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Black Ink

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Don’t believe the lie of Dark Souls.

“You Died”, it tells you in big bold letters, a jeering taunt that follows practically any new discovery you make on your travels – any new beast you have yet to slay or devious trap you haven’t outsmarted, anything and everything in the treacherous world of Lordran will cause your quick and unfeeling death.

So progress in Dark Souls is achieved blindly, as you daringly throw yourself into unknown territory until something again stops you dead in your tracks. After being revived at one of the game’s sparse few checkpoints, slain enemies jump back to life, leaving you to see if maybe you can progress just a litle bit further. Once more unto the breach.

But to me, Dark Souls shares more with an author’s proverbial balled-up drafts in the wastebasket. It’s really about editing.

Dark Souls is like a notebook whose empty pages never dwindle.

———

New Year’s Eve is never as glorious and lively a night as you’d like it to be, and the arrival of 2013 was a particularly weak moment for myself. Various plans and backup plans had somehow fallen apart, and I found myself drinking on my own in an anonymous bar surrounded by cheerful noise, alone with my thoughts.

We’ve all been there, and as one does on such an occasion, I began thinking back on 2012 and found my achievements lacking. Whether or not they actually were had probably stopped being important a few glasses of whiskey ago – at this point I was only interested in counting my perceived failures and shortcomings.

My most damning realization was another year had come and gone and I was still no closer to being an accomplished writer. It stung because of the strides I’d made while waiting for editors to reply: I had started a gaming magazine of my own in the past year, recruiting other amateur or would-be writers to help fill its pages. It forced me to write more frequently, communicate efficiently, keep track of other writers, even speak assertively to their work and its flaws, confronting and fixing them.

My plans were to release a free PDF every two months, and to my genuine surprise it seemed to work. People wrote. I edited. A friend from Canada did the design. It all somehow fell into place.

The first issue wasn’t terribly impressive, but it was ours. We had made something, and from scratch. The second issue improved on the concept with more variety. The third was to have gone out that earlier that day, but I hadn’t heard from the designer; at the time, all I knew was that the one big thing I had made this year seemed to be falling apart, and it didn’t seem that there was anything I could do about it.

Games, by and large, are a great antidote to such feelings of disempowerment. They plant you in a world that is built specifically for you. A world that depends on you, where rewards are plentiful and you’re always being groomed for the challenges ahead.

Alone, drunk in that bar, it was a great time for self-pity. I wanted a game that would leave me as powerless as I felt in the moment. When I rolled out of bed later that morning (or afternoon) I remembered acquiring Dark Souls in the stupor of a Steam sale. It seemed like just the game to gleefully embrace misery.

Of course, if you’ve spent any time with Dark Souls you know that misery is only half the battle. What might at first seem like your own personal hell – I was crushed, impaled, burned alive, thrown from cliffs and generally suffered more than I could imagine – gradually finds a shape beyond rote repetition. It’s a chance to create one perfect version of your adventure. Like a notebook whose empty pages never dwindle.

Your successes stick, and not just because you eventually conquer the falsely confident notion that your souls – the game’s combination currency and experience points earned from kills and yours to lose at death – aren’t rightfully yours, not really, until you can get them to checkpoint safety.

The game certainly doesn’t grow harder when you slip up. It doesn’t keep track of failed attempts, creating a living monument to your own inability the way Super Meat Boy does. It simply sets you back in time and allows you to rewrite that passage of your adventure until, at last, you pen the one version of your story that works.

You can take a lot of general life lessons about perseverance and learning from mistakes here, but it’s the idea of constantly working towards your final draft, and doing so without getting too hung up on the flawed iterations that painstakingly delivered it, that got me thinking. It might not necessarily show in the work I deliver, but I’m actually a painfully slow and meticulous writer; it can take hours to create as little as a hundred words because I’m trapped in some circular train of thought trying to decide between two equally valid word choices.

As frustrating as it can be to wrestle with perfectionism that shoots down sentences before you can even get them onscreen, I see it as a noble (if, yes,  unrealistic) goal to strive towards high standards. But you can’t apply this thinking to everything. You can’t expect things to be perfect immediately, or allow anger over flaws in a temporary placeholder.

Maybe sketching, dawdling, doodling and endlessly toying with sentences are just things I need to do, and maybe none of it gets me any closer to what I’m actually trying to say. But it’s part of writing the narrative. And damn it, I can fail as often and as awkwardly as I want – this is the only version you’ll ever see. Only I am counting the discarded pages.

It’s a debt of gratitude I owe mostly to Dark Souls’ hated knight duo Ornstein and Smough. Arguably no other challenge in the game inspires as much loathing, as many heated tales: well-meaning friends warned me, muttering the names of this tag-team boss pair like curses. They weren’t lying, either, probably because it’s the only time in Dark Souls’ cruelty when you’re fighting two bosses at once.

When early bosses had me stumped for hours, I was angry that I wasn’t learning their tricks fast enough or progressing on my own terms, but I still managed to take them down despite my frustration. Ornstein and Smough sent me from controller-smashing, desk-slamming rage to silent fuming and back again before I had even managed to put a chink in their armor.

Fury turned into angry determination, maledictions into sighs and despairing moans. Eventually, I just ran out of emotions. I was flat out of feelings. Indifferent.

When you’re working towards a goal (or at any other time, really), anger is a pretty useless emotion. In my efforts to slay the hated knights I noticed the more riled up I became the progressively worse my performance. It got to the point where I’d do so poorly I’d be forced to quit the game, only to return a few hours later.

Only when I had stopped giving a damn about losing did I finally start to improve. It was a liberating realization: I could fail as many times as it would take, because sooner or later I’d finish that draft and finally get published. Sooner or later I’d kill Ornstein and Smough.

That’s the version you’re getting, anyway.

———

Follow Johannes Köller on Twitter @deadpanlunatic.

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- Journey

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15.06.2013 | Autor: André

Die Kommunikation zwischen Spielern ist etwas Wunderbares. Ein einziges „Hör auf Granaten zu spammen, du Opfer!“ sagt bekanntlich mehr, als 1000 wohlerzogene Aufforderungen. Es gibt daher Menschen, die an PC und Konsole grundsätzlich zumindest die Sprachübertragung verweigern. Entwickler hingegen, tun das in der Regel nicht. Sie überlassen dem Spieler die Entscheidung, ob für ihn heute ein guter Tag ist, um den Wortschatz für Konfliktsituationen aufzumöbeln. Eine interessante Frage, die sich mir während der E3 stellte, lautete aber: Sollten sie ihm diese Entscheidung wirklich immer überlassen?

Jenova Chen ist 32 und der Designer von „Journey“, einem PS3-Exklusivtitel, der mehr Preise gewonnen hat, als andere Leute Spiele verkaufen. Es ist ein Spiel, in dem man eine grazile, staksige Figur durch riesige, verlassene Welten steuert. Nur ganz selten begegnet man einem anderen Wanderer. Dabei handelt es sich ausnahmslos um menschliche Mitspieler. Der „Online-Modus“ von „Journey“ bedeutet im wahrsten Sinne den Anschluss an die Umwelt. Das Netzwerk ist das Tor, durch das andere Spieler in unsere Welt gelangen. Nur reden, kann man mit ihnen nicht. Die Sprachübertragung der PS3, haben die Entwickler absichtlich deaktiviert.

Als ich Chen am auf der E3 treffe, will ich mit ihm eigentlich über seinen einzigartigen Designansatz sprechen. Jedes Spiel von thatgamecompany wird nicht mit Blick auf ein bestimmtes Genre oder eine Geschichte entwickelt, sondern basiert auf einem Gefühl: Freude, Liebe, Einsamkeit – dergleichen.

Jetzt stellt euch kurz vor, wie der eine zum anderen sagt: ‘Jetzt komm weiter, du Lutschgesicht, mein Essen wird kalt!’

Es ist ein bemerkenswerter Prozess, der damit beginnt, dass Chen seinem Team irgendwie erklären muss, welches Gefühl er im Sinn hat und was dieses Gefühl für ihn persönlich überhaupt bedeutet. Alle übrigen Spielbestandteile, werden dann nur noch dazu entwickelt, das gewünschte Gefühl zu erzeugen. Sprachchat, so erzählt er mir, habe sich daher recht schnell disqualifiziert.

Weil es in „Journey“ aber auch um seltene Begegnungen in der Einsamkeit geht, schien ihm die Idee der Kommunikation zwischen den Spielern überaus passend.

Das Problem war nur: zu viele Spieler waren alle Arschgeigen! Nachdem sein Team die Sprachübertragung als Störquelle ausgeschlossen hatte, flog als nächstes das Chatfenster. „Selbst wenn die Leute sich benahmen, schrieb andauernd jemand „Bist du männlich oder weiblich?“ in den Chat, erzählt Chen.

‘Call of Duty’-Spieler: Wurden Sie geschult, Leute von Klippen zu schubbsen, wenn es irgendwie geht?

Eine Begegnung in „Journey“ sollte aber Freude und Neugier hervorrufen, nicht Augenrollen. Daher entwickelte das Team ein eigenes System zur Verständigung. Die Figuren in „Journey“ rufen einander nun durch niedliche Fieps-Geräusche, während fremdartige Symbole über ihren Köpfen erscheinen.

Laut Chen ist es kein Wunder, dass heutige Spieler von Haus in vielen fällen keine guten Teamplayer sind. „Die Spieler sind es gewohnt, in Spielen eine Machtposition einzunehmen und nach einer direkten Belohnung zu streben. Selbst die meisten kooperativen Spiele sind im Grunde nicht sozial. Der Mitspieler ist darin nur ein Mittel zum Zweck, das ich brauche, um schwierigere Gegner zu bezwingen“, so Chen. Um den Mitspieler in „Journey“ wertvoll zu machen, trifft man daher nur so selten auf andere Reisende. Damit man den Mitspieler nur in seiner Rolle im Spiel wahrnimmt und nicht als nörgelnden Studenten mit Vollbart, muss der Mensch dahinter die Klappe halten.

Nachdem die direkte Kommunikation zwischen den Spielern gekappt war, dachte Chen daher, nun würde Ruhe einkehren. Doch es stellte sich heraus: Wenn der Spieler einen Weg sucht, jemanden darüber zu informieren, dass seine Mutter ja nun mal gar nicht kochen kann, ist ihm jedes Mittel Recht. In diesem Falle eben per Körpersprache. Plötzlich begannen die Testspieler damit in ihre neuen Kameraden hinein zu rennen, um sie gegen Wände zu klatschen, vor sich her zu treiben oder von einer Klippe zu stoßen. Es scheint, als wäre vielen Spielern ihr destruktives Verhalten einfach nicht auszutreiben.

Diesen Impuls zu überwinden, gelingt zwar einem Teil der Spieler, aber der Anteil an Unruhestiftern bleibt hoch. Chen musste einsehen, dass es nur eine Möglichkeit gibt, sicher dafür zu sorgen, dass nicht ein Spieler dem anderen die Atmosphäre von „Journey“ versaut:„Ich habe dann kurz den Gauben an die Menschheit verloren und dann haben wir den physikalischen Kontakt unter den Figuren eben komplett aus dem Spiel entfernt“, lacht er.

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Von ludonarrativer Dissonanz

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Spiele sind heute ein Medium, in dem es oft nicht mehr vornehmlich darauf ankommt, bestimmte Herausforderungen zu bestehen oder Hindernisse zu überwinden. Stattdessen wollen sie Geschichten erzählen – über Liebe, Leben, Politik, Kultur, Krieg und Hass. Seitdem mit der ersten Playstation und dem N64 3D-Spiele der Normalfall wurden, haben sich die bewährten Genregrenzen jedoch kaum noch verschoben. Ein Widerspruch entsteht – zwischen der Geschichte eines Spiels und seiner Story. Geboren ist ein aktuelles Trendthema der Spieleszene: Ludonarrative Dissonanz!

Die Diskussion um die Widersprüchlichkeit zwischen Spielgeschehen und Geschichte wurde dabei interessanterweise nicht durch theoretische Überlegungen von Spielentwicklern ausgelöst. Stattdessen waren es hauptsächlich die Kritiker, die in konkreten Veröffentlichungen der letzten Monate allzu arge ludonarrative Dissonanzen sahen. Im Paradebeispiel, der Neuauflage von Tomb Raider, versuchten die Entwickler von Square Enix, die Geburt einer Heldin zu porträtieren. Von einem schlimmen Sturm auf hoher See erwischt, landet die noch junge Lara Croft auf einer geheimnisvollen Insel, die von skrupellosen Banditen bewohnt wird. In vielen (teils via Quick-Time-Events interaktiv gestalteten) Zwischensequenzen, wird dem Spieler die Verletzlichkeit der Protagonistin vor Augen geführt. Lara bleibt an jedem rostigen Nagel hängen, kriecht stöhnend durch Höhlen, die sich vor allem durch ihr geschmackvolles Interieur auszeichnen – das nämlich besteht größtenteils aus Knochen, Blut und Leichenteilen. Wenig später ist die Arme auch noch gezwungen, ein Reh zu jagen, zu schlachten und zu essen – um zu überleben versteht sich. Reuevoll entschuldigt sich Lara bei ihrem Opfer. Dann beginnt das eigentliche Gameplay und nachdem kaum 30 Minuten vergangen sind, schießt Lara bereits dem zehnten menschlichen Gegner mit der Flinte ins Gesicht. An eine glaubwürdige Erzählung ist nicht mehr zu denken.

Was Ayn Rand damit zu tun hat

Der Begriff der ludonarrativen Dissonanz in Computerspielen wurde erstmals in größerem Rahmen im Jahr 2007 von der Öffentlichkeit wahrgenommen, als Clint Hocking, seines Zeichens ehemaliger Kreativdirektor bei LucasArts, später Ubisoft, in seinem Blog Bioshock für ebendiesen Widerspruch kritisierte. Wir erinnern uns: Bioshock spielt in der fiktiven Unterwasserstadt Rapture, die auf den Ideen der russisch-amerikanischen Schriftstellerin und Philosophin Ayn Rand errichtet wurde. Als der Spieler in der Stadt ankommt, befindet sich diese jedoch bereits in einem desolaten Zustand, Bürgerkrieg und genetische Manipulation haben alles zugrunde gerichtet, wofür sie stehen sollte. Bioshock ist damit und durch den Verlauf der Geschichte selbst eine Kritik an Ayn Rands Philosophie. Rand’sche Ethik bedeutet verkürzt gesagt: Der höchste ethische Wert ist das Leben. „Gut“ ist dabei alles, was das eigene Leben als rationales Wesen fördert, „schlecht“ ist alles, was dem eigenen Leben schadet. Das große Problem ist nun, dass Bioshock ein Ego-Shooter ist, der grundsätzlich nach ebendiesen Werten funktionieren  muss – schließlich will der Spieler überleben, alles Feindliche wird über den Haufen geschossen. Was gut für den Spieler ist, ist gut für den Fortschritt der Geschichte. Zudem macht Bioshock das rücksichtslose und egoistische Ausbeuten der Little Sisters zu einer vernünftigen Option – schließlich bekommt er dafür mehr Adam, womit er schließlich seine Fähigkeiten schneller erweitern kann. Als Bestrafung gibt es lediglich eine veränderte Endsequenz. Leider steht genau diese Spielmechanik jedoch im krassen Gegensatz zur Botschaft des Spiels. Die sagt nämlich wiederum, dass Macht korrumpiert und dass schierer Egoismus alles andere als ein Garant für ein funktionierendes Gemeinwesen ist.

Resonanz als Spaßbremse

Leider lässt sich ludonarrative Dissonanz in Spielen zu einem gewissen Grad kaum vermeiden. Bis auf wenige Ausnahmen enthält ein Egoshooter immer eine zentrale Figur, den vom Spieler gesteuerten Protagonisten, der Wellen von gegnerischen Soldaten, Aliens, Mutanten oder Monstern um die Ecke bringt ohne dabei auch nur mit der Wimper zu zucken. Die in den meisten neueren Spielen aus diesem Genre hinzugekommene Fähigkeit, sich durch einen kleinen Rückzug komplett selbst heilen zu können, trägt auch nicht unbedingt dazu bei, dieses Geschehen realistischer erscheinen zu lassen. Eine solche Geschichte kann somit, gemessen an ihrer ludonarrativen Resonanz (als Grad der Einheit von Story und Gameplay) niemals glaubwürdig funktionieren. Sie wird zur James-Bond-Geschichte, in der sämtliche Handlungen überzogen wirken, die Spielerfigur übermächtig oder ihre Feinde außergewöhnlich schwach. Selbst in Survival-Horror-Spielen wie Dead Space, die naturgemäß darauf ausgelegt sind, die Spielerfigur verletzlich und verwundbar zu präsentieren, hat diese nach den Credits meist eine absolut atemberaubende Abschussliste. Spiele, die sich mit dem Problem ludonarrativer Dissonanz nicht herumschlagen müssen, sind  zwangsläufig solche, die sich selbst nicht ernst nehmen oder die von Anfang an bewusst eine derart überzogene Fantasy-Geschichte präsentieren, dass jede Frage nach Glaubwürdigkeit ohnehin lächerlich wäre. Beispiele hierfür sind Bayonetta, die Final-Fantasy-Titel und zu einem gewissen grad auch die Assassin’s-Creed-Reihe, wo die Frage nach dem Realismusgehalt durch die Installation des Animus gleich komplett umgangen wird. Einen geschickten Kniff wagten auch die Entwickler von Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, die die Geschichte des Spiels zur Erzählung eines alternden Revolverhelden machten, der zudem auch noch immer betrunkener wird. Bioshock Infinite hat dagegen ein ganz ähnliches Problem wie der von Hocking kritisierte erste Teil: philosophische Themen, Fragen nach Schuld, Sühne, Fürsorge und Herrschaft werden durch Ego-Shooter-Passagen unterbrochen, in denen Booker DeWitt mehr Menschen tötet als der Spieler zählen kann.

Wege aus der Dissonanz

Natürlich sind Shooter für ludonarrative Dissonanzen besonders anfällig. In den meisten Rollenspielen, die sich bemühen, glaubwürdige Welten zu zeichnen, verhält es sich jedoch prinzipiell ähnlich, Strategiespiele und Wirtschaftssimulationen, die ohnehin keinen allzu ausgeprägten Story-Fokus haben, kommen meist gar nicht in die Verlegenheit, sich mit inneren Widersprüchen auseinandersetzen zu müssen. Klassische Adventures kämpfen sowieso mit anderen Problemen – hier sind Spielwelten zwar meist in sich schlüssig, trotzdem bleibt aber unerklärt, warum der Spieler erst ein kompliziertes Rätsel lösen muss, um einen bestimmten Charakter überhaupt aufwecken zu können, warum die Spielerfigur über bestimmte Mauern und Zäune nicht einfach klettern kann oder warum manch wünschenswerte Dialogoption einfach nicht zur Verfügung steht. Wenn Spiele jedoch ernsthafte und glaubwürdige Geschichten erzählen und gleichzeitig nicht zu interaktiven Filmen verkommen wollen, müssen Entwickler kleine Meisterleistungen vollbringen. Denn allzu akribisch integrierter Realismus tut keinem Spiel gut. Niemand will bei Call of Duty nach einem Schuss ins Knie erst einmal ein halbes Jahr Pause machen. Niemand will in einem Adventure 20 Minuten auf den Bus warten und wirklich kein Mensch hätte Spaß daran, ein Raumschiff so zu steuern, wie es sich physikalisch korrekterweise verhalten müsste. Was also tun? Ich glaube, dass für ein glaubwürdiges Spielerlebnis vor allem Genregrenzen fallen müssen. Auf Xbox, PlayStation 3 und GameCube funktionierte Beyond Good and Evil nicht zuletzt deshalb hervorragend. Es bot Versatzstücke aus vielen Genres, verzichtete auf massenhaft umzunietende Gegnermassen und verkam trotzdem nicht zu einem frustrierenden Schleichspiel. Es bot eine Science-Fiction-Geschichte mit Gehalt und Aussage, die in jeder Sekunde immersiv und in sich schlüssig war. Ein reiner Ego-Shooter wird ein solches Erlebnis nie bieten können. Muss er auch nicht. Ego-Shooter dürfen James-Bond-Shooter bleiben und haben als solche ihre Berechtigung. Das Entwicklerstudio Telltale hat mit The Walking Dead allerdings bewiesen, dass ein Zombie-Szenario als Adventure funktionieren kann und zwar immersiver als es als Shooter je hätte sein können. Manche Themen können in bestimmten Genres besser behandelt werden als in anderen. Experimentierfreude ist gefragt. Und ich glaube, dass Spieler auf weitere Überraschungen mit Recht sehr gespannt sein dürfen.

(Screenshot: Square Enix)

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The Revival of a Long-Lost Gaming Genre : The New Yorker

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Hundreds of metres above a burning city, a businessman crashes out of an office window. He arcs across the sky before curling into a stuntman’s tumble. He loses no momentum as he lands on the roof below and straightens into a sprint, his suit jacket flapping in the quickening wind. He leaps over a gap, his arms rotating like helicopter blades as he soars across it. He lands, and, accelerating again, continues to bolt from the unseen terror in pursuit. He miscalculates the next gap and leaps prematurely, then falls in slow motion toward a grisly death on the sidewalk below. A postmortem appears on the screen: “You ran 1533m before hitting a wall and tumbling to your death.” This is what it’s like to play Canabalt, a video game that has sparked an entirely new genre of play for mobile phones.

After thirty-odd years of invention and iteration, wholly new gaming genres rarely emerge, and when they do, they are often niche. But the “endless runner,” as the genre is called, has quickly become ubiquitous in the smartphone era. Temple Run is the second most downloaded game in Apple’s App Store, while a similar title, Jetpack Joyride, has exceeded a hundred million downloads. In these games, players attempt to see how far they can successfully gallop and tumble along a track before they trip and crash. It is a simple style of game to play and, apparently, a simple style of game to create.

“The first endless runner I played was Canabalt,” said Luke Muscat, Jetpack Joyride’s designer. “You had this single button to jump. I loved the juxtaposition of high-intensity action with absolute simplicity.” Prior to Canabalt’s release, game makers had struggled to reconcile the smartphone’s absence of buttons with the interactive complexities of contemporary video games. Canabalt’s solution was elegant and simple: tap anywhere on the glass and your character leaps. Muscat recalled: “I remember playing Canabalt and just thinking, How has nobody ever thought of this before?”

Canabalt’s creator, Adam Saltsman, had been searching for a follow-up to Wurdle, his first commercially successful game, since its 2008 release. He built a number of prototypes, but none of his ideas had that indefinable frisson required of a smash hit. “I wasn’t feeling depressed,” he said. “But I was feeling keen angst. I’d spent at least a year not finishing the things I’d started.”

Saltsman found his way into the Experimental Gameplay Project, a monthly “game jam,” in which participants have just seven days to create a game for a specified theme. “Everything tumbled out in a very practical manner; the design was dictating what I should be doing,” he said. “I knew there was going to be a guy running and jumping over gaps, and I knew I wanted the game to be fast, like a racing game. I love games that deliver a sense of vertigo.” Inspiration for the rooftop setting came from the title sequences of the Bond movie “Casino Royale” and the television series “Mad Men,” both of which featured suited men running along or falling from tall buildings.

Set against the muted backdrop of a city under siege, Canabalt’s distinctive color scheme came about through an early image that Saltsman drew. “There were only six colors in my sketch, but I liked the look of it so I ended up using that to do all the final artwork,” said Saltsman. “I gave the character a suit, as I needed him to stand out against the grays of the cityscape behind. If he wasn’t black and white, you simply weren’t going to see him.”

By the end of the week, the game was ready. But it needed a name. That summer, Saltsman had watched his nephew shouting “cannonball” as he jumped into the pool. “At the same time, we were playing a PlayStation game in the evenings that featured catapults. He had real difficulty pronouncing this word. We would practice it, and he would scrunch up his face and say ‘Canabalt,’ ” Saltsman said. “We’ve since made a healthy donation to his college fund.”

Canabalt launched quietly. Saltsman posted a short message on a game-developer forum, pointing readers toward a Web site where they could play the game. Word of Canabalt spread throughout the close-knit community of indie game makers and spilled onto social networks. A couple of weeks later, Saltsman received an e-mail from Scott Stoddard, a game designer at Adult Swim, seeking permission to riff on Canabalt, and promising that his game would look very different.

Stoddard’s game, Robot Unicorn Attack, took Canabalt’s basic template and re-skinned it with Saturday-morning-cartoon exuberance. You play as a robotic unicorn with a rippling rainbow mane, collecting pixies while Erasure’s “Always” plays in the background. The combination of Adult Swim’s vast audience and the game’s quirky theme transformed Robot Unicorn Attack into an Internet meme.

While the term “endless runner” had yet to be coined, the creation of Canabalt and Robot Unicorn Attack indicated the discovery of a new type of video game. Within a few months, the App Store was teeming with clones.

While nobody would contest that Canabalt had popularized the genre, some doubt whether it originated it, Saltsman included: “Two months after Canabalt’s release, I remembered an old DOS game. You had to fly a helicopter down a tunnel, avoiding obstacles in order to see how far you could go.” Saltsman wasn’t the only one probing his memory for Canabalt’s predecessors. As Wikipedia’s volunteer contributors tried to pin down the origins of the endless runner, discussion turned to a 1983 Commodore 64 game, B.C.’s Quest for Tires.

When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak left Atari to develop the first Apple home computer, Chuck Benton was working for a company developing flight simulators. “I was running field engineering for the company, which meant I had to fly to training locations whenever anything went wrong with one of the machines,” he said. “I pleaded for the company to buy me an Apple, saying I would write the software to automate the paperwork side of my work. It worked.”

Benton, a self-taught programmer, started work on a video game. His first project was Softporn Adventure, in which players had to convince women to sleep with the lead character. After failing to find anyone willing to advertise and promote the game, he sold the rights to the video-game publisher Sierra. It would later turn the game into the Leisure Suit Larry series.

Sierra hired Benton to convert its ColecoVision titles to the Commodore 64 and, over the next two years, the young programmer adapted no fewer than twenty games. “I’d play the game as far as I could,” explained Benton, “and then would, essentially, create a knock-off of what I’d seen.” One of these titles was B.C.’s Quest For Tires, in which players guide a caveman riding a unicycle around obstacles as he races to save his kidnapped girlfriend. “I caught up with their programmers and so began designing the second half of the game myself, even though it wasn’t part of the contract.” Sierra liked Benton’s design work so much they requested he start sending his builds back to their offices, for their in-house designers to copy.

Work on B.C.’s Quest for Tires was completed in just eight weeks. It became a sizeable hit for its time, selling over fifty thousand copies. Despite the game’s commercial success, its unique auto-runner design wasn’t copied.

Two years after the game’s release, Benton was approached by DARPA to create video games that could be used to train U.S. soldiers, work that would result in the SIMNET project, an early vehicle-based combat simulation. He left the consumer-video-game industry, and never revisited B.C.’s Quest for Tires. “It makes me shake my head,” he said. “I’ve always wondered how life might have gone if I stayed in the game business.”

Following Canabalt’s release, a handful of titles have taken the genre in new directions: Jetpack Joyride introduced vehicles, which altered the pacing of the game; Temple Run’s over-the-shoulder viewpoint, which tails a character from behind as he flees a gaggle of spectres through an ancient ruin, has inspired a new subset of imitators. Meanwhile, the San Francisco–based studio Gaijin Games has introduced a musical element with Bit.Trip Runner, whose course acts like an abstracted musical stave and every jump triggers a different sound sample.

This past November, Canabalt was one of fourteen titles selected for inclusion in an exhibition on video games at the New York Museum of Modern Art, alongside seminal greats like Pac-Man and Tetris. “The human emotion of speed is something I’m fascinated by,” Saltsman told me. “But you know, I don’t want to make anything about running for a while.”

Credit: Canabalt.com.

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The Woman on the Box — Editor's Picks — Medium

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The last of us / sCEA

Sam Machkovech
Hi, @medium! Nice place you got here. Find my other ramblings at samred.com || @samred || wherever finer tacos are sold.

Published
June 7, 2013

The Woman on the Box

If you want to assign a review score to the most important parts of new games Remember Me and The Last of Us, break out your 10s.

I have seen a certain crop of videogames fail before. Fail to sell, fail to “recoup” and “excite”; instead, they stand out as a sore thumb in a giant game company’s quarterly report.

I don’t mean the obvious duds, full of glitches or bad play. This crop of videogames explodes with stuff like color, experimentation, and dialogue-rich plot. These games feel familiar, yet take every scenic detour to nudge the average gaming Joe and Jane into newish territory.

But this crop seems to bomb—at least financially—every time. It’s all I can think of this week while playing (arguably) June’s biggest console titles. I’m exploring a memory-tainted, sci-fi dystopia in new adventure game Remember Me, and I’m sneaking and mourning around the wasteland of upcoming PlayStation exclusive The Last of Us.

Here are two welcome strides for the industry’s mainstream; two titles that shake a few sacred gaming babies to maybe birth something new. And while I enjoy these games, I also ponder their mediocrities—their pacing flaws and dialogue missteps and ho-hum sequences—and watch the games’ figurative review scores drizzle and melt. Getting to their best bits requires just a few too many button presses, or a few gaming-specific hurdles, and in the “gotta quantify it” game-review scene, that means fewer stars, fewer points.

Thus, their importance and qualities, like other games from their crop, fall by the wayside in that short-term, quarterly way, and folks in suits wring their hands, point at the box art, and blame the crop’s other commonality: women. Women as the lead characters, women figuring hugely in the plot, women receiving a particular level of respect.

Those aspects are among the best bits of these two games: Ellie and Tess in The Last of Us; Nilin and Olga in Remember Me. And yet all I can hear is those suits whispering, “Let’s not do that again,” over a conference call’s mute button.
The hero of Hillys, the woman they call Jade: Beyond Good & Evil’s heroine wielded equal parts camera and cane.
For the uninitiated, games with so-called “strong” lady characters exist, and some have done quite well for themselves. Cue about 2,000 Tomb Raider references. But this week’s one-two punch of strong-lady games immediately recalls a graveyard of commercial fumbles, a graveyard that outpaces the work of one Lara Croft.

Mirror’s Edge. Beyond Good & Evil. King’s Quest VII. Arguably, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, which sold plenty but not as much as Nintendo had expected. These games put women at the forefront while either tweaking known series or putting odd spins on other mainstream fare.

Respectively: A parkour-loving secret agent sprinting through a first-person adventure. A photojournalist whose camera figured as much as her weaponry. A point-and-click adventure that put more emphasis on accessible story than its forebears. A revitalized take on an old classic.

All of those games received lukewarm responses at their launches, yet they also did something crazy with women: They let them be characters first, women second. Not to say they were deprived of their sexuality, but for the most part, they were not defined by their relationships, their need for romance, or their connection to a male hero. (In Zelda’s case, the titular princess appears with some actual backbone as an adventurer for once; sadly, she’s reduced to a helpless damsel later on, but her Wind Waker pirate incarnation was an out-and-obvious asskicker as opposed to her “secret non-gendered hero” incarnations in other titles.)
Shockingly, at no point during Remember Me does Nilin kick a guy in the balls while shouting “Remember THIS.”
In this week’s Remember Me, main character Nilin starts her story as a blank slate, wiped clean of her memories and learning her ways by a combination of encouragement and occasional revelation. She eventually returns to her original life as an “errorist,” a future-fighter in the last 21st century who jacks into people’s memories to subvert the state, while both retaining her feminine identity and not being locked to it. Nilin’s story is about redemption through battle and discovery, not through love, men, or dependence.

Her game suffers from trying to put a twist on recent punch-everything games. In Remember Me, players create their own “combos,” then rhythmically tap punches and kicks to clear out giant crowds of foes. There’s a lot of that, and it’s fine, fine like a house salad or a later-era episode of Cheers. A brutal “fine,” really.

The better stuff comes when Nilin gets to “remix” memories, and it’s among the coolest things you’ll experience in a 2013 game. She breaks into people’s brains, then rewinds and fast-forwards their memories to change little bits of them and tell entirely new stories—or reveal side-stories that explain a tertiary character or a thinly referenced plot point. In the year of the Twine revolution, it’s good to see a giant games company try their own tremendous spin on interactive fiction (though, sadly, it doesn’t come often enough in this game, and the gimmick doesn’t always make up for the script).

Next week, we’ll see The Last of Us hit stores, from the folks who brought us Uncharted—a game series that pretty much played how you’d want an Indiana Jones game to play. Lots of bravado and gunplay and biting, sarcastic quips. Also, lots of women—armed to the teeth and ready to fight, sure, but also enmeshed in love triangles and reduced to objects for the series’ hero to contend with.

The Last of Us takes a different route—namely, a stealthier, far brutal route through a zombie-ridden wasteland, where killing isn’t as frequent and is meant to feel more disturbing. You control Joel, a renegade survivor with a chip on his shoulder and a mission to ferry a special 14-year-old across broken America’s most hazardous zones. Shoot guns, sneak behind broken cars, smash men and zombies alike with bricks.

At first blush, the newer game seems to fail because it has been made by Uncharted’s parents. The “stealth” stuff triggers weirdly, where some foes are oblivious to your presence, while others smell you faster than a drug dog running up to Li’l Wayne. The supposed need to conserve ammo and scavenge the land for useful gear doesn’t come to fruition; your hero eventually has so many guns and arrows on his back, it’s hard not to imagine him ripping his shirt off and equipping a red Rambo bandanna.

But that stuff shouldn’t mean a kiss of death. The game world is beautiful, turning America into an overrun jungle bathed in sunsets and gloom; its tense action sequences are among the best of this generation of adventure games; the acting and storytelling are top-notch; and, holy cow, this is a game where women get their due.

The opening sequence tells a story of a little girl feeling abandoned by her father in a way only a video game could. Soon after, your main character Joel enjoys an uneasy truce with a hard-nosed survivor named Tess, and that relationship is bound not by sexual tension but by getting by one day at a time. And eventual main companion, Ellie, is a survivor first—not a girl, not a child.

One of the game’s best conversation sequences has come dozens of times in zombie lore, but the powder keg of Joel, Ellie and salty helper Frank is kept from blowing up by a great mix of writing and acting. Looking after someone special gets tagged as something that’ll “get you fuckin’ killed,” while Ellie is treated like garbage and throws up middle fingers accordingly. But she’s not reduced to a “bitch” or any other dainty, knee-jerk insult. She’s first and foremost another piece of fallout in this American dystopia, equal to the men in their scenario, and the vitriol she receives—and gives—should be commended.
Between The Last of Us’s shadows, and its gameplay missteps, hide some of the best dialogue and acting ever put into a game.
Writers in games (and most other fields) take the easy way out when painting characters as scumbags. They call women “bitches.” They make veiled and overt sexual threats. They employ triggerable scenarios to make a hero look like a savior in comparison. Remember Me and The Last of Us avoid such pitfalls. Unlike the last Batman Arkham City game, they don’t need to remind us how great a word “bitch” is. Unlike the recent Tomb Raider reboot, they don’t need to push a woman to the brink of exploitation to earn our empathy.

The experience of play, of well-rounded characters that we send on terrible adventures, is empathy enough. As we look forward to the “next generation” of gaming experiences, let’s not look at the mixed scores attached to adventurous mainstream games like Remember Me and The Last of Us. Let’s instead look at how they equip their heroes and foes alike with a nobler sort of humanity, never losing their ability to express evil or villainy or terror in the process. That’s the next generation I’m interested in playing. Score that hope 10-outta-10.

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Sam Machkovech
Hi, @medium! Nice place you got here. Find my other ramblings at samred.com || @samred || wherever finer tacos are sold.

Published
June 7, 2013

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Apple’s Folly: The story of the Pippin game console - Featured Article

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A few years ago, I found myself in a flea market in downtown Montreal. Amid dusty furniture and faded French-Canadian comic books, I saw something that piqued my interest: a large black plastic box—a cross between a Nintendo 64 and something you might pull from the wreckage of a jetliner. Placed on top of it was a pair of sleek gray boomerang-style controllers and what appeared to be a modem. The device was simple and utilitarian, yet it had a hint of style. The colorful logo on the front of the device read “Pippin @WORLD.” What the hell was this thing?

A chain-smoking salesman seated nearby told me it was some kind of gaming system from Apple. It was mine if I had a hundred bucks. I contemplated snapping it up, but I figured it was unlikely to work—not to mention the fact that I’d have to track down games for it. The Pippin, however, always stuck in the back of my mind.

Today, the Pippin is a curious footnote in Apple’s corporate history, a device long since laid to rest alongside the TurboGrafx-16 and the Sega Dreamcast; dug up and enjoyed almost exclusively by a few masochistic hardware modders and eBay traders. And yet, Apple is now a leader in the video game industry, with players choosing from countless titles on the iPhone and iPad. In fact, last year, iOS and Google Play apps outsold portable games from Nintendo and Sony, according to a recent industry analysis. Is it any wonder that the internet was abuzz with recent (and later debunked) rumors of Apple once again entering the console market?

Apple’s rise to the top as a gaming giant, however, has hardly been quick or easy. In fact, the company’s first big foray into video games was a complete disaster.

Send In The Clones

The story of the Pippin reads like a geekier, technological version of a Greek tragedy. It has its heroes and its villains. There’s a strange artifact with supposedly untold magical powers. And like all good tragedies, it’s a story filled with its fair share of hubris, with characters who were destined to fail almost before they even began.

To really understand the Pippin, we have to jump back almost 20 years to December 1994, shortly before the ill-fated device was unveiled at a crowded Tokyo trade show. In the chaotic tech boom of the early ’90s, Apple was a very different company. Steve Jobs had been ousted several years earlier after a humiliating and much-publicized boardroom coup, and the company was now under the control of CEO Michael Spindler, an eccentric German engineer who had risen through the ranks of Apple’s European division.

Spindler’s tireless work ethic and hard-nosed policies had earned him the nickname “Diesel.” And while he was an exceptional engineer and strategist, Spindler’s people skills left something to be desired. He was known for leading incomprehensible meetings in which he’d rattle off stream-of-consciousness talking points and scribble illegible notes on a whiteboard. He’d then leave the room without answering any questions, relying on his assistants to explain what he’d actually meant. In one infamous anecdote, Spindler had landed a front page interview with the prestigious PCWeek magazine, but the conversation was such a mess—Spindler rambled aimlessly, jumping from one non-sequitur to the next—that the magazine’s editors had to schedule another chat. Spindler remained equally inarticulate the second time. The story was never published.

Michael Spindler c. 1994

Under Spindler’s watch, Apple remained the largest computer manufacturer in the world, but it was losing ground as a slew of inexpensive Windows computers flooded the market.

To make matters worse, Apple’s once-sizable coffers were being drained on a number of failed experimental consumer products, with Apple dabbling in digital cameras, portable CD players, speakers, and even TV appliances. Millions of dollars had been funneled into the Newton, a handheld computer that was the butt of jokes in Doonesbury and on The Simpsons. Apple was spending more on research and development than almost any other tech company—$600 million in 1992 alone—yet this investment wasn’t producing successful products.

Faced with mounting financial pressure and an eroding market share, there was increased talk of Apple merging with other companies or even selling off its assets. Spindler, however, was determined to turn Apple’s fortunes around. He came to the conclusion that licensing the Mac operating system to other hardware manufacturers—emulating Microsoft’s Windows model—was the only viable option to keep Apple from running aground. As such, Spindler approved the “clone” initiative. Starting in 1995, Apple-approved third-party manufacturers could create their own Mac-compatible computers.

The Pippin came directly out of the clone initiative. Based largely on the Macintosh, the console used a simplified version of the Mac OS. In terms of processing power and speed, the Pippin was a Ferrari compared to the lumbering Pintos of other game consoles at the time. The device packed a speedy PowerPC processor and, more importantly, included built-in internet access and a CD-ROM drive that could run a variety of multimedia programs. Apple pictured the Pippin being more than just a game console. It could easily be modified for use in business and education—a two-headed beast that would let you blow up evil aliens as well as surf the net on your TV.

Kill Them With Kindness

In keeping with the clone program, Apple’s plan was to license out the Pippin design to third-party manufacturers who would then customize their own versions of the system. Video games, in particular, were considered the low-hanging fruit that Apple hoped to snatch.

Bearding the lions of the home-gaming den was no easy task. The PC market was exploding, and the console market was dominated by Nintendo and Sega, with the Sony PlayStation hitting stores in Japan shortly before the Pippin was launched. Apple’s fledgling console would essentially be going toe-to-toe with industry giants who had crushed any competition that came their way. (A decade later, the same could be said of the iPhone, although with a very different outcome.)

I recently spoke with Julian Wilson, a veteran of the tech industry who was a director in the New Media division at Apple during the Pippin’s development. “What you have to remember is that at that time, there were multiple different games consoles coming out. But the leaders, the big guys, were the Nintendo—and the PlayStation later—and the [Sega] Genesis product,” Wilson said. “And these guys had already sold twice as many games consoles, up to ’96, than the entire PC industry. And they had what appeared to be a very aggressive, dominant relationship with the developers, where the developers accepted that their software was redundant as soon as a new [console] product came out.”

The idea, then, was for Apple to cozy up to developers, offering a console that would allow them to create a single game that could—in theory—run on multiple consumer versions of the Pippin as well as the Mac OS. It was billed as being a win-win, offering more bang for developers’ buck.

Apple “was committing in a contract to give you a longer shelf life for your code,” Wilson said. “In the traditional games console model, the device is subsidized because of the cost of the applications and the fact that every time a new device comes out, a new license needs to be bought.” So Apple’s model should have been attractive to developers. “They were tired of having to redo things.”

With Apple facing financial turmoil and losing its standing in the marketplace, the Pippin quickly became more than just another in a long line of experimental consumer products. Spindler instead saw the device as a chance to generate serious revenue by breaking into a new market. There was a lot riding on the outcome of the Pippin, not only in terms of Spindler’s reputation, but also the future of Apple itself.

Enter Bandai

As Apple courted developers to produce games and content for the Pippin, the first to bite was the Japanese toymaker Bandai. Founded 50 years earlier by Naoharu Yamashina amid the ashes of post-war Japan, Bandai had grown into one of the world’s largest toy manufacturers.

When Apple began its preliminary discussions with Bandai, the company was under the control of Naoharu’s eldest son, Makoto. Unlike his father, the younger Yamashina had grown up with a life of privilege and luxury, typifying the Japanese “Keio Boy” and spending much of his time driving fast cars, dining at exclusive Tokyo night spots, and sailing his private yacht.

As Bandai’s CEO, Makoto clashed with his aging father. The elder Yamashina had run Bandai using an extremely bare-bones production model. A toy line could be shut down at any moment with only minimal loss of resources and revenue. Electronics and more complicated products, on the other hand, require more investment in design and tooling, making them a riskier proposition. Naoharu preferred a traditional approach that focused more on developing well-established brands rather than taking a risk with entirely new product lines.

For his part, Makoto Yamashina was determined to modernize the company and make Bandai more than just an action-figure assembly line. The young CEO dreamed of creating an entertainment company that rivaled Disney and could target young audiences on a global scale.

Under Yamashina’s tenure, Bandai had branched out into a number of risky but lucrative fields, inking deals with a number of entertainment companies. The company purchased the rights to the Sailor Moon and Power Ranger characters from Toei, a Japanese film and television production company. Yamashina also went into business with (and later purchased a large share of) the Japanese animation studio Sunrise, which produced a series of popular animated films featuring Bandai’s Gundam robot action figures.

Makoto Yamashina in 1997

By 1994, Bandai had become a force to be reckoned with, generating $330 million in the U.S. alone from the sale of Power Rangers merchandise, according to Anne Allison, author of Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys And The Global Imagination. Despite Bandai’s success, however, the two Yamashinas continued to butt heads. The company’s founder once publicly complained that his son had adopted a strategy of bringing out 10 toys in the hope that three would become successful.

Despite the internal squabbling, Apple viewed Bandai as an ideal partner. Bandai had some experience with game consoles, having created a number of systems in the ’70s and ’80s. The Nintendo Power Pad, a floor-mat controller for the NES, was originally a Bandai prototype. More importantly, Bandai had two things Apple coveted at the time: a portfolio of popular intellectual property, which could be licensed to game studios, and a lot of cash.

The details of the Apple-Bandai deal did not take long to hammer out. Bandai would be responsible for manufacturing and marketing the device, while Apple in turn would absorb all the research costs, collecting royalties for every Pippin sold and retaining the right to license Pippin to other companies. (Lacking the technical expertise to manufacture the device within their own production facilities, Bandai brought on Mitsubishi as a subcontractor to produce the Pippin.)

The Pippin ATMARK (Photo: Evan Amos)

In March 1995, shortly after the ink dried on Apple and Bandai’s deal, the first white Bandai Pippin—christened the ATMARK—went on sale in Japan. Retailing for a costly 64,800 yen (roughly $650 at the time), the console included a dial-up modem and four bundled titles. Yamashina was betting big, predicting sales of 200,000 Pippin ATMARKs in the first 12 months.

A few months later, the black-colored Bandai Pippin—this model was called @WORLD—was released in the United States. At launch, it retailed for $600, three times the price of the popular Nintendo 64. The @WORLD bundle included a six-month unlimited internet account from PSINet at an additional cost of $25 per month. Yamashina was confident again: He forecast that 300,000 @WORLD systems would be sold within a year.

For Bandai, there was as much riding on the Pippin as there was for Apple. Yamashina was determined to dethrone Nintendo and Sega, cementing Bandai’s place as an international entertainment juggernaut. As such, he earmarked nearly $100 million for Pippin manufacturing and marketing. Even with Bandai’s war chest, a Pippin failure would mean a major blow to Yamashina, both from a personal and professional standpoint. For Yamashina, it was the chance not only to take Bandai into the future, but also to prove his father wrong.

Bungie Jumps

Since the Pippin ran a stripped-down version of the Mac OS, the conventional wisdom on Apple’s Cupertino campus was that existing games and other software could be ported over to the Pippin with relatively little effort. One of the leading developers that Apple hoped to bring on board was Alex Seropian, the co-founder of Bungie Studios. Bungie had released Marathon, a hit first-person shooter, exclusively on the Mac—a rare triumph for Mac gaming at a time when computer game makers were focused on Windows.

Seropian, whose studio would later go on to create the Halo series, was directly involved in porting over Bungie’s Mac-exclusive title Marathon to the Pippin. “I remember us being kind of excited. We were focused on the Mac, and here was an opportunity to maybe reach more people,” Seropian told me in an interview. “I think we were somewhat skeptical but supportive at the time. It was something that Apple and Bandai really wanted us to do, and we had a really good relationship with them.”

Marathon

With financial and technical support from Bandai and Apple, Bungie set to work on Super Marathon, a Pippin title that would contain both Marathon and Marathon 2: Durandal. Apple and Bandai were hoping to lure game enthusiasts with titles that were exclusive to the Pippin, and Super Marathon would spearhead that effort.

While their corporate patrons brimmed with confidence, Seropian and his team had mixed feelings. “My recollection of that whole experience—and the introduction to the Pippin, and the console space—was it was certainly made easier by the fact that it was Apple and we were big on Mac. But we didn’t have huge expectations out of it.” In fact, Super Marathon was fated for obscurity, barely remembered among the handful of titles that ever saw the light of day on the doomed console.

The Collapse

By the middle of 1996, it was clear that sales of the Pippin were catastrophically low, with no prospect for improvement on the horizon. Yes, Apple had Bungie on board, but developer interest was minimal otherwise. The resulting lack of software and the exorbitant consumer price tag were simply too much for Pippin to bear. Apple was also distracted by an internal crisis. Spindler’s attempt to reorganize the company was unraveling. Struggling to manage Apple’s numerous, disparate divisions, the discipline-focused CEO had implemented a more rigid structure that focused simply on product development, marketing, manufacturing, sales, and customer relations. The reorganization only muddled Apple’s structure further, however, and exacerbated Spindler’s lack of control. Moribund projects were allowed to limp along, siphoning away much-needed cash and resources, and employees struggled to reconcile conflicting messages from the marketing and sales teams. Spindler was losing his grip on Apple.

Despite this chaos, and despite the console’s dismal sales, an increasingly desperate Spindler took every opportunity to calm investor fears with his vision of the silver-bullet Pippin. In Business Week magazine, a financial analyst said that Spindler talked about Pippin “like it would be the savior of the company”—and, implicitly, the savior of Spindler himself.

It wasn’t. In 1996, Spindler was ousted from his position as CEO and replaced by Gil Amelio. The demise of the Pippin was the final death knell for Spindler’s career at Apple.

The Pippin was a financial disaster for Bandai, as well. The Japanese company failed to recoup practically any of their investment. As the elder Yamashina had predicted, the cost of developing and marketing the Pippin had been astronomical. The lean production model that had made Bandai’s fortune simply wasn’t practical for complex electronics. For both Spindler and Makoto Yamashina, the Pippin was a disastrously bad gamble.

Aftermath

As the Pippin continued to implode, Apple made a last-ditch effort to lure in manufacturers for the device. Unfortunately, the only other company to express any interest was a little-known Norwegian software company called Katz Media, which signed an agreement in June 1996 to produce its own version of the Pippin. Faced with the same lack of interest that Bandai had faced, Katz desperately attempted to repurpose and repackage the Pippin—as an interactive kiosk display, as an internet appliance for hotel rooms, and as a low-cost computer for hospitals, among other schemes. None of them caught on.

By 1997, the Pippin was dead. The device was a complete flop in Japan, Europe, and North America. (Apple’s diligence had ensured that Pippin failed in every market possible.) Sales were particularly dismal in the U.S., with Bandai shipping thousands of unsold units back to Japan. Exact sales figures of the device are hard to find, but estimates from several sources suggest that in all likelihood, only 12,000 to 42,000 @WORLD units were sold in North America. A far cry from Spindler and Yamashina’s lofty projections.

So what went wrong? “You could do a PhD on deconstructing what happened,” said Wilson, the former Apple manager. “I learned a lot at Apple, but one of the things that sticks with me is the importance of a vision. A vision provides a context for every decision.” He regards Pippin as a project that was never given a chance to succeed. “It was a distraction at the time, Apple had other things to consider and it was probably right that it didn’t spend too much time on Pippin.”

For Seropian and his fellow developers at Bungie, the death of the Pippin was a blip. They would soon go on to develop Halo for the Xbox in partnership with another tech giant, Microsoft. But when Apple was developing the Pippin, “we didn’t think too much of console gaming,” Seropian said. “Console gaming was a whole other industry that had its own jargon, and having Apple show up with Bandai—it was sort of like meeting a girl who went to school on the other side of the tracks, but we had a mutual friend, so we went on a couple of dates. But we didn’t have an expectation we were going to get married or anything. And I guess you could say she turned out to be a drug addict that ODed, and we never hung out anymore.”

When Steve Jobs became Apple’s CEO again in 1997, one of his first orders was to dismantle the clone initiative. That meant shelving the Pippin project once and for all, with Bandai stopping all production of the machine. Bandai felt the ripples of the Pippin disaster that same year, as the financially troubled company was briefly courted by SEGA, who hoped to absorb Bandai into its fold. The deal fell through, with both sides citing “cultural differences.” Some speculated that Bandai’s executives still had a sour taste in their mouth from their ill-fated dealings with Apple, another powerful tech company that approached Bandai with big promises.

Yamashina resigned as CEO of Bandai shortly after the SEGA deal fell through. His dream of elevating his father’s company into a global entertainment brand was over. Yamashina faded into the background, later dabbling in film and television production.

Officially, Bandai continued to support the Pippin until 2002. By that point, the damage had been done, with the Pippin effectively draining hundreds of millions of dollars from Apple and Bandai—and contributing to the downfall of both its chief executives.

Today, Apple maintains almost obsessive control over its hardware and software. The third-party wheeling and dealing that gave birth to the Pippin is a thing of the past. What’s more, the once-dominant console makers have felt the sting of Apple, as the company continues to attract consumers’ time and money with countless easily digestible games developed for the iPhone and iPad.

As for the Pippin itself, Apple acknowledges it with a single product information page buried on their corporate website. A financially ruined Katz Media later sold off its remaining Pippin stock to a company called DayStar Digital, which sold several thousand units before shelving the remaining stock. Thousands more Pippins remain unaccounted for, presumably lost, destroyed, available for sale online by niche collectors, or cluttering dusty thrift store shelves like the one I discovered in Montreal. The final resting place for a video game dream project that simply wasn’t meant to be.

Words by Adam Volk. Illustrations by Dana Wulfekotte.

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E3 2013, Next-Gen, And PC’s Bizarre Invisibility Problem

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We Can Hear You, Ya Know

By Nathan Grayson on June 13th, 2013 at 7:00 pm.

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After sitting through nearly all of E3′s press conferences (and catching up on Microsoft’s, which I skipped to marvel at my super cutting-edge next-gen loft sink), I came away with two raucously growling gut reactions: 1) new Mirror’s Edge yes yes yes yay yes mmm-hmm yes good indeed and 2) did I just step into an alternate dimension where PC never emerged from the primordial gaming ooze? I don’t mean that in the sense that PC’s not the focus at E3 either, because frankly it never really has been. But come on: our platform of choice has spent years in the deepest waters of areas where Microsoft and Sony are only just beginning to dip their piggy toes. Free-to-play, DRM, cloud, servers, indies, problematic communities, etc, etc, etc. So why does it seem like nobody’s even tried to learn from PC gaming’s mistakes?

We have fucked up. A lot. Early and often. It kind of goes hand-in-hand with that whole trailblazing thing our open platform does so well. Things go horribly, horribly wrong for a bit, but then we get up, dust ourselves off, and keep moving forward. From the moment Steam launched as an unmitigated disaster to the slowly receding tide of pay-to-win to the (sort of, not really) final wheezing gasp of Ubisoft’s dreaded DRM, PC’s past decade has been paved by just as many tooth-flinging faceplants as it has glorious success stories. We learned – and continue to learn – by doing. Fact: most PC gamers don’t have functional hands, because we simply can’t resist putting them on stoves to see if they’re actually hot.

So then, let’s check in on all the sensible, business-focused Boxlords over in Consoletopia, shall we? And here, I’ll pick a random topic from my half-meter-tall, patch-soldered stovepipe hat – which, for the sake of this and all other arguments, you should just assume I’m always wearing. First up we’ve got an obvious one: DRM and other forms of copy protection. Sony seems to be handling the issue well enough, but Microsoft’s dropped the ball repeatedly without so much as a single oddly captivating beat poetry session to back it up. Daily online requirements, strict limits on trading and reselling, and egregiously nebulous explanations of many key elements have led the charge on a frighteningly closed-off assault. And what do Xbone owners get in exchange? TV and sports and a lot of the same multimedia services they already have on Xbox 360 anyway. Wooooo.

But wait, Steam’s offline functionality has a history of horrific jankiness, and we can’t resell games at all. Goodness, why haven’t we rioted in the streets yet? Well, largely because Steam provides so much excellent game-centric convenience and functionality that we’re less to prone to care – even if we probably should. Valve gives PC gamers constant updates, cloud saves, absurd sales, one-button mod support, one-stop shops for F2P and early games, and most importantly of all, hats. Oh, and that all comes sans arbitrary monthly fees. Steam is by no means perfect, but it generally does a great job of piling on so much convenience that the more problematic elements of its nature quietly suffocate below.

Worth nothing: when Steam first launched, it most certainly did not do that. Valve rather arrogantly assumed players would tolerate its Trojan horse for Half-Life 2. People despised the service for years. Meanwhile, exceedingly overt DRM sans much added service didn’t work out so well for Ubisoft and EA more recently. The lesson? DON’T DO THAT, EVERYONE ELSE. YOU ARE NOT SPECIAL OR DIFFERENT. Yeah, the aforementioned publishers made money, but not without some utterly excruciating growing pains that left ugly black stains on their most beloved franchises. Why not just, you know, avoid that part? Or at least try to.

But OK, Microsoft’s recent nauseating practices are rooted in cold, calculating business, and I’m no businessman. That said, indies, MOBAs, and eSports – the holy trinity of PC gaming’s latest renaissance – have been quite hard to spot at E3, both during press conferences and on the show floor. If nothing else, the former just makes sense. Many of them are inexpensive, interesting, and proven. The latter two, meanwhile, are spreading throughout PC gaming like wildfire, crisscrossing to decimate all else in their path. Once again, Sony comes out looking much better overall, but the situation is mind-boggling.

Perhaps even more egregious, however, is console-makers’ (and many publishers’) apparent stance on troublesome community matters. It’s one thing, for instance, to quietly ignore abusive or otherwise mean-spirited online behavior, but to openly endorse it is something else entirely. Companies like Microsoft and EA (and Ubisoft, to a lesser extent) revel in the culture their online communities have created. They co-opt it as a marketing tool – essentially shouting, “This is totally cool! It’s an essential part of playing our games” – to enhance their images. It’s especially frightening when very overt “jokes” about rape enter the picture during conferences meant to represent a product and its culture to millions.

I don’t think trash talk is necessarily bad. For some people, it’s a cornerstone of their gaming experience. And as long as the feeling’s mutual, that’s great. But that’s a big if, and services like Xbox Live have become known for their sizzling cesspits of toxic filth. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that people avoid online multiplayer for that reason.

Actually, I know it. Both Riot and Valve have sort of, um, provided data. But even without that, come on: it’s just common sense. Who enjoys being verbally pummeled into smoking oblivion when they’re just trying to relax? That goes double when race, gender, or other issues of identity needlessly enter the picture, even under auspices of just coming part and parcel with online wars of words.

Valve and Riot, especially, have fought to turn things around. They saw people stomping away from their games – parades thoroughly rained upon and smiles extinguished – and they sprang into action. Countless hours, attempts, and honest-to-goodness science experiments later, both developers are starting to see change.  The current solutions are far from perfect, but they have produced some results. More importantly, though, both Valve and Riot weren’t afraid to acknowledge an issue in the first place. At this point, console-oriented companies don’t even seem willing to admit that player behavior’s frequently a problem, and that’s, er, the problem.

It’s really quite a puzzling state of affairs, especially seeing as those things are only the beginning of a contagiously willful ignorance of PC’s triumphs and – more importantly – its ugliest, sludgiest failures. I’m not suggesting that these nuggets of wisdom will Save Console Gaming or convert me into a stalwart living room lover, either. I just want to see gaming grow and succeed in all sizes and shapes of relative box-ness. Plus, we’ve already got a head start on some related issues that will almost certainly define this hobby’s future (server shutdowns that pull the plug on games permanently, preservation of older games in general, free-to-play pricing/balance, MMOs), and it’d be nice to have everyone on the same page, hopefully working for some kind of common good. Otherwise, one side could very well take a turn for some new, even more player-unfriendly road and drag the other down with it.

Gaming’s evolving, the industry’s evolving, the world’s evolving. At the heart of it all is connectedness, and ideas are traveling through society more fluidly than ever. So I can’t help but wonder: why does everyone have such a hard time just listening? The information’s out there. If companies aren’t willing to learn from it, it’s the industry’s loss. And, in all likelihood, ours as well.

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Electronic Arts: Video games firm wants to stop being 'hated'

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By Leo Kelion Technology reporter
EA says its next-generation video games engines will offer a new level of realism

“Can a computer make you cry?” It’s 30 years since video games giant Electronic Arts ran an advert asking that question, adding that it believed the medium had the potential to “bring people’s thoughts and feelings closer together”.

Three decades on, if its audience is indeed weeping in unison, it may be in frustration.

EA has been voted the “worst company in America” two years running in an online poll by Consumerist magazine, and comments posted by gamers to other sites - complaining of “price gouging” and “arrogance” - confirm many dislike it.

Speaking to the BBC, Frank Gibeau, EA’s president of labels, acknowledges his firm has an image problem.

“That type of feedback is disappointing personally for people inside of EA because we love our company and the games that we make,” he says.

“We’re in the business of entertaining and exciting people, and when our business policies get in the way of that and we hear this reaction and see this feedback we have to take note of it. We’re not tone deaf.”
‘Generic games’
Criticism of big business is nothing new, and Electronic Arts’s status as the world’s second biggest games publisher puts it firmly in the firing line. But the editor-in-chief of news site Game Front suggests in this case real change - rather than lip service to the idea - is required.

“EA might be a scapegoat for larger industry trends beyond its control, but a big part of the hatred has to be an image of not caring what players think or want,” says Mark Burnham.

“Practices like charging for DLC [downloadable content] on day one of a title’s release and online passes [requiring buyers of used games to pay extra for access to online content and services] aren’t loved, and you can couple that with what many players see as a tendency to try make games more saleable to wider audiences - and therefore, much more generic and homogenised.”

Mr Gibeau notes that EA has already ditched charges for online passes, ending a policy which meant second-hand game buyers needed to pay the publisher if they wanted to unlock bonus online content already bought by the original owners.

EA was criticised after problems with its servers meant gamers who bought Sim City were unable to play it

But he defends other controversial strategies, such adding micro-transactions to premium games.

The idea of giving away software for free but charging for virtual goods was popularised in Asia as a way to combat piracy. Some gamers are uncomfortable with its extension to console titles, which cost up to £50.

A decision to charge between £2.39 and £11.99 for suit and weapon upgrades in EA’s sci-fi horror sequel Dead Space 3 proved particularly controversial.

Mr Gibeau acknowledges the move damaged perceptions of the title, but suggests that was because the optional nature of the feature was misunderstood.

“We never think of micro-transactions as a gate or a place you have to pay to win,” he says.

“If a micro-transaction exists in an online service - which is usually where we place it, like in Fifa Ultimate Team - it’s tied to an experience and a price-value proposition that you either feel good about or you don’t.

Frank Gibeau says EA is making changes to address complaints

“When we get it right it feels great and people are really happy about it. When we don’t get it right or it’s misunderstood, like in the case of Dead Space, that’s not good and we make changes accordingly.”
New ideas
When it comes to the type of games EA makes, Mr Gibeau makes no apology for a “fewer, bigger, better” strategy, even when that involves job cuts.

“In the console business there frankly isn’t much of a business for games outside of the top 20,” he says.

“You have to really get into the charts to make the initial investment in these games work. We’re really trying to create epic products that have a chance to reach the widest possible audience.”

As a result EA is willing to keep pumping out sequels to successful franchises such as its Need for Speed racing games, Battlefield war series, Tiger Woods golf simulations and Dragon Age role-playing titles.

But when sales sputter - as was the case for its most recent Medal of Honor and Army of Two shooter franchises - the series are promptly “rested”.

EA made a splash in 1983 when it asked whether a computer could make you cry

But, Mr Gibeau adds, EA is also willing to invest in fresh ideas, such as Titanfall - a futuristic first-person shooter developed by independent studio Respawn Entertainment.

Moreover, he stresses that EA has learned from past mistakes to ensure its customers get the most out of the new Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles, whichever games they buy.

“The last console generation, we frankly didn’t make the investment in engine technology that we did this time,” he says.

“It left us in a position where our launch wasn’t as smooth or a breakthrough as we wanted.”

EA charges £11.99 for Dead Space 3’s Tau Volantis Survival kit, which upgrades in-game equipment

This time, he says, EA has poured money into two next-generation games engines well in advance: EA Sports Ignite and Frostbite 3.

“It’s not just about [better] graphics, it’s content and online features too,” he says.

“If you can support just two engines instead of the 13 to 14 we were supporting over the last cycle… you can focus on making great games.”
Options open
EA’s stance on Nintendo’s Wii U - which went on sale in November - is less clear.

When the Japanese firm unveiled the console at the E3 games expo in 2011, EA’s chief executive John Riccitiello took to the stage to announce an “unprecedented partnership” between the two firms.

Two years on, Mr Riccitiello has stepped down after missing financial targets, and other EA executives have made conflicting statements about their commitment to the platform.

“We didn’t make it easy for the market to figure out our stance on the Wii U, that’s for sure,” says Mr Gibeau.

“We’re not announcing any new Wii U titles at E3, but that doesn’t preclude us making games for it going forward.”

When pushed to clarify whether EA has any Wii U titles in the works he is deliberately vague.

“Do we have developers inside Electronic Arts that are watching the Wii U and understanding how it’s developing? Yes, we’re absolutely doing that. Do we have active development of Wii U titles that we’re ready to publicly announce right now. No we do not.”

EA released Mass Effect 3 for the Wii U but has not announced new games for the console at the E3 games expo

Despite his enthusiasm for Sony and Microsoft’s new machines, Mr Gibeau says that he believes sales of smartphone and tablet games will be the fastest growing segment of the industry for the foreseeable future.

And when asked if the new consoles could be the last of their kind, he says gaming on a big screen will likely prove “resilient” but notes that in its time EA has outlived several platforms “from the Amiga to the Sega Genesis”.

As the interview ends, there’s time for one last question: Will EA deliver on its promise and make us sob for the right reasons?

“I think we’re right about there,” he says.

“Certainly the Mass Effect 3 ending caused a few people to cry, so I think we achieved some level of emotional impact towards the end of the last cycle. And as you look at the fidelity of experience on generation four, ‘Can a console make you cry?’ is going to be possible over the next several years.”

Read more of the BBC’s E3 coverage.

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