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 (85 page)
Authors: Steven Kent
Square Soft’s decision to switch to Sony was largely due to aesthetic considerations. In a 1997 interview, Hironobu Sakaguchi explained that Sony’s CD-ROM format allowed for more artistic freedom. His next game, released as
Final Fantasy VII
in both Japan and the United States, would be the biggest game of 1997 and one of the first RPGs to crack the U.S. market.
With PlayStation’s 32-bit processing power and the seemingly unlimited storage of CD-ROM, Sakaguchi was able to increase the artistic qualities of his games. Sakaguchi had always had an eye for cinematics, art, and intricate storytelling, but working with CD-ROM gave him the opportunity to enhance these features exponentially.
Final Fantasy VII
had epic dramatic cut scenes with symphonic music. Sold under the Square Soft label in Japan, it was marketed by Sony with a huge budget in the United States. Nintendo had always published the bestselling game of the year in the United States, but with Sakaguchi’s amazing
animations and Sony’s big-budget marketing,
Final Fantasy VII
became the biggest-selling game of 1997 worldwide. Once, when asked if the time and money spent on the game paid off, Sakaguchi happily replied, “Big time. It sold better in the United States than in Japan, and six million worldwide.”
In August 1997, Nintendo released
GoldenEye 007
, a game that Rare, Ltd., developed, based on the James Bond movie
Goldeneye.
Few people paid close attention when Nintendo first announced plans to make a game based on James Bond, and interest waned even more when it was announced that the game would be a first-person shooter. When the game was released, it became a sleeper hit. PCs would remain the best platform for first-person shooters, but
GoldenEye 007
set the standard by which console versions of this genre would be judged.
The Rare team members who designed
GoldenEye 007
had been meticulous. They requested blueprints of set locations to be sure that their virtual locations matched those in the movie. They filled their game with Bond music and created a storyline that was reasonably true to the film.
As the game progressed, one designer asked Ken Lobb, the Nintendo of America executive in charge of second-party games, if he would like to appear in it. Tickled at the idea of becoming a virtual target, Lobb agreed. Curious to see what he would look like, Lobb looked for his image in each unfinished version of the game as Rare submitted them for review. When his likeness did not show up after several versions, he thought that Rare had decided against using it. Then, when a nearly completed version of
GoldenEye 007
came in for review, Lobb’s team found a bug in the game and called him for help.
They said they taped it and showed me the tape. It was me. They had made a tape of each of them shooting me, again and again.
—Ken Lobb, head of Tree House, Nintendo of America
GoldenEye 007
was quietly released in August, a month not often associated with blockbuster game releases. But the game’s popularity grew steadily. By the end of 1997, Nintendo had sold nearly 1.1 million copies. By 1999, that number would swell to more than 5 million copies worldwide.
This was a watershed game in the history of Nintendo. Rated “T” (or appropriate for players ages thirteen and up),
GoldenEye 007
was, like any other first-person shooter, about traveling through 3D environments and killing enemies. Nintendo, the last holdout of the video game industry, had shed its Disney image.
On October 1, 1997, 16-year-old Luke Woodham of Pearl, Mississippi, used a baseball bat and a butcher knife to murder his mother. He then hid a rifle under his trench coat and took it to school. By the end of the day, he had killed three students and wounded several more before being stopped by Pearl High School assistant principal Joel Myrick, who grabbed a pistol from his car and brought Woodham down at gunpoint. “Mr. Myrick, the world has wronged me,” Woodham told the stunned school official.
On the morning of December 1, exactly two months after the shooting in Pearl, 14-year-old Michael Carneal of Paducah, Kentucky, brought a 22-caliber pistol that he had stolen from his next-door neighbor to Heath High School and entered the lobby where 35 students had gathered together for a prayer meeting. Without warning, Carneal fired shots into the crowd, stopped to reload, and was wrestled down by Ben Strong, the boy leading the prayer. He wounded 8 students, 3 of whom died.
On March 24, 1998, 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson and 11-year-old Andrew Golden of Jonesboro, Arkansas, set off the fire alarm at Westside Middle School, then opened fire on students and teachers from nearby woods.
Two months later, on May 20, after being expelled from Thurston High School, 15-year-old Kip Kinkel of Springfield, Oregon, shot his parents and planted booby-traps around their bodies. He returned to school the next day with a 22-caliber semiautomatic rifle and shot 24 students, killing 2. When several boys tackled him to the ground, Kinkel shouted, “Shoot me!”
These events left the entire nation unhinged. Tragically, the violence did not stop there. On April 20, 1999, 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold of Littleton, Colorado, smuggled four high-powered guns and a stash of homemade explosives into Columbine High School and carried out a massacre that left 12 students and 1 teacher dead, and 23 students injured, before killing themselves. National outrage turned to horror and grief as the media
showed the nation images of the wounded and the dead. As people tried to make sense of what happened, stories about school violence became a common theme in the media.
Video games were not immediately rooted out as a cause of the Pearl, Mississippi, shooting, and the Paducah shooting was said to have been inspired by the movie
Basketball Diaries.
Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden, on the other hand, were said to have spent a lot of time playing shooting games, including
GoldenEye 007
, before their 1998 Jonesboro assault. Most incriminating of all, however, was the shooting in Littleton. “The two became ‘obsessed’ with the violent videogame
Doom
—an interactive game in which the players try to rack up the most kills—and played it every afternoon,” reported
Newsweek.
5
Harris was said to have created a special version of
Doom
based on his high school.
Months later, the media reported that Klebold and Harris had made videotapes of themselves shortly before going on their killing spree. In the tapes, Klebold and Harris talked about their plans and related it to
Doom.
Dylan Klebold sits in the tan La-Z-Boy, chewing on a toothpick. Eric Harris adjusts his video camera a few feet away, then settles into his chair with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a sawed-off shotgun in his lap. He calls it Arlene, after a favorite character in the gory
Doom
video games and books that he likes so much.
6“I hope we kill 250 of you,” Klebold says. He thinks it will be the most “nerve-racking 15 minutes of my life, after the bombs are set and we’re waiting to charge through the school. Seconds will be like hours. I can’t wait. I’ll be shaking like a leaf.”
“It’s going to be like fucking
Doom
,” Harris says. “Tick, tick, tick, tick … Haa! That fucking shotgun is straight from
Doom.
”
7
State legislators from Oregon, Arkansas, Florida, and other states proposed legislation to outlaw certain arcade games, and activist groups rose up, decrying violence in the media. In Washington, D.C., Senator Sam Brownback (Republican of Kansas) had long tried to hold hearings that investigated the marketing of violence to children. The events in Columbine gave his hearings a new urgency, and they began on May 4, 1999, just two weeks later.
The hearings had been rescheduled at least twice. We had it previously scheduled, and then an expert witness fell out or we had some objection, so this was like the third time it had been scheduled.
—Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, United States Senate
In light of recent events, it was only natural that this round of Senate hearings took on a more serious and heated tone than the earlier hearings. While only a few senators appeared at Joseph Lieberman’s 1993 hearings, fourteen made an appearance at the latter ones. John McCain and Orrin Hatch, both of whom would run in the 2000 presidential primaries, delivered statements at the hearings.
*
Reverend Charles J. Chaput, archbishop of Denver, Colorado, addressed the hearing, as did Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti and Doug Lowenstein of the Interactive Digital Software Association.
The hearings, which focused as much if not more on movies than on video and computer games, began with statements from each senator. Senator Brownback started his statement discussing the connection between the Paducah shooting and the movie
Basketball Diaries
, then turned his attention to video games.
The violence in video games is, in some ways, even more disturbing. A game player does not merely witness violence, he takes an active part. Indeed, the point of such games as
Postal, Kingpin, Duke Nuke ’Em, Guilty Gear
, and others, is to kill as many characters as possible. The higher your body count, the higher your score.
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**—Senator Sam Brownback
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (Republican of Texas) gave one of the most accusatory opening statements.
I think we need to find the connection between our violent art and our violent culture. Modern video games are worse and more realistic than ever. An
eight-year-old can sneak off into cyberspace, assume a new virtual identity, and commit ghastly acts of violence and brutality. With the touch of a button, our children can torture victims, rip out their hearts or spinal cords, and then wave the bloody debris above their heads.The statistics on television violence are staggering. The average American child witnesses 100,000 acts of violence and 8,000 murders on television before leaving elementary school, but if a child is playing video games, that number is multiplied and the violence is at his own hands. He pulls the trigger, he likes it, he has fun, and his score goes up. What kind of message is that?
One of our witnesses today says that video games deliberately use the psychological techniques of desensitization used to teach soldiers how to kill in battle. The difference, he says, is that video game violence is associated with reward and pleasure, and not tempered by a respect for authority or the revulsion of war.
9—Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Republican of Texas, United States Senate
It was inevitable that the hearings would refer back to the tragedy at Columbine High School again and again, giving the impression that the senators held violent games and movies responsible for the killing. In interviews, however, the senators were more cautious about laying blame. “I don’t know that you could quantify that. We do know, and we now have studies showing a correlation between playing the violent video games and violent behavior, and that correlation is actually higher than the correlation between smoking and lung cancer. So there is correlation, but I don’t know that you can draw that directly on the Columbine case,” Senator Brownback stated in an interview after the hearings.
Slade Gorton, the Washington State Republican who approached Nintendo for help in saving the Mariners, also participated in the hearings. Although he pronounced scathing condemnation of the executives from entertainment conglomerates who refused to appear at the hearings, he also spoke out in Nintendo’s defense.
Colonel Grossman yesterday on
Meet the Press
said that Nintendo marketed a game, or had a contract with the Army to market a game, for target purposes that is also used by children. Nintendo informs me that it does not now
and never has had any contract with the Army or any Armed Service for any purpose whatsoever, and I think their response deserves to be on the record.
10—Slade Gorton, Republican of Washington, United States Senate
After the senators finished their opening statements, the first of two panels came onto the floor. The members of this panel included Archbishop Chaput; Jack Valenti, of the MPAA; and Dr. William Bennett, former secretary of education and drug czar in the Bush administration.
“Exactly one week ago today, I buried the third of four Catholic teenagers shot to death at Columbine High School,” the Archbishop began. “More than 1,000 people turned out for each of the funerals.” Clearly unfamiliar with video games, the Archbishop mentioned the movie
The Matrix
in his brief talk. He finished by urging the senators to look at the causes, not symptoms, of our violent culture.
The roots of violence in our culture are much more complicated than just bad rock lyrics or brutal screenplays. It is clear that the Columbine killings were planned well before
The Matrix
ever opened. But common sense tells us that the violence of our music, our video games, our films, and our television has to go somewhere. And it goes straight into the hearts of our children, to bear fruit in ways we cannot imagine until something like Littleton happens.
11—Reverend Charles J. Chaput, archbishop of Denver, Colorado