All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg

Author:Harold Goldberg [Goldberg, Harold]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-46356-2
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Published: 2011-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

* CBS television came over to interview me about the rape scene. I mentioned to them that parents or the faint of heart could turn off the offending portion of the game. “There’s no story in that,” announced the annoyed reporter. In a huff, the CBS team packed up their equipment and left.

EVERQUEST: ORCS, ELVES, AND A CAST OF THOUSANDS

While everyone from Ralph Baer to Ken and Roberta Williams to Ken Kutaragi envisioned a world of online games, it wasn’t until the late nineties that the general gaming population became interested. On one gray day at Sony’s midtown Manhattan headquarters an all-hands meeting made everyone present a small part of a new kind of game. Within days, a select group was beta testing EverQuest, which would become one of the more popular massively multiplayer online role playing games.*

MMOs (massively multiplayer online games) feature the most communicative, expansive game play ever devised. Thousands of happy, rabid nerds can play online at once. The idea was revolutionary. You hustle over to your favorite game store, buy the game, and install it on your PC. Then with your modem you connect online with throngs of people who are of the same mind. All these people want to level up and become powerful wielders of magic or they want to be healers, peaceful helpers. But more, each one has an impact on the way the game evolves. As a social group, you all create a sprawling, somewhat chaotic city of fantasy, full of paladins, rogues, wizards, trolls, and shamans. The choices are like riches to a nerd, and they include a wide array of customized powers and physical features for your avatar. With friends, you set forth on dramatic adventures to kill dragons and other beasts, and then you bore everyone who isn’t playing the game with what you firmly believe to be vast accomplishments. As you play, you suspend disbelief and ignore the occasional errors, like the egregiously bad grammar and spelling in the text, knowing that it’s a work in progress. The problems will always be fixed over time. And then there will be new problems. It really is like a city online.

But Sony had needed to be pulled kicking and screaming into the world of PC gaming. The germ of the idea came from John Smedley, a longtime Dungeons & Dragons fan whose childhood dream was to make that game into a computer role playing game. At nineteen, the San Diegan son of a naval officer was a college dropout, already making great money in the videogame industry. The optimistic, nerdy Smedley had toiled away at Sony Imagesoft, learning the rosters and minutiae of all things puck-related for the ESPN National Hockey Night game. While he did the job well, he hated it, spending his free time instead on a proposal for a game that included orcs and elves and dragons. In January 1994, he gave the proposal to Rich Robinson, the head of Sony Imagesoft development. Robinson, who was more

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