Video Game Invasion: The History of a Global Obsession [2004]

it's an industry that's revolutionised every area of entertainment from television to sports to movies the video game business rakes in more than 20 billion dollars a year making bigger bucks than even Hollywood this industry was created on products that were so exciting that people would stay up all night outside a store together the next morning but how did two lines in a dot turn into the high-tech hyper-realistic worlds of games like The Sims and Halo it's not just about circuit boards and chips it's about people driven by vision and obsession video games to me is my whole life that's all I've done since I was 12 it's about games that have been blamed for making kids antisocial and violent if you play too much doom you're gonna end up going on a shooting spree there's really people who believe this it's about fuse wars and even a little bit of good old-fashioned piracy if they were gonna copy our stuff we were gonna bury it one way or another but most of all it's about how a whole generation grab the joystick and got juiced up on video gaming the secrets behind the games the passion that powered the industry and the guys who made it happen video games some people they're a blast from the past something they used to do at the local arcade when they were hanging out after high school both brothers videogames are the new technological frontier an innovative form of communication and storytelling and the future of entertainment hi I'm Tony Hawk a lot of you are probably used to seeing with a skateboard and looking a little something like this and a lot of you gamers are even more used to seeing me like this I got into video games early on even before I got to be a video game character myself in fact I don't think I even had my first board yet where could you find me playing pacman down at the pizza parlor but games have come a long way since then if you think the history of the video game invasion is all about cool graphics and cutting-edge technology well you're right but it's also a story about a group of unique individuals who started with nothing but ideas guys who came out of their garages and ended up as power players in a multi-billion dollar industry who revolutionized entertainment and turn themselves into rock stars and the first rock star of the mall was this guy this is Willie Higginbotham he helped invent the nuclear bomb and the first computer game the bomb looked like this the game looks like this a primitive version of tennis it was just a dot moving back and forth on an oscilloscope screwed it showed up as a novelty exhibit at Brookhaven National Lab in 1958 and generated about as much excitement as this picture MORTAL KOMBAT it was not fast forward 1961 student and pioneering hacker Steve Russell nicknamed slug he spent six months tapping into $120,000 computer at MIT end result a punch card driven video game called space war he was the one who conceived the idea of making a game that would be completely interactive it was a game where there were two rockets game where a Flash Gordon style rockets of fly around shooting each other with a Sun in the middle that had some gravity if it sucked you in you got destroyed space war spread universities around America on an early version of the internet but with the average Joe spent hundred twenty thousand bucks to own one slug figured no way and never patented the idea he left MIT without graduating jump in 1966 a little device called television and made it into almost every living room in America it was a cultural phenomenon at a Ralph Baer vice president of engineering at electronics giant Sanders associates it was a business opportunity the concept was this 40 million TV sets out there in the US alone if I could hit 1% of that that's 400,000 attach some gadget to 400,000 says I got a business fair needed his play device to fit on a shelf so that didn't give his little brown box much room for processing power he wasn't doing much better than ol Higgy just two dots moving on a screen no way this is gonna set the world on fire then it hit him a blockbuster breakthrough that would blow the roof off of Home Entertainment forever three spots my third splat became a ball that made it into a ping pong game or to a tennis game once we had that third ball going back and forth we know we had something by 1971 bears bosses had patented the brown box and licensed it to television manufacturer of Magnavox now called Odyssey it began showing up at various trade fairs around the country Yallah see was a hit of the show and had a hard time not getting up for my season of jumping up and I say that's my baby the system is called Odyssey and the hardware consists of a master control and two-player control units connected by cable to any set 18 inches or larger black and white or color the players will simply switch to an unused channel select their game insert the program card in the control box and place the overlay on the TV screen so for instance if you were playing a tennis game this would actually using from static electricity would cling to the front of your your television would be the overlay for hockey game The Odyssey hit store shelves in May 1972 and sold for a hundred bucks hey if you want to pop for another twenty nine bucks you could also buy yourself this wicked weapon and tie the first-ever shooter video game seems that even then guns and video games were destined to be together and to convince America how hip it was to own an odyssey Magnavox got the king of cool old blue eyes Frank Sinatra himself to piss the product unfortunately in the beginning they connect to a magnet like television said of course I got the idea abroad that you needed Magnavox television set to play games they had to undo that i convincing customers in the store that no you put in deed plug it in to any TV set it took over a year but Magnavox managed to hook up about 150,000 Americans and their televisions to an odyssey system next player in the game nolan bushnell an employee of northern california electronics firm he'd played slug rustles spacewar at engineering school and couldn't get it out of his brain it actually thought hey this would be great in music park but how do you put a million dollar computer into and pay for it at 25 cents to throw remember the microprocessor hadn't been invented yet and then one day the mini computer for $5,000 came across my desk I mean they had for it I had the Epiphany of being able to reduce it to a single board that was actually a fancy signal generator if you would in 1971 Nolan's first video game computer space hit American pinball arcade sleek sexy and we all remember the first time we played it right right it was one of the biggest turkeys of all time the problem with the game was that I loved it all my friends loved it but all my friends were engineers it was a little bit too complex for the guy with a beer in a bar Nolan's next move taking 500 bucks and starting his own company in Santa Clara California with buddy Ted Dabney the year was 1972 the company was called Atari Atari comes from the Japanese game of Go which is a flight warning saying watch out you're gonna get whacked first big hire engineer Alcorn Nolan proving he already had what it takes to be a great corporate executive landed al by lying to him he told me he had a contract with General Electric to build a consumer video game a home video game which was like almost impossible to do in those days and the fact that nobody from General Electric ever came by or called who wrote us a letter didn't occur to me I was too busy building the prototype we decided to give him a test game I'll call it a throwaway game but something was simple basically ping pong two paddles on either side ball moving between them man does this sound familiar but remember it was still early in 1972 and the Odyssey hadn't hit store shelves yet the concept was still fair game and Al had his own spin on the idea one of the things I discovered is that if the ball didn't speed up it wasn't fun to play so I added the ball speed up to the game and the other thing that that we did at the very end was the sound and since I was already way over budget I poked around and found codes that were already existent in the machine and that's became the sound we said okay let's call it pong and we put it in handicaps tavern in Sunnyvale California this baby here is the original pong prototype that went Andy Capps tavern in Sunnyvale and it has the original wire wrap that I built in three months in 1972 we put it in the box put it up on the barrel it was the media hit we weren't aware of just how much of the hit it was until we got a service call and found that the coin box had totally filled up and wouldn't take any more quarters those are kind of technical problems that we can solve here we have one of the first quarters at the pong machine ever made which now represents a multi-billion dollar industry and it's a little piece plastic Atari started rolling out their machines in November of 1972 in America with pong crazy there were several reasons the pong was very successful the first one was it was extremely easy to play but very very difficult to master they had to pay a lot of money to get really good the second one is that women found that they were better players than men it turns out that women have better small motor coordination than men do and it became socially acceptable for women to ask men to come over and play pong more players meant more machines an Atari needed more manpower to build them fast we tried a few social experiments with running buses into lung dishonourable parts of the town and giving people a chance to come and have a job it was kind of a rude awakening from some of our Age of Aquarius belief structures they hired whoever they could hire in the beginning which meant they got a lot of bikers you talked to some of the straight-laced people and they talked about being scared to walk the floor they talked about going into the bathrooms and seeing used needles and stuff on the on the ground the converse is the 20% that stayed with us really appreciated the opportunity became some of our most valuable employees but who wouldn't want to work at a company where the bonuses came in beer kegs and strategy meetings were held in hot tubs since we had a lot of young people we would constantly offer to throw a party if they hit quota and it turns out when you've got 18 19 20 year-olds they're much more interested in the party than an extra you know fifty cents an hour so we got known as party company there's a story that if you walked by the boring a street building and you breathe deeply by the air vents you'd get stoned because the pot smoking inside of it was so heavy it was a very laid-back culture which is very important in a creative environment I mean you can't really punch the clock and come up with something creative it didn't seem to matter what was going on inside Atari because on the outside they'd become the kings of the 60-year old arcade business and in America how do you know when you've really made it to the top when people start suing it was it long before Atari got hit with their first lawsuit and it came from Magnavox who claimed the pong violated Ralph Baer's Odyssey patent I looked at the patent and I said my god this guy's patented the idea of any kind of a moving object on a video screen controlled by anything and it was filed in 1969 the Magnavox was based on analog technology which made SiC fuzzy didn't have sound and half score I mean you didn't really feel like you were being somebody when you beat them which is one of the core essence of what a game is but hey what about those Magnavox trade show demos Nolan Bushnell plays a game in Burlingame California on May the 24th I think 1972 he signed a guestbook they've a ping pong game Bushnell decided to accept Magnavox his offer of a settlement Atari paid Magnavox just under a million dollars an exchange became their first licensee game over and everyone's a winner and who says lawsuit still work we're not it was never a very big issue for us we settled it for less than it cost us to defend it then Atari went on the attack against the clones knockoffs and pirate versions of pong that we're popping up all over the world we actually became quite diabolical about seeing ways we could just mess them up we put a chip in and we purposely mismarked it so that when somebody copied us they put the wrong chip in we felt like we were in a war it was a war that would change entertainment forever and there's the Atari troops attacked the arcades Bushnell got ready to open the second front in living rooms across America the battle for videogame dominance was about to begin in 1974 nearly two years after pawns introduction everyone had played the game so much that three-quarters of the world's population was suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome no not really but in the arcades pong fever was still running hot as ever people couldn't get enough so Nolan Bushnell figured he'd give him more by introducing a home version of lung Alcorn said I believe we can put pong on a chip and I said let's do it this is actually what's inside the coin-operated pong videogame there's about 75 integrated circuits on this and that was all replaced by what's in this Atari cut a deal with Sears and over a hundred fifty thousand home pong units flew off the shelves during the 1975 holiday season now the established gaming leader Atari was the place where top programming talent wanted to be Steve Jobs showed up unannounced one day I wanted a job he was unwashed unkempt smelled bad had no degree alicorn secretary came to him and said well I do and alicorns comment was well we should either hire him or call the cops and Al hired him Jobs brought along a buddy Steve Wozniak we hired Steve Jobs and we didn't know that we sort of got woz along with the package he was never an official employee of Atari but hung out with jobs a lot in labs they did break out actually there was a line of bricks and tried to break the bricks away by knocking the ball against them it was pong only was pong turned vertical pretty soon Jobs and Wozniak broke out of Atari to start their own little business Apple Computer Jobs asked his boss to invest in the idea Bushnell declined the company's capital was tied up producing home pong units in developing their next home console concept they called it the VCS video computer system was the 2600 and became universally known as the atari the idea behind the 2600 was to get away from having to build a whole new custom chip for every new game so if we could make the game just be in a cartridge in software we could release it much faster and much cheaper than we could with a whole new game one Nolan needed big money to develop and launch the 2600 he got it by selling the company Warner Communications headed by Chairman Steve Ross paint Bushnell 28 million dollars for Atari not bad for a $500 investment plus Nolan would still draw a paycheck as the company chairman in October of 1977 supported by a handful of games like street racer Indy 500 and combat the Atari 2600 hit the streets it was a bomb it did nothing they didn't get him out in time for Christmas they didn't sell the ones that were out there and Warner hit the roof the net result of that was they removed no one and put in a Ray Kassar who was a person from the East Coast who worked at Burlington industries and was probably a more professional big businessman to run Atari Nolan was out but don't cry for this guy he made even more money with his next business chain of family restaurants called Chucky Cheese now while all of this was going on at Atari something even bigger was going on in a galaxy far far away in 1977 the movie mega hit Star Wars sent the nation's sci-fi crazy and in less than a year a new game arrived that cashed in on the craze Ataris competitor Midway got the arcade upper hand with a Japanese import that went by the name space invaders we're all fascinated by the pong machines and then we were fascinated by space invaders which again was just lines coming down from the screen ultimately you couldn't win but it was the first arcade machine to record and display a high score and that just made people want to play more you look at games today that cost literally millions and millions of dollars and take literally four or five years or more to complete most of those games don't rival the gameplay and addictiveness of space invaders it took Atari nearly a year but they did strike back with asteroids an updated version of slug rustles space war the object break up a surrounding storm of falling asteroids and avoid getting blown up by a fleet of flying saucers I can remember asteroids like there's no tomorrow going down there and literally begging my mother for quarters then you know an hour later I'm back asking for more it's a good memory for me the first ones that I played was basically space invaders and asteroids I always spent my allowance really fast was only like $5.00 a week it was like two days and I mean I was stretching it as far as I could go as the 70s disco danced their way into history 1980 arrived and true 8-bit color came to the arcade screens up until then any colors seen in the game had been achieved by using tinted Overland's Atari was pumping out hits like Missile Command and battlezone which had a custom version built for the American military to use in combat range one of the biggest hits of the year was defender from Williams an atari rival this was another fight the aliens game but it was cooler because it had a radar screen that let you see everything it was coming your way there was one invader no one saw coming check him out he's got a classic profile his name pac-man he was born at a Japanese game company called Namco and brought to the US by Ataris nemesis Midway originally called puck man Midway was afraid vandals would have too much fun changing the first letter of his name small and yellow he ate everything in his path little dots and ghosts with names like blinky pinky inky and Clyde I love pac-man it was just such a simplistic movement with a joystick and yet it was easy to play hard to master and that was really I think the secret of it it was also the first time a character was the star of a video game most important thing about characters you can license them pretty soon pac-man had a song in the top 40 charts Saturday morning TV show he even made it to the cover of Time magazine then a year later miss pac-man showed up on the scene same profile only this time sporting a bow and a beauty spot and we're also more mazes more ghosts and even bigger success time to head back over to Japan and the company called Nintendo they got their start in 1889 Manufacturing playing cards by 1980 under the leadership of Hiroshi Yamauchi company was desperate to cash in on the video game craze Nintendo was doing modestly well in the Japanese arcade business they could not get up foot in in the US market in desperation the amount she turned through this guy he had hired named Shigeru Miyamoto by Japanese standards Miyamoto was sort of a wild man when it came to music he loved the Beatles and bluegrass played the banjo and he loved designing toys and they said can you make a game for us and Miyamoto start spouting off about how we do this and he do that Mao is like yeah sure just make us a good game Miyamoto came up with something that had never been done in gaming a story to motivate the action marilla runs away from a carpenter and steals the carpenter's girlfriend carpenter chases the gorilla through a factory to rescue the girl hey nobody said it was Shakespeare literally translated Miyamoto's japanese title for the game came out as stubborn gorilla wanting something sexier he went to the japanese english dictionary for stubborn he came up with donkey gorilla became kong your Maui called his American headquarters headed by Minoru Arakawa and Howard Lincoln and gave everyone the good news on the game and he said Donkey Kong um I mean they almost passed out they were like Donkey Kong what's a Donkey Kong I think heroine Lincoln's comment was Donkey Kong konkey dong I mean come on but Donkey Kong was mad game Donkey Kong fever swept the arcades closely followed by Donkey Kong jr. when it came to merchandising the monkey was natural but it was really the man who became the breakout character plans were soon made to give the little guy with the mustache his own game everyone knew he had personality but what he really needed was a name American Nintendo chief Minoru Arakawa came up with the answer originally he was jump them and the Nintendo's landlord out here was Mario Segale II pissed off Arakawa so the Arakawa renamed jump man Mario after Mario Segale II and when Mario got his new name he also got a new job as a plumber along with a new brother named Luigi and the Mario Brothers jumped into the arcades in a series of games that are still popular today by 1982 it seemed like the country was having one great big party Ronald Reagan was in power the economy was booming in the gaming industry was taking a big slice of the disposable income Americans had now spent over seventy five thousand man years playing video games and dropped more than 20 billion quarters in the process it looked like things couldn't get any better and you know what they couldn't players in the video game industry we're about to move up to the next level and face the revolution that would tear the business apart this was the first game I ever played there was a machine just like it at the local pizza place man it's still great pac-man not the pizza but there was one version of this game that wasn't so hot in fact it was so bad that nearly killed off videogames for good rewinds in 1980 Namco and Midway's pac-man is eating up most of the arcade business and cutting into Ataris bottom line the company had a new president ray Kassar it was a marketing Pro looking for a new revenue stream he set his sights on American homes getting the 2600 console into more of them marketing 101 people buy what they know and people know these guys space invaders had kicked the Tories but in the arcades back in 1978 now kisara thought they were the ones who could save in the best camp beat him join him tradition he went straight to Taito the original Japanese company that had designed the game and bought the rights to a home version of space invaders when it hit stores 2600 sales skyrocketed Kassar wanted more we were asked to do home versions of popular arcade titles very difficult task because the Atari 2600 is a very simple game system electronically whereas an arcade game had $4,000 with the technology in it faster than you could say asteroids more Atari arcade knockoffs hit store shelves Atari soon had a reputation as a profitable company and a great place to work but only if you were an upper management the culture changed Atari when Bushnell was forced out and the new management came in they didn't understand the industry they didn't understand consumer electronics they didn't understand technology they had little respect for the creative work that was being done by game designers such as myself these engineers would create a software program that would result in 20 30 million dollars in sales and they were making this little paltry salary and they figured gee I'd like to get a penny or two or three for each cartridge so we go to the president of Atari and point that out and he said to us not quote is that you are no more important to that game than the person on the assembly line who puts it together that didn't sit too well with us contempt breeds competition so four of Ataris top game designers gave Kassar the kiss-off and started their own company finding out star master by Activision the most significant thing about Activision was that it was the first independent video game publisher prior to our formation all game software was created by the hardware manufacturers one of the differences with Activision was we promoted the game creator as an author if you creative at what you do he kind of liked some recognition from the public activision was a huge success we grew from zero and revenue 260 million in revenue in 3 years their first hits included pitfall kaboom and freeway I came up with freeway on Lakeshore Drive in Chicago which is ten lanes of traffic looked out the window and there was this idiot trying to cross the street and I'm looking at that and I said that make a good video game Atari wasn't the only game in town anymore more companies were making more consoles Activision was making games for all of them Magnavox had the Odyssey two famous toymaker Mattel had Intellivision Mattel's ads for their console featured intellectual literary figure George Plimpton I've been comparing the exciting new and television space games starstruck with one of the most popular Atari games asteroid yes they figured most Americans had to be dragged away from reading war and peace to play video games star strike features our most exciting visual effects destruction of a planet which is why after star striker asteroids left Big Brother flat destruction of a planet then another unlikely player showed up on the field a plastic pool maker called Kaliko we looked at this whole arcade position and believed that electronics as it related to kids was going to be a very very important angle so we started to work on a number of different products that used electronic chips as their part and I don't like for the quarterback I start in the back field follow my blockers walkers I don't have any blockers Coley goes electronic quarterback we did the head to head serious of dedicated games where he played against an opponent on the other side of the game now we can play at the same time I'm office I'm defense went head to head you're really in the game a power sweep you pass he winces intercepts this is real competition and we did the miniature tabletop arcade games which were miniature versions of pac-man and Donkey Kong they looked exactly like the arcade games they were very successful and that put Coleco on the road to developing more video and you know electronic games in the new console called ColecoVision was born ColecoVision was an attempt to try and replicate as closely as possible in those days the actual experience of the arcade knowing they needed a hot game to kick off their console sales they set their sights on the arcade hit Donkey Kong and bought themselves a six-month exclusive to the game from Nintendo ColecoVision became the smash hit of 1982 Donkey Kong was the driver we impacted it with units picked up what Caligula we got a Bobby Fong cartridge suddenly another 800 pound gorilla came into the room Universal Studios they claim that Nintendo's Donkey Kong violated their copyright on the movie King Kong and they wanted their piece of the action it's a great court case they actually at one point brought in a Donkey Kong machine and played the game for the judge in the middle of the court which was quite a scene but the biggest laugh came when court papers prepared by universal zone lawyers revealed that the original copyright holder have let the rights fall into the public domain so in the end not only did they lose they have to pay damages and court expenses hate to say it but we gotta Nintendo made a monkey out of Universal and what about those monkeys who were running Atari they were affected by waves of people leaving the company first activision then there was another wave after us and so they lost our very best programmers desperate Atari licensed the arcade classic pac-man in ordered 12 million cartridges it sucked it flickered then we'll look like pac-man had been play well it was hard to control and was ugly it was an awful game and a financial disaster big time Steve Ross chief of Ataris corporate parent Warner Communications decided to step in and he brought one of Hollywood's biggest talent along with him Steven Spielberg in the summer of 1982 et was burning up the box office and Ross wanted to ride that bike too he paid a cool twenty five million for the right to use Steve's extra-terrestrial a new video game and he promised to have it out by Christmas I think they had to develop the game in eight weeks instead of nine months it's kind of hard to make in be really fun and have a lot of depth in it in a period of eight weeks and it was so bad the ones they sold most of them were returned in 83 Atari sent diesel trucks into the New Mexico desert packed with unsold cartridges and they buried a legend was they had to run in and pour concrete over them to make them really go away ugly ugly it Betsy killed Atari was the end of Atari by early 1983 it looked like the home gaming boom was going bust for everyone 30 companies got a couple million dollars in venture capital hired a couple programmers off the street had never designed video games and developed a video game and tried to sell it and nobody was buying because it was a piece of garbage it was ironic because when we saw those 30 new companies we looked at each other and said no these guys are going to be in business a year from now and we didn't take that one step further and say and my god what that's going to do to the business in the next two years Warner Communications dumped Atari and got out of the industry Mattel shut down production of their and television systems Coleco sales dropped through the floor and in 1985 just as everything really hit bottom Nintendo stood up and said they weren't gonna take it anymore and launched their own gaming console the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES everyone thought they were crazy all of a sudden Nintendo came in better graphics better color better sound boom rock and roll total success Nintendo has the most video like baseball and Excitebike now you're playing with power they really brought in a new age of video game spy with the simple introduction of the NES system they rethought everything they say you know the way cartoon is loaded the way the controllers are designed so let's start over and create a really friendly game system for families to enjoy and who was leading the Nintendo NES charge their Donkey Kong hero Mario now starring in Super Mario Brothers they came out with Super Mario Brothers which was a great game so far beyond anything that had existed before in the home it made side-scrolling with him and I gave you puzzles hidden puzzles and fun puzzles it characterized what games could be and it was a phenomenon all over again once that happened it really changed the business because then sake had started looking at the business more seriously Sega was short for service games it had actually gotten its start as an American company than imported pinball machines to military bases in Japan after World War two but by 1986 Sega was a Japanese company toiling away in the arcade business seeing Nintendo's success they came out with their first console the Sega Master System most of their games were repackaged arcade titles and couldn't compete with the exciting originals that Nintendo was cranking out it would take another five years before Sega would get a real shot at pushing Nintendo and Mario off their high ladder the Japanese really took over the video game industry because we have these games that anyone could play anyone could understand and everyone who loves you know and they're very simple they're very easy to get into and the hardware is more powerful than anything we've seen from the American side so these guys they're able to bring back video games like they brought it back from the dead after a five-year slump consoles were clawing their way back into homes only to meet a new challenger personal computer we can barely remember life without them but in the early 80s these machines were the hot new thing and they were about to take video gameplay to a higher level create new competition for gaming dollars and give game designers a new opportunity to take even more power into their own hands you know some people always seem to be in the right place at the right time maybe it has more to do with being ready to step up than just dumb luck and the video game industry has always been packed with risk takers people who can't wait to take their shot time for another chapter in our tale of two Steve's jobs and Wozniak remember those two guys are left Atari to start their own thing by the early 80s their Apple 2 home computer was a must buy for tech heads everywhere at a whopping 1,300 dollars a pop I just thought I have to have lunch I convinced my wife that I would somehow make it pay for itself and we spent well over a month's income for the two of us buying that first Apple 2 computer and no I guess I did make it pay for itself eventually computers were making word-processing a breeze and typewriters were being tossed out of office windows everywhere coming out of Atari the two Steve's had gaming in their blood and knew that working card meant playing harder so they made sure their baby was built to gain once you have a PC on your desk you seen realize that it's something that you can goof off on and right from the very beginning of pcs on desktops in the workplace there were games to play in those days the mid 80s a lot of them were just text games like the Zork and the great thing about that is because it was all text it actually kind of looked like work a rival PC the Commodore 64 came out in 1982 and was even more successful 22 million machines were sold in 1983 alone well maybe because that one was only 600 bucks when the Commodore 64 first came out I bought one those like the first day and spent like the next month he was a learning machine trying every last feature of it and then the first game I did actually was on the Commodore 64 I would go into the college and there were students programming on the Apple so I could ask them how do you get the dot on the screen and yeah I'm just asking them all the basic commands and writing them all down and in trying to make my own programs in the corner on the machines I loved playing on a computer a lot more than a console because I feel like the interaction was there there was a lot more fun in actually programming things rather than just being passive and letting somebody else make the game for me that was really when I fell in love with games back at Apple a young employee named chip Hawkins was getting ready to pull a Steve Jobs on Steve Jobs and take off on his own at Apple Steve Jobs was treating him like you know worthless MBA instead of like the future CEO and rock star the big idea I had was to basically bring a lot of practices from Hollywood into this new digital medium elevating the development of the product to that of an art form and treating the creative talent as artists in October of 1982 Electronic Arts was born we wrote the business plan of November 82 when two weeks later Atari which had just ship et announced that they weren't gonna make their revenue profit targets what they were doing is they're spending their money on bulldozers bulldozing all those ETS in the ground we thought cartridge video games were done forever so we took a big risk when we launched and only did a floppy disk PC game trip had to get people's eyes back on gaming and you did it by catching their eye on the store shelves I immediately gravitated towards thinking that the product should be packaged like a record album and it was very successful in the marketplace and that you know a lot of people really liked those early record albums trip also figured sports stars would look great on box covers not sure why maybe he ate a lot of Wheaties whatever the reason he went after two of the biggest Larry Bird and Julius Erving better known as dr. J each got about 25 K for a snapshot in their names and the doctor himself got involved in the game design we asked him questions about how he played and strategies and we want to understand what kind of shots he would take from different parts of the floor and what his shooting percentages were exactly built out of it again and then we said imagine you're really going one-on-one with Larry what would the outcome be he goes well when I wanted Larry I'd beat him every time but cool premiering on the Apple 2 and Commodore 64 dr. J and Larry Bird go one on one was a huge seller next up football Lata n John Madden but the big-name give him a big shock you see in the early 80s technology would only allow seven players on each team Madden's like that where's the other guys well this is an apple to and you know Leo's 64k a ramp so actually having seven on seven is a huge breakthrough and it just gets the stinkface on the side where are the that's not football you can ship that if you want but not my name on you know our thing he's got our money so we go back to Robin Antin ik that programmer designer it's a it's got to be 11 on 11 May he goes animal that's impossible two years later when the 11 on 11 game was finished we shipped and in 1988 the ultimate video sports game franchise was born along with one of the greatest video game marketing opportunities ever like football itself a new version of Madden started arriving every season new team's statistics and players I said this is the crown jewel we're gonna build a company around this this is gonna be hugely successful product man's success proved that sports could be very very good for EA and it has giving birth to a whole subdivision within the company and it doesn't stop there from action to adventure from franchises to tie-in titles these guys are on it now going for over 20 years they are the biggest and most successful publisher of video games ever in 2003 the revenues top 2.5 billion dollars but hey we're starting to get ahead of ourselves here put the brakes on and let's rewind back to 1979 this is Ken Williams and his wife Roberta based in LA Ken had just started a computer consulting business called online systems and then one day he bought his own computer along with the computer game Roberto started playing and she got really really hooked and after she got hooked she said you know I could do that and it turned out that she could not only do it she could do it brilliantly in 1980 she started writing her own game mystery house the adventure game genre really developed around what the PC was capable of which was exploration and storytelling you could type in walk left and you would get a description of okay now you're in the field it was all text-based an avid movie lover Roberta loved visuals and insisted the game would be more fun if there were pictures to go along with it she couldn't understand why the hardware at the time couldn't do the things that she wanted done and so she would just say and you've got to make this happen and somehow kid would work on and figured out some kind of thing and make it happen because of her had created this software program that allowed them to store hundreds of graphics screens on one single floppy disk and they produced the first adventure game for the Apple to the head graphics it would take these games in a baggie and they'd drive them around the California now how computer shops sell them and that got successful and that became their company ken and Roberta sold 80,000 copies of mystery house more games started coming some were originals some adaptations of arcade titles they also move their office out of the LA kitchen and into a building just outside Yosemite National Park name change time - the company became Sierra online then IBM knocked on the new office door they wanted a game for their new consumer machine the PC junior Roberta came up with King's Quest a fantasy adventure game filled with Knights treasures and puzzles it also let gamers play from a third-person perspective controlling and moving a character inside a physical world first for adventure games my first experience with King's Quest was just a revelation it was kind of a very very early form of virtual reality that I was the main character and I I was actually creating the story as I went along I thought that was very exciting as a storyteller and very compelling for me as a gamer like the movie biz success brought sequels and a few spin-offs too with each game Roberta's vision expanding and Ken had to think fast to ki bubble she said well I want color and he said well Apple only has six colors and they're kind of weird and she said we'll make more than that and so he did she wanted sound so he convinced Rowland's to produce a mini board at a sound fart so that pcs could have music soundtracks because of them the sound cars really came into the PC in like Nintendo with Mario can ever Berta knew continuing characters like Leisure Suit Larry could be just as lucrative as franchise titles the first Leisure Suit Larry game has very simple plot you were a 39 year old virgin software salesman in Las Vegas for one night and hoping to lose your virginity and you could do that through a variety of means none of which were very sexy or are stimulating but we're funny that's what made it successful was ruse game time despite all of the success at Sierra and Electronic Arts we're finding in the mid 80s their audience still consisted of a highly specialized group of tech heads and gamers with computers becoming an everyday part of everyone's work and home life a money-making stream of potential players was just sitting there untapped also when needed was one simple game he needed to be something that anyone could play a game so addictive that workers around the world would have to cover their computer screens when the boss walked by well that game was about to arrive in terms of global obsession this next game broke all the records it was one of those classic why didn't I think of that ideas a game so simple no one in the world could resist playing it was called Tetris and next to cocaine it was the most addictive substance being passed around in the party Harty 1980s and the idea came right out of party central well make that Communist Party Central in 1984 Alexey Pajitnov was working at the Academy of Science in Moscow occupation mathematician his hobby puzzles Alexey came up with Tetris using his computer at work he based it on an old Russian puzzle game called pentominoes so this is original container which I brought from Russia and I had an idea to make two-player games with this and I stopped the programming and when I program it I see well in order to put a day you need to flip it or rotate it that was the moment when Tetris was born in 1985 the game was ready and Alexi made his big launch Soviet style release in Russian means that you give the cognate to your friends and that was like a forest of fire in her in two weeks it was on every single DC law school probably Russia at that photo and of course Alexei made a ton of money retired and he's been sitting around sipping Stoli in this dirty room mansion ever since yeah right this was the Soviet Union remember it was the Communist power in Russia so basically at that point we are agreeing that I will grant them all my rights for for ten years so the Communists did what any good capitalist would do they sold the rights to Tetris around the world it started showing up on us computers in January of 1988 and soon everyone was playing at home at work on company time personal time it didn't seem to matter the nation was transfixed kids ask your parents if they say they never played Tetris they're lying that this is very intuitive kids are very good at that this about people who don't senior people like this games everybody find something for himself as this game smelling a hit Nintendo used Tetris to launch Gameboy their new handheld gaming device the very big part of the tetris success is connected to Gameboy somehow this platform and this game was born for each other Gameboy the status was solved and the number of the chameleons exported not only was the game a hit it helped establish the Gameboy as a viable and popular gaming platform that could move software numbers that rival consoles and PCs and continues to do that kind of business today the best part of the story in 1996 Tetris rights returned to Alexey now instead of Stoli he's sipping Starbucks in Seattle where he works with Microsoft and new generations are discovering Tetris on a variety of platforms including mobile phones we collect and distribute royalties for the game they are not that big anymore but but it still gets to him as the 1990s kicked in Nintendo was riding high not only was the gameboy doing great but Nintendo had single-handedly rebuilt the home console market leaving Atari and the toy makers in the dust the NES was the leader of the pack with their lock on hit titles and game franchises sega was also hanging in there with their master system they decided it was time to challenge nintendo supremacy and in 1989 sega launched the genesis console when the Sega Genesis came out it really brought video games to the next generation of technical capabilities club our agency created the slogan Genesis does when intend don't which meant we have a 16-bit system they an 8-bit system was the first competitive position in the video game industry in terms of home game systems in the no-holds-barred campaign Sega rolled out their secret weapon a blue hedgehog called Sonic they said you know what this is gonna be our mascot he's gonna have more of an attitude he's gonna be here toward a slightly older audience and he's gonna be fast they used to show Sonic just like whizzing by on his screen just going super fast while Mario is just kind of jumping up and down and they really made Mario out to be some kids character while Sonic was hey this is the next hottest thing and this sound heard at the end of every Sega commercial Kyle Don the attitude well Sega and Nintendo were fighting over the home market gamers were heading back to the arcades where the games were more graphic and intense games like Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat Mortal Kombat is game or after you've beaten your opponents you can put in what's called a fatality you can rip out their spine in their skull or stick your hand into their chest and pull out their heart or a whole bunch of other really grisly little endings both Sega and Nintendo wanted to match the visual quality of these intense arcade games Sega saw possibilities in a new format cd-rom one CD could hold 320 times more data than a console cartridge to you and me that's just more gaming power just as Sega began to consider the cd-rom personal computers beat them to the punch in 1993 a new game designed for the Macintosh home computer made its debut no pages it was designed by Rand and Robin Miller two brothers who had found modest success designing children's computer games working out of their garage in Spokane Washington they crafted an immersive interactive world Myst typically games start with a gameplay system hours start with a place in our minds we were building real place and some people could lose themselves in that they could sit down in front of their computer it turn the lights down turn the sound up and they'd forget that they were in this world and they would feel like they were in that world the graphics in mist were what defined it because for the first time I think you can saw stuff on their screen that can be mistaken for real images in real places there were some terrific constraints like we couldn't actually move the pictures in real time so we built them very realistic but they were they were still missed was the killer app for CD because it allowed for this incredible wealth of graphics that we had really never seen before floppiness just couldn't handle size of these graphics Myst became the must-have game selling 250,000 copies in 12 months it stayed on computer game bestseller lists for the next three years selling over 4 million copies it also turned the Miller brothers into millionaires I smile because I look back and think when we were too stupid brothers sitting in the garage we didn't have great insight we maybe had some good instincts and the timing was right her loads of gamers Myst was a watershed moment with his enchanting magical graphics helping to create a completely immersive experience but the next killer application for multimedia PC would follow arcade games down a much darker more brutal road and suddenly the videogame industry would find itself in a head-on collision with the US government 20 years after the awesome success of pong videogames had morphed from a geeky hobby for computer engineers to addictive entertainment for the masses and like all success stories the industry soon attracted the attention of big business and law makers okay let's back up to 1981 for a second this is the original Castle Wolfenstein classic let's fight the Nazis computer game when it came to action gaming this was as good as it got with just 11 years later technology would take it to this Wolfenstein 3d was the brainchild of its software a company run by two young game designers named John Carmack and John Romero based in Texas and both in their early 20s they were hardcore gamers with a passion for movies like aliens and Evil Dead and a love for heavy metal music combined these influences with Carmack's recent mastery of smooth scrolling 3d graphics for the PC and you got one of 1992's breakout computer games especially when the buzz got out about its blood and gore content people were quite literally blown away by it because they'd never seen anything like this and it really showed that there could be this whole interesting compelling edgy gaming experience on a PC that you weren't able to find on consoles or necessarily in arcades it was also one of the first games to be played through a first-person perspective since you needed to shoot a lot of people to win it helped coin the video game genre title first person shooter first person shooter is where your eyes are the monitor basically and you get to see your hands or your weapon or whatever in front of you so it's you the first person to us was the most successful interface that there was because you didn't have to think about anything but just what you're doing in the game but the best thing about Wolfenstein 3d was the way it was sold with more and more computers hooking up to the Internet Carmack and Romero could take advantage of a new distribution system called shareware shareware was a really really radical concept of time because what it basically meant is that you'd be giving games away online portions of the game hoping that people got tough here's the first third in the trilogy that you get for free and you leave them with a cliffhanger and all this stuff so they have to buy the other two and it was like crack basically or in the internet and a lot of people got hooked on Wolfenstein hardcore style eighteen months later carmical Romero gave him their next fix the game was called dude December 10th of 1993 when we released doom we'd been up for about 30 hours before that working it was trying to get this uploaded but there were so many people waiting online that it could not get in to upload it and the files and the dress should be in an empty directory but people were putting sentences in there as file names then maybe when will it be here you know and hurry up and stuff is like a whole directory full of sentences and we're just like these people are insane what it had to do was to tell everybody to just back off don't come on for a few minutes while they upload the game when it came to graphic action and intensity doom pushed it farther than Wolfenstein it was an even bigger success my mouth Seminole gaming experience playing doom with my headphones on late at night with my wife asleep in the other room and being really terrified and feeling stupid for being terrified but still being terrified the other thing that made doom appealing to gamers was as multiplayer capabilities go-go-go Network a few computers together and you could start shooting at your buddies inside the same game here they come here they come Carmack and Romero called it death matching through all pretty much 1994 I was just addicted to deathmatch it was just the coolest thing I'd ever experienced my entire life for two young guys in their 20s the success of doom was a dream come true practically overnight the id's software founders have become multimillionaires I totally had fun buying new fun cars and houses and all that kind of stuff Romero would show up at gaming conventions and there would be people literally bowing at his feet and doing the Wayne's World I'm not worthy they really were the rock stars at that time and then when all the controversy came out of her violent games then they had all that to to kind of stoke their image in the year leading up to dooms release violent video games have become headline news makers but not in a good way popularity of games like Street Fighter 2 and mortal combat among young children and teenagers had parents and lawmakers blaming video games for everything from unfinished homework to anti-social behavior and rising street crime in late 1993 the issue has picked up a Connecticut Senator joseph Lieberman who formed a Senate committee to investigate video game violence we're not talking about pac-man or space invaders anymore we're talking about video games that too often glorify violence and teach children to enjoy inflicting the most gruesome forms of cruelty imaginable we are calling on the video game industry today to recognize its responsibilities to the parents and children of this country Lieberman Senate committee wagged their finger at the uncensored version of MORTAL KOMBAT and an obscure game called night trap in the game you play a guy who's trying to protect a house full of sorority girls that are being attacked by these fledgling vampires who apparently don't have fangs yet so they use this grill contraption that hooks up to the neck and sucks their blood up game wasn't selling it wasn't fun it was a silly game lieberman called it gratuitous and offensive and ought not to be available to people in our society his comments turned night trap into one of the biggest selling games of the year the other result of the government hearing was that all major game producers agreed to set up the Entertainment Software Rating board to rate games violence didn't go away but now it came with a warning I was actually a key proponent in the creation of the rating system for video games so I'm a big believer in honest packaging and provided consumers with all the information they need to make a good product decision and to know what they're getting you can only your kiss see r-rated movies is chinnough let your kids play at Medicaid's and what's that because more ingrained in American culture and everyone's minds well then the whole violence issue in video games will become less of an issue with the government battle behind them Sega and Nintendo we're now free to start beating each other up in the marketplace again Sega fired the first volley by announcing their plan to launch a new home system called the Saturn which would operate exclusively from a cd-rom drive Nintendo said well they're going to do it we've got to do it so Nintendo partnered with Sony and they created a CD player for the Super Nintendo called the PlayStation only then Nintendo decided you know what we don't trust Sony very much and they partnered up with Philips they love Sony standing at the altar and as anyone who's been left at the altar knows revenge can be sweet Nintendo's and Philips plans for a cd-rom system began to fall apart and consumer electronics giant Sony decided they could make it in the video game industry all by themselves they kept the same PlayStation which I think was a real plumbing of the nose at the Nintendo everybody knows Sony as a company that makes Walkmans and electronics and then gradually over time consumers have accepted that Sony represents really good quality stuff it just it was a natural progression and then with the PlayStation they just dropped the bomb and was incredible the Sony Playstation hit the shelves in September 1995 and immediately left Sega's new system to Saturn in the dust technologically you could tell about the Saturn move way behind the PlayStation PlayStation handle 3d all of a sudden there was no competition because here's Sony they've got a better unit the unit's a hundred dollars cheaper and they've got all the games you can't compete with sign like that especially when Lara Croft was playing on their team thank you the Tomb Raider first came out in 1996 it was only available for the PlayStation he had not only a female lead character but a sexy woman you know who had big boobs and short shorts she became really popular in the game itself was incredible so Tomb Raider was one of the key games that helped make PlayStation two of the other games that helped push the playstation to success we're a fighting game called Tekken and Crash Bandicoot crash did for Sony when Mario and Sonic had done for their competitors and the character became sort of an unofficial PlayStation mascot Sega just couldn't compete with the might of Sony in 1999 Sega launched another console the Dreamcast it bombed Sega quietly dropped out of the console market to concentrate on game development Sony plan to follow up the PlayStation with the PlayStation 2 which would be more of a multimedia machine able to play CD music and DVD movies but just when it looked like Nintendo would be the only competition a seattle-based company decided it was time to get into the business oh and that company was just about the biggest in the u.s. Microsoft there are a lot of people saying you know Sony's gonna replace the PC with ps2 it occurred to me that the only way to really carry that would be to make a dedicated device to make your game console but Microsoft was all about software and had trouble convincing people in the game business that they knew what they were doing and we had about six months of not really being taken seriously because you know I would show up or you know this mother could show up and say hey we're from Microsoft we're making a game console to compete with Sony now that's a hard thing to say that's like saying worse than the government we're here to help and it turned out the Microsoft did know what they were doing they even got the fact that hardware was useless without killer games when the software giant released the Xbox in 2001 they had an exclusive on a huge first-person shooter Halo if you look at successful console launches and you'll see the console becomes a player for the popular game xbox became the halo player yes this black device with the green circle on it plays halo halo is a big hit because the critics love dates then the hardcore gamers really picked up on it and then word of mouth spread Microsoft might have established their gaming credentials but along with Nintendo's new mini disk system the Gamecube the Xbox was still chasing the market leader Sony's PlayStation 2 now some of the biggest multimedia corporations in the world were gaining control of the video game industry real proof that there were big bucks to be made and the video games were now a major part of the entertainment business and as entertainers the game designers would have to keep the hits coming games today have gone way past the run jump and shoot basics of the early titles instead of blowing up aliens and aiming for high scores gamers are looking for a more realistic immersive and open-ended experience and the gaming audience is changing to boys girls men women they're all getting into games big time whether it's attempting to execute a 900 on a skateboard from the safety of your couch we're deciding how much to tax the residents of your very own virtual City back in the late 80s we'll write a young programmer and a hardcore gamer was fascinated by how cities and societies work urban planning might not sound like the next hot thing and entertainment will thought it was a great idea for a game well SimCity was basically a game we're designing a city it's almost like a paint program in a way you have a palette of parts but the parts in this case were things like roads or industrial zones or schools and as you paint things happen you know people start building houses traffic appears on the roads there's pollution in this crime so we released in 89 it was a very different sort of game at the time you know at that time stole most games were very action-oriented very clear goals and at first we were having a hard time getting anybody to even play it until a rave review in Newsweek put SimCity on the map and cent sales of the game through the roof and a new gaming franchise was born but the big pay day came when will apply to simulation concepts to the human form when the Sims debuted in February of 2000 players can now build simulations of actual people and run their lives it's effectively a dollhouse you get to lead a virtual life and really fun to play I think it's one of the most innovative games ever made The Sims is one of the games that my daughter will play it's one of the games that my wife will play Sims is one that they're immediately drawn to will right wasn't the only one giving gamers the power to build their own world 5,000 miles east of Silicon Valley in England to be exact British designer Peter Molyneux also had a new take on gameplay instead of playing a hero instead of playing a character or a plumber or a hedgehog what do you play god that's the most powerful thing you could possibly be ballin news game populist sold over 4 million copies and gave birth to a new genre the god game rather than actually controlling a single character with your godly powers you influence lots of little characters just as when you were little kids and you were setting up your GI Joes in the sandbox or whatever you're doing the same thing now but with digital toys if some gamers got juiced being God others wanted to get their kicks by playing with a bunch of friends inside the virtual world of a game when the internet exploded in the 90s technology was able to deliver their fantasy one of the first games to really hook into the concept was Carmack in Romero's 1996 follow-up to doom quake quake enabled 16 people to play over the Internet and that really just blew it open there started to be teams of gamers and they called themselves clans oh no no I just wake up in the morning and can't wait to go hop on the game and secrets there stay higher we long not exactly the usual way to win friends and influence people within months of quakes release some of the clans decided to have it get together so they can meet face to face quick on is really a grassroots event it was about fifty guys that that wanted to get together because they met online and thought well we'll just do it in Texas and it just grew this has become a yearly vacation it's my time to just have fun stay up late sleep late meet people I play against online we're in a senior gaming league and we have our own competition anyone over the age of 35 and play I just have five we came out of here to meet our fellow teammates that we play on it's nads North American destroyers our nads set up a group for the younger children we call them it ads and training seven years on from the first fan fest quakecon attracts over five thousand players every summer Texas in August they've got a love quake it seemed people couldn't get enough of playing in big groups so game designers started coming up with games that thousands of computer gamers could play online when you go from 16 or 8 or 32 people to thousands it's massively multiplayer a massively multiplayer game is where you are running the game on your PC and thousands of other people are connecting to the server and that connection is allowing you to interact with the game and communicate with others hot titles included Ultima Online lineage and EverQuest the brainchild of John Smedley in 1999 he persuaded Sony to create a whole new customer service online so that 30,000 people could play at once we make a world for people to play on EverQuest we have a 60 person team that does nothing but make this world unique every day so when they come into work they're changing creatures they're adding new quests there they're looking what the players have done and saying ok that's a little too easy for them let's tweaked out or maybe that's too hard there are dragons and orcs and fairies and Giants and all sorts of creatures and it's supposed to be a virtual world to the extent that whether you're logged on or not the world keeps going so much for the stereotype of a nerdy gamer playing on his own now gamers including women we're joining forces to take on the challenges of EverQuest women are really into forming the relationships and so women do go to these worlds you often find that they become community leaders they become the center of a social group soon millions of computer gamers around the world were logging on to massively multiplayer games PlayStation and Xbox jumped on the bandwagon in 2002 when they made the latest versions of their consoles internet friendly the console online scheme is really just a response to the PC they're looking at what's happening on the PC and saying well we can do that too the game is entertaining and you put it online it's entertaining online and it's awesome it's entertainment square it's a bad game and you put it online you're just spreading the misery around in a more efficient way you probably won't believe it when we tell you this but not everyone plays games for fun remember how back in 1980 the US Army ordered a special version of battlezone from Atari to train the troops the Marines even had their own version of doom in 1994 to teach teamwork skills 21st century army recruits are tech-savvy and into video games big time so it made sense for the military to tap into all that expertise these kids playing 13 hours 20 hours a week video games these thumbs are very agile they no joystick they no triggers and they said let's just make our interfaces like that and we're already over the first hurdle in getting them kind of feel comfortable in these systems in 2002 the Army gave away a game called America's army to the American public intended to test wannabe GIS it turned into a smash hit then they drafted pandemic studios onto a top-secret project they wanted a game that would get recruits ready for combat without putting them at risk full spectrum warrior it's not a war game where you're running around and celebrating the fact that you're killing people your goal is to advance to a certain location or secure something to make sure your men are safe it's a very different take on other military games the army also had a plan to create a retail version of full spectrum warrior of course the GI Joe game needed a few tweaks to make it play for Joe public the army product was made for sergeants who already fully trained years of experience we couldn't make that assumption with the average game player so it's up to us to teach as you play all of the army tactics that the soldiers have spent years learning it's a design challenge because we're moving away from the sim into the purely entertainment aspect of the game so we're trying to find creative ways to keep it authentic but also keep the pace going keep you moving forward get the action level up a bit playing the commercial version might just be one of the best recruiting tools the army could dream up a video games actively improve your hand-eye coordination and I can train you directly in things that are relevant to the military you're planning those things in your head when you're really young hey you want to be a super soldier or you want to play games the Army is the place to go it's pretty ironic that the same government a few years ago hammer the video game industry for damaging young minds is now using the same tools to hook and train their raw recruits video game industry is still full of surprises and now the biggest surprise are not just the games themselves but who's playing how many billions of dollars are involved and who wants to be part of the action so video games have been with us since the 1970s moving from arcades to home consoles to handhelds and cell phones like this they've become essential entertainment for a whole generation and with gross revenues of over 20 billion dollars a year the video game industry is making more money than the movie business but they also continue to be a lightning rod for controversy anytime there's trouble in society video games still get a big chunk of the blame in 1999 two students went on a horrific shooting spree at their school and Columbine and a society searched for a reason people began to blame video games there was a videotape much later I think released of Eric Harris talking about how shooting a high school is going to be just like doom and the press ran with it they just said you know life is bad for America's morality is corrupting kids and it's causing kids to do all sorts of bad things when there's quite a bunch of problems making kids do bad things nowadays there's no correlation between video games and human violence human violence has always been with us we're in a society where politicians and the special interest groups pick on the new media it just underscores the fact that it's not about video games at all and with recent titles like Max Payne and the Grand Theft Auto series the controversy continues who knows if it will ever end in 2004 one hundred and forty five million Americans are playing video games that's more than half of us and they're not all lonely teenage kids sitting in a dark room playing for hours on end people still have this idea to the United States that games are something for fourteen-year-old skater criminals to do to avoid doing their homework and when you point out that you know the middle of our demographic is you know the twenty six-year-old a lot of expendable income is probably professional they just refuse to believe it the female gaming population is actually the quickest growing segment of the video game business almost every girl my age has played a game in her life and would not call herself a gamer but is now 28% of video gamers are women and for PC players the numbers are even higher 41% with such a diverse audience the industry has to use every available resource to keep them hooked thanks to the mega processing power of 21st century computers programmers have been able to develop artificial intelligence which means that non player characters and games can apparently think for themselves what artificial tones should do is look at what you a player enjoy and what you applied doesn't enjoy and adapt the game accordingly not only adapt the challenges you face the opponents you face but I adapt the storyline adapt the world itself yes ultimately we could all proclaim the same game and but but having a completely different experience sports games are still huge and they've kept up with the explosion of action sports like snowboarding and BMX and a little thing called skateboarding there's some games here I can really recommend the latest one called Tony Hawk's Underground you can email a picture of yourself to never saw download it from their server you match up the points to your face and you're in the game it's pretty cool if I say so myself oh not bad where are you from I came all the way down from New Jersey for the Tampa am talk about a surprise attack if you stay on your board tomorrow you'll walk away with the contest another method of customizing games has been around since the early 90s when John Carmack and John Romero put out software that let gamers make their own versions of doom just like hot rodders personalizing their cars gamers could now modify or mod bringing the gaming experience to a new and even more personal level I had put out all the information out there for how the sectors and line segments and everything everything was was organized so everyone had the information they could write tools for it and that was the start of the whole mod scene team spawned this whole culture of mod making which was incredibly far-reaching and important because it was really weaning the next generation of game developers check it out the next wave of designers can even go to school to learn how to create video games for me game design is a design field like architecture it should have courses departments whole schools dedicated to it at schools like USC and the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Seattle a degree in game design is more than just a workout for the thumbs we want to teach people how to be critical thinkers about this rich medium that there isn't historically a lot of academic grounding to we have the Faculty of science and the Faculty of Fine Arts you may not have bargained for so much math you may not have bargained for so much physics you thought that if you played video games you're going to be good at it having more game related studies in a university context is part of what needs to happen for games to become a more mature pop cultural medium but future graduates will have to be pretty determined because none of the videogame pioneers are going away anytime soon after 30 years in the business Atari founder Nolan Bushnell is still coming up with ideas his latest is called you Wang ping touchscreen coin-operated games we're generally in adult locations simple games a little bit Atari asked if you would games that are well produced and operate for adults you can sit down you can play for a few minutes and have a good time and no one's first company Atari has changed hands a few times and hit rock bottom more than once but they've stormed back with a slew of hit games like Enter the Matrix and Unreal Tournament the Rockstar designers are also looking at new ways to deliver great games to us everyone's got a cell phone right with a cell phone you can play video games anytime anywhere even though the handset may not have a lot of computing power itself it's connected to an incredibly vast computer network I saw that now mobile devices like PDAs had the power to actually play games well on them you know that's always kind of going in the back of my mind is how can I do something else that I think would be a killer app for this new platform with all those guys still pushing the envelope a new designers joining their ranks every day we can't even imagine what games are going to look like 10 years from now in just a few short decades videogames have led an entertainment revolution movies television they haven't been the same since video games arrived on the scene there's a perception in the game industry that games are in their infancy we've achieved a lot but we're far from where it's gonna be and more than that they continue to massively impact every aspect of our culture influencing everything from education to the military people really do wonder how can you play that damn thing for 40 hours I mean they have 40 hours okay it must be deep and must be doing something for you so the emotional experience we have with games is something everybody can have with games as the debate of their violence and addictiveness rages on video games also continue to drive the leading edge of computer technology opening players minds to new concepts of strategy and tactical thinking and capturing the attention of the world in bold and unexpected ways in the next 20 years the person who is in the White House will have played Super Mario Brothers and what will that mean for the way that they think about policy or the way they think about resource distribution or the way they think about problem-solving people in their 30s grew up playing this stuff are now paying attention to it and we don't think twice about it and we don't think these games are just for kids we don't think these games are destroying the fabric of we for us it's just like music it's just like TV is just like film it's part of life thanks to the vision of the guys behind the games there's no limit to where they'll take us in the future video game invasion it's just beginning yes

Channel: Gameplayerspecial

Views: 330,501

Rating: 4.8173075 out of 5

Keywords: video, game, invasion, history, global, obsession, 2004, videogame, video game, tony hawk, arcade, xbox, coleco, intellivision, commodore

Id: O4dPSOncwVQ

Length: 90min 25sec (5425 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 21 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/boydie]

It’s a great documentary, some of the books that cover this are also great, there’s one from Seva on how they caught up with Nintendo

[u/aquietmanmike]

Is Tony Hawk a gamer or is it just because he's a celebrity that he is hosting this? Feels strange to see, is all.