Jimmy Maher (maher@filfre.net)

The Digital Antiquarian
Volume 19: 1997

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This eBook was converted on
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Contents

1. From Mechs to Mopar

2. Magic and Loss, Part 1: Magic in the Cards

3. Magic and Loss, Part 2: Magic on the Screen

4. The Last Express

5. A Digital Pornutopia, Part 1: The Seedy-ROM Revolution

6. A Digital Pornutopia, Part 2: The Internet is for Porn

7. Putting the “J” in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue!

8. Putting the “J” in the RPG, Part 2: PlayStation for the Win

9. Putting the “J” in the RPG, Part 3: Playing Final Fantasy VII (or, Old Man Yells at Cloud)

10. Televising the Revolution

11. The Rise of POMG, Part 1: It Takes a Village…

12. The Rise of POMG, Part 2: Multima

13. The Rise of POMG, Part 3: Competition and Conflict

14. The Rise of POMG, Part 4: A World for the Taking

15. Age of Empires (or, How Microsoft Got in on Games)

16. Jedi Knight (Plus, Notes on an Expanded Universe)

17. The Curse of Monkey Island

18. Blade Runner

19. Riven

From Mechs to Mopar
August 18, 2023

The future is boring.

— Zack Norman

Prologue: Scenes from an Italian Restaurant

One day in the fall of 1995, two Activision game designers by the names of Sean Vesce and Zack Norman went out to lunch together at their favorite Italian joint. Both had just come off of MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat, an action-packed “simulation” of giant rock-em, sock-em robots that took place in the universe of the popular tabletop game BattleTech. They had done their jobs well: slick and explosive, MechWarrior 2 had become the game of the hour upon its release the previous August, the perfect alternative for players who had been entranced by the Pandora’s Box of 3D mayhem that had been cracked open by DOOM but who were growing a little bored with the recent onslaught of me-too DOOM clones.

There was only one cloud on the horizon: Activision knew already that they wouldn’t be allowed to make a MechWarrior 3. Their rights to BattleTech were soon to expire and were not going to be renewed, what with FASA, the company which owned the tabletop game, having decided to start a studio of its own, FASA Interactive, to produce digital incarnations of its tabletop properties. Activision’s owner Bobby Kotick, who was quickly making a name for himself as one of the savviest and most unsentimental minds in gaming, had accordingly issued orders to his people to milk MechWarrior 2 and its engine, which had required a great deal of time and expense to create, for all they were worth while the opportunity was still there. This would result in two expansion packs for the core game before the curtain fell on the license. Meanwhile Vesce and Norman were tasked with coming up with an idea for another “vehicular combat game” that could be developed relatively quickly and cheaply, to take advantage of the engine one last time before it became hopelessly out of date. They had gone to lunch together today to discuss the subject.

Or Vesce had, at any rate. Norman was still basking in the bonus he had earned from MechWarrior 2, the biggest check he had ever seen with his name on it. A diehard Mopar fanboy, he had just about decided to buy himself a vintage muscle car with his windfall. He had thus brought an Auto Trader magazine along with him to the restaurant, and kept flipping through the pages distractedly while Vesce threw out game ideas, none of which quite seemed right. (“What about a helicopter sim?”) But Norman suddenly stopped turning the pages when he came across a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda. “Is that the car?” asked Vesce, a little disinterestedly.

Then he saw the look on Norman’s face — the look of a man who had finally seen something that had been staring him in the face for most of the last hour. It was, after all, a vehicular combat game they had been tasked with making. “No,” said Norman. “That’s the game!” And so Interstate ’76, one of the freshest and cleverest mass-market computer games of the late 1990s, was born.

Part 1: I, Robot

The road to that memorable lunch stretches all the way back to 1980, when the excitement around Dungeons & Dragons was inspiring many tabletop gamers to start companies in the role-playing space which it had opened up. Among their number was a pair of Chicago boys named Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babcock. They formed FASA that year; the acronym was an elaborate high-school joke that owed a debt to the Marx Brothers, standing for “Freedonian Aeronautics and Space Administration.” They scrounged together $300 in seed capital, just enough to run off a bunch of copies of an adventure module they had created for Traveller, the most popular of the early science-fiction RPGs. Then they took their adventure to that year’s Gen Con to sell it, sleeping in their van in the parking lot for lack of the funds to pay for a hotel room.

From those humble beginnings, FASA scraped and clawed their way within two years to landing a stunner of a deal: to make a tabletop RPG based on Star Trek. It shipped in 1983, whereupon critics lauded the system for its simplicity and approachability, and for the way it captured the idealistic essence of Star Trek at its best, with its ethos of violence as a last rather than a first resort. (A comparison might be mooted with Call of Cthulhu, another tabletop RPG that turned the Dungeons & Dragons power-gaming approach on its head in the service of a very different mission statement.) “To make Star Trek: The RPG a Klingon shoot would be in violation of everything the series represented,” said Guy W. McLimore Jr., one of the game’s trio of core designers. “Man-to-man-combat and starship-combat systems were important, and had to be done right, but these were to take a backseat to the essential human adventure of space exploration.”

FASA supported their Star Trek RPG lavishly, with rules supplements, source books, and adventure modules galore during the seven years they were allowed to hang onto the license. Many a grizzled tabletop veteran will still tell you today that FASA’s Star Trek was as good as gaming on the Final Frontier ever got. When you did engage in spaceship combat, for example, the game did an uncanny job of putting you in the shoes of your character standing on the bridge, rather than relegating you to pushing cardboard counters around on a paper map in the style of Star Fleet Battles.

Still, if you were more interested in shooting things than wrestling with ethical dilemmas, FASA had you covered there as well. The same year as the Star Trek RPG, they published Combots. Inspired by Japanese anime productions that enjoyed no more than a tiny following in the United States as yet, it was a board game of, as the name would imply, combat between giant robots, co-designed by Jordan Weisman himself and one Bill Fawcett.

They refined and added to the concept the following year with a miniatures-based strategy game called Battledroids. A year after that, Battledroids became BattleTech in response to legal threats from Lucasfilm of Star Wars fame, who felt the term “droid” rightfully belonged to them alone. (“I politely wrote back,” says Weisman, “to point out that Isaac Asimov had been using the word ‘android’ since something like 1956. They wrote back to point out that they had a lot more lawyers than we did.”)

By now, the wave of Japanese giant robots had fully broken Stateside; the Saturday morning cartoon lineup showcased Transformers prominently, and that show’s associated line of action figures was flying off store shelves even faster than their Star Wars brethren. BattleTech was the right game at the right time, perfect for people who were too old to play with action figures that were intended as mere toys but still young enough at heart to appreciate duels between gargantuan armor-plated “mechs” bristling with laser cannons, missile launchers, and just about every other imaginable form of futuristic destruction.

From the beginning, BattleTech incorporated some RPG elements. It came complete with a detailed setting whose history was laid out in a timeline that spanned over a millennium of humanity’s future. Likewise, players were encouraged to keep and slowly improve the same mech over the course of many battles. At the same time, though, the game required no referee and was quick to pick up and play, keeping the focus squarely on the combat. In 1986, FASA released a supplement called MechWarrior that moved the system further into RPG territory, for those who so desired, adding the missing referee back into the equation. It placed players in the roles of individual mech pilots, a new breed of knights in shining armor who had much in common with their Medieval ancestors, being fixated on chivalry, noblesse oblige, and blood feuds. BattleTech and MechWarrior spawned a cottage industry, one which by the late 1980s rivaled the Star Trek RPG in terms of its contributions to FASA’s bottom line as well the sheer quantity of supplements that were available for it, full of background information, scenarios, and most of all cool new mechs and mech kit, things its fans could never seem to get enough of.

FASA had had the opportunity to study up close and personal the way that a huge property like Star Trek sprawled across the ecosystem of media: television, movies, books, comics, toys, tabletop and digital games. They saw no reason that BattleTech shouldn’t follow its example. Thus they commissioned a BattleTech comic, and hired the tabletop-gaming veteran Michael Stackpole to write a series of BattleTech novels. If the latter read like a blow-by-blow description of someone’s gaming session, so much so that you could almost hear the dice rolling in the background… well, that was perhaps a feature rather than a bug in the eyes of the target audience.

Only three of his hastily loosed missiles made their target, but those hit with a vengeance. One exploded into one of the Rifleman’s autocannon ejection ports, fusing the ejection mechanism. The other missiles both slammed into the radar wing whirling like a propeller above the ‘Mech’s hunched shoulders. The first explosion froze the mechanism in place. The second blast left the wing hanging by thick electrical cables…

Then, too, FASA didn’t neglect the digital space. From 1987, Jordan Weisman devoted most of his energy to the creation of “BattleTech Centers,” which played host to virtual-reality cockpits where players could take on the role of mech pilots far more directly and viscerally than any mere tabletop game would allow. A radically ambitious idea that wasn’t at all easy to bring to fruition, the first BattleTech Center didn’t open until 1990, in Chicago’s North Pier Mall. But it was very successful once it did, selling 300,000 tickets for time in one of its sixteen cockpits over its first two years. After a cash injection from the Walt Disney family, this proof of concept would lead to at least 25 more BattleTech Centers in the United States and Japan by the turn of the millennium.

And then there was also digital BattleTech for the home. FASA signed a deal with Activision in 1987, giving them the right to make BattleTech games for personal computers for the next ten years. The first fruit of that deal appeared in late 1988 under the name of BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception. It was published under the Infocom imprint, but that storied text-adventure specialist, a somewhat reluctant member of the Activision family since 1986, had little to do with it; the real developer was Westwood Associates. In its review, Computer Gaming World magazine called The Crescent Hawk’s Inception a cross between Ultima and the BattleTech board game, and this strikes me as a fair description. You wandered the world, following the bread-crumb trail of the story line, building up your finances and your skills, recruiting companions, and improving your collection of mechs, the better to fight battles which were quite faithful to the tabletop game, right down to being turn-based from an overhead perspective. It wasn’t a bad game, but it wasn’t an amazing one either, feeling more workmanlike than truly inspired. All indications are that it sold fairly modestly.

One year later, Activision returned with another BattleTech game. Developed by Dynamix, MechWarrior borrowed the name of FASA’s RPG expansion to the core tabletop game, yet was actually less of a CRPG than its predecessor had been. You still wandered from place to place chasing the plot and searching out battles, but the latter were now placed front and center, and had more in common with the still-in-the-works BattleTech Centers than the tabletop game, taking place in real time from a first-person perspective. MechWarrior sold much better than The Crescent Hawk’s Inception, proving that many others agreed with Computer Gaming World’s Johnny L. Wilson when he said that this was the kind of BattleTech computer game “I was looking for.”

It was followed another year later by another Westwood game, a direct sequel to The Crescent Hawk’s Inception entitled The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge. In spite of its sequel status, it dispensed with the CRPG aspects entirely, in favor of a simple branching mission tree. These were shown once again from an overhead perspective, but played out in real time rather than in turns. These qualities make the game stand out as an interesting progenitor to the full-fledged real-time-strategy genre, which Westwood themselves would invent less than two years later with Dune II. In the meantime, Computer Gaming World declared it “the game every BattleTech devotee has been waiting for.”

Unfortunately for everyone, Activision imploded just weeks after publishing The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge in late 1990, brought down by an untimely patent-infringement lawsuit and a long string of bad decisions on the part of CEO Bruce Davis. The company was rescued from the brink of oblivion by the opportunistic young wheeler and dealer Bobby Kotick, who had been itching for a computer-game publisher of his very own for several years already. He declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, moved the whole operation from Silicon Valley to Los Angeles, cut its staff from 150 to eight, and kept it alive by digging deep into his capacious bag of tricks to wheedle just a little more patience out of its many creditors, a few months at a time.

It is one of the little-known ironies of modern gaming that Bobby Kotick’s Activision — the same Activision that brought in revenues of almost $9 billion in 2021 — owes its ongoing existence to the intellectual property of Infocom, a company which in its best year as an independent entity brought in $10 million in revenue. Casting about for a product he could release quickly to bring in some much-needed cash, Kotick hit upon Infocom’s 1980s text-adventure catalog. He published all 35 of the games in question in two shovelware collections, The Lost Treasures of Infocom I and II, the first of which alone sold at least 100,000 copies at $60 a pop and a profit margin to die for. He followed that triage operation up by going all-in on Return to Zork, a state-of-the-art graphic adventure that capitalized equally on the excitement over multimedia CD-ROM and older gamers’ nostalgia for the bygone days of a purely textual Great Underground Empire.

But if the Lost Treasures stopped the bleeding in 1992 and Return to Zork took the patient off life support in 1993, it was MechWarrior 2 in the summer of 1995 that announced Kotick’s Activision to be fully restored to rude health, once again a marquee publisher of top-shelf gamer’s games that didn’t need to shirk comparisons with anyone else’s.

That said, actually making MechWarrior 2 had been a rather tortured process. Knowing full well that the first MechWarrior had been the old Activision’s last real hit, Kotick would have preferred to have had the sequel well before 1995. However, Dynamix, the studio that had made the first game, had been bought by Activision’s competitor Sierra in 1990. Kotick thus decided to do the sequel in-house, initiating the project already by the end of 1992. It was ill-managed and under-funded by the still cash-strapped company. Artist Scott Goffman later summed up the problems as:

1. Over-eager PR people hyping a game that was not even close to being done. This led to forced promises of release dates that were IMPOSSIBLE to make.

2. Lack of a design. There was no clear direction for the first year and a half on the game, and no solid style.

3. Featuritis. A disease that often afflicts game developers, causing them to want to keep adding more and more features to a game, rather than debugging and shipping what they already have.

4. Morale. As they fell further and further behind schedule, the programmers and artists felt less and less inclined to produce. This led to departures.

By early 1994, the entire original team had left, forcing Activision to all but start over from scratch. The project now had such a bad odor about it that, when producer Josh Resnick was asked to take it over, his first instinct was to run the other way as fast as he could: “I actually thought this was a demotion and went so far as to ask if I had done something wrong.”

To his credit, though, it all started to come together after he bit the bullet and took control. He brought Sean Vesce and Zack Norman aboard to tighten up the design, combining elements of the last two licensed BattleTech computer games to arrive at a finished whole that was superbly suited to the post-DOOM market: the first-person action of MechWarrior 1 and the no-nonsense, straightforward mission tree of The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge. (Or rather missions trees in this case: MechWarrior 2 had two campaigns, each from the point of view of a different clan.) And everything was suitably updated to take advantage of the latest processors, graphics cards, and sound cards, of course.

It had now been almost five years since the last boxed BattleTech game for personal computers. In the interim, FASA, having lost their Star Trek license in 1989, had made the franchise their number-one priority. It was more popular than ever, encompassing more than 100 individual tabletop-gaming products, plus novels and comics, a line of toys, and even a televised cartoon series. Meanwhile a downloadable multi-player BattleTech computer game, developed by the online-gaming pioneer Kesmai, was doing very good business on the GEnie subscription service. So, there was a certain degree of pent-up demand among the FASA faithful for a new BattleTech computer game that you didn’t have to pay to play by the minute, even as there was also a fresh audience of rambunctious young men who had come to computer gaming through the likes of DOOM, who might not know BattleTech from Battle Isle, but who thought the idea of giant battling robots was hella cool in its own right.

MechWarrior 2 disappointed the expectations of neither its creators nor its consumers; it exploded out of the gate like a mech in its death throes, generating sales that made everything Bobby Kotick’s Activision had done before seem quaint. The party continued in 1996, when Activision released a free add-on that made online multiplayer games a possibility, thus destroying the Kesmai BattleTech’s market at a stroke. When the first hardware-accelerated 3D graphics cards began to appear in the summer of 1996, MechWarrior 2 was there once again. With his customary savvy, Kotick went to the makers of these disparate, mutually incompatible cards one by one, offering them a special version of one of the most popular games of the era, optimized to look spectacular with their particular card, ripe for packing right into the box along with it. All they had to do was pay Activision to make it for them. And pay they did; MechWarrior 2 became the king of the 3D-card pack-in games, a strange species that would exist for only a sharply limited period of time, until the switch from MS-DOS to Windows 95 as computer gaming’s standard platform made the need for all these custom builds for incompatible hardware a thing of the past. But it was very, very good for Activision while it lasted.

And then there was that other game that was to be made using the MechWarrior 2 engine. I must confess that it’s with that game that my heart really lies, and so it’s there that we’ll turn now.

Part 2: Feel Like Funkin’ It Up

When Sean Vesce and Zack Norman stood up from what had proved to be an inordinately long lunch, they had a pretty good idea of what they wanted Interstate ’76 to be. It was to be “a game with soul,” as Vesce puts it — soul in more ways than one. They wanted to make a tribute to the television shows of the 1970s, in which irreverent two-fisted heroes with names like Rockford and Ponch had scoured the nation’s highways and byways of ne’er-do-wells, sharing top billing in the minds of the audience with the vehicles they drove. Children of the 1980s that the two friends were, those shows had been one of the entertainment staples of their youth, to be enjoyed along with a cold soda and a sandwich as afternoon reruns after a long day at school. “We wanted to make a game that could capture a mood in a way that goes beyond just lighting things on fire and blowing them up,” says Norman, in a not-so-oblique reference to the game he worked on just before Interstate ’76. The new game’s soul was to be found as much as anywhere in the soundtrack, which was to draw from the 1970s heyday of blaxploitation flicks in the theaters as well as television.

In short, Vesce and Norman wanted to steer clear of all the usual gaming clichés, even as they embraced a whole pile of older ones, like tires that inexplicably squealed on dirt roads. They were adamant that, although it would feature battling automobiles, this was not to be yet another post-apocalyptic exercise; surely games had milked The Road Warrior enough by now. No, in their dystopian wasteland the bad guys would be OPEC and their mobster cronies, who were starving the nation of the gasoline it needed to keep its Mopar Hemis humming. It was to be, in other words, an exaggerated version of what was really going on in 1976, when the last of the muscle cars were being strangled by federal fuel-economy standards and the mad scientist’s tangle of emissions dampeners that was now required under each and every American hood. Only in this timeline vintage American muscle might just be able to win out rather than shuffle quietly off to extinction.

All of this may not have been a recipe for high art, but it was as foreign a notion for the increasingly risk-averse, perpetually lily-white executives of the games industry as an avant-garde character study would be to Jerry Bruckheimer. Vesce and Norman had a damnably hard time selling it to the suits; Vesce admits that “the first pitch meeting was disastrous.” But slowly they made headway. After all, they noted, it wasn’t as if the young males who constituted the heart of the gaming demographic wouldn’t get where they were coming from; plenty of them had grown up with the same afternoon television as Vesce and Norman. And by reusing the MechWarrior 2 engine, keeping the scope modest, and avoiding such misbegotten indulgences as live-action cut scenes, they could get by with a relatively small development team, a compressed development cycle, and a reasonable development budget. Thanks to MechWarrior 2’s success, Activision finally had a little bit of cash on hand to take a flier on something a little bit different, without the fate of the whole company hanging on the outcome. First the Director of Creative Affairs saw the light. Then, one by one, his colleagues in business suits fell into line. The game got the green light.

Making Interstate ’76 proved a happy experience for everyone involved. And in the end, they delivered exactly the game they had promised, more or less on time and on budget. It was released by Activision in the spring of 1997, garnering very favorable reviews and solid if not stupendous sales, despite graphics that were the state of the art of two years ago.

The only reason to play the game today is its story mode — or, the “T.R.I.P.” (“Total Recreational Interactive Production”), as it prefers to call it. This T.R.I.P. takes us to the desolated landscapes of West Texas and New Mexico (whose lack of such complications as trees makes them much easier for the engine to render). Your avatar is a white soul brother by the name of Groove Champion, with a rather glorious handlebar pornstache and a preference for huge collars and unbuttoned shirt fronts. His sister Jade — “Jade was always a better racer than me, man,” he confesses — has just been violently killed. Groove has inherited her car, a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda like the one Zack Norman stumbled across in that Auto Trader on that memorable day in an Italian restaurant. (Well, it’s actually called a “Picard Piranha” in the game; all of the cars were rebranded for legal reasons, but all are based on real-world models that the aficionado will readily recognize.) Groove is no natural-born killer, and it takes quite some cajoling from Jade’s best friend, a spiffy dude named Taurus, to convince him to hit the road to find her killer and avenge her death.

Groove Champion, proving that real men drink Slurpees.

Taurus is the funkiest cat ever to appear in a game. Vesce calls him “the embodiment of the attitude and soul we were trying to inject into the game. He was Shaft, Super Fly and Samuel L. Jackson all rolled into one. Plus, he was a poet.” Indeed, one of your options in your car is to “ask Taurus for a poem.” The verses he intones over the CB radio when you do so are… not too bad, actually.

Looking out the window of your room onto a wet rainy day
Main street under a slate grey afternoon sky
The light on your face is soft and dim under the lace curtain
And the streets are empty
In the distance, there is a flash and a rumble
Clouds sail the sky like giant wooden ships
On a blackened evergreen sea
Capped with foam

(All of the poems are the work of Zack Norman.)

Taurus, who takes his Slurpees red.

Soon after meeting Taurus, you meet the story’s third and final good guy, a seemingly slow-witted country bumpkin of a mechanic named Skeeter who, in one of the game’s best running gags, turns out to have a savant-like insight on the things that really matter. Add in Antonio Malochio, the oily Mafia don and OPEC stooge who eventually emerges as Jade’s murderer, and the cast of characters is complete. Interstate ’76 is a masterclass in tight, effective videogame storytelling, giving you exactly what you need to motivate you through its seventeen missions — or “scenes,” as it prefers to call them — and nothing that you don’t. (In this sense as in many others, it’s the polar opposite of Realms of the Haunting, the hilariously piebald everything-but-the-kitchen-sink “epic” I wrote about in my last article.)

From the moment you start the game, everything you see and hear draws you into its world; nothing jars with anything else. The soundtrack is credible 1970s funk, where the booty-shaking bass lines do the heavy lifting. It was a side gig for Arion Salazar, the bassist for Third Eye Blind, whose first hit single was climbing the music charts at the same time Interstate ’76 was on the games charts. As its pedigree would suggest, the music was recorded in a real studio on real instruments by a solid band of real pros.

In order to keep everything seamless, Vesce and Norman originally wanted to have the cut scenes run in the game engine itself, presaging the approach that Half-Life would employ to such revolutionary effect more than a year later. When this proved impractical, they deliberately made the cut scenes look like they were coming out of the same engine. Somehow the characters here, lacking though they may be such purportedly essential details as eyes and lips, have more character than the vast majority of photo-realistic gaming specimens, proof that good aesthetics and high resolutions are not one and the same. By keeping its visuals all of a piece, the game makes the standard loop of “play a level, watch a cut scene,” which was already becoming tedious in many contexts by 1997, feel much more organic, like it really is all one story you’re living through.

Everything else is fashioned in the same spirit. Everything is diegetic. You upgrade your car between missions by talking it over with Skeeter; your in-mission map had been scrawled on an empty bag of fast-food takeout; even the options menu appears as the check from a roadside restaurant.

Having given praise where it is richly due, I must acknowledge that the gameplay itself is rather less revelatory than that which surrounds it. Unsurprisingly given the origins of the gameplay engine, the cars themselves behave more like BattleTech mechs than real automobiles, even when making allowances for the machine guns and flame throwers that are bolted onto their chassis. Vehicles bounce off of one another and the terrain like Matchbox cars; collisions that ought to leave your Barracuda nothing put a pile of twisted wreckage result in no more more than an artfully crinkled fender. Likewise, the engine doesn’t entirely transcend MechWarrior 2’s aspirations toward being a real simulation; the controls are a bit fiddly, more Wing Commander than WipEout, and this does clash somewhat with the easygoing immersion of the story line. The worst frustration is your inability to save within missions, some of which are fairly extended exercises. It isn’t much fun to play the first ten minutes of a mission over and over in order to get to the part that’s giving you trouble.

Asked in 1999 about what he would like to have done differently in Interstate ’76, Vesce expressed regrets with which I wholeheartedly agree.

If  I could turn back time and do it again, the first thing I would do is make the game more action-oriented, with easier controls, clearer mission objectives, and greater and more frequent rewards. I would greatly simplify the game’s shell, most importantly the vehicle repair screen that players accessed between missions. I talked to a lot of people who were completely baffled the first time they went through. It was far too complex and difficult to use without the manual. I would split some of the missions into multiple missions (especially the first one), and offer a way to save at any point in the game.

Like a number of games I’ve written about recently, Interstate ’76 could have benefited from being released in the era of digital distribution, when the marketplace would have allowed it to be its best self: a four to six hour romp, to be undertaken more for the joy of the thing than the challenge. As it is, the nature of the engine and bygone expectations about value for money and what boxed games “ought” to be gum up the works from time to time even if you play on “Wimp” level, as I was more than happy to do. We probably could have done entirely without the then-obligatory skirmish and multiplayer modes, which pretty clearly weren’t where the developers’ hearts were.

Yet the way that the game recognizes and even leans into its limitations does soften the blow. It makes an inside joke out of the fact that you can’t ever get out of your car, because the engine wasn’t designed for that sort of thing. Jade, Skeeter tells us, made one fatal mistake: “She got out of the car. Don’t ever get out of the car.” Needless to say, he doesn’t need to worry that Groove will do the same.

Interstate ’76 is a breath of fresh air for any 1990s gamer — or 21st-century digital antiquarian — who’s grown tired of the typical strictures of game fictions, of the endless procession of dragons and spaceships and fighter jets and zombies and, yes, even giant robots. In an article written in 1999, Ernest Adams noted that, two years after the release of Interstate ’76, “Taurus may be the only black character with a central role in any computer game today.” That of course speaks to a colossal failure on the part of the industry as a whole, but at least we have this welcome exception to point to.

If you’ll bear with me, I’d like to close this review with two personal anecdotes that might begin to explain why this game hits me right in my sweet spot.

Anecdote #1: I spent the early 1990s working in a record store, back when such places still existed. This was the heyday of grunge, and in the name of pleasing the customers I was forced to listen to way too much flannel-clad whinging, backed by pummeling rhythm sections who thought swinging was something you did on a playground. At the end of a long day of this, it was always a joy for me and my soul sister Lorrie to put on some Althea and Donna or some Spoonie Gee and the Sequence and groove for a while as we closed the store. Coming across this game whilst writing these histories brought the same sweet sense of vive la différence!

Anecdote #2: My second car was a 1965 Ford Mustang, which wound up costing me every bit as much money and trouble as my father told me it would when I bought it. Weirdo that I was, I graduated after selling it to weird foreign cars: a Volkswagen Beetle and camper van, a Datsun 280Z, a Volkswagen GTI. But I had friends who stayed wedded to American muscle, and I was always able to appreciate the basso profondo of a finely tuned V8. I stopped messing around with cars when I moved to Europe in 2009; today I confine my mechanical endeavors to keeping our lawn tractor in good working order. Yet a throaty exhaust note heard through an open window, or just the smell of gasoline in a dimly lit garage, can still take me back to those days of barked shins and grease under the fingernails as surely as a madeleine transported Proust. Add this game to that list as well. I realize now that I lived through the tail end of a period that can never return; we absolutely must wean ourselves off of our addiction to fossil fuels if we’re to continue to make a go of civilization on this long-suffering planet of ours. And that’s okay; change is the essence of existence, as Heraclitus knew more than 2500 years ago, when he wrote that one can never step into the same river twice. Still, there’s no harm in reminiscing sometimes, is there?

All that is just me, though. A more impersonal argument for Interstate ’76 might point to it as a case study in how the best games aren’t really about technology at all. A low-budget affair based on an aging and imperfectly repurposed engine, it was nevertheless all kinds of awesome. For it had that one magic ingredient that most of its wealthier, more attractive peers lacked: it had soul, baby.

Hot rubber eternally pressing against a blackened pavement
A wheel is forever
A car is infinity times four

Postscript: Yesterday, When I Was Young

MechWarrior 2 and Interstate ’76 both proved to be peaks that were impossible to scale a second time, each in its own way.

Activision was indeed forced to give the digital rights to BattleTech to FASA’s new computer-games division, but the latter never managed to thrust its own games into the central spotlight that MechWarrior 2 had enjoyed. FASA itself closed up shop in 2001. “The adventure-gaming world has changed much, and it is time for the founders of FASA to move on,” wrote the old friends Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babcock in a farewell letter to their fans. BattleTech, however, lives on, under the auspices of WizKids, a new company set up by Weisman. MechWarrior games and other BattleTech games with different titles have continued to appear on computers, but none has ever become quite the sensation that MechWarrior 2 was back in those heady days of the mid-1990s.

Interstate ’76 got one rushed-seeming expansion pack that added support for 3D hardware acceleration — a feature oddly missing from the base game, given its engine’s history — and 20 missions that weren’t tied together by any story line, an approach which the core gameplay arguably wasn’t strong enough to support. Then, in 1999, it got a full-fledged sequel, Interstate ’82, which tried to do for the synth-pop decade what its predecessor had for the decade of funk. But it just didn’t come together somehow, despite Zack Norman once again taking the design reins and despite a much prettier, faster engine. While Interstate ’76 lives on as a cult classic today, Interstate ’82 is all but forgotten. Chalk it up as yet more evidence that advanced technology does not automatically lead to a great game.

If you were to ask my advice, I would suggest that you enjoy Interstate ’76, the only computer game I’ve written about today that transcends the time and circumstances of its creation, and consign the rest to history. But remember: whatever you do, don’t get out of the car.

Where to Get Them: Due doubtless to the complications of licensing, all of the BattleTech and MechWarrior computer games described in this article are out of print. Interstate ’76, however, is available as a digital purchase at GOG.com. Unfortunately, it can be a frustrating game to get working properly on modern Windows, and the version that’s for sale does less than you might expect to help you. In many cases, it seems to degrade rather than fail outright, often in pernicious ways: missions are glitched so as to become impossible to complete, etc. There are solutions out there — I’d suggest starting on the GOG.com forums and the PC Gaming Wiki — but all require some technical expertise. Further, different solutions seem to work (and not work) on different computers, making it impossible for me to point you to a single foolproof set of instructions here. I wish it were otherwise, believe me — this game deserves to be played — but I thought it best to warn you right here. It breaks my heart to say this, but if you aren’t ready to roll up your sleeves, this may be one to just watch on YouTube.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: The book Designers & Dragons: The 80s by Sheldon Appelcline. Next Generation of November 1996 and November 1998; Computer Gaming World of January 1989, December 1989, November 1990, February 1991, June 1992, July 1995, August 1996, June 1997, July 1997, July 1998, and January 1999; Space Gamer of July/August 1983; Dragon of March 1988. Online sources include Online Gaming Review’s interview with Internet ’76 producer Scott Krager, an “overview” and “history” of MechWarrior 2 at Local Ditch Gaming, early MechWarrior 2 programmer Eric Peterson’s beginning of a history of his work on the game, Polygon’s interview with Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babcock, and the Interstate ’76 wiki. Also Sarna.net’s surveys of The Crescent Hawk’s Inception, MechWarrior 1, the first would be MechWarrior 2, the finished MechWarrior 2, the MechWarrior 2 soundtrack, and the Mercenaries expansion for MechWarrior 2.

Magic and Loss, Part 1: Magic in the Cards
September 8, 2023

Imagine a card game where there are hundreds of cards, with more being made all the time. Some cards are rare and some are common. You build a deck with whatever cards you want. You have no idea what’s in your opponent’s deck. And then you duel.

— Richard Garfield to Peter Adkison, 1991

Most revolutions have humble origins. Magic: The Gathering, the humble little card game that upended its industry in the 1990s, is no exception. It began with an ordinary-seeming fellow from the American heartland by the name of Peter Adkison.

Adkison grew up in rural Idaho in a family of Seventh Day Adventists, an idiosyncratic branch of evangelical Christianity. When not in church, the household played card and board games of all descriptions, a hobby for which the dark, snowy winters of their part of the country left ample time.

Adkison had moved to eastern Washington State to attend Walla Walla College when the Dungeons & Dragons craze of the early 1980s hit. Unfortunately, the game was soon banned from his college, itself a Seventh Day Adventists institution, because it was believed to have ties to Satanism. But fortunately, his mother, who had recently left both his father and the faith, gave him and his friends a safe space to play in her basement during vacations and holidays.

In 1985, Adkison graduated with a degree in computer science and went to work for Boeing in Seattle. Half a decade later, having grown disenchanted with the humdrum day-to-day of corporate aerospace engineering, he founded a would-be games publisher called Wizards of the Coast in his own basement. Looking for the right ticket into the hobby-game industry, he posted an open call on Usenet for designers who might be willing to sign on with a new and unproven company such as his. It was answered by two graduate students in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, whose names were Mike Davis and Richard Garfield. They all agreed to meet in person on August 17, 1991, in Portland, Oregon, the home of Garfield’s parents.

Adkison realized quickly at that meeting that the specific design the pair had come to pitch to him was untenable for Wizards of the Coast, at least at this juncture. Called Robo Rally, it portrayed a madcap race by out-of-control robots across a factory floor, the players continually “programming” them a few moves ahead of time to deal with whatever obstacles looked like they were coming next. The game was (and is) pretty brilliant, but it required far too many bobs and thingamajigs in the box to be practical under Adkison’s current budgetary constraints.

Nevertheless, he was impressed by the pair — especially by Garfield, a PhD student in the field of combinatorics, who seemed the more committed, passionate, and creative of the two. Mind you, it wasn’t that he cut a particularly rousing figure by conventional metrics. “Then, as now,” says Adkison, “he wore mismatched socks, had strange bits of thread and fabric hanging from parts of his clothing, and generally looked like someone who had just walked into the Salvation Army [Store] and grabbed whatever seemed colorful.” It was Garfield’s sheer love of games — all kinds of games — that drew Adkison in: “His vision was clear, and went to the heart of gaming. He was looking for entertainment, social interaction, mental exercise, creativity, and challenge. I suddenly felt stupid, remembering the time I had refused to play Pictionary, even though I knew I would probably enjoy it.”

Still, Adkison recognized that he had no choice but to let this weirdly inspiring new acquaintance down as gently as possible: It’s not your game design, it’s my lack of the resources to do it justice. Whereupon Garfield spoke the words that would change both their lives forever: “If you don’t want Robo Rally, what do you want? Describe a game concept — any concept — and I’ll design a game around it for you.”

Adkison was taken aback. He had been hoping to serendipitously stumble upon the ideal game, and now he had the chance to have one designed to order. What made the most sense for getting his company off the ground? It ought to be something small and simple, something cheap and easy to produce. Perhaps… yes! A card game would be ideal; that way, there would be no need for the manufacturing complications of boards or dice or injection-molded plastic figurines. And yet it could still be colorful and exciting to look at, if he brought in some good illustrators for the cards. It could be a snack-sized game for two people that was playable in twenty minutes or less, perfect for filling those down times around the table while waiting for the rest of the group to show up, or waiting for that week’s designated away team to return with the pizzas. There always seemed to be a shortage of that kind of game in the hobbyist market, where everybody wanted to go epic, man all the time. It could be displayed next to the cash register at gaming stores as a potential impulse buy, could become a little stocking stuffer for that special gamer in your life. Such a game would be a splendid way of getting Wizards of the Coast off the ground. Once that was accomplished, there would be plenty of time for the likes of Robo Rally.

A nodding Richard Garfield took it all in and promised to think about it.

They all met up again at a Seattle gaming convention a week later. Here Adkison learned that, true to his word, Garfield had indeed been thinking about his requested snack-sized card game. In fact, he’d been thinking rather hard. He proposed a game in which the players would be wizards who engaged in a duel, summoning minions to do their bidding and hurling spells at one another. Thematically speaking, it wasn’t exactly groundbreaking in a gaming milieu that had J.R.R. Tolkien and Gary Gygax as its patron saints. Nevertheless, as Garfield expanded on his concept, Adkison’s eyes kept getting wider. And when he was done, Adkison ran outside to the parking lot so that he could whoop for joy without inhibition. Garfield’s idea was, he was convinced, the best one to come along in the tabletop space since Dungeons & Dragons. He could already smell the money it was going to make all of them.

The true genius of Garfield’s idea — the reason that Adkison knew it could make him rich — was ironically external to the core gameplay loop that is the alpha and omega of most games. That said, that loop needed to be rock solid for the rest of the magic of Magic: The Gathering to happen. And this it most certainly was. I should take a moment to go over it here before I continue my story.

You Can Do Magic: A Very (Very, Very) Brief Introduction

While it is possible for more than two players to participate in a game of Magic, we’ll play it today as a one-on-one duel, by far its most common incarnation in its glory days of the 1990s. Indeed, because we’re doing history here, I’ll be describing the game in general as it was played in the 1990s. The modern game had not changed markedly, but there has been some tinkering here and there.

Unless another number has been agreed upon, each player starts with twenty life points. The objective is to reduce your opponent’s life points to zero before she can do the same to you. Alternatively — and less commonly — you can win through attrition, by causing her to run out of cards to play before you do.

Each player starts with her own freshly shuffled deck of cards. How many cards? That’s a little bit complicated to get into right now, involving as it does the aforementioned revolutionary aspects of the game that are external to the core rules. Suffice for now to say that the range is usually but not always between about 40 and 60, and that the number of cards is not necessarily the same for both players.

These cards fall into two broad categories. There are land cards, which provide mana, the fuel for the spells you will cast. And there are spell cards, which represent the spells themselves. There are five different types of land, from Swamps to Mountains, and each provides a different color of mana. Likewise, most of the spell cards require some quantity of a specific color of mana to play.

One of the key attributes that sets Magic apart from most card games is its asymmetry. As I already noted, each player has her own deck of cards, and these decks are not identical, what with their contents being selected by the players themselves. Some might go with a completely White deck, some with all Black. Slightly more adventurous souls might mix two colors; the really smart, brave, and/or foolhardy might dare to blend three. To use more colors than that in a deck is generally agreed to be a recipe for disaster.

In theory at least, the cards of each color are equally powerful in the aggregate, but they lend themselves to divergent play styles. White (using mana drawn from Plains) is the color of healing and protection, and its cards reflect this. Black (Swamps), on the other hand, is the color of decay, corruption, and pestilence. And so it goes with the other colors: Blue (Islands) is the color of trickery and deception, Red (Mountains) of unbridled destruction and mayhem, Green (Forests) of nature and life. The Magic colors you prefer to play with are a sort of Rorschach test, defining what sort of player you want to be if not what sort of person you already are.

On the theory that the best way to learn something is often by example, let’s begin a sample duel. I’ll play a Red and Green deck against my much cleverer wife Dorte, who is playing Black and Blue.

At the beginning of the match, Dorte and I each draw the seven cards that compose our starting hand. The game then proceeds in rounds, during each of which each player takes one turn. I’ll be the starting player, the one who takes his turn first each round. (This is not always an advantage.)

Each player gets to draw one more card at the beginning of his or her turn, and each player is then allowed to deploy a maximum of one land card during that turn. I do both, placing a Mountain on the table in front of me.

Most spell cards require you to tap your store of mana — signified by turning one or more deployed land cards sideways — in order to play them. I happen to have in my hand a Lightning Bolt, which, I can see from the symbol at the top right of the card, requires just one Red mana to cast. That’s perfect for an early strike to wake up my enemy! I tap my freshly deployed Mountain and hurl the spell, doing three points of damage to Dorte just like that, reducing her life total to seventeen. “Instant” spells like this one go directly to the graveyard — known in most other card games as the player’s discard pile — once they’ve been cast. They’re gone forever from that point on — except under special circumstances, such as a spell that lets one pull cards out of the graveyard. (One quickly learns that every rule in Magic comes with that same implied asterisk.)

On her turn, Dorte draws a card, deploys a Swamp, and does nothing else. Presumably she doesn’t have any spell cards in her hand that cost just one Black mana to cast — or any that she wants to cast right now, at any rate.

The first round is now finished, so I can untap the Mountain I’ve already put on the table. This means I will be able to use it again on my next turn.

I draw another card to start my second turn. But after doing so, I find that there’s nothing else that I’m willing and able to do with my current hand, other than to grow my Red mana stockpile a bit by deploying another Mountain. Quick turns like the ones Dorte and I have just taken are not at all unusual during the early rounds of a game. Most spells cost more than the Lightning Bolt I happened to have handy at the start, and it can take time to build up the supply of mana needed to cast them. Because land cards that have been deployed in one turn stay deployed in those that follow, the amount of mana in play escalates steadily during a game of Magic, allowing more and more powerful spell cards to be played.

Unhappily for me, Dorte doesn’t need to wait around anymore. After drawing a card and deploying a second Swamp, she has enough mana to summon a Black Knight. As a summoned minion rather than a one-shot spell, he goes out onto the table in front of her, next to her supply of land. He will soon be able to attack me, or do battle with my own minions, should I manage to summon any. Thankfully, though, he is not allowed to attack on the same turn he is summoned. And so the round ends without further ado.

I get some luck of my own on my next turn; I draw the Forest card I’ve been looking for. I immediately deploy my Forest alongside my two preexisting Mountains, giving me one Green and two Red mana to work with this turn.

I use one of each to summon my first minion (or rather minions): a group of Elven Archers. (The symbols at the top right of this card tell me that it costs one Green mana and one additional mana of any color to play.) And then, because they too aren’t allowed to attack on the turn in which I summoned them, I can do nothing else.

Dorte deploys an Island on her turn, giving her one Blue and two Black mana in her reservoir.

Then she sends her Black Knight to attack me. I’m about to respond with my Elven Archers as defenders. Take a close look at both cards. The numbers at the bottom right tell us that both attack with a power of two, but that, while the Black Knight dies only after absorbing two points of damage, my Elven Archers are more fragile, dying after taking just one point of damage. Both also have special abilities. The Black Knight is invulnerable to White enemies, but this is irrelevant in this match, since I won’t be summoning any of them. On the other hand, both the Black Knight and the Elven Archers have a “First Strike” ability. This requires a bit more unpacking.

When minions clash, they normally damage one another simultaneously. A creature with First Strike, however, damages its enemy first; if and only if the enemy is left alive by the attack does it get to inflict retaliatory damage of its own. Yet in this case, both attacker and defender have First Strike. Their special abilities cancel one another out, causing them to inflict damage on one another simultaneously as usual. The result ought to be that both are killed, going to their respective players’ graveyards. I am, in other words, prepared to sacrifice my Elven Archers in order to get Dorte’s Black Knight — a slightly more formidable pugilist on the whole — out of the game as well.

But that’s not what actually happens here — because Dorte, who hasn’t yet tapped any of her lands, does so now in order to cast a Terror spell, killing my Elven Archers outright before they can move to block her Black Knight. With his way thus cleared, the Black Knight can attack me directly, reducing my life points to eighteen. And so the round ends.

On my next turn, I deploy another Mountain, giving me a total of three Red and one Green mana. That’s more than enough to summon another minion from my hand, a Gray Ogre this time. Having done so, I end my turn.

Dorte now deploys another Island, giving her a pool of two Blue and two Black mana. She uses one Black mana to cast Unholy Strength on her Black Knight, increasing his attack power to four and his hit points to three.

Then she uses one Blue mana to cast a Flight spell, giving the same Black Knight the “Flying” special ability, meaning it will be able to soar right over my (non-flying) Gray Ogre and do four points of damage to me directly. This match does not appear to be going my way.

But appearances can be deceiving. It so happened that I drew another Lightning Bolt on my last turn, and I still have one untapped Mountain left to use to cast it — not directly against Dorte this time, but rather against her augmented Black Knight. The spell’s three points of damage will be just enough to kill him, even with his newfound Unholy Strength; nor can his ability to Fly save him.

But I did tell you that Dorte is clever, right? Not wanting to lose her Black Knight permanently, she hurriedly casts Unsummon with her last remaining point of Blue mana. This allows her to take him back into her hand, to be summoned again on some future turn to fight another day — minus his buffs, which now go to her graveyard without him.

The outcome of the last round has been mixed, but by no means ruinously so for me. I’ve been able to avoid taking any more damage, have forced Dorte’s only minion out of play for the moment, and now have a minion of my own poised to take the offensive next round. I’ll chalk the round up as more successful than not, even as I worry about what Dorte might still have up her sleeve — or rather in her hand — for dealing with my Gray Ogre.

And so it goes. A game of Magic is a cat-and-mouse one of move and countermove, strike and counterstrike, feint and counter-feint.

Although the explanation above is highly simplified, the core gameplay loop of Magic really is fairly easy to teach and to learn. The game’s ability to obsess its players over the long term derives not from its core rules but from the cards themselves. Through them, a simple game becomes devilishly complex — albeit complex in a different sense from, say, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, with its hundreds of pages of closely typed rules. In Magic, by contrast, all of the rules beyond the most basic are literally printed right there on the cards. The rules thus rewrite themselves every time somebody brings a new card to a session. This was unprecedented enough in the early 1990s to be called revolutionary — and not only in the sense of pure game design, but in a cultural and commercial sense as well. For Magic, you see, was envisioned from the start as a collectible card game, the world’s first.

This meant that there wouldn’t be a single monolithic Magic game to buy, containing everything you needed to play. Each player would instead assemble his own unique deck of cards by buying one or more card packs from Wizards of the Coast and/or by trading cards with his friends. All of the card packs produced by Wizards would be randomized. No one — not Wizards, not the store that sold them, definitely not you the buyer — could know for sure what cards any given pack contained. You would have to pay your money and take your chances on whatever pack seemed to be calling to you from its shelf in the store on that day.

The concept was utterly original, arguably more so than anything that had been seen in tabletop gaming since Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson had unleashed their “single-unit wargame” Dungeons & Dragons. But because of its unprecedented nature, Magic took a long, long time to turn into a reality. For, whatever its other merits, Magic did not live up to Peter Adkison’s request for a card game that would be simple and cheap to turn into a finished product.

First there was the work of making up hundreds of cards and their abilities, then of testing them against one another over and over to find out which ones were too powerful, which ones weren’t powerful enough, and which ones had been a bad idea from the get-go. Richard Garfield’s expertise in combinatorics was a godsend here, as was that of the other mathematicians who surrounded him at the University of Pennsylvania. “Richard would grab people for games all the time,” remembers one of those colleagues, the fellow who had the office across the hall from his. “If you said yes once, you were in the loop.” Magic became a way of life at the math department, threatening to derail graduations and theses. The University of Pennsylvania was the first educational institution to be so afflicted; it would not be the last.

The process of hewing a real game out of Garfield’s stroke of genius took so long that Peter Adkison came close to writing the whole project off, notwithstanding his bellow of enthusiasm in that Seattle parking lot after he had first been told of it. While he waited to see if Garfield would come through, he tried to bootstrap Wizards of the Coast by making supplements for established RPG lines. But his very first effort in this direction, a source book dealing with deities and their religions, nearly brought an end to the whole operation; the included notes on how to use the material with The Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game got him sued. He wound up having to scrap the source book and pay Palladium Books a settlement he really couldn’t afford. All he could do was chalk it up as a lesson learned. It wasn’t worth it to piggyback on anyone else’s intellectual property, he decided. Better for Wizards of the Coast to build its own inviolate empire with Magic.

Early in 1993 — fully eighteen months after that eureka moment in Seattle — Garfield finally delivered an initial slate of 300 different cards that he judged to be adequately tested and balanced. Now Adkison’s work began. He considered it essential that Magic look as good as it played; a part of the appeal of collecting the cards should be purely aesthetic. He farmed the illustrations out to a small army of freelance artists, most of them students at Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts, who agreed to work for royalties and stock in lieu of the up-front fees that Adkison couldn’t afford to pay them; he also offered them the unusual bonus of seeing their names featured right there on the fronts of the cards themselves.

You would begin your journey into the realms of Magic by buying a 60-card “Starter Deck,” at a price of $7.95. After that, you could add to your deck’s possibilities by buying 15-card “Booster Packs,” which would sell for $2.45 each. Working out the top-secret algorithms that would dictate the card packs’ contents was an enormously complicated exercise in combinatorics, one that put even Garfield’s skills to the test. Starter Decks, for example, had to be reasonably playable all by themselves, with a balance between types of land and spells that required that color of mana. To introduce a modicum of balance into the Magic economy as a whole, Garfield classified each card as common, uncommon, or rare, with their proportions in a print run and in each individual pack within that run to be dictated accordingly. Adkison awarded the contract to print the cards to a firm in far-off Belgium, the only one he could find that was willing and able to piece together so many bespoke packages.

He planned to introduce Magic to the world in August of 1993 at Gen Con, the highlight of the hobbyist-gaming calendar. It very nearly didn’t happen. Having paid for a booth at the tabletop-gaming Mecca, he was flustered when the cards he intended to show and sell there failed to arrive in time from Belgium. He spent the first and most of the second day of the four-day show standing in front of the empty booth, telling nonplussed gamers about the revolutionary game he would like to be showing them but for a logistical snafu. Needless to say, it was not a good look.

At long last, on the afternoon of the second day, the truck he had been waiting for arrived from the East Coast. Adkison and his people ripped open the shipping boxes right there on the show floor and began stacking the card packs around them. The show attendees still looked skeptical, still didn’t quite seem to understand the concept: “What? Each player needs his own deck?” But eventually a few took the plunge on a Starter Pack, then a few more. Then a lot of people did so, even as the earliest adopters started coming back to pick up Booster Packs. And then the second wave of Starter Pack buyers returned to buy more Booster Packs, as the future of Magic played out in microcosm right there in the hallways, hotel rooms, cafeterias, and gaming halls of Gen Con. Adkison sold $25,000 worth of Magic that weekend. On Monday morning, he walked into Boeing and tendered his resignation.

Dragon magazine, the journal of record of hobbyist gaming on the tabletop, had a reporter on the scene at the show. Allen Varney’s article is prescient in many ways, although even he couldn’t possibly know just how big Magic would become.

Through the Gen Con Game Fair, people clustered three deep around the Wizards of the Coast table, craning to see the ongoing demonstrations of this game. Everywhere I went I saw someone playing it. In discussing it, some players showed reserved admiration, others enthusiasm, but body language told more than words. Everyone hunched forward intently, the way you do in deep discussions of politics or religion. Onlookers and devoted fans alike felt compelled to grapple with the idea of this game. It achieved more than just a commercial hit; it redefined gamers’ perspectives on their hobby.

The Magic: The Gathering card game, the trailblazer in what may become an entire industry category, combines card-game rules with trading-card collectability…

The Magic game requires a medium to large league of players to bring out its magic. Fortunately, its low entry price, simplicity, and quick play make this easier to achieve. It makes an ideal choice for conventions or lunch boxes. Its drawbacks seem minor beside its groundbreaking achievement.

Things happened quickly after Gen Con — so quickly that Dragon saw the need to append a hasty postscript to Varney’s original review in the very same issue in which it first appeared. Already at this point Magic could only be described as a “phenomenon.”

As I write this postscript, about six weeks after the game’s release, Magic has attracted legions of instant fanatics. The decks have sold out everywhere. Retailers frantically await follow-up shipments of millions of cards. I know lots of gamers who play the game long into the night, and weigh trade offers the way home buyers study mortgage contracts. I wonder what these junkies did before the game appeared; probably the junkies wonder too.

Yes, if you must know, I have become a junkie myself. The review above fails to highlight the game’s addictive quality, which clicks in when you appreciate the diverse strategies you can pursue in tailoring your deck or decks; you may create decks for different situations, like a golfer choosing irons. These decks display fascinating contrasts keyed to the colors and creatures they use, and to the players who use them…

Owning a large number of different cards seems to confer an odd, unspoken status. So does ownership of a particular rare card that no one else owns. Because every deck contains rare cards, this means a neophyte can buy one Magic deck and acquire instant stature among these long-time players: “Wow, he’s got a Lord of the Pit!” This seems to me something new in the gaming subculture, another sign of the game’s pioneering nature…

The allure of the rarest cards was partially down to the collector instinct alone; while those who called Magic the nerdy kid’s version of baseball cards overlooked much of the full picture, they weren’t entirely wrong either. In addition, though, uncommon and especially rare cards tended to be, when played properly, more powerful than their more plebeian comrades that might have been acquired inside the same cellophane wrapping.

It’s extraordinary to think that all of this was happening already just six weeks after Magic’s debut. No other game in the hobby market had ever exploded out of the gates like this. Peter Adkison had used every dime he could scrape together from family, friends, bankers, and personal savings to fund an initial print run of 2.6 million cards, which he had thought should get him through the next year if the game took off like he hoped it would. It sold out within a week, leaving him scrambling to put together a second run of 7.3 million cards. That one too sold out in pre-orders before it had even arrived Stateside from Belgium. Not only were gamers demanding more cards in general, but also more types of cards. Adkison set Richard Garfield, who had just received a PhD after his name that he would never need to use now, to dreaming up and play-testing new cards.

Why was Magic such a hit? The answer is not that hard to grasp in the broad strokes, but there were some troubling ethical dilemmas lurking behind its success. While there’s no doubt that Magic was a genuinely great, compelling game, there’s also little doubt that it ruthlessly exploited the insecurities of its primary fan base: teenage males of a, shall we say, mathematical rather than athletic disposition. As anyone who has ever seen a computer-coding contest or a DOOM deathmatch can tell you, these kids aren’t a jot less competitive than the jocks that they mock and are mocked by; they’ve just transferred their competitive instinct to a different arena. It does seem to me that hyper-competitiveness is rooted in personal insecurity. And who is as insecure as a teenage boy of any high-school clique, other than perchance a teenage girl?

In practice, then, the story might go something like this:

A kid keeps hearing about this neat new game called Magic, and finally goes out and buys himself a Starter Pack. Now, he needs people to play with. So he shows his cards to some of his buddies, and convinces them to go out and buy Starter Packs of their own. They all start to play together — in fact, they start to play every chance they get, because the game turns out to be really, really fun. Taking less than twenty minutes to play a match as it does, it’s perfect for squeezing into school lunch breaks and the like.

So far, so good. But one kid in the group is having a bit more trouble than the others coming to terms with the game. He loses more than any of his friends, perhaps even becomes known as the pushover of the group, to be teased accordingly. Being a teenage boy, he likes that not at all. He’s been seeing these Booster Packs at the local gaming store. Could one of those give him a leg up? He decides to take a chance. And he’s rewarded for his initiative: he gets one or two powerful new cards, and suddenly he isn’t losing so much anymore.

Of course, the other kids in the group are hardly unaware of the source of their friend’s novel formidability. They grumble about how pathetic it is to go out and buy your way to victory. Eventually, though, one of them breaks down and buys a Booster Pack of his own. And so the arms race begins. Soon the boys are spending allowances, lawn-cutting and paper-route earnings, paychecks from Burger King on more and more Booster Packs. They tear each new one open, flinging the common and even uncommon cards into a big pile of the undesirable in the center of their bedroom, which sits there like vanities awaiting the bonfire while their owners look desperately for that Time Walk or Ancestral Recall that will let them dominate. The blessed day comes they do find what they’ve been looking for — but then they find that it’s still not enough, because the other boys have also upgraded their decks. And so the vicious cycle continues, fueled by the more cards that Wizards of the Coast is constantly inventing and churning out as quickly as a body ludic of adolescent addicts can absorb them into its bloodstream.

I hasten to add that it never had to go down this way. Theoretically speaking, a group of friends could decide to get into Magic, buy a Starter Pack or two each, and agree that that was as far as they would go. Such disciplined souls would be rewarded with an entertaining, deceptively intricate little card game that was well worth the relatively paltry sum they’d paid for it. But still, the chance that someone would give in to the shrink-wrapped temptations beckoning from the shelves of the local gaming store was always there. And after they did so, all bets were off.

I must acknowledge here as well that the motivation to buy more and more Booster Packs wasn’t always or even usually purely egotistical. Deck-building became a fascinating art and science in itself. Among advanced players, Magic duels tended to be won or lost before they even began, being determined by the mix of cards each player had in his deck. Remember that the number and types of cards in a deck were entirely up to that deck’s owner. Refining a deck into a precision-guided killing machine was an education in itself in probability and statistics. For example, how many land versus spell cards were optimal? If you drew too few land cards, you might find yourself unable to do much of anything while your opponent pounded on you; too many land cards, on the other hand, were clutter in your hand that just as effectively prevented you from getting summoned minions and other spells into play. And how many cards should you have in total, for that matter? Inexperienced players with more money than sense tended to assemble motley monstrosities of decks with 80 cards or more, only to learn that their probability of getting the right combinations of cards into their hand with such a deck was far too low. Lean and mean decks that did just a few things extremely well were almost always better than a random smorgasbord of even the rarest, most powerful cards.

All of which is to say that, at the most advanced level, Magic came to revolve around specific, devious combinations of cards that multiplied one another’s strengths in unexpected ways. Allow me to cite a simple example, laughably so by the standards of skilled players.

Consider the case of the Lifetap. This card is deadly against an opponent who relies heavily on Green mana, because it lets you gain one point of life every single time he taps one of his Forests for the mana he needs. It puts him in a place where literally everything he tries to do to kill you only makes you stronger. Yet it’s useless against an opponent who isn’t using Green mana, nothing but clutter in your deck. Or is it?

If you can put it into a play alongside a Magic Hack, it becomes an all-purpose game changer. For Magic Hack, you see, will let you change the word “Forest” on the Lifetap card to whatever land your opponent happens to be relying on most of all.

Of course, you have to balance the number of Lifetaps and Magic Hacks in your deck to give yourself a reasonable chance of getting them into play in combination, without having so many that you don’t see enough of the other cards you will need to win. And so begins the endless process of tinkering and honing that is the fate and the passion of the serious student of Magic…

By way of summation, then, Magic: The Gathering was simultaneously a great game in its own right and a downright dangerous pastime for the right (or wrong?) kind of mind. It could deliver an enormous amount of satisfying fun, or it could eat up all of one’s money and free time, distracting from other, less zero-sum forms of social interaction and trapping its victims into a wallet-emptying spiral of addiction. Even teenage players could recognize its dangers, for all that they often couldn’t see their way clear of them; they took to calling those tempting Booster Packs “Crack in a Pack.” In Generation Decks, his thoughtful book-length history of Magic, Titus Chalk describes the unhealthily cloistered air of the shop backrooms in which Magic thrived.

These shops are turf. The tangible space a community has carved out for itself, and which it is loath to surrender again. Here there is safety in numbers. Reassurance in peers who look, act, and speak the same. And a comfort to looking inwards rather than out through cluttered windows. Hiding in the shadows, these places preserve the community’s cosiness, without holding it up to scrutiny or opening it up to others whose different values might enrich it. The physical environment is a symptom of its inhabitants’ insecurities. In gloomy backrooms, Magic cloaks itself in stigma.

How do you encourage a community to look outwards when it is so accustomed to lurking in the margins?

Richard Garfield insists that exploiting his young players was never on his mind when he was designing Magic, and we have no reason to disbelieve him. Indeed, his original vision for the Magic economy was actually quite different from what the reality became. He imagined that Magic would become primarily a trading game, in which a pool of cards that grew only slowly if at all would circulate busily among a community of players. Barry Reich, a fellow graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania who helped Garfield refine the game before its release, says that they imagined back then that “extravagant people might buy two [Starter] Decks and [thereafter] a Booster Pack or two a year.”

The game’s most notorious early rule stemmed directly from this vision of a semi-closed economy with only limited external stimulus in the form of new cards. That rule was the “ante.” It stipulated that, before beginning a game, each player would randomly draw one card from his deck and set it aside; the winner of the match would then get to take the loser’s ante card home with him. If you squint just right, you can sort of see this rule through Garfield’s eyes. The ante would get and keep cards moving through the Magic community.

Still, its problematic aspects ought to have been obvious even to an innocent like him. How much fun could it be for a new player, trying Magic for the first time, to pay for the learning experience by losing card after card? As if that wasn’t argument enough against it, the rule effectively turned Magic into a Wizards of the Coast-sanctioned form of gambling, one that was literally illegal according to the laws of many American states; you were, after all, playing a game with a strong element of chance for objects of real monetary value. The fact that the gamblers in this case were mostly underage only made the optics that much worse. Small wonder that, within a few years of Magic’s release, the ante would be quietly retired and scrubbed as much as possible from the game’s history. Its only saving grace while it existed was that it was officially described as “optional.”

In the spirit that every rule in Magic comes complete with a card-provided asterisk, some early cards played with the ante mechanic. This one, which lets you draw seven new cards into your hand for the price of just one Black mana, is very potent. But you also pay for that potency by risking two cards instead of one on the outcome of the match.

Wizards of the Coast grew from a handful of people working out of Peter Adkison’s basement in 1993 to 50 employees in 1994, then to 250 in 1995. It even started publishing Magic novels — a rather cheeky move, given how thin the fiction and “universe” of the card game was, drawing indiscriminately on everything from the myths of King Arthur to the mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. (Lots of Magic addicts bought the books mainly for the coupons to be found at the back of them, which could be mailed in to receive a card that was otherwise unavailable.) The company was drowning in money, with profit margins on the ubiquitous little cards that the makers of traditional tabletop games could only dream of.

It soon became all too clear that, although Magic was certainly drawing some new folks into the circle of tabletop gamers, most of its success was coming at the expense of every other company in that market — not least the 800-ton mothership, TSR of Dungeons & Dragons fame, the host of the Gen Con convention where Magic had gotten its start. The marketplace calculus proved to be as relentlessly zero-sum as a Magic duel: the new game’s young fans had only a limited amount of funds to splash around, so that every dollar they spent on Magic was a dollar they couldn’t spend on Dungeons & Dragons or the like. Anyone from the industry’s old guard who might have been sleeping at the switch was fully alerted to the magnitude of the crisis at the 1994 Gen Con, which seemed to be about little else than this little card game that was now celebrating its first birthday. “The joke of the convention was that if there was any horizontal space, Magic players were playing on it,” says Mark Rosewater, then a writer for The Duelist, Wizards of the Coast’s new in-house magazine. “As you walked through the convention halls, you could see Magic players camped out all over the floor.” The first annual Magic World Championship was held at the convention: 500 players dueling for the title of best in the world, overshadowing everything else that went on there. Soon there would be a Magic Pro Tour to compete with the World Series of Poker.

The growing chorus of grumbles about Magic that could be detected underneath all the hysteria was the very definition of sour grapes, on the part of gamers and companies who saw a silly card game stealing away from them a hobby that they loved. But be that as it may, there were valid points to be detected amidst the chorus. In Dungeons & Dragons, you lived through the triumphs and tragedies of the dice together with your friends; in Magic, you did your level best to beat them. Something about the game seemed to bring out the worst in many of its players. The vibes in the room at Magic tournaments weren’t always the most pleasant.

Then, too, Dungeons & Dragons was a creative endeavor in a way that Magic wasn’t. Although it was easy to forget amidst the torrent of source books and adventure modules unleashed by the TSR of the 1990s, Dungeons & Dragons had once taken it as a given that you would make up your own worlds and adventures from whole cloth, and that ideal was still lodged somewhere deep in even in the current game’s DNA; in principle, you could still have a marvelous time exploring realms of the imagination with your friends after buying no more than the core trio of rule books. Magic, on the other hand, belonged to Wizards of the Coast, not to its players; the latter could only play with the content their ludic overlords deigned to give them, content of which they were forced to keep buying more and more by peer pressure and the need to stay competitive — which were largely one and the same, of course.

Yet such philosophical objections didn’t stop the other gaming companies from doing what they felt they had to in order to survive: making Magic-style collectible card games of their own. TSR was actually one of the first to do so, rushing out a product called Spellfire, reportedly designed over a weekend and then slapped together using recycled Dungeons & Dragons art. When it didn’t set the world on fire, they tried again with Dragon Dice, which at least scored some points for innovation by replacing cards with piles and piles of bespoke dice. Many, many others joined the fray as well. There were collectible card games based on Mortal Kombat, on The Lord of the Rings, on Babylon 5, on Star Wars and Star Trek, even on Monty Python, to say nothing of the dozens of also-rans who tried to make a go of it without the benefit of a license. Some did okay for a while, but none came anywhere close to Magic numbers. This applied even to Netrunner and The BattleTech Collectible Card Game, both designed by Richard Garfield himself for Wizards of the Coast, both commercial disappointments.

And then too there was a Magic computer game, to which one of the most famous designers in that industry lent his considerable talents. It will be our subject next time…

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: The books Designers & Dragons: The 80s by Sheldon Appelcline, Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons by Ben Riggs, and Generation Decks: The Unofficial History of Gaming Phenomenon Magic: The Gathering by Titus Chalk, Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It by David M. Ewalt, and The Fantasy Roleplaying Bible, second edition, by Sean Patick Fannon. Plus the Dragon of January 1994 and the January 2018 issue of Seattle Met. Online sources include interviews with Richard Garfield on Board Game Geek, Vice, Star City Games, Magic F2F, and the official Magic YouTube channel.

Magic and Loss, Part 2: Magic on the Screen
September 22, 2023

It seems poetically apt that Peter Adkison first met Richard Garfield through Usenet. For Magic: The Gathering, the card game that resulted from that meeting, went on to usher in a whole new era of tabletop gaming, during which it became much more tightly coupled with digital spaces. The card game’s rise did, after all, coincide with the rise of the World Wide Web; Magic sites were among the first popular destinations there. The game could never have exploded so quickly if it had been forced to depend on the old-media likes of Dragon magazine to spread the word, what with print publishing’s built-in lag time of weeks or months.

But ironically, computers could all too easily also be seen as dangerous to the immensely profitable business Wizards of the Coast so speedily became. So much of the allure of Magic was that of scarcity. A rare card like, say, a Lord of the Pit was an awesome thing to own not because it was an automatic game-winner — it wasn’t that at all, being very expensive in terms of mana and having a nasty tendency to turn around and bite you instead of your opponent — but because it was so gosh-darned hard to get your hands on. Yet computers by their very nature made everything that was put into them abundant; here a Lord of the Pit was nothing but another collection of ones and zeroes, as effortlessly copyable as any other collection of same. Would Magic be as compelling there? Or, stated more practically if also more cynically, what profit was to be found for Wizards of the Coast in putting Magic on computers? If they made a killer Magic implementation for the computer, complete with Lords of the Pit for everyone, would anyone still want to play the physical card game? In the worst-case scenario, it would be sacrificing an ongoing revenue stream to die for in return for the one-time sales of a single boxed computer game.

Had it been ten years later, Wizards of the Coast might have been thinking about setting up an official virtual community for Magic, with online duels, tournaments, leader boards, forums, perhaps even a card marketplace. As it was, though, it was still the very early days of the Web 1.0, when most sites consisted solely of static HTML. Online play in general was in its infancy, with most computer games that offered it being designed to run over local-area networks rather than a slow and laggy dial-up Internet connection. In this technological milieu, then, a Magic computer game necessarily meant a boxed product that you could buy, bring home, install on a computer that may or may not even be connected to the Internet, and play all by yourself.

That last part of the recipe introduced a whole host of questions and challenges beyond the strictly commercial. Think again about the nature of Magic: a fairly simple game in itself, but one that could be altered in an infinity of ways by the instructions printed on the cards themselves. Making hundreds and hundreds of separate cards play properly on the computer would be difficult enough. And yet that wasn’t even the worst of it: the really hard part would be teaching the computer to use its millions of possible combinations of cards effectively against the player, in an era before machine learning and the like were more than a glint in a few artificial-intelligence theorists’ eyes.

But to their credit, Wizards of the Coast didn’t dismiss the idea of a Magic computer game out of hand on any of these grounds. When MicroProse Software came calling, promising they could make it happen, Wizards listened and agreed to let them take a stab at it.

It so happened that Magic had caught the attention of MicroProse’s star designer, Sid Meier of Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, and Civilization fame. This was unsurprising in itself; Meier was a grizzled veteran of many a tabletop war, who still kept a finger on the pulse of that space. Although he was never a dedicated player of the card game, he was attracted to Magic precisely because it seemed so dauntingly difficult to implement on a computer. Meier was, you see, a programmer as well as a designer, one with a strong interest in artificial intelligence, who had in fact just spent a year or more trying to teach a 3DO console to create music in the mold of his favorite classical composer, Johann Sebastian Bach. In his memoir, he frames his interest in a Magic computer game as a way of placating the managers in the corner offices at MicroProse who were constantly pushing him and his colleagues in the trenches toward licensed properties. With Magic, he could have his cake and eat it too, pleasing the suits whilst still doing something he could get personally excited about. “It seemed prudent,” he writes dryly, “for us to choose the kind of license we liked before they assigned one to us.”

We cannot accuse MicroProse of thinking small when it came to Magic on the computer; they wound up creating not so much a game as a sort of all-purpose digital Magic toolkit. You could put together your dream deck in the “Deck Builder,” choosing from 392 different cards in all. Then you could take the deck you built into the “Duel” program, where you could participate in a single match or in a full-on tournament against computer opponents. If all of this left you confused, you could work your way through a tutorial featuring filmed actors. Or, last but by no means least, you could dive into Shandalar, which embedded the card game into a simple CRPG format, in which Magic duels with the monsters that roamed the world took the place of a more conventional combat engine and improving your deck took the place of improving your character’s statistics. Suffice to say that MicroProse’s Magic did not lack for ambition.

Like the cheesy advisors in the otherwise serious-minded Civilization II, the tutorial that uses clips of real actors dates the MicroProse Magic indelibly to the mid-1990s. The actress on the left is Rhea Seehorn, whose long journeyman’s career blossomed suddenly into fame and Emmy awards in 2015, when she began playing Kim Wexler in the acclaimed television series Better Call Saul.

Doubtless for this reason, it took an inordinately long time to make. The first magazine previews of the computer game, describing most of the features that would make it into the finished product, appeared in the spring of 1995, just as the craze for the card game was nearing its peak. Yet the finished product wasn’t released until March of 1997, by which point the frenzy was already beginning to cool off, as Magic slowly transformed into what it still is today: “just” an extremely popular card game. “This is the end of a long journey,” wrote Richard Garfield in his foreword to the computer game’s manual, a missive that exudes relief and exhaustion in equal measure.

In fact, by the time MicroProse and Garfield completed the journey a whole different digital Magic game had been started and completed by a different studio. Acclaim Entertainment’s Magic: The Gathering — Battlemage was Wizards of the Coast’s attempt to hedge their bets when the MicroProse project kept stretching out longer and longer. At the surface level, Battlemage played much like Shandalar: you wandered a fantasy world collecting cards and dueling with enemies. But its duels were far less ambitious; rather than trying to implement the real card game in nitty-gritty detail, it moved its broadest strokes only into a gimmicky real-time framework, with a non-adjustable clock that just so happened to run way too fast. “By the time [you] manage to summon one creature,” wrote Computer Gaming World in its review, “the enemy has five or six on the attack.” This, the very first Magic computer game to actually ship, is justifiably forgotten today.

Then, too, by the time MicroProse’s Magic appeared Sid Meier had been gone from that company for nine months already, having left with his colleagues Jeff Briggs and Brian Reynolds to form a new studio, Firaxis Games. In his memoir, he speaks to a constant tension between MicroProse, who just wanted to deliver the funnest possible digital implementation of Magic, and Wizards of the Coast, who were worried about destroying their cash cow’s mystique. “I was frustrated,” he concludes. “Magic was a good computer game, but not as good as it could be.”

I concur. The MicroProse Magic is a good game — in fact, a well-nigh miraculous achievement when one considers the technological times in which it was created. Yet Shandalar in particular is a frustrating case: a good game that, one senses, just barely missed being spectacular.

The heart of the matter, the Duel screen.

But without a doubt, the most impressive thing about this Magic is that it works at all. The interface is a breeze to use once you grasp its vagaries, the cards all function just as they should in all of their countless nuances, and the computer actually does make a pretty credible opponent most of the time, capable of combining its cards in ingenious ways that may never have occurred to you until you get blasted into oblivion by them. Really, I can’t say enough about what an incredible programming achievement this is. Yes, familiarity may breed some contempt in the course of time; you will eventually notice patterns in some of your opponents’ play that you can exploit, and the computer players will do something flat-out stupid every once in a while. (Then again, isn’t that true of a human player as well?) Early reviewers tended to understate the quality of the artificial intelligence because it trades smarts for speed on slower computers, not looking as far ahead in its calculations. These days, when some of our toasters probably have more processing power than the typical 1997 gaming computer, that isn’t a consideration.

The MicroProse game even manages to implement cards like Magic Hack, which lets you alter the text(!) found on other cards.

Wow. Just… wow.

Meanwhile Shandalar is a characteristic stroke of genius from Sid Meier, who was crazily good at translating lived experiences of all sorts into playable game mechanics. As we saw at length in the last article, it was the meta-game of collecting cards and honing decks that turned the card game into a way of life for so many of its players. Shandalar transplants this experience into a procedurally-generated fantasy landscape, capturing in the process the real heart of its analog predecessor’s appeal in a way that the dueling system on its own never could have, no matter how beautifully implemented. You start out as a callow beginner with a deck full of random junk, just like someone who has just returned from a trip to her friendly local game store with her first Magic Starter Pack. Your objective must now be to improve your deck into something you can win with on a regular basis, whilst learning how to use the cards you’ve collected most effectively and slowly building a reputation for yourself. Again, just like in real life.

The framing story has it that you are trying to protect the world of Shandalar from five evil wizards — one for each of the Magic colors — who are vying with one another and with you to take it over. You travel between the many cities and towns, buying and selling cards in their marketplaces and doing simple quests for their inhabitants that can, among other things, add to your dueling life-point total, which is just ten when starting out. Enemies in the employ of the wizards wander the same paths you do with decks of their own. Defeat them, and you can win one of their cards for yourself; get defeated by them, and you lose one of your own cards. (Shandalar is the last Magic product to use the misbegotten ante rule that the Wizards of the Coast of today prefers not to mention.)

After you’ve been at it a while, the other wizards’ lieutenants will begin attacking the towns directly. If any one enemy wizard manages to take over just three towns, he wins the game and you lose. (Unfortunately, the same lax victory conditions don’t apply to you…) Therefore it’s important not to let matters get out of hand on this front. You can rush to a town that’s being attacked and defend it by defeating the attacker in a duel, or you can even attack an already occupied town yourself in the hope of freeing it again, although this tends to be an even harder duel to win. When not thus occupied, you can explore the dungeons that are scattered about the map, stocked with tough enemies and tempting rewards in the form of gold, cards, and magical gems that confer special powers. Your ultimate goal, once you think you have the perfect deck, is to attack and defeat each wizard in his own stronghold; his strength in this final battle is determined by how many enemies of his color you’ve defeated elsewhere, so it pays to take your time. Don’t dawdle too long, though, because the other wizards get more and more aggressive about attacking towns as time goes by, which can leave you racing around willy-nilly trying to put out fire after fire, with scant time to take the offensive.

The MicroProse Magic was the first Sid Meier-designed game to appear in many years without the “Sid Meier’s…” prefix. His name was actually scrubbed from the credits completely, what with him having left the company before its completion. It was probably just as well: as he notes in his memoir, if MicroProse had tried to abide by its usual practice the game would presumably have needed to be called Sid Meier’s Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering, which doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue.

Wandering the world of Shandalar.

You can accept quests for cards and other treasures.

When you bump into an enemy, you can either duel him for an ante or give him some money to go away.

You can reclaim towns that have been occupied by one of the enemy wizards, but it’s a risky battle, for which you must ante three cards to your opponent’s one.

Exploring a dungeon.

All told, it’s a heck of a lot of fun, the perfect way to enjoy Magic if you don’t want to spend a fortune on cards and/or aren’t overly enamored with the culture of nerdy aggression that surrounds the real-life game to some extent even today. I spent way more time with Shandalar than I could really afford to as “research” for this article, restarting again and again to explore the possibilities of many different colors and decks and the variations in the different difficulty levels. Shandalar is great just as it is; I highly recommend it, and happily add it to my personal Hall of Fame.

And yet the fact is that the balance of the whole is a little off — not enough so as to ruin the experience, but just enough to frustrate when you consider what Shandalar might have been with a little more tweaking. My biggest beef is with the dungeons. They ought to be one of the best things about the game, being randomly generated labyrinths stocked with unusual opponents and highly desirable cards. Your life total carries over from battle to battle within a dungeon and you aren’t allowed to save there, giving almost a roguelike quality to your underground expeditions. It seems to be a case of high stakes and high rewards, potentially the most exciting part of the game.

It makes no sense to risk the dungeons when you can randomly stumble upon places on the world map that let you have your choice of any card in the entire game. Happy as you are when you find them, these places are devastating to game balance.

But it isn’t, for the simple reason that the rewards aren’t commensurate with the risks in the final analysis. Most of the time, the cards you find in a dungeon prove not to be all that great after all; in fact, you can acquire every single one of them above-ground in one way or another, leaving you with little reason to even enter a dungeon beyond sheer, bloody-minded derring-do. A whole dimension of the game falls away into near-pointlessness. Yes, you can attempt to compensate for this by, say, pledging not to buy any of the most powerful cards at the above-ground marketplaces, but why should you have to? It shouldn’t be up to you to balance someone else’s game for them.

Even looking beyond this issue, Shandalar just leaves me wanting a little more — a bigger variety of special encounters on the world map, more depth to the economy, more and more varied quests. This is not because what we have is bad, mind you, but because it’s so good. My problem is that I just can’t stop seeing how it could be even better, can’t help wondering how it might have turned out had Sid Meier stayed at MicroProse through the end of the project. Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t try this game if you already enjoy the card game or are even slightly curious about it. The MicroProse Magic retains a cult following to this day, many of whom will tell you that Shandalar in particular is still the most fun you can have with Magic on a computer.

In its own time, however, the most surprising thing about the MicroProse Magic is that it wasn’t more commercially successful. “I’ve found a wonderful place to play Magic: The Gathering,” wrote Computer Gaming World in its review. “I can play as much as I want whenever I want, and use legendary cards like Black Lotus and the Moxes without spending hundreds of dollars.” Nevertheless, the package didn’t set the world on fire. Perhaps the substandard Acclaim game, which was released just a month before the MicroProse version, muddied the waters too much. Or perhaps even more of the appeal of the card game than anyone had realized lay in the social element, which no digital version in 1997 could possibly duplicate.

Not that MicroProse didn’t try. “This game is exceedingly expandable,” wrote Richard Garfield in his foreword in the manual, strongly implying that the MicroProse Magic was just the beginning of a whole line of follow-on products that would keep it up to date with the ever-evolving card game. But that didn’t really happen. MicroProse did release Spells of the Ancients, a sort of digital Booster Pack with some new cards, followed by a standalone upgrade called Duels of the Planeswalkers, with yet more new cards and the one feature that was most obviously missing from the original game: the ability to duel with others over a network, albeit without any associated matchmaking service or the like that could have fostered a centralized online community of players. Not long after Duels of the Planeswalkers came out in January of 1998, the whole line fell out of print, having never quite lived up to MicroProse’s expectations for it. Wizards of the Coast, for their part, had always seemed a bit lukewarm about it, perchance not least because Shandalar relied so heavily on the ante system which they were by now trying hard to bury deep, deep down in the memory hole. Their next foray into digital Magic wouldn’t come until 2002, when they set up Magic: The Gathering Online, precisely the dynamic online playing space I described as infeasible earlier in this article in the context of the 1990s.

I’ll have more to say about the Magic phenomenon in future articles, given that it was the fuel for the most shocking deal in the history of tabletop gaming. The same year that the MicroProse Magic game came out, a swaggering, cash-flush Wizards of the Coast bought a teetering, cash-strapped TSR, who had seen the market for Dungeons & Dragons all but destroyed by Richard Garfield’s little card game. This event would have enormous repercussions on virtual as well as physical desktops, occurring as it did just after Interplay Entertainment had been awarded the license to make the next generation of Dungeons & Dragons computer games.

For today, though, let me warmly recommend the MicroProse Magic — if you can see your way to getting it running, that is. (See below for more on that subject.) Despite my quibbles about the ways in which it could have been even better, Shandalar remains almost as addictive for me today as the card game was for so many teenagers of the 1990s, only far less expensively so. When I pulled it up again to capture screenshots for this article, I blundered into a duel and just had to see it out. Ditto the next one, and then the one after that. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Where to Get It: The MicroProse Magic: The Gathering is unfortunately not an easy game to acquire or get running; the former difficulty is down to the complications of licensing, which have kept it out of digital-download stores like GOG.com, while the latter is down to its status as a very early Windows 95 game, from before DirectX was mature and before many standards for ensuring backward compatibility existed. Because I’d love for you to be able to play it, though, I’ll tell you how I got it working. Fair warning: it does take a bit of effort. But you don’t need to be a technical genius to make it happen. You just have to take it slow and careful.

1. First of all, you’re going to need a virtual machine running Windows XP. This is not as onerous an undertaking as you might expect. I recommend a video tutorial from TheHowToGuy123, which walks you step by step through installing the operating system under Oracle VirtualBox in a very no-nonsense way.

2. Next you need an image of the Magic CD. As of this writing, a search for “Magic The Gathering MicroProse” on archive.org will turn one up. Note that these procedures assume you are installing the original game, not Duels of the Planeswalkers. The patches you install will actually update it to that version.

3. Boot up your virtual Windows XP machine and mount the Magic image from the VirtualBox “Devices” menu. Ignore the warning about not being on Windows 95 and choose “Install” from the window that pops up. Take the default options and let it do its thing. Do not install DirectX drivers and do not watch the tutorial; it won’t work anyway.

4. Now you need to patch the game — twice, in fact. You can download the first patch from this very site. Mount the image containing the patch in VirtualBox and open the CD drive in Windows Explorer. You’ll see three executable files there, each starting with “MTGV125.” Drag all three to your desktop, then double-click them from there to run them one at a time. You want to “Unzip” each into the default directory.

5. Restart your virtual Windows XP machine.

6. Now you need the second patch, which you can also get right here. Mount this disk image on your virtual machine, create a folder on its desktop, and copy everything in the image into that folder. Double-click “Setup” from the desktop folder and wait a minute or two while it does its thing.

7. Now copy everything from that same folder on your desktop into “C:\Magic\Program,” selecting “Yes to All” at the first warning prompt to overwrite any files that already exist there. If you see an error message about open file handles or the like, restart your virtual machine and try again.

8. Here’s where it gets a little weird. The “Shandalar” entry on your Start menu is no longer pointing to the Shandalar game, but rather to the multiplayer engine. Go figure. To fix this, navigate into “C:\Magic\Program,” find “shandalar.exe,” and make a shortcut to it on your desktop. Double-click this to play the game. If it complains about a lack of swap space, just ignore it and go on.

9. You’ll definitely want the manual as well.

Shandalar, the Deck Builder, and the single-player Duel app should all work now. The first does still have some glitches, such as labels that don’t always appear in town menus, but nothing too devastating (he says, having spent an inordinate amount of time… er, testing it thoroughly). I haven’t tested multiplayer, but it would surprise me if it still works. Alas, the cheesily charming tutorial is a complete bust with this setup; you can watch it on YouTube if you like.

Note that this is just one way to get Magic running on a modern computer, the one that worked out for me. Back in 2010, a group of fans made a custom version that ran seamlessly under Windows 7 without requiring a virtual machine, but it’s my understanding that that version doesn’t work under more recent versions of the operating system. Sigh… retro-gaming in the borderlands between the MS-DOS and Windows eras is a bit like playing Whack-a-Mole sometimes. If you have any other tips or tricks, by all means, share them in the comments.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: The book Sid Meier’s Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games by Sid Meier with Jennifer Lee Noonan; Computer Gaming World of June 1995, August 1996, May 1997, June 1997, and May 1998. And Soren Johnson’s interview with Sid Meier on his Designer Notes podcast.)

The Last Express
October 6, 2023

A moving train at night is an incredible place to hear stories. Like a campfire.

— Jordan Mechner’s journal, February 24, 1992

I was in Germany once, standing in a train station at night. A train was coming into the station, moonlight glinting off its steel sides. For some reason this image was very vivid to me, and I remember thinking, well, that’s modern European history at a glance.

— Tomi Pierce, 1997

In the years after he completed Prince of Persia and saw it become one of the biggest international videogame hits of the early 1990s, Jordan Mechner did something that one can wish more game designers would find the time to do: he unplugged for a while, leaving games and the sometimes blinkered culture that surrounded them behind as he went off to see the world. From a base in Paris, he traveled extensively throughout Europe. Young, good-looking, rich, talented, and linguistically precocious — his French and Spanish were soon almost as good as his English — he lived “a life right out of Henry James,” as one of his friends told him, whilst lightly supervising his publisher Brøderbund Software’s progress on the Prince of Persia sequel out of his apartment in the Sixth Arrondissement. He was, as he puts it today, “in a rare and fortunate position that few creative artists ever get to experience. At age 28, I was being offered a dazzling array of opportunities to write my own ticket.” Uncertain whether he wanted to keep making games or return to his early dream of becoming a filmmaker, he went to Cuba for several weeks in the summer of 1992, to shoot a twenty-minute wordless documentary about the life of a society 90 miles and 30 years removed from that of the contemporary United States. “I really should make a short film or two before I go after my first big-time feature job,” he wrote in his journal with the blasé optimism of fortunate youth, not pausing to reflect on the reality that most aspiring filmmakers cannot afford to turn their student demo reels over to a first-class Parisian studio for editing and post-production.

It took an older friend named Tomi Pierce to talk some sense into him. A longtime trusted agent of the Brøderbund management team, she had been instrumental in shepherding Prince of Persia to completion, by alternately coddling and cajoling its moody young auteur through milestone after milestone. She did the latter on a long-distance call from California to France that took place just after his adventure in Cuba. Recharging the batteries was all well and good, she said, but enough was enough. She pointed out how insane it was for a young man who had become a veritable name brand unto himself in one entertainment industry to wish to start over from scratch in another. As she later remembered it, she told him that his life “was a pretentious and pathetic wreck,” and urged him to get hands-on with another game sooner rather than later. Being by no means uncreative herself, she even gave him the stub of a story to start with: “It’s a World War II spy story, and here’s the first sentence: ‘I was taking the night train to Berlin.'”

Those words of hers sparked a four-and-a-half-year odyssey that burned Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia fortune right to the ground, ending for the nonce his prospect of living the rest of his life as a globe-trotting dilettante. And he thanked her for it.

Tomi Pierce and Jordan Mechner.

Mechner and Pierce were soon talking daily about their game over the transatlantic wire. They decided to move the time period from the Second to the First World War — or rather to just before the First World War, to the summer of 1914, when, almost unremarked by the general public, the dominoes of disaster were falling one by one in Europe. Nothing would ever be the same after that fateful summer; as Barbara Tuchman once wrote, “the Great War of 1914 to 1918 lies like a band of scorched earth, dividing that time from ours.”

But a train would still be the centerpiece of the game. And they knew which train it would have to be: the legendary Orient Express, which left Paris to begin the three-day journey to Constantinople for the last time in a long time on the evening of July 24, 1914. While it was underway, the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia expired, and Europe started the final plunge down the slippery slope to war. Mechner:

Not only did that train cross the very countries that were about to go to war, but at the time, in 1914, it was the very symbol of the unity and financial interdependence of the European countries, kind of like the European Economic Community today. On that train you had a cross-section of all the different segments of European society — all the different countries, all the different political and ideological factions that were about to find themselves at odds.

Needless to say, Mechner and Pierce were not envisioning another cinematic platformer like Prince of Persia. They rather wanted to make a full-fledged adventure game, with a complex story line that did not have to take its cues from the silent movies of yesteryear, as had been the case with Mechner’s previous masterstroke. This was despite — or rather in some ways because of — the fact that Mechner was no fan of adventure games as they were currently implemented, with their fixed plots gated by mostly arbitrary puzzles. He was sure he could do better.

But doing so would require a leap into unknown waters, require him to act as the head of a creative team rather than remaining the lone-wolf coder he had always been before. For better or for worse, those days had ended with the 1980s; Prince of Persia, which shipped on the Apple II three months before that decade expired, had been the last of its breed.

In December of 1992, Mechner visited Brøderbund’s offices near Silicon Valley to iron out some final details concerning Prince of Persia 2, whose release date was fast approaching. He took the opportunity to pitch “the train game” to Doug Carlston, the company’s co-founder (and the future husband of Tomi Pierce).

I’m really excited about this train game. I’ve played all the other adventure games out there, and I think here’s a chance to make something that will blow them all away — not just in terms of story, although that’s a big part of it, but also in the graphic look, sound, music, interface, the way it all fits together — the whole package. I’m talking about a game that will really be a work of art. The first adventure game to have a story and graphics that can stand on their own merits, not just by adventure-game standards.

And I’m thinking beyond just this one game. The train game will take maybe two years to develop, and if it’s the hit I think it will be, there’ll be a major opportunity to follow it up with other games with the same interface, the same special “look and feel.” I want this to be a whole line of games. I’ve been working on this for weeks, and I’m so convinced it’s worth it that I’d be ready to go out and do it on my own as an independent project if I need to.

Look, I’ve spent the last two years traveling and making movies and learning a lot, but basically goofing off. I wouldn’t mind really throwing myself into something for a change. I’d like to risk something. So, emotionally, I’m up for it. I’ve already started looking for an apartment in the city. I want to do this game.

I don’t even like adventure games. But I’m going to do this one. This will be the first adventure game since Scott Adams that I’ll actually like.

Carlston was encouraging, but only cautiously so. He told Mechner that, while Brøderbund would be happy to publish his train game when it was ready, they weren’t prepared to make it in-house or to shoulder all of its development costs. In short, Mechner would indeed have to arrange to make it himself independently, under a standard out-of-house development contract. If he had proposed doing a Prince of Persia 3, the verdict might have been different, but Brøderbund just couldn’t go all-in on such an unproven commodity as this. By way of compensation, Carlston was willing to let Mechner borrow Tomi Pierce for as long as he needed her.

Mechner took Carlston’s words to heart; he would make his train game himself, partially financing it out of his own Prince of Persia royalties, then count on Brøderbund to sell it. He went back to Paris only long enough to arrange a more permanent return to the United States. On January 7, 1993, he moved into his new San Francisco apartment. Five days later, he opened a bank account in the name of Smoking Car Productions, his very own games studio. It was full steam ahead on The Last Express, as the “train game” would eventually come to be called.

The deeper Mechner and Pierce dived into the details of the real time and place in which they’d chosen to set the game, the more they wanted and needed to know. The project became more than just a better take on the adventure genre: it became an exercise in living history. “Authenticity” became its watchword. “And thereby [we] added two years to the project,” says Jordan Mechner wryly.

There are any number of ways that computer games can engage with real history, plenty of which have already been featured on this site over the years. Tactical wargames can let the armchair generals among us refight the battles of the past at a granular level, finding out what might have happened if General Lee had not ordered a frontal assault on the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg or if Admiral Nagumo had not elected to withdraw from the Battle of Midway after losing all four of his aircraft carriers. Meanwhile grand-strategy games can let us explore more abstract questions about economic and political systems, as well as, inevitably, their consequences on the battlefield. But these forms of engagement are more intellectual than empathetic. Another, perhaps ultimately more valuable service games can do us is to drop us right into history in the way of a great historical novel, to let us walk a mile in the shoes of people who are not generals or statesmen, to see what they see and feel what they feel and decide what they do next when faced with dilemmas that may have no easy answers; this last is an aid to immersion and understanding that no static novel can offer us, no matter how vividly written. Such is what Mechner and Pierce now proposed to do: to let their players truly live through a constrained but meaningful piece of history.

Before they could engage with the bigger issues of the day, they would need to get the nitty-gritty details right, from the angles at which the corridors inside each coach on the Orient Express bent to the way the toilets flushed in the washrooms. Finding these things out was not easy. Although the Orient Express had run between Paris and Istanbul (né Constantinople) from 1883 until 1977, the 1914-vintage carriages were, as far as anyone knew, long gone, excepting only two restaurant cars that were preserved by museums, one in Paris and one in Budapest. Of the interior of the sleeper cars there remained only three photographs. Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, the operator of the Orient Express, told our heroes that all of their blueprints and other archives from that era had been destroyed.

Imagine their thrill, then, when they got a call one day from a Parisian club of railroad old timers, in response to an advertisement they had placed in a French railway magazine. “The train companies think these archives have been destroyed,” they were told. “We’ve got ’em.”

They agreed to meet at the Gare de l’Est station in Paris, the departure point of the Orient Express throughout its history. (In fact, a train by that name was still running from the station at the time, but it only went as far as Budapest, making rather a misnomer of its appellation.) Tomi Pierce:

Through a door marked NO ADMITTANCE, we plunged into a rabbit warren of offices under the station. In a grimy room at the end of a long corridor, two very old men were sitting at a table. Around them were stacks of boxes.

They had no idea what a computer game was, but as soon as they realized we were seriously interested in their train, they began to talk furiously. For hours, they bombarded us with information, from the exact date when electricity was introduced on the Express to the social structure among train employees of the time. They joked about the frosted glass in the washrooms — not thick enough to completely conceal the occupants. They sorted through the boxes, pulling out irreplaceable original materials. Passenger lists, menus from July 1914, detailed floor plans, conductor’s rule books — a thousand features of the train were documented. As the old men talked, the Orient Express seemed to rise in ghostly form. “Use it all,” they said a little sadly. “No one else ever will.”

We felt a responsibility to do the right thing. If you listen to these old trainmen — well, they love trains and their history. I thought about their apartments at home, filled to the brim with old train archives they had saved themselves. And when they die, that knowledge is probably gone forever. So, you feel an obligation to them to get it right.

At the end of that interview, they asked if we would like to see their train set. Directly under the central platform was a room the size of a basketball court, filled with the largest train set I had ever seen. Every period of train history was represented. All the train-car and engine types, wide- and narrow-gauge rails, signals and tracks were hand-built. The model-train network had been under continuous construction by the employees at the Gar de l’Est for the last 40 years. Our guide shrugged. “It’s just to amuse ourselves,” he said. “It is… for our pleasure.”

Pierce resolved then and there to turn The Last Express into an exercise in “electronic archaeology”: to “recreate that train and the drama of its time using every high-tech trick we knew.” Mechner:

I mean, you can legitimately ask, “Who cares? What does it matter which way the sleeping car faced?” But there’s something about a piece of history on the verge of being forgotten. Whatever else you can say about this game, it’s authentic.

Word of these crazy Americans who wanted to recreate the Orient Express on a computer screen spread among the trainspotters of Europe. One day they received an unsolicited note from an Italian gentleman: “There is a 1914 Orient Express sleeping car in Athens. It is in dilapidated condition and is not in working order.”

It turned out to be just sitting there right where he said it was, shunted to the side of a railway depot on the outskirts of the city. Unlike the restaurant cars in Paris and Budapest, both of which were maintained as museum pieces with rigorously enforced rules of access, this car was open season. From Jordan Mechner’s journal:

Two days in that sauna of a busted-down Wagon-Lits car, baked by the sun for the past 50 years, or however long it’s been sitting there. Kicking aside debris, sending up clouds of dust, covering the windows with sheets to try to cut down the contrast, sweating, snarling at each other, and generally getting to know that car more intimately than we ever could have if it had been in good condition with an official keeping an eye on us, like the one in Budapest.

They documented every inch of the carriage in pedantic detail. “The colors in the painted ceilings, the mechanism of opening the bed bunks, the tooled leather of the walls, the pattern in the carpet,” wrote Pierce later. “We studied it all.” With the cockiness of youth, Mechner wrote in his journal that “I think we can now safely say that we know more about the 1914 Orient Express than any one person living.” Now they just had to move all that knowledge into the computer.

Inside the sleeper car in Athens.

A mock-up of the scene in a 3D modeler.

And the final image with textures applied.

Extracts from the “Making Of” video included on The Last Express CDs.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/making.mp4

Shortly after returning from Athens in August of 1993, Mechner made a pivotal decision. As a Brøderbund insider, he’d been watching with considerable interest the progress of an adventure game called Myst, which Brøderbund planned to  publish on the Apple Macintosh the following month. Although his design goals for The Last Express were in many ways far more ambitious than those of Myst, he loved the sense of immersion fostered by its first-person, pre-rendered 3D environments. It seemed the way to go with his game as well. But, as he admitted in his journal, “I know almost nothing about this.” To remedy that, he flew out to Spokane, Washington, to spend several days with the Miller brothers of Cyan, Incorporated, the masterminds of Myst. He even wondered whether it might be possible to hire one or both of them for his own company. In a year or two, the huge success of Myst would retroactively make this musing sound hilariously presumptuous. At the time, though, it must have seemed perfectly reasonable. After all, he was an established auteur with one of the biggest franchises in gaming on his résumé, while the Miller brothers were just a pair of refugees from children’s software trying to make a go of it with the big boys.

In lieu of the Miller brothers, Mechner wound up hiring his own team of 3D modellers and programmers to bring the Orient Express to life. The watchword remained authenticity, down to the literal last screw. The textures in the carriages were pulled directly from photographs of the cars in Paris, Budapest, and most of all Athens: “green velvet upholstered benches, stamped-leather wall panels, flowered ceilings and brass rails. The train that appears onscreen in The Last Express hasn’t been seen in 80 years,” wrote Tomi Pierce.

Indeed, the game has almost a unique claim to historical authenticity. The wargames that the grognards love may wish to think of themselves as infallible “simulations” of events in time, but their what-if scenarios hinge on their designers’ own all-too-fallible interpretations of the events they purport to simulate. The recreated interior of the Orient Express, however, is dependent on no one’s interpretation. It’s simply a copy of the real thing, implemented as meticulously as the technology of the 1990s would allow by people with no allegiance to anything but the truth of their cameras and measuring tapes.

But of course, there had to be more to the game than its environment. The recreated Orient Express was to be the stage for a work of historical fiction, a complicated caper taking place on the train’s last voyage before the Belle Époque ran out, Europe descended into four and a half years of war, and a new twentieth century full of unprecedented wonders and horrors got going for real.

Historians are divided into two broad camps when it comes to the origins of the First World War: the powder-keg school, who see the Europe of the time as just waiting for a spark to start an inevitable conflagration, and the bad-luck school, who see a thoroughly evitable war that came at the end of a long string of random unfortunate events. It’s probably for the best that The Last Express doesn’t take a firm position either way. Rather than whys, it’s interested in how it was to be in Europe just before the Old was swept away forever by the New. Aboard its version of the Orient Express are German industrialists, Russian aristocrats and anarchists, Serbian separatists, Austrian and British spies, French engineers and bohemians and socialists, a Persian harem, even an enigmatic, fabulously wealthy North African “prince.” Unlike the train itself, which is scrupulously realistic, the cast of characters aboard it reflects a sort of hyper-realism; all are, whatever the other details of their individual personalities, archetypes of the social currents swirling around Europe at the time. The only group missing — albeit necessarily so, given the opulent setting — are the unwashed masses who would soon be expected to fight and die in the name of their betters.

Link to audio:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/abbot_schmidt.mp3

There’s something about a train, a circumscribed space rushing inexorably through a landscape from which its occupants are isolated, that’s irresistible to lovers of romantic intrigue. It’s a locked-room mystery, only somehow even better, combining claustrophobia with exotica; small wonder that trains figure so prominently in the classic-thriller canon, from Agatha Christie to Alfred Hitchcock to Patricia Highsmith.

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/express.mp4

In this iteration on the template, you play Robert Cath, a debonair American doctor who boards the Orient Express in rather… unusual fashion just as it’s pulling out of Paris. He’s responding to a summons from an old friend, a fellow American named Tyler Whitney, whom he now finds dead in their shared compartment, apparently the victim of cold-blooded murder. Cath dares not draw attention to himself because he is sought by the police for some antics he may or may not have gotten up to recently with some Irish terrorists/freedom fighters, so he disposes of the body and assumes his friend’s identity, as you do in such situations. Soon he finds that Tyler, a heedless idealist of the sort that tends to cause an awful lot of trouble in the world, was up to his eyebrows in a complicated conspiracy to sell arms to Serbia’s Black Hand, the terrorist group responsible for the recent assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an act destined to go down in history as the spark that ignited a world war. And then there’s the strange Russian artifact known as the Firebird that’s been stolen out of his friend’s luggage…

But I won’t spoil the story for you. Trust me, it’s worth experiencing for yourself.

A Digression on Being and Time

Let’s pause here for a moment to consider adventure games’ fraught relationship with time. In fact, let’s go way back, to before Myst, before point and click, before even graphics and sound, to a time when all adventure games were text adventures. The earliest of these were treasure hunts: thin quest narratives in which you roamed a static world that changed only when you did something to make it change. Your only goal was to explore and solve puzzles in order to collect treasures, for which you earned points by depositing them back in some safe place. Sure, the introduction to the game might attempt to provide some more noble justification, but that was more or less the gist of it. Once you had all the treasures, you also had all the points and you were done.

But within a year or two, people began to chafe at the limitations of worlds frozen in amber, itched to create real interactive stories where characters and things moved and changed around you independent of your own actions. Scott Adams, the very first man to put a text adventure on a mass-market microcomputer, gave it a shot already in 1979 with an unusual effort called The Count; Roberta Williams, who with her husband Ken was the first to add illustrations to the text adventure, made some more gestures in that direction the following year with Mystery House. But the folks who really moved the needle, here as in so many aspects of the craft of adventure, were the ones at Infocom. In 1982, Infocom’s Marc Blank gave us Deadline, a full-on interactive mystery, taking place in a mansion whose inhabitants moved about and acted on their own accord, challenging you as the detective to figure out what they were up to if you wanted to survive the day, crack the case, and bring the guilty party to justice. Instead of exploring a landscape, it asked you to explore a dynamic possibility space.

Yet there was a big drawback to this approach: the game could and usually did run away from you. If you didn’t happen to be in the right place at the right time to answer the telephone or to intercept the postman, you were just out of luck; the crime was doomed to go unsolved. The only way to beat Deadline was to play it over and over again, gradually putting together where you needed to be when and what you needed to do there. Only then could you make your winning run, where everything just kind of worked out for you in the way it always seems to for Hercule Poirot on the very first try.

In the abstract, it’s as valid an approach to game design as any other. Yet if we’re wedded to the idea of an adventure game as an interactive fiction — as a lived story — rather than a mere meta-puzzle, it can feel deeply artificial and unsatisfying. In a game like Deadline, relatively small and quick-playing and implemented entirely in text, it’s perhaps more agreeable than in one of those later multimedia extravaganzas that force you to watch the same interminable cut scenes again and again. Still, even Infocom learned pretty quickly that their customers didn’t much care for it. Each of the two dynamic mysteries they released after Deadline sold worse than its immediate predecessor, causing them to give up on the approach.

For the fourth Infocom title with the genre label of “Mystery,” 1986’s rather obscure Ballyhoo, author Jeff O’Neill tried something different.  Ballyhoo is the first adventure I know of to fully embrace plot rather than clock time. That is to say that events unfold in the rundown circus that is its setting not in response to passing turns but in response to your progress through the plot. As I wrote in my review of Ballyhoo years ago, it “flips the process on its head: makes the story respond to the player rather than always asking the player to respond to the story. Put another way, here the story chases the player rather than the player chasing the story.” As you solve puzzles and make progress, the world rejiggers itself to accommodate the next phase of the story it wants you to live through. Of course, this is not playing fair by the objective rules of simulation. No matter: O’Neill grasped that the player’s subjective experience of an interactive story is what really matters in the end. The approach was adopted by a great number of later adventure games, many of them far less obscure than Ballyhoo — perhaps most famously of all by Jane Jensen’s plot-heavy Gabriel Knight graphic adventures of the 1990s.

Yet plot time can produce pitfalls of its own. Anyone who has ever played a Gabriel Knight game is familiar with the frustration of trying to end the day: of running hither and yon through the world, clicking on everything and talking to everyone for the umpteenth time, looking for that hidden trigger that will satisfy the conditions for grinding the plot gears forward to another evening, so that Gabriel can go home and go to bed and wake up to another morning and the next phase of the story line. This sort of plot stasis can be almost as infuriating as a plot that has run away without you; when you’re caught up in it, it can pull you out of the fiction every bit as much. And then, too, the very notion of plot time philosophically bothers many a player and designer, who see it as a sort of betrayal of the very premise of an adventure game as a living world, one that ought to be allowed to go about its business without any such thumbs on its scales.

Count Jordan Mechner and Tomi Pierce among this group. While they couldn’t make their game run in literal real time — it would have been impossible to implement that much content, and quite probably deadly boring for the people who experienced it — they did want it to run in an accelerated version of same, such that the three-day trip to Constantinople would take about five hours of playing time. The other passengers and crew on the Orient Express would move about and pursue their own agendas during those hours, even as the train itself chugged relentlessly onward. All of this would happen no matter what Robert Cath chose to do with himself. Lead programmer Mark Moran:

We created a language where every character has a script. They all have their motivations to drive the story forward. At 8:00 PM, August Schmidt goes to dinner, and has dinner until 8:30. He’s hoping he might run into you at dinner, but if he doesn’t he might see you from 8:30 to 9:00, when he’s in the salon smoking. At 9:30, he’ll grow frustrated and come to your compartment and knock. He’s got a long list of instructions. We created this language where we could write the instructions for every single character.

There would be no patently manufactured drama in The Last Express; if, say, a group of police officers boarded the train to look for a suspected American terrorist, they wouldn’t wait until Cath found the perfect hiding spot before bursting into his cabin. Instead they’d burst in when they burst in, let the chips fall where they may.

And yet it remained an incontrovertible fact that adventure gamers hated sudden deaths and especially walking-dead situations, as it’s called when you’re left wandering around in a game which you can no longer win, often without even knowing that that’s the case. They hated these things so much that LucasArts had built an immensely successful adventure empire out of promising players that they would never, ever put them in that position, no matter what they did or didn’t do. Clearly a simple reversion to clock time alone wouldn’t do for The Last Express. Out of this dilemma sprang the game’s biggest formal innovation: it would have no conventional save command at all. Instead it would let you rewind time itself to some earlier point whenever you wished, as if you were rewinding a videotape of your actions, and pick up again from there. Meanwhile the forward progress of the plot, chugging constantly onward like the train itself, would ensure that any conceivable walking-dead situation couldn’t drag on for very long. Once you died or blundered into some other bad ending, the game would automatically rewind the story to the last point where victory was possible and let you try again. In this way, The Last Express would preserve the integrity — or, if you like, the authenticity — of its storyworld, without driving its players crazy.

Smoking Car would also eliminate the artificial set-piece puzzles that were the typical adventure game’s bread and butter, offering up strictly situational challenges instead that were inseparable from the story: hiding Tyler’s body in your cabin, hiding from the police, figuring out just why that beautiful and famous Austrian concert violinist seems to want to kill you. Needless to say, alternative solutions would abound. Jordan Mechner:

A traditional rule of dramatic construction is that, if you put a gun on the wall, it must go off. In a game, if someone mentions their birth date in a conversation, you’re supposed to write that down, because it might be a combination to a safe. The Last Express deliberately breaks that rule. We just didn’t want to do that. The Last Express is gentler than most adventure games, because the things you have to do to win are not that hard to figure out. It’s what fills the spaces in between that makes life on the train interesting. (Or real life, for that matter.) Anyone who plays The Last Express is going to get drawn in listening to a particular conversation, or reading an article in the newspaper, and miss other events that are happening at the same time. And it’s all okay. You aren’t punished, you don’t miss a crucial clue or get dumped into another story branch. You just have a different experience.

Does the finished game live up to this billing? Not entirely, I must say. The fact is that there are dead ends in The Last Express — how could there not be with such an approach? — and the auto-rewind function, useful though it is, can still leave you replaying substantial chunks of the game, hoping to find a way to progress past the stumbling block this time around. In short, and in direct contradiction to Mechner’s statement above, there are “vital clues” which you can and probably will be “punished” for missing.

In the end, then, I have mixed feelings on this idea of clock time with rewind. I fear that Smoking Car may have violated one of Sid Meier’s principles of game design: that it’s the player who should be the one having the fun, not the programmer or designer. Yes, it’s neat to think about 30 different characters moving about the train pursuing their own agendas, and it was surely exciting to implement and finally see in action. But how much does it really add to the ordinary player’s experience? Ironically given its formal ambitions in other respects, The Last Express has just one story to tell at the end of the day; there’s only one “winning” ending to contrast with the eleven losing ones where Robert Cath doesn’t complete the trip to Constantinople for one reason or another. Would a cleverly designed plot-time structure have been so bad after all? It would definitely have been easier to implement, shaving some time and some dollars out of an extended and expensive development cycle.

But, lest I sound too harsh, let me also say that experiments like this one are necessary to tell us where the limits of fun and frustration lie. If The Last Express proved a road not taken by later adventure designers for a reason, that makes it only all the more valuable a case study to have had to hand.

Like Myst and countless other adventure games of its era, The Last Express blended its computer-generated environments with real human actors. But it did so as it did all things: with a twist. In September of 1994, Smoking Car Productions began a three-week film shoot, just like about a million other game projects seemed to be doing at the time. Yet instead of crudely and incongruously overlaying undoctored digitized images of the actors onto their 3D-modeled scenery, they used only their outlines, coloring them in by hand like comic-book art. It was, one might say, the logical next step for Jordan Mechner, who had filmed his little brother running around a New York park back in the 1980s, then laboriously hand-traced his outline frame by frame on his Apple II in order to give his Prince of Persia a more lifelike sense of movement than just about any other figure ever seen on an 8-bit computer. In this new context, though, it was labor intensive on a whole different scale, adding an incalculable number of months and dollars to the project. Never mind: it had to be done, for there was no appetite for compromise at Smoking Car Productions.

Here we see how August Schmidt and Robert Cath went from film to game.

Jordan Mechner with two of the actors at the film shoot. “They were garish costumes, purple and orange, just the gaudiest things,” remembers Mark Moran. “A jacket would be purple on one side and orange on the other so that the computer would be able to tell where one flap met [another]. Every single line was a big piece of felt. They looked almost like cartoons when they were on set. It was very hot because you’re caked in theatrical makeup and you’re wearing these wigs that accentuate the colors in your hair, so the computer can find those and highlight a curl or a parting…”

This applied equally to the sound design. A team of voice actors, mostly not the same as the onscreen ones, was hired to voice dialog in English, French, Russian, German, Arabic, Turkish, and Serbo-Croatian. All had to be native speakers for the sake of authenticity. “Casting American actors who can do a fake German or French accent just wasn’t acceptable to us,” says Mechner. Luckily for the player, Robert Cath was written as a rare American polyglot, much like Jordan Mechner himself. Those languages he could understand — the first four of those listed above — were subtitled in the game. The others were left a mystery to the player, as they were to Robert — but if you the player could happen to understand one or more of those other languages, you would realize that these dialogs too made perfect sense.

Originally projected to take two years and $1 million to make, The Last Express ended up taking four years and $5 million. (If we add to the timeline Mechner and Pierce’s earliest design discussions, we end up at almost exactly the length of the First World War itself…) Tomi Pierce:

In October 1994, we were 15 people; by December we were 28; by July 1995, 50 leather-jacketed nerds, spread over four offices, were working 70-hour weeks. Smoking Car had become a bustling thought factory. The 3D department created thousands of train interiors. The art department created and processed 40,000 frames of animation. The programmers built animation tools as well as the game structure. We worked on sound and film editing. Additional dialog recordings in French, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and German created a rich sonic tapestry. A Czech film-music composer wrote and scored a beautiful soundtrack for the game. By 1996, we were running 24 hours a day; people were sharing computers in shifts. We became a major patron of delivery pizza; everyone was either losing or gaining quite a bit of weight.

We missed our first, second, and third product deadlines. Since our cash advances were tied to achieving these milestones, we stretched payables and everyone went on half salary; the tension and stress increased.

Now a year behind schedule, we finally assembled a fully playable version of the game. This is called beta: the point when, like Frankenstein’s monster, all the parts of the body have been hooked up, and it begins to breathe and open its eyes. Play testing began at Brøderbund. Its testers played the game over and over for months, attempting to break it by finding flaws in the design. Every time it crashed, our programmers fixed the weak point… and the process began again. In three months, more than 5000 bugs were logged. All of them got fixed.

February 1997: we were done.

The calm was deafening. One night we all sat down and played the game together for the first time. It seemed to have a life of its own. We were thrilled and humbled to see the strange, living drama we had made — this odd new marriage of story and technology. It may seem counterintuitive, but computer software is in many ways a handicraft business.

Most people who have worked on a large-scale creative project are familiar with the vaguely unnerving, anti-climatic quiet that follows such a project’s completion, that feeling of “Now what?” that marks the time between production and reception. If all goes well, that period of yawning calm is a short one, soon to be replaced by slaps on the back and bonus checks as the sales reports roll in, the belated rewards for a long, hard job well done.

But that wasn’t what happened this time. Brøderbund sent The Last Express out the door with a $1 million marketing budget, and Tomi Pierce even managed to secure a four-page feature on its making in, of all places, Newsweek magazine — hardly an obvious outlet, but emblematic of everyone’s hopes that this interactive story could generate interest well beyond the usual gaming circles. (I’ve quoted liberally from her article here.) And then… crickets. The Last Express flopped like a pancake on a cold linoleum floor.

To my mind, the saddest document in the Jordan Mechner archive at the Strong Museum of Play is an email from him to Brøderbund’s marketing department, dated July 7, 1997. In it, he pleads with Brøderbund not to give up on his baby, not to lower the price and consign all remaining copies to the bargain bins, that graveyard of game developers’ hopes and dreams. Instead he asks them to gird their loins and pour another $1 million into a second marketing campaign. One of the section titles is, “Why we still think Last Express can sell 1 million units.”

Last Express does not appeal primarily to adventure gamers. Its target market is adults, 18 to 44, both men and women, college-educated professionals pre-disposed to purchasing sophisticated, intelligent entertainment. An informal survey of the reviewer and user response to the game shows that we are scoring high with the non-adventure-gamer audience — in particular, with the adult female audience that the entire industry is trying to figure out how to reach. Diana Griffiths and other reviewers have singled out The Last Express as one of the rare games that appeals to intelligent adult women.

People rave about the game for a variety of reasons — the story and characters, the lack of “gaminess,” the sense of “being there” — but they all seem to agree on one thing: Last Express is different. Like Myst, it will probably have limited or partial success within its genre (adventure games), but will ultimately succeed with a much wider audience of non-gamers and non-adventure gamers (i.e., gamers who do not usually play adventure games).

One doesn’t have to read too much between the lines of this missive to recognize that even Mechner doesn’t really believe his arguments will find traction at Brøderbund. He had always had a good relationship with his publisher’s management staff, but they hadn’t gotten where they were by beating dead horses. They were especially unlikely to do so now, given what they had waiting in the barn for release that Christmas season: Riven, the long-anticipated sequel to Myst, the closest thing to a guaranteed million-plus-seller that a softening adventure market could still produce. It made no sense to divide their Christmas marketing energies between two different adventure games and risk fatally confusing the public. So, by the time Riven appeared in stores, The Last Express was already long gone from them, written off as one of the costs of doing business in an unpredictable creative industry. It deserved a better fate.

Mind you, I don’t want to overstate the case for it. Even when setting aside my reservations about clock time with rewind, The Last Express falls short of perfection. Indeed, I think most players would agree that one part of it at least is downright bad. There are about half a dozen places where Robert Cath can get into fisticuffs or knife fights, implemented via a little action-oriented mini-game. I appreciate the sentiment that lies behind them — that of dropping the player right into the action — but that doesn’t change the fact that these places where The Last Express suddenly wants to be Prince of Persia are awful. The controls are sluggish and feedback is nonexistent. They devolve into pushing the mouse about randomly and clicking madly, until you stumble upon the rote combination of moves that will let you continue. It’s hard to imagine anything more off-putting to the audience of non-hardcore adults that Mechner believed the game to be capable of reaching.

Then, too, we’re still stuck in the old Myst interface paradigm of the first-person slideshow game. It’s seldom clear where you can and can’t look or how many degrees you’ll turn when you rotate, making it weirdly easy to get confused and lost inside the train, despite it being about the most linear space one could possibly choose to set a game.

That said, it would take a much stricter critic than I to say that these weaknesses outweigh all of The Last Express’s strengths. It’s thus unsurprising that so many extrinsic reasons have been floated for the abject commercial failure of The Last Express, by both the principals involved in making it and by the game’s fans. Some of these are dubious: the claim that Smoking Car’s inability to finish the game in time for the 1996 holiday season was the culprit is belied by the existence of other games, such as that very same year’s mega-hit Diablo, which likewise missed the silly shopping season and did more than fine in the end. And some of them are flat-out wrong: Brøderbund’s acquisition by the edutainment giant The Learning Company had nothing to do with it, given that said acquisition occurred fully a year and a half after the game’s release and subsequent washout.

Sooner or later, most arguments tend to fall back on blaming gamers themselves for not being “ready” for The Last Express in some way, as Jordan Mechner is already beginning to do in the email above. In 2021, for example, Mark Moran said that the unusual setting didn’t “resonate” with American gamers. I must admit that I’m not entirely unsympathetic to such sentiments; I have nothing against dragons and spaceships in themselves, but I’ve often wished — and often on record right here — that more games would dare to look beyond the nerdy ghetto and embrace some more of life’s rich pageant. Nevertheless, in the world of games, fantasy and science fiction have always outsold realism, and this seems unlikely to change anytime soon.

And really, there’s not much more to be said on the subject beyond that; audience blaming is always a counterproductive pursuit in the long term, for the critic every bit as much as it is for the artist. The Last Express simply didn’t tickle the fancy of existing gamers. And meanwhile, for all that some of the readers of Newsweek may have found the article about the game to be interesting, very few of them found it interesting enough to venture into the unfamiliar space of a software store to pick it up. One does suspect that, if they had, they would have found the game fairly incomprehensible: The Last Express actually expects quite a lot from its player; by no means it is a “casual” game. Its combination of subject matter and gameplay approach meant it was always destined for niche status at best.

After its rejection by the marketplace, Jordan Mechner quietly closed down Smoking Car Productions, retrenched and regrouped, and jumped back on the horse he’d rode in on. His next game was 2003’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a massive worldwide smash that recouped all the money he’d blown on The Last Express and then some, making him once again a very wealthy man. He elected not to squander his second fortune on any more esoteric passion projects. And who can blame him? The Last Express is the sort of crazy creative gamble that most commercial artists dare to take only once in their lives.

Still, you didn’t have to look too hard at The Sands of Time to see that his train game was still exerting an influence over him: the new game’s central innovation, which a new generation of critics were soon elbowing one another out of the way to praise and analyze, wasn’t really as big an innovation as most of them believed it to be, being a rewind mechanic similar to the one found in The Last Express. Transplanted into a platforming action-adventure, it actually felt far more natural. This, folks, is how game design inches forward.

Alas, Tomi Pierce, who gave as much of herself to The Last Express as the man whose name featured so prominently on the box, never got to play an equally pivotal role on any other game. She died in 2010 of ALS. “A bright light has gone out but continues to sparkle in our memories,” wrote Mechner in memoriam. “We miss her terribly.”

On a happier note, The Last Express lives on today as a cult classic; it’s even been ported to mobile platforms. Some years ago now, I quoted Infocom’s Jon Palace in praise of Steve Meretzky’s A Mind Forever Voyaging (a game that, come to think of it, occupies a similar place in his career as The Last Express does in Jordan Mechner’s). Palace’s words have just come back to me unbidden as I write this conclusion: “For me it was, like, ‘Great! Look, we can really elicit an emotional response!’ — an emotional response which isn’t trite. That for me was the best.”

There is nothing trite about the thoughts and feelings The Last Express will stir up in you if you meet it with an open mind. More than just a labor of love, it’s a true work of interactive art as well as an evocative work of history, a long-vanished world brought to life just as it was the instant before it passed away.

Where to Get It: The Last Express is available for digital purchase at GOG.com for Windows computers, at The Apple Store for iOS devices, and at Google Play for Android devices.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: the books Game Design Theory and Practice by Richard Rouse III, The Making of Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner, The Last Express: The Official Strategy Guide by Rick Barba, The End of Books — Or Books without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives by J. Yellowlees Douglas, and The Guns of August and The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War, 1890-1914 by Barbara Tuchman. Computer Gaming World of January 1997 and July 1997; Retro Gamer 112, 118, and 216; Edge of February 2011; Newsweek Special Issue for 1997; Next Generation of January 1997; PC Zone of June 1997. The Jordan Mechner archive at The Strong Museum of Play was invaluable, as was the wealth of material to be found on Mechner’s personal website.

A Digital Pornutopia, Part 1: The Seedy-ROM Revolution
October 20, 2023

Fair warning: although there’s no nudity in the pictures below, the text of this article does contain frank descriptions of the human anatomy and sexual acts.

If I’m showing people what a CD-ROM can do, and I try to show them the Kennedy assassination, their eyes glaze over. But if I show them an adult title, they perk right up.

— John Williams of Sierra On-Line, 1995

As long as humans have had technology, they’ve been using it for titillation. A quarter of a million years ago, they were carving female figurines with exaggerated breasts, buttocks, and vulvae out of stone. Well before they started using fired clay to make pottery for the storage of food, they were using the same material to make better versions of these “Venus figurines,” some of them so explicit that the archaeology textbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries didn’t dare to reproduce or even describe them. And then as soon as humans had pigments and dyes to hand, they used them to paint dirty pictures on the walls of their caves.

Immediately after the world’s first known system of writing came to be in Mesopotamia, the people of that region began using it for naughty stories. (In one of them, a new wife tells her husband to place his hand in her “goodly place,” promising to compensate him in kind thereafter: “Let me caress you. My precious caress is more savory than honey.”) The ancient Greeks covered their household and decorative items with sexual imagery. And the Romans too were enthusiastic and uninhibited pornographers, as evidenced by the famous erotic wall frescoes inside Pompeii’s brothel.

Things changed somewhat in Europe with the rise of Christianity, a religion which, unlike the pagan belief systems that preceded it, framed the questions surrounding sex — whether you did it, with whom you did it, how you did it, even how and how much you thought about doing it — as issues of intense spiritual significance. “To be carnally minded is death,” wrote Saint Paul.

Yet the vicarious desires of the flesh couldn’t be quelled even by the prospect of an afterlife of eternal torment. Porn simply went underground, where it has remained to a large extent to this day. The Decameron of Boccaccio and The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, two of the most celebrated examples of Medieval literature, preserve some of the bawdy tales of promiscuous priests and nubile nuns that the largely illiterate peasantry told one another when they gathered in taverns out of earshot of their social betters.

The Gutenberg Bible of the fifteenth century was followed closely by less rarefied printed books, with titles like The Errant Prostitute. In the seventeenth century, the renowned English diarist Samuel Pepys wrote ashamedly of how he had found a copy of a book called The Girls’ School in a second-hand store, and spent so much time perusing its pages whilst, er, indulging himself that he finally felt compelled to burn “that idle, roguish book.” The book generally considered the first true English novel, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, appeared in 1740; John Cleland’s Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, the first English erotic novel, was published just eight years later. It spawned a lively market for written erotica, the consumption of which, followed perhaps by a visit to a brothel or two, became the Victorian Age’s version of sex education for gentlemen.

And then along came photography. Some of the first photographs ever taken were of nude women and cavorting couples; traveling circuses sold them from under the table to furtive men while their wives and children were off buying sweetmeats. Improved photographic techniques, combined with cheap “pulp” paper and cheaper printing technologies led to the first mass-market “skin” magazine in 1931: The Nudist, a publication of the American Sunbathing Association, who knew perfectly well that most of their audience wasn’t buying the magazine for tips on how best to soak up the rays. Throughout modern times, pornographers have often couched titillation under just such a veneer of “educational value.” And another, even more enduring truth of modern porn was also on display in The Nudist’s pages: the camera lens focused most lovingly on the women. The producers and consumers of visual pornography have always been mostly men, although the reasons why this has been the case are matters for debate among psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists. (The opposite is largely the case for textual erotica in the post-photographic age, for whatever that’s worth.)

By the time The Nudist made the scene, still images of nakedness already had serious competition. Back in 1896, Thomas Edison had released a movie called The Kiss to widespread outrage. “They get ready to kiss, begin to kiss, and kiss and kiss and kiss in a way that brings down the house every time,” ran the description in Edison’s catalog, rather overselling the thrill of an 18-second movie that ends with little more than a chaste series of henpecks. But never fear, matters quickly escalated from there. The first known full-fledged porn film appeared in 1908. A synopsis of the action shows that, when it comes to porn as so many other things, those wise words from the Book of Ecclesiastes (“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun”) ring true: “A woman was seen pleasuring herself with a dildo, then another man and woman joined her for a threesome, involving lots of oral sex before intercourse.” By the 1920s, a full-fledged “blue” film industry was thriving in Hollywood alongside the more respectable one, using many of the same sets and in some cases even the same performers. The arrival of the Hays Code in 1933 put a damper on some of the fun, but the blue movies never went away, just slunk further underground. During the Second World War, the American military turned a blind eye to the “stag films” that infiltrated its ranks at every level; those who made them said it was their patriotic duty to help the boys in uniform through all those lonely nights in the barracks.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s brought big changes to movies, both above- and below-ground. Suddenly things that hadn’t been seen in respectable fare since 1933 — bare female breasts and sex scenes prominent among them — became commonplace in even the most conservative Middle American movie houses. At the same time, the arrival of cheap Super 8 cameras and projectors combined with the general loosening of social mores to yield what some connoisseurs still call the “golden age” of porn. To distinguish themselves from a less prudish mainstream-film industry, the purveyors of porn pushed boundaries of their own, into every imaginable combination of people and occasionally animals, with ever tighter shots of the actual equipment in action, as it were.

By 1970, there were more than 750 porn-only movie theaters in the United States alone. In 1973, a pornographic comedy called Deep Throat, a timeless tale of a woman born with her clitoris on the wrong end of her torso, became an international sensation, shown even by many “legitimate” theaters. Made for $25,000, it eventually grossed $100 million, enough to make it far and away the most successful film of all time when measured in terms of return on investment.

At the time, Deep Throat was widely heralded as the future of porn, but the era of mainstream “porno chic” which it ushered in proved short-lived. Instead of yielding more blockbusters in the style of respectable Hollywood, the porn industry that came after was distinguished by the sheer quantity of material it rolled out for every taste and kink. This explosion was enabled by the arrival of videotape in 1975; shooting direct to video was cheaper by almost an order of magnitude than even Super 8 film. But even more importantly, videotape players for the home gave the porn hounds and would-be porn hounds of the world a way to consume movies in privacy, thereby giving the porn industry access to millions upon millions of upstanding pillars of their communities who would never have frequented sticky-seated cinemas. Every porno kingpin in the world redoubled his production efforts in response, even as they all rushed en masse to move their libraries of “classics” onto videotape as well. The gold rush that followed made Deep Throat look like the flash in the pan it was. In 1978 and 1979, three quarters of all home movies sold in the United States were porn. That percentage inevitably dropped as the technology went more mainstream in the 1980s, but the raw numbers remained huge. Even in the late 1990s, Americans were still renting $4.2 billion worth of porn on videotape each year.

Advances in voice communication as well were co-opted by porn. The party lines of the 1960s and the pay-per-call services that sprang up in the 1980s were quickly taken over by it: respectively, by people wanting to talk dirty to one another and by people willing to pay a professional to talk dirty to them.

Just why is porn so perpetually on the technological cutting edge, both driving and being driven by each new invention that comes around? Perhaps it’s down to its fundamentally aspirational nature. While voyeurism for the sake of it certainly has a place on the list of human fetishes, for most of its consumers porn is a substitute — by definition a less than ideal one — for something they’re not getting, whether just in that precise moment or in their current life in general. So, they’re always looking for ways to get closer to the real thing, as Walter Kendrick, the author of a book-length history of porn, told The New York Times back in 1994.

Pornography is always unsatisfied. It’s always a substitute for the contact between two bodies, so there’s a drive behind it that doesn’t exist in other genres. Pornographers have been the most inventive and resourceful users of whatever medium comes along because they and their audience have always wanted innovations. Pornographers are excluded from the mainstream channels, so they look around for something new, and the audience has a desire to try any innovation that gives them greater realism or immediacy.

If you look at the history of pornography and new technologies, the track record has been pretty good. Usually everyone has come out ahead. The pornography people have gotten what they want, which is a more vivid way to portray sex. And the technology has benefited from their experimentation. The need for innovation in pornography is so great that it usually gets to a medium first and finds out what can be done and what can’t.

If early computers are not as strong an example of this phenomenon as photography, film, and videotape, that perhaps speaks more to the nature and limitations of that particular technology than it does to any lack of abstract interest in using computers for getting off. Yet sex definitely wasn’t absent from the picture even here. I’ve written elsewhere on this site of how the men who worked at Bell Labs in the 1960s contrived ways to put naked women on their monitor screens using grids of alphanumeric characters in lieu of a proper bitmap, of how Scott Adams sold games of Strip Dice alongside his iconic early adventure games, and of how Sierra On-Line once made a mint with the naughty text adventure Softporn, about a loser who wishes he was a swinger trying to navigate the dating scene of the late disco era.

Softporn may have had a name that no big publisher like Sierra would have dared use much after its 1981 release date, but in other ways it became the template for the mainstream games industry’s handling of sex. The rule was that a little bit of sexiness was okay if it was presented in the context of comedy. Infocom’s Leather Goddesses of Phobos went this way to significant success in 1986, helping to convince Sierra to revisit the basic premise of Softporn in the graphical adventure Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards the following year. Larry starred in a whole series of games after his first one proved a huge hit, becoming the poster child for risqué computer gaming. His success in turn brought more games of a similar style from other publishers, from Accolade’s Les Manley (yes, really) series to Legend’s Spellcasting series. The players of such games walked a fine line between being vicariously titillated alongside their protagonists and laughing at them for being the losers they were.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.the Church Lady would have blanched at calling such games porn; they were in fact no more explicit than the typical PG-13-rated frat-boy movie. To find pictures of actual naked women on computers, you would have to download them — slowly! — from a BBS, or buy a still less respectable game like Artwox’s Strip Poker via mail order.[1]A few years ago, I went to a retro-gaming exhibition here in Denmark with a friend of mine. We got to talking with a woman who worked at the museum hosting it, who told us of her own memories from those times. It seems her brother had managed to acquire a copy of Strip Poker for his Commodore Amiga. Being a lover of card games, she tried to play it, but all the stupid pictures kept getting in the way. “I just wanted to play poker!” she lamented. I suspect this story may have something to tell us about the differences between the genders, but I have no idea what it is.

But by 1993 or so, that impression was at last beginning to change. The arrival of mouse-driven user interfaces, decent graphics and sound, and CD-ROM had made “multimedia” one of the buzzwords of the zeitgeist. Part and parcel of the multimedia boom was a new generation of “interactive movies,” which featured real human actors playing their roles according to your instructions. Computer games, went the conventional wisdom, were growing up to become sophisticated adult entertainment — potentially in all senses of the word “adult.” Just like the makers of conventional movies during the 1960s, the makers of these interactive movies were eager to push the boundaries, to explore previously taboo subjects and see how much they could get away with. They had to be careful; 1993 was also the year of an overheated Senate hearing on videogame content, partially prompted by an early interactive movie for the Sega Genesis console called Night Trap. But be that as it may, many of the people behind interactive movies believed strongly in the principle that they should be allowed to show anything that a non-porn traditional film might, as long as, like such a film, they played with an open hand, disclosing the nature of the content to possible buyers upfront.

The pioneer of the risqué — but not pornographic — interactive movie was a game called Voyeur, released in 1993 for the Philips CD-i, a multimedia set-top box for the living room — don’t call it a games console! — that was marketed primarily to adults. The following year, Voyeur made it to ordinary computers as well.

Masterminded by David Riordan, whose earlier attempt at an interactive movie It Came from the Desert has aged much better, Voyeur casts you as a private dick surveilling a potential candidate for the American presidency, a fellow who makes Gary Hart and Bill Clinton look like choirboys. Everything from infidelity to incest, from sado-masochism to an eventual murder is going on in his house. But, like so many productions of this ilk, the game is caught between the urge to titillate and the fear of going too far and getting itself blacklisted. The end result is a weird mixture of the provocative and the prudish, as inimitably described by Charles Ardai, the most entertaining reviewer ever to write for Computer Gaming World magazine.

For those connoisseurs of striptease who prefer the tease to the strip, Voyeur should be a source of endless delight. Women are forever unfastening their bra straps in this game, or opening their towels while conveniently facing away from the camera, or walking around in unbuttoned vests that don’t quite reveal what you think they’re going to, or leaning toward each other for lesbian kisses that somehow never get completed. Men have it worse in some ways: they get led around in bondage collars, handcuffed to bedposts, and violently groped by their sisters. No one actually manages to have sex, though; all they do is go around interrupting each other. No wonder that after several hours of this someone ends up murdered.

Voyeur.

Coming a year after a panties-less Sharon Stone had shocked movie-goers in that scene in Basic Instinct, in a time when even network television shows like NYPD Blue were beginning to flirt with nudity, Voyeur was pretty tame stuff, notable only for existing on a computer. There was very little actual game to Voyeur, even by comparison to most interactive movies; as the player, your choices were limited to deciding which window to peep into at any given time. Yet it attracted a storm of press coverage and sold very well by the standards of the time — enough to prompt a belated 1996 sequel that was if anything even more problematic as a game and that didn’t sell anywhere near as well.

In fact, only one other game of this stripe can be called an outright commercial success. That game was Sierra’s 1995 release Phantasmagoria, designed against type by Roberta Williams, best known as the creator of the family-friendly King’s Quest series. Having written about it at some length in another article, I won’t repeat myself here. Suffice to say that Phantasmagoria became Sierra’s best-selling game to date, despite or because of content that was not quite as transgressive as the game’s advertising made it appear. In his memoir, Sierra’s co-founder (and Roberta’s husband) Ken Williams speaks of the curious dance — two steps forward, one step back — that interactive movies like this one were constantly engaged in.

There was a scene in Phantasmagoria which was shot with Victoria Morsell, the heroine of the story, topless. Roberta wrote the scene and helped direct it. If it were a horror film no one would have thought anything about it, other than giving the film an “R” rating. But this was a videogame, and the market hadn’t fully realized yet that interactive stories weren’t always just for kids. When it came time to release the game, we edited [it] to only show some side-boob. Even with only a hint of nudity, Phantasmagoria was not a game we felt was appropriate for children. [We] voluntarily self-rated the product with a large “M” for Mature.

But Ken Williams must have believed the market was evolving quickly, because just a year after the first Phantasmagoria Sierra released a sequel in name only — it had nothing to do with the characters or story of the first — called Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh, which proudly strutted all of the stuff that its predecessor had only hinted at. Designed by Lorelei Shannon rather than Roberta Williams, A Puzzle of Flesh was as sexually explicit as any mainstream game would get during the 1990s, an interactive exploitation flick steeped in sado-masochism, bondage, and the bare boobies that had been so conspicuously lacking from Roberta’s game. Like too many Sierra adventure games, its writing and design both left something to be desired. And yet it was an important experiment in its way, demonstrating to everyone who might have been contemplating making a game like it that there really were boundaries which they would be well advised not to cross. In contrast to many organs of game journalism, Computer Gaming World did deign to give A Puzzle of Flesh a review, but said review oozes disgust: “Playing this game, if one can grace this morally reprehensible product with such happy terms as ‘play’ and ‘game,’ is extremely unpleasant; to do so ‘for fun’ requires a fascination with hardcore schlock or a hardened attitude toward horror and exploitive erotica. You have been duly warned.”

Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh.

It speaks to one of the peculiarities of American culture that the magazine could work itself into such a lather of moral outrage over this game whilst praising the booby-less ultra-violence of HyperBlade (“The 3D Battlesport of the Future!”) in the very same issue. (“Fractured skull. Severed bronchial artery. Shattered tibia. This will eventually come as music to your ears. Want to cut an opponent’s head off and throw it in the goal? Pretty brazen, but that’s okay too.”) But such were the conditions on the ground, and publishers had to learn to live with them. Sierra never made another full-fledged interactive movie after A Puzzle of Flesh. The genre as a whole slowly died as the limitations of games made from spliced-together pieces of canned video became clear to even the most casual players. The dream of a games industry that regularly delivered R-rated content in terms of sex as well as violence blew away like so much chaff on the breeze alongside the rest of the interactive-movie fad. Mind you, games would continue to be full of big-breasted, scantily-clad women to feed the male gaze, but gamers wouldn’t get to see them in action in the bedroom.

Yet this isn’t to say that there was no sex whatsoever to be had on CD-ROM. Far from it. Even as the above-ground industry’s fad for interactive movies was swelling up and then petering out, there was plenty of explicit sex available for consumption on “seedy ROM,” the name a wag writing for The New York Times coined for the underground genre. A cottage industry sprang up around the technology of CD-ROM when it was still in its infancy — an industry which it would be disarmingly easy for a historian like me, trolling through my old issues of Computer Gaming World and the like, to never realize ever existed. This has always been the way with porn; despite its eternal popularity, it lives in the shadows, segregated from other forms of media whose consumers are less ashamed of their habit. It is forced to exist in its own parallel universe of distribution and sales — and yet people who are determined to see it always find a way to meet it where it lives. This was as true of porn during the multimedia-computing boom as it has been in every other technological era and context.

The pioneer of the seedy-ROM field, coming already in 1990 — fully three years before Voyeur, at a time when the standards around CD-ROM had barely been set and most people had not yet even heard of it — was a product of a tiny company called Reactor, Incorporated. It called itself Virtual Valerie. Implemented using Apple’s HyperCard authoring system, it plays a bit like The Manhole with sex; you can explore your girlfriend Valerie’s apartment, discovering a surprising number of secret paths and Easter eggs therein, or you can spend your time exploring Valerie herself. Relying on hand-drawn pixel graphics rather than digitized photographs or video, it’s whimsical in personality — almost innocent by contrast with what would come later — but it nevertheless demonstrated that there was an eager market for this sort of thing. “A left-handed mouse designed for use by right-handed people will be a hot seller,” wrote Anne Gregor only partly jokingly in CD-ROM Today, one of the few glossy magazines that dared to cover this space at all.

Virtual Valerie.

Virtual Valerie was the canary in the coal mine. In her wake, dozens of companies plunged into making and selling porn on CD-ROM, smelling an opportunity akin to the porn-on-videotape boom of the recent past. They sold disks full of murky images downloaded from Usenet, where a lively trade in porn went on alongside lively discussions. They sold old porn movies on CDs, the better for gentlemen to view on the computer in the home office, away from the prying eyes of the wife and kids. (The Voyager Company’s version of the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night was promoted in 1993 as the very first full-length movie on CD-ROM, but it actually wasn’t this at all: it was rather the first non-pornographic movie on CD-ROM.) And then there were the more ambitious, genuinely interactive efforts that followed in the footsteps of Virtual Valerie. “Virtual girlfriends” became a veritable sub-genre unto itself for a while. Girlfriend Teri, for example, claimed a vocabulary of 3000 words. Journalist Nancie S. Martin called her perfect for men who preferred “a woman you can talk to, who, unlike most real women, has no opinions of her own. While she can’t discuss Proust, she can say, ‘It’s so big!’ on demand.”

It was proof of a longstanding axiom in media: no matter how daunting the obstacles to distribution, porn will out. When American CD-duplication houses refused their business, the purveyors of seedy ROMs found alternatives in Canada. When no existing software distributor or retailer was willing to touch their products, when the big computer and gaming magazines too rejected them or allowed them only small advertisements sequestered in their back pages, they advertised in the skin magazines and urban newspapers instead, and sealed the deal through mail order and through porn-rental shops that stocked their CDs alongside the usual videotapes. Those who joined this latest porn gold rush were a variegated lot, ranging from the likes of Playboy and Penthouse, whose libraries of photographs stretched back decades, to hardcore pornography pimpers like Vivid Media with catalogs of their own that were equally ripe for re-purposing, to fresh faces who were excited about the overall potential of multimedia, and saw porn as a way to make money from it or to nudge it along as a consumer-facing technology, or both.

One of these newcomers to porn was New Machine Publishing, founded by one Larry Miller and two other 25-year-old men in 1992. “At first, we thought we’d do a CD-ROM on the rain forest,” Miller told The Los Angeles Times three years later. “It was gonna be interactive, have bird calls, native music, all that stuff. Then we discovered we were not thinking in real-world terms. No one would have bought it.” Instead they acquired a bunch of footage from a local porno-production company and stuck it on a CD alongside a frame story not that far away in spirit from Voyeur: you were a guest at a hotel where all the rooms were wired for video and sound, and you were in the catbird seat in the control room. The difference, of course, was that their “interactive porn movie,” which they called Nightwatch, didn’t shirk from the money shots. They took 500 Nightwatch discs to a Macworld show in San Francisco and sold every single one of them, at $70 a pop. Attendees “would cruise by,” remembered Miller. “Then they would get to the end of the aisle and do a U-turn.”

It turned out that porn was immune to the infelicities of this early era of digital video that caused customers to turn away from more upstanding multimedia productions. While few could convince themselves to overlook the fact that Voyager’s A Hard Day’s Night played in a resolution more suited to a postage stamp than a computer monitor, they were happy to peer at Nightwatch’s even blearier clips, jittering before them enigmatically at all of five frames per second. New Machine plowed their Nightwatch profits into The Interactive Adventures of Seymore Butts (yes, really), which did for Leisure Suit Larry what their previous seedy ROM had done for Voyeur. Everyone knew the drill of this sort of scenario by now: another loser protagonist out on the town trying to score. Except that Seymore would get lucky in a way that Larry or Les and their players could hardly have begun to imagine.

Seymore Butts, ladies man, on the prowl.

Indeed, New Machine was now able to pay for their own film shoots. Robert A. Jones of The Los Angeles Times was permitted to visit the set one day, and returned to bear witness to the ultimate hollowness of mechanistic sex without emotion or context: “Watching it unfold, it’s hard to believe anything of redeeming value could be salvaged from this scene of bored sordidness.” There has always been money to be made in some people’s compulsion to keep watching porn long after the novelty is gone. Why should seedy ROMs be any different?

But, you might be asking, how much money are we talking about here? Alas, that’s a tough question to answer with any degree of certainty. Because porn lives underground, both abhorring the light of mainstream attention and being likewise abhorred, it has always been notoriously difficult to figure out how much money people are actually making from the stuff. Porn on CD-ROM is no exception. That said, the sheer quantity of it that was out there by the middle of the 1990s indicates that real money was being made by at least some of its providers. To be sure, no one was selling discs in the quantities of Voyeur or Phantasmagoria. But then again, they didn’t have to, thanks to vastly cheaper production budgets and the ability to charge a premium price. This latter has always been one of the advantages of peddling smut: most people just want to take their porn and disappear back into blessed anonymity, not haggle and bargain hunt.

We do have some data points. The founders of New Machine Publishing alluded vaguely to selling “tens of thousands” of copies of Seymore Butts, more than many a more wholesome point-and-click adventure game of the era. The first Penthouse Virtual Photo Shoot disc — “Be the photographer!” — reportedly sold 30,000 copies in its first three months. (In another testament to its popularity, no fewer than five additional volumes, featuring different sets of girls for the camera’s roving eye to capture, were later released.) Vivid Entertainment’s interactive division reported having four 10,000-plus sellers on CD-ROM already in the spring of 1994, barely six months after its founding. Fay Sharp, who acted as a distributor and liaison between seedy-ROM makers and mom-and-pop porn shops all over the country, claimed that $260 million worth of porn on disc was sold in that same year. Pixis Interactive claimed multiple titles with sales of 50,000 to 100,000 units a couple of years after that. For all that such numbers may still have been a drop in the bucket compared to porn on videotape, they could mean serious money for the people involved, with the tantalizing prospect of a lot more where that had come from in the future, once multimedia personal computers had become as ubiquitous in American homes as videocassette players. In short, and despite the fact that seedy ROMs would never blow up quite as spectacularly as many of the folks involved in them expected — we’ll get to the reasons for that shortly — all signs are that some people in this market did very well for themselves for a while, thanks to sales that in many cases seem to have dwarfed the numbers racked up by, say, The Voyager Company’s lineup of high-brow explorations of history and science.

Perhaps the best testimony to the real if brief-lived success of porn on CD-ROM is a brouhaha that erupted at COMDEX, the buttoned-down computer industry’s biggest trade show, taking place in November of each year in Las Vegas. In 1993, The New York Times reported with considerable surprise that porn had become one of the highlights of the show in the opinion of businessmen who were ostensibly there to investigate decidedly unsexy server racks and backup systems and the like.

“CD-ROM brings unimaginable quantities of knowledge to those for whom information is their most valuable asset,” said Bill Kelly, president of PC Compo Net of La Habra, California, who sells such knowledge bases as L.A. Strippers: Bikes & Babes & Rock ‘n’ Roll. PC Compo Net was among a half dozen companies selling CD-ROM titles that depict graphic sex with video, sound, and still images. The displays caused traffic jams in the aisles as the predominantly male computer crowd stopped to gawk. Many customers waved fists of cash. One harried booth clerk noted that CD-ROM is ideal for circumventing Japanese laws restricting pornographic films and magazines, because the mirror-like disks give no clue as to their contents and can easily be slipped through customs in an audio-CD case.

Some COMDEX exhibitors complained about their X-rated neighbors on moral grounds; others said they were pleased by the crowds. One Japanese computer dealer, who asked that his name not be used, said it appears that pornography may be the long-awaited “killer” application that will spur the sale of CD-ROM drives. “People who develop CD-ROM software should be overjoyed that we’re here, because we’re helping sell CD-ROM drives,” said Lawrence Miller, one of three partners in New Machine Publishing of Santa Monica, California, which makes games with explicit sexual content.

Concerned about their show’s image, the COMDEX organizers moved the seedy-ROM exhibits into a dank corner of the basement the following year — an apt metaphor for pornography’s place in polite society, yes, but one the exhibitors themselves considered less than gracious, given that they were by now contributing about half a million dollars to the show’s bottom line. In return, COMDEX couldn’t even be bothered to keep the power on for them all the time down there in the cellar. Its organizers were deaf to their complaints: “COMDEX is a place where people show creative new products for the benefit of the industry. This is not appropriate.”

So, Fay Sharp, a rare woman in porn in a role other than that of performer, set up her own show in 1995 just a few blocks away from that year’s COMDEX. Called AdultDex, its admission charge was just $20 if you could show a COMDEX ticket. “COMDEX is the classroom and AdultDex is recess,” said William Margold of the Free Speech Coalition, one of the new show’s sponsors. About 7500 people came by that first year, while the bigger show’s organizers huffed and hawed and threatened this unwelcome parasite. In the end, though, there was nothing they could do about it.

AdultDex became a regular event thereafter, drawing upwards of 20,000 attendees some years. The scene there was much the same as that in the countless Vegas strip clubs that catered to the same clientele of business road warriors enjoying a taste of freedom from the strictures of family life. (“COMDEX attendees don’t gamble, but they line up in those gentlemen’s clubs,” said the chairwoman of the tourism and convention department at the University of Nevada. “I’ve been on flights coming into Las Vegas sitting next to hookers who fly in just for that week.”) Journalist Samantha Cole describes AdultDex as “men in polo shirts and cheap brown suits standing too close to tanned women in bikinis and leather, or leaning their five-o’clock shadows on their breasts. One thing that’s never changed through decades of Las Vegas porn conferences: in this gin-scented setting, men and women do seem like separate species.”

In 1997, the police raided AdultDex — at the instigation, many suspected, of the COMDEX organizers — and handed out citations for “lewd and dissolute conduct” and “performing a live sex act.” But, as always, the porn show must go on. “We were on CNN, the local TV; we have even had an editorial in the newspaper that was favorable,” said Fay Sharp to Billboard magazine. “It’s giving us the kind of publicity we could never buy. It’s showing [that] adult interactivity is very much in the mainstream.” AdultDex wouldn’t pass into history until 2003, when it expired, like any good parasite, alongside its host, COMDEX itself.

The scene at AdultDex.

Yet even as Fay Sharp was saying those words in 1997, the nature of the products being peddled at AdultDex was changing markedly. The fact was that the seedy-ROM boom was already past its peak, already starting onto the down slope toward what all those dirty discs have become today: the kitschy detritus of a quaint past, media artifacts which manifestly failed to reach the world-changing heights once predicted for them. Pixis Interactive reported that year that its latest sales figures looked suddenly “ghastly.” The smart folks in the cottage industry were now plotting exit strategies from CD-ROM, which in some cases involved going legit — or at least more legit — in one way or another. The boys behind New Machine, for example, reinvested their Seymore Butts profits into casino games on CD-ROM, then took that concept online. At the turn of the millennium, their virtualvegas.com was one of the most popular online-gaming sites on the Internet.

Meanwhile those digital impresarios who intended to stay in porn were trying to figure out how to execute a dramatic shift in terms of delivery medium. For, just as video had once killed the radio star, the World Wide Web was now all too clearly killing the multimedia CD-ROM, regardless of whether it concerned itself with kinky sex or with the fate of the rain forests. Seedy ROMs wouldn’t disappear because of any shortage of horny boys and men — perish the thought! They would disappear because anything they could do, the Web could do better — cheaper and easier and, best of all, even more anonymously. The fact was that the Web was about to change humanity’s relationship to sex in general to an extent that few of even the most enthusiastic proponents of sex on CD-ROM would have ventured to predict. And, almost equally interestingly, sex was about to change the Web — change not only the sites people surfed to and what they did there, but make the whole place safe for commerce and its filthy lucre in a way that a million wide-eyed idealists like its original inventor Tim Berners-Lee could never have managed.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: the books How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex by Samantha Cole, Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age by Frederick S. Lane III, The Players Ball: A Genius, a Con Man, and the Secret History of the Internet’s Rise by David Kushner, The Erotic Engine by Patchen Barss, The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession by Kelsy Burke, and Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings by Ken Williams; The New York Times of November 21 1993, January 9 1994, and October 4 1995; CD-ROM Today of June/July 1994; Electronic Entertainment of August 1994 and August 1995; Wired of July 1995; Computer Gaming World of March 1995, July 1996, and March 1997; Wired of July 1995 and February 1997; The Los Angeles Times of March 19 1995; The San Francisco Chronicle of November 19 1997; frieze of March/April 1996; The Las Vegas Sun of November 19 1996; American Heritage of September/October 2000. Online sources include “Inside AdultDex” by Adi Robertson at The Verge, “COMDEX Trade Show Leaves Vegas” by Chris Jones at Casino City Times, and “History of Sex in Cinema” at filmsite.

Footnotes

Footnotes

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A few years ago, I went to a retro-gaming exhibition here in Denmark with a friend of mine. We got to talking with a woman who worked at the museum hosting it, who told us of her own memories from those times. It seems her brother had managed to acquire a copy of Strip Poker for his Commodore Amiga. Being a lover of card games, she tried to play it, but all the stupid pictures kept getting in the way. “I just wanted to play poker!” she lamented. I suspect this story may have something to tell us about the differences between the genders, but I have no idea what it is.

A Digital Pornutopia, Part 2: The Internet is for Porn
November 3, 2023

See https://www.youtube.com/embed/j6eFNRKEROw?si=w1gYxGJud2g3Vbzw&start=2

Fair warning: although there’s no nudity in the pictures below, the text of this article does contain frank descriptions of the human anatomy and sexual acts.

When you want to know where the zeitgeist is heading, just look to what the punters are lining up to see on Broadway. To wit: the unexpected breakout hit of the 2003 to 2004 season was Avenue Q, a low-budget send-up of Sesame Street where the puppets cursed, drank, and had sex with one another. They were rude, crude, and weirdly relatable — even lovable, what with their habit of breaking into song at the drop of a hat. The most enduring of their songs was a timeless show tune called “The Internet is for Porn.” (Eat your hearts out, Rodgers and Hammerstein!) It became, inevitably, an Internet meme of its own, reflecting an unnerving feeling that the ground was shifting beneath society’s feet, that the most important practical affordance of the World Wide Web, that noble experiment in the unfettered exchange of information, might indeed be to put porn at the fingertips of every human being with a computer on his desk.

And yet the world hadn’t seen anything yet in 2003; the statistics surrounding Internet porn would become truly gob-smacking after streaming video and smartphones became everyday commodities. By 2016, Pornhub, the biggest smut aggregator on the Internet, would be attracting four visits per year for every man, woman, and child on the planet. There was enough material on that site alone to keep a porn hound glued to his screen for five times as long as Homo sapiens have existed, with more fresh porn being uploaded to the site every few months than the entirety of the twentieth century had managed to produce. Needless to say, the pace of neither porn consumption nor production has cooled off a jot in the years since.

On one level, the sheer size of porn’s digital footprint is kind of hilarious. How many images do we really need of an activity which has only a limited number of possible permutations and combinations in the end, despite the fevered efforts of the imaginations behind it to discover… well, not quite virgin territory, but you know what I mean. I’ve long since come to realize that I am, for better or for worse, a member of the last generation of Western humanity to have grown up thinking of images of naked bodies and sexual activity as a scarce commodity. Cue the anecdotes about the lengths boys like I was used to have to go to in order to get a glimpse of an actual naked or even partially unclothed woman: sneaking into Dad’s Playboy stash, circumventing the child lockout on the family television’s cable box, perusing Big Sister’s Victoria’s Secret catalog, even resorting when worst came to worst to the sturdy maidens in equally sturdy brassieres that used to be found in the lingerie section of the Sears catalog. Such tales read as quaintly as the courtship rituals of Jane Austen novels to the generation after ours, who just have to pull their phones out of their pockets to see sights that would have shocked the young me to my pubescent core.

Yet lurking behind the farcical absurdity of porn’s present-day popularity are serious questions for which none of us have any concrete answers. What does it do to young people to grow up with virtual if not physical sex at their literal fingertips? For that matter, what does it do to those of us who aren’t so young anymore? Some point hopefully to statistics which seem to show that accessible porn leads to dramatically decreased rates of real-world sexual violence. But even those of us who try our darnedest to be open-minded and sex-positive can’t always suppress the uneasy feeling that turning an act as intimate as making love into a commodity as ubiquitous as toilet paper may come at a cost to our humanity.

Of course, we won’t be able to resolve these dilemmas here. What we will do today, however, is learn how the song “The Internet is for Porn” may have been more truthy than even its writers were aware of. For if you look at the technologies and practices that make the modern Web go — not the idealistic building blocks provided by J.C.R. Licklider and Tim Berners-Lee and their many storied colleagues, but the ones behind the commercial Web of today — you find that a crazy amount of them came straight out of porn: online payment systems, ad trackers, affiliated marketing, streaming video, video conferencing… all of them and more were made for porn.

It was fully eight years before Avenue Q opened that the mainstream media’s attention was captured for the first time by porn on the Internet. On June 14, 1995, Jim Exon, a 74-year-old Democratic senator from Nebraska, stood up inside the United States Capitol Building to lead his colleagues in a prayer.

Almighty God, lord of all life, we praise you for the advancements in computerized communications that we enjoy in our time. Sadly, however, there are those who are littering this information superhighway with obscene, indecent, and destructive pornography. Now, guide the senators when they consider ways of controlling the pollution of computer communications and how to preserve one of our greatest resources: the minds of our children and the future moral strength of our nation. Amen.

As Exon spoke, he waved a blue binder in front of his face, filled, so he said, with filthy pictures his staff had found online. “I cannot and would not show these pictures to the Senate,” he thundered. “I would not want our cameras to pick them up. If nothing is done now, the pornographers may become the primary beneficiary of the information revolution.”

Most of his audience had no idea what he was on about. An exception was Dan Coats, a Republican senator from Indiana, who had in fact been the one to light a fire under Exon in the first place. “With old Internet technology, retrieving and viewing any graphic image on a PC at home could be laborious,” Coats explained in slightly more grounded diction after Exon had finished his righteous call to arms. “New Internet technology, like browsers for the Web, makes all of this easier.” He cited a study that was about to be published in The Georgetown Law Review, claiming that 450,000 pornographic images could already be found online, and that these had already been downloaded 6.4 million times. What on earth would happen once the Internet became truly ubiquitous, something everyone expected to happen over the next few years? “Think of the children!”

Luckily for that most precious of all social resources, Coats and Exon had legislation ready to go. Their bill would make it a federal crime to “use any interactive computer service to display in a manner available to a person under eighteen years of age, any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs.” Nonplussed though they largely were by it all, “few senators wanted to cast a nationally televised vote that might later be characterized as pro-pornography,” as Time magazine put it. The bill passed by a vote of 86 to 14.

On February 8, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the final version of the Communications Decency Act into law. “Today,” he said, “with the stroke of a pen, our laws will catch up to the future.” Or perhaps not quite today: just as countless legal experts had warned would happen, the new law was immediately tied up in litigation, challenged as an unacceptable infringement on the right to free speech.

Looking back, the most remarkable thing about this first furor over online porn is just how early it came, before the World Wide Web was more than a vague aspirational notion, if that, in the minds of the large majority of Americans. The Georgetown Law study which had prompted it — a seriously flawed if not outright fraudulent study, written originally as an undergraduate research paper — didn’t focus on the Web at all but rather on Usenet, a worldwide textual discussion forum which had been hacked long ago to foster the exchange of binary files as well, among them dirty pictures.

Nevertheless, by the time the Communications Decency Act became one of the shakier laws of the land the locus of digital porn was migrating quickly from CD-ROM and Usenet to the Web. Like so much else there, porn on the Web began more in a spirit of amateur experimentation than hard-eyed business acumen. During the early days of Mosaic and Netscape and Web 1.0, hundreds of thousands of ordinary folks who could sense a communications revolution in the offing rushed to learn HTML and set up their own little pages on the Web, dedicated to whatever topic they found most interesting. For some of them, that topic was sex. There are far too many stories here for me to tell you today, but we can make space for one of them at least. It involves Jen Peterson and Dave Miller, a young couple just out of high school who were trying to make ends meet in their cramped Baltimore apartment.

In the spring of 1995, Jen got approved for a Sears credit card, whereupon Dave convinced her that they should buy a computer with their windfall, to find out what this Internet thing that they were seeing in the news was really all about. So, they spent $4000 on a state-of-the-art 75Mhz Packard Bell system, complete with monitor and modem, and lugged it back home on the bus.

Dave’s first destinations on the Internet were Simpsons websites. But one day he asked himself, “I wonder if there’s any nudity on this thing?” Whereupon he discovered that there was an active trade in dirty pictures going on on Usenet. Now, it just so happened that Dave was something of a photographer himself, and his favorite subject was the unclothed Jen: “We would look at [the pictures] afterwards, and that would lead to even better sex. I wanted to share them. I wanted people to see Jen’s body.” Jen was game, so the couple started uploading their own pictures to Usenet.

But Usenet was just so baroque and unfriendly. Dave’s particular sexual kink — not an unusual one, on the spectrum of same — made him want to show Jen to as many people as possible, which meant finding a more accessible medium for the purpose. In or around October of 1995, the couple opened “JENnDAVE’s HOME PAGE!” (“I called us Jen and Dave rather than Dave and Jen,” says Dave, “because I knew nobody was there to see me. I wasn’t being sweet; I was being practical.”) At that time, Internet service providers gave you a home page with which to plant your flag on the Web as part of your subscription, so the pair’s initial financial investment in the site was literally zero. This same figure was, not coincidentally, what they charged their visitors.

Jen and Dave’s home page, from a simpler time when 800 X 600 was a high resolution.

But within five months, the site was attracting 25,000 visitors every day, and their service provider was growing restless under the traffic load; in fact, the amount of bandwidth Jen and Dave’s dirty pictures were absorbing was single-handedly responsible for the provider deleting the promise of “unlimited traffic” from its contracts. Meanwhile the Communications Decency Act had become law — a law which their site was all too plainly violating, placing them at risk of significant fines or even prison terms if the courts should finally decide that it was constitutional.

Yet just how was one to ensure that one’s porn wasn’t “available to a person under eighteen years of age,” as the law demanded, on the wide-open Web? Some folks, Jen and Dave among them, put up entrance pages which asked the visitor to click a button certifying that, “Yep, I’m eighteen, alright!” It was doubtful, however, whether a judge would construe such an honor system to mean that their sites were no longer “available” to youngsters. Out of this dilemma, almost as much as the pure profit motive, arose the need and desire to accept credit cards in return for dirty pictures over the Internet. For in the United States at least, a credit card, which by law could not be issued to anyone under the age of eighteen, was about as trustworthy a signifier of maturity as you were likely to find.

We’ll return to Jen and Dave momentarily. Right now, though, we must shift our focus to a wheeler and dealer named Richard Gordon, a fellow aptly described by journalist Samantha Cole as “a smooth serial entrepreneur with a grifter’s lean.” Certainly he had a sketchy background by almost anyone’s terms. In the late 1970s, he’d worked in New York in insurance and financial planning, and had gotten into the habit of dipping into his customers’ accounts to fund his own lavish lifestyle. He attempted to flee the country after being tipped off that he was under investigation by the feds, only to be dragged out of the closet of a friend’s apartment with a Concorde ticket to Paris in his hand. He served just two years of his seven-year prison sentence, emerging on parole in 1982 to continue the hustle.

Two years later, President Ronald Reagan’s administration effected a long-in-the-offing final breakup of AT&T, the corporate giant that had for well over half a century held an all but ironclad monopoly over telegraphy, telephony, and computer telecommunications in the United States. Overnight, one ginormous company became 23 smaller ones. There followed just the explosion of innovation that the Reagan administration had predicted, as those companies and other, new players all jockeyed for competitive advantage. Among other things, this led to a dramatic expansion in the leasing of “1-900” numbers: commercial telephone numbers which billed the people who called them by the minute. When it had first rolled them out in the 1970s, AT&T had imagined that they would be used for time and temperature updates, sports scores, movie listings, perhaps for dial-a-joke services, polls, and horoscopes. And indeed, they were used for all of these things and more. But if you’ve read this far, you can probably guess where this is going: they were used most of all for phone sex. The go-go 1980s in the telecom sector turned personalized auditory masturbation aids into a thriving cottage industry.

Still, there was a problem that many of those who wanted to get in on the action found well-nigh intractable: the problem of actually collecting money from their customers. The obvious way of doing so was through a credit card, which was quick and convenient and thus highly conducive to impulse buying, and which could serve as an age guarantee to boot. But the credit-card companies were huge corporations with convoluted application processes for merchants, difficult entities for the average shoestring phone-sex provider teetering on the ragged edge of business-world legitimacy to deal with.

Richard Gordon saw opportunity in this state of affairs. He set up an intermediate credit-card-billing service for the phone-sex folks. They just had to sign up with him, and he would take care of all the rest — for a small cut of the transactions he processed, naturally. His system came with an additional advantage which phone-sex customers greatly appreciated: instead of, say, “1-900-HOT-SEXX” appearing on their credit-card statements, there appeared only the innocuously generic name of “Electronic Card Systems,” which was much easier to explain away to a suspicious spouse. Gordon made a lot of money off phone sex, learning along the way an important lesson: that there was far more money to be made in facilitating the exchange of porn than in making the stuff yourself and selling it directly. The venture even came with a welcome veneer of plausible deniability; there was nothing preventing Gordon from signing up other sorts of 1-900 numbers to his billing service as well. These could be the customers he talked about at polite cocktail parties, even as he made the bulk of his money from telephonic masturbation.

The Web came to his attention in the mid-1990s. “What is the Net?” he asked himself. “It’s just a phone call with pictures.” So, Gordon extended his thriving phone-sex billing service to the purveyors of Internet pornography. In so doing, he would “play a significant role in the birth of electronic commerce,” as The New York Times would diffidently put it twelve years later, “laying the groundwork for electronic transactions conducted with credit cards, opening the doors to the first generation of e-commerce startups.”

In truth, it’s difficult to overstate the importance of this step to the evolution of the Web. Somewhat contrary to The New York Times’s statement, Richard Gordon did not invent e-commerce from whole cloth; it had been going on on closed commercial services like CompuServe since the mid-1980s. Because those services were run from the top down and, indeed, were billing their customers’ credit cards every month already, they were equipped out of the box to handle online transactions in a way that the open, anarchic Web was not. Netscape provided the necessary core technology for this purpose when they added support for encrypted traffic to their Navigator browser. But it was Gordon and a handful of others like him who actually made commerce on the Web a practical reality, blazing trails that would soon be followed by more respectable institutions; without Gordon’s Electronic Card Services to show the way, there would never have been a PayPal.

In the meantime, Gordon happily accepted babes in the woods like Jen Peterson and Dave Miller, who wouldn’t have had a clue how to set up a merchant’s account with any one of the credit-card companies, much less all of them for maximum customer convenience. “He was the house for Internet porn in those days,” says one Steven Peisner, who worked for him. “At that time, if you had anything to do with Internet porn, you called Electronic Card Systems.”

Thanks to Gordon, Jen and Dave were able to sign up with a real hosting company and start charging $5 for six months of full access to their site in early 1996. By the turn of the millennium, the price was $15 for one month.

Dave in booby clover.

The site lost some of its innocence in another sense as well over the course of time. What had begun with cheesecake nudie pics turned into real hardcore porn, as others came to join in on the fun. “I would be with other girls and Jen would be with other dudes and most of the time, that was in the context of picture taking,” says Dave. “People said, ‘Oh Jen and Dave, you’ve gone away from your roots, you’re no longer the sweet innocent couple that you were. Now, you’ll screw anybody.'”

Their unlikely careers in porn largely ended after they had twins in 2005, by which time their quaint little site was already an anachronism in a sea of cutthroat porn aggregators. Today Dave works in medical administration and runs pub quizzes on the weekends, while Jen maintains their sexy archive and runs a home. They have no regrets about their former lives. “We were just looking to have a good time and spread the ideals of body-positivity and sex-positivity,” says Jen. “Even if we didn’t yet have the words for those things.”

Jen and Dave today, in wholesome middle age.

A Pennsylvanian college student named Jennifer Ringley was a trailblazer of a different stripe, billing herself as a “lifecaster.” In 1996, she saw an early webcam, capable of capturing still images only, for sale in the Dickinson College bookstore and just had to have it. “You could become the human version of FishCam,” joked one of her friends, referring to a camera that had been set up in an aquarium in Mountain View, California, to deliver a live feed, refreshed every three to four seconds, to anyone who visited its website. Having been raised in a nudist family, Ringley was no shrinking violet; she found the idea extremely appealing.

The result was JenniCam, which showed what was going on in her dorm room around the clock — albeit, this being the 1990s, in the form of a linear series of still photographs only, snapped at the rather bleary-eyed resolution of 320 X 240. “Whatever you’re seeing isn’t staged or faked,” she said, “and while I don’t claim to be the most interesting person in the world, there’s something compelling about real life that staging it wouldn’t bring to the medium.” She was at pains to point out that JenniCam was a social experiment, one of many that were making the news on the early Web at the time. Whatever else it was, it wasn’t porn; if you happened to catch her changing clothes or making out with a boy she’d brought back to the room or even pleasuring herself alone, that was just another aspect of the life being documented.

One cannot help but feel that she protested a bit too much. After all, her original domain name was boudoir.org, and she wasn’t above performing the occasional striptease for the camera. Even if she hadn’t played for the camera so obviously at times, we would have reason to doubt whether the scenes it captured were the same as they would have been had the camera not been present. For, as documentary-film theory teaches us, the “fly on the wall” is a myth; the camera always changes the scene it captures by the very fact of its presence.

Jenny Ringley not performing at all for the camera.

Like Jen and Dave, Ringley first put her pictures online for free, but later she began charging for access. At its peak, her site was getting millions of hits every day. “The peep-show nature of the medium was enough to get viewers turned on,” writes Patchen Barss in The Erotic Engine, a study of pornography. “Just having a window into a real person’s life was plenty — people would pay for the occasional chance to observe Ringley’s non-porn-star-like sex life, or to just catch her walking naked to the shower.”

Ringley inspired countless imitators, some likewise insisting that they were engaged in a social experiment or art project, others leaning more frankly into titillation. Some of the shine went off the experiment for her personally in 2000, when she was captured enjoying a tryst with the fiancé of another “cam girl.” (Ah, what a strange world it was already becoming…) The same mainstream media that had been burning with high-minded questions to ask her a few years earlier now labeled her a “redheaded little minx” and “amoral man-trapper.” Still, she kept her site going until December 31, 2003, making a decent living from a 95-percent male clientele who wanted the thrill of being a Peeping Tom without the dangers.

Sites like Jen and Dave’s and to some extent Jennifer Ringley’s existed on the hazy border between amateur exhibitionism and porn as a business. Much of their charm, if that is a word that applies in your opinion, stems from their ramshackle quality. But other keen minds realized early on that online porn was going to be huge, and set out far more methodically to capitalize on it.

One of the most interesting and unique of them was the stripper and model who called herself Danni Ashe, who marketed herself as a living, breathing fantasy of nerdy males, a “geek with big breasts,” as she put it. Well before becoming an online star, she was a headline attraction at strip clubs all over the country, thanks to skin-magazine “profiles” and soft-core videos. “I ventured onto the Internet and quickly got into the Usenet newsgroups, where I was hearing that my pictures were being posted, and started talking to people,” she said later. “I spent several really intense months in the newsgroups, and it was out of those conversations that the idea for Danni’s Hard Drive was born.” According to her official lore, she learned HTML during a vacation to the Bahamas and coded up her site all by herself from scratch.

In contrast to the sites we’ve already met, Danni’s Hard Drive was designed to make money from the start. It went live with a subscription price of $20 per month, which provided access to hundreds of nude and semi-nude photographs of the proprietor and, soon enough, many other women as well. Ashe dealt only in pictorials not much more explicit than those seen in Playboy, both in the case of her own pictures and those of others. As Samantha Cole writes, “Danni never shot any content with men and never posted images of herself with anything — even a sex toy — inside her.” Despite its defiantly soft-core nature in a field where extremism usually reigns supreme, some accounts claim that Danni’s Hard Drive was the busiest single site on the Internet for a couple of years, consuming more bandwidth each day than the entirety of Central America. It was as innovative as it was profitable, setting into place more building blocks of the post-millennial Web. Most notably, it pioneered online video streaming via a proprietary technology called DanniVision more than half a decade before YouTube came to be.

Danni’s Hard Drive had 25,000 subscribers by the time DanniVision was added to its portfolio of temptations in 1999. It weathered the dot.com crash of the year 2000 with nary a scratch. In 2001, the business employed 45 people behind the cameras — almost all of them women — and turned an $8 million annual profit. Savvy businesswoman that she was, Ashe sold out at the perfect moment, walking away with millions in her pocket in 2004.

Equally savvy was one Beth Mansfield, who realized, like Richard Gordon before her, that the easiest and safest way to earn money from porn was as a facilitator rather than a maker. She was a 36-year-old unemployed accountant and single mother living with her children in a trailer in Alabama when she heard the buzz about the Web and resolved to find a way to make a living online. She decided that porn was the easiest content area in which to do so, even though she had no personal interest in it whatsoever. It was just smart business; she saw a hole in an existing market and figured out how to fill it.

Said hole was the lack of a good way to find the porn you found most exciting. With automated site-indexing Web crawlers still in their infancy, most people’s on-ramp to the Web at the time was the Yahoo! home page, an exhaustive list of hand-curated links, a sort of Internet Yellow Pages. But Yahoo! wasn’t about to risk offending the investors who had just rewarded it with the splashiest IPO this side of Netscape’s by getting into porn curation.

So, Mansfield decided to make her own Yahoo! for porn. She called it Persian Kitty, after the family cat. Anyone could submit a porn site to her to be listed, after which she would do her due diligence by ensuring it was what they said it was and add it to one or more of her many fussily specific categories. She compared her relationship with the sex organs she spent hours per day staring at to that of a gynecologist: “I’m probably the strangest adult cruiser there is. I go and look at the structure [of the site, not the sex organs!], look at what they offer, count the images, and I’m out.” While a simple listing on Persian Kitty was free, she made money — quite a lot of money — by getting the owners of porn sites to pay for banner advertisements and priority placement within the categories, long before such online advertising went mainstream. Like Danni Ashe, she eventually sold her business for a small fortune and walked away.

We’ve met an unexpected number of female entrepreneurs thus far. And indeed, if you’re looking for positives to take away from the earliest days of online porn, one of them must surely be the number of women who took advantage of the low barriers to entry in online media to make or facilitate porn on their own terms — a welcome contrast to the notoriously exploitive old-school porn industry, a morally reprehensible place regardless of your views on sexual mores. “People have an idea of who runs a sexually oriented site on the Web,” said Danni Ashe during a chance encounter with the film critic Roger Ebert at Cannes. “They think of a dirty old man with a cigar. A Mafia type.” However you judged her, she certainly didn’t fit that stereotype.

Sadly, though, the stereotype became more and more the rule as time went on and the money waiting to be made from sex on the Web continued to escalate almost exponentially. By the turn of the millennium, the online porn industry was mostly controlled by men, just like the offline one. In the end, that is to say, Richard Gordon rather than Danni Ashe or Beth Mansfield became the archetypal porn entrepreneur online as well.

Another of the new bosses who were the same as the old was Ron “Fantasy Man” Levi, an imposing amalgamation of muscles, tattoos, and hair tonic who looked and lived like a character out of a mob movie. Having made his first fortune as the owner of a network of phone-sex providers, Levi, like Gordon before him, turned to the Web as the logical next frontier. His programmers developed the technology behind what we now refer to as “online affiliate marketing,” yet another of the mainstays of modern e-commerce, in a package he called the “XXX Counter.”

In a sense, it was just a super-powered version of what Beth Mansfield was already doing on Persian Kitty. By taking advantage of cookies — small chunks of persistent information that a Web browser can be asked to store on a user’s hard drive, that can then be used to track that user’s progress from site to site — the XXX Counter was able to see exactly what links had turned a sex-curious surfer into a paying customer of one or more porn sites.

This technology is almost as important to the commercial Web of today as the ability to accept credit cards. It’s employed by countless online stores from Amazon on down, being among other things the reason that a profession with the title of “online influencer” exists today. (Oh, what a strange world we live in…) Patchen Barss:

The esoteric computer technology which originally merely allowed EuroNubiles.com to know when PantyhosePlanet.com had sent some customers their way is today a key part of how Amazon, iTunes, eBay, and thousands of other online retailers work. Each offers a commission system for referring sites that send paying traffic their way. They rarely acknowledge that this key part of their business model was developed and refined by the adult industry.

All of the stories and players we’ve met thus far, along with many, many more, added up to a thriving industry, long before respectable e-commerce was much more than a twinkle in Jeff Bezos’s eye. Wired magazine reported in its December 1997 issue that an extraordinary 28,000 adult sites now existed on the World Wide Web, and that one or more of them were visited by 30 percent of all Internet-connected computers every single month. Estimates of the annual revenues they were bringing in ranged from $100 million to $1.2 billion. The joke in Silicon Valley and Wall Street alike was that porn was the only thing yet making real money on the Web (as opposed to the funny money of IPOs and venture capitalists, a product of aspirations rather than operations). Porn was the only form of online content that people had as yet definitively shown themselves to be willing — eager, in fact — to pay for. From the same Wired article:

Within the information-and-entertainment category — sales of online content, as opposed to consumer goods and financial services — commercial sex sites are almost the only ones in the black. Other content providers, operating in an environment that puts any offering that doesn’t promise an orgasm at a competitive disadvantage, are still trying to come up with a viable business model. ESPN SportsZone may be one of the most popular content sites on the Web, but most of what it offers is free. Online game developers can’t figure out whether to impose a flat fee or charge by the hour or rely on ad sales. USA Today had to cut the monthly subscription fee on its website from $15 to $13 and finally to nothing. Among major print publications, only The Wall Street Journal has managed to impose a blanket subscription fee.

“Sex and money,” observes Mike Wheeler, president of MSNBC Desktop Video, a Web-based video news service for the corporate market. “Those are the two areas you can charge for.”

The San Francisco Chronicle put it more succinctly at about the same time: “There’s a two-word mantra for people who want to make money on the Internet — sex sells.”

Ironically, the Communications Decency Act — the law that had first prompted so many online porn operators to lock their content behind paywalls — was already history by the time the publications wrote these words. The Supreme Court had struck it down once and for all in June of 1997, calling it a gross violation of the right to free speech. Nevertheless, the paywalled porn sites remained. Too many people were making too much money for it to be otherwise. In attempting to stamp out online porn, Senators Coats and Exon had helped to create a monster beyond their wildest nightmares.

In addition to blazing the trails that the Jeff Bezos of the world would soon follow in terms of online payments and affiliate marketing, porn sites were embracing new technologies like JavaScript before just about anyone else. As Wired magazine wrote, “No matter how you feel about their content, sex sites are among the most visually dazzling around.” “We’re on the cutting edge of everything,” said one porn-site designer. “If there’s a new technology out there and we want to add it to the site, it’s not hard to convince management.”

I could keep on going, through online technology after online technology. For example, take the video-conferencing systems that have become such a mainstay of business life around the world since the pandemic. Porn was their first killer app, after some enterprising entrepreneurs figured out that the only thing better than phone sex was phone sex with video. The porn mavens even anticipated — ominously, some might say — the business models of modern-day social-media sites. “The consumers are the content!” crowed one of them in the midst of setting up a site for amateur porn stars to let it all hang out. The vast majority of that deluge of new porn that now gets uploaded every day comes from amateurs who expect little or nothing in payment beyond the thrill of knowing that others are getting off on watching them. The people hosting this material understand what Richard Gordon, Beth Mansfield and Ron Levi knew before them. Allow me to repeat it one more time, just for good measure: the real money is in porn facilitation, not in porn production.

In light of all this, it’s small wonder that nobody talked much about porn on CD-ROM after 1996, that AdultDex became all about online sex, showcasing products like a “$100,000 turnkey cyberporn system” — a porn site in a box, perfect for those looking to break into the Web’s hottest sector in a hurry. “The whole Internet is being driven by the adult industry,” said one AdultDex exhibitor who asked not to be named. “If all this were made illegal tomorrow, the Internet would go back to being a bunch of scientists discussing geek stuff in email.” That might have been overstating the case just a bit, but there was no denying that virtual sex was at the vanguard of the most revolutionary development in mass communications since the printing press. The World Wide Web had fulfilled the promise of the seedy ROM.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: The books How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex by Samantha Cole, Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age by Frederick S. Lane III, The Players Ball: A Genius, a Con Man, and the Secret History of the Internet’s Rise by David Kushner, The Erotic Engine by Patchen Barss, and The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession by Kelsy Burke. Wired of February 1997 and December 1997; Time of July 1995; San Francisco Chronicle of November 19 1997; San Diego Tribune of May 8 2017; New York Times of August 1 2003 and May 1 2004; Wall Street Journal of May 20 1997. Online sources include “Sex Sells, Doesn’t It?” Mark Gimein on Salon, Jen and Dave’s current (porn-free) home page, and “‘I Started Really Getting Into It’: Seven Pioneers of Amateur Porn Look Back” by Alexa Tsoulis-Reay at The Cut.

You can find the 1990s-vintage Jen and Dave, JenniCam, Danni’s Hard Drive, and Persian Kitty at archive.org. Needless to say, you should understand what you are getting into before you visit.

Finally, for a highly fictionalized and sensationalized but entertaining and truthy tale about the early days of online porn, see the 2009 movie Middle Men.

Putting the “J” in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue!
November 17, 2023

See https://www.youtube.com/embed/DDxikKSDtZg?si=RRTSE2JmrlrcOZwc

Fair warning: this article includes some plot spoilers of Final Fantasy I through VI.

The videogame industry has always run on hype, but the amount of it that surrounded Final Fantasy VII in 1997 was unparalleled in its time. This new game for the Sony PlayStation console was simply inescapable. The American marketing teams of Sony and Square Corporation, the game’s Japanese developer and publisher, had been given $30 million with which to elevate Final Fantasy VII to the same status as the Super Marios of the world. They plastered Cloud, Aerith, Tifa, Sephiroth, and the game’s other soon-to-be-iconic characters onto urban billboards, onto the sides of buses, and into the pages of glossy magazines like Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Spin. Commercials for the game aired round the clock on MTV, during NFL games and Saturday Night Live, even on giant cinema screens in lieu of more traditional coming-attractions trailers. “They said it couldn’t be done in a major motion picture,” the stentorian announcer intoned. “They were right!” Even if you didn’t care a whit about videogames, you couldn’t avoid knowing that something pretty big was going down in that space.

And if you did care… oh, boy. The staffs of the videogame magazines, hardly known for their sober-mindedness in normal times, worked themselves up to positively orgasmic heights under Square’s not-so-gentle prodding. GameFan told its readers that Final Fantasy VII would be “unquestionably the greatest entertainment product ever created.”

The game is ridiculously beautiful. Analyze five minutes of gameplay in Final Fantasy VII and witness more artistic prowess than most entire games have. The level of detail is absolutely astounding. These graphics are impossible to describe; no words are great enough. Both map and battle graphics are rendered to a level of detail completely unprecedented in the videogame world. Before Final Fantasy VII, I couldn’t have imagined a game looking like this for many years, and that’s no exaggeration. One look at a cut scene or call spell should handily convince you. Final Fantasy VII looks so consistently great that you’ll quickly become numb to the power. Only upon playing another game will you once again realize just how fantastic it is.

But graphics weren’t all that the game had going for it. In fact, they weren’t even the aspect that would come to most indelibly define it for most of its players. No… that thing was, for the very first time in a mainstream console-based videogame with serious aspirations of becoming the toppermost of the poppermost, the story.

I don’t have any room to go into the details, but rest assured that Final Fantasy VII possesses the deepest, most involved story line ever in an RPG. There’s few games that have literally caused my jaw to drop at plot revelations, and I’m most pleased to say that Final Fantasy VII doles out these shocking, unguessable twists with regularity. You are constantly motivated to solve the latest mystery.

So, the hype rolled downhill, from Square at the top to the mass media, then on to the hardcore gamer magazines to ordinary owners of PlayStations. You would have to have been an iconoclastic PlayStation owner indeed not to be shivering with anticipation as the weeks counted down toward the game’s September 7 release. (Owners of other consoles could eat their hearts out; Final Fantasy VII was a PlayStation exclusive.)

Just last year, a member of an Internet gaming forum still fondly recalled how

the lead-up for the US launch of this game was absolutely insane, and, speaking personally, it is the most excited about a game I think I had ever been in my life, and nothing has come close since then. I was only fifteen at the time, and this game totally overtook all my thoughts and imagination. I had never even played a Final Fantasy game before, and I didn’t even like RPGs, yet I would spend hours reading and rereading all the articles from all the gaming magazines I had, inspecting all the screenshots and being absolutely blown away at the visual fidelity I was witnessing. I spent multiple days/hours with my Sony Discman listening to music and drawing the same artwork that was in all the mags. It was literally a genre- and generation-defining game.

Those who preferred to do their gaming on personal computers rather than consoles might be excused for scoffing at all these breathless commentators who seemed to presume that Final Fantasy VII was doing something that had never been done before. If you spent your days playing Quake, Final Fantasy VII’s battle graphics probably weren’t going to impress you overmuch; if you knew, say, Toonstruck, even the cut scenes might strike you as pretty crude. And then, too, computer-based adventure games and RPGs had been delivering well-developed long-form interactive narratives for many years by 1997, most recently with a decidedly cinematic bent more often than not, with voice actors in place of Final Fantasy VII’s endless text boxes. Wasn’t Final Fantasy VII just a case of console gamers belatedly catching on to something computer gamers had known all along, and being forced to do so in a technically inferior fashion at that?

Well, yes and no. It’s abundantly true that much of what struck so many as so revelatory about Final Fantasy VII really wasn’t anywhere near as novel as they thought it was. At the same time, though, the aesthetic and design philosophies which it applied to the abstract idea of the RPG truly were dramatically different from the set of approaches favored by Western studios. They were so different, in fact, that the RPG genre in general would be forever bifurcated in gamers’ minds going forward, as the notion of the “JRPG” — the Japanese RPG — entered the gaming lexicon. In time, the label would be applied to games that didn’t actually come from Japan at all, but that evinced the set of styles and approaches so irrevocably cemented in the Western consciousness under the label of “Japanese” by Final Fantasy VII.

We might draw a parallel with what happened in music in the 1960s. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and all the other Limey bands who mounted the so-called “British Invasion” of their former Colonies in 1964 had all spent their adolescence steeped in American rock and roll. They took those influences, applied their own British twist to them, then sold them back to American teenagers, who screamed and fainted in the concert halls like Final Fantasy VII fans later would in the pages of the gaming magazines, convinced that the rapture they were feeling was brought on by something genuinely new under the sun — which in the aggregate it was, of course. It took the Japanese to teach Americans how thrilling and accessible — even how emotionally moving — the gaming genre they had invented could truly be.

The roots of the JRPG can be traced back not just to the United States but to a very specific place and time there: to the American Midwest in the early 1970s, where and when Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, a pair of stolid grognards who would have been utterly nonplussed by the emotional histrionics of a Final Fantasy VII, created a “single-unit wargame” called Dungeons & Dragons. I wrote quite some years ago on this site that their game’s “impact on the culture at large has been, for better or for worse, greater than that of any single novel, film, or piece of music to appear during its lifetime.” I almost want to dismiss those words now as the naïve hyperbole of a younger self. But the thing is, I can’t; I have no choice but to stand by them. Dungeons & Dragons really was that earthshaking, not only in the obvious ways — it’s hard to imagine the post-millennial craze for fantasy in mass media, from the Lord of the Rings films to Game of Thrones, ever taking hold without it — but also in subtler yet ultimately more important ones, in the way it changed the role we play in our entertainments from that of passive spectators to active co-creators, making interactivity the watchword of an entire age of media.

The early popularity of Dungeons & Dragons coincided with the rise of accessible computing, and this proved a potent combination. Fans of the game with access to PLATO, a groundbreaking online community rooted in American universities, moved it as best they could onto computers, yielding the world’s first recognizable CRPGs. Then a couple of PLATO users named Robert Woodhead and Andrew Greenberg made a game of this type for the Apple II personal computer in 1981, calling it Wizardry. Meanwhile Richard Garriott was making Ultima, a different take on the same broad concept of “Dungeons & Dragons on a personal computer.”

By the time Final Fantasy VII stormed the gates of the American market so triumphantly in 1997, the cultures of gaming in the United States and Japan had diverged so markedly that one could almost believe they had never had much of anything to do with one another. Yet in these earliest days of digital gaming — long before the likes of the Nintendo Entertainment System, when Japanese games meant only coin-op arcade hits like Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong in the minds of most Americans — there was in fact considerable cross-pollination. For Japan was the second place in the world after North America where reasonably usable, pre-assembled, consumer-grade personal computers could be readily purchased; the Japanese Sharp MZ80K and Hitachi MB-6880 trailed the American Trinity of 1977 — the Radio Shack TRS-80, Apple II, and Commodore PET — by less than a year. If these two formative cultures of computing didn’t talk to one another, whom else could they talk to?

Thus pioneering American games publishers like Sierra On-Line and Brøderbund forged links with counterparts in Japan. A Japanese company known as Starcraft became the world’s first gaming localizer, specializing in porting American games to Japanese computers and translating their text into Japanese for the domestic market. As late as the summer of 1985, Roe R. Adams III could write in Computer Gaming World that Sierra’s sprawling twelve-disk-side adventure game Time Zone, long since written off at home as a misbegotten white elephant, “is still high on the charts after three years” in Japan. Brøderbund’s platformer Lode Runner was even bigger, having swum like a salmon upstream in Japan, being ported from home computers to coin-op arcade machines rather than the usual reverse. It had even spawned the world’s first e-sports league, whose matches were shown on Japanese television.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Wizardry game and the second and third Ultima had only recently been translated and released in Japan. And yet if Adams was to be believed,[1]Adams was not an entirely disinterested observer. He was already working with Robert Woodhead on Wizardry IV, and had in fact accompanied him to Japan in this capacity.

have huge followings. The computer magazines cover Lord British [Richard Garriott’s nom de plume] like our National Inquirer would cover a television star. When Robert Woodhead of Wizardry fame was recently in Japan, he was practically mobbed by autograph seekers. Just introducing himself in a computer store would start a near-stampede as people would run outside to shout that he was inside.

Robert Woodhead with Japanese Wizardry fans.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Wizardry and Ultima pump had been primed in Japan by a game called The Black Onyx, created the year before in their image for the Japanese market by an American named Henk Rogers.[2]A man with an international perspective if ever there was one, Rogers would later go on to fame and fortune as the man who brought Tetris out of the Soviet Union.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Wizardry in particular became a smashing success in Japan, even as a rather lackadaisical attitude toward formal and audiovisual innovation on the part of its masterminds was already condemning it to also-ran status against Ultima and its ilk in the United States. It undoubtedly helped that Wizardry was published in Japan by ASCII Corporation, that country’s nearest equivalent to Microsoft, with heaps of marketing clout and distributional muscle to bring to bear on any challenge. So, while the Wizardry series that American gamers knew petered out in somewhat anticlimactic fashion in the early 1990s after seven games,[3]It would be briefly revived for one final game, the appropriately named Wizardry 8, in 2001.Wizardry MMORPG, if it hadn’t proved to be just too big a mouthful for the hardware and telecommunications infrastructure at his disposal.

Box art helps to demonstrate Wizardry’s uncanny legacy in Japan. Here we see the original 1981 American release of the first game.

And here we have a Japan-only Wizardry from a decade later, self-consciously echoing a foreboding, austere aesthetic that had become more iconic in Japan than it had ever been in its home country. (American Wizardry boxes from the period look nothing like this, being illustrated in a more conventional, colorful epic-fantasy style.)

Much of the story of such cultural exchanges inevitably becomes a tale of translation. In its original incarnation, the first Wizardry game had had the merest wisp of a plot. In this as in all other respects it was a classic hack-and-slash dungeon crawler: work your way down through ten dungeon levels and kill the evil wizard, finito. What background context there was tended to be tongue-in-cheek, more Piers Anthony than J.R.R. Tolkien; the most desirable sword in the game was called the “Blade of Cuisinart,” for Pete’s sake. Wizardry’s Japanese translators, however, took it all in with wide-eyed earnestness, missing the winking and nodding entirely. They saw a rather grim, austere milieu a million miles away from the game that Americans knew — a place where a Cuisinart wasn’t a stainless-steel food processor but a portentous ancient warrior clan.

When the Japanese started to make their own Wizardry games, they continued in this direction, to almost hilarious effect if one knew the source material behind their efforts; it rather smacks of the post-apocalyptic monks in A Canticle for Liebowitz making a theology for themselves out of the ephemeral advertising copy of their pre-apocalyptic forebears. A franchise that had in its first several American releases aspired to be about nothing more than killing monsters for loot — and many of them aggressively silly monsters at that — gave birth to audio CDs full of po-faced stories and lore, anime films and manga books, a sprawling line of toys and miniature figures, even a complete tabletop RPG system. But, lest we Westerners begin to feel too smug about all this, know that the same process would eventually come to work in reverse in the JRPG field, with nuanced Japanese writing being flattened out and flat-out misunderstood by clueless American translators.

The history of Wizardry in Japan is fascinating by dint of its sheer unlikeliness, but the game’s importance on the global stage actually stems more from the Japanese games it influenced than from the ones that bore the Wizardry name right there on the box. For Wizardry, along with the early Ultima games, happened to catch the attention of Koichi Nakamura and Yuji Horii, a software-development duo who had already made several games together for a Japanese publisher called Enix. “Horii-san was really into Ultima, and I was really into Wizardry,” remembers Nakamura. This made sense. Nakamura was the programmer of the pair, naturally attracted to Wizardry’s emphasis on tactics and systems. Horii, on the other hand, was the storytelling type, who wrote for manga magazines in addition to games, and was thus drawn to Ultima’s quirkier, more sprawling world and its spirit of open-ended exploration. The pair decided to make their own RPG for the Japanese market, combining what they each saw as the best parts of Wizardry and Ultima.

Yuji Horii in the 1980s. Little known outside his home country, he is a celebrity inside its borders. In his book on Japanese videogame culture, Chris Kohler calls him a Steven Spielberg-like figure there, in terms both of name recognition and the style of entertainment he represents.

This was interesting, but not revolutionary in itself; you’ll remember that Henk Rogers had already done essentially the same thing in Japan with The Black Onyx before Wizardry and Ultima ever officially arrived there. Nevertheless, the choices Nakamura and Horii made as they set about their task give them a better claim to the title of revolutionaries on this front than Rogers enjoys. They decided that making a game that combined the best of Wizardry and Ultima really did mean just that: it did not mean, that is to say, throwing together every feature of each which they could pack in and calling it a day, as many a Western developer might have. They decided to make a game that was simpler than either of its inspirations, much less the two of them together.

Their reasons for doing so were artistic, commercial, and technical. In the realm of the first, Horii in particular just didn’t like overly complicated games; he was the kind of player who would prefer never to have to glance at a manual, whose ideal game intuitively communicated to you everything you needed to know in order to play it. In the realm of the second, the pair was sure that the average Japanese person, like the average person in most countries, felt the same as Horii; even in the United States, Ultima and Wizardry were niche products, and Nakamura and Horii had mass-market ambitions. And in the realm of the third, they were sharply limited in how much they could put into their RPG anyway, because they intended it for the Nintendo Famicom console, where their entire game — code, data, graphics, and sound — would have to fit onto a 64 K cartridge in lieu of floppy disks and would have to be steerable using an eight-button controller in lieu of a keyboard. Luckily, Nakamura and Horii already had experience with just this sort of simplification. Their most recent output had been inspired by the adventure games of American companies like Sierra and Infocom, but had replaced those games’ text parsers with controller-friendly multiple-choice menus.

In deciding to put American RPGs through the same wringer, they established one of the core attributes of the JRPG sub-genre: generally speaking, these games were and would remain simpler than their Western counterparts, which sometimes seemed to positively revel in their complexity as a badge of honor. Another attribute emerged fully-formed from the writerly heart of Yuji Horii. He crafted an unusually rich, largely linear plot for the game. Rather than being a disadvantage, he thought linearity would make this new style of console game “more accessible to consumers”: “We really focused on ensuring people would be able to experience the fun of the story.”

He called upon his friends at the manga magazines to help him illustrate his tale with large, colorful figures in that distinctly Japanese style that has become so immediately recognizable all over the world. At this stage, it was perhaps more prevalent on the box than in the game itself, the Famicom’s graphical fidelity being what it was. Nonetheless, another precedent that has held true in JRPGs right down to the present day was set by the overall visual aesthetic of this, the canonical first example of the breed. Ditto its audio aesthetic, which took the form of a memorable, melodic, eminently hummable chip-tune soundtrack. “From the very beginning, we wanted to create a warm, inviting world,” says Horii.

Dragon Quest. Ultima veterans will almost expect to meet Lord British on his throne somewhere. With its overhead view and its large over-world full of towns to be visited, Dragon Quest owed even more to Ultima than it did to Wizardry — unsurprisingly so, given that the former was the American RPG which its chief creative architect Yuji Horii preferred.

Dragon Quest was released on May 27, 1986. Console gamers — not only those in Japan, but anywhere on the globe — had never seen anything like it. Playing this game to the end was a long-form endeavor that could stretch out over weeks or months; you wrote down an alphanumeric code it provided to you on exit, then entered this code when you returned to the game in order to jump back to wherever you had left off.

That said, the fact that the entire game state could be packed into a handful of numbers and letters does serve to illustrate just how simple Dragon Quest really was at bottom. By the standards of only a few years later, much less today, it was pretty boring. Fighting random monsters wasn’t so much a distraction from the rest of the game as the only thing available to do; the grinding was the game. In 2012, critic Nick Simberg wondered at “how willing we were to sit down on the couch and fight the same ten enemies over and over for hours, just building up gold and experience points”; he compared Dragon Quest to “a child’s first crayon drawing, stuck with a magnet to the fridge.”

And yet, as the saying goes, you have to start somewhere. Japanese gamers were amazed and entranced, buying 1 million copies of Dragon Quest in its first six months, over 2 million copies in all. And so a new sub-genre was born, inspired by American games but indelibly Japanese in a way The Black Onyx had not been. Many or most of the people who played and enjoyed Dragon Quest had never even heard of its original wellspring Dungeons & Dragons.

We all know what happens when a game becomes a hit on the scale of Dragon Quest. There were sequels — two within two years of the first game, then three more in the eight years after them, as the demands of higher production values slowed down Enix’s pace a bit. Wizardry was big in Japan, but it was nothing compared to Dragon Quest, which sold 2.4 million copies in its second incarnation, followed by an extraordinary 3.8 million copies in its third. Middle managers and schoolmasters alike learned to dread the release of a new entry in the franchise, as about half the population of Japan under a certain age would invariably call in sick that day. When Enix started bringing out the latest games on non-business days, a widespread urban legend said this had been done in accordance with a decree from the Japanese Diet, which demanded that “henceforth Dragon Quest games are to be released on Sunday or national holidays only”; the urban legend wasn’t true, but the fact that so many people in Japan could so easily believe it says something in itself. Just as the early American game Adventure lent its name to an entire genre that followed it, the Japanese portmanteau word for “Dragon Quest” — Dorakue — became synonymous with the RPG in general there, such that when you told someone you were “playing dorakue” you might really be playing one of the series’s countless imitators.

Giving any remotely complete overview of these dorakue games would require dozens of articles, along with someone to write them who knows far more about them than I do. But one name is inescapable in the field. I refer, of course, to Final Fantasy.

Hironobu Sakaguchi in 1991.

Legend has it that Hironobu Sakaguchi, the father of Final Fantasy, chose that name because he thought that the first entry in the eventual franchise would be the last videogame he ever made. A former professional musician with numerous and diverse interests, Sakaguchi had been working for the Japanese software developer and publisher Square for a few years already by 1987, designing and programming Famicom action games that he himself found rather banal and that weren’t even selling all that well. He felt ready to do something else with his life, was poised to go back to university to try to figure out what that thing ought to be. But before he did so, he wanted to try something completely different at Square.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.dorakue game.[4]In another unexpected link between East and West, one of his most important assistants became Nasir Gebelli, an Iranian who had fled his country’s revolution for the United States in 1979 and become a game-programming rock star on the Apple II. After the heyday of the lone-wolf bedroom auteur began to fade there, Doug Carlston, the head of Brøderbund, brokered a job for him with his friends in Japan. There he maximized the Famicom’s potential in the same way he had that of the Apple II, despite not speaking a word of Japanese when he arrived. (“We’d go to a restaurant and no matter what he’d order — spaghetti or eggs — they’d always bring out steak,” Sakaguchi laughs.) Gebelli would program the first three Final Fantasy games almost all by himself.

Final Fantasy I.

The very first Final Fantasy may not have looked all that different from Dragon Quest at first glance — it was still a Famicom game, after all, with all the audiovisual limitations that implies — but it had a story line that was more thematically thorny and logistically twisted than anything Yuji Horii might have come up with. As it began, you found yourself in the midst of a quest to save a princess from an evil knight, which certainly sounded typical enough to anyone who had ever played a dorakue game before. In this case, however, you completed that task within an hour, only to learn that it was just a prologue to the real plot. In his book-length history and study of the aesthetics of Japanese videogames, Chris Kohler detects an implicit message here: “Final Fantasy is about much more than saving the princess. Compared to the adventure that is about to take place, saving a princess is merely child’s play.” In fact, only after the prologue was complete did the opening credits finally roll, thus displaying another consistent quality of Final Fantasy: its love of unabashedly cinematic drama.

Still, for all that it was more narratively ambitious than what had come before, the first Final Fantasy can, like the first Dragon Quest, seem a stunted creation today. Technical limitations meant that you still spent 95 percent of your time just grinding for experience. “Final Fantasy may have helped build the genre, but it didn’t necessarily know exactly how to make it fun,” acknowledges Aidan Moher in his book about JRPGs. And yet when it came to dorakue games in the late 1980s, it seemed that Sakaguchi’s countrymen were happy to reward even the potential for eventual fun. They made Final Fantasy the solid commercial success that had heretofore hovered so frustratingly out of reach of its creator; it sold 400,000 copies. Assured that he would never have to work on a mindless action game again, Sakaguchi agreed to stay on at Square to build upon its template.

Final Fantasy II, which was released exactly one year after the first game in December of 1988 and promptly doubled its sales, added more essential pieces to what would become the franchise’s template. Although labelled and marketed as a sequel, its setting, characters, and plot had no relation to what had come before. Going forward, it would remain a consistent point of pride with Sakaguchi to come up with each new Final Fantasy from whole cloth, even when fans begged him for a reunion with their favorite places and people. In a world afflicted with the sequelitis that ours is, he can only be commended for sticking to his guns.

In another sense, though, Final Fantasy II was notable for abandoning a blank slate rather than embracing it. For the first time, its players were given a pre-made party full of pre-made personalities to guide rather than being allowed to roll their own. Although they could rename the characters if they were absolutely determined to do so — this ability would be retained as a sort of vestigial feature as late as Final Fantasy VII — they were otherwise set in stone, the better to serve the needs of the set-piece story Sakaguchi wanted to tell. This approach, which many players of Western RPGs did and still do regard as a betrayal of one of the core promises of the genre, would become commonplace in JRPGs. Few contrasts illustrate so perfectly the growing divide between these two visions of the RPG: the one open-ended and player-driven, sometimes to a fault; the other tightly scripted and story-driven, again sometimes to a fault. In a Western RPG, you write a story for yourself; in a JRPG, you live a story that someone else has already written for you.

Consider, for example, the two lineage’s handling of mortality. If one of your characters dies in battle in a Western RPG, it might be difficult and expensive, or in some cases impossible, to restore her to life; in this case, you either revert to an earlier saved state or you just accept her death as another part of the story you’re writing and move on to the next chapter with an appropriately heavy heart. In a JRPG, on the other hand, death in battle is never final; it’s almost always easy to bring a character who gets beat down to zero hit points back to life. What are truly fatal, however, are pre-scripted deaths, the ones the writers have deemed necessary for storytelling purposes. Final Fantasy II already contained the first of these; years later, Final Fantasy VII would be host to the most famous of them all, a death so shocking that you just have to call it that scene and everyone who has ever played the game will immediately know what you’re talking about. To steal a phrase from Graham Nelson, the narrative always trumps the crossword in JRPGs; they happily override their gameplay mechanics whenever the story they wish to tell demands it, creating an artistic and systemic discontinuity that’s enough to make Aristotle roll over in his grave. Yet a huge global audience of players are not bothered at all by it — not if the story is good enough.

But we’ve gotten somewhat ahead of ourselves; the evolution of the 1980s JRPG toward the modern-day template came in fits and starts rather than a linear progression. Final Fantasy III, which was released in 1990, actually returned to a player-generated party, and yet the market failed to punish it for its conservatism. Far from it: it sold 1.4 million copies.

Final Fantasy IV, on the other hand, chose to double down on the innovations Final Fantasy II had deployed, and sold in about the same numbers as Final Fantasy III. Released in July of 1991, it provided you with not just a single pre-made party but an array of characters who moved in and out of your control as the needs of the plot dictated, thereby setting yet another longstanding precedent for the series going forward. Ditto the nature of the plot, which leaned into shades of gray as never before. Chris Kohler:

The story deals with mature themes and complex characters. In Final Fantasy II, the squeaky-clean main characters were attacked by purely evil dark knights; here, our main character is a dark knight struggling with his position, paid to kill innocents, trying to reconcile loyalty to his kingdom with his sense of right and wrong. He is involved in a sexual relationship. His final mission for the king turns out to be a mass murder: the “phantom monsters” are really just a town of peaceful humans whose magic the corrupt king has deemed dangerous. (Note the heavy political overtones.)

Among Western RPGs, only the more recent Ultima games had dared to deviate so markedly from the absolute-good-versus-absolute-evil tales of everyday heroic fantasy. (In fact, the plot of Final Fantasy IV bears a lot of similarities to that of Ultima V…)

Ever since Final Fantasy IV, the series has been filled with an inordinate number of moody young James Deans and long-suffering Natalie Woods who love them.

Final Fantasy IV was also notable for introducing an “active-time battle system,” a hybrid between the turn-based systems the series had previously employed and real-time combat, designed to provide some of the excitement of the latter without completely sacrificing the tactical affordances of the former. (In a nutshell, if you spend too long deciding what to do when it’s your turn, the enemies will jump in and take another turn of their own while you dilly-dally.) It too would remain a staple of the franchise for many installments to come.

Final Fantasy V, which was released in December of 1992, was like Final Fantasy III something of a placeholder or even a retrenchment, dialing back on several of the fourth game’s innovations. It sold almost 2.5 million copies.

Both the fourth and fifth games had been made for the Super Famicom, Nintendo’s 16-bit successor to its first console, and sported correspondingly improved production values. But most JRPG fans agree that it was with the sixth game — the last for the Super Famicom — that all the pieces finally came together into a truly friction-less whole. Indeed, a substantial and vocal minority will tell you that Final Fantasy VI rather than its immediate successor is the best Final Fantasy ever, balanced perfectly between where the series had been and where it was going.

Final Fantasy VI abandoned conventional epic-fantasy settings for a steampunk milieu out of Jules Verne. As we’ll see in a later article, Final Fantasy VII’s setting would deviate even more from the norm. This creative restlessness is one of the series’s best traits, standing it in good stead in comparison to the glut of nearly indistinguishably Tolkienesque Western RPGs of the 1980s and 1990s.

From its ominous opening-credits sequence on, Final Fantasy VI strained for a gravitas that no previous JRPG had approached, and arguably succeeded in achieving it at least intermittently. It played out on a scale that had never been seen before; by the end of the game, more than a dozen separate characters had moved in and out of your party. Chris Kohler identifies the game’s main theme as “love in all its forms — romantic love, parental love, sibling love, and platonic love. Sakaguchi asks the player, what is love and where can we find it?”

Before that scene in Final Fantasy VII, Hironobu Sakaguchi served up a shocker of equal magnitude in Final Fantasy VI. Halfway through the game, the bad guys win despite your best efforts and the world effectively ends, leaving your party wandering through a post-apocalyptic World of Ruin like the characters in a Harlan Ellison story. The effect this had on some players’ emotions could verge on traumatizing — heady stuff for a videogame on a console still best known worldwide as the cuddly home of Super Mario. For many of its young players, Final Fantasy VI was their first close encounter on their own recognizance — i.e., outside of compulsory school assignments — with the sort of literature that attempts to move beyond tropes to truly, thoughtfully engage with the human condition.

It’s easy for an old, reasonably well-read guy like me to mock Final Fantasy VI’s highfalutin aspirations, given that they’re stuffed into a game that still resolves at the granular level into bobble-headed figures fighting cartoon monsters. And it’s equally easy to scoff at the heavy-handed emotional manipulation that has always been part and parcel of the JRPG; subtle the sub-genre most definitely is not. Nonetheless, meaningful literature is where you find it, and the empathy it engenders can only be welcomed in a world in desperate need of it. Whatever else you can say about Final Fantasy and most of its JRPG cousins, the messages these games convey are generally noble ones, about friendship, loyalty, and the necessity of trying to do the right thing in hard situations, even when it isn’t so easy to even figure out what the right thing is. While these messages are accompanied by plenty of violence in the abstract, it is indeed abstracted — highly stylized and, what with the bifurcation between game and story that is so prevalent in the sub-genre, often oddly divorced from the games’ core themes.

Released in April of 1994, Final Fantasy VI sold 2.6 million copies in Japan. By this point the domestic popularity of the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole was rivaled only by that of Super Mario and Dragon Quest; two of the three biggest gaming franchises in Japan, that is to say, were dorakue games. In the Western world, however, the picture was quite different.

In the United States, the first-generation Nintendo Famicom was known as the Nintendo Entertainment System, the juggernaut of a console that rescued videogames in the eyes of the wider culture from the status of a brief-lived fad to that of a long-lived entertainment staple, on par with movies in terms of economics if not cachet. Yet JRPGs weren’t a part of that initial success story. The first example of the breed didn’t even reach American shores until 1989. It was, appropriately enough, the original Dragon Quest, the game that had started it all in Japan; it was renamed Dragon Warrior for the American market, due to a conflict with an old American tabletop RPG by the name of Dragonquest whose trademarks had been acquired by the notoriously litigious TSR of Dungeons & Dragons fame. Enix did make some efforts to modernize the game, such as replacing the password-based saving system with a battery that let you save your state to the cartridge itself. (This same method had been adopted by Final Fantasy and most other post-Dragon Quest JRPGs on the Japanese market as well.) But American console gamers had no real frame of reference for Dragon Warrior, and even the marketing geniuses of Nintendo, which published the game itself in North America, struggled to provide them one. With cartridges piling up in Stateside warehouses, they were reduced to giving away hundreds of thousands of copies of Dragon Warrior to the subscribers of Nintendo Power magazine. For some of these, the game came as a revelation seven years before Final Fantasy VII; for most, it was an inscrutable curiosity that was quickly tossed aside.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Final Fantasy I, on the other hand, received a more encouraging reception in the United States when it reached there in 1990: it sold 700,000 copies, 300,000 more than it had managed in Japan. Nevertheless, with the 8-bit Nintendo console reaching the end of its lifespan, Square didn’t bother to export the next two games in the series. It did export Final Fantasy IV for the Super Famicom — or rather the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, as it was known in the West. The results were disappointing in light of the previous game’s reception, so much so that Square didn’t export Final Fantasy V.[5]Square did release a few spinoff games under the Final Fantasy label in the United States and Europe as another way of testing the Western market: Final Fantasy Legend and Final Fantasy Adventure for the Nintendo Game Boy handheld console, and Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest for the Super Nintendo. Although none of them were huge sellers, the Game Boy titles in particular have their fans even today.Final Fantasy II was the Japanese Final Fantasy IV and the American Final Fantasy III was the Japanese Final Fantasy VI. The latter game shifted barely one-fourth as many copies in the three-times larger American marketplace as it had in Japan — not disastrous numbers, but still less than the first Final Fantasy had managed.

The heart of the problem was translation, in both the literal sense of the words on the screen and a broader cultural sense. Believing with some justification that the early American consoles from Atari and others had been undone by a glut of substandard product, Nintendo had long made a science out of the polishing of gameplay, demanding that every prospective release survive an unrelenting testing gauntlet before it was granted the “Nintendo Seal of Quality” and approved for sale. But the company had no experience or expertise in polishing text to a similar degree. In most cases, this didn’t matter; most Nintendo games contained very little text anyway. But RPGs were the exception. The increasingly intricate story lines which JRPGs were embracing by the early 1990s demanded good translations by native speakers. What many of them actually got was something very different, leaving even those American gamers who wanted to fall in love baffled by the Japanese-English-dictionary-derived word salads they saw before them. And then, too, many of the games’ cultural concerns and references were distinctly Japanese, such that even a perfect translation might have left Americans confused. It was, one might say, the Blade of Cuisinart problem in reverse.

To be sure, there were Americans who found all of the barriers to entry into these deeply foreign worlds to be more bracing than intimidating, who took on the challenge of meeting the games on their own terms, often emerging with a lifelong passion for all things Japanese. At this stage, though, they were the distinct minority. In Japan and the United States alike, the conventional wisdom through the mid-1990s was that JRPGs didn’t and couldn’t sell well overseas; this was regarded as a fact of life as fundamental as the vagaries of climate. (Thanks to this belief, none of the mainline Final Fantasy games to date had been released in Europe at all.) It would take Final Fantasy VII and a dramatic, controversial switch of platforms on the part of Square to change that. But once those things happened… look out. The JRPG would conquer the world yet.

Where to Get It: Remastered and newly translated versions of the Japanese Final Fantasy I, II, III, IV, V, and VI are available on Steam. The Dragon Quest series has been converted to iOS and Android apps, just a search away on the Apple and Google stores.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: the books Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World by Matt Alt, Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life by Chris Kohler, Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese RPGs in the West by Aidan Moher, and Atari to Zelda: Japan’s Videogames in Global Contexts by Mia Consalvo. GameFan of September 1997; Retro Gamer 69, 108, and 170; Computer Gaming World of September 1985 and December 1992.

Online sources include Polygon’s authoritative “Final Fantasy 7: An Oral History”; “The Long Life of the Original Wizardry“ by guest poster Alex on The CRPG Addict blog; “Wizardry: Japanese Franchise Outlook” by Sam Derboo at Hardcore Gaming 101, plus an interview Robert Woodhead, conducted by Jared Petty at the same site; “Wizardry’s Wild Ride from West to East” at VentureBeat; “The Secret History of AnimEigo” at that company’s homepage; Robert Woodhead’s slides from a presentation at the 2022 KansasFest Apple II convention; a post on tabletop Wizardry at the Japanese Tabletop RPG blog; and “Dragon Warrior: Aging Disgracefully” by Nick Simberg at (the now-defunct) DamnLag.

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

Adams was not an entirely disinterested observer. He was already working with Robert Woodhead on Wizardry IV, and had in fact accompanied him to Japan in this capacity.

↑2

A man with an international perspective if ever there was one, Rogers would later go on to fame and fortune as the man who brought Tetris out of the Soviet Union.

↑3

It would be briefly revived for one final game, the appropriately named Wizardry 8, in 2001.

↑4

In another unexpected link between East and West, one of his most important assistants became Nasir Gebelli, an Iranian who had fled his country’s revolution for the United States in 1979 and become a game-programming rock star on the Apple II. After the heyday of the lone-wolf bedroom auteur began to fade there, Doug Carlston, the head of Brøderbund, brokered a job for him with his friends in Japan. There he maximized the Famicom’s potential in the same way he had that of the Apple II, despite not speaking a word of Japanese when he arrived. (“We’d go to a restaurant and no matter what he’d order — spaghetti or eggs — they’d always bring out steak,” Sakaguchi laughs.) Gebelli would program the first three Final Fantasy games almost all by himself.

↑5

Square did release a few spinoff games under the Final Fantasy label in the United States and Europe as another way of testing the Western market: Final Fantasy Legend and Final Fantasy Adventure for the Nintendo Game Boy handheld console, and Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest for the Super Nintendo. Although none of them were huge sellers, the Game Boy titles in particular have their fans even today.

Putting the “J” in the RPG, Part 2: PlayStation for the Win
December 8, 2023

From the Seven Hills of Rome to the Seven Sages of China’s Bamboo Grove, from the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World to the Seven Heavens of Islam, from the Seven Final Sayings of Jesus to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the number seven has always struck us as a special one. Hironobu Sakaguchi and his crew at Square, the people behind the Final Fantasy series, were no exception. In the mid-1990s, when the time came to think about what the seventh entry in the series ought to be, they instinctively felt that this one had to be bigger and better than any that had come before. It had to double down on all of the series’s traditional strengths and tropes to become the ultimate Final Fantasy. Sakaguchi and company would achieve these goals; the seventh Final Fantasy game has remained to this day the best-selling, most iconic of them all. But the road to that seventh heaven was not an entirely smooth one.

The mid-1990s were a transformative period, both for Square as a studio and for the industry of which it was a part. For the former, it was “a perfect storm, when Square still acted like a small company but had the resources of a big one,” as Matt Leone of Polygon writes.  Meanwhile the videogames industry at large was feeling the ground shift under its feet, as the technologies that went into making and playing console-based games were undergoing their most dramatic shift since the Atari VCS had first turned the idea of a machine for playing games on the family television into a popular reality. CD-ROM drives were already available for Sega’s consoles, with a storage capacity two orders of magnitude greater than that of the most capacious cartridges. And 3D graphics hardware was on the horizon as well, promising to replace pixel graphics with embodied, immersive experiences in sprawling virtual worlds. Final Fantasy VII charged headlong into these changes like a starving man at a feast, sending great greasy globs of excitement — and also controversy — flying everywhere.

The controversy came in the form of one of the most shocking platform switches in the history of videogames. To fully appreciate the impact of Square’s announcement on January 12, 1996, that Final Fantasy VII would run on the new Sony PlayStation rather than Nintendo’s next-generation console, we need to look a little closer at the state of the console landscape in the years immediately preceding it.

Through the first half of the 1990s, Nintendo was still the king of console gaming, but it was no longer the unchallenged supreme despot it had been during the 1980s. Nintendo had always been conservative in terms of hardware, placing its faith, like Apple Computer in an adjacent marketplace, in a holistic customer experience rather than raw performance statistics. As part and parcel of this approach, every game that Nintendo agreed to allow into its walled garden was tuned and polished to a fine sheen, having any jagged edges that might cause anyone any sort of offense whatsoever painstakingly sanded away. An upstart known as Sega had learned to live in the gaps this business philosophy opened up, deploying edgier games on more cutting-edge hardware. As early as December of 1991, Sega began offering its Japanese customers a CD-drive add-on for its current console, the Mega Drive (known as the Sega Genesis in North America, which received the CD add-on the following October). Although the three-year-old Mega Drive’s intrinsic limitations made this early experiment in multimedia gaming for the living room a somewhat underwhelming affair — there was only so much you could do with 61 colors at a resolution of 320 X 240 — it perfectly illustrated the differences in the two companies’ approaches. While Sega threw whatever it had to hand at the wall just to see what stuck, Nintendo held back like a Dana Carvey impression of George Herbert Walker Bush: “Wouldn’t be prudent at this juncture…”

Sony was all too well-acquainted with Nintendo’s innate caution. As the co-creator of the CD storage format, it had signed an agreement with Nintendo back in 1988 to make a CD drive for the upcoming Super Famicom console (which was to be known as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in the West) as soon as the technology had matured enough for it to be cost-effective. By the time the Super Famicom was released in 1990, Sony was hard at work on the project. But on May 29, 1991, just three days before a joint Nintendo/Sony “Play Station” was to have been demonstrated to the world at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Nintendo suddenly backed out of the deal, announcing that it would instead be working on CD-ROM technology with the Dutch electronics giant Philips — ironically, Sony’s partner in the creation of the original CD standard.

This prototype of the Sony “Play Station” surfaced in 2015.

Nintendo’s reason for pulling out seems to have come down to the terms of the planned business relationship. Nintendo, whose instinct for micro-management and tough deal-making was legendary, had uncharacteristically promised Sony a veritable free hand, allowing it to publish whatever CD-based software it wanted without asking Nintendo’s permission or paying it any royalty whatsoever. In fact, given that a contract to that effect had already been signed long before the Consumer Electronics Show, Sony was, legally speaking, still free to continue with the Play Station on its own, piggybacking on the success of Nintendo’s console. And initially it seemed inclined to do just that. “Sony will throw open its doors to software makers to produce software using music and movie assets,” it announced at the show, promising games based on its wide range of media properties, from the music catalog of Michael Jackson to the upcoming blockbuster movie Hook. Even worse from Nintendo’s perspective, “in order to promote the Super Disc format, Sony intends to broadly license it to the software industry.” Nintendo’s walled garden, in other words, looked about to be trampled by a horde of unwashed, unvetted, unmonetized intruders charging through the gate Sony was ready and willing to open to them. The prospect must have sent the control freaks inside Nintendo’s executive wing into conniptions.

It was a strange situation any way you looked at it. The Super Famicom might soon become the host of not one but two competing CD-ROM solutions, an authorized one from Philips and an unauthorized one from Sony, each using different file formats for a different library of games and other software. (Want to play Super Mario on CD? Buy the Philips drive! Want Michael Jackson? Buy the Play Station!)

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[1]Philips wasn’t, however, above exploiting the letter of its contract with Nintendo to make a Mario game and three substandard Legend of Zelda games available for the CD-i.

Still, the episode had given some at Sony a serious case of videogame jealousy. It was clear by now that this new industry wasn’t a fad. Why shouldn’t Sony be a part of it, just as it was an integral part of the music, movie, and television industries? On June 24, 1992, the company held an unusually long and heated senior-management debate. After much back and forth, CEO Norio Ohga pronounced his conclusion: Sony would turn the Play Station into the PlayStation, a standalone CD-based videogame console of its own, both a weapon with which to bludgeon Nintendo for its breach of trust and — and ultimately more importantly — an entrée to the fastest-growing entertainment sector in the world.

The project was handed to one Ken Kutaragi, who had also been in charge of the aborted Super Famicom CD add-on. He knew precisely what he wanted Sony’s first games console to be: a fusion of CD-ROM with another cutting-edge technology, hardware-enabled 3D graphics. “From the mid-1980s, I dreamed of the day when 3D computer graphics could be enjoyed at home,” he says. “What kind of graphics could we create if we combined a real-time, 3D computer-graphics engine with CD-ROM? Surely this would develop into a new form of entertainment.”

It took him and his engineers a little over two years to complete the PlayStation, which in addition to a CD drive and a 3D-graphics system sported a 32-bit MIPS microprocessor running at 34 MHz, 3 MB of memory (of which 1 MB was dedicated to graphics alone), audiophile-quality sound hardware, and a slot for 128 K memory cards that could be used for saving game state between sessions, ensuring that long-form games like JRPGs would no longer need to rely on tedious manual-entry codes or balky, unreliable cartridge-mounted battery packs for the purpose.

In contrast to the consoles of Nintendo, which seemed almost self-consciously crafted to look like toys, and those of Sega, which had a boy-racer quality about them, the Sony PlayStation looked stylish and adult — but not too adult. (The stylishness came through despite the occasionally mooted comparisons to a toilet.)

The first Sony PlayStations went on sale in Tokyo’s famed Akihabara electronics district on December 3, 1994. Thousands camped out in line in front of the shops the night before. “It’s so utterly different from traditional game machines that I didn’t even think about the price,” said one starry-eyed young man to a reporter on the scene. Most of the shops were sold out before noon. Norio Ohga was mobbed by family and friends in the days that followed, all begging him to secure them a PlayStation for their children before Christmas. It was only when that happened, he would later say, that he fully realized what a game changer (pun intended) his company had on its hands. Just like that, the fight between Nintendo and Sega — the latter had a new 32-bit CD-based console of its own, the Saturn, while the former was taking it slowly and cautiously, as usual — became a three-way battle royal.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.vibe was better. Nintendo had its own home-grown line of games for its consoles to which it always gave priority in every sense of the word, a conflict of interest from which Sony was blessedly free.[2]Sony did purchase the venerable British game developer and publisher Psygnosis well before its console’s launch to help prime the pump with some quality games, but it largely left it to manage its own affairs on the other side of the world.Galaxian and Pac-Man — into committing itself “100 percent to the PlayStation.” The first fruit of this defection was Ridge Racer, a port of a stand-up arcade game that became the new console’s breakout early hit.

Square was also among the software houses that Ken Kutaragi approached, but he made no initial inroads there. For all the annoyances of dealing with Nintendo, it still owned the biggest player base in the world, one that had treated Final Fantasy very well indeed, to the tune of more than 9 million games sold to date in Japan alone. This was not a partner that one abandoned lightly — especially not with the Nintendo 64, said partner’s own next-generation console, due at last in 1996. It promised to be every bit as audiovisually capable as the Sony PlayStation or Sega Saturn, even as it was based around a 64-bit processor in place of the 32-bit units of the competition.

Indeed, in many ways the relationship between Nintendo and Square seemed closer than ever in the wake of the PlayStation’s launch. When Yoshihiro Maruyama joined Square in September of 1995 to run its North American operations, he was told that “Square will always be with Nintendo. As long as you work for us, it’s basically the same as working for Nintendo.” Which in a sense he literally was, given that Nintendo by now owned a substantial chunk of Square’s stock. In November of 1995, Nintendo’s president Hiroshi Yamauchi cited the Final Fantasy series as one of his consoles’ unsurpassed crown jewels — eat your heart out, Sony! — at Shoshinkai, Nintendo’s annual press shindig and trade show. As its farewell to the Super Famicom, Square had agreed to make Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, dropping Nintendo’s Italian plumber into a style of game completely different from his usual fare. Released in March of 1996, it was a predictably huge hit in Japan, while also, encouragingly, leveraging the little guy’s Stateside popularity to become the most successful JRPG since Final Fantasy I in those harsh foreign climes.

But Super Mario RPG wound up marking the end of an era in more ways than Nintendo had imagined: it was not just Square’s last Super Famicom RPG but its last major RPG for a Nintendo console, full stop. For just as it was in its last stages of development, there came the earthshaking announcement of January 12, 1996, that Final Fantasy was switching platforms to the PlayStation. Et tu, Square? “I was kind of shocked,” Yoshihiro Maruyama admits. As was everyone else.

The Nintendo 64, which looked like a toy — and an anachronistic one at that — next to the PlayStation.

Square’s decision was prompted by what seemed to have become an almost reactionary intransigence on the part of Nintendo when it came to the subject of CD-ROM. After the two abortive attempts to bring CDs to the Super Famicom, everyone had assumed as a matter of course that they would be the storage medium of the Nintendo 64. It was thus nothing short of baffling when the first prototypes of the console were unveiled in November of 1995 with no CD drive built-in and not even any option on the horizon for adding one. Nintendo’s latest and greatest was instead to live or die with old-school cartridges which had a capacity of just 64 MB, one-tenth that of a CD.

Why did Nintendo make such a counterintuitive choice? The one compelling technical argument for sticking with cartridges was the loading time of CDs, a mechanical storage medium rather than a solid-state one. Nintendo’s ethos of user-friendly accessibility had always insisted that a game come up instantly when you turned the console on and play without interruption thereafter. Nintendo believed, with considerable justification, that this quality had been the not-so-secret weapon in its first-generation console’s victorious battle against floppy-disk-based 8-bit American microcomputers that otherwise boasted similar audiovisual and processing capabilities, such as the Commodore 64. The PlayStation CD drive, which could transfer 300 K per second into memory, was many, many times faster than the Commodore 64’s infamously slow disk drive, but it wasn’t instant. A cartridge, on the other hand, for all practical purposes was.

Fair enough, as far as it went. Yet there were other, darker insinuations swirling around the games industry which had their own ring of truth. Nintendo, it was said, was loath to give up its stranglehold on the means of production of cartridges and embrace commodity CD-stamping facilities. Most of all, many sensed, the decision to stay with cartridges was bound up with Nintendo’s congenital need to be different, and to assert its idiosyncratic hegemony by making everyone else dance to its tune while it was at it. The question now was whether it had taken this arrogance too far, was about to dance itself into irrelevance while the makers of third-party games moved on to other, equally viable alternative platforms.

Exhibit Number One of same was the PlayStation, which seemed tailor-made for the kind of big, epic game that every Final Fantasy to date had strained to be. It was far easier to churn out huge quantities of 3D graphics than it was hand-drawn pixel art, while the staggering storage capacity of CD-ROM gave Square someplace to keep it all — with, it should not be forgotten, the possibility of finding even more space by the simple expedient of shipping a game on multiple CDs, another affordance that cartridges did not allow. And then there were those handy little memory cards for saving state. Those benefits were surely worth trading a little bit of loading time for.

But there was something else about the PlayStation as well that made it an ideal match for Hironobu Sakaguchi’s vision of gaming. Especially after the console arrived in North America and Europe in September of 1995, it fomented a sweeping change in the way the gaming hobby was perceived. “The legacy of the original Playstation is that it took gaming from a pastime that was for young people or maybe slightly geeky people,” says longtime Sony executive Jim Ryan, “and it turned it into a highly credible form of mass entertainment, really comparable with the music business and the movie business.” Veteran game designer Cliff Bleszinski concurs: “The PlayStation shifted the console from having an almost toy-like quality into consumer electronics that are just as desired by twelve-year-olds as they are by 35-year-olds.”

Rather than duking it out with Nintendo and Sega for the eight-to-seventeen age demographic, Sony shifted its marketing attention to young adults, positioning PlayStation gaming as something to be done before or after a night out at the clubs — or while actually at the clubs, for that matter: Sony paid to install the console in trendy nightspots all over the world, so that their patrons could enjoy a round or two of WipEout between trips to the dance floor. In effect, Sony told the people who had grown up with Nintendo and Sega that it was okay to keep on gaming, as long as they did it on a PlayStation from now on. Sony’s marketers understood that, if they could conquer this demographic, that success would automatically spill down into the high-school set that had previously been Sega’s bread and butter, since kids of that age are always aspiring to do whatever the university set is up to. Their logic was impeccable; the Sony PlayStation would destroy the Sega Saturn in due course.

For decades now, the hipster stoner gamer, slumped on the couch with controller in one hand and a bong in the other, has been a pop-culture staple. Sony created that stereotype in the space of a year or two in the 1990s. Whatever else you can say about it, it plays better with the masses than the older one of a pencil-necked nerd sitting bolt upright on his neatly made bed. David James, star goalkeeper for the Premier League football team Liverpool F.C., admitted that he had gotten “carried away” playing PlayStation the night before by way of explaining the three goals that he conceded in a match against Newcastle. It was hard to imagine substituting “Nintendo” or “Saturn” for “PlayStation” in that statement. In May of 1998, Sony would be able to announce triumphantly that, according to its latest survey, the average age of a PlayStation gamer was a positively grizzled 22. It had hit the demographic it was aiming for spot-on, with a spillover that reached both younger and older folks. David Ranyard, a member of Generation PlayStation who has had a varied and successful career in games since the millennium:

At the time of its launch, I was a student, and I’d always been into videogames, from the early days of arcades. I would hang around playing Space Invaders and Galaxian, and until the PlayStation came out, that kind of thing made me a geek. But this console changed all that. Suddenly videogames were cool — not just acceptable, but actually club-culture cool. With a soundtrack from the coolest techno and dance DJs, videogames became a part of [that] subculture. And it led to more mainstream acceptance of consoles in general.

The new PlayStation gamer stereotype dovetailed beautifully with the moody, angsty heroes that had been featuring prominently in Final Fantasy for quite some installments by now. Small wonder that Sakaguchi was more and more smitten with Sony.

Still, it was one hell of a bridge to burn; everyone at Square knew that there would be no going back if they signed on with Sony. Well aware of how high the stakes were for all parties, Sony declared its willingness to accept an extremely low per-unit royalty and to foot the bill for a lot of the next Final Fantasy game’s marketing, promising to work like the dickens to break it in the West. In the end, Sakaguchi allowed himself to be convinced. He had long run Final Fantasy as his own fiefdom at Square, and this didn’t change now: upper management rubber-stamped his decision to make Final Fantasy VII for the Sony PlayStation.

The announcement struck Japan’s games industry with all the force of one of Sakaguchi’s trademark Final Fantasy plot twists. For all the waves Sony had been making recently, nobody had seen this one coming. For its part, Nintendo had watched quite a number of studios defect to Sony already, but this one clearly hurt more than any of the others. It sold off all of its shares in Square and refused to take its calls for the next five years.

The raised stakes only gave Sakaguchi that much more motivation to make Final Fantasy VII amazing — so amazing that even the most stalwart Nintendo loyalists among the gaming population would be tempted to jump ship to the PlayStation in order to experience it. There had already been an unusually long delay after Final Fantasy VI, during which Square had made Super Mario RPG and another, earlier high-profile JRPG called Chrono Trigger, the fruit of a partnership between Hironobu Sakaguchi and Yuji Horii of Dragon Quest fame. (This was roughly equivalent in the context of 1990s Western pop culture to Oasis and Blur making an album together.) Now the rush was on to get Final Fantasy VII out the door within a year, while the franchise and its new platform the PlayStation were still smoking hot.

In defiance of the wisdom found in The Mythical Man-Month, Sakaguchi decided to both make the game quickly and make it amazing by throwing lots and lots of personnel at the problem: 150 people in all, three times as many as had worked on Final Fantasy VI. Cost was no object, especially wherever yen could be traded for time. Square spent the equivalent of $40 million on Final Fantasy VII in the course of just one year, blowing up all preconceptions of how much it could cost to make a computer or console game. (The most expensive earlier game that I’m aware of is the 1996 American “interactive movie” Wing Commander IV, which its developer Origin Systems claimed to have cost $12 million.) By one Square executive’s estimate, almost half of Final Fantasy VII’s budget went for the hundreds of high-end Silicon Graphics workstations that were purchased, tools for the unprecedented number of 3D artists and animators who attacked the game from all directions at once. Their output came to fill not just one PlayStation CD but three of them — almost two gigabytes of raw data in all, or 30 Nintendo 64 cartridges.

Somehow or other, it all came together. Square finished Final Fantasy VII on schedule, shipping it in Japan on January 31, 1997. It went on to sell over 3 million copies there, bettering Final Fantasy VI’s numbers by about half a million and selling a goodly number of PlayStations in the process. But, as that fairly modest increase indicates, the Japanese domestic market was becoming saturated; there were only so many games you could sell in a country of 125 million people, most of them too old or too young or lacking the means or the willingness to acquire a PlayStation. There was only one condition in which it had ever made sense to spend $40 million on Final Fantasy VII: if it could finally break the Western market wide open. Encouraged by the relative success of Final Fantasy VI and Super Mario RPG in the United States, excited by the aura of hipster cool that clung to the PlayStation, Square — and also Sony, which lived up to its promise to go all-in on the game — were determined to make that happen, once again at almost any cost. After renumbering the earlier games in the series in the United States to conform with its habit of only releasing every other Final Fantasy title there, Square elected to call this game Final Fantasy VII all over the world. For the number seven was an auspicious one, and this was nothing if not an auspicious game.

Final Fantasy VII shipped on a suitably auspicious date in the United States: September 7, 1997. It sold its millionth unit that December.

In November of 1997, it came to Europe, which had never seen any of the previous six mainline Final Fantasy game before and therefore processed the title as even more of a non sequitur. No matter. Wherever the game went, the title and the marketing worked — worked not only for the game itself, but for the PlayStation. Coming hot on the heels of the hip mega-hit Tomb Raider, it sealed the deal for the console, relegating the Sega Saturn to oblivion and the Nintendo 64 to the status of a disappointing also-ran. Paul Davies was the editor-in-chief of Britain’s Computer and Video Games magazine at the time. He was a committed Sega loyalist, he says, but

I came to my senses when Square announced Final Fantasy VII as a PlayStation exclusive. We received sheets of concept artwork and screenshots at our editorial office, sketches and stills from the incredible cut scenes. I was smitten. I tried and failed to rally. This was a runaway train. [The] PlayStation took up residence in all walks of life, moved from bedrooms to front rooms. It gained — by hook or by crook — the kind of social standing that I’d always wanted for games. Sony stomped on my soul and broke my heart, but my God, that console was a phenomenon.

Final Fantasy VII wound up selling well over 10 million units in all, as many as all six previous entries in the series combined, divided this time almost equally between Japan, North America, and Europe. Along the way, it exploded millions of people’s notions of what games could do and be — people who weren’t among the technological elite who invested thousands of dollars into high-end rigs to play the latest computer games, who just wanted to sit down in front of their televisions after a busy day with a plug-it-in-and-go console and be entertained.

Of course, not everyone who bought the game was equally enamored. Retailers reported record numbers of returns to go along with the record sales, as some people found all the walking around and reading to be not at all what they were looking for in a videogame.

In a way, I share their pain. Despite all its exceptional qualities, Final Fantasy VII fell victim rather comprehensively to the standard Achilles heel of the JRPG in the West: the problem of translation. Its English version was completed in just a couple of months at Square’s American branch, reportedly by a single employee working without supervision, then sent out into the world without a second glance. I’m afraid there’s no way to say this kindly: it’s almost unbelievably terrible, full of sentences that literally make no sense punctuated by annoying ellipses that are supposed to represent… I don’t know what. Pauses… for… dramatic… effect, perhaps? To say it’s on the level of a fan translation would be to insult the many fans of Japanese videogames in the West, who more often than not do an extraordinary job when they tackle such a project. That a game so self-consciously pitched as the moment when console-based videogames would come into their own as a storytelling medium and as a form of mass-market entertainment to rival movies could have been allowed out the door with writing like this boggles the mind. It speaks to what a crossroads moment this truly was for games, when the old ways were still in the process of going over to the new. Although the novelty of the rest of the game was enough to keep the poor translation from damaging its commercial prospects overmuch, the backlash did serve as a much-needed wake-up call for Square. Going forward, they would take the details of “localization,” as such matters are called in industry speak, much more seriously.

Oh, my…

Writerly sort that I am, I’ll be unable to keep myself from harping further on the putrid translation in the third and final article in this series, when I’ll dive into the game itself. Right now, though, I’d like to return to the subject of what Final Fantasy VII meant for gaming writ large. In case I haven’t made it clear already, let me state it outright now: its arrival and reception in the West in particular marked one of the watershed moments in the entire history of gaming.

It cemented, first of all, the PlayStation’s status as the overwhelming victor in the late-1990s edition of the eternal Console Wars, as it did the Playstation’s claim to being the third socially revolutionary games console in history, after the Atari VCS and the original Nintendo Famicom. In the process of changing forevermore the way the world viewed videogames and the people who played them, the PlayStation eventually sold more than 100 million units, making it the best-selling games console of the twentieth century, dwarfing the numbers of the Sega Saturn (9 million units) and even the Nintendo 64 (33 million units), the latter of which was relegated to the status of the “kiddie console” on the playgrounds of the world. The underperformance of the Saturn followed by that of its successor the Dreamcast (again, just 9 million units sold) led Sega to abandon the console-hardware business entirely. Even more importantly, the PlayStation shattered the aura of remorseless, monopolistic inevitability that had clung to Nintendo since the mid-1980s; Nintendo would be for long stretches of the decades to come an also-ran in the very industry it had almost single-handedly resurrected. If the PlayStation was conceived partially as revenge for Nintendo’s jilting of Sony back in 1991, it was certainly a dish served cold — in fact, one that Nintendo is to some extent still eating to this day.

Then, too, it almost goes without saying that the JRPG, a sub-genre that had hitherto been a niche occupation of American gamers and virtually unknown to European ones, had its profile raised incalculably by Final Fantasy VII. The JRPG became almost overnight one of the hottest of all styles of game, as millions who had never imagined that a game could offer a compelling long-form narrative experience like this started looking for more of the same to play just as soon as its closing credits had rolled. Suddenly Western gamers were awaiting the latest JRPG releases with just as much impatience as Japanese gamers — releases not only in the Final Fantasy series but in many, many others as well. Their names, which tended to sound strange and awkward to English ears, were nevertheless unspeakably alluring to those who had caught the JRPG fever: Xenogears, Parasite Eve, Suikoden, Lunar, Star Ocean, Thousand Arms, Chrono Cross, Valkyrie Profile, Legend of Mana, Saiyuki. The whole landscape of console gaming changed; nowhere in the West in 1996, these games were everywhere in 1998 and 1999. It required a dedicated PlayStation gamer indeed just to keep up with the glut. At the risk of belaboring a point, I must note here that there were relatively few such games on the Nintendo 64, due to the limited storage capacity of its cartridges. Gamers go where the games they want to play are, and, for gamers in their preteens or older at least, those games were on the PlayStation.

From the computer-centric perspective that is this site’s usual stock in trade, perhaps the most important outcome of Final Fantasy VII was the dawning convergence it heralded between what had prior to this point been two separate worlds of gaming. Shortly before its Western release on the PlayStation, Square’s American subsidiary had asked the parent company for permission to port Final Fantasy VII to Windows-based desktop computers, perchance under the logic that, if American console gamers did still turn out to be nonplussed by the idea of a hundred-hour videogame despite marketing’s best efforts, American computer gamers would surely not be.

Square Japan agreed, but that was only the beginning of the challenge of getting Final Fantasy VII onto computer-software shelves. Square’s American arm called dozens of established computer publishers, including the heavy hitters like Electronic Arts. Rather incredibly, they couldn’t drum up any interest whatsoever in a game that was by now selling millions of copies on the most popular console in the world. At long last, they got a bite from the British developer and publisher Eidos, whose Tomb Raider had been 1996’s PlayStation game of the year whilst also — and unusually for the time — selling in big numbers on computers.

That example of cross-platform convergence notwithstanding, everyone involved remained a bit tentative about the Final Fantasy VII Windows port, regarding it more as a cautious experiment than the blockbuster-in-the-offing that the PlayStation version had always been treated as. Judged purely as a piece of Windows software, the end result left something to be desired, being faithful to the console game to a fault, to the extent of couching its saved states in separate fifteen-slot “files” that stood in for PlayStation memory cards.

The Windows version of Final Fantasy VII came out a year after the PlayStation version. “If you’re open to new experiences and perspectives in role-playing and can put up with idiosyncrasies from console-game design, then take a chance and experience some of the best storytelling ever found in an RPG,” concluded Computer Gaming World in its review, stamping the game “recommended, with caution.” Despite that less than rousing endorsement, it did reasonably well, selling somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million units by most reports.

They were baby steps to be sure, but Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy VII between them marked the start of a significant shift, albeit one that would take another half-decade or so to come to become obvious to everyone. The storage capacity of console CDs, the power of the latest console hardware, and the consoles’ newfound ability to easily save state from session to session had begun to elide if not yet erase the traditional barriers between “computer games” and “videogames.” Today the distinction is all but eliminated, as cross-platform development tools and the addition of networking capabilities to the consoles make it possible for everyone to play the same sorts of games at least, if not always precisely the same titles. This has been, it seems to me, greatly to the benefit of gaming in general: games on computers have became more friendly and approachable, even as games on consoles have become deeper and more ambitious.

So, that’s another of the trends we’ll need to keep an eye out for as we continue our journey down through the years. Next, though, it will be time to ask a more immediately relevant question: what is it like to actually play Final Fantasy VII, the game that changed so much for so many?

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: the books Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World by Matt Alt, Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life by Chris Kohler, Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese RPGs in the West by Aidan Moher, Atari to Zelda: Japan’s Videogames in Global Contexts by Mia Consalvo, Revolutionaries at Sony: The Making of the Sony PlayStation by Reiji Asakura, and Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World by David Sheff. Retro Gamer 69, 96, 108, 137, 170, and 188; Computer Gaming World of September 1997, October 1997, May 1998, and November 1998.

Online sources include Polygon’s authoritative “Final Fantasy 7: An Oral History”, “The History of Final Fantasy VII“ at Nintendojo, “The Weird History of the Super NES CD-ROM, Nintendo’s Most Notorious Vaporware” by Chris Kohler at Kotaku, and “The History of PlayStation was Almost Very Different” by Blake Hester at Polygon.

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

Philips wasn’t, however, above exploiting the letter of its contract with Nintendo to make a Mario game and three substandard Legend of Zelda games available for the CD-i.

↑2

Sony did purchase the venerable British game developer and publisher Psygnosis well before its console’s launch to help prime the pump with some quality games, but it largely left it to manage its own affairs on the other side of the world.

Putting the “J” in the RPG, Part 3: Playing Final Fantasy VII (or, Old Man Yells at Cloud)
December 22, 2023

Fair warning: this article includes plot spoilers of Final Fantasy VII.

Historians and critics like me usually have to play the know-it-all in order to be effective at our jobs. My work flow begins with me going out and learning everything I can about a topic in the time I have available. Then I decide what I think about it all, find a way to structure my article, and share it with you as if I’ve been carrying all this information around with me all my life. Often I get things wrong, occasionally horribly wrong. But I can always count on you astonishingly knowledgeable folks to set me straight in the end, and in the meantime being direct is preferable in my book to equivocating all over the place. For, with the arguable exception of a wide-eyed undergraduate here or there enrolled in her first class in postmodern studies, absolutely no one wants to read a writer prattling on about the impossibility of achieving Complete Truth or the Inherent Subjectivity of criticism. Of course complete truth is an unattainable ideal and all criticism is subjective! I assume that you all know these things already, so that we can jump past the hand-wringing qualifiers and get right to the good stuff.

Still, I don’t believe that all criticism is of equal value, for all that it may in the end all be “just, like, your opinion man!” The most worthwhile criticism comes from a place of sympathy with the goals and expectations that surround a work and is grounded in an understanding of the culture that produced it. It behooves no one to review a blockbuster action movie as if it was an artsy character study, any more than it makes sense to hold, say, Michael Crichton up to the standards of fine literature. Everything has its place in the media ecosystem, and it’s the critic’s duty to either understand that place or to get out of the way for those that do.

Which goes a long way toward explaining why I start getting nervous when I think about rendering a verdict on Final Fantasy VII. I am, at best, a casual tourist in the milieu that spawned it; I didn’t grow up with Japanese RPGs, didn’t even grow up with videogame consoles after I traded my Atari VCS in for a Commodore 64 at age eleven. Sitting with a game controller in my hand rather than a keyboard and mouse or joystick is still a fairly unfamiliar experience for me, almost 40 years after it became the norm for Generation Nintendo. My experience with non-gaming Japanese culture as well is embarrassingly thin. I’ve never been to Japan, although I did once glimpse it from the Russian island of Sakhalin. Otherwise, my encounters with it are limited to the Star Blazers episodes I used to watch as a grade-school kid on Saturday mornings, the World War II history books I read as an adolescent war monger, that one time in my twenties when I was convinced to watch Ghost in the Shell (I’m afraid it didn’t have much impact on me), a more recent sneaking appreciation for the uniquely unhinged quality of some Japanese music (which can make a walking-blues vamp sound like the apocalypse), and the Haruki Murakami novels sitting on the bookshelf behind me as I write these words, the same ones that I really, really need to get around to reading. In summation, I’m a complete ignoramus when it comes to console-based videogames and Japan alike.

So, the know-it-all approach is right out for this article; even I’m not daring enough to try to fake it until I make it in this situation. I hesitate to even go so far as to call what follows a review of Final Fantasy VII, given my manifest lack of qualifications to write a good one. Call it a set of impressions instead, an “old man yells at cloud” for the JRPG world where the joke is quite probably on the old man.

In a weird sort of way, though, maybe that approach will work out okay, just this once. For, as we learned in the last article, Final Fantasy VII was the first heavily hyped JRPG to be released on computers as well as consoles in the West. When that happened, many computer gamers who were almost as ignorant then as I am now played it. As I share my own experiences below, I can be their voice in this collision between two radically different cultures of gaming. The fallout from these early meetings would make games as a whole better in the long run, regardless of the hardware on which they ran or the country where they were made. It’s this gratifying ultimate outcome that prompted me to write this trilogy of articles in the first place. Perhaps it even makes my personal impressions relevant in this last entry of said trilogy, despite my blundering cluelessness.

Nevertheless, given the intense feelings that JRPGs in general and this JRPG in particular arouse in their most devoted fans, I’m sure some small portion of you will hate me for writing what follows. I ask only that you read to the end before you pounce, and remember that’s it’s just my opinion, man, and a critic’s aesthetic judgments do not reflect his moral character.

The trains in Final Fantasy VII look like steam locomotives. This doesn’t make much sense, given what we know of the technology in use in the city of Midgar, but it’s kind of cool.

I had heard a lot about Final Fantasy VII before I played it, most of it extremely positive, to put it lightly. In fact, I had seen it nominated again and again for the title of Best Game Ever. For all that I have no personal history with JRPGs, I do like to think of myself as a reasonably open-minded guy. I went into Final Fantasy VII wanting to be wowed, wanting to be introduced to an exciting new world of interactive narrative that stood apart from both the set-piece puzzle-solving of Western adventure games and the wide-open emergent diffusion of Western RPGs. But unfortunately, my first couple of hours with Final Fantasy VII were more baffling than bracing. I felt a bit like the caveman at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing with this new bone I had just picked up.

After watching a promisingly understated opening-credits sequence, accompanied by some rather lovely music, I started the game proper. I was greeted with a surreal introductory movie, in which a starry sky morphed into scenes from a gritty, neon-soaked metropolis of trains and heavy industry, with an enigmatic young girl selling flowers amidst it all. Then several people were leaping off the top of a train, and I realized that I was now controlling one of them. “C’mon, newcomer!” shouted one of the others. “Follow me.” I did my best to oblige him, fumbling through my first combat — against some soldierly types who were chasing us for some reason — along the way.

The opening credits are the last part of Final Fantasy VII that can be described as understated. From that point on, even the swords are outsized.

Who the hell was I? What was I supposed to be doing? Naïve child of 1980s computer gaming that I was, I thought maybe all of this was explained in the manual. But when I looked there, all I found were some terse, unhelpful descriptions of the main characters, not a word about the plot or the world I had just been dropped into. I was confused by everything I saw: by the pea soup of bad translation that made the strictly literal meanings of the sentences the other characters said to me impossible for me to divine at times; by the graphics that sometimes made it hard to separate depth from height, much less figure out where the climbable ladders and exit points on the borders of the maps lay; by the way my character lazily sauntered along — “Let’s mosey!”, to quote one of the game’s famously weird translations — while everyone else dashed about with appropriate urgency; by the enemies who kept jumping me every minute or two while I beat my head against the sides of the maps looking for the exits, enemies whom I could dispatch by simply mashing “attack” over and over again; by the fact that I seemed to be a member of a terrorist cell set on blowing up essential civic infrastructure, presumably killing an awful lot of innocent people in the process; by the way the leader of my terrorist group, a black man named Barret, spoke and acted like Mr. T on old A-Team reruns, without a hint of apparent irony.

What can I say? I bounced. Hard. After I made it to the first boss enemy and died several times because, as I would later learn from the Internet, the shoddy English translation was telling me to do the exact opposite of what I needed to do to be successful against it, I threw the game against the metaphorical wall. What did anyone see in this hot mess, I asked my wife — albeit in considerably more colorful language than that. She just laughed  — something that, to be fair, she spends a lot of time doing when I play these crazy old games on the television.

The first hill on which I died. Final Fantasy VII’s original English translation is not just awful to read but actively wrong in places. When you meet the first boss monster, you’re told to “attack while it’s [sic] tail’s up!” The Japanese version tells you not to attack when its tail’s up. Guess which one is right…

I sulked for several weeks, deeply disappointed that this game that I had wanted to be awesome had turned out to be… less than awesome. But the fact remained that it was an important work, in the history of my usual beat of computer gaming almost as much as that of console gaming. Duty demanded that I go back in at some point.

When that point came, I steeled myself to fight harder for my pleasure. After all, there had to be some reason people loved this game so, right? I read a bit of background on the Internet, enough to understand that it takes place on an unnamed world whose economy is dominated by an all-powerful mega-corporation called the Shinra Electric Power Company, which provides energy and earns enormous profits by siphoning off the planet’s Mako, a sort of spiritual essence. I learned that AVALANCHE, the terrorist cell I was a part of, was trying to break Shinra’s stranglehold, because its activities were, as Barret repeats ad nauseum, “Killin’ the planet.” And I learned that the main character — the closest thing to “me” in the game — was a cynical mercenary named Cloud Strife, a former member of a group called SOLDIER that did Shinra’s dirty work. But Cloud has now switched sides, joining AVALANCHE strictly for the paycheck, as he makes abundantly clear to anyone who asks him about it and most of those who don’t. The action kicks off in the planet’s biggest city of Midgar, with AVALANCHE attempting to blow up the Shinra reactors there one by one.

With that modicum of background information, everything began to make a little more sense to me. I also picked up some vital practical tips on the Internet. For example, I discovered that I could push a button on the controller to clearly mark all ladders and exits from a map, and that I could hold down another button to make Cloud run like everybody else; having to do so basically all the time was a trifle annoying, but better than the alternative of moseying everywhere. I learned as well that I could turn off the incessant random encounters using a fan-made application called 7th Heaven, but I resisted the temptation to do so; I was still trying to be strong at this point, still trying to experience the game as a player would have in the late 1990s.

Things went better for a while. By doing the opposite of what the bad translation was telling me to do, I got past the first boss monster that had been killing me. (Although I didn’t know it at the time, this would prove to be the the only fight that ever really challenged me until I got to the very end of the game). Then I returned with the others to our terrorist hideout, and agreed to help AVALANCHE blow up the next reactor. (All in a day’s work for a mercenary, I suppose.) While the actual writing remained more or less excruciating most of the time, I started to recognize that there was some real sophistication to the narrative’s construction, that my frustration at the in medias res beginning had been more down to my impatience than any shortcoming on the game’s part. I realized I had to trust the game, to let it reveal its story in its way. Likewise, I had to recognize that its environmentalist theme, a trifle heavy-handed though it was, rang downright prescient in light of the sorry state of our own planet a quarter-century after Final Fantasy VII was made.

Which isn’t to say that it was all smooth sailing. After blowing up the second Mako reactor, Cloud was left dangling from a stray girder, hundreds of feet above the vaguely Blade Runner-like city of Midgar. After some speechifying, he tumbled to his presumed doom — only to wake up inside a cathedral, staring into the eyes of the flower girl from the opening movie. “The roof and the flower bed must have broken your fall,” she said. While my wife was all but rolling on the floor laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of this idea, I bravely SOLDIERed onward, learning that the little girl’s name was Aerith and that she was being stalked by Shinra thugs due to some special powers they believed her to possess. “Take me home,” she begged Cloud.

“Okay, I’ll do it,” he grunted in reply. “But it’ll cost you.” (Stay classy, Cloud… stay classy.)

And now I got another shock. “Well, then, let’s see…” Aerith said. “How about if I go out with you once?” Just like that, all of my paradigms had to shift. Little Aerith, it seemed, wasn’t so little after all. Nonetheless, playing Cloud in this situation left me feeling vaguely unclean, like a creepy old guy crashing his tweenage daughter’s slumber party.

Judging from his facepalm, Cloud may have been as shocked by Aerith’s offer of affection for protection as I was.

Ignoramus though I was, I did know that Japanese society is not generally celebrated for its progressive gender politics. (I do think this is the biggest reason that anime and manga have never held much attraction for me: the tendency of the tiny sliver of it which I’ve encountered to simultaneously infantalize and sexualize girls and women turns me right off.) Now, I realized that I — or rather Cloud — was being thrown into a dreaded love triangle, its third point being Cloud’s childhood friend and fellow eco-terrorist Tifa. Going forward, Aerith and Tifa would spend their character beats snipping at one another when not making moon-eyes at Cloud. Must be something about that giant sword he carries around, tucked only God knows where inside his clothing…

I was able to identify Tifa as an adult — or at least an adolescent — from the start, thanks to her giant breasts, which she seems to be trying to thrust right out of the screen at you when you win a fight, using them as her equivalent of Cloud’s victoriously twirling sword. (This was another thing my wife found absolutely hilarious…) The personalities of the women in this game demonstrate as well as anything its complete bifurcation between gameplay and story. When you control Aerith or Tifa in combat, they’re as capable as any of the men, but when they’re playing their roles in the story, they suddenly become fragile flowers utterly dependent on the kindness of Cloud.

Anyway, soon we got to Wall Market. Oh, my. This area is unusual in that it plays more like a puzzle-based adventure game than anything else, featuring no combat at all — what a blessed relief that was! — until the climax. Less positively, the specific adventure game it plays like is Leisure Suit Larry at its most retrograde. Tifa gets abducted and forced to join the harem of a Mafia kingpin-type named Don Corneo, and it’s up to Cloud and Aerith to rescue her. Aerith decides that the only way to get Cloud inside Corneo’s mansion and effect the rescue is to dress him up like… gasp… a girl! This suggestion Cloud greets with appropriate horror, understanding as he does that the merest contact with an article of female clothing not hanging on a female body carries with it the risk of an instant and incurable case of Homosexuality. But he finally comes around with all the good grace of a primary cast member of Bosom Buddies. Many shenanigans ensue, involving a whorehouse, a gay bathhouse, erectile dysfunction, a “love hotel,” cross-dressing bodybuilders, and a pair of panties, all loudly Othered for the benefit of the insecure straight male gaze. What the hell, I wondered for the umpteenth time, had I gotten myself into here?

You can’t make this stuff up…

But I didn’t let any of it stop me; I pushed right on through like the SOLDIER Cloud was. No, readers, what broke me wasn’t Don Corneo chasing Cloud-in-a-dress around his  bedroom, but rather the goddamn train graveyard. Let me repeat that with emphasis… the goddamn train graveyard.

In a way, this area illustrates one of Final Fantasy VII’s more admirable attributes, its determination to give you a variety of different stuff to do. It’s a combination of a maze and a sort of Sokoban puzzle, as you must climb in and over broken-down train carriages and engines in an abandoned depot, even sometimes putting on your engineer’s cap and driving a locomotive out of the way. This is fine in and of itself. What I found less fine was, as usual, the random combat. I would be working out my route in my pokey middle-aged way, coming up with a plan… and then the screen would go all whooshy and the battle music would start, and I’d have to spend the next 30 seconds mashing the attack button before I could get back to the navigational puzzle, by which time I’d completely lost track of what I had intended to do there. Rinse and repeat. Words cannot express how much I had learned to loath that battle music already, but this took the torture to a whole new level, as combat seemed to come at twice, thrice, five times the rate of before. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I quit. Not willfully… I just stopped playing one evening and didn’t start again the next. Or the next. Or the one after that. You know how it goes.

The second hill on which I died.

So, real life went on. But as it did so, my conscience kept pricking me. This game is important, it said. People love this game. Can you not find some way to make friends with it?

I decided to give it one last shot. This time, however, I would approach it differently. Final Fantasy VII has a passionate, active fan community — have I told you that people love this game? — who have done some rather extraordinary things with it over the years. I already mentioned one of these things in passing: 7th Heaven, an application that makes it effortless to install dozens of different “mod” packages, which can alter the game in ways both trivial and major, allowing you to play Final Fantasy VII exactly the way that you wish.

Now, I normally consider such things off-limits; my aim on this site is to give you the historical perspective, which means playing and reviewing games as their original audience would have known them. Still, I decided that, if it could help me to see the qualities other people saw in Final Fantasy VII that I all too plainly was not currently seeing, it might be okay, just this one time. I installed 7th Heaven and started to tweak away. First and foremost, I turned off the random encounters. Then I set it up so Cloud would run rather than mosey by default. Carried away by my newfound spirit of why the heck not, I even replaced the Windows version’s tinny MIDI soundtrack with the PlayStation version’s lusher music.

And then, having come this far, I really took the plunge. A group of fans who call themselves “Tsunamods” have re-translated all of the text in the game from the original Japanese script. As if that wasn’t enough, they’ve also found a way to add voice acting, covering every single line of dialog in the game. I went for it.

I was amazed at the difference it made — so amazed that I felt motivated to start the game all over from the beginning. The Tsunamods voice acting is way, way better than it has any right to be — far better than the average professional CD-ROM production of the 1990s. Being able to listen to the dialog flowing by naturally instead of tapping through text box after text box was a wonderful improvement in itself. But I was even more stunned by the transformation wrought by the fresh translation. Suddenly the writing was genuinely good in places, and never less than serviceable, displaying all sorts of heretofore unsuspected layers of nuance and irony. Instead of fawning all over Cloud like every teenage boy’s sexual fantasy, Aerith and Tifa took a more bantering, patronizing attitude. The Wall Market sequence especially displayed a new personality, with Aerith now joshing and gently mocking Cloud for his hetero horror at the prospect of donning a dress. Even Barret evinced signs of an inner life, became something more than an inadvertent caricature of Mr. T. when he expressed his love for the little orphan girl to whom he’d become surrogate father. And I could enjoy all of this without having to fight a pointless random battle every three minutes; only the meaningful, plot-dictated fights remained. I was, to coin a phrase, in seventh heaven. I had abandoned all of my principles about fidelity to history, and it felt good.

At the same time, though, I wasn’t really sure whose game I was playing anymore. In his YouTube deconstruction of Final Fantasy VII’s original English translation, Tim Rogers states that “I believe that no such thing exists as a ‘perfect’ translation of a work of literature from one language to another. All translation requires compromise.” I agree wholeheartedly.

For the act of translation — any act of translation — is a creative act in itself. Even those translations which strive to be as literal as possible — which in my opinion are often the least satisfying of them all — are the product of a multitude of aesthetic choices and of the translator’s own understanding of the source text. In short, a work in translation is always a different work from its source material. This is why Shakespeare buffs like me get so upset when people talk about “modernizing” the plays and poetry by translating them into 21st-century English. If you change the words, you change the works. Whether you think it’s better or worse, what you end up with is no longer Shakespeare. The same is true of the Bible; the King James Bible in English is a different literary work from the Hebrew Old Testament or the Greek New Testament. (This is what makes the very idea of Biblical Fundamentalism — of the Bible as the incontrovertible Word of God — so silly on its face…)

Needless to say, all of this holds equally true for Final Fantasy VII. When that game was first translated into English, it became a different work from the Japanese original. And when it was translated again by Tsunamods, it became yet another work, one reflecting not only these latest translators’ own personal understandings and aesthetics but also the changed cultural values of its time, more than twenty years after the first translation was done.

Of course, we can attempt to simply enjoy the latest translation for what it is, as I was intermittently able to do when I could shut my historian’s conscience off. Yet that same conscience taunts me even now with questions that I may never be able to answer, given that I don’t expect to find the time and energy in my remaining decades to become fluent in Japanese. Lacking that fluency, all I am left with are suppositions. I strongly suspect that the first English translation of Final Fantasy VII yielded a work that was cruder and more simplistic than its Japanese source material. Yet I also suspect that the latest English translation has softened many of the same source material’s rough edges, sanding away some racism, misogyny, and homophobia to suit the expectations of a 21st-century culture that has thankfully made a modicum of progress in these areas. What I would like to know but don’t is exactly where all of the borders lie in this territory. (Although Tim Rogers’s video essays are worthy in their way, I find them rather frustrating in that they never quite seem to answer the questions I have, whilst spending a lot of time on details of grammar and the like that strike me as fairly trivial in the larger scheme of things.)

What I do know, however, is that the Tsunamods re-translation and voice acting, combined with the other tweaks, finally allowed me to unabashedly enjoy Final Fantasy VII. I was worried in the beginning that forgoing random encounters might leave my characters hopelessly under-leveled, but the combat as a whole is so unchallenging that I found having a bit less experience to actually improve the game, by forcing me to employ at least a modicum of real strategy in some of the boss fights. I had a grand old time with my modified version of the game for the first seven or eight hours especially, when my party was still running around Midgar on the terrorist beat. Being no longer forced to gawk at the writing like a slow-motion train wreck, I could better appreciate the storytelling sophistication on display: the willingness of the plot to zig where conventional genre-narrative logic said it ought to zag, the refusal to shy away from the fact that AVALANCHE was, whatever the inherent justice of its cause, a gang of reckless terrorists who could and eventually did get lots and lots of innocent people killed.

After I carried the fight directly to the Shinra headquarters, I was introduced to the real villain of the story, a fellow named Sephiroth who used to be Cloud’s commanding officer in SOLDIER but had since transcended his humanity entirely through a complicated set of circumstances, and was now attempting to become a literal god at the expense of the planet and everyone else on it. Leaving Midgar and its comparatively parochial concerns behind, Cloud and his companions set off on Sephiroth’s trail, a merry chase across continents and oceans.

Wandering the world map.

This chase after Sephiroth fills the largest chunk of the game by far. Occasionally, dramatic revelations continued to leave me admiring its storytelling ambition. While the tragic death of Aerith at the hands of Sephiroth had perhaps been too thoroughly spoiled for me to have the impact it might otherwise have had, the gradual discovery that Cloud was not at all what he seemed to be — that he was in fact a profoundly unreliable narrator, a novelistic storytelling device seldom attempted in games — was shocking and at times even moving. Whenever the main plot kicked into gear for these or other reasons, I sat up and paid attention.

But a goodly portion of this last 80 percent of the game is spent meandering through lots and lots of disparate settings, from “rocket cities” to beach-side resort towns to a sprawling amusement park of all places, that have only a tangential relation to the real story and that I don’t tend to find as intrinsically interesting as Midgar. I often got restless and a bit bored in these places, with that all too familiar, creeping feeling that my time was being wasted. I’ve played and enjoyed plenty of Western RPGs whose watchword is “Go Forth and Explore,” but that approach didn’t work so well for me here. I found the game’s mechanics too simplistic to stand up on their own without the crutch of a compelling story, while the graphics, much-admired though they were by PlayStation gamers back in the day, were too hazy and samey in that early 3D sort of way to make the different areas stand out from one another in terms of atmosphere. Even the apparent non-linearity of the huge world map proved to be less than it seemed; there is actually only one really viable path through it, although there is a fair amount of optional content and Easter eggs for the truly dedicated to find. Being less dedicated, I soon began to wish for a way to further bastardize my version of the game, by turning off the plot-irrelevant bits in the same way I’d turned off the random encounters. Like a lot of RPGs of the Western stripe as well, Final Fantasy VII strikes me as far, far longer than it needs to be, an enjoyable 25-hour experience blown up to 50 hours or more, even without all those random encounters. I was more than ready for it to be over when I got to the end. The last fight was a doozie, what with my under-leveled characters, but it was nice to be pushed to the limit for once. And then it was all over.

What, then, do I think about Final Fantasy VII when all is said and done? For me, it’s a game that contains multitudes, one that resists blithe summation. Some of it is sublime, some of it is ridiculous. Sometimes it’s riveting, sometimes it’s exhausting. It certainly doesn’t achieve everything it aims for. But then again, how could it? It shoots for the moon, the sun, and the stars all at once when it comes to its story. It wants to move you so very badly that it’s perhaps inevitable that some of it just comes off as overwrought. Still, I’ll take its heartfelt earnestness over bro-dudes chortling about gibs and frags any day of the week, and all day on Sunday. “Can a computer make you cry?” asked another pioneering company almost a decade and a half before Final Fantasy VII was released. Square, it seems, was determined to provide a definitive affirmative answer to that question. And I must admit that the final scene, of ugly old Midgar now overrun with the beautiful fruits of the earth, did indeed leave a drop or two of moisture in the eyes of this nature lover, going a long way toward redeeming some of my earlier complaints. Whatever quibbles I may have with this game, its ultimate message that we humans can and must learn to live in harmony with nature rather than at odds with it is one I agree with, heart, mind, and soul.

My biggest problem with Final Fantasy VII — or rather with the version of it that I played to completion, which, as noted above, is not the same as the one Square created in Japanese — is that it tries to wed this story and message to a game, and said game isn’t always all that compelling. It’s not that there are no good ideas here; I do appreciate that Final Fantasy VII tries to give you a lot of different stuff to do, some of which, such as the action-based mini-games, I haven’t even mentioned here. (Suffice to say now that, while the mini-games won’t blow anyone away, they’re generally good enough for a few minutes’ change of pace.)

Still, and especially if you’re playing without mods, most of the gamey bits of this game involve combat, and the balance there is badly broken. Final Fantasy VII’s equivalent of magic is a mystical substance called “materia,” which can be imbued with different spell-like capabilities and wielded by your characters. Intriguingly, the materia “levels up” with repeated usage, taking on new dimensions. But the balance of power is so absurdly tilted in favor of the player that you never really need to engage with these mechanics at all; there are credible reports of players making it all the way to the final showdown with Sephiroth without ever once even equipping any materia, just mashing that good old attack button. (To put this in terms that my fellow old-timers will understand: this is like playing all the way through, say, Pool of Radiance without ever casting a spell.) Now, you could say that this is such players’ loss and their failure, and perhaps you’d be partially correct. But the reality is that, if you give them the choice, most players will always take the path of least resistance, then complain about how bored they were afterward. It’s up to a game’s designer to force them to engage on a deeper level, thereby forcing them to have fun.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Final Fantasy VII that played as a visual novel, without the RPG trappings at all. But commercial considerations dictated that that could never happen. So, again, here we are.[1]The game’s tireless fan base has gone to great lengths, here as in so many places, to mitigate its failings by upping the difficulty in various ways. I didn’t investigate much in this area, deciding I had already given the game the benefit of enough retro-fitting with the mods I did employ.

As it was, I found my modified version of Final Fantasy VII intermittently gripping, for all that I never quite fell completely in love with it. It’s inherently condescending for any critic to tell a game’s fans why they love it despite its flaws, and I don’t really want to do that here. That said, it does occur to me that a lot of Final Fantasy VII’s status in gaming culture is what we might call situational. This game was a phenomenon back in 1997, the perfect game coming at the perfect time, sweeping away all reservations on a tide of novelty and excitement. It was a communal event as much as a videogame, a mind-blower for millions of people. If some of what it was and did wasn’t actually as novel as Generation PlayStation believed it to be — and to be fair, some of it was genuinely groundbreaking by any standard — that didn’t really matter then and doesn’t matter now. Final Fantasy VII brought high-concept videogame storytelling into the mainstream. It didn’t do so perfectly, but it did so well enough to create memories and expectations that would last a lifetime.

Even the romance was perfectly attuned to the times, or rather to the ages of many players when they first met this game. The weirdness of Wall Market aside, Cloud and Aerith and Tifa live in that bracket that goes under the name of “Young Adult” on bookstore shelves: that precious time which we used to call the period of “puppy love” and which most parents still wish lasted much longer, when romance is still a matter of “girls and guys” exchanging Valentines and passing notes in class (or perhaps messages on TikTok these days), when sex — or at least sex with other people — is still more of a theoretical future possibility than a lived reality. (Yes, the PlayStation itself was marketed to a slightly older demographic than this one, but, as I noted in my last article, that made it hugely successful with the younger set as well, who always want to be doing what their immediate elders are.) I suspect that I too would have liked this game a lot more if I’d come to it when the girls around me at my school and workplace were still exotic, semi-unknowable creatures, and my teenage heart beat with tender feelings and earthier passions that I’d hardly begun to understand.

In short, the nostalgia factor is unusually strong with this one. Small wonder that so many of its original players continue to cherish it so. If that causes them to overvalue its literary worth a bit, sometimes claiming a gravitas for it not entirely in keeping with what is essentially a work of young-adult fiction… well, such is human nature when it comes to the things we cherish. For its biggest fans, Final Fantasy VII has transcended the bits and bytes on the CDs that Square shipped back in 1997. It doesn’t exist as a single creative artifact so much as an abstract ideal, or perhaps an idealized abstraction. Like the Bible, it has become a palimpsest of memory and translation and interpretation, a story to be told again and again in different ways. To wit: in 2020, Square began publishing a crazily expansive re-imagining of Final Fantasy VII, to be released as a trilogy of games rather than a single one. The first entry in the trilogy — the only one available as of this writing — gets the gang only as far as their departure from Midgar. By all indications, this first part has been a solid commercial success, although not a patch on the phenomenon its inspiration was in a vastly different media ecosystem.

As for me, coming to this game so many years later, bereft of all those personal connections to it: I’m happy I played it, happy to have familiarized myself with one of the most important videogames in history, and happy to have found a way to more or less enjoy it, even if I did have to break my usual rules to do so. I wouldn’t call myself a JRPG lover by any means, but I am JRPG curious. I can see a lot of potential in the game I played, if it was tightened up in the right ways. I look forward to giving Final Fantasy VIII a try; although it’s widely regarded as one of the black sheep of the Final Fantasy family, it seems to me that some of the qualities widely cited as its failings, such as its more realistic, less anime-stylized art, might just strike my aesthetic sensibilities as strengths. And I understand that Square finally got its act together and sprang for proper, professional-quality English translations beginning with this installment, so there’s that.

Now, to do something about those Haruki Murakami novels on my shelf…

Where to Get It: The original version of Final Fantasy VII can still be purchased from Steam as a digital download. If you’re an impatient curmudgeon like me, you may also want to install the 7th Heaven mod manager to tweak the game to your liking. For the record, the mods I wound up using were “OST Music Remastered” (for better music), “Echo-S 7” (for the better translation and voice acting), and “Gameplay Tweaks — Qhimm Catalog” (strictly to make my characters “always run”; I left everything else here turned off). With 7th Heaven alone installed, you can toggle random encounters off and on by pressing CONTROL-B while playing. Note that you need to do this each time you start the game up again.

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Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

The game’s tireless fan base has gone to great lengths, here as in so many places, to mitigate its failings by upping the difficulty in various ways. I didn’t investigate much in this area, deciding I had already given the game the benefit of enough retro-fitting with the mods I did employ.

Televising the Revolution
January 5, 2024

When we finished Broken Sword, the managing director of Virgin [Interactive] called me into his office and showed me a game from Argonaut [Software] called Creature Shock. He said, “These are the games you should be writing, not adventure games. These are the games. This is the future.”

— Charles Cecil, co-founder of Revolution Software

Broken Sword, Revolution Software’s third point-and-click adventure game, was released for personal computers in September of 1996. Three months later, it arrived on the Sony PlayStation console, so that it could be enjoyed on television as well as monitor screens. And therein lies a tale in itself.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), the console du jour in the United States during the latter 1980s, thanks to the small capacity of the cartridges that machine used to host its games, its lack of means for easily storing state so that one could return to a game where one had left off after spending time away from the television screen, and the handheld controllers it used that were so very different from a mouse, joystick, and/or keyboard. Still, these challenges didn’t stop some enterprising studios from making a go of it, tempted as they were by the huge installed base of Nintendo consoles. Over the course of 1988 and 1989, ICOM Simulations managed to port to the NES Deja Vu, Uninvited, and Shadowgate; the last in particular really took off there, doing so well that it is better remembered as a console than a computer game today. In 1990, LucasArts[1]LucasArts was actually still known as Lucasfilm Games at the time.Maniac Mansion; this port too was surprisingly playable, if also rather hilariously Bowdlerized to conform to Nintendo’s infamously strict censorship regime.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.cram their adventure games onto the Sega Genesis,[2]The Genesis was known as the Mega-Drive in Japan and Europe.

But then, along came the Sony PlayStation.

For all that the usual focus of these histories is computer games, I’ve already felt compelled to write at some length about the PlayStation here and there. As I’ve written before, I consider it the third socially revolutionary games console, after the Atari VCS and the Nintendo Entertainment System. Its claim to that status involves both culture and pure technology. Sony marketed the PlayStation to a new demographic: to hip young adults rather than the children and adolescents that Nintendo and its arch-rival Sega had targeted. Meanwhile the PlayStation hardware, with its built-in CD-drive, its 32-bit processor, its 2MB of main memory and 1MB of graphics memory, its audiophile-quality sound system, and its handy memory cards for saving up to 128 K of state at a time, made ambitious long-form gaming experiences easier than ever before to realize on a console. The two factors in combination opened a door to whole genres of games on the PlayStation that had heretofore been all but exclusive to personal computers. Its early years brought a surprising number of these computer ports, such as real-time strategy games like Command & Conquer and turn-based strategy games like X-COM. And we can also add to that list adventure games like Broken Sword.

Their existence was largely thanks to the evangelizing efforts of Sony’s own new PlayStation division, which seldom placed a foot wrong during these salad days. Unlike Nintendo and Sega, who seemed to see computer and console games as existing in separate universes, Sony was eager to bridge the gap between the two, eager to bring a wider variety of games to the PlayStation. And they were equally eager to push their console in Europe, where Nintendo had barely been a presence at all to this point and which even Sega had always treated as a distant third in importance to Japan and North America.

Thus Revolution Software got a call one day while the Broken Sword project was still in its first year from Phil Harrison, an old-timer in British games who knew everyone and had done a bit of everything. “Look, I’m working for Sony now and there’s this new console going to be produced called the PlayStation,” he told Charles Cecil, the co-founder and tireless heart and soul of Revolution. “Are you interested in having a look?”

Cecil was. He was indeed.

Thoroughly impressed by the hardware and marketing plans Harrison had shown him, Cecil went to Revolution’s publisher Virgin Interactive to discuss making a version of Broken Sword for the PlayStation as well. “That’s crazy, that’s not going to work at all,” said Virgin according to Cecil himself. Convinced the idea was a non-starter, both technically and commercially, they told him he was free to shop a PlayStation Broken Sword elsewhere for all they cared. So, Cecil returned to his friend Phil Harrison, who brokered a deal for Sony themselves to publish a PlayStation version in Europe as a sort of test of concept. Revolution worked on the port on the side and on their own dime while they finished the computer game. Sony then shipped this PlayStation version in December of 1996.

Broken Sword on a computer…

…and on the PlayStation, where it’s become more bleary-eyed.

To be sure, it was a compromised creation. Although the PlayStation was a fairly impressive piece of kit by console standards, it left much to be desired when compared to even a mid-range gaming computer. The lovely graphics of the original had to be downgraded to the PlayStation’s lower resolution, even as the console’s relatively slow CD drive and lack of a hard drive for storing frequently accessed data made them painfully sluggish to appear on the television screen; one spent more time waiting for the animated cut scenes to load than watching them, their dramatic impact sometimes being squandered by multiple loading breaks within a scene. Even the voiced dialog could take unnervingly long to unspool from disc. Then, too, pointing and clicking was nowhere near as effortless using a game controller as it was with a mouse. (Sony actually did sell a mouse as an optional peripheral, but few people bought one.) Perhaps most worrisome of all, though, was the nature of the game itself. How would PlayStation gamers react to a cerebral, puzzle-oriented and narrative-driven experience like this?

The answer proved to be, better than some people — most notably those at Virgin — might have expected. Broken Sword’s Art Deco classicism may have looked a bit out of place in the lurid, anime-bedecked pages of the big PlayStation magazines, but they and their readers generally treated it kindly if somewhat gingerly. Broken Sword sold 400,000 copies on the PlayStation in Europe. Granted, these were not huge numbers in the grand scheme of things. On a console that would eventually sell more than 100 million units, it was hard to find a game that didn’t sell well into the six if not seven (or occasionally eight) figures. By Revolution’s modest standards, however, the PlayStation port made all the difference in the world, selling as it did at least three times as many copies as the computer version despite its ample reasons for shirking side-by-side comparisons. Its performance in Europe was even good enough to convince the American publisher THQ to belatedly pick it up for distribution in the United States as well, where it shifted 100,000 or so more copies. “The PlayStation was good for us,” understates Charles Cecil today.

It was a godsend not least because Revolution’s future as a maker of adventure games for computers was looking more and more doubtful. Multinational publishers like Virgin tended to take the American market as their bellwether, and this did not bode well for Revolution, given that Broken Sword had under-performed there in relation to its European sales. To be sure, there were proximate causes for this that Revolution could point to: Virgin’s American arm, never all that enthused about the game, had given it only limited marketing and saddled it with the terrible alternative title of Circle of Blood, making it sound more like another drop in the ocean of hyper-violent DOOM clones than a cerebral exercise in story-driven puzzle-solving. At the same time, though, it was hard to deny that the American adventure market in general was going soggy in the middle; 1996 had produced no million-plus-selling mega-hit in the genre to stand up alongside 1995’s Phantasmagoria, 1994’s Myst, or 1993’s The 7th Guest. Was Revolution’s sales stronghold of Europe soon to follow the industry’s bellwether? Virgin suspected it was.

So, despite having made three adventure games in a row for Virgin that had come out in the black on the global bottom line, Revolution had to lobby hard for the chance to make a fourth one. “It was frustrating for us,” says Revolution programmer Tony Warriner, “because we were producing good games that reviewed and sold well, but we had to beg for every penny of development cash. There was a mentality within publishing that said you were better off throwing money around randomly, and maybe scoring a surprise big hit, instead of backing steady but profitable games like Broken Sword. But this sums up the problem adventures have always had: they sell, but not enough to turn the publishers on.”

We might quibble with the “always” in Warriner’s statement; there was a time, lasting from the dawn of the industry through the first half of the 1990s, when adventures were consistently among the biggest-selling titles of all on computers. But this was not the case later on. Adventure games became mid-tier niche products from the second half of the 1990s on, capable of selling in consistent but not huge numbers, capable of raking in modest profits but not transformative ones. Similar middling categories had long existed in other mass-media industries, from film to television, books to music, all of which industries had been mature enough to profitably cater to their niche customers in addition to the heart of the mainstream. The computer-games industry, however, was less adept at doing so.

The problem there boiled down to physical shelf space. The average games shop had a couple of orders of magnitude fewer titles on its shelves at any given time than the average book or record store. Given how scarce retail space was, nobody — not the distributors, not the publishers, certainly not the retailers themselves — was overly enthusiastic about filling it with product that wasn’t in one of the two hottest genres in gaming at the time, the first-person shooter and the real-time strategy. This tunnel vision had a profound effect on the games that were made and sold during the years just before and after the millennium, until the slow rise of digital distribution began to open fresh avenues of distribution for more nichey titles once again.

In light of this situation, it’s perhaps more remarkable how many computer games were made between 1995 and 2005 that were not first-person shooters or real-time strategies than the opposite. More dedicated, passionate developers than you might expect found ways to make their cases to the publishers and get their games funded in spite of the remorseless logic of the extant distribution systems.

Revolution Software found a way to be among this group, at least for a while — but Virgin’s acquiescence to a Broken Sword II didn’t come easy. Revolution had to agree to make the sequel in just one year, as compared to the two and a half years they had spent on its predecessor, and for a cost of just £500,000 rather than £1 million. The finished game inevitably reflects the straitened circumstances of its birth. But that isn’t to say that it’s a bad game. Far from it.

Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror kicks off six months after the conclusion of the first game. American-in-Paris George Stobbart, that game and this one’s star, has just returned to France after dealing with the death of his father Stateside. There’s he’s reunited with Nico Collard, the fetching Parisian reporter who helped him last time around and whom George has a definite hankering for, to the extent of referring to her as his “girlfriend”; Nico is more ambiguous about the nature of their relationship. At any rate, an ornately carved and painted stone, apparently Mayan in origin, has come into her possession, and she has asked George to accompany her to the home of an archaeologist who might be able to tell them something about it. Unfortunately, they’re ambushed by thugs as soon as they arrive; Nico is kidnapped, while George is left tied to a chair in a room whose only other inhabitants are a giant poisonous spider and a rapidly spreading fire.

If this game doesn’t kick off with the literal bang of an exploding bomb like last time, it’s close enough. “I believe that a videogame must declare the inciting incident immediately so the player is clear on what their character needs to do and, equally importantly, why,” says Charles Cecil.

With your help, George will escape from his predicament and track down and rescue Nico before she can be spirited out of the country, even as he also retrieves the Mayan stone from the dodgy acquaintance in whose safekeeping she left it and traces their attackers back to Central America. And so George and Nico set off together across the ocean to sun-kissed climes, to unravel another ancient prophecy and prevent the end of the world as we know it for the second time in less than a year.

Broken Sword II betrays its rushed development cycle most obviously in its central conspiracy. For all that the first game’s cabal of Knights Templar was bonkers on the face of it, it was grounded in real history and in a real, albeit equally bonkers classic book of pseudo-history, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Mayans, on the other hand, are the most generic adventure-game movers and shakers this side of Atlanteans. “I was not as interested in the Mayans, if I’m truthful,” admits Charles Cecil. “Clearly human sacrifices and so on are interesting, but they were not on the same level of passion for me as the Knights Templar.”

Lacking the fascination of uncovering a well-thought-through historical mystery, Broken Sword II must rely on its set-piece vignettes to keep its player engaged. Thankfully, these are mostly still strong. Nico eventually gets to stop being the damsel in distress, becoming instead a driving force in the plot in her own right, so much so that you the player control her rather than George for a quarter or so of the game; this is arguably the only place where the second game actually improves on the first, which left Nico sitting passively in her flat waiting for George to call and collect hints from her most of the time. Needless to say, the sexual tension between George and Nico doesn’t get resolved, the writers having learned from television shows like Moonlighting and Northern Exposure that the audience’s interest tends to dissipate as soon as “Will they or won’t they” becomes “They will!” “We could very easily have had them having sex,” says Cecil, “but that would have ruined the relationship between these two people.”

The writing remains consistently strong in the small moments, full of sly humor and trenchant observations. Some fondly remembered supporting characters return, such as Duane and Pearl, the two lovably ugly American tourists you met in Syria last time around, who’ve now opted to take a jungle holiday, just in time to meet George and Nico once again. (Isn’t coincidence wonderful?)

And the game is never less than fair, with occasional deaths to contend with but no dead ends. This manifestation of respect for their players has marked Revolution’s work since Beneath a Steel Sky; they can only be applauded for it, given how many bigger, better-funded studios got this absolutely critical aspect of their craft so very wrong back in the day. The puzzles themselves are pitched perfectly in difficulty for the kind of game this is, being enough to make you stop and think from time to time but never enough to stop you in your tracks.

Broken Sword or Monkey Island?

In the end, then, Broken Sword II suffers only by comparison with Broken Sword I, which does everything it does well just that little bit better. The backgrounds and animation here, while still among the best that the 1990s adventure scene ever produced, aren’t quite as lush as what we saw last time. The series’s Art Deco and Tintin-inspired aesthetic sensibility, seen in no other adventure games of the time outside of the equally sumptuous Last Express, loses some focus when we get to Central America and the Caribbean. Here the game takes on an oddly LucasArts-like quality, what with the steel-drum background music and all the sandy beaches and dark jungles and even a monkey or two flitting around. Everywhere you look, the seams show just a little more than they did last time; the original voice of Nico, for example, has been replaced by that of another actress, making the opening moments of the second game a jarring experience for those who played the first. (Poor Nico would continue to get a new voice with each subsequent game in the series. “I’ve never had a bad Nico, but I’ve never had one I’ve been happy with,” says Cecil.)

But, again, we’re holding Broken Sword II up against some very stiff competition indeed; the first game is a beautifully polished production by any standard, one of the crown jewels of 1990s adventuring. If the sequel doesn’t reach those same heady heights, it’s never less than witty and enjoyable. Suffice to say that Broken Sword II is a game well worth playing today if you haven’t done so already.

It did not, however, sell even as well as its predecessor when it shipped for computers in November of 1997, serving more to justify than disprove Virgin’s reservations about making it in the first place. In the United States, it was released without its Roman numeral as simply Broken Sword: The Smoking Mirror, since that country had never seen a Broken Sword I. Thus even those Americans who had bought and enjoyed Circle of Blood had no ready way of knowing that this game was a sequel to that one. (The names were ironic not least in that the American game called Circle of Blood really did contain a broken sword, while the American game called Broken Sword did not.)

That said, in Europe too, where the game had no such excuses to rely upon, the sales numbers it put up were less satisfactory than before. A PlayStation version was released there in early 1998, but this too sold somewhat less than the first game, whose relative success in the face of its technical infelicities had perchance owed much to the novelty of its genre on the console. It was not so novel anymore: a number of other studios were also now experimenting with computer-style adventure games on the PlayStation, to mixed commercial results.

With Virgin having no interest in a Broken Sword III or much of anything else from Revolution, Charles Cecil negotiated his way out of the multi-game contract the two companies had signed. “The good and the great decided adventures [had] had their day,” he says. Broken Sword went on the shelf, permanently as far as anyone knew, leaving George and Nico in a lovelorn limbo while Revolution retooled and refocused. Their next game would still be an adventure at heart, but it would sport a new interface alongside action elements that were intended to make it a better fit on a console. For better or for worse, it seemed that the studio’s hopes for the future must lie more with the PlayStation than with computers.

Revolution Software was not alone in this; similar calculations were being made all over the industry. Thanks to the fresh technology and fresh ideas of the PlayStation, said industry was entering a new period of synergy and cross-pollination, one destined to change the natures of computer and console games equally. Which means that, for all that this site has always been intended to be a history of computer rather than console gaming, the PlayStation will remain an inescapable presence even here, lurking constantly in the background as both a promise and a threat.

Where to Get It: Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror is available as a digital download at GOG.com.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: the book Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders: How British Video Games Conquered the World by Magnus Anderson and Rebecca Levene; Retro Gamer 6, 31, 63, 146, and 148; GameFan of February 1998; PlayStation Magazine of February 1998; The Telegraph of January 4 2011. Online sources include Charles Cecil’s interviews with Anthony Lacey of Dining with Strangers, John Walker of Rock Paper Shotgun, Marty Mulrooney of Alternative Magazine Online, and Peter Rootham-Smith of Game Boomers.

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

LucasArts was actually still known as Lucasfilm Games at the time.

↑2

The Genesis was known as the Mega-Drive in Japan and Europe.

The Rise of POMG, Part 1: It Takes a Village…
January 19, 2024

No one on their deathbed ever said, “I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer!”

— Dani Bunten Berry

If you ever want to feel old, just talk to the younger generation.

A few years ago now, I met the kids of a good friend of mine for the very first time: four boys between the ages of four and twelve, all more or less crazy about videogames. As someone who spends a lot of his time and earns a lot of his income writing about games, I arrived at their house with high expectations attached.

Alas, I’m afraid I proved a bit of a disappointment to them. The distance between the musty old games that I knew and the shiny modern ones that they played was just too far to bridge; shared frames of reference were tough to come up with. This was more or less what I had anticipated, given how painfully limited I already knew my knowledge of modern gaming to be. But one thing did genuinely surprise me: it was tough for these youngsters to wrap their heads around the very notion of a game that you played to completion by yourself and then put on the shelf, much as you might a book. The games they knew, from Roblox to Fortnite, were all social affairs that you played online with friends or strangers, that ended only when you got sick of them or your peer group moved on to something else. Games that you played alone, without at the very least leader boards and achievements on-hand to measure yourself against others, were utterly alien to them. It was quite a reality check for me.

So, I immediately started to wonder how we had gotten to this point — a point not necessarily better or worse than the sort of gaming that I knew growing up and am still most comfortable with, just very different. This series of articles should serve as the beginning of an answer to that complicated question. Their primary focus is not so much how computer games went multiplayer, nor even how they first went online; those things are in some ways the easy, obvious parts of the equation. It’s rather how games did those things persistently — i.e., permanently, so that each session became part of a larger meta-game, if you will, embedded in a virtual community. Or perhaps the virtual community is embedded in the game. It all depends on how you look at it, and which precise game you happen to be talking about. Whichever way, it has left folks like me, whose natural tendency is still to read games like books with distinct beginnings, middles, and ends, anachronistic iconoclasts in the eyes of the youthful mainstream.

Which, I hasten to add, is perfectly okay; I’ve always found the ditch more fun than the middle of the road anyway. Still, sometimes it’s good to know how the other 90 percent lives, especially if you claim to be a gaming historian…

“Persistent online multiplayer gaming” (POMG, shall we say?) is a mouthful to be sure, but it will have to do for lack of a better descriptor of the phenomenon that has created such a divide between myself and my friend’s children.  It’s actually older than you might expect, having first come to be in the 1970s on PLATO, a non-profit computer network run out of the University of Illinois but encompassing several other American educational institutions as well. Much has been written about this pioneering network, which uncannily presaged in so many of its particulars what the Internet would become for the world writ large two decades later. (I recommend Brian Dear’s The Friendly Orange Glow for a book-length treatment.) It should suffice for our purposes today to say that PLATO became host to, among other online communities of interest, an extraordinarily vibrant gaming culture. Thanks to the fact that PLATO games lived on a multi-user network rather than standalone single-user personal computers, they could do stuff that most gamers who were not lucky enough to be affiliated with a PLATO-connected university would have to wait many more years to experience.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.The first recognizable single-player CRPGs were born on PLATO in the mid-1970s, inspired by the revolutionary new tabletop game known as Dungeons & Dragons. They were followed by the first multiplayer ones in amazingly short order. Already in 1975’s Moria,[1]The PLATO Moria was a completely different game from the 1983 single-player roguelike that bore the same name.Oubliette implemented the same basic concept in an even more sophisticated way. The degree of persistence of these games was limited by a lack of storage capacity — the only data that was saved between sessions were the statistics and inventory of each player’s character, with the rest of the environment being generated randomly each time out — but they were miles ahead of anything available for the early personal computers that were beginning to appear at the same time. Indeed, Wizardry, the game that cemented the CRPG’s status as a staple genre on personal computers in 1981, was in many ways simply a scaled-down version of Oubliette, with the multiplayer party replaced by a party of characters that were all controlled by the same player.

Chester Bolingbroke, better known online as The CRPG Addict, plays Moria. Note the “Group Members” field at bottom right. Chester is alone here, but he could be adventuring with up to nine others.

A more comprehensive sort of persistence arrived with the first Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), developed by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, two students at the University of Essex in Britain, and first deployed there in a nascent form in late 1978 or 1979. A MUD borrowed the text-only interface and presentation of Will Crowther and Don Woods’s seminal game of Adventure, but the world it presented was a shared, fully persistent one between its periodic resets to a virgin state, chockablock with other real humans to interact with and perhaps fight. “The Land,” as Bartle dubbed his game’s environs, expanded to more than 600 rooms by the early 1980s, even as its ideas and a good portion of its code were used to set up other, similar environments at many more universities.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.the first commercial online services were starting up in the United States. By 1984, you could, for the price of a substantial hourly fee, dial into the big mainframes of services like CompuServe using your home computer. Once logged in there, you could socialize, shop, bank, make travel reservations, read newspapers, and do much else that most people wouldn’t begin to do online until more than a decade later — including gaming. For example, CompuServe offered MegaWars, a persistent grand-strategy game of galactic conquest whose campaigns took groups of up to 100 players four to six weeks to complete. (Woe betide the ones who couldn’t log in for some reason of an evening in the midst of that marathon!) You could also find various MUDs, as well as Island of Kesmai, a multiplayer CRPG boasting most of the same features as PLATO’s Oubliette in a genuinely persistent world rather than a perpetually regenerated one. CompuServe’s competitor GEnie had Air Warrior, a multiplayer flight simulator with bitmapped 3D graphics and sound effects to rival any of the contemporaneous single-player simulators on personal computers. For the price of $11 per hour, you could participate in grand Air Warrior campaigns that lasted three weeks each and involved hundreds of other subscribers, organizing and flying bombing raids and defending against the enemy’s attacks on their own lines. In 1991, America Online put up Neverwinter Nights,[2]Not the same game as the 2002 Bioware CRPG of the same name.the “Gold Box” line of licensed Dungeons & Dragons CRPGs what MUD had done for Adventure and Air Warrior had done for flight simulators, transporting the single-player game into a persistent multiplayer space.

All of this stuff was more or less incredible in the context of the times. At the same time, though, we mustn’t forget that it was strictly the purview of a privileged elite, made up of those with login credentials for institutional-computing networks or money in their pockets to pay fairly exorbitant hourly fees to feed their gaming habits. So, I’d like to back up now and tell a different story of POMG — one with more of a populist thrust, focusing on what was actually attainable by the majority of people out there, the ones who neither had access to a university’s mainframe nor could afford to spend hundreds of dollars per month on a hobby. Rest assured that the two narratives will meet before all is said and done.

POMG came to everyday digital gaming in the reverse order of the words that make up the acronym: first games were multiplayer, then they went online, and then these online games became persistent. Let’s try to unpack how that happened.

From the very start, many digital games were multiplayer, optionally if not unavoidably so. Spacewar!, the program generally considered the first fully developed graphical videogame, was exclusively multiplayer from its inception in the early 1960s. Ditto Pong, the game that launched Atari a decade later, and with it a slow-building popular craze for electronic games, first in public arcades and later in living rooms. Multiplayer here was not so much down to design intention as technological affordances. Pong was an elaborate analog state machine rather than a full-blown digital computer, relying on decentralized resistors and potentiometers and the like to do its “thinking.” It was more than hard enough just to get a couple of paddles and a ball moving around on the screen of a gadget like this; a computerized opponent was a bridge too far.

Very quickly, however, programmable microprocessors entered the field, changing everyone’s cost-benefit analyses. Building dual controls into an arcade cabinet was expensive, and the end result tended to take up a lot of space. The designers of arcade classics like Asteroids and Galaxian soon realized that they could replace the complications of a human opponent with hordes of computer-controlled enemies, flying in rudimentary, partially randomized patterns. Bulky multiplayer machines thus became rarer and rarer in arcades, replaced by slimmer, more standardized single-player cabinets. After all, if you wanted to compete with your friends in such games, there was still a way to do so: you could each play a round against the computerized enemies and compare your scores afterward.

While all of this was taking shape, the Trinity of 1977 — the Radio Shack TRS-80, Apple II, and Commodore PET — had ushered in the personal-computing era. The games these early microcomputers played were sometimes ports or clones of popular arcade hits, but just as often they were more cerebral, conceptually ambitious affairs where reflexes didn’t play as big — or any — role: flight simulations, adventure games, war and other strategy games. The last were often designed to be played optimally or even exclusively against another human, largely for the same reason Pong had been made that way: artificial intelligence was a hard thing to implement under any circumstances on an 8-bit computer with as little as 16 K of memory, and it only got harder when you were asking said artificial intelligence to formulate a strategy for Operation Barbarossa rather than to move a tennis racket around in front of a bouncing ball. Many strategy-game designers in these early days saw multiplayer options almost as a necessary evil, a stopgap until the computer could fully replace the human player, thus alleviating that eternal problem of the war-gaming hobby on the tabletop: the difficulty of finding other people in one’s neighborhood who were able and willing to play such weighty, complex games.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Dani Bunten Berry. From the beginning of her design career in 1979, when she made an auction game called Wheeler Dealers for the Apple II,[3]Wheeler Dealers and all of her other games that are mentioned in this article were credited to Dan Bunten, the name under which she lived until 1992.Wheeler Dealers shipped with a custom-made hardware add-on, the only method she could come up with to let four players bid at once. Such experiments culminated in M.U.L.E., one of the first four games ever published by Electronic Arts, a deeply, determinedly social game of economics and, yes, auctions for Atari and Commodore personal computers that many people, myself included, still consider her unimpeachable masterpiece.

A M.U.L.E. auction in progress.

And yet it was Seven Cities of Gold, her second game for Electronic Arts, that became a big hit. Ironically, it was also the first she had ever made with no multiplayer option whatsoever. She was learning to her chagrin that games meant to be played together on a single personal computer were a hard sell; such machines were typically found in offices and bedrooms, places where people went to isolate themselves, not in living rooms or other spaces where they went to be together. She decided to try another tack, thereby injecting the “online” part of POMG into our discussion.

In 1988, Electronic Arts published Berry’s Modem Wars, a game that seems almost eerily prescient in retrospect, anticipating the ludic zeitgeist of more than a decade later with remarkable accuracy. It was a strategy game played in real time (although not quite a real-time strategy of the resource-gathering and army-building stripe that would later be invented by Dune II and popularized by Warcraft and Command & Conquer). And it was intended to be played online against another human sitting at another computer, connected to yours by the gossamer thread of a peer-to-peer modem hookup over an ordinary telephone line. Like most of Berry’s games, it didn’t sell all that well, being a little too far out in front of the state of her nation’s telecommunications infrastructure.

Nevertheless, she continued to push her agenda of computer games as ways of being entertained together rather than alone over the years that followed. She never did achieve the breakout hit she craved, but she inspired countless other designers with her passion. She died far too young in 1998, just as the world was on the cusp of embracing her vision on a scale that even she could scarcely have imagined. “It is no exaggeration to characterize her as the world’s foremost authority on multiplayer computer games,” said Brian Moriarty when he presented Dani Bunten Berry with the first ever Game Developers Conference Lifetime Achievement Award two months before her death. “Nobody has worked harder to demonstrate how technology can be used to realize one of the noblest of human endeavors: bringing people together. Historians of electronic gaming will find in these eleven boxes [representing her eleven published games] the prototypes of the defining art form of the 21st century.” Let this article and the ones that will follow it, written well into said century, serve as partial proof of the truth of his words.

Danielle Bunten Berry, 1949-1998.

For by the time Moriarty spoke them, other designers had been following the trails she had blazed for quite some time, often with much more commercial success. A good early example is Populous, Peter Molyneux’s strategy game in real time (although, again, not quite a real-time strategy) that was for most of its development cycle strictly a peer-to-peer online multiplayer game, its offline single-player mode being added only during the last few months. An even better, slightly later one is DOOM, John Carmack and John Romero’s game of first-person 3D mayhem, whose star attraction, even more so than its sadistic single-player levels, was the “deathmatch” over a local-area network. Granted, these testosterone-fueled, relentlessly zero-sum contests weren’t quite the same as what Berry was envisioning for gaming’s multiplayer future near the end of her life; she wished passionately for games with a “people orientation,” directed toward “the more mainstream, casual players who are currently coming into the PC market.” Still, as the saying goes, you have to start somewhere.

But there is once more a caveat to state here about access, or rather the lack thereof. Being built for local networks only — i.e., networks that lived entirely within a single building or at most a small complex of them — DOOM deathmatches were out of reach on a day-to-day basis for those who didn’t happen to be students or employees at institutions with well-developed data-processing departments and permissive or oblivious authority figures. Outside of those ivory towers, this was the era of the “LAN party,” when groups of gamers would all lug their computers over to someone’s house, wire them together, and go at it over the course of a day or a weekend. These occasions went on to become treasured memories for many of their participants, but they achieved that status precisely because they were so sporadic and therefore special.

And yet DOOM’s rise corresponded with the transformation of the Internet from an esoteric tool for the technological elite to the most flexible medium of communication ever placed at the disposal of the great unwashed, thanks to a little invention out of Switzerland called the World Wide Web. What if there was a way to move DOOM and other games like it from a local network onto this one, the mother of all wide-area networks? Instead of deathmatching only with your buddy in the next cubicle, you would be able to play against somebody on another continent if you liked. Now wouldn’t that be cool?

The problem was that local-area networks ran over a protocol known as IPX, while the Internet ran on a completely different one called TCP/IP. Whoever could bridge that gap in a reasonably reliable, user-friendly way stood to become a hero to gamers all over the world.

Jay Cotton discovered DOOM in the same way as many another data-processing professional: when it brought down his network. He was employed at the University of Georgia at the time, and was assigned to figure out why the university’s network kept buckling under unprecedented amounts of spurious traffic. He tracked the cause down to DOOM, the game that half the students on campus seemed to be playing more than half the time. More specifically, the problem was caused by a bug, which was patched out of existence by John Carmack as soon as he was informed. Problem solved. But Cotton stuck around to play, the warden seduced by the inmates of the asylum.

He was soon so much better at the game than anyone else on campus that he was getting a bit bored. Looking for worthier opponents, he stumbled across a program called TCPSetup, written by one Jake Page, which was designed to translate IPX packets into TCP/IP ones and vice versa on the fly, “tricking” DOOM into communicating across the vast Internet. It was cumbersome to use and extremely unreliable, but on a good day it would let you play DOOM over the Internet for brief periods of time at least, an amazing feat by any standard. Cotton would meet other players on an Internet chat channel dedicated to the game, they’d exchange IP addresses, and then they’d have at it — or try to, depending on the whims of the Technology Gods that day.

On August 22, 1994, Cotton received an email from a fellow out of the University of Illinois — yes, PLATO’s old home — whom he’d met and played in this way (and beaten, he was always careful to add). His name was Scott Coleman. “I have some ideas for hacking TCPSetup to make it a little easier. Care to do some testing later?” Coleman wrote. “I’ve already emailed Jake [Page] on this, but he hasn’t responded (might be on vacation or something). If he approves, I’m hoping some of these ideas might make it into the next release of TCPSetup. In the meantime, I want to do some experimenting to see what’s feasible.”

Jake Page never did respond to their queries, so Cotton and Coleman just kept beavering away on their own, eventually rewriting TCPSetup entirely to create iDOOM, a more reliable and far less fiddly implementation of the same concept, with support for three- or four-player deathmatches instead of just one-on-one duels. It took off like a rocket; the pair were bombarded with feature requests, most notably to make iDOOM work with other IPX-only games as well. In January of 1995, they added support for Heretic, one of the most popular of the first wave of so-called “DOOM clones.” They changed their program’s name to “iFrag” to reflect the fact that it was now about more than just DOOM.

Having come this far, Cotton and Coleman soon made the conceptual leap that would transform their software from a useful tool to a way of life for a time for many, many thousands of gamers. Why not add support for more games, they asked themselves, not in a bespoke way as they had been doing to date, but in a more sustainable one, by turning their program into a general-purpose IPX-to-TCP/IP bridge, suitable for use with the dozens of other multiplayer games out there that supported only local-area networks out of the box. And why not make their tool into a community while they were at it, by adding an integrated chat service? In addition to its other functions, the program could offer a list of “servers” hosting games, which you could join at the click of a button; no more trolling for opponents elsewhere on the Internet, then laboriously exchanging IP addresses and meeting times and hoping the other guy followed through. This would be instant-gratification online gaming. It would also provide a foretaste at least of persistent online multiplayer gaming; as people won matches, they would become known commodities in the community, setting up a meta-game, a sporting culture of heroes and zeroes where folks kept track of win-loss records and where everybody clamored to hear the results when two big wheels faced off against one another.

Cotton and Coleman renamed their software for the third time in less than nine months, calling it Kali, a name suggested by Coleman’s Indian-American girlfriend (later his wife). “The Kali avatar is usually depicted with swords in her hands and a necklace of skulls from those she has killed,” says Coleman, “which seemed appropriate for a deathmatch game.” Largely at the behest of Cotton, always the more commercially-minded of the pair, they decided to make Kali shareware, just like DOOM itself: multiplayer sessions would be limited to fifteen minutes at a time until you coughed up a $20 registration fee. Cotton went through the logistics of setting up and running a business in Georgia while Coleman did most of the coding in Illinois. (Rather astonishingly, Cotton and Coleman had still never met one another face to face in 2013, when gaming historian David L. Craddock conducted an interview with them that has been an invaluable source of quotes and information for this article.)

Kali certainly wasn’t the only solution in this space; a commercial service called DWANGO had existed since December of 1994, with the direct backing of John Carmack and John Romero, whose company id Software collected 20 percent of its revenue in return for the endorsement. But DWANGO ran over old-fashioned direct-dial-up connections rather than the Internet, meaning you had to pay long-distance charges to use it if you weren’t lucky enough to live close to one of its host computers. On top of that, it charged $9 for just five hours of access per month, with the fees escalating from there. Kali, by contrast, was available to you forever for as many hours per month as you liked after you plunked down your one-time fee of $20.

So, Kali was popular right from its first release on April 26, 1995. Yet it was still an awkward piece of software for the casual user despite the duo’s best efforts, being tied to MS-DOS, whose support for TCP/IP relied on a creaky edifice of third-party tools. The arrival of Windows 95 was a godsend for Kali, as it was for computer gaming in general, making the hobby accessible in a way it had never been before. The so-called “Kali95” was available by early 1996, and things exploded from there. Kali struck countless gamers with all the force of a revelation; who would have dreamed that it could be so easy to play against another human online? Lloyd Case, for example, wrote in Computer Gaming World magazine that using Kali for the first time was “one of the most profound gaming experiences I’ve had in a long time.” Reminiscing seventeen years later, David L. Craddock described how “using Kali for the first time was like magic. Jumping into a game and playing with other people. It blew my fourteen-year-old mind.” In late 1996, the number of registered Kali users ticked past 50,000, even as quite possibly just as many or more were playing with cracked versions that bypassed the simplistic serial-number-registration process. First-person-shooter deathmatches abounded, but you could also play real-time strategies like Command & Conquer and Warcraft, or even the Links golf simulation. Computer Gaming World gave Kali a special year-end award for “Online-Enabling Technology.”

Kali for Windows 95.

Competitors were rushing in at a breakneck pace by this time, some of them far more conventionally “professional” than Kali, whose origin story was, as we’ve seen, as underground and organic as that of DOOM itself. The most prominent of the venture-capital-funded startups were MPlayer (co-founded by Brian Moriarty of Infocom and LucasArts fame, and employing Dani Bunten Berry as a consultant during the last months of her life) and the Total Entertainment Network, better known as simply TEN. In contrast to Kali’s one-time fee, they, like DWANGO before them, relied on subscription billing: $20 per month for MPlayer, $15 per month for TEN. Despite slick advertising and countless other advantages that Kali lacked, neither would ever come close to overtaking its scruffy older rival, which had price as well as oodles of grass-roots goodwill on its side. Jay Cotton:

It was always my belief that Kali would continue to be successful as long as I never got greedy. I wanted everyone to be so happy with their purchase that they would never hesitate to recommend it to a friend. [I would] never charge more than someone would be readily willing to pay. It also became a selling point that Kali only charged a one-time fee, with free upgrades forever. People really liked this, and it prevented newcomers (TEN, Heat [a service launched in 1997 by Sega of America], MPlayer, etc.) from being able to charge enough to pay for their expensive overheads.

Kali was able to compete with TEN, MPlayer, and Heat because it already had a large established user base (more users equals more fun) and because it was much, much cheaper. These new services wanted to charge a subscription fee, but didn’t provide enough added benefit to justify the added expense.

It was a heady rush indeed, although it would also prove a short-lived one; Kali’s competitors would all be out of business within a year or so of the turn of the millennium. Kali itself stuck around after that, but as a shadow of what it had been, strictly a place for old-timers to reminisce and play the old hits. “I keep it running just out of habit,” said Jay Cotton in 2013. “I make just enough money on website ads to pay for the server.” It still exists today, presumably as a result of the same force of habit.

One half of what Kali and its peers offered was all too obviously ephemeral from the start: as the Internet went mainstream, developers inevitably began building TCP/IP support right into their games, eliminating the need for an external IPX-to-TCP/IP bridge. (For example, Quake, id Software’s much-anticipated follow-up to DOOM, did just this when it finally arrived in 1996.) But the other half of what they offered was community, which may have seemed a more durable sort of benefit. As it happened, though, one clever studio did an end-run around them here as well.

The folks at Blizzard Entertainment, the small studio and publisher that was fast coming to rival id Software for the title of the hottest name in gaming, were enthusiastic supporters of Kali in the beginning, to the point of hand-tweaking Warcraft II, their mega-hit real-time strategy, to run optimally over the service. They were rewarded by seeing it surpass even DOOM to become the most popular game there of all. But as they were polishing their new action-CRPG Diablo for release in 1996, Mike O’Brien, a Blizzard programmer, suggested that they launch their own service that would do everything Kali did in terms of community, albeit for Blizzard’s games alone. And then he additionally suggested that they make it free, gambling that knowledge of its existence would sell enough games for them at retail to offset its maintenance costs. Blizzard’s unofficial motto had long been “Let’s be awesome,” reflecting their determination to sell exactly the games that real hardcore gamers were craving, honed to a perfect finish, and to always give them that little bit extra. What better way to be awesome than by letting their customers effortlessly play and socialize online, and to do so for free?

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Warcraft’s chief competitor Command & Conquer, had introduced a service called Westwood Chat that could launch people directly into a licensed version of Monopoly. (Shades of Dani Bunten Berry’s cherished childhood memories…) At the moment it supported only Monopoly, a title that appealed to a very different demographic from the hardcore crowd who favored Blizzard’s games, but who knew how long that would last?[4]Westwood Chat would indeed evolve eventually into Westwood Online, with full support for Command & Conquer, but that would happen only after Blizzard had rolled out their own service.

So, when Diablo shipped in the last week of 1996, it included something called Battle.net, a one-click chat and matchmaking service and multiplayer facilitator. Battle.net made everything easier than it had ever been before. It would even automatically patch your copy of the game to the latest version when you logged on, pioneering the “software as a service” model in gaming that has become everyday life in our current age of Steam. “It was so natural,” says Blizzard executive Max Schaefer. “You didn’t think about the fact that you were playing with a dude in Korea and a guy in Israel. It’s really a remarkable thing when you think about it. How often are people casually matched up in different parts of the world?” The answer to that question, of course, was “not very often” in the context of 1997. Today, it’s as normal as computers themselves, thanks to groundbreaking initiatives like this one. Blizzard programmer Jeff Strain:

We believed that in order for it [Battle.net] to really be embraced and adopted, that accessibility had to be there. The real catch for Battle.net was that it was inside-out rather than outside-in. You jumped right into the game. You connected players from within the game experience. You did not alt-tab off into a Web browser to set up your games and have the Web browser try to pass off information or something like that. It was a service designed from Day One to be built into actual games.

The combination of Diablo and Battle.net brought a new, more palpable sort of persistence to online gaming. Players of DOOM or Warcraft II might become known as hotshots on services like Kali, but their reputation conferred no tangible benefit once they entered a game session. A DOOM deathmatch or a Warcraft II battle was a one-and-done event, which everyone started on an equal footing, which everyone would exit again within an hour or so, with nothing but memories and perhaps bragging rights to show for what had transpired.

Diablo, however, was different. Although less narratively and systemically ambitious than many of its recent brethren, it was nevertheless a CRPG, a genre all about building up a character over many gaming sessions. Multiplayer Diablo retained this aspect: the first time you went online, you had to pick one of the three pre-made first-level characters to play, but after that you could keep bringing the same character back to session after session, with all of the skills and loot she had already collected. Suddenly the link between the real people in the chat rooms and their avatars that lived in the game proper was much more concrete. Many found it incredibly compelling. People started to assume the roles of their characters even when they were just hanging out in the chat rooms, started in some very real sense to live the game.

But it wasn’t all sunshine and roses. Battle.net became a breeding ground of the toxic behaviors that have continued to dog online gaming to this day, a social laboratory demonstrating what happens when you take a bunch of hyper-competitive, rambunctious young men and give them carte blanche to have at it any way they wish with virtual swords and spells. The service was soon awash with “griefers,” players who would join others on their adventures, ostensibly as their allies in the dungeon, then literally stab them in the back when they least expected it, killing their characters and running off with all of their hard-won loot. The experience could be downright traumatizing for the victims, who had thought they were joining up with friendly strangers simply to have fun together in a cool new game. “Going online and getting killed was so scarring,” acknowledges David Brevick, Diablo’s original creator. “Those players are still feeling a little bit apprehensive.”

To make matters worse, many of the griefers were also cheaters. Diablo had been born and bred a single-player game; multiplayer had been a very late addition. This had major ramifications. Diablo stored all the information about the character you played online on your local hard drive rather than the Battle.net server. Learn how to modify this file, and you could create a veritable god for yourself in about ten minutes, instead of the dozens of hours it would take playing the honest way. “Trainers” — programs that could automatically do the necessary hacking for you — spread like wildfire across the Internet. Other folks learned to hack the game’s executable files themselves. Most infamously, they figured out ways to attack other players while they were still in the game’s above-ground town, supposedly a safe space reserved for shopping and healing. Battle.net as a whole took on a siege mentality, as people who wanted to play honorably and honestly learned to lock the masses out with passwords that they exchanged only with trusted friends. This worked after a fashion, but it was also a betrayal of the core premise and advantage of Battle.net, the ability to find a quick pick-up game anytime you wanted one. Yet there was nothing Blizzard could do about it without rewriting the whole game from the ground up. They would eventually do this — but they would call the end result Diablo II. In the meanwhile, it was a case of player beware.

It’s important to understand that, for all that it resembled what would come later all too much from a sociological perspective, multiplayer Diablo was still no more persistent than Moria and Oubliette had been on the old PLATO network: each player’s character was retained from session to session, but nothing about the state of the world. Each world, or instance of the game, could contain a maximum of four human players, and disappeared as soon as the last player left it, leaving as its legacy only the experience points and items its inhabitants had collected from it while it existed. Players could and did kill the demon Diablo, the sole goal of the single-player game, one that usually required ten hours or more of questing to achieve, over and over again in the online version. In this sense, multiplayer Diablo was a completely different game from single-player Diablo, replacing the simple quest narrative of the latter with a social meta-game of character-building and player-versus-player combat.

For lots and lots of people, this was lots and lots of fun; Diablo was hugely popular despite all of the exploits it permitted — indeed, for some players perchance, because of them. It became one of the biggest computer games of the 1990s, bringing online gaming to the masses in a way that even Kali had never managed. Yet there was still a ways to go to reach total persistence, to bring a permanent virtual world to life. Next time, then, we’ll see how mainstream commercial games of the 1990s sought to achieve a degree of persistence that the first MUD could boast of already in 1979. These latest virtual worlds, however, would attempt to do so with all the bells and whistles and audiovisual niceties that a new generation of gamers raised on multimedia and 3D graphics demanded. An old dog in the CRPG space was about to learn a new trick, creating in the process a new gaming acronym that’s even more of a mouthful than POMG.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: the books Stay Awhile and Listen Volumes 1 and 2 by David L. Craddock, Masters of Doom by David Kushner, and The Friendly Orange Glow by Brian Dear; Retro Gamer 43, 90, and 103; Computer Gaming World of September 1996 and May 1997; Next Generation of March 1997. Online sources include “The Story of Battle.net” by Wes Fenlon at PC Gamer, Dan Griliopoulos’s collection of interviews about Command & Conquer, Brian Moriarty’s speech honoring Dani Bunten Berry from the 1998 Game Developers Conference, and Jay Cotton’s history of Kali on the DOOM II fan site. Plus some posts on The CRPG Addict, to which I’ve linked in the article proper.

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

The PLATO Moria was a completely different game from the 1983 single-player roguelike that bore the same name.

↑2

Not the same game as the 2002 Bioware CRPG of the same name.

↑3

Wheeler Dealers and all of her other games that are mentioned in this article were credited to Dan Bunten, the name under which she lived until 1992.

↑4

Westwood Chat would indeed evolve eventually into Westwood Online, with full support for Command & Conquer, but that would happen only after Blizzard had rolled out their own service.

The Rise of POMG, Part 2: Multima
February 2, 2024

This sign, executed in throwback 1980s Ultima iconography, hung on the wall outside the elevator on the fifth floor of Origin Systems’s office building, pointing the way to the Multima team. If you neglected to follow the sign’s advice and turned left instead of right here, you would plunge five stories to your doom.

To carry our story forward into the next phase of persistent online multiplayer gaming, we first need to go backward again — all the way back to the days when tabletop Dungeons & Dragons was new on the scene and people were first beginning to imagine how computers might make it more accessible. Some dreamed of eliminating the pesky need for other humans to play with entirely; others wondered whether it might be possible to use networked computers in place of the tabletop, so that you could get together and play with your friends without all of the logistical complications of meeting up in person. Still others dreamed bigger, dreamed of things that would never be possible even with a tabletop big enough to make King Arthur blush. What if you could use computers to make a living virtual world with thousands of human inhabitants? In a column in a 1983 issue of Starlog magazine, Lenny Kaye mused about just such a thing.

When played among groups of people, [tabletop] RPGs foster a sense of cooperation toward a common goal, something videogames have hardly approached.

But with the computer’s aid, the idea of the game network can expand outward, interfacing with all sorts of societal drifts. The technology for both video[games] and RPGs is still in its infancy — one with graphics and memory far from ideal, the other still attached to its boards and figurines — and yet, it’s not hard to imagine a nationwide game, in which all citizens play their part. Perhaps it becomes an arena in which to exercise and exorcise ourselves, releasing our animal instincts through the power of the mind, understanding the uses and misuses of our humanity.

While they waited for the technology which could make that dream a reality to appear, people did what they could with what they had. The ones who came closest to the ideal of a “nationwide game” were those running MUDs, those “multi-user dungeons” that allowed up to 100 players to interact with one another by typing commands into a textual parser, with teletype-style streaming text as their eyes and ears into the world they all shared.

Island of Kesmai did soon come along on the big online service CompuServe, with an interface that looked more like Rogue than the original game of Adventure. But again, only 100 people could play together simultaneously there, about the same number as on the biggest MUDs. And in this case, each of them had to pay by the minute for the privilege. For all that it was amazing that it could exist at all in its time and place, Island of Kesmai was more like a wealthy gated village than a teeming virtual world.

Still, it must be acknowledged that the sellers of traditional boxed computer games were even farther away from that aspiration, being content to offer up single-player CRPGs where combat — that being the aspect of tabletop RPGs that was easiest to implement on a computer — tended to overwhelm everything else. The one obvious exception to this norm was Origin Systems of Austin, Texas. Especially after 1985’s landmark Ultima IV, Origin’s Ultima series became not only the commercial standard bearer for CRPGs but the best argument for the genre’s potential to be about something more than statistics and combat tactics. These games were rather about world-building and about the Virtues of the (player’s) Avatar, daring to introduce an ethical philosophy that was applicable to the real world — and then, in later installments, to muddy the waters by mercilessly probing the practical limitations and blind spots inherent in any such rigid ethical code.

Richard Garriott — “Lord British” to his legion of fans, the creator of Ultima and co-founder of Origin — had first conceived of the games as a re-creation of the tabletop Dungeons & Dragons sessions that had made him a minor celebrity in his Houston neighborhood well before he got his hands on his first Apple II. The setting of computerized Ultima was the world of Britannia, the same one he had invented for his high-school friends. The idea of adventuring together with others through the medium of the computer thus made a lot of sense to him. Throughout the 1980s and beyond, he repeatedly brought up the hypothetical game that he called Multima, a multiplayer version of Ultima. In 1987, an Origin programmer was actually assigned to work on it for a while. Garriott, from a contemporary interview:

James Van Artsdalen, who does our IBM and Macintosh translations, is working on a program that lets several people participate in the game. Two people can do this with different computers directly connected via modems, or even more can play via a system with multiple modems. We don’t know if we’ll be able to support packet networks like CompuServe because they may be too slow for this application. We’ll do it if we can.

What you’ll buy in the store will be a package containing all the core graphics routines and the game-development stuff (all the commands and so on), which you could even plug into your computer and play as a standalone. But with a modem you could tie a friend into the game, or up to somewhere between eight and sixteen other players, all within the same game.

We will most likely run a game of this out of our office. Basically, we can almost gamemaster it. There could be a similar setup in each town, and anybody could run one. Our intention is to let anyone capable of having multiple modems on their system have the network software. Anybody can be a node: two people can play if they each own a package, just by calling each other. But to be a base, a multiplayer node, you’ve got to have multiple modems and may need additional software. If the additional software is needed, we’ll let anyone who wants it have it, since we’re just supporting sales of our own products anyway.

Should be a lot of fun, we think. We hope to have it out by next summer [the summer of 1988], and it should cost between $30 and $60. This will be able to tie different kinds of computers together, since the information being sent back and forth doesn’t include any graphics. I could play on my Apple while you’re on your IBM, for instance. The graphics will be full state-of-the-art Ultima graphics, but they’ll already be on your computer.

Alas, this Multima was quietly abandoned soon after the interview, having been judged just too uncertain a project to invest significant resources into when there was guaranteed money to be made from each new single-player Ultima. As we’ll soon see, it was not the last time that argument was made against a Multima.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Multima was revived for a time, this time as a three-way partnership among Origin, the commercial online service GEnie, and Kesmai, the maker of Island of Kesmai. The last would be given the source code to Ultima VI, the latest iteration of the single-player series, and would adapt it for online play, after which GEnie would deploy it on its central mainframe. As it happened, a similar deal was already taking SSI’s Gold Box engine for licensed Dungeons & Dragons CRPGs through the same process of transformation. It would result in something called Neverwinter Nights[1]Not the same game as the 2002 Bioware CRPG of the same name.America Online in 1991 with an initial capacity of 100 simultaneous players, eventually to be raised by popular demand to 500, making it the most massively multiplayer online game of the early 1990s. But Multima was not so lucky; the deal fell through before it had gotten beyond the planning stages, perchance having proved a simple case of too many cooks in the kitchen.

Richard Garriott had largely ceased to involve himself in the day-to-day work of making new Ultima games by this point, but he continued to set the overall trajectory of the franchise. And as he did so, he never forgot those old hopes for a Multima. Not long after Electronic Arts (EA) purchased Origin Systems in 1992, he thought he saw the stars aligning at long last. For 1993 brought with it NCSA Mosaic, the first broadly popular multimedia Web browser, the harbinger of the home Internet boom. This newly accessible public Internet could replace fragile peer-to-peer modems connections as easily as it could the bespoke private networks of CompuServe and GEnie, making the likes of Multima seem far more practical, both to implement and to offer to customers at an affordable price.

Richard Garriott in 1995.

For better or for worse, though, Origin was now a part of EA, who had the final say on which projects got funded. Garriott tried repeatedly over a period of a year and a half or more to interest EA’s CEO Larry Probst in his Multima schemes, without success. As he tells the story, he and a couple of other true believers from Origin resorted to guerrilla tactics at the third formal pitch meeting.

We literally just refused to give up the floor. They said, “No. Get out.” And we stomped our feet and held our breath. “We are not leaving until you guys get a clue. As a developer, we go over-budget by 25 to 50 percent every year. We’re only asking for $250,000 to build a prototype.” I already had a piece of paper prepared: “You approve of us going $250,000 over-budget to prove that this can work.” And finally, after heated yelling and screaming, they signed the piece of paper and kicked us in the ass as we left the room.

It must be said here that Garriott is generally not one to let an overly fussy allegiance to pedantic truth get in the way of a good story. Thus I suspect that the decision to green-light a Multima prototype may not have been arrived at in quite so dramatic a fashion as the tale above. (Garriott has in fact told a number of versions of the story over the years; in another of them, he’s alone in Larry Probst’s office, hectoring him one-and-one into signing the note granting him $250,000 to investigate the possibility.) Most important for our purposes, however, is that the decision was definitely made by early 1995.

The answer to another question is even more murky: that of just when the change was made from an Ultima that you could play online with a few of your buddies — a feature that would be seen well before the end of the 1990s in a number of otherwise more conceptually conventional CRPGs, such as Diablo and Baldur’s Gate — to a persistent virtual Britannia inhabited by dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of other players. The acronym by which we refer to such worlds today would be coined by Richard Garriott in 1997: the “massively multiplayer online role-playing game,” or MMORPG. (And you thought POMG was a mouthful!) Yet it appears that Multima may not have become an MMORPG in the minds of its creators until after Garriott secured his funding, and that that hugely important conceptual shift may not have originated with Garriott himself. One alternative candidate is the man to whom Garriott turned to become the nuts-and-bolts administrator of the project: Starr Long, a quality-assurance lead who had been one of his few Multima allies inside the company for quite some time. (“The original idea,” Long said in a 1996 interview — i.e., close to the events in question — “was to take an Ultima and just make it so you could have a party of people travel together.”) A third candidate is Rick Delashmit, the first and for a long time the only programmer assigned to the project, who unlike Garriott and Long had deep connections to the MUD scene, gaming’s closest extant equivalent to what Multima would become. In fact, Delashmit had actually co-founded a MUD of his own: LegendMUD, which was still running on a single 80486-based personal computer humming away under a desk in an Austin data center.

Regardless of who decided to do what, Long and Delashmit soon had cause to wonder whether signing onto Multima had been their worst career move ever. “We were kind of the bastard stepchild,” Long says. “No one got it and no one was really interested, because everyone wanted to build the next [single-player] Ultima or Wing Commander. Those were the sexy projects.” They found themselves relegated to the fifth floor of Origin’s Austin, Texas, headquarters, jammed into one corner of a space that was mostly being leased out to an unaffiliated advertising agency.

Making the best of it, Long and Delashmit hacked together a sort of prototype of a prototype. Stealing a trick and possibly some code from the last attempt at a Multima, they started with the now-archaic Ultima VI engine. “All you could do was run around and pick up a single object off of the ground,” says Long. “And then if another player ran into you, you would drop it. We had a scavenger hunt, where we hid a few objects around the map and then let the whole company loose to find them. Whoever was still holding them after an hour won.”

It was a start, but it still left a million questions unanswered. A game like this one — or rather a virtual world — must have a fundamentally different structure than a single-player Ultima, even for that matter than the tabletop RPG sessions that had inspired Richard Garriott’s most famous creations. Those games had all been predicated on you — or at most on you and a few of your best mates — being the unchallenged heroes of the piece, the sun around which everything else orbited. But you couldn’t fill an entire world with such heroes; somebody had to accept supporting roles. Some might even have to play evil rather than virtuous characters, upending the core message of Ultima since Ultima IV.

Garriott, Long, and Delashmit weren’t the only ones pondering these questions. In a 1993 issue of Sierra On-Line’s newsletter InterAction, that company’s head Ken Williams — a man who bore some surface similarities to Garriott, being another industry old-timer who had given up the details of game development for the big-picture view by this point in his career — asked how massively multi-player adventuring could possibly be made to function. He had good reason to ask: his own company’s Sierra Network was doing pioneering work in multiplayer gaming at the time, albeit as a closed dial-up service rather than on the open Internet.

I think a multiplayer adventure game is the next major step. Imagine a version of Police Quest, looking like it does now, except that your partner in the patrol car and the people in the street around you are real people. I think this would be cool.

For three months, Roberta [Williams, Ken’s wife], Chris [Williams, the couple’s son], and I have been arguing over how this would work. The problem is that most adventure games have some central quest story. Generally speaking, once you’ve solved the quest the game is over. You are there as the central character, and all of the other characters are there primarily to help move you towards completing your quest (or to get in your way).

A multiplayer adventure game would be a completely different animal. If 500 people were playing multiplayer King’s Quest at the same time, would there have to be 500 separate quests? There are also problems having to do with the fact that people aren’t always connected to the network. If my goal is to save you from an evil wizard, what do I do if neither you nor the evil wizard happen to sign on?

Here’s the thoughts we’ve had so far. What if we create a world that just contains nothing but forest as far as you can see? When you enter the game, you can do things like explore, or even build yourself a house. There’ll be stores where you can buy supplies. Soon, cities will form. People may want to build walls around their cities. Cities may want to bargain with each other for food. Or, for protection against common enemies. There needs to be some sense of purpose to the game. What if, after some amount of time in the land, the game “promotes” you to some status where your goals become to create the problems which affect the city, such as plagues, war, rampaging dragons, etc. In other words, some of the players are solving quests while others are creating them. Sooner or later, it becomes your turn to complicate the lives of others.

Either this is a remarkable case of parallel invention or someone was whispering in Ken Williams’s ear about MUDs. For the last paragraph above is an uncannily accurate description of how many of the latter were run, right down to dedicated and accomplished players being elevated to “wizard” status, with powers over the very nature of the virtual world itself. The general MUD design philosophy, which had been thoroughly tested and proven solid over the years, held that the creators of multiplayer worlds didn’t have to worry overmuch about the stories and quests and goals that were needed for compelling single-player games. It was enough simply to put a bunch of people together in an environment that contained the raw building blocks of such things. They’d do the rest for themselves; they’d find their own ways to have fun.

In our next article, we’ll see what resulted from Ken Williams’s ideas about massively-multiplayer adventure. For now, though, let us return to our friends at Origin Systems and find out how they attempted to resolve the quandary of what people should actually be doing in their virtual world.

In the immediate aftermath of that first online scavenger hunt, nobody there knew precisely what they ought to do next. It was at this point that Rick Delashmit offered up the best idea anyone had yet had. Multima would share many commonalities with textual MUDs, he said. So why not hire some more folks who knew those virtual worlds really, really well to help the Origin folks make theirs? He had two friends in mind in particular: a young couple named Raph and Kristen Koster, who had taken over the running of LegendMUD after he had stepped down.

The Kosters were graduate students in Alabama, meaning that much of the negotiation had to be conducted by telephone and computer. Raph was finishing up his program in poetry at the University of Alabama, while Kristen studied economics — a perfect pair of perspectives from which to tackle the art and science of building a new virtual world, as it happened. Raph Koster:

We started to get interview questions remotely as they worked to figure out whether we were qualified. All of the questions came from what was very much a single-player slant. We were sent examples of code and asked if we could write code like that and find the bugs that had been intentionally inserted into the code. It was something like a misplaced closing brace.

Finally, we were asked for a sample quest. I sent them the entire code and text of my quest for the Beowulf zone in LegendMUD, but then also said, “But we wouldn’t do quests this way at all now.” Kristen and I had been working on a simulation system based on artificial life and economic theory. We basically sent in a description of our design work on that. It was a system that was supposed to simulate the behavior of creatures and NPCs [non-player characters] using a simplistic version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, with abstract properties behind everything.

The Kosters were hired already in the spring of 1995, but couldn’t start on a full-time basis until September 1. Over the course of several drives between Tuscaloosa and Austin and back in the interim, they hashed out their vision for Multima.

They wanted to lean heavily into simulation, trusting that, if they did it right, quests and all the rest would arise organically from the state of the world rather than needing to be hard-coded. Objects in the world would be bundles of abstract qualities which interacted with one another in pre-defined ways; take an object with the quality of “wood” and touch it to one with the quality of “fire,” and exactly what you expected to happen would occur. This reliance on qualities would make it quick and easy for people — designers or just ordinary players — to create new objects on the fly and have them act believably.

But the system could go much further. The non-player creatures which populated the world would have different sorts of qualities attached, derived, as Raph Koster notes above, from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Each creature would have its own types of Food and Shelter that it sought to attain and retain, alongside a more elevated set of Desires to pursue and Aversions to avoid once it had served for its most basic needs.

An early preview of the game, written by Paul Schuytema for Computer Gaming World magazine, describes how the system would ideally work in action, how it would obviate the need for a human designer to generate thousands of set-piece quests to keep players busy.

Designing a dynamic world is a tricky business. How do you create enough quests to interest 2000 people? Origin’s solution: don’t. Create a world with enough logical conditions that it will generate its own quests. For example, consider a cave in the virtual world. Any self-respecting cave needs a monster, so you assign the cave a “need for monster” request of the game-world engine. Poof! A monster, let’s say a dragon, is then spontaneously created in the cave. Dragons are big eaters, so the dragon sends out a “need for meat” request. Meat, in the form of deer, roams the forest outside the cave, so the dragon’s life consists of leaving the cave to consume deer. If something happens that lowers the deer population (bad weather, over-hunting, or a game administrator strategically killing off deer), the dragon will have to widen its search for meat, which might lead it to the sheep pastures outside town.

At this point, NPCs can be useful to tell real players about a ravenous dragon roaming the countryside. NPCs can also sweeten the pot by offering rewards to anyone who can slay it. But what are they going to say?

“All of the [NPCs’] conversations come from a dynamic conversation pool which is linked to the world state,” explains Long. This means that if you, as a player, were to walk into this town, any one of the villagers will say something like, “Hey, we need your help. This dragon is eating all our sheep.” Thus, the “Kill the Dragon” quest is underway — succeed, and the villagers will handsomely reward you.

If you put it all together correctly, you would end up with a living world, to an extent that even the most ambitious textual MUDs had barely approached to that point. Everything that was needed to make it a game as well as a virtual space would come about of its own accord once you let real humans start to run around in it and interfere with the lives of the algorithmically guided dragons and guards and shopkeepers. It would be all the more fun for being true to itself, a complex dynamic system responding to itself as well as to thousands of human inputs that were all happening at once, a far cry from the typical single-player Ultima where nothing much happened unless you made it happen. Incidentally but not insignificantly, it would also be a sociologist’s dream, a fascinating study in mass human psychology, perhaps even a laboratory for insights into the evolution of real-world human civilizations.

When they arrived for their first day on the job, the Kosters were rather shocked to find that their new colleagues had already begun to implement the concepts which the couple had informally shared with them during the interview process and afterward. It was disconcerting on the one hand — “It freaked us out because we had assumed there was already a game design,” says Raph — but bracing on the other. This pair of unproven industry neophytes, with little on their résumés in games beyond hobbyist experimentation in the obscure culture of MUDs, was in a position to decide exactly what Multima would become. It would take a year or more for Raph Koster to be given the official title of “Creative Lead”; when he arrived, that title belonged to one Andrew Morris, a veteran of Ultima VII and VIII who had recently been transferred to the project, where he would struggle, like so many others at Origin, to wrap his head around the paradigm shift from single-player to multiplayer gaming. But for all intents and purposes, Raph and Kristen Koster filled that role from the start. Each was paid $25,000 per year for building this brave new world. They wouldn’t have traded it for a job that paid ten times the salary. At their urging, Origin hired several other MUDders to work with them on what was now to be called Ultima On-Line; the game would soon loose the hyphen to arrive at its final name.

I can’t emphasize enough what a leap into uncharted territory this was for Origin, as indeed it would have been for any other games studio of the time. To put matters in perspective, consider that Origin began working on Ultima Online before it even had a static website up on the Internet. The company had always been in the business of making packaged goods, games on disc that were sold once for a one-time price. Barring a patch or two in the worst cases, these games’ developers could wash their hands of them and move on once they were finished. But Ultima Online was to be something entirely different, a “game” — if that word even still applied — that was run as a service. How should people pay for the privilege of playing it? (Origin had no experience with billing its customers monthly.) And how much should they pay? (While everyone on the team could agree that Ultima Online needed to be appreciably cheaper than the games on CompuServe and its ilk, no one could say for sure where the sweet spot lay.) In short, the practical logistics of Ultima Online would have been a major challenge even if the core team of less than a dozen mostly green youngsters — median age about 22 — hadn’t also been trying to create a new world out of whole cloth, with only partially applicable precedents.

The early Multima team, or the “MUDders of Invention,” as they sometimes liked to call themselves. Clockwise from top left: Rick Delashmit, Edmond Mainfelder, Clay Hoffman, Starr Long, Micael Priest, Andrew Morris, Scott Phillips, Kristen Koster, and Raph Koster.

When the advertising agency that had been the team’s neighbor moved out, Origin decided to gut the now almost empty fifth floor where the latter was still ensconced. “They literally knocked out all the walls and the windows,” says Raph Koster. “So, the elevator surfaced to bare concrete. If you turned right, you went to see our team in a converted hallway, the only part left standing. If you turned left, you fell five floors to your death.” It was freezing cold up there in the winter, and the dust was thick in the air all year round, such that they learned to wrap their computers in plastic when they left for the day. “This team was given the least possible support you can imagine,” says Richard Garriott.

Undaunted, the little group did what the best game developers have always done when cast onto uncharted waters: they made something to start with, then tested it, then iterated, then tested some more, ad nauseum. Garriott came by “once a month or so,” in the recollection of Raph Koster, to observe and comment on their progress. Otherwise, their ostensible colleagues at Origin seemed hardly to know that they existed. “We were punk kids doing stuff in the attic,” says Raph, “and our parents had no idea what we were up to.”

In January of 1996, they put a message up on the Origin Systems website (yes, one had been built by this point): “Ultima Online (working title, subject to change) is now taking applications from people interested in play-testing a pre-alpha version, starting on March 1, 1996.” Almost 1500 people asked to take part in a test which only had space for a few dozen.

The test began a month behind schedule, but it proved that the core technology could work when it was finally run from April 1 until April 8. “This will be damn awesome when it comes!” enthused one breathless participant over chat. Richard Garriott thrilled the group by appearing in the world as his alter ego one evening. “We ran into LB! The REAL THING!” crowed a starstruck tester. “So what? I went adventuring with him to kill monsters!” scoffed another.

A more ambitious alpha test began about a month later, with participants logging in from as far away as Brazil and Taiwan. The developers waited with bated breath to see what they would do in this latest, far more feature-complete version of the virtual world. What they actually did do was an eye-opener, an early warning about some of the problems that would continue to dog the game and eventually, in the estimation of Raph Koster, cost it half its user base. Koster:

On the very first day of the alpha, players appeared in the tavern in Britain [the capital city of Ultima’s world of Britannia]. They waited for other newbies to walk out the doors, then they stood at the windows and shot arrows at them until they died. The newbies couldn’t shoot back because the archers were hidden behind the wall inside the building. This is, of course, exactly what archery slits were invented for, but it made for a truly lousy first impression of the game.

That was the first time that players took something inherent in the simulation and turned it against their fellow players. Not long after, someone spelled out “fuck” on the main bridge into Britain using fish. Not long after that, players figured out that explosive potions detonated other potions. It was illegal to kill someone in town; it would get you instantly killed by the guards. But if you ran a chain of potions a long distance, like a fuse, you could avoid that.

Chalk it up as another lesson, one to which the team perhaps should have paid more attention. The hope was always that the community would learn to police itself much like those of the real world, that the risks and the stigma of being a troublemaker would come to outweigh the gains and the jollies for all but the most hardened members of the criminal element. Richard Garriott seems to have been in an unusually candid mood when he expressed the hope in a contemporary interview:

One of the unfortunate side effects of computer gaming is that we have a whole generation of kids who have no social graces whatsoever. And this is exemplified in my mind by how much I hate going online for discussions I am invited to do once a month or so. And I truly abhor going to do that for a variety of reasons, one because it’s such a slow experience, but also because everyone has a level of anonymity behind their online persona, [and] they lose their normal and proper etiquette. So you have people screaming over each other to get their questions in, people screaming expletives, people popping in a chat room and making some dumb comment and then popping out again — the kind of behavior that you would never get away with in the real world. So one of the things that I’m really keen to introduce with Ultima Online is making people responsible for their actions, and this will happen as people are recognized by their online persona within the game. They won’t be so anonymous anymore.

This hope would be imperfectly realized at best. “I used to think that you could reform bad apples and argue with hard cases,” says an older and presumably wiser Raph Koster. “I’m more cynical these days.”

So, the alpha testers ran around breaking stuff and making stuff, while the gods of the new fantasy world watched closely from their perch on a gutted floor of an anonymous-looking office building in flesh-and-blood late-twentieth-century Texas to see what it was they had wrought. A bug in the game caused killed characters to respawn naked. (No, not even these simulation-committed developers were cruel enough to make death permanent…) Some players decided they liked it that way, leading to much of Britannia looking like a nudist colony. The guards in the cities had to be instructed to crack down on these victimless criminals as well as thieves and murderers.

But the most important finding was that most of the players loved it. All of it. “We had people who literally did not log off for a week,” says Starr Long. “Groups of players formed tribes, and at the end of the test there was a huge battle between the two largest tribes. None of that we set up. We gave them the world to play in, and human nature took over.” From one of the first substantial previews of the work-in-progress, published in Next Generation magazine:

In a very real sense, the world is what you make of it. One of the more interesting results of Ultima’s alpha testing is that when you have several hundred people in one place at one time, they tend to form their own micro-societies. There are already some two dozen player-created “guilds.” For example, when Richard Garriott signed on as his alter-ego Lord British, two groups sprang up: the Dragon Liberation Front, which pledged itself to destroying him, and the aptly named Protectors of Virtue & Lord British. Threats were made, battles were joined, and a fine time was had by all.

Just as gratifyingly, reports of the alpha test, in the form of previews like the above in many of the glossy gaming magazines, were received very positively by ordinary gamers who hadn’t known that a massively multiplayer Ultima was in the offing prior to this point. Some went so far as to form and run guilds through email, so that they would be ready to go when the day came that they could actually log in. There was still much work to be done before Ultima Online would be ready to welcome the unwashed masses inside, but the MUDders who were making it believed that all of the arrows were pointing in the right direction.

Until, that is, September 27, 1996, when it suddenly seemed that its thunder might have been well and truly stolen. On that date, The 3DO Company published something called Meridian 59, which purported to already be what Ultima Online intended to be: a massively-multiplayer persistent virtual fantasy world. Its box copy trumpeted that hundreds of people would be able to adventure together at the same time, killing monsters and occasionally each other, whilst also chatting and socializing. It sounded great — or terrible, if you happened to be working on Ultima Online.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: the books Braving Britannia: Tales of Life, Love, and Adventure in Ultima Online by Wes Locher, Postmortems: Selected Essays, Volume One by Raph Koster, Online Game Pioneers at Work by Morgan Ramsay, Through the Moongate, Part II by Andrea Contato, Explore/Create by Richard Garriott, and MMOs from the Inside Out by Richard Bartle; Questbusters of July 1987; Sierra’s customer newsletter InterAction of Summer 1993; Computer Gaming World of October 1995 and October 1996; Starlog of December 1983; PC Powerplay of November 1996; Next Generation of June 1996, September 1996, and March 1997; Origin’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of November 3 1995, January 12 1996, and April 5 1996.

Web sources include a 2018 Game Developers Conference talk by some of the Ultima Online principals, an Ultima Online timeline at UOGuide, and some details about LegendMUD, the winner of MUD Connector’s coveted “MUD of the Month” prize for October 1995.

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

Not the same game as the 2002 Bioware CRPG of the same name.

The Rise of POMG, Part 3: Competition and Conflict
February 16, 2024

While the broth of Ultima Online was slowly thickening, not one but two other publishers beat EA and Origin Systems to the punch by releasing graphical persistent virtual worlds of their own. We owe it to them and to ourselves to have a look at these other POMG pioneers before we return to the more widely lauded one that was being built down in Texas. They were known as Meridian 59 and The Realm.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Meridian 59 was inspired by Scepter of Goth,[1]The first word in the name is often spelled Sceptre as well.the text-only MUD outside of the walled gardens of online services such as CompuServe and GEnie. After a long gestation period on a mainframe of the Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium, it was ported in 1983 to an IBM PC/XT, to which were cabled sixteen modems and sixteen phone lines, one for each of the players who could be online at any given time. A company called InterPlay — no, not that Interplay — franchised the software out to operators in at least seven American cities. These franchisees then charged their customers an hourly fee to roam around inside the world. The business model worked surprisingly well for a couple of years, until InterPlay’s founder was sent to prison for tax evasion and his company went down with him.

During the fairly brief window of time that Scepter of Goth remained a going concern, a pair of brothers named Andrew and Chris Kirmse fell in love with the incarnation of it that was run out of their hometown of Fairfax, Virginia. Not yet teenagers when they discovered it, they never forgot it after it disappeared. In the summer of 1994, when Andrew had just earned his bachelor’s degree from MIT and Chris had just finished his junior year at Virginia Tech, they set about bringing something similar to life, albeit this time with a top-down graphical view of the world rather than scrolling text. By the end of the year, they felt they had “the foundation of a game,” as Andrew puts it.

A very early version of the game that would evolve into Meridian 59. At this point, it was known as Blackstone.

Then, like so many other young men of their generation and disposition, they found their productivity derailed by a little game called DOOM. “I spent the early part of 1995 playing DOOM II to the exclusion of all else,” admits Andrew. As soon as he had finished all of the single-player levels, he and a friend started to make a DOOM-like engine of their own — again, just as about a million other young programmers were doing at the time. But there was a key difference in Andrew’s case: he didn’t want to make a single-player game, nor even one oriented toward the one-and-done online deathmatches that were all the rage at university campuses all over the country. He rather wanted to combine DOOM with the persistent online game which he and his brother had already begun — that is to say, to make a DOOM that took place in a persistent world.

Andrew and Chris Kirmse cleared their schedules so that they could spend the summer of 1995 in their parents’ basement, figuring out whether it was possible and practical to make the unholy union a reality. With the Internet now entering the public consciousness in a big way, it was a no-brainer to move the game there, where it would be able to welcome far more than sixteen players without requiring a warehouse worth of modems. A handful of other young dreamers joined them as partners in a would-be company called Archetype Interactive, contributing art, world designs, and even a modicum of business acumen from locations all over the country. Like Kali and for that matter DOOM itself, it was the very definition of an underground project, springing to life far from the bright lights of the major publishers, with their slick “interactive movies” and their fixed — and, it would turn out, comprehensively wrong — ideas of the direction mainstream gaming was destined to go. At first the Archetypers wanted to call their game Meridian, simply because they thought the word sounded cool. But they found that the name was already trademarked, so they stuck an arbitrary number at the end of it to wind up with Meridian 59.

By December, they had a bare-bones world with, as Andrew Kirmse says, “no character advancement, no spells, no guilds, no ranged weapons, just the novelty of seeing other people walking around in 3D and talking to them.” Nevertheless, they decided they were ready for an alpha test, several months before Ultima Online would reach the same milestone. They fired up the server late one evening and went to bed, and were thrilled to wake up the next morning and find four people — out of a maximum of 35 — poking around in their world at the same time. Andrew still calls the excitement of that moment “the high point of the entire project.” They redoubled their efforts, roping in more interested observers to provide more art and expand upon the world and its systems, pushing out major updates every few weeks.

In an testament to the endearingly ramshackle nature of the whole project, the world of Meridian 59 was built using a hacked DOOM level editor. Likewise, much of the early art was blatantly stolen from DOOM.

The world went into beta testing in April of 1996. The maximum number of concurrent players had by now been raised by an order of magnitude, but Meridian 59 had become popular enough that the Archetypers still had to kick people out when they needed to log on themselves to check out their handiwork. Among the curious tire-kickers who visited was Kevin Hester, a programmer with The 3DO Company. Founded by Trip Hawkins five years earlier with the intention of bringing a “multimedia console” — don’t call it a games console! — to living rooms everywhere, 3DO was rather at loose ends by this point, having banked on a future of digital entertainment that was badly at odds with the encroaching reality. But Hawkins’s latest instincts were sounder than those of a half-decade previous: he had now decided that online play rather than single-player multimedia extravaganzas was the future. He jumped on Meridian 59 as soon as Hester brought it to his attention, putting together in a matter of days a deal to acquire the budding virtual world and its far-flung network of creators for $5 million in 3DO stock. The Archetypers all signed on the dotted line and moved to Silicon Valley, most of them meeting one another face to face for the first time on their first day in their new office, where they were thrilled to find five servers — enough for five separate instances of their virtual world! — just waiting for them to continue with the beta test.

It had started off like a hacker fairy tale, but the shine wore off quickly enough. Inspired by the shareware example of DOOM, the Kirmse brothers had expected to offer the game client as a free download, with the necessity to pay subscription fees kicking in only after players had been given a few hours to try it out. 3DO vetoed all of this, insisting that the client be made available only as a boxed product with a $50 initial price tag, plus a $15 monthly subscription fee. And instead of being given as much time as they needed to make their new world fit for permanent habitation, as they had been promised they would, the Archetypers were now told that they had to begin welcoming paying customers into Meridian 59 in less than three months. Damion Schubert, Meridian 59’s world-design lead, claims that “3DO was using us to learn about the business of online gaming,” seeing their very first virtual world as a stepping-stone rather than a destination unto itself. Whatever the truth of that assertion, it is a matter of record that, while the Archetypers were trying to meet 3DO’s deadline, the stock they had been given was in free fall, losing 75 percent of its value in those first three months, thereby doing that much more to convince the accountants that Meridian 59 absolutely, positively had to ship before 3DO’s next fiscal year began on October 1.

An aesthetic triumph Meridian 59 was not.

So, the game that was officially released on September 27, 1996, was not quite the one the Kirmses had envisioned when they signed the contract with 3DO. To call it little more than a massively-multiplayer DOOM deathmatch with a chat system grafted on would be unkind but not totally unfair. Its pseudo-3D engine would have looked badly outdated in 1996, the year of Quake, even if the art hadn’t been such a mismatched grab bag of aesthetics and resolutions. Meridian 59 evinced none of the simulational aspirations of Ultima Online; this was not a world in which anyone was going to pass the time baking bread or chopping lumber. For lack of much else to do, people mostly occupied themselves by killing one another. Like Ultima Online, the software permitted player-versus-player combat anywhere and everywhere; unlike Ultima Online, there were no guards patrolling any of the world’s spaces to disincentivize it. A Meridian 59 server was a purely kill-or-be-killed sort of world, host to a new war every single day. Because there was no budget to add much other content to the world, this was just as well with its creators; indeed, they soon learned to lean into it hard. Activities in the world came to revolve around the possession of guild halls, of which each server boasted ten of varying degrees of splendor for the disparate factions to fight over. If you didn’t like to fight with your fellow players more or less constantly, Meridian 59 probably wasn’t the game for you.

Handed the first-ever full-fledged massively-multiplayer online role-playing game, 3DO’s marketers chose to… write non-sequiters about latex. This might be the worst advertisement I’ve ever seen; I literally have no idea what joke it’s trying and failing to land. Something about condoms, I presume?

Luckily, there were plenty of gamers who really, really did like to fight, as the popularity of DOOM deathmatches illustrated. Despite its dated graphics and despite promotional efforts from 3DO that were bizarrely inept when they weren’t nonexistent, Meridian 59 managed to attract 20,000 or more subscribers and to retain them for a good while, keeping all ten of the servers that were given over to it after the beta test humming along at near capacity most of the time. 3DO even approved a couple of boxed expansion packs that added a modicum of additional content.

But then, in late 1997, 3DO all but killed the virtual world dead at a stroke. Deciding it was unjust that casual players who logged on only occasionally paid the same subscription fee as heavy users who spent many hours per day online, they rejiggered the pricing formula into a tangle of numbers that would have baffled an income-tax accountant: $2.49 per day that one logged on, capped at $9.99 per week, with total fees also capped at $29.99 per month. But never mind the details. Since the largest chunk of subscribers by far belonged to the heavy-user category, it boiled down to a doubling of the subscription price, from $15 to $30 per month. The populations on the servers cratered as a result. Meridian 59’s best days — or at least its most populous ones — thus passed into history.

The other graphical MMORPG to beat Ultima Online to market had a very different personality. Sierra’s The Realm was the direct result of Ken Williams’s musings about what an “online adventure game” might be like, the same ones that I quoted at some length in my last article. After trying and failing to convince Roberta Williams to add a multiplayer option to King’s Quest VII, he went to a programmer named David Slayback, saying, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could do something like our adventure games, that was Medieval themed, and allowed players to swap items with each other, buy weapons, and attack monsters?” Slayback then took the ball and ran with it; as Ken himself acknowledges, that initial conversation was “the limit of my involvement creatively.”

The original plan was for The Realm to become a part of America Online, the great survivor of the pre-Web era of commercial online services. That deal, however, fell through. Meanwhile Sierra was itself acquired by an e-commerce firm called CUC International, and The Realm seemed to fall between two stools amidst the reshuffling of deck chairs that followed. A beta test in the summer of 1996 did lead to the acceptance of the first paying subscribers in December of that year, but Sierra never did any real promotion beyond its own customer magazine, making the client software available only via mail order. Still, by all indications this virtual world attracted a number of players comparable to that of Meridian 59, perhaps not least because in its case buying the boxed client entitled the customer to a full year of free online play.

The Realm stands today as a rather fascinating artifact, being the road largely not taken in the MMORPG space. In presentation, aesthetics, and culture, it has more in common with Habitat, an amazingly early attempt by Lucasfilm Games and America Online’s direct predecessor Quantum Link to build a non-competitive graphical space for online socializing, than it does with either Meridian 59 or Ultima Online. This world was very clear about where its priorities lay: “The Realm offers you a unique environment in which to socialize with online friends (or make some new ones) and also gives you something fun to do while you’re socializing.” It was, in other words, a case of social space first, game second. As such, it might be better read as a progenitor to the likes of Second Life or The Sims Online than something like World of Warcraft.

Each player started in her own house, which she had to fight neither to acquire nor to defend. The interface was set up like one of the point-and-click graphic adventures that had been Sierra’s bread and butter since the mid-1980s, with the player guiding her avatar in the third person across a map made up of “rooms” that filled exactly one screen each. The graphical style too was right out of King’s Quest. None of this is terribly surprising, given that The Realm was built using SCI, Sierra’s venerable adventure-game engine.

Although there were monsters to fight and treasure to collect, player-versus-player combat was impossible. Even profanity was expressly forbidden. (“This includes ‘masking’ by using asterisks as part of the word,” noted the FAQ carefully.) The combat was also unusual in that it was turn-based. This choice, combined with the way that The Realm off-loaded an unusual amount of work to the player’s local client, meant that Sierra didn’t have to spread it across multiple servers; uniquely for this era, there really was just one Realm.

All of this attracted a dramatically different clientele from that of Meridian 59; many more women hung out in The Realm, for one thing. Interior decoration and fashion trumped murder and theft in the typical range of pursuits. Beth Demetrescu wrote in Sierra’s magazine InterAction about her own first days there:

As with all newbies, I started in my house. I was a poor, hungry, fashion faux pas. After I got out of my house, moved about six screens, and was lost in my hometown, I encountered HorseWoman, whose biography said she was an eleven-year-old. She took me to her home, gave me decent clothes, and taught me about basic communication, navigation, and combat. This was my first experience with the warm, welcoming community of The Realm.

I soon found myself outside of the town fighting rats. There are plenty of large, ferocious beasts to fight, but for the time being, all I could handle were rats. I was really worried the first time one of these rats killed me, thinking I was going to get kicked out of the game and would have to log back on. Instead, I lost everything I was carrying, but I was found by wanderers who dragged me home to heal…

I learned of Realm weddings. BlueRose, the Justice of the Peace, often called the Lady of Love, conducts over half of the Realm weddings…

I have picked up several valuable things from the many Realmers I have encountered. Not only did I get important information on The Realm’s features and inhabitants, but I also learned from their example about The Realm’s vast, multinational community. These people are friendly and helpful.

The contrast with Meridian 59, where a bewildered newbie was more likely to be given a broadsword to the back of the neck than navigational and sartorial assistance, could hardly have been greater.

A wedding in The Realm.

All told, then, Meridian 59 and The Realm provided the early MMORPG space with its yang and its yin: the one being a hyper-violent, hyper-competitive free-for-all where pretty much anything went, the other a friendly social space that was kept that way by tight moderation. Nevertheless, the two did have some things in common. Neither ever became more than moderately popular, for one — and that according to a pretty generous interpretation of “moderately” in a fast-expanding games industry. And yet both proved weirdly hard to kill. In fact, both are still alive to this day, abandoned decades ago by their original publishers but kept online by hook or by crook by folks who simply refuse to let them go away — certainly not now, when the aged code that makes their worlds come alive can be run for a pittance on a low-end server tucked away in some back corner of an office or data center somewhere. Their populations on any given evening may now be in the dozens rather than the hundreds or thousands, but these virtual worlds abide. In this too, they’ve set a precedent for their posterity; the Internet of today is fairly littered with online games whose heyday of press notices and mainstream popularity are well behind them, but that seem determined to soldier on until the last grizzled graybeard who cut his teeth on them in his formative years shuffles off this mortal coil. MMORPGs especially are a bit like cockroaches in this respect — with no insult to either the worlds or the insects in question intended. Suffice to say that community can be a disarmingly resilient thing.

But we return now to the story of Ultima Online, whose makers viewed the less than overwhelming commercial acceptance of Meridian 59 and The Realm with some ambivalence. On the one hand, Ultima Online had avoided having its own thunder stolen by another MMORPG sensation. On the other, these other virtual worlds’ middling trajectories gave no obvious reason to feel hugely confident in Ultima Online’s own commercial prospects.

This was a problem not least because, as 1996 turned the corner into 1997, the project’s financial well had just about run dry, just as this virtual Britannia was ready to go from the alpha to the beta stage of testing, with ten to twenty times the number of participants of earlier testing rounds. It wasn’t clear how this next step could be managed under the circumstances; the client software was by now too big to ask prospective testers to download it in its entirety in this era of dial-up connections, yet there simply wasn’t sufficient money in the budget to stamp and ship 20,000 or more CDs out to them. The team decided there was only one option, cheeky though it seemed: to ask each participant in effect to pay Origin for the privilege of testing their game for them, by sending in $5 to cover the cost of the CD. The principals claim today that 50,000 people did so as soon as the test was announced online, burying Origin in incoming mail; I suspect this number may be inflated somewhat, as many of those associated with Ultima Online tend to be in the memories of those who made it. But regardless of the exact figure, the response definitely was considerable, not to mention gratifying for the little team of ex-MUDders who had been laboring in disrespected obscurity up there on a gutted fifth floor. It was the first piece of incontrovertible evidence that there were significant numbers of people out there who were really, really excited by the idea of living out an Ultima game with thousands of others.

The original Ultima Online beta CDs have become coveted collectors’ items.

As the creators tell the story, the massive popular reaction to the call for beta testers was solely responsible for changing the hearts and minds of their managers at EA and Origin. Realizing suddenly that Ultima Online had serious moneymaking potential, they went overnight from passive-aggressively trying to kill it to being all-in with bells on. In March of 1997, they moved the MUDders from their barren exile down to the scene of the most important action at Origin, where a much larger team had been working on Ultima IX, the latest iteration in the single-player series. Yet it was the latter project that was now to go on hiatus, not Ultima Online. This new amalgamation of developers, five or six times the size of the team of the day before, had but one mandate: get the virtual world done already. After two years of living hand to mouth, the original world-builders had merely to state their wishes in terms of resources in order to see them granted.

Most of the conceptual work of building this new online world had already been done by the time the team was so dramatically expanded. Still, we shouldn’t dismiss the importance of this sudden influx of sometimes unwilling bandwagon jumpers. For they made Ultima Online look like at least a passable imitation of a AAA prestige project, in a way that Meridian 59 and The Realm did not. A high design standard combined with a relatively high audiovisual one would prove a potent combination.

With its isometric perspective, Ultima Online most resembled Ultima VII in terms of presentation. The graphics were by no means cutting-edge — Ultima VII had come out back in 1992, after all — but they were bright and attractive, without going full-on cartoon like The Realm.

Did all of this really happen simply because the response to the call for beta testers was better than expected? I have no smoking gun either way, but I must say that I tend to doubt it. Just about everyone loves a good creatives-versus-suits story, such that we seldom question them. Yet the reasoning that went on in the executive suites prior to this turnaround in Ultima Online’s fortunes was perhaps a little more complex than that of a pack of ravenous wolves chasing a tasty rabbit that had finally been revealed to their unimaginative minds. Whatever else one can say about them, most of the suits didn’t get where they were by being stupid. So, maybe we should try to see the situation from their perspective — try to see what Origin looked like to the outsiders at EA’s California headquarters.

Throughout the 1990s, Origin lived on two franchises: Richard Garriott’s Ultima and Chris Roberts’s Wing Commander. To be sure, there were other games here and there, some of which even turned modest profits, but it was these two series that kept the lights on. When EA acquired Origin in September of 1992, both franchises were by all indications in rude health. Wing Commander I and II and a string of mission packs for each were doing tremendous numbers. Ultima VII, the latest release in Richard Garriott’s mainline series, had put up more middling sales figures, but it had been rescued by the spinoff Ultima Underworld, which had come out of nowhere — or more specifically out of the Boston-based studio Blue Sky Productions, soon to be rebranded as Looking Glass — to become another of the year’s biggest hits.

Understandably under the circumstances, EA overlooked what a dysfunctional workplace Origin was already becoming by the time of the acquisition, divided as it was between two camps: the “Friends of Richard” and the “Friends of Chris.” Those two personifications of Origin’s split identity were equally mercurial and equally prone to unrealistic flights of fancy; one can’t help but sense that both of their perceptions of the real world and their place in it had been to one degree or another warped by their having become icons of worship for a cult of adoring gamers at an improbably young age. Small wonder that EA grew concerned that there weren’t enough grounded adults in the room down in Austin, and, after first promising a hands-off approach, showed more and more of a tendency to micro-manage as time went on — so much so that, as we learned in the last article, Garriott was soon reduced to begging for money to start his online passion project.

Wing Commander maintained its momentum for quite some time after the acquisition, even after DOOM came along to upend much of the industry’s conventional wisdom with its focus on pure action at the expense of story and world-building, the things for which both Garriott and Roberts were most known. Wing Commander III was released almost a year after DOOM in late 1994 with a cast of real actors headed by Mark Hamill of Star Wars fame, and became another huge success. Ultima, however, started to lose its way almost as soon as the ink was dry on the acquisition contract. Ultima VIII, which was also released in 1994, chased the latest trends by introducing a strong action element and simplifying most other aspects of its gameplay. This was not done, as some fan narratives wish to state, at the behest of EA’s management, but rather at that of Richard Garriott himself, who feared that his signature franchise was at risk of becoming irrelevant. That said, EA can and should largely take the blame for the game being released too early, in a woefully buggy and unpolished state. The critical and commercial response was nothing short of disastrous, leaving plenty of blame to go around. Fans complained that Ultima VIII had more in common with Super Mario Bros. than the storied Ultima games of the past, bestowing upon it the nickname Super Avatar Bros. in a backhanded homage to the series’s most hallowed incarnation, 1985’s Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, whose unabashed idealism now seemed like something from a lifetime ago in a parallel universe.

Then, in early 1996, Origin’s other franchise went squishy as well. As the studio’s own press releases breathlessly trumpeted, Wing Commander IV was the most expensive digital game ever made to that date, with a claimed production budget of $12 million. The vast majority of that money went into a real Hollywood film shoot, directed by Chris Roberts himself and starring a returning Mark Hamill among a number of other recognizable faces from the silver screen. Wing Commander IV wound up costing four times as much as its predecessor and selling half as many copies, taking months of huffing and puffing to just about reach the break-even point. The interactive-movie era had reached the phase of diminishing returns; under no circumstances was EA going to let Origin make a game like this one again.

But what kinds of games should Origin be making? That was the million-dollar question in the aftermath of Wing Commander IV. After Chris Roberts left the studio to pursue his dream of becoming the latest George Lucas in Hollywood, Origin announced that his series was to be continued on a less grandiose scale, moving some of the focus away from the cut scenes and back to the gameplay. Yet there was no reason to believe such games would make many inroads beyond the hardcore Wing Commander faithful. Meanwhile Richard Garriott had pledged to repair the damage done by Ultima VIII, by making the next single-player Ultima the biggest, best one ever. But epic CRPGs in general had been in the doldrums for years, and the Ultima IX project was already showing signs of becoming another over-hyped, over-expensive boondoggle like Wing Commander IV. Exacerbating the situation was the loss of two of the only people at Origin who had shown themselves to be capable of restraining and channeling Garriott’s flights of fancy. Origin and EA alike felt keenly the loss of the diplomatic and self-effacing designer and producer Warren Spector, the first everyday project lead on Ultima IX, who decamped to Looking Glass in 1995 when that project was still in its infancy. Ditto the production manager Dallas Snell, a less cuddly character whose talent for Just Getting Things Done — by cracking heads if necessary — was almost equally invaluable.

Of course, one can still ding EA for failing to see that Richard Garriott was onto something with Ultima Online long before they did. In their partial defense, though, Garriott tended to propose a lot of crazy stuff. As his checkered post-millennial career in game development illustrates all too clearly, he has not been a detail-oriented creator since his days of conceiving and coding the early Ultima games all by himself. This has made his ideas — even his good ones, which Ultima Online certainly was — all too easy to dismiss.

Nonetheless, the potential of persistent online multiplayer gaming was becoming impossible to deny by early 1997, what with the vibrant virtual communities being built on the likes of Kali and Battle.net, in addition to the smaller but no less dedicated ones that had sprung up in Meridian 59 and The Realm. You’d have to be a fool not to be intrigued by the potential of Ultima Online in a milieu such as this one — and, again, EA’s executives most definitely weren’t fools. They wanted to keep Origin alive and viable and relevant as badly as anyone else. Suddenly this seemed the best way to do so. Thus the mass personnel transfer from Ultima IX, which was increasingly smelling like gaming’s past, into Ultima Online, which had the distinct whiff of its future.

It was a difficult transition for everyone, made that much more difficult by the fact that most of the people involved were still in their twenties, with all of the arrogant absolutism of youth. Both the project’s old-timers and its newcomers had plenty of perfectly valid complaints to hurl at their counterparts. Raph Koster, who had been told that he was the design lead, was ignored by more experienced developers who thought they knew better. And yet he did little for his cause by, as he admits today, “sulking and being very rude” and “behaving badly and improperly” even to Richard Garriott himself. From his point of view, the newcomers showed that they fundamentally didn’t understand online games when they wasted their time on fluff that players who needed to be captured for months or years would burn through in a matter of hours, such as lengthy, single-player-Ultima-style conversation trees for the non-player characters. Yet the newcomers were right to express shock and horror when they found that, amidst all the loving attention that had been given to simulating Britannia’s ecology and the like, no one on the original team had thought up a consistent system for casting spells, a bedrock of Ultima’s appeal since the very beginning. Even today, one Ultima IX refugee accuses the MUDders of being “focused on minutia, what I would call silly little details that really added nothing to the game.”

When the two-month-long beta test finally began after repeated delays in June of 1997, the dogged simulation-first mentality of Koster and company faced a harsh reckoning with reality. Many of the systems that had seemed wonderful in theory didn’t work in practice, or displayed side effects that they’d never anticipated. Here as in many digital games, attempting to push the simulation too far just plunged the whole thing into a sort of uncanny valley, making it feel more rather than less artificial. For instance, the MUDders had made it possible for you to learn or improve skills simply by standing in close proximity to someone who was using the skill in question at a high level, on the assumption that your character was observing and internalizing this example of a master at work. But they’d also instituted a cap on the total pool of skill points a character could possess across all disciplines, on the assumption that no Jack of all trades could be a master of them all; just as is the case for most of us in real life, in Ultima Online you could be really good at a few things, or fair at a lot of them, but not really good at a lot of them. When a character hit her skill-point cap, learning new things would cause some of her other skills to decline to stay under it. In practice, this caused players to desperately try to avoid seeing what that baker or weaver was doing, for fear of losing their ability to hunt or cast spells as a result. Problems like these hammered home again and again the fact that any digital simulation is only the crudest approximation of a lived existence; in the real world, matters are not quite so zero-sum as instantly losing the ability to catch a fish because one has learned to cook a fish.

But the most extreme case of unforeseen consequences involved the aforementioned lovingly crafted ecology of virtual Britannia. To put it bluntly, the players destroyed it — all of it, within days if not hours. The population of deer and rabbits, the food sources of apex predators like dragons, were slaughtered to extinction by players instead. This was not done out of sheer bloody-mindedness alone, although that was undoubtedly a part of the equation. The truth was that deer and rabbits had value, in the form of meat and pelts. In a sense, then, virtual Britannia was becoming a real economy, just as its creators had always hoped it would. But it was an economy without real-world limits or controls, unimpeded by consequences which were themselves only virtual, never real; no one was going to go hungry in real life for over-hunting the forests and fields of Britannia. The same went for trees and fish and a hundred other precious resources that we of the real world usually make some effort to conserve, however imperfectly. With the simulation spinning wildly out of control, Origin had to start putting its thumb on the scales, applying external remedies such as magically re-spawning rabbits and trees, lest the world degenerate into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a deserted moonscape where roving bands of starving players were chased hither and yon by equally hungry dragons. People came to an Ultima game expecting a Renaissance Faire version of Merry Olde England, not a Harlan Ellison story.

Of course, the external corrections themselves had further knock-on consequences. By creating an endless supply of animals to hunt and trees to fell, Origin was in effect giving the economy a massive, perpetual external stimulus. The overseers were therefore always on the lookout for ways to suck gold back out of the world. Ironically, one of the best was to let players get killed a lot, since between death and resurrection they lost whatever money they’d been carrying with them. Thus Origin had a perverse incentive not to try too hard to make Britannia a safer, more friendly place.

Such collisions between idealism and reality were scarring for the MUDders. “This was a wake-up call for me,” says Raph Koster. “The limits on what we can get an audience to go along with, and how much we can affect the bottom line. A lot of people [on the development team] were emotionally hurt by the player killing. Many of the tactics we would use on MUDs just didn’t work at a large scale. Players behaved differently. They were ruder to one another.” All of which is to say that Richard Garriott’s fondly expressed wish that the persistent quality of Ultima Online would serve to put a brake on the more toxic ways of acting out on the anonymous Internet did not come to pass to anything like the extent he had imagined.

At the same time, though, it wasn’t all destruction a nd disillusionment during that summer of the beta test. Some players proved less interested in killing than they were in crafting, becoming armorers and blacksmiths, jewelers and merchants, chefs and bankers and real-estate agents. Players cooked food and sold it from booths in the center of the cities or earned a (virtual) living as tour guides, leading groups of people on treks to scenic but dangerous corners of the world. Enterprising wizards set up a sort of long-distance bus service, opening up magical portals to shuttle their fellow players instantly from one side of the world to another for a fee. Many of the surprises of the beta period were just the kind the MUDders had been hoping to see, emerging from the raw simulational affordances of the environment. “[Players] used the ability to dye clothing to make uniforms for their guilds,” says Raph Koster, “and they [held] weddings with coordinated bridesmaids dresses. They started holding sporting events. They founded theater troupes and taverns and police forces.” The agents of chaos may have been perpetually beating at the door, but there was a measure of civilization appearing in virtual Britannia as well.

Or rather in the virtual Britannias. One of the most frustrating compromises the creators had to make was necessitated by, as compromises usually are in game development, the practical limitations of the technology they had to hand. There was no way that any one of the servers they possessed could contain the number of players the beta test had attracted. So, there had to be two virtual Britannias rather than just one, the precursors to many more that would follow. Both Garriott and Koster have claimed to be the one who came up with the word “shards” as a name for these separate servers, each housing its own initially identical but quickly diverging version of Britannia. The name was grounded in the lore of the very early days of Ultima. In Ultima I back in 1981, the player had shattered the Gem of Immortality, the key to the power of that game’s villain, the evil wizard Mondain. It was claimed now that each of the jewel’s shards had contained a copy of the world of Britannia, and that these were the duplicate worlds inhabited by the players of Ultima Online. Rather amusingly, the word “shard” has since become a generalized term for separate but equal server instances, co-opted not only by other MMORPGs but by administrators of large de-centralized online databases of many stripes, most of which have nothing to do with games.

Each shard could host about 2500 players at once. In these days when the nation’s Internet infrastructure was still in a relatively unrefined state, such that latency tended to increase almost linearly with distance, the shards were named after their real-world locations — there was one on each coast in the beginning, named “Atlantic” and “Pacific” — and players were encouraged to choose the server closest to them if at all possible. (Such concerns would become less pressing as the years went by, but to this day Ultima Online has continued the practice of naming its virtual Britannias after the locations of the servers in the real world.)

On the last day of the beta test, there occurred one of the more famous events in the history of Ultima Online, one with the flavor of a Biblical allegory if not a premonition. Richard Garriott, playing in-character as Lord British, made a farewell tour of the shards in the final hours, to thank everyone for participating before the servers were shut down, not to be booted up again until Ultima Online went live as a paid commercial service. Among fans of the single-player Ultima games, there was a longstanding tradition of finding ways to kill Lord British, who always appeared as a character in them as well. People had transplanted the tradition into Ultima Online with a vengeance, but to no avail; acknowledging that even the most stalwart commitment to simulation must have its limits when it comes to the person who signs your paycheck, the MUDders had agreed to provide Lord British with an “invulnerability” flag. As he stood up now before a crowd on the Pacific shard to deliver his valediction, someone threw a fireball spell at him. No matter; Lord British stepped confidently right into the flames. Whereupon he fell over and died. Someone had forgotten to set the invulnerability flag.

If Lord British couldn’t be protected, decided the folks at Origin on the spur of the moment, he must be avenged; in so deciding, they demonstrated how alluring virtual violence could be even to those most dedicated to creating a virtual civilization. Garriott:

It’s amazing how quickly the cloak of civilization can disappear. The word spread verbally throughout the office: let us unleash hell! My staff summoned demons and devils and dragons and all of the nightmarish creatures of the game, and they cast spells and created dark clouds and lightning that struck and killed people. The gamemasters had special powers, and once they realized I had been killed, they were able to almost instantly resurrect Lord British. And I gleefully joined in the revelry. Kill me, will you? Be gone, mortals! It was a slaughter of thousands of players in the courtyard.

It definitely was not the noble ending we had intended.

And while some players enjoyed the spontaneity of this event, others were saddened or hurt by it. When most characters die they turn into a ghost and are transported to a distant place on the map. Then they have to go find their body. So the cost of being killed is a temporary existence as a ghost. In the last three minutes of these characters’ existence, they suddenly found themselves alone, deep in the woods, unable to speak or interact with anyone else. The net result of this mass killing in retaliation for the assassination of Lord British was that not only were all of these innocent people slaughtered, they were also cast out of the presence of the creators at the final moment. As the final seconds trickled down, they desperately tried to get back, but most often failed. The fact that all of us, the creators and the players, were able to turn the last few moments of the beta test into this completely unplanned and even unimagined chaos was proof that we had built something unique, a platform that would allow players to do pretty much whatever they pleased, and that it was about to take on a life — and many deaths — of its own.

After more than two and a half years, during which the face of the games industry around it had changed dramatically and its own importance to its parent company had been elevated incalculably, Ultima Online was about to greet the real world as a commercial product. Whether the last minutes of its existence while it was still officially an experiment boded well or ill for its future depended on your point of view. But, as Richard Garriott says, the one certain thing was uncertainty: nobody knew quite what would happen next. Would Ultima Online be another Meridian 59 or The Realm, or would this be the virtual world that finally broke through? And what would it mean for gaming — and, for that matter, for the real world beyond gaming — if it did?

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: the books Braving Britannia: Tales of Life, Love, and Adventure in Ultima Online by Wes Locher, Postmortems: Selected Essays, Volume One by Raph Koster, Online Game Pioneers at Work by Morgan Ramsay, Through the Moongate, Part II by Andrea Contato, Explore/Create by Richard Garriott, MMOs from the Inside Out by Richard Bartle, and Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings by Ken Williams; Sierra’s customer newsletter InterAction of Spring 1996, Summer 1996, Spring 1997, Summer 1997, Fall 1997, Summer 1998, and Fall 1998; PC Powerplay of November 1996; Next Generation of March 1997.

Web sources include a 2018 Game Developers Conference talk by some of the Ultima Online principals, an Ultima Online timeline at UOGuide, “How Scepter of Goth Shaped the MMO Industry” by Justin Olivetti at Massively Overpowered, David A. Wheeler’s history of Scepter of Goth, “How the World’s Oldest 3D MMO Keeps Cheating Death” by Samuel Axon at Vice, Andrew Kirmse’s own early history of Meridian 59, Damion Schubert’s Meridian 59 postmortem and its accompanying slides from the 2012 Game Developers Conference, and Gavin Annand’s video interview with the Kirmse brothers.

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

The first word in the name is often spelled Sceptre as well.

The Rise of POMG, Part 4: A World for the Taking
March 1, 2024

Just as the Ultima Online beta test was beginning, Electronic Arts was initiating the final phase of its slow-motion takeover of Origin Systems. In June of 1997, the mother ship in California sent down two Vice Presidents to take over completely in Texas, integrate Origin well and truly into the EA machine, and end once and for all any semblance of independence for the studio. Neil Young became Origin’s new General Manager on behalf of EA, while Chris Yates became Chief Technical Officer. Both men were industry veterans.

Appropriately enough given that he was about to become the last word on virtual Britannia, Neil Young was himself British. He attributes his career choice to the infamously awful English weather. “There are a lot of people in the games industry that come from the UK,” he says. “I think it’s because the weather is so bad that you don’t have a lot to do, so you either go into a band or teach yourself to program.” He chose the latter course at a time when computer games in Britain were still being sold on cassette tape for a couple of quid. After deciding to forgo university in favor of a programming job at a tiny studio called Imagitec Design in 1988, he “quickly realized there were more gifted engineers,” as he puts it, and “moved into producing.” Having made a name for himself in that role, he was lured to the United States by Virgin Interactive in 1992, then moved on to EA five years later, which organization had hand-picked him for the task of whipping its sometimes wayward and lackadaisical stepchild Origin into fighting shape.

Chris Yates had grown up amidst the opposite of English rain, hailing as he did from the desert gambler’s paradise Las Vegas. He was hired by the hometown studio Westwood Associates in 1988, where he worked as a programmer on games like Eye of the Beholder, Dune II, and Lands of Lore. In 1994, two years after Virgin acquired Westwood, he moved to Los Angeles to join the parent company. There he and Young became close friends as well as colleagues, such that they chose to go to EA together as a unit.

The two were so attractive to EA thanks not least to an unusual project which had occupied some of their time during their last year and a half or so at Virgin. Inspired by Air Warrior, the pioneering massively-multiplayer online flight simulator that had been running on the GEnie commercial online service since the late 1980s, a Virgin programmer named Rod Humble proposed in 1995 that his company invest in something similar, but also a bit simpler and more accessible: a massively-multiplayer version of Asteroids, the 1979 arcade classic whose roots stretched all the way back to Spacewar!, that urtext of videogaming. Neil Young and his friend Chris Yates went to bat for the project: Young making the business case for it as an important experiment that could lead to big windfalls later on, Yates pitching in to offer his exceptional technical expertise whenever necessary. Humble and a colleague named Jeff Paterson completed an alpha version of the game they called SubSpace in time to put it up on the Internet for an invitation-only testing round in December of 1995. Three months later, the server was opened to anyone who cared to download the client — still officially described as a beta version — and have at it.

SubSpace was obviously a very different proposition from the likes of Ultima Online, but it fits in perfectly with this series’s broader interest in persistent online multiplayer gaming (or POMG as I’ve perhaps not so helpfully shortened it). For, make no mistake, the quality of persistence was as key to its appeal as it was to that of such earlier featured players in this series as Kali or Battle.net. SubSpace spawned squads and leagues and zones; it became an entire subculture unto itself, one that lived in and around the actual battles in space. The distinction between it and the games of Kali and Battle.net was that SubSpace was massively — or at least bigly — multiplayer. Whereas an online Diablo session was limited to four participants, SubSpace supported battles involving up to 250 players, sometimes indulging in crazy free-for-alls, more often sorted into two or more teams, each of them flying and fighting in close coordination. It thus quickly transcended Asteroids in its tactical dimensions as well as its social aspects — transcended even other deceptively complex games with the same roots, such as Toys for Bobs’s cult classic Star Control. That it was playable at all over dial-up modem connections was remarkable; that it was so much fun to play and then to hang out in afterward, talking shop and taking stock, struck many of the thousands of players who stumbled across it as miraculous; that it was completely free for a good long time was the icing on the cake.

It remained that way because Virgin didn’t really know what else to do with it. When the few months that had been allocated to the beta test were about to run out, the fans raised such a hue and cry that Virgin gave in and left it up. And so the alleged beta test continued for more than a year, the happy beneficiary of corporate indecision. In one of his last acts before leaving Virgin, Neil Young managed to broker a sponsorship deal with Pepsi Cola, which gave SubSpace some actual advertising and another lease on life as a free-to-play game. During that memorable summer of the Ultima Online beta test, SubSpace was enjoying what one fan history calls its “greatest days” of all: “The population tripled in three months, and now there were easily 1500-plus people playing during peak times.”

With the Pepsi deal about to run out, Virgin finally took SubSpace fully commercial in October of 1997, again just as Ultima Online was doing the same. Alas, it didn’t go so well for SubSpace. Virgin released it as a boxed retail game, with the promise that, once customers had plunked down the cash to buy it, access would be free in perpetuity. This didn’t prevent half or more of the existing user base from leaving the community, even as nowhere near enough new players joined to replace them. Virgin shut down the server in November of 1998; “in perpetuity” had turned out to be a much shorter span of time than anyone had anticipated.

As we’ve seen before in this series, however, the remaining hardcore SubSpace fans simply refused to let their community die. They put up their own servers — Virgin had made the mistake of putting all the code you needed to do so on the same disc as the client — and kept right on space-warring. You can still play SubSpace today, just as you can Meridian 59 and The Realm. A website dedicated to tracking the game’s “population statistics” estimated in 2015 that the community still had between 2000 and 3000 active members, of whom around 300 might be online at any given time; assuming these numbers are to be trusted, a bit of math reveals that those who like the game must really like it, spending 10 percent or more of their lives in it. That same year, fans put their latest version of the game, now known as Subspace Continuum, onto Steam for free. Meanwhile its original father Rod Humble has gone on to a long and fruitful career in POMG, working on Everquest, The Sims Online, and Second Life among other projects.

But we should return now to the summer of 1997 and to Origin Systems, to which Neil Young and Chris Yates came as some of the few people in existence who could boast not only of ideas about POMG but of genuine commercial experience in the field, thanks to SubSpace. EA hoped this experience would serve them well when it came to Ultima Online.

Which isn’t to say that the latter was the only thing they had on their plates: the sheer diversity of Young’s portfolio as an EA general manager reflects the confusion about what Origin’s identity as a studio should be going forward. There were of course the two perennials, Ultima — meaning for the moment at least Ultima Online — and Wing Commander, which was, as Young says today, “a little lost as a product.” Wing Commander, the franchise in computer gaming during the years immediately prior to DOOM, was becoming a monstrous anachronism by 1997. Shortly after the arrival of Young and Yates, Origin would release Wing Commander: Prophecy, whose lack of the Roman numeral “V” that one expected to see in its name reflected a desire for a fresh start on a more sustainable model in this post-Chris Roberts era, with a more modest budget to go along with more modest cinematic ambitions. But instead of heralding the dawn of a new era, it would prove the franchise’s swan song; it and its 1998 expansion pack would be the last new Wing Commander computer games ever. Their intended follow-up, a third game in the Wing Commander: Privateer spinoff series of more free-form outer-space adventures, would be cancelled.

In addition to Ultima and Wing Commander, EA had chosen to bring under the Origin umbrella two product lines that were nothing like the games for which the studio had always been known. One was a line of military simulations that bore the imprimatur of “Jane’s,” a print publisher which had been the source since the turn of the twentieth century of the definitive encyclopedias of military hardware of all types. The Jane’s simulations were overseen by one Andy Hollis, who had begun making games of this type for MicroProse back in the early 1980s. The other line involved another MicroProse alum — in fact, none other than Sid Meier, whose name had entered the lexicon of many a gaming household by serving as the prefix before such titles as Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, Civilization, and Colonization. Meier and two other MicroProse veterans had just set up a studio of their own, known as Firaxis Games, with a substantial investment from EA, who planned to release their products under the Origin Systems label. Origin was becoming, in other words, EA’s home for all of its games that were made first and usually exclusively for computers rather than for the consoles that now provided the large majority of EA’s revenues; the studio had, it seemed, more value in the eyes of the EA executive suite as a brand than as a working collective.

Still, this final stage of the transition from independent subsidiary to branch office certainly could have been even more painful than it was. Neil Young and Chris Yates were fully aware of how their arrival would be seen down in Austin, and did everything they could to be good sports and fit into the office culture. Brit-in-Texas Young was the first to come with the fish-out-of-water jokes at his own expense — “I was expecting a flat terrain with lots of cowboys, cacti, and horses, so I was pleasantly surprised,” he said of Austin — and both men rolled up their sleeves alongside Richard Garriott to serve the rest of the company a turkey dinner at Thanksgiving, a longtime Origin tradition.

Neil Young and Chris Yates on the Thanksgiving chow line.

Young and Yates had received instructions from above that Ultima Online absolutely had to ship by the end of September. Rather than cracking the whip, they tried to cajole and josh their way to that milestone as much as possible. They agreed to attend the release party in drag if the deadline was met; then Young went one step farther, promising Starr Long a kiss on the lips. Yates didn’t go that far, but he did agree to grow a beard to commemorate the occasion, even as Richard Garriott, whose upper lip hadn’t seen the sun since he’d graduated from high school, agreed to shave his.

Young and Yates got it done, earning for themselves the status of, if not the unsung heroes of Ultima Online, two among a larger group of same. The core group of ex-MUDders whose dream and love Ultima Online had always been could probably have kept running beta tests for years to come, had not these outsiders stepped in to set the technical agenda. “That meant trading off features with technology choices and decisions every minute of the day,” says Young. He brought in one Rich Vogel, who had set up and run the server infrastructure for Meridian 59 at The 3DO Company, to do the same for Ultima Online. In transforming Origin Systems into a maintainer of servers and a seller of subscriptions, he foreshadowed a transition that would eventually come to the games industry in general, from games as boxed products to gaming as a service. These tasks did not involve the sexy, philosophically stimulating ideas about virtual worlds and societies with which Raph Koster and his closest colleagues spent their time and which will always capture the lion’s share of the attention in articles like this one, but the work was no less essential for all that, and no less of a paradigm shift in its way.

So, the big day came and the deadline was met: Ultima Online shipped on September 24, 1997, three days before Meridian 59 would celebrate its first anniversary. The sleek black box was an end and a beginning at the same time. Young and Yates did their drag show, Starr Long got his kiss, and, most shockingly of all, Richard Garriott revealed his naked upper lip to all and sundry. (Opinions were divided as to whether the mangy stubble which Chris Yates deigned to grow before picking up his razor again really qualified as a beard or not.) And then everyone waited to see what would happen next.

A (semi-)bearded Chris Yates and a rare sight indeed: a clean-shaven Richard Garriott.

EA made and shipped to stores all over the country 50,000 copies of Ultima Online, accompanying it with a marketing campaign that was, as Wired magazine described it, of “Hollywood proportions.” The virtual world garnered attention everywhere, from CNN to The New York Times. These mainstream organs covered it breathlessly as the latest harbinger of humanity’s inevitable cyber-future, simultaneously bracing and unnerving. Flailing about for a way to convey some sense of the virtual world’s scope, The New York Times noted that it would take 38,000 computer monitors — enough to fill a football field — to display it in its entirety at one time. Needless to say, the William Gibson quotes, all “collective hallucinations” and the like, flew thick and fast, as they always did to mark events like this one.

Three weeks after the launch, 38,000 copies of Ultima Online had been sold and EA was spooling up the production line again to make another 65,000. Sales would hit the 100,000 mark within three months of the release. Such numbers were more than gratifying. EA knew that 100,000 copies sold of this game ought to be worth far more to its bottom line than 100,000 copies of any other game would have been, given that each retail sale hopefully represented only the down payment on a long-running subscription at $10 per month. For its publisher, Ultima Online would be the gift that kept on giving.

In another sense, however, the sales figures were a problem. When Ultima Online went officially live, it did so on just three shards: the Atlantic and Pacific shards from the beta test, plus a new Great Lakes one to handle the middle of the country. Origin was left scrambling to open more to meet the deluge of subscribers. Lake Superior came up on October 3, Baja on October 10, Chesapeake on October 16,  Napa Valley on November 14, Sonoma on December 13, Catskills on December 22. And still it wasn’t enough.

Origin’s estimates of how many players a single server could reliably support proved predictably overoptimistic. But rather than dial back on the number of players they allowed inside, thereby ensuring that each of them who did get in could have a reasonably enjoyable experience, they kept trying to cover the gap between technical theory and reality by hacking their code on the fly. As a result, Ultima Online became simultaneously the most loved and most hated game in the country. When it all came together, it was magic for many of its players. But truth be told, that didn’t happen anywhere near as often as one might have wished in that first year or so. Extreme lag, inexplicable glitches, dropped connections, and even total server crashes were the more typical order of the day. Of course, with almost everyone who surfed the Web still relying on dial-up modems running over wires that had been designed to carry voices rather than computer data, slowdowns and dropped connections were a reality of daily online life even for those who weren’t attempting to log onto virtual worlds. This created a veneer of plausible deniability, which Origin’s tech-support people, for lack of any other suggestions or excuses to offer, leaned on perhaps a bit too heavily. After all, who could say for sure that the problem any individual player might be having wasn’t downstream from Origin’s poor overtaxed server?

Weaselly excuses like these led to the first great act of civil disobedience by the residents of Britannia, just a few weeks after the launch, when hundreds of players gathered outside Lord British’s castle, stripped themselves naked, broke into the throne room, drank gallons of wine, and proceeded to disgorge all of it onto Richard Garriott’s virtual furniture, whilst chanting in unison their demands for a better, stabler virtual world. The world’s makers were appalled, but also weirdly gratified. What better sign of a budding civic life could there be than a full-on political protest? “We were all watching and thinking it was a grand statement about the project,” says Richard Garriott. “As unhappy as they were about the game, they voiced their unhappiness in the context of the game.” Much of what happened inside Ultima Online during the first year especially had the same quality of being amazing for philosophers of virtual worlds to witness, but stressful for the practical administrators who were trying to turn this one into a sustainable money tree. The rub was that the two categories were combined in the very same people, who were left feeling conflicted to say the least.

The journals of hardcore gaming, hardly known for their stoicism in the face of hype on most days, were ironically more reserved and skeptical than the mainstream press on the subject of Ultima Online, perchance because they were viewing the virtual world less as a harbinger of some collective cyber-future and more as a game that their readers might wish to, you know, actually play. Computer Gaming World wittily titled its scathing review, buried on page 162 and completely unmentioned on the cover of the issue in question, simply “Uh-Oh.” Among the litany of complaints were “numerous and never-ending bugs, horrible lag time, design issues [that] lead to repetitive and time-consuming activities, and [an] unbalanced economy.” The magazine did admit that “Ultima Online could become a truly great game. But we can’t review potential, we can only review concrete product.” Editor-in-chief Johnny L. Wilson, for his part, held out little hope for improvement. “Ultima Online begins with hubris and ends in Greek tragedy,” he said. “The hubris is a result of being unwilling to learn from others’ mistakes. The tragedy is that it could have been so much more.” Randy Farmer, co-creator of the earlier would-be virtual world Habitat, expressed a similar sentiment, saying that “Origin seems to have ignored many of the lessons that our industry has learned in the last ten years of building online worlds. They’re making the same mistakes that first-time virtual-world builders always make.”

The constant crashes and long periods of unexplained down time associated with a service for which people were paying good money constituted a corporate lawyer’s worst nightmare — or a different sort of lawyer’s wet dream. One of these latter named George Schultz began collecting signatures from Origin’s most disgruntled customers within weeks, filing a class-action lawsuit in San Diego at the beginning of March of 1998. Exhibit A was the copy right there on the back of the box, promising “a living, growing world where thousands of real people discover real fantasy and adventure, 24 hours a day, every day of the year,” with all of it taking place “in real time.” This was, claimed Schultz, a blatant case of false advertising. “We’re not trying to tell anyone how to design a good or a bad game,” he said. “What it’s about is holding Origin and EA to the promises they made on the box, in their advertising, and [in] the manual. It’s about the misrepresentations they’ve made. A big problem with the gaming industry is that they think there are some special rules that only apply to them.”

Whatever the truth of that last claim, there was no denying that just about half of the learning curve of Ultima Online was learning to navigate around the countless bugs and technical quirks. For example, Origin took down each shard once per day for a backup and a “therapeutic” reboot that was itself a testament to just what a shaky edifice the software and hardware were. When the server came back up again, it restored the state of the world from the last backup. But said state was a snapshot in time from one hour before the server went down. There was, in other words, an hour every day during which everything you did in virtual Britannia was doomed to be lost; this was obviously not a time to go on any epic, treasure- and experience-point-rich adventures. Yet such things were documented nowhere; one learned them only through the proverbial school of hard knocks.

In their defense, Origin was sailing into completely uncharted waters with Ultima Online. Although there had been online virtual worlds before, dating all the way back to that first MUD of 1978 or 1979, none of them — no, not even Meridian 59 and The Realm — had been as expansive, sophisticated, and most of all popular as these shards of Britannia. Most of the hardware technologies that would give rise to the era of Web 2.0, from DSL in homes to VPS’s in data centers, existed only as blueprints; ditto most of the software. No one had ever made a computer game before that required this much care and feeding after the initial sale. And it wasn’t as if the group entrusted with maintaining the beast was a large one. Almost the entirety of the Ultima IX team which had been parachuted in six months before the launch to just get the world done already was pulled out just as abruptly as soon as it started accepting paying subscribers, leaving behind a crew of maintainers that was little bigger than the original team of ex-MUDders who had labored in obscurity for so long before catching the eye of EA’s management. The idea that maintaining a virtual world might require almost as much manpower and ongoing creative effort as making it in the first place was too high a mental hurdle for even otherwise clever folks like Neil Young and Chris Yates to clear at this point.

Overwhelmed as they were, the maintainers began to rely heavily on unpaid volunteers from the community of players to do much of the day-to-day work of administrating the world, just as was the practice on MUDs. But Ultima Online ran on a vastly larger scale than even the most elaborate MUDs, making it hard to keep tabs on these volunteer overseers. While some were godsends, putting in hours of labor every week to make Britannia a better place for their fellow players, others were corrupted by their powers, manipulating the levers they had to hand to benefit their friends and punish their enemies. Then, too, the volunteer system was another legal quagmire, one that would doubtless have sent EA’s lawyers running screaming from the room if anyone had bothered to ask them about it before it was rolled out; sure enough, it would eventually lead to another lawsuit, this one more extended, serious, and damaging than the first.

In the meanwhile, though, most players did not rally behind the first lawsuit to anything like the degree that George Schultz might have been hoping. The fact was that even the ones who had vomited all over Lord British’s throne had done so because they loved their virtual Britannia and wanted to see it fixed rather than destroyed, as it would likely be if Schultz won the day. The suit concluded in a settlement at the end of 1998. The biggest concession on the part of the defendants was a rather weird one that gave no recompense to any individual inhabitant of virtual Britannia: EA agreed to donate $15,000 to the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation. Perhaps Schultz thought that it would be able to innovate up a more reliable virtual world.

While many of the technical problems that beset Ultima Online were only to be expected in the context of the times, some of the other obstacles to enjoying the virtual world were more puzzling. First and foremost among these was the ever-present issue of players killing other players, which created so much frustration that George Schultz felt compelled to explicitly wall it off from the breach-of-trust claims that were the basis of his lawsuit: “We’re not getting into whether there should be player-killing.” Given that it had been such a constant theme of life (and death) in virtual Britannia going all the way back to the alpha-testing phase, the MUDders might have taken more steps to address it before the launch. As it was, though, one senses that, having seen so many of their ideas about a virtual ecology and the like not survive contact with real players, having been forced to give up in so many ways on virtual Britannia as a truly self-sustaining, living world, they were determined to make this the scene of their last stand, the hill that they would either hold onto or die trying.

Their great white hope was still the one that Richard Garriott had been voicing in interviews since well before the world’s commercial debut: that purely social pressures would act as a constraint on player-killing — that, in short, their world would learn to police itself. In fact, the presence of player-killing might act as a spur to civilization — for, as Raph Koster said, “cultures define and refine themselves through conflict.” They kept trying to implement systems that would nudge this particular culture in the right direction. They decided that, after committing murder five times, a player would be branded with literal scarlet letters: the color of his onscreen name would change from blue to red. Hopefully this would make him a pariah among his peers, while also making it very dangerous for him to enter a town, whose invulnerable computer-controlled guards would attack him on sight. The designers didn’t reckon with the fact that a virtual life is, no matter how much they might wish otherwise, simply not the same as a real life. Some percentage of players, presumably perfectly mild-mannered and law-abiding in the real world, reveled in the role of murderous outlaws online, taking the red letters of their name as a badge of honor rather than shame, the dangers of the cities as a challenge rather than a deterrent. To sneak past the city gates, creep up behind an unsuspecting newbie and stab her in the back, then get out of Dodge before the city watch appeared… now, that was good times. The most-wanted rolls posted outside the guard stations of Britannia became, says Raph Koster, “a high-score table for player killers.”

The MUDders’ stubborn inflexibility on this issue — an issue that was by all indications soon costing Ultima Online large numbers of customers — was made all the more inexplicable in the opinion of many players by the fact that it was, in marked contrast to so many of the other problems, almost trivial to address in programming terms. An “invulnerability” flag had long existed, to be applied not only to computer-controlled city guards but to special human-controlled personages such as Lord British to whom the normal laws of virtual time and space did not apply. All Origin had to do was add a few lines of code to automatically turn the flag on when a player walked into designated “safe” spaces. That way, you could have places where those who had signed up mostly in order to socialize could hang out without having to constantly look over their backs, along with other places where the hardcore pugilists could pummel one another to their heart’s content. Everyone would be catered to. Problem solved.

But Raph Koster and company refused to take this blindingly obvious step, having gotten it into their heads that to do so would be to betray their most cherished ideals. They kept tinkering around the edges of the problem, looking for a subtler solution that would preserve their world’s simulational autonomy. For example, they implemented a sort of karmic justice system, which dictated that players who had been evil during life would be resurrected after death only after losing a portion of their stats and skills. Inevitably, the player killers just took this as another challenge. Just don’t get killed, and you would never have to worry about it.

The end result was to leave the experience of tens of thousands of players in the unworthy hands of a relatively small minority of “griefers,” people who thrived on causing others pain and distress. Like all bullies, they preyed on the weak; their typical victims were the newbies, unschooled in the ways of defense, guiding characters with underwhelming statistics and no arms or armor to speak of. Such new players were, of course, the ones whose level of engagement with the game was most tentative, who were the mostly likely to just throw up their hands and go find something else to play after they’d been victimized once or twice, depriving Origin of potentially hundreds of dollars in future subscription revenue.

In light of this, it’s strange that no one from EA or Origin overrode the MUDders on this point. For his part, Richard Garriott was adamantly on their side, insisting that Ultima Online simply had to allow player-killing if it wasn’t to become a mockery of itself. It was up to the dissatisfied and victimized residents themselves to band together and turn Britannia into the type of world they wanted to live in; it wasn’t up to Origin to step in and fix their problems for them with a deus ex machina. “When we first launched Ultima Online, we set out to create a world that supported the evil player as a legitimate role,” said Garriott in his rather high-handed way. “Those who have truly learned the lessons of the [single-player] Ultima games should cease their complaining, rise to the challenge, and make Britannia into the place they want it to be.” He liked to tell a story on this subject. (Knowing Garriott’s penchant for embellishment, it probably didn’t happen, or at least didn’t happen quite like this. But that’s not relevant to its importance as allegory.)

One evening, he was wandering the streets of the capital in his Lord British persona, when he heard a woman screaming. Rushing over to her, he was told that a thief had stolen all of her possessions. His spirit of chivalry was awoken; he told her that he would get her things back for her. Together they tracked down the thief and cornered him in a back alley. Lord British demanded that the thief return the stolen goods, and the thief complied. They all went their separate ways. A moment later, the woman cried out again; the thief had done it again.

This time, Lord British froze the thief with a spell before he could leave the scene of the crime. “I told you not to do that,” he scolded. “What are you doing?”

“Sorry, I won’t do it again,” said the thief as he turned over the goods for a second time.

“If you do that again, I’m going to ban you from the game,” said Lord British.

You might be able to guess what happened next: the thief did it yet again. “I said I was going to ban you, and now I have to,” shouted Lord British, now well and truly incensed. “What’s wrong with you? I told you not to steal from this woman!”

The thief’s answer stopped Garriott in his tracks. “Listen. You created this world, and I’m a thief,” he said, breaking character for the first time. “I steal. That’s what I do. And now you’re going to ban me from the game for playing the role I’m supposed to play? I lied to you before because I’m a thief. The king caught me and told me not to steal. What am I going to do, tell you that as soon as you turn around I’m going to steal again? No! I’m going to lie.”

And Garriott realized that the thief was right. Garriott could do whatever he wished to him as Lord British, the reigning monarch of this world. But if he wished to stay true to all the things he had said in the past about what virtual Britannia was and ought to be, he couldn’t go outside the world to punish him as Richard Garriott, the god of the server looking down from on-high.

Some of the questions with which Origin was wrestling resonate all too well today: questions involving the appropriate limits of online free speech — or rather free action, in this case. They are questions with which everyone who has ever opened an Internet discussion up to the public, myself included, have had to engage. When does strongly felt disagreement spill over into bad faith, counterpoint into disruption for the sake of it? And what should we do about it when it does? In Origin’s case, the pivotal philosophical question at hand was where the boundary lay between playing an evil character in good faith in a fantasy world and purposely, willfully trying to cause real pain to other real people sitting behind other real computers. Origin had chosen to embrace a position close to the ground staked out by our self-described “free-speech maximalists” of today. And like them, Origin was learning that the issue is more dangerously nuanced than they had wished to believe.

But there were others sorts of disconnect at play here as well. Garriott’s stern commandment that his world’s inhabitants should “cease their complaining, rise to the challenge, and make Britannia into the place they want it to be” becomes more than a bit rich when we remember that it was being directed toward Origin’s paying customers. Many of them might have replied that it was up to Origin rather than they themselves to make Britannia a place they wanted to be, lest they choose to spend their $10 per month on something else. The living-world dynamic held “as long as everyone is playing the same game,” wrote Amy Jo Kim in an article about Ultima Online and its increasingly vocalized discontents that appeared in Wired magazine in the spring of 1998. “But what happens when players who think they’re attending an online Renaissance Faire find themselves at the mercy of a violent, abusive gang of thugs? In today’s Britannia, it’s not uncommon to stumble across groups of evil players who talk like Snoop Doggy Dogg, dress like gangstas, and act like rampaging punks.” To be sure, some players were fully onboard with the “living-world” policy of (non-)administration. Others, however, had thought, reasonably enough given what they had read on the back of the game’s box, that they were just buying an entertainment product, a place to hang out in a few hours per day or week and have fun, chatting and exploring and killing monsters. They hadn’t signed up to organize police forces or lead political rallies. Nor had they signed up to be the guinea pigs in some highfalutin social experiment. No; they had signed up to play a game.

As it was, Ultima Online was all but impossible to play casually, thanks not only to the murderers skulking in its every nook and cranny but to core systems of the simulation itself. For example, if you saved up until you could afford to build yourself a nice little house, made it just like you wanted it, then failed to log on for a few days, when you did return you’d find that your home had disappeared, razed to make room for some other, more active player to build something. Systems like these pushed players to spend more time online as a prerequisite to having fun when they were there. Some left when the demands of the game conflicted with those of real life, which was certainly the wisest choice. But some others began to spend far more time in virtual Britannia than was really good for them, raising the specter of gaming addiction, a psychological and sociological problem that would only become more prevalent in the post-millennial age.

Origin estimated that the median hardcore player spent a stunning if not vaguely horrifying total of six hours per day in the virtual world. And if the truth be told, many of the non-murderous things with which they were expected to fill those hours do seem kind of boring on the face of it. This is the flip side of making a virtual world that is more “realistic”: most people play games to escape from reality for a while, not to reenact it. With all due respect to our dedicated and talented real-world tailors and bakers, most people don’t dream of spending their free time doing such jobs online. Small wonder so many became player killers instead; at least doing that was exciting and, for some people at any rate, fun. From Amy Jo Kim’s article:

There’s no shortage of realism in this game — the trouble is, many of the nonviolent activities in Ultima Online are realistic to the point of numbingly lifelike boredom. If you choose to be a tailor, you can make a passable living at it, but only after untold hours of repetitive sewing. And there’s no moral incentive for choosing tailoring — or any honorable, upstanding vocation, for that matter. So why be a tailor? In fact, why not prey on the tailors?

True, Ultima Online is many things to many people. Habitués of online salons come looking for intellectual sparring and verbal repartee. Some other people log on in search of intimate but anonymous social relationships. Still others play the game with cunning yet also a discernible amount of self-restraint, getting rich while staying pretty honest. But there’s no avoiding where the real action is: an ever-growing number are playing Ultima Online to kill everything that moves.

All of this had an effect: all signs are that, after the first rush of sales and subscriptions, Ultima Online began to stagnate, mired in bad reviews, ongoing technical problems, and a growing disenchantment with the player-killing and the other barriers to casual fun. Raph Koster admits that “our subscriber numbers, while stratospheric for the day, weren’t keeping up” with sales of the boxed game, because “the losses [of frustrated newbies] were so high.”

Although Origin and EA never published official sales or subscriber numbers, I have found one useful data point from the early days of Ultima Online, in an internal Origin newsletter dated October 30, 1998. As of this date, just after its first anniversary, the game had 90,000 registered users, of whom approximately half logged on on any given day. These numbers are depicted in the article in question as very impressive, as indeed they were in comparison to the likes of Meridian 59 and The Realm. Still, a bit of context never hurts. Ultima Online had sold 100,000 boxed copies in its first three months, yet it didn’t have even that many subscribers after thirteen months, when its total boxed sales were rounding the 200,000 mark. The subscriber-retention rate, in other words, was not great; a lot of those purchased CDs had become coasters in fairly short order.

Nine shards were up in North America at this time, a number that had stayed the same since the previous December. And it’s this number that may be the most telling one of all. It’s true that, since demand was concentrated at certain times of day, Ultima Online was hosting just about all the players it could handle with its current server infrastructure as of October of 1998. But then again, this was by no means all the players it should be able to handle in the abstract: new shards were generally brought into being in response to increasing numbers of subscribers rather than vice versa. The fact that no new North American shards had been opened since December of 1997 becomes very interesting in this light.

I don’t want to overstate my case here: Ultima Online was extremely successful on its own, somewhat experimental terms. We just need to be sure that we understand what those terms were. By no means were its numbers up there with the industry’s biggest hits. As a point of comparison, let’s take Riven, the long-awaited sequel to the mega-hit adventure game Myst. It was released two months after Ultima Online and went on to sell 1 million units in its first year — at least five times the number of boxed entrées to Origin’s virtual world over the same time period, despite being in a genre that was in marked decline in commercial terms. Another, arguably more pertinent point of comparison is Age of Empires, a new entry in the red-hot real-time-strategy genre. Released just one month after Ultima Online, it outsold Origin’s virtual world by more than ten to one over its first year. Judged as a boxed retail game, Ultima Online was a middling performer at best.

Of course, Ultima Online was not just another boxed retail game; the unique thing about it was that each of the 90,000 subscribers it had retained was paying $10 every month, yielding a steady revenue of almost $11 million per year, with none of it having to be shared with any distributor or retailer. That was really, really nice — nice enough to keep Origin’s head above water at a time when the studio didn’t have a whole lot else to point to by way of justifying its ongoing existence to EA. And yet the reality remained that Ultima Online was a niche obsession rather than a mass-market sensation. As so often happens in life, taking the next step forward in commercial terms, not to mention fending off the competition that was soon to appear with budgets and publisher support of which Meridian 59 and The Realm couldn’t have dreamed, would require a degree of compromise with its founding ideals.

Be that as it may, however, one thing at least was now clear: there was real money to be made in the MMORPG space. Shared virtual worlds would soon learn to prioritize entertainment over experimentation. Going forward, there would be less talk about virtual ecologies and societies, and more focus on delivering slickly packaged fun, of the sort that would keep all kinds of players coming back for more — and, most importantly of all, get those subscriber counts rising once more.

I’ll continue to follow the evolution of PMOG, MMORPGs, and Ultima Online in future articles, and maybe see if I can’t invent some more confusing acronyms while I’m at it. But not right away… other subjects beg for attention in the more immediate future.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: the books Braving Britannia: Tales of Life, Love, and Adventure in Ultima Online by Wes Locher, Postmortems: Selected Essays, Volume One by Raph Koster, Online Game Pioneers at Work by Morgan Ramsay, Through the Moongate, Part II by Andrea Contato, Explore/Create by Richard Garriott, and MMOs from the Inside Out by Richard Bartle, and Dungeons and Dreamers by Bard King and John Borland. Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of February 20 1998 and October 30 1998; Computer Gaming World of February 1998 and November 1998; New York Times of October 20 1997; Wired of May 1998.

Web sources include a 2018 Game Developers Conference talk by some of the Ultima Online principals, an Ultima Online timeline at UOGuide, and GameSpot’s vintage reviews of Ultima Online and its first expansion, The Second Age. On the subject of SubSpace, we have histories by Rod Humble and Epinephrine, another vintage GameSpot review, and a Vice article by Emanuel Maiberg.

Age of Empires (or, How Microsoft Got in on Games)
March 15, 2024

We don’t have a strategy to do a $200 game console that is a direct competitor to what Nintendo, Sega, and Sony are doing…

— Bill Gates, June 1996

It’s hard to overstate the scale of the real-time-strategy deluge of the late 1990s. For a period of several years, it seemed that every studio and publisher in the industry was convinced that duplicating the gameplay of Blizzard’s Warcraft and Westwood’s Command & Conquer franchises, those two most striking success stories in the business of computer games since Myst and DOOM, must surely be the digital equivalent of printing money. In the fall of 1997, Computer Gaming World magazine counted no fewer than 40 RTS’s slated for release during the coming Christmas season alone, to go along with the “nearly 20” that had already appeared with names other than Warcraft or Command & Conquer on their boxes. With no other obvious way of sorting through the jumble, the magazine chose simply to alphabetize the combatants in this “biggest clone war to hit the PC,” resulting in a list that began with 7th Legion and ended with Waterworld.

If those names don’t ring any bells with you today, you aren’t alone. While many of these games were competently made by genuinely enthusiastic developers, few mass movements in gaming have ever felt quite so anonymous. Although the drill of collecting resources, building up an army, and attacking your computerized or human enemies in real time struck a lot of people as a whole lot of fun — there was, after all, a reason that Warcraft and Command & Conquer had become so popular in the first place — it was hard for the creators of the next RTS generation to figure out what to do to set their games apart, whilst also staying within a strict set of design constraints that were either self-imposed or imposed upon them by their conservative publishers. Adventure games, CRPGs, and first-person shooters had all been the beneficiaries or victims of similar gluts in the past, but they had managed to explore a larger variety of fictional contexts if not always gameplay innovations. When it came to RTS’s, though, they all seemed to follow in the footsteps of either the high-fantasy Warcraft or the techno-futuristic Command & Conquer in their fictions as well as their gameplay. This can make even those members of the RTS Class of 1997 that are most fondly remembered today, such as the fantasy Myth or the science-fictional Total Annihilation, feel just a little generic to the uninitiated.

One game from this group, however, did stand out starkly from the crowd for the editors of Computer Gaming World, as it still does in the memories of gamers to this day. Whilst sticking to the tried and true in many of its mechanics, Age of Empires dared to try something different in terms of theme, mining its fiction from the real cultures of our planet’s ancient past. It played relatively straight with history, with no magic spells or aliens in sight. This alone was enough to make Age of Empires a welcome gust of fresh air in a sub-genre that was already sorely in need of it.

Yet there was also something else that made it stand out from the pack. Although its developer was an unknown outfit called Ensemble Studios — one of many that were springing up like toadstools after a rain to feed the real or perceived hunger among gamers for more, more, more RTS’s — its publisher was, of all companies, Microsoft, that one name in software that even your grandparents knew. The arrival of Age of Empires signaled a new era of interest and engagement with games by the most daunting single corporate power in the broader field of computing in general. If anyone still needed convincing that computer games were becoming mainstream entertainments in every sense of the phrase, this ought to have been enough to do the trick. For, whatever else one could say about Microsoft, it was not in the habit of exploring the nooks and crannies of the software market — not when there was a sprawling middle ground where it could plant its flag.

The man behind Ensemble Studios was one Tony Goodman, whose life’s direction had been set in the sixth grade, when his father, a professor of management science at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, brought home a terminal that could be used to connect to the university’s mainframe. “He would give me the same problems that he had given his students,” says Goodman. “My father would say, ‘Tony, I have a puzzle for you.’ Immediately, I was sucked in for the rest of the day. I always looked at the problems as puzzles. I loved puzzles and games, so I just couldn’t get enough. It came to me naturally. I remember saying, ‘This is it. This is what I’m going to do with the rest of my life!'”

In an ironic sense, Goodman’s career path would be the opposite of that of the typical game developer, who joins the world of more plebeian software development only after getting burnt out by the long hours and comparatively low pay in games. Long before starting Ensemble Studios, Goodman made a career for himself in the information-technology departments of the banking industry, specializing, like his father before him, in data-visualization tools and the like that could aid executive-level decision-making. Along the way, he learned much that he would later be able to apply to games — for, he says, good games have much in common with good software of any other stripe: “One of the most valuable things that I learned about developing software was that, for users to be productive, the software had to be fun to use. The key is to keep people entertained long enough to be rewarded. This also happens to be the fundamental dynamic of games and, indeed, all human experiences.”

In 1989, Tony Goodman and three partners formed Ensemble Corporation — not to be confused with Ensemble Studios — in his garage. Two years later, they released Command Center, a user-friendly front-end for Borland’s Paradox database system that could “automate queries, reports, forms, and graphics.” The company exploded from there, becoming a darling of the Forbes and Inc. set.

Throughout his years in business software, Goodman never lost touch with that younger version of himself who had been drawn to computers simply because he found them so wonderfully entertaining. He and his older brother Rick, who joined Ensemble Corporation as a programmer shortly after the release of Command Center, were lifelong board and computer gamers, watching at first-hand the aesthetic and technical evolution of the latter, parallel software industry. They found a kindred soul in another Ensemble programmer named Angelo Laudon, who, like them, could appreciate the higher salaries and profit margins in productivity software but nonetheless felt a longing to engage with his biggest passion. “We would talk about games until the early hours of the morning,” says Tony Goodman. “I loved the business of developing software, but I wanted to create products that everyone would tell their friends about. I wanted to create a pop-culture phenomenon. If you want to create software that people really want, developing videogames places you at the center of the universe.”

He realized that computer games had hit a watershed moment when Microsoft announced Windows 95, and with it DirectX, a software subsystem that would allow people to install and run even cutting-edge games as effortlessly as any other type of software, without the travails of the bespoke IRQ and DMA settings and memory managers that had been such a barrier to entry in the past. If he ever wanted to try to make games of his own, he knew, the time to get started was now, between the market’s expansion and the inevitable market saturation that would follow. Rick Goodman remembers how one day his brother

walks into work, assembles the team of database programmers, and says, “Would any of you guys rather be making games than database applications?”

I think people were caught off-guard. We were looking around the room, like, “Is this a trick question?” But I raised my hand, and Angelo Laudon raised his. Tony was serious. He said, “I’m going to pull you guys aside and we’ll make a game.” I thought that was awesome. I said, “Okay! What kind of game?” None of us had any idea.

For months thereafter, they continued to do their usual jobs during the day, then gathered again in the evening to hash through ideas and plans. During one of these sessions, Rick suddenly brought up a name that Tony hadn’t heard in a long, long time: Bruce Shelley, an older fellow with whom the brothers had played a lot of board games during their pre-teen and teenage years. Shelley worked in computer games now, said Rick — had in fact assisted Sid Meier with the design of Railroad Tycoon and Civilization. “Maybe — maybe —  he’s not busy.”

And lo and behold, it turned out that he wasn’t. After finishing Civilization, Shelley had left Meier and his other colleagues at MicroProse Software in order to follow his new wife, a banking executive, to Chicago, where she’d secured a job that was far more lucrative than any that he’d ever held. He was writing gaming strategy guides out of his home office when Tony Goodman called him up one day out of the blue: “I hadn’t heard from him in fifteen years, and here he is with his own business in Dallas, doing software for banks, and he’s got guys who want to make computer games. We had these long conversations about what it takes to make a game. I told my wife, ‘I think this guy’s going to start a game company.’ And finally he did call me and say, ‘We are going to start a game company, and we want you to be involved.'” Shelley agreed to fly down to Dallas to talk it over.

But they still weren’t sure what kind of game they wanted to make. Then, as Shelley remembers, “One day one of the guys walked in with Warcraft. He said, ‘We’ve got to make this. We’ve got to make one of these. This is blowing the socks off the gaming world right now.'” It all came together quickly after that. Why not combine the hottest current trend in gaming with the last game Shelley had helped to make, which was already widely regarded as a hallowed classic? “The idea was, let’s take the ideas of Civilization — an historical game — and do a Warcraft/Command & Conquer-style RTS.”

This, then, was the guiding ethos of the project, the first line of any pitch document to a potential publisher: to combine the fast action of the typical RTS with at least some of the more expansive scope of Civilization. You would guide a tribe — in time, a full-fledged civilization — through the Paleolithic Age, the Neolithic Age, the Bronze Age, and the early stages of the Iron Age (where this particular voyage through history would end, leaving the table set for a sequel). Along the way, you would research a variety of technologies and build ever more impressive structures, some of which would not be strictly military in application, such as granaries and temples. There would even be a version of Wonders of the World, those grandest of all Civilization achievements, waiting to be built. But the whole experience would be compressed down into the typical RTS time frame of an hour or so, as opposed to the dozen or more hours it might take to get through a full game of MicroProse’s Civilization.

Initially titled Dawn of Man, the game evolved slowly but steadily betwixt and between the usual daily routine at Ensemble Corporation. The other Ensemble principals took Tony Goodman’s after-hours vanity project with a shrug. They didn’t really understand it, but he had worked hard for a long time and was entitled to it, they supposed, in the same way that other successful entrepreneurs were entitled to go out and buy themselves a Porsche.

When Tony Goodman started shopping the game to prospective publishers, it already looked and played decently well. He was growing more and more convinced that he had a winner on his hands. Yet even he was surprised at his good fortune when he made a cold call to Stuart Moulder, a middle manager at Microsoft’s relatively little-remarked games division, and captured the interest of the biggest fish in the software sea.

Historically speaking, Microsoft’s relationship to games had long been a tentative one. It was true that, in the very early days of the company, when it was known chiefly as a peddler of 8-bit BASIC implementations, Microsoft had published a fair number of games. (The most important of these was probably its ethically dodgy commercial version of Will Crowther and Don Woods’s classic Adventure, the game that lent its name to a whole genre.) Even after it signed the landmark deal to provide IBM’s first mass-market personal computer with an operating system — a deal that resulted in the ever-evolving PC standard that remains dominant to this day — Microsoft continued to dabble in games for a while. There was a good reason for this; it’s often forgotten today that IBM and Microsoft first envisioned that original IBM PC becoming a fixture in homes as well as offices. But when home users didn’t embrace the platform as rapturously as the partners had hoped, even as Corporate America took it to its bosom more quickly than they had ever dreamed, Microsoft abandoned games, thanks not only to the bigger profits that could be earned in operating systems and business software but out of fear of the stigma that surrounded games and their makers in the more “serious” software circles of the 1980s. The one exception to Microsoft’s no-fun-allowed policy was — at least according to some people’s definition of “fun” — Flight Simulator, an early product for the IBM PC that turned into a minor cash cow for the company; like Microsoft’s operating systems and productivity packages, it was a program that people proved willing to buy all over again every few years, whenever it was updated to take advantage of the latest graphics cards and microprocessors. Its focus on the pedantic details of flying a real civilian airplane — the complications of VOR navigation systems and the insidious threat of carburetor ice were implemented, but absolutely no guns were to hand — presumably made it acceptable in Microsoft’s staid software lineup.

The release in 1990 of the comparatively approachable, user-friendly Windows 3.0 operating environment marked the moment when more conventional games began to become less of an anathema to Microsoft once again. An implementation of the hoary old card game Solitaire was among this latest Windows’s standard suite of software accessories. As easy to pick up as it was to put down, it became the perfect time killer or palate cleanser for hundreds of millions of office workers all over the world, enough to make it quite probably the most popular videogame ever in terms of sheer number of person-hours played. Microsoft went on to release four “Entertainment Packs” of similarly simple games for the Windows 3.x desktop, and to include a clever Battleship variant called Minesweeper in 1992’s Windows 3.1. Microsoft was slowly loosening up; even Bill Gates confessed to a Minesweeper addiction.

The company now began to dabble in more ambitious games, the kind that could stand on their own rather than needing to be packaged a half-dozen to a box. There came a golf game for the corporate set, and then there came Space Simulator, an attempt to do for armchair astronauts what Flight Simulator had for so long been doing for armchair aviators. But the big shift came with Windows 95, the first (and arguably only) Microsoft operating system whose arrival would become a full-fledged pop-culture event. That old dream of the PC as a standard for the home as well as the office was coming true in spades by now; amidst the hype over multimedia and the World Wide Web, ordinary people were buying computers to use in their homes in unprecedented numbers. Microsoft was determined to serve their wishes and needs just as they had for so long been serving those of the corporate world. One result of this determination was DirectX, which allowed Microsoft’s customers to install and play audiovisually rich, immersive games without having to learn the arcane mantras of MS-DOS or memorize every detail of a computer’s hardware configuration. Another, less initially prominent one was a more empowered games division, which was for the first time given permission to blow through the musty vibes of office life or educational value that had clung to Microsoft’s earlier entertainment efforts and give the hardcore gamers what they really wanted.

At the same time, though, it should be understood that even by this point game publishing had not become a major priority at Microsoft. Far from it. There remained plenty of people inside the company who didn’t think getting into that business was a good idea at all, who feared that it would be perceived as a conflict of interest by the very extant game publishers Microsoft was trying to convince to embrace DirectX, or who thought the potential rewards just weren’t worth the distraction; after all, even if Microsoft managed to publish the most popular computer game in the world, those revenues would still pale in comparison to the Windows and Office juggernauts. Among the skeptics who did no more than tolerate the notion of Microsoft peddling games was Bill Gates himself.

The games division was in the keeping of one Tony Garcia at this time. One day a manager a rung below him on the hierarchy, a “talent scout” named Stuart Moulder whom he had explicitly tasked with finding hot “gamer’s games” to sway the naysayers and reinvigorate the division, knocked on his door to say that he’d just seen an RTS work-in-progress by a brand-new studio that was being bootstrapped out of a business-software maker. Yes, Moulder rushed to add, he understood that no part of that sentence sounded overly promising at first blush. But the game itself looked surprisingly good, he said. Really, really good. This could be the Big One they’d been waiting for.

So, Garcia invited the Dawn of Man crew to come up to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and show him what they had. And he too liked what he saw enough to want to put the Microsoft logo on it.

Microsoft was an infamously tough negotiator, but Tony Goodman was no slouch in that department either. “Negotiation is often about compromise,” he says. “However, negotiating with Microsoft is more often about leverage. Microsoft negotiates hard. They don’t respect you unless you do the same.” Goodman gained some of his needed leverage by showing the game to other publishers as well — Electronic Arts, Hasbro, even Discovery Channel Multimedia (who were attracted by the game’s interest in real history) — and showing Microsoft the letters they had sent him to express their very real interest. Meanwhile Microsoft’s marketing department had already come up with the perfect name for a game whose historical time frame extended well beyond the Dawn of Man: Age of Empires. Having invented the name, Microsoft insisted on owning the trademark. Goodman wasn’t able to move the beast from Redmond on this point, but he did secure a royalty rate and other contract terms that he could live with.

In February of 1996, Goodman’s moonlighting venture was transformed from a skunk works inside a business-software maker to a proper games studio at long last, via official articles of incorporation. That said, it wouldn’t do to exaggerate the degree of separation even now: Ensemble Studios was still run out of the office of Ensemble Corporation. It had about ten employees in the beginning. Angelo Laudon was listed as lead programmer and Rick Goodman as lead designer, despite the latter’s complete lack of experience in that field. Fortunately, Bruce Shelley had agreed to join up as well, coming down to Dallas about one week of every month and working from home in Chicago the rest of the time.

Soon after Age of Empires became a real project from a real studio, Tony Garcia left Microsoft. He was replaced by Ed Fries, a veteran member of the Office team who had programmed games for 8-bit Atari computers before starting at Microsoft in 1986. When he agreed to take this new job in games, he was told by his colleagues that he was committing career suicide: “Why would you leave Office, one of the most important parts of this company, to go work on something nobody cares about?”

For all their apparent differences in size and clout, Microsoft and Ensemble Corporation were in an oddly similar boat; both were specialists in other kinds of software who were trying to break into games. Or rather, a handful of passionate individuals within each of the companies was, while everyone else looked on with bemused indifference. In an odd sort of way, though, said indifference was the passionate individuals’ superpower. If the new RTS failed utterly, it wouldn’t show up on the ledgers of Microsoft or Ensemble Corporation as anything more than a slight blip on an otherwise healthy bottom line. This lack of existential stakes — an extreme rarity in an industry whose instability is legendary — was greatly to the game’s benefit. With no pressure to have it finished by such-and-such a date or else, the developers could fuss over it until they got every detail just exactly perfect. Sticking close to the RTS playbook even in his choice of metaphors, Rick Goodman describes time in game development as “a resource, like collecting wood. The more of it you have, the better off you are. We took a lot of time. A lot of time. Most companies would not have survived that length of time.”

During that time, the game got played. Over and over and over and over again, it got played, not only by the Ensemble crew but by lots of folks at Microsoft, including the experts at that company’s “usability laboratory.” Microsoft brought in people from the street who had never played an RTS before, who didn’t even know what those initials stood for, and had them run through the early tutorial missions to see if they communicated what they were supposed to. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. Age of Empires was tested and tweaked no differently than it would have been if it was a $1000 mission-critical software application destined to be the fodder of corporate purchasing departments all over the world.

For this was to be a broad-spectrum computer game, beamed straight at the center of the mass market but wide and diffuse enough to capture an unusual variety of playing styles and priorities. Bruce Shelley has spoken often since of the value of putting “multiple gaming experiences within one box.”

To reach a broad audience, include a variety of game types and adjustable game parameters that combine in different ways to create a range of quite different gaming experiences, all within the same game. Examples of different gaming experiences with the Age of Empires games are multiplayer death matches, single-player campaigns, random-map games, cooperative-play games, and Wonder races. Victory conditions, map types, and level-of-difficulty settings are examples of parameters that can be adjusted to create different gaming experiences.

We want the smartest kid in junior-high school (a hardcore gamer) telling his or her friends that our game is his or her favorite right now. When those friends buy our game, they probably won’t be able to compete with the star, but by adjusting those parameters they can still find a type of game that suits them and have fun. The average kids and the smart kids can both enjoy our game, although they play quite different parts of it.

When we provide a variety of gaming experiences within the single box, we increase the number of people who can buy our game and be happy with it. Each of these satisfied customers becomes in turn a potential evangelist.

Although I wouldn’t directly equate being “hardcore” when it comes to games with being “smarter” than those who are not in the way that Shelley (perhaps inadvertently) does here, the larger point is well-taken. This was something that the industry in general was finally coming to realize by the latter 1990s, probably more belatedly than it ought to have done. By making it possible to play the same game in a variety of different ways, you could dramatically expand the size of that game’s audience. You did so by including varying difficulty levels and speed settings, to make the game as easy or hard, as relaxing or frenetic, as any particular player wished. And you did so by including different modes of play: story-driven campaigns, a single-player skirmish mode, online multiplayer contests. It might take additional time and money to make all of these things, especially if you were determined, as you ought to be, to make them all well, but it remained vastly cheaper than making a whole new game. Most older games dictate to you how you must play them; newer ones ask you how you would like to play them. And this has been, it seems to me, an immensely positive development on the whole, broadening immeasurably the quantity and types of people who are able to enjoy games — both each individual game that appears and gaming in the aggregate.

Certainly Age of Empires understood all of this; in addition to selectable difficulty levels and speed settings, it includes campaigns, pre-crafted singleton maps for single- or multiplayer sessions, randomly generated maps, even a scenario and campaign editor for those who want to turn their hobby into a truly creative pursuit. Anyone who has been reading these histories of mine for a while will surely know that the RTS is far from my favorite sub-genre of games. Yet even I found Age of Empires surprisingly easy to get along with. I turned the difficulty and speed down and approached the campaigns as an interactive whirlwind tour of the ancient world; as readers of this site’s companion The Analog Antiquarian are well aware, that is a subject I can never get enough of. I have a friend, on the other hand, who tells me that he can’t remember ever even starting a campaign back in the day, that he jumped right into multiplayer on Day One to engage in ferocious zero-sum contests with his friends and never looked back. And that’s fine too. Different strokes for different folks.

But since I am the person I am, I just have to say a bit more about the campaigns. There are actually four of them in all, chronicling the evolution of ancient Egypt, Greece, Babylon, and Japan. (An expansion pack that appeared about a year after the base game includes three more campaigns that deal exclusively with the rise and fall of Rome.) The campaigns were a labor of love for the lifetime history buff Bruce Shelley, as were the 40-plus pages in the manual dedicated to the twelve different playable civilizations, whose ranks include not only the aforementioned but also such comparatively obscure cultures as the Minoans, the Phoenicians, and even the Shang Chinese, all with strengths and weaknesses that stem from what we know — in some cases, what little we know — of their real-world inspirations.

“We really only needed one grand theme for a civilization that was historical enough to make people believe,” says Rick Goodman. “Like, they know Rome was good at X and the Greeks were good at Y.” For all that Age of Empires is no one’s idea of a studious exploration of history, it does have a little bit more on its mind than the likes of Warcraft or Command & Conquer. At its best, it can make you ponder where and how human civilization came to be, starting as it does with the bedrock resources, the food and wood and, yes, stone out of which everything that followed was built. I’m sure it must have sent at least a few of its young players scurrying to the library to learn a little more about our shared heritage. Perhaps it managed to spark an enduring passion for history in some of them.

The graphics style was an additional key to Age of Empires’s appeal. Bruce Shelley:

The sun is always shining in Age of Empires. It was always a bright, inviting world that you wanted to know more about. I’ve always had problems with dark, forbidding games. You’re crushing your audience — you’re really narrowing who is going to consider buying a game when you make it ugly, dark, and forbidding. Maybe it appeals to a certain audience, but…

When you set out to develop a PC game, the potential market is everyone on Earth who owns a PC. Once you begin making decisions about your game (gory, sci-fi, RTS, shooter), you begin losing potential customers who are not interested in your topic, genre, or style. Commercially successful games hold onto [a] significant share of that market because they choose a topic, genre, and style that connect with a broad audience. The acceptance of the PC into more world communities, different age groups, and by women means that games do not need to be targeted, and perhaps should not be targeted, solely to the traditional gaming audience of young males.

Age of Empires inevitably comes down to war in the end, as do most computerized depictions of history. But the violence is kept low-key in comparison to many another RTS bloodbath, and there is at least a nod in the direction of a non-conquest victory, an equivalent to sending a spaceship off to Alpha Centauri as a capstone to a game of Civilization: if you can build yourself a Wonder of the World in Age of Empires, then defend it for a period of time against all comers, you are declared the victor then and there. A “religious” victory can also be achieved, by collecting all of the religious artifacts on the map or holding all of its sacred sites for a period of 2000 years — about ten minutes in game time. There’s even some nods toward diplomacy, although in practice becoming allies usually just means you’ve agreed not to fight each other quite yet.

I don’t want to overstate the scale of the game’s innovations. At the end of the day, Age of Empires remains an RTS in the classic mold, with far more in common with Warcraft and Command & Conquer than it has with Civilization. It’s an extremely well-made derivative work with a handful of fresh ideas, not a revolution from whole cloth. Its nods in the direction of Civilization are no more than that; it’s not, that is to say, the full-blown fusion that may have been Bruce Shelley’s original vision for it. Compressing into just one hour the first 10,000 to 12,000 years of human civilization, from the dawn of sedentary farming to the splendors of high antiquity, means that lots of the detail and texture that make the game called Civilization so compelling must get lost. Even if you’re a story guy like me, you’ll no longer be marveling that you’ve brought writing, irrigation, or religion to your little group of meeples after you’ve played your first map or two; those things will have become mere rungs on the ladder to the victory screen, the real point of the endeavor. In a rare lukewarm review, GameSpot’s T. Liam MacDonald put his finger on some of the places where Age of Empires’s aspirations toward Civilization don’t live up to the reality of its well-worn RTS template.

I wish that Age of Empires was what it claimed to be: Civilization with a Warcraft twist. Instead, it is Warcraft with a hint of Civilization. That’s all well and good, but it places it firmly in the action-oriented real-time combat camp, rather than in the high-minded empire-building [camp] of Civilization. The result is Warcraft in togas, with slightly more depth but a familiar feel.

I too must confess that I did eventually get bored with the standard RTS drill of collect, build, and attack that is the basis of almost every scenario. As the scenarios got harder, I gradually lost the will to put in the effort it would take to beat them; I wound up quitting without regrets about halfway through the second campaign, satisfied that I’d had my measure of fun and certain that life is too short to continue with entertainments of any type that you no longer find entertaining. Still, I won’t soon forget Age of Empires, and not just because its theme and atmosphere make it stand out so from the crowd. I would be the last person to deny that it’s an incredibly polished product from top to bottom, a game that was clearly fussed over and thought about to the nth degree. It exudes quality from its every virtual pore.

The Age of Empire intro movie displays some of the game’s contradictory impulses. The scenes of combat are no better nor worse than those of any other game that attempts to make war seem glorious rather than terrible. Yet the weathered ancient stone raises other, more poignant thoughts about the cycles of life, time, and civilization. “For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”

Link to video:
https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/intro.mp4

Each campaign follows the historical development of the civilization in question to whatever extent the demands of gameplay allow.

In commercial terms, Age of Empires was a perfect storm, a great game with wide appeal combined with a lot of marketing savvy and the international distributional muscle of the biggest software publisher in the world. The principals from Ensemble remember a pivotal demonstration to Bill Gates, whose reservations about Microsoft’s recent push into games were well-known to all of them. He emerged from his first first-hand encounter with Age of Empires calling it “amazing,” assuring it the full support of the Microsoft machine.

While Microsoft’s marketing department prepared an advertising campaign whose slick sophistication would make it the envy of the industry, Tony Goodman deployed a more personal touch, working the phones at the big gaming magazines. He wasn’t above using some psychological sleight-of-hand to inculcate a herd mentality.

I built relationships with the most recognized gaming magazines. I invested a lot of time with key editors, seeding the idea that Age of Empires was “revolutionary” and would become a “phenomenon.” They may not have believed me at first, but my goal wasn’t to convince them. My goal was to plant wondrous possibilities in their brains and create anticipation, like Christmas for kids.

When the early previews began appearing, they were using the terms that we seeded: “revolutionary” and “phenomenon.” These early opinions were then picked up and echoed by other publications, creating a snowball effect. Eventually, all the publications would get on board with this message, just so they didn’t look out of touch.

Sure enough, in the Computer Gaming World RTS roundup with which I opened this article, Age of Empires was given pride of place at the top of the otherwise alphabetized pile, alongside just one august companion: Starcraft, Blizzard’s long-awaited follow-up to Warcraft II, which was to try the science-fiction side of the usual RTS fantasy/science-fiction dichotomy on for size. As it happened, Starcraft would wind up slipping several months into 1998, leaving the coming yuletide season free to become the Christmas of Age of Empires.

So, while Age of Empires may not have quite lived up to its “revolutionary” billing in gameplay terms, it definitely did become a marketplace phenomenon after its release in October of 1997, demonstrating to everyone what good things can happen when a fun game with broad appeal is combined with equally broad and smart marketing. It doubled Microsoft’s own lifetime sales projections of about 400,000 units in its first three months; it would probably have sold considerably more than that, but Microsoft had under-produced based on those same sales predictions, leaving the game out of stock on many store shelves for weeks on end while the factories scrambled to take up the slack. Age of Empires recovered from those early travails well enough to sell 3 million units by 1999, grossing a cool $120 million. It left far behind even those other members of the RTS Class of 1997 that did very well for themselves by the conventional standards of the industry, such as Myth and Total Annihilation. In fact, Age of Empires and the franchise that it spawned came to overshadow even Command & Conquer, taking the latter’s place as the only RTS series capable of going toe-to-toe with Blizzard’s Warcraft and Starcraft.

And yet that is only a part of Age of Empires’s legacy — in a way, the smaller part. In the process of single-handedly accounting for half or more of the Microsoft games division’s revenue during the last couple of years of the 1990s, Age of Empires changed Microsoft’s attitude about games forever. The direct result of that shift in attitude would be a little product called the Xbox. “I believe there were two successes that had to happen at Microsoft in order for the Xbox console to happen,” says Stuart Moulder. “One was DirectX, which showed that we had the chops on the operating-system side to deliver technology that made it possible to build great games. Then, on the other side, we had to show that we had the ability as a first-party publisher to deliver a hit game aimed at core gamers — because that’s [the] people who buy and play console games.” Thanks to Age of Empires, gaming would be overlooked no more at Microsoft.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: The book Gamers at Work by Morgan Ramsay; Computer Gaming World of October 1997, November 1997, and January 1998; Next Generation of June 1996; InfoWorld of April 22 1991.

Online sources include Soren Johnson’s interview with Bruce Shelley, Scott Stilphen’s interview with Ed Fries, David L. Craddock’s long ShackNews series on Microsoft’s gaming history (especially the chapter dealing directly with Age of Empires), Thomas Wilde’s profile of Ed Fries for GeekWire, Richard C. Moss’s history of Age of Empires for Ars Technica, a Microsoft press release from February of 1998, T. Liam MacDonald’s vintage review of Age of Empires for GameSpot.

Finally, the box of documents that Bruce Shelley donated to the Strong Museum of Play were a valuable resource.

A “Definitive Edition” of the original Age of Empires is available as a digital purchase on Steam.

Jedi Knight (Plus, Notes on an Expanded Universe)
April 5, 2024

The years from 1991 to 1998 were special ones in which to be a Star Wars fan. For during these years, more so than during any other time in the franchise’s existence, Star Wars truly belonged to its fans.

The period just before this one is sometimes called the “Dark Period” or the “Dark Ages” by the fans of today. After 1983’s Return of the Jedi, that concluding installment in the original trilogy of films, George Lucas, Star Wars’s sometimes cantankerous creator, insisted that he was done with his most beloved creation. A few underwhelming television productions aside, he stayed true to his word in the years that followed, whilst also refusing anyone else the right to play in his playground; even Kenner Toys was denied its request to invent some new characters and vehicles with which to freshen up the action-figure line. So, Star Wars gradually faded from the mass-media consciousness, much like the first generation of videogames that so infamously crashed the same year Return of the Jedi dropped. But no Nintendo came along to revive Star Wars’s fortunes, for the simple reason that Lucas refused to allow it. The action figures that had revolutionized the toy industry gathered dust and then slowly disappeared from store shelves, to be replaced by cynical adjuncts to Saturday-morning cartoons: Transformers, He-Man, G.I. Joe. (Or, perhaps better said, the television shows were adjuncts to the action figures: the old scoffer’s claim that Star Wars had been created strictly to sell toys was actually true in their case.)

The biggest Star Wars project of this period wasn’t any traditional piece of media but rather a theme-park attraction. In a foreshadowing of the franchise’s still-distant future, Disneyland in January of 1987 opened its Star Wars ride, whose final price tag was almost exactly the same as that of the last film. Yet even at that price, something felt vaguely low-rent about it: the ride had been conceived under the banner of The Black Hole, one of the spate of cinematic Star Wars clones from the films’ first blush of popularity, then rebranded when Disney managed to acquire a license for The Black Hole’s inspiration. The ride fit in disarmingly well at a theme park whose guiding ethic was nostalgia for a vanished American past of Main Streets and picket fences. Rather than remaining a living property, Star Wars was being consigned to the same realm of kitschy nostalgia. In these dying days of the Cold War, the name was now heard most commonly as shorthand for President Ronald Reagan’s misconceived, logistically unsustainable idea for a defensive umbrella that would make the United States impervious to Soviet nuclear strikes.

George Lucas’s refusal to make more Star Wars feature films left Lucasfilm, the sprawling House That Star Wars Built, in an awkward situation. To be sure, there were still the Indiana Jones films, but those had at least as much to do with the far more prolific cinematic imagination of Steven Spielberg as they did with Lucas himself. When Lucas tried to strike out in new directions on his own, the results were not terribly impressive. Lucasfilm became as much a technology incubator as a film-production studio, spawning the likes of Pixar, that pioneer of computer-generated 3D animation, and Lucasfilm Games (later LucasArts), an in-house games studio which for many years wasn’t allowed to make Star Wars games. The long-running Star Wars comic book, which is credited with saving Marvel Comics from bankruptcy in the late 1970s, sent out its last issue in May of 1986; the official Star Wars fan club sent out its last newsletter in February of 1987. At this point, what was there left to write about? It seemed that Star Wars was dead and already more than half buried. But, as the cliché says, the night is often darkest just before the dawn.

The seeds of a revival were planted the very same year that the Star Wars fan club closed up shop, when West End Games published Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, a tabletop RPG. Perhaps because it addressed such a niche segment of the overall entertainment marketplace, it was allowed more freedom to expand upon the extant universe of Star Wars than anything that had come before from anyone not named George Lucas. Although its overall commercial profile would indeed remain small in comparison to the blockbuster films and toys, it set a precedent for what was to come.

In the fall of 1988, Lou Aronica, head of Bantam Books’s science-fiction imprint Spectra, sent a proposal to Lucas for a series of new novels set in the Star Wars universe. This was by no means an entirely original idea in the broad strokes. The very first Star Wars novel, Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, had appeared just nine months after the first film, having been born as a script treatment for a potential quickie low-budget sequel if the movie should prove modestly but not extremely successful. After it, a handful of additional paperbacks starring Han Solo and Lando Calrissian had been published. But Aronica envisioned something bigger than those early coattail-riders, a series of true “event” novels. “We can’t do these casually,” he wrote to Lucas. “They have to be as ambitious as the movies were. This body of work is too important to popular culture to end with these three movies.”

He knew it was a shot in the dark. Thus he was disappointed but not overly surprised when he heard nothing back for months; many an earlier proposal for doing something new with Star Wars had fallen on similarly deaf ears. Then, out of the blue, he received a grudging letter expressing interest. “No one is going to buy these,” Lucas groused — but if Bantam Books wanted to throw its money away, Lucasfilm would deign to accept a licensing royalty, predicated on a number of conditions. The most significant of these were that the books could take place between, during, or after the movies but not before; that they would be labeled as artifacts of an “Expanded Universe” which George Lucas could feel free to contradict at any time, if he should ever wish to return to Star Wars himself; and that Lucas and his lieutenants at Lucasfilm would be able to request whatever changes they liked in the manuscripts — or reject them completely — prior to their publication. All of that sounded fine to Lou Aronica.

So, Heir to the Empire, the first of a trilogy of novels telling what happened immediately after Return of the Jedi, was published on May 1, 1991. Its author was Timothy Zahn, an up-and-coming writer whose short stories had been nominated for Hugo awards four times, winning once. Zahn was symbolic of the new group of creators who would be allowed to take the reins of Star Wars for the next seven years. For unlike the workaday writers who had crafted those earlier Star Wars novels to specifications, Zahn was a true-blue fan of the movies, a member of the generation who had first seen them as children or adolescents — Zahn was fifteen when the first film arrived in theaters — and literally had the trajectory of their lives altered by the encounter. Despite the Bantam Spectra imprint on its spine, in other words, Heir to the Empire was a form of fan fiction.

Heir to the Empire helped the cause immensely by being better than anyone might have expected. Even the sniffy mainstream reviewers who took it on had to admit that it did what it set out to do pretty darn effectively. Drawing heavily on the published lore of Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game as well as his own imagination, Zahn found a way to make his novel feel like Star Wars without lapsing into rote regurgitation of George Lucas’s tropes and plot lines. Grand Admiral Thrawn, his replacement for Darth Vader in the role of chief villain, was at least as interesting a character as his predecessor, whilst being interesting in totally different ways. Through him, Zahn was able to articulate an ethical code for the Empire that went beyond being evil and oppressive for the sake of it: a philosophy of political economy by no means unknown to some of the authoritarian nations of our own world, hinging on the belief that too much personal freedom leads only to anarchy and chaos and an endemic civic selfishness, making life worse for everyone. It’s a philosophy with which you can disagree — I certainly do, stridently — but it isn’t a thoughtless or even an entirely heartless one.

This is not to say that Heir to the Empire was some dry political dissertation; Zahn kept the action scenes coming, kept it fun, kept it Star Wars, striking a balance that George Lucas himself would later fail badly to establish in his own return to his science-fiction universe. The hardcover novel topped the New York Times bestseller chart, defying Lucas’s predictions of its failure, proving there was a ready market out there for new Star Wars product.

That said, very few of the Star Wars novels that would follow would match Heir to the Empire and its two sequels in terms of quality. With so much money waiting to be made, Lou Aronica’s vision for a carefully curated and edited series of event novels — perhaps one per year — fell by the wayside all too rapidly. Soon new novels were appearing monthly rather than yearly, alongside a rebooted comic book. Then they were coming even faster than that; 1997 alone saw a staggering 22 new Star Wars novels. And so the Expanded Universe fell victim to that bane of fan fictions everywhere, a lack of quality control. By the time Han Solo and Princess Leia had gotten married and produced three young Jedi of their own, who were all running around having adventures of their own in their own intertwining series of books, it was reasonable to ask whether it was all becoming much, much too much. A drought had become an indiscriminate tsunami; a trilogy of action movies had turned into All My Children.

Even when it was no better than it ought to have been, however, there was a freewheeling joy to the early Expanded Universe which is poignant to look back upon from the perspective of these latter days of Star Wars, when everything about the franchise is meticulously managed from the top down. The Expanded Universe, by contrast, was a case of by the fans, for the fans. With new movies the stuff of dreams only, they painted every corner of the universe in vivid colors of their own. The Expanded Universe could be cheesy, but it was never cynical. One could argue that it felt more like Star Wars — the original Star Wars of simple summertime fun, the one that didn’t take itself so gosh-darn seriously — than anything that has appeared under the name since 1998.

By a happy accident, a contract between Lucasfilm and Kenner Toys, giving the latter an exclusive monopoly on Star Wars “toys and games,” was allowed to lapse the same year that Heir to the Empire appeared in bookstores. Thus LucasArts, Lucasfilm’s own games division, could get in on the Expanded Universe fun. What had been a bizarre dearth of Star Wars games during the 1980s turned into a 1990s deluge almost comparable to the one taking place in novels. LucasArts released a dozen or so Star Wars games in a broad range of gameplay genres between 1993 and 1998, drawing indiscriminately both from the original movies and from the new tropes and characters of the literary Expanded Universe. Like the books, these games weren’t always or even usually masterpieces, but their unconstrained sense of possibility makes them feel charmingly anomalous in comparison to the corporate-managed, risk-averse, Disneyfied Star Wars of today.

And then, too, LucasArts did produce two games that deserve to be ranked alongside Timothy Zahn’s first trilogy of Star Wars novels as genuine classics in their field. We’ve met one of these already in an earlier article: the “space simulator” TIE Fighter, whose plot had you flying and fighting for Zahn’s more philosophically coherent version of the Empire, with both Darth Vader and Admiral Thrawn featuring in prominent roles. The other, the first-person shooter Jedi Knight, will be our subject for today.

Among other things, Jedi Knight heralded a dawning era of improbably tortured names in games. Its official full name is Star Wars: Jedi Knight — Dark Forces II, a word salad that you can arrange however you like and still have it make just about the same amount of sense. It’s trying to tell us in its roundabout way that Jedi Knight is a sequel to Dark Forces, the first Star Wars-themed shooter released by LucasArts. Just as TIE Fighter and its slightly less refined space-simulator predecessor X-Wing were responses to the Wing Commander phenomenon, Jedi Knight and before it Dark Forces put a Star Wars spin on the first-person-shooter (FPS) craze that was inaugurated by DOOM. So, it’s with Dark Forces that any Jedi Knight story has to begin.

Dark Forces was born in the immediate aftermath of DOOM, when half or more of the studios in the games industry seemed suddenly to be working on a “DOOM clone,” as the nascent FPS genre was known before that acronym was invented. It was in fact one of the first of the breed to be finished, shipping already in February of 1995, barely a year after its inspiration. And yet it was also one of the few to not just match but clearly improve upon id Software’s DOOM engine. Whereas DOOM couldn’t handle sloping surfaces, didn’t even allow you to look up or down, LucasArts’s “Jedi” engine could play host to vertiginous environments full of perches and ledges and passages that snaked over and under as well as around one another.

Dark Forces stood out as well for its interest in storytelling, despite inhabiting a genre in which, according to a famous claim once advanced by id’s John Carmack, story was no more important than it was in a porn movie. This game’s plot could easily have been that of an Expanded Universe novel.

Dark Forces begins concurrent to the events of the first Star Wars movie. Its star is Kyle Katarn, a charming rogue of the Han Solo stripe, a mercenary who once worked for the Empire but is now peddling his services to the Rebel Alliance alongside his friend Jan Ors, a space jockey with a knack for swooping in in the nick of time to save him from the various predicaments he gets himself into. The two are hired to steal the blueprints of the Death Star, the same ones that will allow the Rebels to identify the massive battle station’s one vulnerability and destroy it in the film’s bravura climax. Once their role in the run-up to that event has been duly fulfilled, Kyle and Jan then go on to foil an Imperial plot to create a new legion of super soldiers known as Dark Troopers. (This whole plot line can be read as an extended inside joke about how remarkably incompetent the Empire’s everyday Stormtroopers are, throughout this game just as in the movies. If ever there was a gang who couldn’t shoot straight…)

Told through sparsely animated between-mission cut scenes, it’s not a great story by any means, but it serves its purpose of justifying the many changes of scenery and providing some motivation to traverse each succeeding level. Staying true to the Han Solo archetype, Kyle Katarn is even showing signs of developing a conscience by the time it’s over. All of which is to say that, in plot as in its audiovisual aesthetics, Dark Forces feels very much like Star Wars. It provided for its contemporary players an immersive rush that no novel could match; this and the other games of LucasArts were the only places where you could see new Star Wars content on a screen during the mid-1990s.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Dark Forces is more of its time than timeless.[1]A reworked and remastered version of Dark Forces has recently been released as of this writing; it undoubtedly eases some of the issues I’m about to describe. These comments apply only to the original version of the game.PC Gamer, who wrote in a retrospective review in 2016 that “I spent more of my Dark Forces playthrough appreciating what it pulled off in 1995 than I did really having fun.” Coming so early in the lifespan of the FPS as it did, its controls are nonstandard and, from the perspective of the modern player at least, rather awkward, lacking even such niceties as mouse-look. In lieu of a save-anywhere system or even save checkpoints, it gives you a limited number of lives with which to complete each level, like one of the arcade quarter-eaters of yore.

Its worst issues, however, are connected to level design, which was still a bit of a black art at this point in time. It’s absurdly easy to get completely lost in its enormous levels, which have no obvious geographical through-line to follow, but are rather built around a tangled collection of lock-and-key puzzles that require lots and lots of criss-crossing and backtracking. Although there is an auto-map, there’s no easy way to project a three-dimensional space like these levels onto its two-dimensional plane; all those ladders and rising and falling passageways quickly turn into an incomprehensible mess on the map. Dark Forces is an ironic case of a game being undone by the very technological affordances that made it stand out; playing it, one gets the sense that the developers have rather outsmarted themselves. When I think back on it now, my main memory is of running around like a rat in a maze, circling back into the same areas again and again, trying to figure out what the hell the game wants me to do next.

Good luck making sense of this bowl of spaghetti…

Nevertheless, Dark Forces was very well-received in its day as the first game to not just copy DOOM’s technology but to push it forward — and with a Star Wars twist at that. Just two complaints cut through the din of praise, neither of them having anything to do with the level design that so frustrated me. One was the lack of a multiplayer mode, an equivalent to DOOM’s famed deathmatches. And the other was the fact that Dark Forces never let you fight with a lightsaber, rather giving the lie to the name of the Jedi engine that powered it. The game barely even mentioned Jedi and The Force and all the rest; like Han Solo, Kyle Katarn was strictly a blaster sort of guy at this juncture. LucasArts resolved to remedy both of these complaints in the sequel.

Jedi Knight actually straddles two trends in 1990s gaming, one of which has remained an evergreen staple of the hobby to this day, the other of which has long since been consigned to the realm of retro kitsch. The former is of course the FPS genre; the later is the craze for “full-motion video,” the insertion of video clips featuring real human actors into games. This “interactive movie” fad was already fast becoming passé when Jedi Knight was released in October of 1997. It was one of the last relatively big-budget, mainstream releases to embrace it.

Having written about so many of these vintage FMV productions in recent years, I’ve developed an odd fascination with the people who starred in them. These were generally either recognizable faces with careers past their prime or, more commonly, fresh-faced strivers looking for their big break, the sort of aspirants who have been waiting tables and dressing up in superhero costumes for the tourists strolling the Hollywood Walk of Fame for time immemorial, waiting for that call from their agent that means their ship has finally come in. Needless to say, for the vast majority of the strivers, a role in a CD-ROM game was as close as they ever came to stardom. Most of them gave up their acting dream at some point, went back home, and embarked on some more sensible career. I don’t see their histories as tragic at all; they rather speak to me of the infinite adaptability of our species, our adroitness at getting on with a Plan B when Plan A doesn’t work out, leaving us only with some amusing stories to share at dinner parties. Such stories certainly aren’t nothing. For what are any of our lives in the end but the sum total of the stories we can share, the experiences we’ve accumulated? All that stuff about “if you can dream it, you can do it” is nonsense; success in any field depends on circumstance and happenstance as much as effort or desire. Nonetheless, “it’s better to try and fail than never to try at all” is a cliché I can get behind.

But I digress. In Jedi Knight, Kyle Katarn is played by a fellow named Jason Court, whose résumé at the time consisted of a few minor television guest appearances, who would “retire” from acting by the end of the decade to become a Napa Valley winemaker. Court isn’t terrible here — a little wooden perhaps, but who wouldn’t be in a situation like this, acting on an empty sound stage whose background will later be painted in on the computer, intoning a script like this one?

Kyle Katarn, right, with his sidekick Jan Ors. It was surely no accident that Jason Court bears a passing resemblance to Mark Hamill — who was ironically himself starring in the Wing Commander games at this time.

Ah, yes… the script. Do you remember me telling you how Timothy Zahn’s early Star Wars novels succeeded by not slavishly echoing the tropes and character beats from the films? Well, this script is the opposite of that. The first words out of any character’s mouth are those of a Light Jedi promising a Dark Jedi that “striking me down” will have unforeseen consequences, just as Obi-Wan Kenobi once said to Darth Vader. What follows is a series of reenactments of beats and entire scenes from the movies in slightly altered contexts, on a budget of about one percent the size. Kyle Katarn, now yanked out of Han Solo’s shoes and thrust into those of Luke Skywalker, turns out to have grown up on a planet bizarrely similar to Tatooine and to have some serious daddy issues to go along with an inherited lightsaber and undreamt-of potential in The Force. The word “derivative” hardly begins to convey the scale of this game’s debt to its cinematic betters.

For all that, though, it’s hard to really hate the cut scenes. Their saving grace is that of the Expanded Universe as a whole (into whose welcoming canon Kyle Katarn was duly written, appearing in the comics, the novels, even as an action figure of his own): the lack of cynicism, the sense that everything being done is being done out of love even when it’s being done badly. When the Jedi ignited their lightsabers during the opening cut scene, it was the first time that distinctive swoosh and buzz had been seen and heard since Return of the Jedi. Even in our jaded present age, we can still sense the makers’ excitement at being allowed to do this, can imagine the audience’s excitement at being witness to it. There are worse things in this world than a community-theater re-creation of Star Wars.

The cut scenes are weirdly divorced from everything else in Jedi Knight. Many FMV productions have this same disjointed quality to them, a sense that the movie clips we watch and the game we play have little to do with one another. Yet seldom is that sense of a right hand that doesn’t know what the left is doing more pronounced than here. The Kyle of the video clips doesn’t even look like the Kyle of the rest of the game; the former has a beard, the latter does not. The divide is made that much more jarring by the aesthetic masterfulness of the game whenever the actors aren’t onscreen. Beginning with that iconic three-dimensional text crawl and John Williams’s equally iconic score, this game looks, sounds, and plays like an interactive Star Wars movie — whenever, that is, it’s not literally trying to be a Star Wars movie.

Certainly the environments you explore here are pure Star Wars. The action starts in a bar that looks like the Mos Eisley cantina, then sends you scampering off through one of those sprawling indoor complexes that seem to be everywhere in the Star Wars universe, all huge halls with improbably high ceilings and miles of corridors and air shafts connecting them, full of yawning gaps and precarious lifts, gun-metal grays and glittering blacks. Later, you’ll visit the streets and rooftops of a desert town with a vaguely Middle Eastern feel, the halls and courts of a fascistic palace lifted straight out of Triumph of the Will, the crawl-ways and garbage bins of a rattletrap spaceship… all very, very Star Wars, all pulsing with that unmistakable Star Wars soundtrack.

Just as Dark Forces was a direct response to DOOM, in technological terms Jedi Knight was LucasArts’s reply to id’s Quake, which was released about fifteen months before it. DOOM and Dark Forces are what is sometimes called “2.5D games” — superficially 3D, but relying on a lot of cheats and shortcuts, such as pre-rendered sprites standing in for properly 3D-modelled characters and monsters in the world. The Quake engine and the “Sith” engine that powers Jedi Knight are, by contrast, 3D-rendered from top to bottom, taking advantage not only of the faster processors and more expansive memories of the computers of their era but the new hardware-accelerated 3D graphics cards. Not only do they look better for it, but they play better as well; the vertical dimension which LucasArts so consistently emphasized benefits especially. There’s a lot of death-defying leaping and controlled falling in Jedi Knight, just as in Dark Forces, but it feels more natural and satisfying here. Indeed, Jedi Knight in general feels so much more modern than Dark Forces that it’s hard to believe the two games were separated in time by only two and a half years. Gone, for example, are the arcade-like limited lives of Dark Forces, replaced by the ability to save wherever you want whenever you want, a godsend for working adults like yours truly whose bedtime won’t wait for them to finish a level.

If you ask me, though, the area where Jedi Knight improves most upon its predecessor has nothing to do with algorithms or resolutions or frame rates, nor even convenience features like the save system. More than anything, it’s the level design here that is just so, so much better. Jedi Knight’s levels are as enormous as ever, whilst being if anything even more vertiginous than the ones of Dark Forces. And yet they manage to be far less confusing, having the intuitive through-line that the levels of Dark Forces lacked. Very rarely was I more than momentarily stumped about where to go next in Jedi Knight; in Dark Forces, on the other hand, I was confused more or less constantly.

Maybe I should clarify something at this point: when I play an FPS or a Star Wars game, and especially when I play a Star Wars FPS, I’m not looking to labor too hard for my fun. I want a romp; “Easy” mode suits me just fine. You know how in the movies, when Luke and Leia and the gang are running around getting shot at by all those Stormtroopers who can’t seem to hit the broadside of a barn, things just kind of work out for them? A bridge conveniently collapses just after they run across, a rope is hanging conveniently to hand just when they need it, etc. Well, this game does that for you. You go charging through the maelstrom, laser blasts ricocheting every which way, and, lo and behold, there’s the elevator platform you need to climb onto to get away, the closing door you need to dive under, the maintenance tunnel you need to leap into. It’s frantic and nerve-wracking and then suddenly awesome, over and over and over again. It’s incredibly hard in any creative field, whether it happens to be writing or action-game level design, to make the final product feel effortless. In fact, I can promise you that, the more effortless something feels, the more hard work went into it to make it feel that way. My kudos, then, to project leader Justin Chin and the many other hands who contributed to Jedi Knight, for being willing to put in the long, hard hours to make it look easy.

Of those two pieces of fan service that were deemed essential in this sequel — a multiplayer mode and lightsabers — I can only speak of the second from direct experience. By their own admission, the developers struggled for some time to find a way of implementing lightsabers in a way that felt both authentic and playable. In the end, they opted to zoom back to a Tomb Raider-like third-person, behind-the-back perspective whenever you pull out your trusty laser sword. This approach generated some controversy, first within LucasArts and later among FPS purists in the general public, but it works pretty well in my opinion. Still, I must admit that when I played the game I stuck mostly with guns and other ranged weapons, which run the gamut from blasters to grenades, bazookas to Chewbacca’s crossbow.

The exceptions — the places where I had no choice but to swing a lightsaber — were the one-on-one duels with other Jedi. These serve as the game’s bosses, coming along every few levels until the climax arrives in the form of a meeting with the ultimate bad guy, the Dark Jedi Jerec whom you’ve been in a race with all along to locate the game’s McGuffin, a mysterious Valley of the Jedi. (Don’t ask; it’s really not worth worrying about.) Like everything else here, these duels feel very, very Star Wars, complete with lots of villainous speechifying beforehand and lots of testing of Kyle’s willpower: “Give in to the Dark Side, Kyle! Use your hatred!” You know the drill. I enjoyed their derivative enthusiasm just as much as I enjoyed the rest of the game.

A Jedi duel in the offing.

Almost more interesting than the lightsabers, however, is the decision to implement other types of Force powers, and with them a morality tracker that sees you veering toward either the Dark or the Light Side of the Force as you play. If you go Dark by endangering or indiscriminately killing civilians and showing no mercy to your enemies, you gradually gain access to Force powers that let you deal out impressive amounts of damage without having to lay your hand on a physical weapon. If you go Light by protecting the innocent and sparing your defeated foes, your talents veer more toward the protective and healing arts — which, given the staggering amounts of firepower at your disposal in conventional-weapon form, is probably more useful in the long run. Regardless of which path you go down, you’ll learn to pull guns right out of your enemies’ hands from a distance and to “Force Jump” across gaps you could never otherwise hope to clear. Doing so feels predictably amazing.

Kyle can embrace the Dark Side to some extent. But as usually happens with these sorts of nods toward free will in games with mostly linear plot lines, it just ends up meaning that he foils the plans of the other Dark Jedi for his own selfish purposes rather than for selfless reasons. Cue the existentialist debates…

I’m going to couch a confession inside of my praise at this point: Jedi Knight is the first FPS I’ve attempted whilst writing these histories that I’ve enjoyed enough to play right through to the end. It took me about a week and a half of evenings to finish, the perfect length for a game like this in my book. Obviously, the experience I was looking for may not be the one that other people who play this game have in mind; those people can try turning up the difficulty level, ferreting out every single secret area, killing every single enemy, or doing whatever else they need to in order to find the sort of challenge they’d prefer. They might also want to check out the game’s expansion pack, which caters more to the FPS hardcore by eliminating the community-theater cut scenes and making everything in general a little bit harder. I didn’t bother, having gotten everything I was looking for out of the base game.

That said, I do look forward to playing more games like Jedi Knight as we move on into a slightly more evolved era of the FPS genre as a whole. While I’m never likely to join the hardcore blood-and-guts contingent, action-packed fun like this game offers up is hard for even a reflex-challenged, violence-ambivalent old man like me to resist.

Epilogue: The Universe Shrinks

Students of history like to say that every golden age carries within it the seeds of its demise. That rings especially true when it comes to the heyday of the Expanded Universe: the very popularity of the many new Star Wars novels, comics, and games reportedly did much to convince George Lucas that it might be worth returning to Star Wars himself. And because Lucas was one of the entertainment world’s more noted control freaks, such a return could bode no good for this giddy era of fan ownership.

We can pin the beginning of the end down to a precise date: November 1, 1994, the day on which George Lucas sat down to start writing the scripts for what would become the Star Wars prequels, going so far as to bring in a film crew to commemorate the occasion. “I have beautiful pristine yellow tablets,” he told the camera proudly, waving a stack of empty notebooks in front of its lens. “A nice fresh box of pencils. All I need is an idea.” Four and a half years later, The Phantom Menace would reach theaters, inaugurating for better or for worse — mostly for the latter, many fans would come to believe — the next era of Star Wars as a media phenomenon.

Critics and fans have posited many theories as to why the prequel trilogy turned out to be so dreary, drearier even than clichés about lightning in a bottle and not being able to go home again would lead one to expect. One good reason was the absence in the editing box of Marcia Lucas, whose ability to trim the fat from her ex-husband’s bloated, overly verbose story lines was as sorely missed as her deft way with character moments, the ones dismissed by George as the “dying and crying” scenes. Another was the self-serious insecurity of the middle-aged George Lucas, who wanted the populist adulation that comes from making blockbusters simultaneously with the respect of the art-house cognoscenti, who therefore decided to make the prequels a political parable about “what happens to you if you’ve got a dysfunctional government that’s corrupt and doesn’t work” instead of allowing them to be the “straightforward, wholesome, fun adventure” he had described the first Star Wars movie to be back in 1977. Suffice to say that Lucas displayed none of Timothy Zahn’s ability to touch on more complicated ideas without getting bogged down in them.

But whatever the reasons, dreary the prequels were, and their dreariness seeped into the Expanded Universe, whose fannish masterminds saw the breadth of their creative discretion steadily constricted. A financially troubled West End Games lost the license for its Star Wars tabletop RPG, the Big Bang that had gotten the universe expanding in the first place, in 1999. In 2002, the year that the second of the cinematic prequels was released, Alan Dean Foster, the author of the very first Star Wars novel from 1978, agreed to return to write another one. “It was no fun,” he remembers. The guidance he got from Lucasfilm “was guidance in the sense that you’re in a Catholic school and nuns walk by with rulers.”

And then, eventually, came the sale to Disney, which in its quest to own all of our childhoods turned Star Wars into just another tightly controlled corporate property like any of its others. The Expanded Universe was finally put out of its misery once and for all in 2014, a decade and a half past its golden age. It continues to exist today only in the form of a handful of characters, Grand Admiral Thrawn among them, who have been co-opted by Disney and integrated into the official lore.

The corporate Star Wars of these latter days can leave one longing for the moment when the first film and its iconic characters fall out of copyright and go back to the people permanently. But even if Congress is willing and the creek don’t rise, that won’t occur until 2072, a year I and presumably many of you as well may not get to see. In the meantime, we can still use the best artifacts of the early Expanded Universe as our time machines for traveling back to Star Wars’s last age of innocent, uncalculating fun.

Where did it all go wrong?

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: The books Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters by David L. Craddock, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe by Chris Taylor, and The Secret History of Star Wars by Michael Kaminski. Computer Gaming World of May 1995, October 1996, January 1997, December 1997, and March 1998; PC Zone of May 1997; Retro Gamer 138; Chicago Tribune of May 24 2017.

Online sources include Wes Fenlon’s Dark Forces and Jedi Knight retrospective for PC Gamer. The film George Lucas made to commemorate his first day of writing the Star Wars prequels is available on YouTube.

Jedi Knight is available for digital purchase at GOG.com. Those who want to dive deeper may also find the original and/or remastered version of Dark Forces to be of interest.

Footnotes

Footnotes

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A reworked and remastered version of Dark Forces has recently been released as of this writing; it undoubtedly eases some of the issues I’m about to describe. These comments apply only to the original version of the game.

The Curse of Monkey Island
April 19, 2024

Fair Warning: this article contains plot spoilers for Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge and The Curse of Monkey Island. No puzzle spoilers, however…

The ending of 1991’s Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge seems as shockingly definitive in its finality as that of the infamous last episode of the classic television series St. Elsewhere. Just as the lovable wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood is about to finally dispatch his arch-nemesis, the zombie pirate LeChuck, the latter tears off his mask to reveal that he is in reality Guybrush’s older brother, looking a trifle peeved but hardly evil or undead. Guybrush, it seems, is just an ordinary suburban kid who has wandered away from his family to play make-believe inside a storage room at Big Whoop Amusement Park, LeChuck the family member who has been dispatched to find him. An irate janitor appears on the scene: “Hey, kids! You’re not supposed to be in here!” And so the brothers make their way out to rejoin their worried parents, and another set of Middle American lives goes on.

Or do they? If you sit through the entirety of the end credits, you will eventually see a short scene featuring the fetching and spirited Elaine, Guybrush’s stalwart ally and more equivocal love interest, looking rather confused back in the good old piratey Caribbean. ‘I wonder what’s keeping Guybrush?” she muses. “I hope LeChuck hasn’t cast some horrible SPELL over him or anything.” Clearly, someone at LucasArts anticipated that a day might just come when they would want to make a third game.

Nevertheless, for a long time, LucasArts really did seem disposed to let the shocking ending stand. Gilbert himself soon left the company to found Humongous Entertainment, where he would use the SCUMM graphic-adventure engine he had helped to invent to make educational games for youngsters, even as LucasArts would continue to evolve the same technology to make more adventure games of their own. None of them, however, was called Monkey Island for the next four years, not even after the first two games to bear that name became icons of their genre.

Still, it is a law of the games industry that sequels to hit games will out, sooner or later and one way or another. In late 1995, LucasArts’s management decided to make a third Monkey Island at last. Why they chose to do so at this particular juncture isn’t entirely clear. Perhaps they could already sense an incipient softening of the adventure market — a downturn that would become all too obvious over the next eighteen months or so — and wanted the security of such an established name as this one if they were to invest big bucks in another adventure project. Or perhaps they just thought they had waited long enough.

Larry Ahern and Jonathan Ackley.

Whatever their reasoning in beginning the project, they chose for the gnarly task of succeeding Ron Gilbert an in-house artist and a programmer, a pair of good friends who had been employed at LucasArts for years and were itching to move into a design role. Larry Ahern had been hired to help draw Monkey Island 2 and had gone on to work on most of LucasArts’s adventure games since, while Jonathan Ackley had programmed large parts of Day of the Tentacle and The Dig. Knowing of their design aspirations, management came to them one day to ask if they’d like to become co-leads on a prospective Monkey Island 3. It was an extraordinary amount of faith to place in such unproven hands, but it would not prove to have been misplaced.

“We were too green to suggest anything else [than Monkey Island 3], especially an original concept,” admits Ahern, “and were too dumb to worry about all the responsibility of updating a classic game series.” He and Ackley brainstormed together in a room for two months, hashing out the shape of a game. After they emerged early in 1996 with their design bible for The Curse of Monkey Island in hand, production got underway in earnest.

At the end of Monkey Island 2, Ahern and Ackley announced, Guybrush had indeed been “hexed” by LeChuck into believing he was just a little boy in an amusement park. By the beginning of the third game, he would have snapped back to his senses, abandoning mundane hallucination again for a fantastical piratey reality.

A team that peaked at 50 people labored over The Curse of Monkey Island for eighteen months. That period was one of dramatic change in the industry, when phrases like “multimedia” and “interactive movie” were consigned to the kitschy past and first-person shooters and real-time strategies came to dominate the sales charts. Having committed to the project, LucasArts felt they had no choice but to stick with the old-school pixel art that had always marked their adventure games, even though it too was fast becoming passé in this newly 3D world. By way of compensation, this latest LucasArts pixel art was to be more luscious than anything that had come out of the studio before, taking advantage of a revamped SCUMM engine that ran at a resolution of 640 X 480 instead of 320 X 200.

The end result is, in the opinion of this critic at least, the loveliest single game in terms of pure visuals that LucasArts ever produced. Computer graphics and animation, at LucasArts and elsewhere, had advanced enormously between Monkey Island 2 and The Curse of Monkey Island. With 1993’s Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max Hit the Road, LucasArts’s animators had begun producing work that could withstand comparison to that of role models like Chuck Jones and Don Bluth without being laughed out of the room. (Indeed, Jones reportedly tried to hire Larry Ahern and some of his colleagues away from LucasArts after seeing Day of the Tentacle.) The Curse of Monkey Island marked the fruition of that process, showing LucasArts to have become a world-class animation studio in its own right, one that could not just withstand but welcome comparison with any and all peers who worked with more traditional, linear forms of media. “We were looking at Disney feature animation as our quality bar,” says Ahern.

That said, the challenge of producing a game that still looked like Monkey Island despite all the new technical affordances should not be underestimated. The danger of the increased resolution was always that the finished results could veer into a sort of photo-realism, losing the ramshackle charm that had always been such a big part of Monkey Island’s appeal. This LucasArts managed to avoid; in the words of The Animation World Network, a trade organization that was impressed enough by the project to come out and do a feature on it, Guybrush was drawn as “a pencil-necked beanpole with a flounce of eighteenth-century hair and a nose as vertical as the face of Half Dome.” The gangling frames and exaggerated movements of Guybrush and many of the other characters were inspired by Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. Yet the characters aren’t grotesques; The Curse of Monkey Island aims to be lovable, and it hits the mark. For this game is written as well as drawn in the spirit of the original Secret of Monkey Island, abandoning the jarring mean-spiritedness that dogs the second game in the series, a change in tone that has always left me a lot less positively disposed toward it than most people seem to be.

This was the first Monkey Island game to feature voice acting from the outset, as telling a testament as any to the technological gulf that lies between the second and third entries in the series. The performances are superb — especially Guybrush, who sounds exactly like I want him to, all gawky innocence and dogged determination. (His voice actor Dominic Armato would return for every single Monkey Island game that followed, as well as circling back to give Guybrush a voice in the remastered versions of the first two games. I, for one, wouldn’t have it any other way.)

The opening sees Guybrush adrift on the open ocean in, of all forms of conveyance, a floating bumper car, for reasons that aren’t initially clear beyond the thematic connection to that amusement park at the end of Monkey Island 2. He floats smack-dab into the middle of a sea battle between LeChuck and Elaine; the former is trying to abduct the latter to make her his bride, while the latter is doing her level best to maintain her single status. Stuff happens, LeChuck seems to get blown up, and Guybrush and Elaine wind up on Plunder Island, a retirement community for aging pirates that’s incidentally also inhabited by El Pollo Diablo, the giant demon chicken. (“He’s hatching a diabolical scheme”; “He’s establishing a new pecking order”; “He’s going to buck buck buck the system”; “He’s crossing the road to freedom”; etc.) Guybrush proposes to Elaine using a diamond ring he stole from the hold of LeChuck’s ship, only to find that there’s a voodoo curse laid on it. Elaine gets turned into a solid-gold statue (d’oh!), which Guybrush leaves standing on the beach while he tries to figure out what to do about the situation. Sure enough, some opportunistic pirates — is there any other kind? — sail away with it. (Double d’oh!) Guybrush is left to scour Plunder Island for a ship, a crew, and a map that will let him follow them to Blood Island, where there is conveniently supposed to be another diamond ring that can reverse the curse.

The vicious chickens of Plunder Island. “Larry and I thought we were so clever when we came up with the idea of having a tropical island covered with feral chickens,” says Jonathan Ackley. “Then I took a vacation to the Hawaiian island of Kauai. It seems that when Kauai was hit by Hurricane Iniki, it blew open all the chicken coops. Everywhere I went on the island I was surrounded by feral chickens.”

From the shopping list of quest items to the plinking steelband soundtrack that undergirds the proceedings, all of this is a dead ringer for The Secret of Monkey Island; this third game is certainly not interested in breaking any new ground in setting, story, or genre. But when it’s done this well, who cares? There is a vocal segment of Monkey Island fans who reject this game on principle, who say that any Monkey Island game without the name of Ron Gilbert first on its credits list is no Monkey Island game at all. For my own part, I tend to believe that, if we didn’t know that Gilbert didn’t work on this game, we’d have trouble detecting that fact from the finished product. It nails that mixture of whimsy, cleverness, and sweetness that has made The Secret of Monkey Island arguably the most beloved point-and-click adventure game of all time.

During the latter 1990s, when most computers games were still made by and for a fairly homogeneous cohort of young men, too much ludic humor tried to get by on transgression rather than wit; this was a time of in-groups punching — usually punching down — on out-groups. I’m happy to say that The Curse of Monkey Island’s humor is nothing like that. At the very beginning, when Guybrush is floating in that bumper car, he scribbles in his journal about all the things he wishes he had. “If only I could have a small drink of freshwater, I might have the strength to sail on.” A bottle of water drifts past while Guybrush’s eyes are riveted to the page. “If I could reach land, I might find water and some food. Fruit maybe, something to fight off the scurvy and help me get my strength back. Maybe some bananas.” And a crate of bananas drifts by in the foreground. “Oh, why do I torture myself like this? I might as well wish for some chicken and a big mug of grog, for all the good it will do me.” Cue the clucking chicken perched on top of a barrel. Now, you might say that this isn’t exactly sophisticated humor, and you’d be right. But it’s an inclusive sort of joke that absolutely everyone is guaranteed to understand, from children to the elderly, whilst also being a gag that I defy anyone not to at least smirk at. Monkey Island is funny without ever being the slightest bit cruel — a combination that’s rarer in games of its era than it ought to be.

Which isn’t to say that this game is without in-jokes. They’re everywhere, and the things they reference are far from unexpected. Star Trek gets a shout-out in literally the first line of the script as Guybrush writes in his “captain’s log,” while, appropriately enough given the studio that made this game, whole chunks of dialogue are re-contextualized extracts from the Star Wars movies. The middle of the game is an extended riff on/parody of that other, very different franchise that springs to mind when gamers think about pirates — the one started by Sid Meier, that’s known as simply Pirates!. Here as there, you have to sail your ship around the Caribbean engaging in battles with other sea dogs. But instead of dueling the opposing captains with your trusty cutlass when you board their vessels, here you challenge them to a round of insult sword-fighting instead. (Pirate: “You’re the ugliest monster ever created!” Guybrush: “If you don’t count all the ones you’ve dated!”)

One of the game’s best gags is an interactive musical number you perform with your piratey crew, feeding them appropriate rhymes. “As far as I know, nobody had ever done interactive singing before,” says Jonathan Ackley. “I think it was an original idea and I still laugh when I see it.” Sadly, the song was cut from the game’s foreign localizations as a bridge too far from its native English, even for LucasArts’s superb translators.See https://www.youtube.com/embed/y9bXjttMxKY?si=6FJwA5gnCtaFCIHh

It shouldn’t work, but somehow it does. In fact, this may just be my favorite section of the entire game. Partly it succeeds because it’s just so well done; the action-based minigame of ship-to-ship combat that precedes each round of insult sword-fighting is, in marked contrast to those in LucasArts’s previous adventure Full Throttle, very playable in its own right, being perfectly pitched in difficulty, fun without ever becoming frustrating. But another key to this section’s success is that you don’t have to know Pirates! for it to make you laugh; it’s just that, if you do, you’ll laugh that little bit more. All of the in-jokes operate the same way.

Pirates! veterans will feel right at home with the ship-combat minigame. It was originally more complicated. “When I first started the ship-combat section,” says programmer Chris Purvis, “I had a little readout that told how many cannons you had, when they were ready to fire, and a damage printout for when you or the computer ships got hit. We decided it was too un-adventure-gamey to leave it that way.” Not to be outdone, a member of the testing team proposed implementing multiplayer ship combat as “the greatest Easter egg of all time for any game.” Needless to say, it didn’t happen.

The puzzle design makes for an interesting study. After 1993, the year of Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max Hit the Road, LucasArts hit a bumpy patch in this department in my opinion. Both Full Throttle and The Dig, their only adventures between those games and this one, are badly flawed efforts when it comes to their puzzles, adhering to the letter but not the spirit of Ron Gilbert’s old “Why Adventure Games Suck” manifesto. And Grim Fandango, the adventure that immediately followed this one, fares if anything even worse in that regard. I’m pleased if somewhat perplexed to be able to say, then, that The Curse of Monkey Island mostly gets its puzzles right.

There are two difficulty levels here, an innovation borrowed from Monkey Island 2. Although the puzzles at the “Mega-Monkey” level are pretty darn convoluted — one sequence involving a restaurant and a pirate’s tooth springs especially to mind as having one more layer of complexity than it really needs to — they are never completely beyond the pale. It might not be a totally crazy idea to play The Curse of Monkey Island twice, once at the easy level and once at the Mega-Monkey level, with a few weeks or months in between your playthroughs. There are very few adventure games for which I would make such a recommendation in our current era of entertainment saturation, but I think it’s a reasonable one in this case. This game is stuffed so full of jokes both overt and subtle that it can be hard to take the whole thing in in just one pass. Your first excursion will give you the lay of the land, so to speak, so you know roughly what you’re trying to accomplish when you tackle the more complicated version.

Regardless of how you approach it, The Curse of Monkey Island is a big, generous adventure game by any standard. I daresay that the part that takes place on Plunder Island alone is just about as long as the entirety of The Secret of Monkey Island. Next comes the Pirates! homage, to serve as a nice change of pace at the perfect time. And then there’s another whole island of almost equal size to the first to explore.  After all that comes the bravura climax, where LeChuck makes his inevitable return; in a rather cheeky move, this ending too takes place in an amusement park, with Guybrush once again transformed into a child.

If I was determined to find something to complain about, I might say that the back half of The Curse of the Monkey Island isn’t quite as strong as the front half. Blood Island is implemented a little more sparsely than Plunder Island, and the big climax in particular feels a little rushed and truncated, doubtless the result of a production budget and schedule that just couldn’t be stretched any further if the game was to ship in time for the 1997 Christmas season. Still, these are venial sins; commercial game development is always the art of the possible, usually at the expense of the ideal.

When all is said and done, The Curse of Monkey Island might just be my favorite LucasArts adventure, although it faces some stiff competition from The Secret of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle. Any points that it loses to Secret for its lack of originality in the broad strokes, it makes up for in size, in variety, and in sheer gorgeousness.

Although I have no firm sales figures to point to, all indications are that The Curse of Monkey Island was a commercial success in its day, the last LucasArts adventure about which that statement can be made. I would guess from anecdotal evidence that it sold several hundred thousand copies, enough to convince the company to go back to the Monkey Island well one more time in 2000. Alas, the fourth game would be far less successful, both artistically and commercially.

These things alone are enough to give Curse a valedictory quality today. But there’s more: it was also the very last LucasArts game to use the SCUMM engine, as well as the last to rely primarily on pixel art. The world-class cartoon-animation studio that the company’s adventure division had become was wound down after this game’s release, and Larry Ahern and Jonathan Ackley were never given a chance to lead a project such as this one again, despite having acquitted themselves so well here. That was regrettable, but not incomprehensible. Economics weren’t working in the adventure genre’s favor in the late 1990s. A game like The Curse of Monkey Island was more expensive to make per hour of play time it provided than any other kind of game you could imagine; all of this game’s content was bespoke content, every interaction a unique one that had to be written and story-boarded and drawn and painted and animated and voiced from scratch.

The only way that adventure games — at least adventures with AAA production values like this one — could have remained an appealing option for gaming executives would have been if they had sold in truly massive numbers. And this they emphatically were not doing. Yes, The Curse of Monkey Island did reasonably well for itself — but a game like Jedi Knight probably did close to an order of magnitude better, whilst probably costing considerably less to make. The business logic wasn’t overly complicated. The big animation studios which LucasArts liked to see as their peers could get away with it because their potential market was everyone with a television or everyone who could afford to buy a $5 movie ticket; LucasArts, on the other hand, was limited to those people who owned fairly capable, modern home computers, who liked to solve crazily convoluted puzzles, and who were willing and able to drop $40 or $50 for ten hours or so of entertainment. The numbers just didn’t add up.

In a sense, then, the surprise isn’t that LucasArts made no more games like this one, but rather that they allowed this game to be finished at all. Jonathan Ackley recalls his reaction when he saw Half-Life for the first time: “Well… that’s kind of it for adventure games as a mainstream, AAA genre.” More to their credit than otherwise, the executives at LucasArts didn’t summarily abandon the adventure genre, but rather tried their darnedest to find a way to make the economics work, by embracing 3D modelling to reduce production costs and deploying a new interface that would be a more natural fit with the tens of millions of game consoles that were out there, thus broadening their potential customer base enormously. We’ll get to the noble if flawed efforts that resulted from these initiatives in due course.

For today, though, we raise our mugs of grog to The Curse of Monkey Island, the last and perhaps the best go-round for SCUMM. If you haven’t played it yet, by all means, give it a shot. And even if you have, remember what I told you earlier: this is a game that can easily bear replaying. Its wit, sweetness, and beauty remain undiminished more than a quarter of a century after its conception.

The Curse of Monkey Island: The Graphic Novel

(I’ve cheerfully stolen this progression from the old Prima strategy guide to the game…)

Our story begins with our hero, Guybrush Threepwood, lost at sea and pining for his love Elaine.

He soon discovers her in the midst of a pitched battle…

…with his old enemy and rival for her fair hand, the zombie pirate LeChuck.

Guybrush is captured by LeChuck…

…but manages to escape, sending LeChuck’s ship to the bottom in the process. Thinking LeChuck finally disposed of, Guybrush proposes to Elaine, using a diamond ring he found in the zombie pirate’s treasure hold…

…only to discover it is cursed. Elaine is less than pleased…

…and is even more ticked off when she is turned into a gold statue.

Guybrush sets off to discover a way to break the curse — and to rescue Elaine, since her statue is promptly stolen. His old friend the voodoo lady tells him he will need a ship, a crew, and a map to Blood Island, where he can find a second diamond ring that will reverse the evil magic of the first.

He meets many interesting and irritating people, including some barbers…

…a restaurateur…

…and a cabana boy, before he is finally able to set sail for Blood Island.

After some harrowing sea battles and a fierce storm…

…his ship is washed ashore on Blood Island.

Meanwhile LeChuck has been revived…

…and has commanded his minions to scour the Caribbean in search of Guybrush.

Unaware of this, Guybrush explores Blood Island, where he meets a patrician bartender…

…the ghost of a Southern belle…

…a vegan cannibal…

…and a Welsh ferryman.

He finally outsmarts Andre, King of the Smugglers, to get the diamond that will restore Elaine.

Unfortunately, as soon as Elaine is uncursed, the two are captured by LeChuck and taken to the Carnival of the Damned on Monkey Island.

LeChuck turns Guybrush into a little boy and attempts to escape with Elaine on his hellish roller coaster.

But Guybrush’s quick thinking saves the day, and he sails off with his new bride into the sunset.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: The book The Curse of Monkey Island: The Official Strategy Guide by Jo Ashburn. Retro Gamer 70; Computer Games Strategy Plus  of August 1997; Computer Gaming World of October 1995, March 1996, September 1997, November 1997, December 1997, and March 1998.

Online sources include a Genesis Temple interview with Larry Ahern, an International House of Mojo interview with Jonathan Ackley and Larry Ahern, the same site’s archive of old Curse of Monkey Island interviews, and a contemporaneous Animation World Network profile of LucasArts.

Also, my heartfelt thanks to Guillermo Crespi and other commenters for pointing out some things about the ending of Monkey Island 2 that I totally overlooked in my research for the first version of this article.

The Curse of Monkey Island is available for digital purchase at GOG.com.

Blade Runner
May 3, 2024

Blade Runner has set me thinking about the notion of a “critical consensus.” Why should we have such a thing at all, and why should it change over time?

Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, about a police officer cum bounty hunter — a “blade runner” in street slang — of a dystopian near-future whose job is to “retire” android “replicants” of humans whose existence on Earth is illegal. The movie had a famously troubled gestation, full of time and budget overruns, disputes between Scott and his investors, and an equally contentious relationship between the director and his leading man, Harrison Ford. When it was finally finished, the first test audiences were decidedly underwhelmed, such that Scott’s backers demanded that the film be recut, with the addition of a slightly hammy expository voice-over and a cheesy happy-ending epilogue which was cobbled together quickly using leftover footage from, of all movies, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

It didn’t seem to help. The critical consensus on the released version ranged over a continuum from ambivalence to outright hostile. Roger Ebert’s faint praise was typically damning: “I was never really interested in the characters in Blade Runner. I didn’t find them convincing. What impressed me in the film was the special effects, the wonderful use of optical trickery to show me a gigantic imaginary Los Angeles, which in the vision of this movie has been turned into sort of a futuristic Tokyo. It’s a great movie to look at, but a hard one to care about. I didn’t appreciate the predictable story, the standard characters, the cliffhanging clichés… but I do think the special effects make Blade Runner worth going to see.” Pauline Kael was less forgiving of what she saw as a cold, formless, ultimately pointless movie: “If anybody comes around with a test to detect humanoids, maybe Ridley Scott and his associates should hide. With all the smoke in this movie, you feel as if everyone connected with it needs to have his flue cleaned.” Audiences do not always follow the critics’ lead, but in this case they largely did. During its initial theatrical run, Blade Runner fell well short of earning back the $30 million it had cost to make.

Yet remarkably soon after it had disappeared from theaters, its rehabilitation got underway in fannish circles. In 1984, William Gibson published his novel Neuromancer, the urtext of a new “cyberpunk” movement in science fiction that began in printed prose but quickly spiraled out from there into comics, television, and games. Whereas Blade Runner’s dystopic Los Angeles looked more like Tokyo than any contemporary American city, Gibson’s book actually began in Japan, before moving on to a similarly over-urbanized United States. The two works’ neon-soaked nighttime cityscapes were very much of a piece. The difference was that Gibson added to the equation a computer-enabled escape from reality known as cyberspace, creating a combination that would prove almost irresistibly alluring to science-fiction fans as the computer age around them continued to evolve apace.

Blade Runner’s rehabilitation spread to the mainstream in 1992, when a “director’s cut” of the film was re-released in theaters, lacking the Captain Obvious voice-over or the tacked-on happy ending but sporting a handful of new scenes that added fresh layers of nuance to the story. Critics — many of them the very same critics who had dismissed the movie a decade earlier — now rushed to praise it as a singular cinematic vision and a science-fiction masterpiece. They found many reasons for its box-office failure on the first go-round, even beyond the infelicitous changes that Ridley Scott had been forced by his backers to make to it. For one thing, it had been unlucky enough to come out just one month after E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, the biggest box-office smash of all time to that point, whose long shadow was as foreboding and unforgiving a place to dwell as any of Blade Runner’s own urban landscapes. Then, too, the audience was conditioned back then to see Harrison Ford as Han Solo or Indiana Jones — a charming rogue with a heart of gold, not the brooding, morally tormented cop Rick Deckard, who has a penchant for rough sex and a habit of shooting women in the back. In light of all this, surely the critics too could be forgiven for failing to see the film’s genius the first time they were given the chance.

Whether we wish to forgive them or not, I find it fascinating that a single film could generate such polarized reactions only ten years apart in time from people who study the medium for a living. The obvious riposte to my sense of wonder is, of course, that the Blade Runner of 1992 really wasn’t the same film at all as the one that had been seen in 1982. Yet I must confess to considerable skepticism about this as a be-all, end-all explanation. It seems to me that, for all that the voice-over and forced happy ending did the movie as a whole no favors, they were still a long way from destroying the qualities that made Blade Runner distinct.

Some of my skepticism may arise from the fact that I’m just not onboard with the most vaunted aspect of the director’s cut, its subtle but undeniable insinuation that Deckard is himself a replicant with implanted memories, no different from the androids he hunts down and kills. This was not the case in Philip K. Dick’s novel, nor was it the original intention of the film’s scriptwriters. I rather suspect, although I certainly cannot prove it, that even Ridley Scott’s opinion on the subject was more equivocal during the making of the film than it has since become. David Peoples, one of the screenwriters, attributes the genesis of the idea in Scott’s mind to an overly literal reading on his part of a philosophical meditation on free will and the nature of human existence in an early draft of the script. Peoples:

I invented a kind of contemplative voice-over for Deckard. Here, let me read it to you:

“I wondered who designs the ones like me and what choices we really have, and which ones we just think we have. I wondered which of my memories were real and which belonged to someone else. The great Tyrell [the genius inventor and business magnate whose company made the replicants] hadn’t designed me, but whoever had hadn’t done so much better. In my own modest way, I was a combat model.”

Now, what I’d intended with this voice-over was mostly metaphysical. Deckard was supposed to be philosophically questioning himself about what it was that made him so different from Rachael [a replicant with whom he falls in love or lust] and the other replicants. He was supposed to be realizing that, on the human level, they weren’t so different. That Deckard wanted the same things the replicants did. The “maker” he was referring to wasn’t Tyrell. It was supposed to be God. So, basically, Deckard was just musing about what it meant to be human.

But then, Ridley… well, I think Ridley misinterpreted me. Because right about this period of time, he started announcing, “Ah-ha! Deckard’s a replicant! What brilliance!” I was sort of confused by this response, because Ridley kept giving me all this praise and credit for this terrific idea. It wasn’t until many years later, when I happened to be browsing through this draft, that I suddenly realized the metaphysical material I had written could just as easily have been read to imply that Deckard was a replicant, even though it wasn’t what I meant at all. What I had meant was, we all have a maker, and we all have an incept date [a replicant’s equivalent to a date of birth]. We just can’t address them. That’s one of the similarities we had to the replicants. We couldn’t go find Tyrell, but Tyrell was up there somewhere. For all of us.

So, what I had intended as kind of a metaphysical speculation, Ridley had read differently, but now I realize there was nothing wrong with this reading. That confusion was my own fault. I’d written this voice-over so ambiguously that it could indeed have meant exactly what Ridley took it to mean. And that, I think, is how the whole idea of Deckard being a replicant came about.

The problem I have with Deckard being a replicant is that it undercuts the thematic resonance of the story. In the book and the movie, the quality of empathy, or a lack thereof, is described as the one foolproof way to distinguish real from synthetic humans. To establish which is which, blade runners like Deckard use something called the Voight-Kampff test, in which suspects are hooked up to a polygraph-like machine which measures their emotional response to shockingly transgressive statements, starting with stuff like “my briefcase is made out of supple human-baby skin” and getting steadily worse from there. Real humans recoil, intuitively and immediately. Replicants can try to fake the appropriate emotional reaction — might even be programmed to fake it to themselves, such that even they don’t realize what they are — but there is always a split-second delay, which the trained operator can detect.

The central irony of the film is that cops like Deckard are indoctrinated to have absolutely no empathy for the replicants they track down and murder, even as many of the replicants we meet evince every sign of genuinely caring for one another, leading one to suspect that the Voight-Kampff test may not be measuring pure, unadulterated empathy in quite the way everyone seems to think it is. The important transformation that Deckard undergoes, which eventually brings his whole world down around his head, is that of allowing himself to feel the pain and fear of those he hunts. He is a human who rediscovers and re-embraces his own humanity, who finally begins to understand that meting out suffering and death to other feeling creatures is no way to live, no matter how many layers of justification and dogma his actions are couched within.

But in Ridley Scott’s preferred version of the film, the central theme falls apart, to be replaced with psychological horror’s equivalent of a jump scare: “Deckard himself is really a replicant, dude! What a mind fuck, huh?” For this reason, it’s hard for me to see the director’s cut as an holistically better movie than the 1982 cut, which at least leaves some more room for debate about the issue.

This may explain why I’m lukewarm about Blade Runner as a whole, why none of the cuts — and there have been a lot of them by now — quite works for me. As often happens in cases like this one, I find that my own verdict on Blade Runner comes down somewhere between the extremes of then and now. There’s a lot about Roger Ebert’s first hot-take that still rings true to me all these years later. It’s a stunning film in terms of atmosphere and audiovisual composition; I defy anyone to name a movie with a more breathtaking opening shot than the panorama of nighttime Tokyo… er, Los Angeles that opens this one. Yet it’s also a distant and distancing, emotionally displaced film that aspires to a profundity it doesn’t completely earn. I admire many aspects of its craft enormously and would definitely never discourage anyone from seeing it, but I just can’t bring myself to love it as much as so many others do.

The opening shot of Blade Runner the movie.

These opinions of mine will be worth keeping in mind as we move on now to the 1997 computer-game adaptation of Blade Runner. For, much more so than is the case even with most licensed games, your reaction to this game might to be difficult to separate from your reaction to the movie.

Thanks to the complicated, discordant circumstances of its birth, Blade Runner had an inordinate number of vested interests even by Hollywood standards, such that a holding company known as The Blade Runner Partnership was formed just to administer them. When said company started to shop the property around to game publishers circa 1994, the first question on everyone’s lips was what had taken them so long. The film’s moody, neon-soaked aesthetic if not its name had been seen in games for years by that point, so much so that it had already become something of a cliché. Just among the games I’ve written about on this site, Rise of the Dragon, Syndicate, System Shock, Beneath a Steel Sky, and the Tex Murphy series all spring to mind as owing more than a small debt to the movie. And there are many, many more that I haven’t written about.

Final Fantasy VII is another on the long list of 1990s games that owes more than a little something to Blade Runner. It’s hard to imagine its perpetually dark, polluted, neon-soaked city of Midgar ever coming to exist without the example of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles. Count it as just one more way in which this Japanese game absorbed Western cultural influences and then reflected them back to their point of origin, much as the Beatles once put their own spin on American rock and roll and sold it back to the country of its birth.

Meanwhile the movie itself was still only a cult classic in the 1990s; far more gamers could recognize and enjoy the gritty-cool Blade Runner aesthetic than had actually seen its wellspring. Blade Runner was more of a state of mind than it was a coherent fictional universe in the way of other gaming perennials like Star Trek and Star Wars. Many a publisher therefore concluded that they could have all the Blade Runner they needed without bothering to pay for the name.

Thus the rights holders worked their way down through the hierarchy of publishers, beginning with the prestigious heavy hitters like Electronic Arts and Sierra and continuing into the ranks of the mid-tier imprints, all without landing a deal. Finally, they found an interested would-be partner in the financially troubled Virgin Interactive.

The one shining jewel in Virgin’s otherwise tarnished crown was Westwood Studios, the pioneer of the real-time-strategy genre that was on the verge of becoming one of the two hottest in all of gaming. And one of the founders of Westwood was a fellow named Louis Castle, who listed Blade Runner as his favorite movie of all time. His fandom was such that Westwood probably did more than they really needed to in order to get the deal. Over a single long weekend, the studio’s entire art department pitched in to meticulously recreate the movie’s bravura opening shots of dystopic Los Angeles. It did the trick; the Blade Runner contract was soon given to Virgin and Westwood. It also established, for better or for worse, the project’s modus operandi going forward: a slavish devotion not just to the film’s overall aesthetic but to the granular details of its shots and sets.

The opening shot of Blade Runner the game.

Thanks to the complicated tangle of legal rights surrounding the film, Westwood wasn’t given access to any of its tangible audiovisual assets. Undaunted, they endeavored to recreate almost all of them on the monitor screen for themselves by using pre-rendered 3D backgrounds combined with innovative real-time lighting effects; these were key to depicting the flashing neon and drifting rain and smoke that mark the film. The foreground actors were built from motion-captured human models, then depicted onscreen using voxels, collections of tiny cubes in a 3D space, essentially pixels with an added Z-dimension of depth.

At least half of what you see in the Blade Runner game is lifted straight from the movie, which Westwood pored over literally frame by frame in order to include even the tiniest details, the sorts of things that no ordinary moviegoer would ever notice. The Westwood crew took a trip from their Las Vegas offices to Los Angeles to measure and photograph the locations where the film had been shot, the better to get it all exactly correct. Even the icy, synth-driven soundtrack for the movie was deconstructed, analyzed, and then mimicked in the game, note by ominous note.

The two biggest names associated with the film, Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford, were way too big to bother with a project like this one, but a surprising number of the other actors agreed to voice their parts and to allow themselves to be digitized and motion-captured. Among them were Sean Young, who had played Deckard’s replicant love interest Rachael; Edward James Olmos, who had played his enigmatic pseudo-partner Gaff; and Joe Turkel, who had played Eldon Tyrell, the twisted genius who invented the replicants. Set designers and other behind-the-scenes personnel were consulted as well.

It wasn’t judged practical to clone the movie’s plot in the same way as its sights and sounds, if for no other reason than the absence of Harrison Ford; casting someone new in the role of Deckard would have been, one senses, more variance than Westwood’s dedication to re-creation would have allowed. Instead they came up with a new story that could play out in the seams of the old one, happening concurrently with the events of the film, in many of the same locations and involving many of the same characters. Needless to say, its thematic concerns too would be the same as those of the film — and, yes, its protagonist cop as well would eventually be given reason to doubt his own humanity. His name was McCoy, another jaded gumshoe transplanted from a Raymond Chandler novel into an equally noirish future. But was he a “real” McCoy?

Westwood promised great things in the press while Blade Runner was in development: a truly open-world game taking place in a living, breathing city, full of characters that went about their own lives and pursued their own agendas, whose response to you in the here and now would depend to a large degree on how you had treated them and their acquaintances and enemies in the past. There would be no fiddly puzzles for the sake of them; this game would expect you to think and act like a real detective, not as the typical adventure-game hero with an inventory full of bizarre objects waiting to be put to use in equally bizarre ways. To keep you on your toes and add replay value — the lack of which was always the adventure genre’s Achilles heel as a commercial proposition — the guilty parties in the case would be randomly determined, so that no two playthroughs would ever be the same. And there would be action elements too; you would have to be ready to draw your gun at almost any moment. “There’s actually very little action in the film,” said Castle years later, “but when it happens, it’s violent, explosive, and deadly. I wanted to make a game where the uncertainty of what’s going to happen makes you quiver with anticipation every time you click the mouse.”

As we’ll soon see, most of those promises would be fulfilled only partially, but that didn’t keep Blade Runner from becoming a time-consuming, expensive project by the standards of its era,  taking two years to make and costing about $2 million. It was one of the last times that a major, mainstream American studio swung for the fences with an adventure game, a genre that was soon to be relegated to niche status, with budgets and sales expectations to match.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Blade Runner’s commercial performance was among the reasons that down-scaling took place. Despite a big advertising push on Virgin Interactive’s part, it got lost in the shuffle among The Curse of Monkey Island, Riven, and Zork: Grand Inquisitor, three other swansongs of the AAA adventure game that all competed for a dwindling market share during the same holiday season of 1997. Reviews were mixed, often expressing a feeling I can’t help but share: what was ultimately the point of so slavishly re-creating another work of art if you’re weren’t going to add much of anything of your own to it? “The perennial Blade Runner images are here, including the winking woman in the Coca-Cola billboard and vehicles flying over the flaming smokestacks of the industrial outskirts,” wrote GameSpot. “Unfortunately, most of what’s interesting about the game is exactly what was interesting about the film, and not much was done to extend the concepts or explore them any further.” Computer and Video Games magazine aptly called it “more of a companion to the movie than a game.” Most gamers shrugged and moved on the next title on the shelf; Blade Runner sold just 15,000 copies in the month of its release.[1]Louis Castle has often claimed in later decades that Blade Runner did well commercially, stating at least once that it sold 1 million copies(!). I can’t see how this could possibly have been the case; I’ve learned pretty well over my years of researching these histories what a million-selling game looked like in the 1990s, and can say very confidently that it did not look like this one. Having said that, though, let me also say that I don’t blame him for inflating the figures. It’s not easy to pour your heart and soul into something and not have it do well. So, as the press of real data and events fades into the past, the numbers start to go up. This doesn’t make Castle dishonest so much as it just makes him human.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Blade Runner never faded completely from the collective gamer consciousness like so many other middling efforts did. It continued to be brought up in various corners of the Internet, became a fixture of an “abandonware” scene whose rise preceded that of back-catalog storefronts like GOG.com, became the subject of retrospectives and think pieces on major gaming sites. Finally, in spite of the complications of its licensing deal, it went up for sale on GOG.com in 2019. Then, in 2022, Night Dive Studios released an “enhanced” edition. It seems safe to say today that many more people have played Westwood’s Blade Runner since the millennium than did so before it. The critical consensus surrounding it has shifted as well. As of this writing, Blade Runner is rated by the users of MobyGames as the 51st best adventure game of all time — a ranking that doesn’t sound so impressive at first, until you realize that it’s slightly ahead of such beloved icons of the genre as LucasArts’s Monkey Island 2 and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.[2]This chart in general is distorted greatly by the factor of novelty; many or most of the highest-ranking games are very recent ones, rated in the first blush of excitement following their release.

In all my years of writing these histories, I’m not sure I’ve ever come across a game that combines extremes of derivation and innovation in quite the way of Westwood’s Blade Runner. While there is nary an original idea to be found in the fiction, the gameplay has if anything too many of them.

I’ve complained frequently in the past that most alleged mystery games aren’t what they claim to be at all, that they actually solve the mystery for you while you occupy your time with irrelevant lock-and-key puzzles and the like. Louis Castle and his colleagues at Westwood clearly had the same complaints; there are none of those irrelevancies here. Blade Runner really does let you piece together its clues for yourself. You feel like a real cop — or at least a television one — when you, say, pick out the license plate of a car on security-camera footage, then check the number in the database of the near-future’s equivalent to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get a lead. Even as it’s rewarding, the game is also surprisingly forgiving in its investigative aspects, not an adjective that’s frequently applied to adventures of this period. There are a lot of leads to follow, and you don’t need to notice and run down all of them all to make progress in your investigation. At its best, then, this game makes you feel smart — one of the main reasons a lot of us play games, if we’re being honest.

Those problems that do exist here arise not from the developers failing to do enough, but rather from trying to do too much. There’s an impossibly baroque “clues database” that purports to aid you in tying everything together. This experiment in associative, cross-referenced information theory would leave even Ted Nelson scratching his head in befuddlement. Thankfully, it isn’t really necessary to engage with it at all. You can keep the relevant details in your head, or at worst in your trusty real-world notepad, easily enough.

If you can make any sense of this, you’re a better detective than I am.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Blade Runner that was promoted in the press while the game was still being made.[3]Louis Castle’s own testimony contradicts this notion as well. He has stated in various interview that “Blade Runner is as close as I have ever come to realizing a design document verbatim.” I don’t wish to discount his words out of hand, but boy, does this game ever strike me, based on pretty long experience in studying these things, as being full of phantom limbs that never got fully wired into the greater whole. I decided in the end that I had to call it like I see it in this article.

This was also to have been an adventure game that you could reasonably play without relying on saving and restoring, taking your lumps and rolling with the flow. Early on, the game just about lives up to this ideal. At one point, you chase a suspect into a dark alleyway where a homeless guy happens to be rooting through a dumpster. It’s damnably easy in the heat of the moment to shoot the wrong person. If you do so — thus committing a crime that counts as murder, unlike the “retiring” of a replicant — you have the chance to hide the body and continue on your way; life on the mean streets of Los Angeles is a dirty business, regardless of the time period. Even more impressively, you might stumble upon your victim’s body again much later in the game, popping up out of the murk like an apparition from your haunted conscience. If you didn’t kill the hobo, on the other hand, you might meet him again alive.

But sadly, a lot of this sort of thing as well falls away as the game goes on. The second half is rife with learning-by-death moments that would have done the Sierra of the 1980s proud, all people and creatures jumping out of the shadows and killing you without warning. Hope you have a save file handy, says the game. The joke’s on you!

By halfway through, the game has just about exhausted the movie’s iconic set-pieces and is forced to lean more on its own invention, much though this runs against its core conviction that imitation trumps originality. Perhaps that conviction was justified after all: the results aren’t especially inspiring. What we see are mostly generic sewers, combined with characters who wouldn’t play well in the dodgiest sitcom. The pair of bickering conjoined twins — one smart and urbane, the other crude and rude — is particularly cringe-worthy.

Writers and other artists often talk about the need to “kill your darlings”: to cut out those scenes and phrases and bits and bobs that don’t serve the art, that only serve to gratify the vanity of the artist. This game is full of little darlings that should have died well before it saw release. Some of them are flat-out strange. For example, if you like, you can pre-pick a personality for McCoy: Polite, Normal, (don’t call me) Surly, or Erratic. Doing so removes the conversation menu from the interface; walk up to someone and click on her, and McCoy just goes off on his own tangent. I don’t know why anyone would ever choose to do this, unless it be to enjoy the coprolalia of Erratic McCoy, who jumps from Sheriff Andy Taylor to Dirty Harry and back again at a whipsaw pace, leaving everyone on the scene flummoxed.

Even when he’s ostensibly under your complete control, Detective McCoy isn’t the nimblest cowboy at the intellectual rodeo. Much of the back half of the game degenerates into trying to figure out how and when to intervene to keep him from doing something colossally stupid. When a mobster you’ve almost nailed hands him a drink, you’re reduced to begging him silently: Please, please, do not drink it, McCoy! And of course he does so, and of course it’s yet another Game Over. (After watching the poor trusting schmuck screw up this way several times, you might finally figure out that you have about a two-second window of control to make him draw his gun on the other guy — no other action will do — before he scarfs down the spiked cocktail.)

Bottoms up! (…sigh…)

All my other complaints aside, though, for me this game’s worst failing remains its complete disinterest in standing on its own as either a piece of fiction or as an aesthetic statement of any stripe. There’s an embarrassingly mawkish, subservient quality that dogs it even as it’s constantly trying to be all cool and foreboding and all, with all its darkness and its smoke. Its brand of devotion is an aspect of fan culture that I just don’t get.

So, I’m left sitting here contemplating an argument that I don’t think I’ve ever had to make before in the context of game development: that you can actually love something too much to be able to make a good game out of it, that your fandom can blind you as surely as the trees of any forest. This game is doomed, seemingly by design, to play a distant second fiddle to its parent. You can almost hear the chants of “We’re not worthy!” in the background. When you visit Tyrell in his office, you know it can have no real consequences for your story because the resolution of that tycoon’s fate has been reserved for the cinematic story that stars Deckard; ditto your interactions with Rachael and Gaff and others. They exist here at all, one can’t help but sense, only because the developers were so excited at the prospect of having real live Blade Runner actors visit them in their studio that they just couldn’t help themselves. (“We’re not worthy!”) For the player who doesn’t live and breathe the lore of Blade Runner like the developers do, they’re living non sequiturs who have nothing to do with anything else that’s going on.

Even the endings here — there are about half a dozen major branches, not counting the ones where McCoy gets shot or stabbed or roofied midway through the proceedings — are sometimes in-jokes for the fans. One of them is a callback to the much-loathed original ending of the film — a callback that finds a way to be in much worse taste than its inspiration: McCoy can run away with one of his suspects, who happens to be a fourteen-year-old girl who’s already been the victim of adult molestation. Eww!

What part of “fourteen years old and already sexually traumatized” do you not understand, McCoy?

Even the options menu of this game has an in-joke that only fans will get. If you like, you can activate a “designer cut” here that eliminates all of McCoy’s explanatory voice-overs, a callback to the way that Ridley Scott’s director’s cut did away with the ones in the film. The only problem is that in this medium those voice-overs are essential for you to have any clue whatsoever what’s going on. Oh, well… the Blade Runner fans have been served, which is apparently the important thing.

I want to state clearly here that my objections to this game aren’t abstract objections to writing for licensed worlds or otherwise building upon the creativity of others. It’s possible to do great work in such conditions; the article I published just before this one praised The Curse of Monkey Island to the skies for its wit and whimsy, despite that game making absolutely no effort to bust out of the framework set up by The Secret of Monkey Island. In fact, The Curse of Monkey Island too is bursting at the seams with in-jokes and fan service. But it shows how to do those things right: by weaving them into a broader whole such that they’re a bonus for the people who get them but never distract from the experience of the people who don’t. That game illustrates wonderfully how one can simultaneously delight hardcore fans of a property and welcome newcomers into the fold, how a game can be both a sequel and fully-realized in an Aristotelian sense. I’m afraid that this game is an equally definitive illustration of how to do fan service badly, such that it comes across as simultaneously elitist and creatively bankrupt.

Westwood always prided themselves on their technical excellence, and this is indeed a  technically impressive game in many respects. But impressive technology is worth little on its own. If you’re a rabid fan of the movie in the way that I am not, I suppose you might be excited to live inside it here and see all those iconic sets from slightly different angles. If you aren’t, though, it’s hard to know what this game is good for. In its case, I think that the first critical consensus had it just about right.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: The book Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner by Paul M. Sammon; Computer and Video Games of January 1998; PC Zone of May 1999; Next Generation of July 1997; Computer Gaming World of March 1998; Wall Street Journal of January 21 1998; New Yorker of July 1982; Retro Gamer 142.

Online sources include Ars Technica’s interview with Louis Castle, Game Developer’s interview with Castle, Edge‘s feature on the making of the game, the original Siskel and Ebert review of the movie, an unsourced but apparently authentic interview with Philip K. Dick, and GameSpot’s vintage Blade Runner review.

Blade Runner is available for digital purchase at GOG.com, in both its original edition that I played for this article and the poorly received enhanced edition. Note that the latter actually includes the original game as well as of this writing, and is often cheaper than buying the original alone…

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

Louis Castle has often claimed in later decades that Blade Runner did well commercially, stating at least once that it sold 1 million copies(!). I can’t see how this could possibly have been the case; I’ve learned pretty well over my years of researching these histories what a million-selling game looked like in the 1990s, and can say very confidently that it did not look like this one. Having said that, though, let me also say that I don’t blame him for inflating the figures. It’s not easy to pour your heart and soul into something and not have it do well. So, as the press of real data and events fades into the past, the numbers start to go up. This doesn’t make Castle dishonest so much as it just makes him human.

↑2

This chart in general is distorted greatly by the factor of novelty; many or most of the highest-ranking games are very recent ones, rated in the first blush of excitement following their release.

↑3

Louis Castle’s own testimony contradicts this notion as well. He has stated in various interview that “Blade Runner is as close as I have ever come to realizing a design document verbatim.” I don’t wish to discount his words out of hand, but boy, does this game ever strike me, based on pretty long experience in studying these things, as being full of phantom limbs that never got fully wired into the greater whole. I decided in the end that I had to call it like I see it in this article.

Riven
May 17, 2024

Robyn and Rand Miller.

Sometimes success smacks you right in the face. More often, it sneaks up on you from behind.

In September of 1993, the brothers Rand and Robyn Miller and the few other employees of Cyan, Inc., were prototypical starving artists, living on “rice and beans and government cheese.” That month they saw Brøderbund publish their esoteric Apple Macintosh puzzle game Myst, which they and everyone else regarded as a niche product for a niche platform. There would go another year before it became abundantly clear that Myst, now available in a version for Microsoft Windows as well as for the Mac, was a genuine mass-market hit. It would turn into the gift that kept on giving, a game with more legs than your average millipede. It wouldn’t enjoy its best single month until December of 1996, when it would set a record for the most copies one game had ever sold in one month.

All of this — not just the sales figures themselves but the dozens of awards, the write-ups in glossy magazines like Rolling Stone and Newsweek, the fawningly overwritten profiles in Wired, the comparisons with Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park and Michael Jackson’s Thriller — happened just gradually enough that it seemed almost natural. Almost natural. “It took a while for it to hit me that millions of people were buying this game,” says Robyn Miller. “The most I could really wrap my head around would be to go to a huge concert and see all of the people there and think, ‘Okay, this is not even a portion of the people who are playing Myst.'”

The Miller brothers could have retired and lived very comfortably for the rest of their lives on the fortune they earned from Myst. They didn’t choose this path. “We took salaries that were fairly modest and just put the company’s money back into [a] new project,” says Rand.

Brøderbund was more than eager for a sequel to Myst, something that many far smaller hits than it got as a matter of course within a year. But the Miller brothers refused to be hurried, and did not need to be, a rare luxury indeed in their industry. Although they enjoyed a very good relationship with Brøderbund, whose marketing acumen had been essential to getting the Myst ball rolling, they did not wish to be beholden to their publisher in any way. Rather than accepting the traditional publisher advance, they decided that they would fund the sequel entirely on their own out of the royalties of the first game. This meant that, as Myst blew up bigger and bigger, their ambitions for the game they intended to call Riven were inflated in tandem. They refused to give Brøderbund a firm release date; it will be done when it’s done, they said. They took to talking about Myst as their Hobbit, Riven as their Lord of the Rings. It had taken J.R.R. Tolkien seventeen years to bridge the gap between his children’s adventure story and the most important fantasy epic in modern literary history. Surely Brøderbund could accept having to wait just a few years for Riven, especially with the sales figures Myst was still putting up.

Cyan’s digs reflected their rising status. They hadn’t even had a proper office when they were making Myst; everybody worked out of their separate homes in and around Spokane, Washington, sharing their output with one another using the “car net”: put it on a disk, get into your car, and drive it over to the other person. In the immediate aftermath of Myst’s release and promising early sales, they all piled into a drafty, unheated garage owned by their sound specialist Chris Brandkamp. Then, as the sales numbers continued to tick upward, they moved into an anonymous-looking former Comfort World Mattress storefront. Finally, in January of 1995, they broke ground on a grandiosely named “Cyan World Headquarters,” whose real-world architecture was to be modeled on the virtual architecture of Myst and Riven. While they were waiting for that building to be completed — the construction would take eighteen months — they junked the consumer-grade Macs which had slowly and laboriously done all of the 3D modeling necessary to create Myst’s environments in favor of Silicon Graphics workstations that cost $40,000 a pop.

Cyan breaks ground on their new “world headquarters.”

The completed building looked very much apiece with their games, both outside…

…and inside.

The machines that made Riven. Its imagery was rendered using $1 million worth of Silicon Graphics hardware: a dozen or so workstations connected to these four high-end servers that did the grunt work of the ray-tracing. It was a far cry from Myst, which had been made with ordinary consumer-grade Macs running off-the-shelf software.

And the people who made Riven…

There were attempts to drum up controversies in the press, especially after Riven missed a tentative Christmas 1996 target date which Brøderbund had (prematurely) announced, a delay that caused the publisher’s stock price to drop by 25 percent. The journalists who always seemed to be hovering around the perimeter of Cyan’s offices claimed to sniff trouble in the air, an aroma of overstretched budgets and creative tensions. But, although there were certainly arguments — what project of this magnitude doesn’t cause arguments? — there was in truth no juicy decadence or discord going on at Cyan. The Miller brothers, sons of a preacher and still devout Christians, never lost their Heartland groundedness. They never let their fluke success go to their heads in the way of, say, the minds behind Trilobyte of The 7th Guest fame, were never even seriously tempted to move their operation to some more glamorous city than Spokane. For them, it was all about the work. And luckily for them, plenty of people were more than willing to move to Spokane for a chance to work at The House That Myst Built, which by the end of 1995 had replaced Trilobyte as the most feted single games studio in the mainstream American press, the necessary contrast to all those other unscrupulous operators who were filling their games and the minds of the nation’s youth with indiscriminate sex and violence.

The most important of all the people who were suddenly willing to come to Spokane would prove to be Richard Vander Wende, a former Disney production designer — his fingerprints were all over the recent film Aladdin — who first bumped into the Miller brothers at a Digital World Expo in Los Angeles. Wende’s conceptual contribution to Riven would be as massive as that of either of the Miller brothers, such that he would be given a richly deserved co-equal billing with them at the very top of the credits listing.

Richard Vander Wende.

Needless to say, though, there were many others who contributed as well. By the time Cyan moved into their new world headquarters in the summer of 1996, more than twenty people were actively working on Riven every day. The sequel would wind up costing ten times to fifteen times as much to make as its predecessor, filling five CDs to Myst’s lone silver platter.

Given the Millers’ artistic temperament and given the rare privilege they enjoyed of being able to make exactly the game they wished to make, one might be tempted to assume that Riven was to be some radical departure from what had come before. In reality, though, this was not the case at all. Riven was to be Myst, only more so; call it Myst perfected. Once again you would be left to wander around inside a beautiful pre-rendered 3D environment, which you would view from a first-person perspective. And once again you would be expected to solve intricate puzzles there — or not, as you chose.

Cyan had long since realized that players of Myst broke down into two broad categories. There were those they called the gamers, who engaged seriously with it as a series of logical challenges to be overcome through research, experimentation, and deduction. And then there was the other group of players — a far, far larger one, if we’re being honest — whom Cyan called the tourists, who just wanted to poke around a little inside the virtual world and take in some of the sights and sounds. These were folks like the residents of a retirement home who wrote to Cyan to say that they had been playing and enjoying Myst for two years and two months, and wanted to hear if the rumors that there were locations to explore beyond the first island — an island which constitutes about 20 percent of the full game — were in fact true.

Riven was meant to cater to both groups, by giving the gamers a much deeper, richer, more complex tapestry of puzzles to unravel, whilst simultaneously being kept as deliberately “open” as possible in terms of its geography, so that you could see most of its locations without ever having to solve a single conundrum. “The two complaints about Myst,” said Rand Miller, “were that it was too hard and too easy. We’re trying to make Riven better for both kinds of players.” Whereas Myst allowed you to visit four separate “ages” — basically, alternative dimensions — after solving those early puzzles which had so stymied the retirees, Riven was to take place all in the same dimension, on a single archipelago of five islands. You would be able to travel between the islands right from the start, using vehicles whose operation should be quite straightforward even for the most puzzle-averse players. If all you wanted to do was wander around the world of Riven, it would give you a lot more spaces in which to do so than Myst.

Of course, while the world of Riven was slowly coming together, the real world wasn’t sitting still. Myst had been followed by an inevitable flood of “Myst clones” from other publishers and studios, which, in lieu of a proper sequel from Cyan, did their best to pick up the slack by offering up their own deserted, 3D-rendered environments to explore. None of them was more than modestly successful; Activision’s Zork Nemesis, which may have done the best of them all, sold perhaps 150,000 copies, barely one-fiftieth of the final numbers that Myst put up when all was said and done. Meanwhile the genre of adventure games in general had peaked in the immediate aftermath of Myst and would be well into an increasingly precipitous decline by the time Riven shipped in October of 1997. The Last Express, the only other adventure that Brøderbund published that year, stiffed badly in the spring, despite sporting prominently on its box the name of Jordan Mechner, one of the few videogame auteurs with a reputation to rival that of the Miller brothers.

Yet Cyan’s own games still seemed weirdly proof against the marketplace pressures that were driving so many other game makers in the direction of real-time strategy and first-person shooters. In June of 1997, the nearly four-year-old Myst was propelled back to the top of the sales charts by the excitement over the approaching debut of Riven. And when it did appear, Riven didn’t disappoint the bean counters. It and Myst tag-teamed one another in the top two chart positions right through the Christmas buying season. Myst would return to number one a few more times in the course of 1998, while an entire industry continued to scratch its collective head, wondering why this particular game — a game that was now approaching its fifth birthday, making it roughly as aged as the plays of Shakespeare as the industry reckoned time — should continue to sell in such numbers. Even today, it’s hard to say precisely why Myst just kept selling and selling, defying all the usual gravities of its market. It seems that non-violent, non-hardcore gaming simply needed a standard bearer, and so it found one for itself.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Riven wasn’t quite as successful as Myst, but this doesn’t mean it didn’t do very well indeed by all of the standard metrics. Its biggest failing in comparison to its older sibling was ironically its very cutting-edge nature; whereas just about any computer that was capable of running other everyday software could run Myst by 1997, you needed a fairly recent, powerful machine to run Riven. Despite this, and despite the usual skepticism from the hardcore-gaming press — “With its familiar, lever-yanking gameplay, Riven emerges as the ultimate Myst clone,” scoffed Computer Gaming World magazine — Riven’s sales surpassed 1 million units in its first year, numbers of which any other adventure game could scarcely have dreamed.[1]An article in the May 17 2001 edition of the Los Angeles Times claimed that Riven had sold 4.5 million copies by that point, three and a half years after its release. This number has since been repeated in numerous places, including Wikipedia. I’ll eat my hat if it’s correct; this game would have left a much wider vapor trail behind it if it was. Read in context in the original article, the figure actually comes across as a typo.

Riven was a huge hit by any conventional standard, but it didn’t have the legs of Myst. Already for long stretches during 1998, it was once again being comfortably outsold by Myst. Lifetime retail sales of around 1.5 million strike me as the most likely figure — still more than enough to place Riven in the upper echelon of late 1990s computer games.

Fans and boosters of the genre naturally wanted to see a broader trend in Riven’s sales, a proof that adventures in general could still bring home the bacon with the best of them. The hard truth that the games of Cyan were always uniquely uncoupled from what was going on around them was never harder to accept than in this case. In the end, though, Riven would have no impact whatsoever on the overall trajectory of the adventure genre.

Because Riven is a sequel in such a pure sense — a game that aims to do exactly what its predecessor did, only bigger and better — your reaction to it is doomed to be dictated to a large extent by your reaction to said predecessor. It’s almost impossible for me to imagine anyone liking or loving Riven who didn’t at least like Myst.

The defining quality of both games is their thoroughgoing sense of restraint. When Myst first started to attract sales and attention, naysayers saw its minimalism through the lens of technical affordance, or rather the Miller brothers’ lack thereof: having only off-the-shelf middleware like HyperCard to work with, lacking the skill set that might have let them create better tools of their own, they just had to do the best they could with what they had. In this reading, Myst’s static world, its almost nonexistent user interface, its lack of even such niceties as a player inventory, stemmed not so much from aesthetic intent as from the fact that it had been created with a hypertext editor that had never been meant for making games. The alternative reading is that the Miller brothers were among the few game developers who knew the value of restraint from the start, that they were by nature and inclination minimalists in an industry inclined to maximalism in all things, and this quality was their greatest strength rather than a weakness. The truth probably lies somewhere between the two extremes, as it usually does. Regardless, there’s no denying that the brothers leaned hard into the same spirit of minimalism that had defined Myst when the time came to make Riven, even though they were now no longer technologically constrained into doing so. One camp reads this as a colossal failure of vision; the other reads it as merely staying true to the unique vision that had gotten them this far.

While I don’t want to plant myself too firmly in either corner, I must say that I am surprised by some of the things that Cyan didn’t do with twice the time and ten or fifteen times the budget. The fact that Riven still relies on static, pre-rendered scenery and node-based movement isn’t the source of my surprise; that compromise was necessary in order to achieve the visual fidelity that Cyan demanded. I’m rather surprised by how little Cyan innovated even within that basic framework. Well before Riven appeared, the makers of other Myst successors had begun to experiment with ways of creating a slightly more fluid, natural-feeling experience. Zork Nemesis, for example, stores each of its nodes as a 360-degree panorama instead of a set of fixed views, letting you smoothly turn in place through a complete circle. Riven, by contrast, confines its innovations in this area to displaying a little transition animation as you rotate between its rigidly fixed views. As a result, switching from view to view does become a little less jarring than it is in Myst, but the approach is far from even the Myst-clone state of the art.

Cyan was likewise disinterested in pursuing other solutions that would have been even easier to implement than panning rotation, but that could have made their game less awkward to play. The extent of your rotation when you click on the left or right side of the screen remains inconsistent, just as it was in Myst; sometimes it’s 90 degrees, sometimes it’s less or more. This can make simple navigation much more confusing than it needs to be, introducing a layer of fake difficulty — i.e., difficulties that you would not have if you were really in this world — which seems at odd with Cyan’s stated determination to create as immersive an experience as possible. Even a compass with which to tell which way you’re facing at any given time would have helped enormously, but no such concessions to player convenience are to hand.

Again, these are solutions that the other makers of Myst clones — not a group overly celebrated for its spirit of innovation — had long since deployed. Cyan was always a strangely self-contained entity, showing little awareness of what others were doing around them, making a virtue of their complete ignorance of the competition. In cases like these, it was perhaps not so much a virtue as a failure of simple due diligence. Building upon the work of others is the way that gaming as a whole progresses.

When it comes to storytelling as well, Riven’s differences from Myst are more a matter of execution than kind. As in Myst, there is very little story at all here, if by that we mean a foreground plot driving things along. A brief bit of exposition at the beginning picks up right where Myst ended, providing an excuse for dumping you into another open-ended environment. Whereas Myst took place entirely in deserted ages, here you’re ostensibly surrounded by the Rivenese, the vaguely Native-American-like inhabitants of the archipelago. Rather conveniently for Cyan, however, the Rivenese are terrified of strangers, and scurry away into hiding whenever you enter a scene. The few named characters you meet, including the principal villain, are likewise forever just leaving when you come upon them, or showing up, giving speeches, and then going away again before you can interact with them. By 1997, this sort of thing was feeling more tired than clever.

Rand Miller, returning in the role of the patriarch Atrus from Myst, gives you your marching orders and sends you on your way in the introductory movie. Riven makes more extensive use of such scenes involving real actors than Myst, but it’s done well, and never overdone. The end result is about as un-cheesy as these techniques can possibly look to modern eyes.

The real story, in both Myst and Riven, is the backstory that caused these spaces to become the places they are, a backstory which you uncover as you explore them. And in this area, I’m happy to say, Riven actually does outdo its predecessor. Almost everything there is to find out about how the ages of Myst became as they are is conveyed in one astonishingly clumsy infodump, a set of books which you find in a library on that first island after solving the first couple of puzzles. These stop your progress dead for an hour or so as you read through them, after which you’re back to exploring, never to be troubled by much of any exposition again.

By the time of Riven, however, the Miller brothers had learned about the existence of something called dramatic pacing. Here, too, most of the real story comes in the form of books and journals, but these are scattered around the islands, providing an enticement to solve puzzles in order to acquire and read them. The Myst “universe” grew considerably in depth and coherency between Myst and Riven, thanks to a trilogy of novels written by the British science-fiction author David Wingrove in close collaboration with the Miller brothers during that interim. In Riven, then, you get some of the same sense that you get in The Lord of the Rings, that you are only scraping the surface of a world that goes much deeper than its foreground sights and sounds. “The Lord of the Rings is so satisfying because of the details,” said Rand Miller at the time. “You get the feeling that the world you’re reading about is real. Different but real. That’s how we go about designing.” Like Tolkien, the Miller brothers went so far as to make up the beginnings at least of a coherent language for their land’s inhabitants. This sense of established lore, combined with the improved pacing and better writing, makes Riven’s backstory more compelling than that of Myst, makes uncovering more of it feel like a worthwhile goal in itself. Instead of providing a mere excuse for the gameplay, as in Myst, Riven’s backstory comes to fuel its gameplay to a large extent.

And this starts to take us into the territory of the first of the two things that Riven does really, really well, does so well in fact that you might just be willing to discount all of the failings I’ve been belaboring up to this point. The archipelago is a truly intriguing, even awe-inspiring place to explore, thanks not just to the cutting-edge 3D-rendering technology that was used to bring it to life, but — and even more so — the thought that went into the place.

Riven makes its priorities clear from the beginning, when it asks you to set up your screen and your speakers to provide the immersive audiovisual experience it intends for you to have.

The adjective “surreal” seems unavoidable when discussing Myst, so much so that Brøderbund built it right into their advertising tagline. (“The Surrealistic Adventure That Will Become Your World.”) Looking back on it now, though, I realize that the surrealism of Myst was as much a product of process as intention. The 3D-modeling software that was used to create the scenery of Myst couldn’t render genuinely realistic scenes; everything it churned out was too geometrical, too stiff, too uniform in color to look in any sense real. The result was surrealism, that forlorn, otherworldly, even vaguely disturbing stripe of beauty that became the hallmark of Myst and its many imitators.

But I would not call Riven surreal. The improved technology that enabled it, on both the rendering side — meaning all those Silicon Graphics servers and workstations, with their complex ray-tracing algorithms — and the consumer-facing side — meaning the latest home computers, with their capability of displaying millions of nuanced shades of color onscreen at once — led to a more believable world. The key to it all is in the textures, the patterns that are overlaid onto the frame of a 3D model in lieu of blocks of solid color to make it look like a real object made out of wood, metal, or dirt. Cyan traveled to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to capture thousands of textures. The same visual qualities that led to that state being dubbed the “Land of Enchantment” and drew artists like Georgia O’Keeffe to its high deserts suffuses the game, from the pueblo walls of the Rivenese homes to the pebbly cliff-side paths, from an old iron tower rusting in the sun to the ragged vegetation huddling around it. You can almost feel the sun on your back and the sweat on your skin.

My wife and I are inveterate hikers these days, planning most of our holidays around where we can get out and walk. Riven made me want to climb through the screen and roam its landscapes for myself. Myst has its charms, but they are nothing like this. When I compare the two games, I think about what a revelation the battered, weathered world of Tatooine was when Star Wars hit cinemas in 1977, how at odds it was with the antiseptic sleekness of the science-fiction films that preceded it. Riven is almost as much of a revelation when set beside Myst and its many clones.

The visuals both feed and are fed by the backstory and the world-building. The islands are replete with little details that have nothing to do with solving the game, that exist simply as natural, necessary parts of this place you’re exploring. In a perceptive video essay, YouTube creator VZedshows notes how “the lived-in world of Riven lets us look at a house and say, ‘Okay, that’s a house.’ And that’s it. A totally different thought than seeing a log cabin on Myst Island and saying, ‘Okay, that’s a house. But what is it for?’ The puzzles in Riven melt into the world around them.”

Which brings us neatly to the other thing that Riven does remarkably well, the one aimed at the gamers rather than the tourists. Quite simply, Riven is one of the most elegantly sophisticated puzzle games ever created. This facet of it is not for everyone. (I’m not even sure it’s for me, about which more in a moment.) But it does what it sets out to do uncompromisingly well. Riven is a puzzle game that doesn’t feel like a puzzle game. It rather feels like you really have been dropped onto this archipelago, with its foreign civilization and all of its foreign artifacts, and then left to your own devices to make sense of it all.

Many of Riven’s puzzles are as much anthropological as mechanical. For example, you have to learn to translate the different symbols of a foreign number system.

This is undoubtedly more realistic than the ages of Myst, whose puzzles stand out from their environs so plainly that they might as well be circled with a bright red Sharpie. But does it lead to a better game? As usual, the answer is in the eye of the beholder. Ironically, almost everything that can be said about Riven’s puzzles can be cast as either a positive or a negative. If you’re looking for an adventure game that’s nails-hard and yet scrupulously fair — a combination that’s rarer than it ought to be — Riven will not disappoint you. If not, however, it will put you right off just as soon as you grow bored with idle wandering and begin to ask yourself what the game expects you to actually be doing. Myst was widely perceived in the 1990s as being more difficult than it really was; Riven, by contrast, well and truly earns its reputation.

Each of Myst’s ages is a little game unto itself when it comes to its puzzles; you never need to use tools or information from one age to overcome a problem in another one. For better or for worse, Riven is not like that — not at all. Puzzles and clues are scattered willy-nilly all over the five islands; you might be expected to connect a symbol you’re looking at now to a gadget you last poked at hours and hours ago. Careful, copious note-taking is the only practical way to proceed. I daresay you might end up spending more time poring over your real-world journal, looking for ways to combine and thereby to make sense of the data therein, than you do looking at the monitor screen. Because most of the geography is open to you from the very beginning — this is arguably Riven’s one real concession to the needs of the marketplace, being the one that allows it to cater to the tourists as well as the gamers — there isn’t the gated progress you get in so many other puzzly adventure games, with new areas and new problems being introduced gradually as you solve the earlier ones. No, Riven throws it all at you from the start, in one big lump. You just have to keep plugging away at it when even your apparently successful deductions don’t seem to be yielding much in the way of concrete rewards, trusting that it will all come together in one big whoosh at the end.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Riven is a slow game, the polar opposite of the instant gratification that defines the videogame medium in the eyes of so many. There are few shortcuts for moving through its sprawling, fragmented geography — something you’ll need to do a lot of, thanks to its refusal to contain its puzzles within smaller areas as Myst does. Just double-checking some observation you think you made earlier or confirming that some effect took place as expected represents a significant investment in time. Back in the day, when everyone was playing directly from CD, Riven was even slower than it is today, requiring you to swap discs every time you traveled to a different island.[2]Some months after its original release, Riven became one of the first games ever to be made available on DVD-ROM. No game benefited more from the switch in storage technology; not only were DVD drives faster than CD drives, but a single DVD disc was capacious enough to contain the whole of Riven.his vintage 1997 review, Andrew Plotkin — a fellow who is without a doubt much, much smarter than I am, at least when it comes to stuff like this — said that he was able to solve Riven in about twenty hours, using just one hint. It will probably take more mortal intelligences some multiple of one or both of those figures.

Your reaction to Riven when approached in “gamer” mode will depend on whether you think this kind of intensive intellectual challenge is fun or not, as well as whether you have the excess intellectual and temporal bandwidth in your current life to go all-in on such a major undertaking. I must sheepishly confess that my answer to the first question is more prevaricating than definitive, while my answer to the second one is a pretty solid no. In the abstract, I do understand the appeal of what Riven is offering, understand how awesome it must feel to put all of these disparate pieces together without help. Nevertheless, when I approached the game for this article, I couldn’t quite find the motivation to persevere down that road. Riven wants you to work a little harder for your fun than the current version of myself is willing to do. I don’t futz around with my notebook too long before I start looking out the window and thinking about how nice it would be to take a walk in real nature. I take enough notes doing research for the articles I write; I’m not sure I want to do so much research inside a game.

Prompted partially by my experience with Riven, I’ve been musing a fair amount lately about the way we receive games, and especially how the commentary you read on this site and others similar to it can be out of step with the way the games in question existed for their players in their heyday. I’m subject to the tyranny of my editorial calendar, to the need to just finish things, one way or another, and move on. Riven is not well-suited to such a mindset. In my travels around the Internet, I’ve noticed that those who remember the game most fondly often took months or years to finish it, or never finished it at all. It existed for them as a tempting curiosity, to be picked up from time to time and poked at, just to see if a little more progress was possible here or there, or whether the brainstorm that came to them unbidden while driving home from work that day might bear some sort of fruit. It’s an open question whether even folks who don’t have an editorial schedule to keep can recapture that mindset here and now, in the third decade (!) of the 21st century, when more entertainment of every conceivable type than any of us could possibly consume in a lifetime is constantly luring us away from any such hard nut as Riven. As of this writing, Cyan is preparing a remake of Riven. It will be interesting to see what concessions, if any, they chose to make to our new reality.

Even in the late 1990s, there was the palpable sense that Riven represented the end of an era, that even Cyan would not be able to catch lightning in a bottle a third time with yet another cerebral, contemplative, zeitgeist-stamping single-player puzzle game. Both Richard Vander Wende and Robyn Miller quit the company as soon as the obligatory rounds of promotional interviews had been completed, leaving the Myst franchise’s future solely in the hands of Rand Miller. Robyn’s stated reason for departing brings to the fore some of the frustrations I have with Cyan’s work. He said that he was most interested in telling stories, and had concluded that computer games just weren’t any good at that: “I felt like, you know what? It’s not working. This whole story thing is not happening, and one of the reasons it’s not happening is because of the medium. It’s not what this medium is good at.” So, he said, he wanted to work in film instead.

The obvious response is that Cyan had never actually tried to tell an engaging foreground story, had rather been content to leave you always picking up the breadcrumbs of backstory. Cyan’s stubborn conservatism in terms of form and their slightly snooty insistence on living in their own hermetically sealed bubble, blissfully unaware of the innovations going on around them in their industry in both storytelling and other aspects of game making, strike me as this unquestionably talented group’s least attractive qualities by far. When asked once what his favorite games were, Richard Vander Wende said he didn’t have any: “Robyn and I are not really interested in games of any kind. We’re more interested in building worlds. To us, Myst and Riven are not ‘games’ at all.” Such scare-quoted condescension does no one any favors.

Then again, that’s only one way of looking at it. Another way is to recognize that Riven is exactly the game — okay, if you like, the world — that its creators wanted to make. It’s worth acknowledging, even celebrating, as the brave artistic statement it is. Love it or hate it, Riven knows what it wants to be, and succeeds in being exactly that — no more, no less. Rather than The Lord of the Rings, call it the Ulysses of gaming: a daunting creation by any standard, but one that can be very rewarding to those willing and able to meet it where it lives. That a game like this outsold dozens of its more visceral, immediate rivals on the store shelves of the late 1990s is surely one of the wonders of the age.

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Sources: The books The Secret History of Mac Gaming (Expanded Edition) by Richard Moss, From Myst to Riven: The Creations & Inspirations by Richard Kadrey, and Riven: The Sequel to Myst: The Official Strategy Guide by Rick Barba; Computer Gaming World of January 1998; Retro Gamer 208; Wired of September 1997; Game Developer of March 1998. Plus the “making of” documentary that was included with the DVD version of Riven.

Online sources include GameSpot’s old preview of Riven, Salon’s profile of the Miller brothers on the occasion of Robyn’s departure from Cyan, VZedshows’s video essay on Myst and Riven, and Andrew Plotkin’s old review of Riven.

The original version of Riven is currently available as a digital purchase on GOG.com. As noted in the article above, a remake is in the works at Cyan.

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

An article in the May 17 2001 edition of the Los Angeles Times claimed that Riven had sold 4.5 million copies by that point, three and a half years after its release. This number has since been repeated in numerous places, including Wikipedia. I’ll eat my hat if it’s correct; this game would have left a much wider vapor trail behind it if it was. Read in context in the original article, the figure actually comes across as a typo.
Riven was a huge hit by any conventional standard, but it didn’t have the legs of Myst. Already for long stretches during 1998, it was once again being comfortably outsold by Myst. Lifetime retail sales of around 1.5 million strike me as the most likely figure — still more than enough to place Riven in the upper echelon of late 1990s computer games.

↑2

Some months after its original release, Riven became one of the first games ever to be made available on DVD-ROM. No game benefited more from the switch in storage technology; not only were DVD drives faster than CD drives, but a single DVD disc was capacious enough to contain the whole of Riven.