Like Sega, Nintendo turned to Sony Corporation as a partner. At the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in January 1992, Nintendo claimed that it could manufacture and distribute the drive within the year. The problem was that Sony was proving to be a very dangerous partner. Sony executives had already
revealed plans to release their own CD-based video game system called the Play Station, and Nintendo executives wondered about the wisdom in giving them access to Nintendo’s system by having Sony make a Super NES–compatible CD drive.
After reconsidering the situation, Nintendo executives allowed Sony to announce plans for the drive at the Consumer Electronics Show, then appeared the next day to say that they had struck up a deal with Philips N.V., the Dutch conglomerate, instead. Sony executives were shut out and humiliated. Ken Kutaragi, the young engineer whom Sony had placed at the head of the Nintendo project, went to Sony CEO Norio Ohga to plead for permission to keep the Play Station project alive, stating that the system could be built into a stand-alone unit. He proposed looking ahead to the next generation of game hardware and creating something that would immediately render Super NES obsolete.
Having just been humiliated by Nintendo, Ohga accepted Kutaragi’s suggestion and brought it to the company board. The general reaction was unfavorable. Nintendo clearly had too much control over the market, and attempting to break in would be too risky. An internal battle ensued, with Ohga almost alone in his support of the venture. In the end, he decided to gamble on Kutaragi and approved the project.
As Kutaragi quietly started work on his project, Nintendo executives began looking for suitable games. One of the first projects to catch their eye was
The 7th Guest
, a breakthrough puzzle game that was being developed by a Medford, Oregon, company called Trilobyte.
We got a call one day from a guy working with Don James’s group at Nintendo. They were trying to find games that would be appropriate for their CD-ROM drive that was eventually going to happen, and he gave me a call and said, “Do you have any CD-ROM titles that you’re working on that we should have a look at?”
I said, “Oh, wow, I’ve got something that you’ve got to see. It’s called
The 7th Guest.
” So he flew down probably about a week and a half later and was given the tour of the company and shown the product. He said that he was very excited. Within a couple of days later, his boss Don James came down and took a look, and from there, they started negotiating a deal to purchase
the rights to
The 7th Guest
for the Nintendo CD-ROM player. A deal was eventually struck, and Nintendo got all CD-ROM game console rights to the product and Virgin (the game’s publisher) was paid, I believe, $1 million up front.—Seth Mendelsohn, former senior game designer, Virgin Interactive Entertainment
Nintendo never released its CD-ROM drive. Nintendo first announced delays and then claimed that the unit would be ready by August 1993. Behind the scenes, Nintendo was slowly closing down the project. By 1995, Nintendo would be the only major video game company that did not have a CD-based game system.
With the collapse of the Nemo project, which he had begun in conjunction with Hasbro, Tom Zito had placed his live-action video games, along with office equipment and other supplies, in a Rhode Island warehouse and largely forgotten about them. What he did not know was that Sega and Nintendo had a new medium with enough storage space to handle his games and that a desperate search for games with digital video was underway.
Ken Melville was working at this company and happened to have a prototype copy of
Sewer Shark
in its original version on videotape. So he calls me up and says, “The weirdest thing happened today. Mickey Schulhof and Peter Guber were in here the other day. They saw
Sewer Shark;
they were blown away by it. I think they’re trying to buy this company because they believe that this company owns
Sewer Shark
and has technology to do products like
Sewer Shark.
”Now Guber was the head of Columbia Pictures, which was owned by Sony, and Schulhof was the chairman of Sony U.S.A. It just so happened that my younger brother, Bob Zito, was Mickey Schulhof’s PR guy.
I called my brother on the phone and told him the story and he said, “That doesn’t sound at all possible.”
“I really can’t believe that’s true.” He said, “I’m gonna be with Mickey two weeks from now. If the opportunity comes up, I’ll ask him. I’ll get back to you.”
About two hours later, my phone rang and it was my brother. He said, “Is this thing set in sewers?” I said, “Yeah,” and he said, “You shoot at rats and bats?”
I said, “Yes.”
He said, “And you own rights to this?”
I said, “Yeah.”
He said, “I think you better take a red-eye to New York.”
—Tom Zito, founder, Digital Pictures
As Nemo collapsed, Zito had purchased the rights to the video-based games that he had helped create for it, thinking they might some day be useable. With clear rights of ownership in hand, he met with Schulhof, who signed him up to create games for the Nintendo Play Station. Zito then formed a company called Digital Pictures. He spent the next year reworking two of the games that had been created for Nemo—
Night Trap
and
Sewer Shark
—so that they would run on the ill-fated Play Station. When the Sony/Nintendo partnership failed, Zito turned to Sega.
So then, in the meantime, Sony had gone off and started off with a Play Station of its own. And we started doing all this stuff for Sega CD; and the rest, as they say, is history. And meanwhile, I met Shinobu Toyoda at Sega and was aware that Sega was coming out with a CD system. When Sony went away, we sort of changed the focus of our development afterwards and started doing stuff for Sega CD rather than for Sony.
The incredible irony of it was that the video we plugged into the Super Nintendo was just terrific because Super NES could display 256 colors at once. Sega CD could only put up 32 colors at a time, so you had this horrible grainy look to the images.
—Tom Zito
Sega CD was released in the United States on October 15, 1992; it retailed for $299 and Zito’s game,
Sewer Shark
, came packed in the box. Digital Pictures became one of Sega’s most important partners, creating several original games for Sega CD.
Tom Zito, CEO of tiny Digital Pictures, is one of the first to take advantage of the technology. Zito, who used to write for the
New Yorker
and
Rolling Stone
, spends some $2 million filming real actors for his CD-based
interactive games. Corey Haim
(The Lost Boys
) and Debbie Harry (
Hairspray
) are among the performers who have starred in his miniproductions. His most interesting title this Christmas is
Prize Fighter
, directed by Ron Stein, who choreographed some boxing sequences in the 1980 Martin Scorsese classic
Raging Bull.
Besides trying to knock out a series of actors portraying boxers, you, the game player, become part of a story. In this case, a crippled boy on the sidelines cheers for you.
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Sega and Nintendo found themselves facing a new and increasingly more dangerous opponent in the early 1990s—PC computers. Just as the Commodore computer had caught up to Atari and Coleco a decade earlier, personal computers threatened to eclipse the new generation of video game manufacturers as the era of multimedia began.
The evolution to multimedia began as sound became more common on computers. Companies such as Roland and Turtle Beach had long offered sound cards that could handle audio files, and even most of the early PCs came with cheap speakers built in. But few people owned early sound cards and the sound that streamed through PC speakers was tinny at best.
In 1989, a company called Creative Labs, founded by a Singaporean entrepreneur named Sim Wong Hoo, introduced a reasonably priced PC sound card called Sound Blaster. The card, which featured an 11-voice FM synthesizer, input/output jacks, and a MIDI/joystick port, became the top-selling add-on card in the PC market. Sound Blaster was not the first sound card; it was not even Creative Labs’ first sound card, but it was the first sound card to see this kind of success, and Sound Blaster compatibility became a standard throughout the industry.
*
Soon companies such as MediaVision and Gravis released their own Sound Blaster–compatible cards.
With the advent of Sound Blaster, PC game companies became very aggressive about adding audio to their games. Origin Systems, a company with a well-earned reputation for making technically superior games that would only run on the latest and most powerful personal computers, published a game called
Wing Commander
that began with a virtual conductor directing a symphony.
The next big move toward multimedia came in the form of CD-ROM drives. Soon companies such as Viacom New Media, Hyperbole Studios, and ICOM were flooding the market with “interactive movies” that featured bad scripts, amateurish acting, and minimal interactivity. Sanctuary Woods, a software publisher that would eventually produce a few impressive products before going bankrupt, released a series of interactive comics called
Victor Vector and Yondo.
CD-ROMs had provided the entertainment industry with a new frontier, and a wave of entrepreneurs rushed to take advantage of it.
Of the droves of games that flooded the market during the first years of multimedia, three stood out as the kind of “killer applications” needed to launch new technologies. The first was
Myst
, a game that was funded by a Japanese video game publisher called Sunsoft.
Myst
was the creation of Rand and Robyn Miller; brothers who had moved to Spokane, Washington, to start up a game development company called Cyan Studios. They had sold a handful of games prior to coming up with an idea for a surrealistic adventure with elaborate puzzles. They needed funding, however. One of the first companies they approached was Activision; but they were turned down. Then they ran into Sunsoft.
We hooked up with Sun, which is a Japanese company, in 1991. They said, “We want a big epic CD-ROM product,” and we said, “We’re ready. We’ll tell you what we need.”
They funded it well. It ended up that they funded half of the project. It cost more than what we thought; but at the time, we had a relationship with Broderbund as well. When we showed
Myst
to Broderbund, they just fell in love with it.—Rand Miller, cofounder, Cyan Studios
As a video game company, Sun Soft cared little about PC rights. The way the final contract was laid out, Sun Soft gave the Millers $350,000 in exchange
for the console rights and went on to release
Myst
on 3DO, Jaguar CD, PlayStation, and Saturn. None of those versions sold particularly well, but Sun Soft’s investment still paid for itself in less than one month. Working with Broderbund, the Millers released their game for Macintosh and it became a runaway hit. In 1994, Broderbund released a PC version. It became a hit, too.
Myst
went on to become the first CD-ROM game to sell over one million units. It remained on the computer game’s bestsellers list for three years. Broderbund eventually sold four million copies of the game.
While
Myst
started out on Macintosh, then migrated to PC, the next multimedia blockbuster went in the opposite direction.
The 7th Guest
, the Virgin game that was licensed by Nintendo, brought a similar mixture of puzzle-solving and exploration to PCs. As a showcase for technology,
The 7th Guest
was a masterpiece. It featured a photo-realistically rendered virtual haunted house with live-action video of actors portraying ghosts. With far less puzzles than
Myst
and not nearly as visually appealing,
The 7th Guest
did not enjoy the same long-lasting success, and critics would later pan it. “A lot of people bought it, and a lot of people bought hardware just so they could play it,” game designer Graeme Devine would later say in defense of his game.
The third game, and the one that has had the most long-lasting impact on the gaming world, was
Doom
, a first-person perspective game in which players stepped into the head of a marine who shoots everything he sees, as he works his way toward a confrontation in the depths of Hell.
Doom
was a true team effort, created by a group of young computer enthusiasts who had started a company called id Software. Formed on February 1, 1991, id consisted of John Romero, the well-known creator of dozens of computer games and a legend among hardcore gamers; John Carmack, a somewhat otherworldly but brilliant programmer with a nearly unequaled ability to create incredibly complex graphics engines; Adrian Carmack, a talented artist with a gift for bringing gore and horror to life; and Tom Hall, the main designer of
Commander Keen
, id’s first product and a game that helped establish the company’s reputation.