[THEME MUSIC PLAYING]
[TIRES SCREECHING]
- It's an industry that's revolutionized
every area of entertainment.
From television to sports to movies.
The video game business rakes in more than $20 billion 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 to get it the next morning.
- But how did two lines and 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.
JOHN ROMERO: 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
going to end up going on a shooting spree.
[GUNFIRE]
There's really people who believe this.
- It's about feuds, wars, and even a little bit
of good old fashioned piracy.
- If they were going to copy our stuff,
we were going to bury them one way or another.
- But most of all, it's about how
a whole generation grabbed 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.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: Video games.
For some people, they're a blast from the past.
[VIDEO GAME SOUND EFFECTS]
Something they used to do at the local arcade
when they were hanging out after high school.
But for others, video games are the new technological frontier.
And 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 me 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 character myself.
In fact, I don't think I even had my first board yet,
and where could you find me?
Playing Pac-Man down at the pizza parlor.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
But games have come a long way since then.
And 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.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And the first rock star of them all was this guy.
This is Willie Higginbotham.
He helped invent the nuclear bomb and the first computer
[EXPLOSION]
The bomb looked like this.
The game looked like this.
A primitive version of tennis.
It was just a dot moving back and forth
on an oscilloscope screen.
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.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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 called, Space War.
STEVE KENT: 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.
A game where a Flash Gordon style rockets that
would fly around shooting each other
with a sun in the middle that had some gravity.
If it sucked you in, you got destroyed.
TONY HAWK: Space Wars spread to universities around America
on an early version of the internet.
But would the average Joe spend $120,000 to own one?
Slug figured, no way and never patented the idea.
He left MIT without graduating.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Jump to 1966.
A little device called television
had made it into almost every living room in America.
It was a cultural phenomenon.
But to Ralph Baer, Vice President of Engineering
at electronics giant Sanders Associates,
it was a business opportunity.
[CHA-CHING]
RALPH BAER: 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 set, I got a business.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: Baer 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 old Higgy, just two dots
moving on a screen.
No way this was going to set the world on fire.
Then it hit him.
A blockbuster breakthrough that would blow the roof off
of home entertainment forever.
Three spots!
[MUSIC PLAYING]
RALPH BAER: The third spot became
a ball that made it into a ping pong game or a tennis game.
Once we had that third ball going back and forth,
we knew we had something.
TONY HAWK: By 1971, Baer's bosses
had patented the brown box and licensed it
to television manufacturer Magnavox.
Now called Odyssey, it began showing up at various trade
fairs around the country.
RALPH BAER: The Odyssey was the hit of the show.
I had a hard time not getting up in my seat
and then jumping up and down saying, 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.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SELLAM ISMAIL: So for instance, if you were playing the tennis
game, this would actually using--
from static electricity, would cling
to the front of your television.
So this would be the overlay for a hockey game.
TONY HAWK: The Odyssey hits store shelves in May, 1972,
and sold for $100.
And hey, if you wanted to pop for another $29,
you could also buy yourself this wicked weapon
and play the first ever shooter video game.
Seems that even then, guns and video games
were destined to be together.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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 pitch the product.
RALPH BAER: Unfortunately in the beginning,
they connected to a Magnavox television set, of course.
That got the idea abroad that you needed a Magnavox
television set to play games.
And they had to undo that by convincing customers
in the store that you could indeed plug it into any TV set.
TONY HAWK: It took over a year, but Magnavox
managed to hook up about 150,000 Americans and their televisions
to an Odyssey system.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Next player in the game, Nolan Bushnell.
An employee of a northern California electronics firm.
He played Slug Russell's Spacewar at engineering school
and couldn't get it out of his brain.
NOLAN BUSHNELL: And actually thought, hey,
this would be great news in an amusement park,
but how do you put a million dollar computer into--
and pay for it at $0.25 a 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, the ad 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.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: In 1971, Nolan's first video game,
Computer Space hit American pinball arcades.
Sleek, sexy, and we all remember the first time
we played it, right?
Right.
It was one of the biggest turkeys of all time.
NOLAN BUSHNELL: 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.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: Nolan's next move, taking $500
and starting his own company in Santa Clara, California,
with buddy Ted Dabney.
The year was 1972.
The company was called Atari.
NOLAN BUSHNELL: Atari comes from the Japanese Game
Go which is plight warning saying, watch out,
you're going to get whacked.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: First big hire, engineer Al Alcorn.
Nolan, proving he already has what
it takes to be a great corporate executive,
landed Al by lying to him.
AL ALCORN: He told me he had a contract with General Electric
to build a consumer video game, a home video
game, which was almost impossible to do in those days.
And the fact that nobody from General Electric
ever came by or called or wrote us a letter didn't occur to me.
I was too busy building the prototype.
NOLAN BUSHNELL: We decided to give him a test game.
Call it throw away game, it was something that was simple.
Basically, ping pong.
two Paddles on either side, ball moving between them.
TONY HAWK: Man does this sound familiar.
But remember, it was still early in 1972
and the Odyssey hadn't hit stores shelves yet.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The concept was still fair game and AL
had his own spin on the idea.
AL ALCORN: 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 we did at the very end was the sound.
And since I was already way over budget,
I poked around and found tones that were already
existent in the machine.
And that became the sound.
NOLAN BUSHNELL: We said OK, let's call it Pong.
And we put it in Andy Capp's Tavern
in Sunnyvale, California.
AL ALCORN: This baby here is the original Pong prototype
that went to Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale.
And it has the original wire wrap
that I built in three months, in 1972.
We put it in a box, put up on a barrel.
[BEEPING]
NOLAN BUSHNELL: It was an immediate hit.
We weren't aware of just how much of a hit
it was until we got a service call
and found that the coin box had totally filled up
and wouldn't take anymore quarters.
Those were kind of technical problems that we can solve.
[COINS DROPPING]
AL ALCORN: Here we have one of the first quarters
that the Pong machine ever made, which now
represents a multi-billion dollar industry.
And it's in a little piece plastic.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: Atari started rolling out their machines
in November of 1972.
And America went Pong crazy.
NOLAN BUSHNELL: There were several reasons
that 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.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: More players meant more machines.
And Atari needed more manpower to build them.
Fast.
NOLAN BUSHNELL: We tried a few social experiments
with running buses into undesirable 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.
STEVE KENT: They hired whoever they
could hire in the beginning.
Which meant they got a lot of bikers.
You talked to some of the straitlaced people
and they'd talk about being scared to walk the floor.
They'd talk about going into bathrooms
and seeing used needles and stuff on the ground.
NOLAN BUSHNELL: The converse is, the 20%
that stayed with us really appreciated the opportunity.
Became some of our most valuable employees.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: 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.
NOLAN BUSHNELL: 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 a party than an extra $0.50
an hour.
So we got known as a party company.
STEVE KENT: There's a story that if you walked by the Borega
Street building and you breathed deeply by the air vents,
you'd get stoned because the pot smoking inside of it
was so heavy.
DAVID CRANE: 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.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: 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 you.
It wasn't long before Atari got hit with their first lawsuit.
And it came from Magnavox who claimed that Pong violated
Ralph Baers' Odyssey patent.
AL ALCORN: And I looked at the patent
and I said, my God, this guy has patented
the idea of any kind of a moving object
on a video screen controlled by anything
and it was filed in 1969.
NOLAN BUSHNELL: Magnavox was based on analog technology,
which makes a fuzzy.
Didn't have sound, didn't have score.
I mean, you didn't really feel like you were you beating
somebody when you beat them.
Which is one of the core essence of what a game is.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: But hey, what about those Magnavox trade
show demos?
RALPH BAER: Nolan Bushnell played
a game in Burlingame, California on May 24th, I think, 1972.
He signed a guest book playing the ping pong game.
TONY HAWK: Bushnell decided to accept Magnavox's offer
of a settlement.
Atari paid Magnavox just under a million dollars
and in exchange, became their first licensee.
Game over and everyone's a winner.
And who says losses don't work?
NOLAN BUSHNELL: Believe it or not,
it was never a very big issue for us.
We settled it for less than it had cost us to defend it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: Then Atari went on the attack against the clones,
knock offs, and pirate versions of Pong
that were popping up all over the world.
NOLAN BUSHNELL: We actually became
quite diabolical about seeing ways
that we could just mess them up.
[CRASH]
We put a chip in and we purposely
mismarked it so that when somebody copied us,
they'd put the wrong chip in.
We felt like we were in a war.
TONY HAWK: It was a war that would change entertainment
forever.
And as the Atari troops attack the arcades,
Bushnell got ready to open a second front
in living rooms across America.
The battle for video game dominance was about to begin.
[THEME MUSIC PLAYING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
In 1974, nearly two years after Pongs introduction,
everyone had played the game so much
that 3/4 of the world population was suffering
from carpal tunnel syndrome.
No, not really.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
But in the arcades, Pong fever was still running hot as ever.
[BUZZER]
People couldn't get enough.
So Nolan Bushnell figured he'd give
them more by introducing a home version of Pong.
NOLAN BUSHNELL: Al Alcorn said, I
believe we can put Pong on a chip.
And I said, let's do it.
AL ALCORN: This is actually what's
inside the coin operated Pong video game.
There's about 75 integrated circuits on this.
And that was all replaced by what's in this.
TONY HAWK: Atari cut a deal with Sears
and over 150,000 home Pong units flew off the shelves
during the 1975 holiday season
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Now the established gaming leader,
Atari was the place where top programming
talent wanted to be.
STEVE KENT: Steve Jobs showed up unannounced one day
and wanted a job.
He was unwashed, unkempt, smelled bad, had no degree.
Al Alcorn's secretary came to him and said, what do I do?
And Al Alcorn's comment was, well
we should either hire him or call the cops.
And Al hired him.
TONY HAWK: Jobs brought along a buddy, Steve Wozniak.
NOLAN BUSHNELL: 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 the labs.
They did break out, actually.
STEVE KENT: There was a line of bricks
and you tried to break the bricks away by knocking
the ball against them.
It was Pong only it was Pong turned vertical.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: 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
and developing their next home console concept.
They called it--
NOLAN BUSHNELL: The VCS, the Video Computer System
was the 2600.
And became universally known as the Atari.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
AL ALCORN: 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 can make the game just be in a cartridge and software,
we could release it much faster and much cheaper
than we could with a whole new game.
TONY HAWK: Nolan needed big money
to develop and launch the 2600.
He got it by selling the company.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Warner Communications, headed by Chairman Steve Ross,
paid Bushnell $28 million for Atari.
Not bad for a $500 investment.
Plus, Nolan would still draw a paycheck
as the company chairman.
[CHA-CHING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
In October of 1977, supported by a handful of games
like Street Racer, Indy 500, and Kombat,
the Atari 2600 hit the streets.
STEVE KENT: It was a bomb.
It did nothing.
They didn't get them out in time for Christmas.
They didn't sell, the ones that were out there.
And Warner hit the roof.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
AL ALCORN: The net result of that
was they removed Nolan and put in Ray Kassar, who
was the person from the east coast who worked at Burlington
Industries and was probably a more professional,
big businessman to run Atari.
TONY HAWK: Nolan was out.
But don't cry for this guy.
He made even more money with his next business,
a chain of family restaurants called, Chuck E. 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.
Atari's competitor Midway got the arcade upper hand
with a Japanese import that went by the name, Space Invaders.
JEFF GREEN: 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.
TONY HAWK: 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.
JEFF GREEN: You look at games today
that cost literally millions and millions of dollars
that take literally four or five years, or more, to complete.
Most of those games don't rival the game play and addictiveness
of Space Invaders.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: It took Atari nearly a year but they did strike back
with Asteroids.
An updated version of Slug Russells' Spacewar.
The object, breakup a surrounding storm
of falling asteroids and avoid getting blown up
by a fleet of flying saucers.
JOHN SMEDLEY: I can remember Asteroids
like there's no tomorrow.
Going down there and literally begging my mother for quarters.
And you know, an hour later I'm back asking for more.
It's a good memory for me.
JOHN ROMERO: The first ones that I played was basically
Space Invaders and Asteroids.
I always spent my allowance really fast.
It was only $5 a week.
It was like two days and I mean, I
was stretching it as far as I could go.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: 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 a game
had been achieved by using tinted overlays.
Atari was pumping out hits like Missile Command and Battle
Zone, which had a custom version built for the American military
to use in combat training.
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
that was coming your way.
But there was one invader no one saw coming.
Check him out.
He's got a classic profile.
[PAC-MAN MUSIC PLAYING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
His name, Pac-Man.
He was born at a Japanese game company
called Namco and brought to the US by Atari's 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.
AL KAHN: I loved 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.
[PAC-MAN SOUND EFFECTS]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: It was also the first time a character was
the star of a video game.
Most important thing about characters?
You can license them.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Pretty soon, Pac-Man had a song in the top 40 charts.
A Saturday morning TV show.
And he even made it to the cover of Time magazine.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Then a year later, Ms. Pac-Man showed up on the scene.
Same profile, only this time sporting
a bow and a beauty spot.
There were also more mazes, more ghosts, an even bigger success.
[MS. PAC MAN THEME MUSIC PLAYING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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,
the company was desperate to cash in on the video craze.
STEVE KENT: Nintendo was doing modestly well
in the Japanese arcade business.
They could not get a foot in, in the US market.
In desperation, Yamauchi turned to this guy
he had hired named Shigeru Miyamoto.
TONY HAWK: By Japanese standards,
Miyamoto was sort of a wild man.
When it came to music, he loved the Beatles and bluegrass.
He played the banjo and he loved designing toys.
STEVE KENT: And they said, can you make a game for us?
Miyamoto started spouting off about how he'd do this
and he'd do that.
And Yamauchi's like, yeah, yeah, sure.
Just make us a good game.
TONY HAWK: Miyamoto came up with something that
had never been done in gaming.
A story to motivate the action.
[DONKEY KONG MUSIC PLAYING]
A gorilla runs away from a carpenter
and steals the carpenters girlfriend.
Carpenter chases the gorilla through a factory
to rescue the girl.
Hey, nobody said it was Shakespeare.
[DONKEY KONG MUSIC PLAYING]
Literally translated, Miyamoto 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.
Yamauchi called his American headquarters,
headed by Minoru Arakawa and Howard Lincoln,
and gave everyone that good news on the game.
STEVE KENT: And he said, Donkey Kong.
I mean, they almost passed out.
They were like, Donkey Kong?
What's a Donkey Kong?
I think Howard Lincoln's comment was, Donkey Kong, Konkey Dong.
I mean, come on.
But Donkey Kong was a magic game.
[DONKEY KONG MUSIC PLAYING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: 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.
STEVE KENT: Originally, he was Jump Man.
And the Nintendo's landlord out here, Mario Sigali,
pissed off Arakawa.
So then Arakawa re-named Jump Man, Mario, after Mario Sigali.
TONY HAWK: And when Mario got his new name,
he also got a new job as a plumber.
Along with a new brother named Luigi.
[MARIO BROS THEME MUSIC PLAYING]
And the Mario Bros jumped into the arcades
in a series of games that are still popular today.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
By 1982, it seemed like the country
was having one great big party.
Ronald Reagan was in power, the economy was booming,
and the gaming industry was taking a big slice
of the disposable income.
Americans had now spent over 75,000 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
were about to move up to the next level
and faced a revolution that would tear the business apart.
[THEME MUSIC PLAYING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is 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 it nearly killed off video games
for good.
Rewind to 1980.
Namco and Midway's Pac-Man is eating up
most of the arcade business and cutting
into Atari's bottom line.
[PAC-MAN SOUND EFFECTS]
The company had a new president, Ray Kassar
who was a marketing pro.
Looking for a new revenue stream,
he set his sights on American homes
and getting the 2600 console into more of them.
Marketing 101, people buy what they know.
And people know these guys.
Space Invaders had kicked Atari's butt in the arcades
back in 1978.
Now Kassar thought they were the ones who could save it.
In the best, can't beat them, join them tradition,
he went straight to Taito, the original Japanese company that
designed the game and bought the rights to a home
version of Space Invaders.
When it hits stores, 2600 sales skyrocketed.
Kassar wanted more.
DAVID CRANE: 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 has $4,000
worth of technology in it.
TONY HAWK: 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 in upper management.
ALAN MILLER: The culture changed at 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.
AL ALCORN: These engineers would create
a software program that would result in $20- $30 million
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 per each cartridge.
DAVID CRANE: So we go to the president of Atari
and point that out, and he said to us, and I'll quote, he said,
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.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: Contempt breeds competition.
So four of Atari's top game designers
gave Kassar the kiss off and started their own company.
- You blast light out of your sense.
Star Master by Activision.
ALAN MILLER: 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.
DAVID CRANE: One of the differences with Activision
was we promoted the game creator as an author.
If you're creative at what you do,
you kind of like some recognition from the public.
ALAN MILLER: Activision was a huge success.
We grew from $0 in revenue to $160 million
in revenue in three years.
TONY HAWK: Their first hits included Pitfall, Ka-Boom,
and Freeway.
- I came up with Freeway on Lakeshore Drive
in Chicago, which is 10 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 would make a good video game.
TONY HAWK: Atari wasn't the only game in town anymore.
More companies were making more consoles.
Activism was making games for all of them.
Magnavox had the Odyssey 2.
Famous toymaker Mattel had Intellivision.
Mattel's ads for their console featured
intellectual literary figure George Plimpton.
- I've been comparing the exciting new Intellivision
space game Star Strike with one of the most popular Atari
games, Asteroids.
TONY HAWK: I guess 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 effect--
total destruction of a planet.
Which is why after Star Strike, Asteroids
left [INAUDIBLE] rather flat.
To-to-total destruction of a planet.
TONY HAWK: Then another unlikely player showed up on the field--
a plastic pool maker called Coleco.
- We had looked at this whole arcade position
and believed that electronics, as it related to kids,
was going to be very, very important angle.
So we started to work on a number of different products
that's used electronic chips as they're heart.
- I'm an electronic quarterback.
I start in the back field and follow my blockers.
- Blockers?
I don't have any blockers.
MAN: Coleco's Electronic Quarterback.
- We did the head to head series of dedicated games,
where you played against an opponent
on the other side of the game.
- Now we can play at the same time.
- I'm offense.
- I'm defense.
MAN: With Head to Head, you're really in the game.
A power sweep.
You pass.
He blitzes.
Intercepts.
- This is real competition.
- And we did the miniature tabletop arcade games,
which are miniature versions of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong.
They looked exactly like the arcade games.
- They were very successful.
And that Coleco on the road to developing more video
and electronic games.
TONY HAWK: And the new console called Coleco Vision was born.
- Coleco Vision was an attempt to try and replicate as closely
as possible in those days the actual experience
of the arcade.
TONY HAWK: 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.
Coleco Vision became the smash hit of 1982.
- And Donkey Kong was the driver.
We impacted it with the unit.
You bought the Coleco Vision, you
got a Donkey Kong cartridge.
TONY HAWK: Suddenly, another 800 pound gorilla
came into the room--
Universal Studios.
They claimed 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 core, which was quite a scene.
TONY HAWK: But the biggest laugh came
when court papers, prepared by Universal's own lawyers,
revealed that the original copyright holder
that the rights fall into the public domain.
- So in the end, not only did they lose,
they have to pay damages and court expenses.
TONY HAWK: Hate to say it, but we got to--
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 their very best programmers.
TONY HAWK: Desperate, Atari licensed
the arcade classic Pac-Man and ordered 12 million cartridges.
[BEEPING]
It sucked.
- It flickered, it didn't look like Pac-Man,
it didn't play well, it was hard to control, it was ugly,
it was an awful game.
TONY HAWK: And a financial disaster, big time.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Steve Ross, chief of Atari's corporate parent, Warner
Communications, decided to step in and he brought
one of Hollywood's biggest talents 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 $25 million for the right
to use Steve's extra terrestrial in 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 a game be really fun
and have a lot of depth in it in a period of a eight weeks.
- And it was so bad.
The ones that 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
them.
- The legend was, they had to run in and pour concrete
over them to make them really go away.
Ugly, ugly.
I basically killed Atari.
It was the end of Atari.
TONY HAWK: 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 of programmers
off the street who'd never designed games,
and developed a video game and tried to sell it
and nobody was buying it, because it was garbage.
It was ironic, because when we saw those 30 new companies,
we looked at each other and said, none of 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.
TONY HAWK: In the next two years,
Warner Communications dumped Atari
and got out of the industry.
Mattel shut down production of their Intellivision system.
Coleco sales dropped through the floor.
And in 1985, just as everything really hit bottom,
Nintendo stood up and said they weren't
going to 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.
MAN: Nintendo has the most video game hits,
like Baseball and Excite Bike.
Now, you're playing with power.
- They really brought in a new age of video games
with the simple introduction of the NES system.
They've rethought everything.
They said, the way a cartridge is loaded,
the way the controllers are designed--
they said, let's start over and create a really friendly game
system for families to enjoy.
TONY HAWK: And who was leading the Nintendo NES charge?
Their Donkey Kong hero Mario, now
starring in Super Mario Bros.
- They came out with Super Mario Bros, which was a great game--
so far beyond anything that has existed before in he home.
It made side scrolling vivid, and it 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 Sega started looking at the business
more seriously.
TONY HAWK: Sega was short for Service Games.
It had actually gotten its start as an American company then
imported pinball machines to military bases in Japan
after World War II.
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 of pushing Nintendo and Mario
off their high latter.
- And the Japanese really took over the video game industry,
because we had these games that anyone could play,
anyone could understand and everyone loves.
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 were able to bring back video games,
like they brought it back from the dead.
TONY HAWK: After a five year slump,
consoles were clawing their way back into homes only
to meet a new challenger-- the 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 game play 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 how 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--
Jobs and Wozniak.
Remember?
Those two guys who 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 a pop.
- I just thought I had to have one.
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 well, I guess I did make it pay for itself eventually.
TONY HAWK: Computers were making word processing a breeze
and typewriters were being tossed out of office windows
everywhere.
But coming out of Atari, the two Steves
had gaming in their blood and knew that working hard
meant playing harder.
So they made sure their baby was built to game.
- Once you have a PC on your desk,
you soon 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 Zork.
The great thing about that is because it was all text,
it actually kind of looked like work.
TONY HAWK: 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.
- When the Commodore 64 first came out,
I bought one of those like the first day
and spent like the next month just learning machine, trying
every last feature of it.
And then, the first game I did actually
was on he 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 I'm just asking them all the basic commands
and writing them all down and trying to make my own programs
in the corner on the machines.
- I love playing on a computer a lot more than a console
because, I felt 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.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: 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 a worthless MBA instead of like the future CEO
and rockstar.
- 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.
TONY HAWK: In October of 1982, Electronic Arts was born.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- We wrote the business plan in November '82.
And two weeks later, Atari, which
had just shipped ET, announced that they
weren't going to make their revenue, or profit, targets.
And what they were doing was they
were spending their money on bulldozers bulldozing
all those ETs into the ground.
We though cartridge video games we're done for ever.
So we took a big risk and we launched and only did
floppy disk PC games.
TONY HAWK: Trip had to get people's eyes back on gaming
and he 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 in that,
a lot of people really liked those early record albums.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: 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 $25K
for a snapshot and their names.
And the doctor himself got involved in the game design.
- We asked him questions about how he played and strategies
and we wanted to understand what kind of shots
he would take from different parts of the floor
and what his shooting percentages were.
- We exactly built into the game.
And then we said, imagine you're really going one on one
with Larry, what would the outcome be.
And he goes, if I went one-on-one with Larry,
I'd beat him every time.
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.
The tie-in, John Madden.
With a big name, give him a big shock.
You see, in the early '80s, technology would only allow
seven players on each team.
- Madden looked at it and he goes, where's the other guys?
Well, this is an Apple 2 and it only has 64k of ram.
So actually having seven on seven is a huge breakthrough.
And he just gets the stink face--
it's like, where are the other-- that's not football.
You can shift that if you want, but not with my name on.
We're thinking, he's got our money.
So I would go back to Rob and Anthonic, the programmer
and designer, and say, it's got to be a 11-on-11.
And he goes, that's impossible.
Two years later when the 11-on-11 game was finished,
we shipped it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: And in 1988, the ultimate video sports game
franchise was born, along with one
of the greatest video marketing opportunities ever.
Like football itself, a new version of Madden
started arriving every season with new teams, statistics,
and players.
- And I said, this is the crown jewel.
We're going to build the company around this.
This is going to be a hugely successful product.
Madden's success proofed that sports can 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 topped $2.5 billion.
But hey, we're starting to get ahead of ourselves here.
Put the brakes on and let's rewind back in 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 a computer game.
- Roberta started playing it and she got really, really hooked.
Then after she got hooked, she said, you know, I can do that.
And it turned out that she could not only do it,
she could do it brilliantly.
TONY HAWK: 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--
OK, now you're in the field.
It was all text based.
TONY HAWK: 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, Ed, you've gotta make this happen.
And somehow Ken would work on it and figure it
out some kind of thing and make it happen.
Because of her, Ken created this software program
that allowed them to store hundreds of graphic screens
on one single floppy disk.
And they produced the first adventure game for the Apple 2
that had graphics.
It
- They take these games in a baggy
and they'd drive them around California
about have computer shops sell them.
And that got successful and that became their company.
TONY HAWK: Ken and Roberta sold 80,000 copies of Mystery House.
More games started coming, some were
originals, some adaptations of arcade titles.
They also moved their office out of the LA kitchen
and into a building just outside Yosemite National Park.
Name change time too-- 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 would also let gamers play from a third person
perspective.
Controlling and moving a character
inside a physical world--
a first for adventure games.
- My first experience with question was just a revelation.
It was kind of a very, very early form of virtual reality,
that I was the main character.
And 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.
TONY HAWK: Like the movie biz, success brought
equals and a few spin-offs too.
With each game, Roberto's vision expanded
and Ken had to think fast to keep up with it.
- She said, well, I want color.
And he said, well, Apple only has six colors
and they're kind of weird.
And she said, well, make more than that.
And so he did.
She wanted sound.
So he convinced [? Rollins ?] to produce
a mini board and a sound card so that the PCs could
have music soundtracks.
Because with them, the sound cards
really came into the PC world.
TONY HAWK: And like Nintendo with Mario,
Ken and Roberta knew continuing characters like Leisure Suit
Larry could be just as lucrative as franchise titles.
- The first Leisure Suit Larry King game had a 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 can do that through a variety of means, none of which
were very sexy or stimulating, but we're funny.
That's what made it successful.
It was a risquÃ© title.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: Despite all of the success that 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.
All someone needed was one simple game.
It 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 hardy 1980s.
And the idea came right out of party central.
Well, make that Communist Party central.
In 1984, Alexey Pajitnov enough was
working at the Academy of Science in Moscow.
Occupation-- mathematician.
His hobbies-- puzzles.
Alexey came up with Tetris using his computer at work.
He based it on an old Russian puzzle game called Pentomino.
- So this is original Pentomino, which I brought from Russia.
And I had an idea to make to play a game with this.
And let's start to program it.
And when I program it, I see--
well, in order to put it there, you
need to flip it or rotate it.
That was the moment when Tetris was born.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: In 1985, the game was ready
and Alexey made his big launch, Soviet style.
- [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH],, in Russian,
means that you give the copy to your friends.
And that was like a forest fire, you know?
In two weeks, it was on every single PC in Moscow,
and probably in Russia.
I don't know.
TONY HAWK: And of course, Alexey made a ton of money, retired
and he's been sitting around sipping
Stoli in this 30-room mansion ever since.
Yeah, right.
This was the Soviet Union, remember?
- It was Communist power in Russia,
so basically, at that point, we are
agreeing that I will grant them all my rights for 10 years.
TONY HAWK: 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.
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.
- Tetris is very intuitive.
Kids are very good at Tetris.
Adult people, even senior people like these games.
Everyone would find something for himself in this game.
TONY HAWK: 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 for Tetris sold them the number of 30 million.
It's a pretty big number.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: 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
rivaled 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 it's still--
it's still good.
TONY HAWK: 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.
- Our agency created the slogan, Genesis does when
Nintendon't, which meant, we had a 16-bit system,
they have an 8-bit system.
It was the first competitive position
in the video game industry in terms of home game systems.
TONY HAWK: In the no holds barred campaign,
Sega rolled out their secret weapon--
a blue hedgehog called Sonic.
- They said, you know what?
This is going to be our mascot.
He's going to have more of an attitude,
he's going to be here toward a slightly older audience
and he's going be fast.
[INAUDIBLE] show Sonic just like, whizzing by on his feet
and just going super fast, while Mario is just
kind of jumping up and down.
And they really made Mario out to be some kid's character,
while Sonic was, hey, this is the next hottest thing.
TONY HAWK: And this sound--
MAN: Sega!
TONY HAWK: Heard at the end of every Sega commercial,
piled on the attitude.
While Sega and Nintendo were fighting over the home market,
gamers we're heading back to the arcades
where the games were more graphic and intense,
games like Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat.
- Mortal Kombat is a game where after you've
beaten your opponents, you can put in what's called a fatality
and you can rip out their spine and their skull
or stick your hand into their chest
and pull out their hard or a whole bunch of other really
grizzly little endings.
TONY HAWK: Both Sega and Nintendo
wanted to match the visual quality
of these intense arcade games.
Sega saw possibilities in a new format--
the CD-ROM.
One CD could hold 320 times more data than a console cartridge.
To you and me that's just more gaming power.
But 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.
- Blue pages.
TONY HAWK: 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 game play system,
ours start with a place.
In our minds, we we're building real places
that people could lose themselves in.
They'd sit down in front of their computer,
they'd 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 Myst were what defined it,
because for the first time, I think people saw stuff
on your screen that could be mistaken
for real images of 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 still.
Myst was the killer app for CD, because it
allowed for this incredible wealth of graphics
that we had really never seen before.
A floppy disk just couldn't handle
the size of these graphics.
TONY HAWK: Myst became the must have game,
selling 250,000 copies in 12 months.
It stayed on computer game best seller lists for the next three
years, selling over 4 million copies.
It also turned the Miller brothers into a millionaires.
- I smile because I look back and think,
when we were two stupid brothers sitting in the garage,
we didn't have great insight.
We maybe had some good instincts and the timing was right.
For loads of gamers, Myst was a watershed moment,
with it's enchanting magical graphics helping
to create a completely immersive experience.
But the next killer application for multimedia PC
would follow arcade games on a much darker more brutal road.
And suddenly, the video game industry
would find itself in a head on collision
with the US government.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
20 years after the awesome success of Pong,
video games had morphed from the 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.
OK, let's back up to 1981 for a second.
This is the original castle Wolfenstein, a classic,
let's-fight-the-Nazis computer game.
When it came to action gaming, this was as good as it got.
But just 11 years later, technology
would take it from this to this.
Wolfenstein 3D was the brainchild
of id 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.
Combine 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 it's blood
and gore content.
- People were quite literally blown away by it,
because they had 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 were able to find on consoles
or necessarily in arcades.
TONY HAWK: It was also one of the first games
to be played to a first person perspective.
Since you needed to shoot a lot of people to win,
it helped coin the video 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 weapons
or whatever in front of you-- so it's you.
And 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.
TONY HAWK: 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 at the time,
because what it basically meant is that you would
be giving games away online--
portions of a game, hoping that people got hooked.
- Here's the first third in a 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 over the internet.
TONY HAWK: And a lot of people got
hooked on Wolfenstein's hardcore style.
18 months later, Carmack and Romero
gave them their next fix.
The game was called Doom.
- December 10 of 1993 when we released Doom,
we'd been up for about 30 hours before that working.
- Id was trying to get this uploaded,
but there were so many people waiting online
that id could not get in to upload it.
- And the files--
it should had been an empty directory--
but people were putting sentences in there
as file names.
They're making, when will it be here?
And hurry up and stuff.
It's like a whole directory full of sentences.
And we're just like, these people are insane.
- What id had to do was to tell everybody to just back off,
don't come on for a few minutes while they upload the game.
TONY HAWK: When it came to graphic action and intensity,
Doom pushed it farther than Wolfenstein
and was an even bigger success.
- My most seminal gaming experience
was 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.
TONY HAWK: The other thing that made Doom appealing to gamers
was its multi-player capabilities.
- Go, go, go.
TONY HAWK: Network a few computers together
and you could start shooting at your buddies
inside the same game.
MAN: Here they come.
Here they come.
TONY HAWK: Carmack and Romero called it death matching.
- But through all of pretty much 1994,
I was just addicted to death match.
It was just the coolest thing I'd ever
experienced my entire life.
TONY HAWK: For two young guys in their 20s, the success of Doom
was a dream come true.
Practically overnight, the id software founders
had become multimillionaires.
- I totally had fun buying fun cars and houses
and all that kind of stuff.
- Romero with 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 of the controversy
came out for violent games, then they
had all that too to kind of stoke their image.
TONY HAWK: In the year leading up to Doom's release,
violent video games had become headline news makers, but not
in a good way.
Popularity of games like Street Fighter 2
and Mortal Kombat among young children and teenagers
had parents and lawmakers blaming
video games for everything, from unfinished homework
to antisocial behavior and rising street crime.
In late 1993, the issue was picked up
by 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 responsibility to the parents
and children of this country.
TONY HAWK: Lieberman's 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 drill
contraption that hooks up to the neck and sucks their blood out.
The game wasn't selling, it wasn't fun,
it was a silly game.
TONY HAWK: Lieberman called a 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.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The 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 providing consumers with all the information
they need to make a good product decision
and to know what they're getting.
- If you don't let your kids see r-rated movies,
you shouldn't let your kids play m-rated games.
And once that becomes more ingrained in American culture
in everyone's minds, then the whole violence issue
in video games will become less of an issue.
TONY HAWK: With the government battle behind them,
Sega and Nintendo were 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, if 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 Phillips.
They left Sony standing at the altar.
TONY HAWK: And as anyone who's been left at the altar knows,
revenge can be sweet.
Nintendo's and Phillip's 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 name PlayStation, which I think
was a real thumbing of the nose at Nintendo.
- Everybody knows Sony is a company that
makes Walkmans and electronics.
And then gradually, over time, consumers
have accepted that Sony represents really good quality
stuff.
It was a natural progression.
And then with the PlayStation, they just dropped the bomb
and it was incredibly.
TONY HAWK: The Sony PlayStation hit the shelves
in September, 1995 and immediately left
Sega's new system, the Saturn, in the dust.
- Technologically, you could tell that the Saturn way
behind the PlayStation.
The PlayStation handled 3D.
All of a sudden, there was no competition,
because here's Sony, they've got a better unit,
the unit is $100 cheaper and they've got all the games.
You can't compete with something like that.
TONY HAWK: Especially when Lara Croft
was playing on their team.
- Thank you.
TONY HAWK: When Tomb Raider first came out in 1996,
it was only available for the PlayStation.
- You had not only a female lead character, but a sexy one, who
had big boobs and short shorts.
She became really popular and the game itself was incredible.
So Tomb Raider was one of the key games
that helped make PlayStation.
TONY HAWK: Two of the other games
that helped push the PlayStation to success
were 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 planned 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 US--
Microsoft.
- There are a lot of people saying,
Sony is going to replace the PC with PS2.
It occurred to me that the only way to really counter
that would be to make a dedicated device,
to make your game console.
TONY HAWK: 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 being taken seriously,
because I would show up or some other guys would show up
and say, hey, we're from Microsoft.
We're making a game console that will compete with Sony now.
That's a hard thing to say.
That's like saying, we're from the government,
we're here to help.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: But it turned out that Microsoft
did know what they were doing.
CROWD: 4, 3, 2, 1.
[CHEERING]
TONY HAWK: They even got the hardware was
useless without killer games.
When the software giant released the Xbox in 2001,
they had an exclusive on first person shooter--
Halo.
- You look at that successful console launches
and you'll see, the console becomes
a player for the popular game.
The Xbox became the Halo player.
Yes, this black device with the green circle on it plays Halo.
- Halo was a big hit, because the critics loved it,
then the hardcore gamers really picked up on it,
and then word of mouth spread.
TONY HAWK: Microsoft might have established their gaming
credentials, but along with Nintendo's new mini-disc
system--
the Game Cube-- 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 that video games were now a major part of the entertainment
business.
And as entertainers, the game designers
would have to keep the hits coming.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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 too.
Boys, girls, men, women--
they're all getting into games big time.
Whether it's attempting to cubed a 900 on a skateboard
from the safety of your couch, or deciding
how much to tax the residents of your very own virtual city.
Back in the late '80s, Will Wright, a young programmer
and hardcore gamer was fascinated by how
cities and societies work.
Urban planning might not sound like the next hot thing
in entertainment, but Will thought
it was a great idea for a game.
- Well, Sim City was basically a game
where you're designing a city.
It's almost like a paint program in a way--
you have a pallet of parts, but the parts in this case
are things like roads or industrial zones or schools.
And as you paint, things happen.
People start building houses, traffic appears on the roads,
there's pollution, there's crime.
So we released in '89.
It was a very different sort of game at the time.
At that time, still most games were very action oriented,
very clear goals.
And at first, we were having a hard time getting anybody
to even play it.
TONY HAWK: Until a rave review in Newsweek
put Sim City on the map and sent sales of the game
through the roof.
And a new gaming franchise was born.
But the big payday came when Will applied his 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 where
you get to a virtual life.
And it's 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.
TONY HAWK: Will Wright 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 game play.
- Instead of playing a hero, or instead
of playing a character, or a plumber, or a hedgehog,
why don't you play a god.
That's the most powerful thing that you could possibly be.
TONY HAWK: Molyneux's game, Populace
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, your influence
lots of little characters.
- Just as when you were little kids
and you were setting up your GI Joe's
in the sandbox or whatever, you're
doing the same thing now, but with digital toys.
TONY HAWK: 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 and 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.
- All right, go.
- Go now.
- I just wake up in the morning and can't
wait to go hope on the game and see who's there
or say hi or pop in and go kill people.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: Not exactly the usual way
to win friends and influence people.
Within months of Quake's release, some of the clans
decided to have a get together, so they can meet face to face.
- QuakeCon is really a grassroots event.
It was about 50 guys 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 can play.
I just have fun.
- We came out here to meet our fellow teammates that we play
on-- it's NADs--
North American Destroyers.
And our NADs set up a group for the younger children.
We call them NITs--
NADS In Training.
TONY HAWK: Seven years on from their first fan fest,
QuakeCon attracts over 5,000 players every summer.
Texas in August, they've got to 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.
- But when you go from 16 or 8 or 32 people to thousands,
it's massively multi-player.
A massively multi-player 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.
TONY HAWK: 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 in.
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, they're
looking at what the players have done and saying,
OK, that's a little too easy for them, let's tweak that,
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.
TONY HAWK: So much for the stereotype of a nerdy gamer
playing on his own.
Now gamers, including women, were joining forces
to take on the challenges of Everquest.
- Women are really into forming 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.
TONY HAWK: Soon millions of computer gamers
around the world we're logging on to massively
multi-player 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.
- If the game is entertaining and you put it online
and it's entertaining online, then it's awesome.
It's entertainment squared.
If it's a bad game and you put it online,
you're just spreading the misery around in a more efficient way.
TONY HAWK: 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.
- With these kids playing 13 hours, 20 hours a week--
video games--
these thumbs are very agile, they know joysticks,
they know triggers.
And they said, let's just make our interfaces like that
and we're already over the first hurdle
in getting them to kind of feel comfortable in these systems.
TONY HAWK: 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 are
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.
TONY HAWK: 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 a general public.
- The army product was made for sergeants who are 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 had 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 were 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.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: Playing the commercial version
might just be one of the best recruiting
tools the Army could dream up.
- Video games actively improve your hand eye coordination
and can train you directly in things that
are relevant to the military.
They're planting those seeds in your head
when you're really young--
hey, you want to be a super soldier,
or to play games-- the Army is the place to go.
TONY HAWK: It's pretty ironic that the same government that
a few years ago hammered the video game
industry for damaging young minds
and is now using the same tools to hook and train
their raw recruits.
The video game industry is still full of surprises.
And now the biggest surprises 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.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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 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 as 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 up a high school saying it would be just like Doom.
And the press ran with it.
- They just said, you know what, this
is bad for America's morality.
It's 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.
TONY HAWK: And with recent titles
like Max Pain and the Grand Theft Auto series,
the controversy continues.
Who knows if it will ever end.
In 2004, 145 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, particularly in the United
States, that games are something for a 14-year-old skater
criminals to do to avoid doing their homework.
And when you point out that the middle of our demographic is
the 26-year-old with 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.
TONY HAWK: 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 in games
can apparently think for themselves.
- What artificial intelligence should do
is look at what you, a player, enjoy, and what you, a player,
doesn't enjoy and adapt the game accordingly.
Not only adapt the challenges you
face, the opponents you face, but adapt the storyline,
adapt the world itself.
Yes, ultimately, we could all be playing the same game,
but having a completely different experience.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TONY HAWK: 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.
And there's some games here I can really recommend.
In the latest one called Tony Hawks Underground,
you could email a picture of yourself to Neversoft, download
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.
- Whoa, 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.
TONY HAWK: 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 Doom,
bringing the gaming experience to a new and even more personal
level.
MAN: Game over man.
- I put out all the information out there
for how the sectors and line segments
and everything was organized.
So everyone had the information, they could write tools for.
And that was the start of the whole mod scene.
- Doom 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.
TONY HAWK: 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 design field, like architecture.
It should have courses, departments, whole schools
dedicated to it.
TONY HAWK: 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 too.
- 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 were going to be good at it.
- Having more game related studies in the university
context is part of what needs to happen
for games to become a more mature pop cultural medium.
TONY HAWK: But future graduates will
have to be pretty determined, because none
of the video 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 uWink Inc, touch
screen coin-operated games.
- We're generally in adult locations.
Simple games, a little bit Atari-esk, if you would.
Games that are well produced and operate for adults.
You can sit down, you play for a few minutes
and have a good time.
TONY HAWK: And Nolan'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 rock star 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.
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.
TONY HAWK: With all those guys still
pushing the envelope and new designers
joining their ranks every day, we can't even
imagine what games are going to look like 10 years from now.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
In just a few short decades, video games
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 going to 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 we play
that damn thing for 40 hours?
I mean, think about 40 hours a game.
It must be deep, it must be doing something for you.
So the emotional experience we have with games is something
everybody can have with games.
- As the debate over 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 who 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 youth.
For us, it's just like music, it's just like TV,
is just like film.
It's part of life.
- And thanks to the vision of the guys behind the games,
there's a limit to where they'll take us in the future.
The video invasion is just beginning.
[OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING]
WOMAN: GSN.
GSN.