¶
(zapping sounds)
(beeping)
¶
Once upon a time, there did exist
a world without video games.
Like so many things distinctly human,
electronic games were born out of a combination
of innovation, necessity and curiosity.
Early tinkerers made electronic amusements,
cheap, crude entertainment that would transform in time
to something potent and alive.
This would not just happen by electronic wizardry,
but by the endeavors of artists, designers, and entrepreneurs
whose initial goal to entertain also came to challenge,
captivate, and enlighten
millions of people around the world.
The men and women who created this industry allowed their own
experiences and the world around them to inform their creations.
This is the story of video games.
This is Video Games: The Movie.
¶ Havin' a good time ¶
¶ I'm a shooting star leaping through the skies ¶
¶ Like a tiger defying the laws of gravity ¶
¶ I'm a racing car passing by like Lady Godiva ¶
¶ I'm gonna go, go, go ¶
¶ There's no stopping me ¶
¶ I'm burning through the sky, yeah ¶
¶ Two hundred degrees ¶
¶ That's why they call me Mister Fahrenheit ¶
¶ I'm traveling at the speed of light ¶
¶ I wanna make a supersonic man out of you ¶
¶ Don't stop me now ¶
¶ I'm having such a good time ¶
¶ I'm having a ball ¶
¶ Don't stop me now ¶
¶ If you wanna have a good time,
just give me a call ¶
¶ Don't stop me now ¶
¶ I'm havin' a good time ¶
¶ Don't stop me now ¶
¶ Yes, I'm havin' a good time ¶
¶ Don't wanna stop at all ¶
¶ I'm a rocket ship on my way to Mars ¶
¶ On a collision course ¶
¶ I am a satellite ¶
¶ I'm out of control ¶
¶ I am a sex machine ready to reload ¶
¶ Like an atom bomb about to
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh explode ¶
¶ I'm burning through the sky, yeah ¶
¶ Two hundred degrees ¶
¶ That's why they call me Mister Fahrenheit ¶
¶ I'm traveling at the speed of light ¶
¶ I wanna make a supersonic woman of you ¶
¶
¶ Don't stop me, don't stop me ¶
¶ Don't stop me ¶
¶ Don't stop me, don't stop me ¶
¶ Ooh, ooh, ooh, I like it ¶
¶ Don't stop me, don't stop me ¶
¶ Have a good time, good time ¶
¶ Don't stop me, don't stop me ¶
¶ Ooh, ooh, all right ¶
¶
¶ Ooh, I'm burning through the sky, yeah ¶
¶ Two hundred degrees ¶
¶ That's why they call me Mister Fahrenheit ¶
¶ I'm traveling at the speed of light ¶
¶ I wanna make a supersonic man out of you ¶
¶ Don't stop me now ¶
¶
I love video games, because I have
the same experience that I have when I watch a movie that I love
or read a book that captures my imagination.
But, I'm an active participant instead of a passive observer.
Video games have a really interesting role to play
in the future of our species,
and we're just starting to figure it out right now.
I feel like video games at this point
are intrinsically linked into our culture
in a way that's irrevocable.
I think from here on it goes deeper.
I think video games root deeper and deeper
into everything we're doing,
until they're just part of our lives in a way
we don't even notice.
All media's relevant to its time.
For example, records and cassette tapes
disappeared from existence, but music didn't disappear,
it was digitized.
The same is true for movies and books.
They evolve from one form to another.
For video games, the evolution is the same.
They will change and evolve.
They will forever be a part of our global culture.
A hundred, two hundred years from now,
video games will still exist.
¶
According to The Entertainment Software Association,
the average gamer's been playing video games
for 12 years.
Adult gamers have been playing for an average of 14 years.
Males average 16 years of gameplay,
while females average 12.
As of 2013, 49 percent of all U.S. households
own a dedicated game console,
and those that do, own an average of two.
The average game player's age as of 2013 is 30.
And no, it's not all males.
Forty-seven percent of gamers are females.
Forty-two percent of game players believe
that computer and video games give them
the most value for their money,
compared with DVDs, music, or going out to the movies.
Who buys video games?
The average age of the most frequent game purchaser is 35.
The point?
Video games have grown up, and now they're not just
in arcades or our living rooms.
They're in our pockets.
Fifteen percent of the most frequent game players
pay to play online games,
while 33 percent play games on their smartphones,
and 25 percent play games on a handheld device.
Most gamers who own dedicated game consoles
use them for other entertainment media as well
like watching movies, TV shows, and music.
Are gamers social?
Sixty-two percent of all gamers play games with others,
either in person or online.
What about rating game content?
Over 85 percent of parents are aware of the ESRB rating system
which rate a game's content and match it
with the appropriate gaming age.
E for Everyone, T or Teen, M for Mature.
But the question on a lot of minds is,
do parents really control what their kids play?
Over 73 percent of parents believe
that the parental controls available
in all new video game consoles are useful.
Further, parents impose time usage limits on video games
more than any other form of entertainment.
Over 90 percent of the time, parents are present
when games are purchased or rented,
and 82 percent of the time
children receive their parents' permission
before purchasing or renting a game.
Much like movies, games have specific genres and sub-genres
such as action, adventure, role playing, casual games,
shooters, strategy games, open world versus linear games,
sports games, racing games.
This list goes on and on, and each genre offers its own
special mix of interactive entertainment.
And yes, each is wildly successful in its own way.
In the past decade, video games have gone from a six billion
to an over $24 billion annual industry,
far surpassing movies and music.
The bottom line?
Video games are here, and they are here to stay.
¶
But where did all this begin?
¶
The answer is...
well, a bit complicated.
That's the debate of the century,
who's the father of video games?
And, you know, you can always say
Nolan Bushnell because he founded Atari.
The godfather of video games has to be Nolan Bushnell.
It's gotta be Nolan Bushnell.
I would say Bushnell.
Nolan Bushnell.
I would probably give that to Bushnell.
Nolan Bushnell.
I would probably be in the Nolan Bushnell camp.
Man who came up with the whole Atari series.
I'd have to say the creator of Atari.
Whoever created Pong.
Ralph Baer.
You know, back in the late '60s,
early '70s, makin' the Brown Box.
Ralph Baer, 'cause he created the first console.
I think we both agree, it was Ralph Baer.
Oh, Ralph Baer.
I can take two different angles here.
I can say, you know, whoever started
the entire ball rolling is whoever created Pong.
Whoever started games as we know them today,
I'm gonna have to say Shigeru Miyamoto
from Nintendo.
Miyamoto.
Shigeru Miyamoto.
I think--I think you know who Shigeru Miyamoto is.
But I'd go all the way back to MIT,
the guys who did Spacewar, John Carmack.
Hideo Kojima, I'm telling you right now, brilliant.
You can't just pick one, because it's doing injustice
to all the other people that have helped
develop the games.
I don't think I've ever really thought about
who started gaming.
I just appreciate that they did.
¶
Some say it began here, a small back room
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962
on the PDP-1,
the first computer to utilize a visual display.
Steve Russell, which I consider to be
the fellow who I stood on the shoulders of,
did a game called Spacewar for the PDP-1.
And I played that in college while working
in an amusement park, and I felt if I could bring
Spacewar to the arcade, it would make a lot of money.
It was a game developed as a demonstration
of the capabilities of a digital equipment corporation,
PDP-1 computer back in 1962.
A group of students and employees at MIT
wanted to create a game that really would showcase
the capabilities of this new machine
that had one particular feature
they were really interested in, and that was a display screen.
Before that, most computers had maybe
paper tape outputs or something like that.
But this one had an actual screen on it.
I would go back to Steve Russell,
because he's the one that actually made
the first playable game.
Russell's product was so much fun to play
it infected every PDP-1 in the world,
and they were trying to get the people to get it
off the machine, 'cause it was wasting so much computer time.
¶
Others argue that electronic games began much earlier
or that video games were a byproduct
of Cold War technology.
As usual, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
While many industries and innovators
combined to pave the way
even for the possibility of the first video game,
there is little argument as to the visionaries
and the company that finally brought video games
to the public... in a big way.
¶
¶ All the colors of the world should be ¶
¶ Lovin' each other wholeheartedly ¶
¶
¶ Yes, it's all right ¶
¶ Take my message to your brother ¶
¶ And tell him twice ¶
¶ Spread the word and try to teach the man ¶
¶ Who's hating his brother ¶
¶ When hate won't do, ooh ¶
¶ 'Cause we're all the same ¶
¶ Yes, the blood inside of me is inside of you ¶
¶ Now, tell me ¶
¶ Can you feel it ¶
¶ Tell me, can you feel it ¶
¶ Can you feel it ¶
¶ Ooh, when you see what's goin' down ¶
¶ Can you feel it in your bones ¶
¶ Can you feel it ¶
Really, Nolan brought to Atari the understanding
of what makes a good game.
He played a lot of games and understood them.
When we started this thing, we found that
the games that were most successful
were those that were simple to learn,
but impossible to master.
Pong was somewhat of an accident.
It was what we consider to be too simple,
but when it got all wired up,
and it was done by Al Alcorn,
he put in some twists to it that were just remarkable
and made it a massively fun game.
One of the design feature's flaws in the original Pong game
was the paddle would not go to the top of the screen
all the way, and I was gonna fix it,
but I didn't get around to doing it, and I realized
that that feature kept the game from--
two good people from playing it forever.
It would never end.
The coining of the phrase "video game" refers to an RGB,
or red, green and blue raster
or "video" display device.
Lets take Pac-Man for example, the original.
This is a bitmap image of Pac-Man.
When enlarged, individual pixels appear as squares.
Zooming in further, they can be analyzed,
with their colors constructed
by adding the values for red, green, and blue.
A bitmap corresponds "bit-for-bit" with an image
displayed on a screen.
A bitmap is technically characterized by
the width and height of the image in pixels
and by the number of bits per pixel,
or a "color depth", which determines
the number of colors the pixel and ultimately the image
can represent.
The more bits, the better the games looked.
More bits, however, meant more memory was needed,
which was in short supply in the early days of gaming.
This resulted in games that looked blocky and simple.
But that didn't stop designers and gamers from diving headlong
into this amazing new medium.
¶
Over time and as technology advanced, 8 bits became 16,
then 32, 64, 128 and so on.
With each generational jump in graphics
and so called "image fidelity,"
the depth of story and immersion in games
seemed to progress as well.
The technological limitations drove the art form
and vice versa.
Games were slowly evolving, and those on the inside
were growing up with the very art form they were creating.
It was the Magnavox machine,
I think it was called the Odyssey,
and to show you how different things were--I mean, basically,
it allowed you to play Pong really.
That console had no real graphics.
There were just squares of light on the TV screen.
So, there were Mylar overlays
that you would stick on the screen.
And so like, then you'd put up like
a haunted house.
And then all of the sudden, the white Pong ball
would be like a ghost, you know, moving through the house.
So, you had to kind of use your imagination
and those Mylar overlays to understand
the story they were trying to tell.
Magnavox presents Odyssey,
the electronic game of the future.
Odyssey easily attaches to any brand TV,
black and white, or color,
to create a closed circuit electronic playground.
Odyssey gives you all the exciting action of hockey,
and 11 other challenging play and learning games
for the entire family.
¶
I had a very dear friend who was the head
of ATCO Records.
She had an Atari 2600 console in her office.
And she pointed at it and asked me,
"Do you know what that is?"
And I said, "Well, kind of, but what is it?"
And she said to me, "It's a license
to print money."
Attention, shoppers.
The new Atari cartridge game is in.
Only Atari makes the world's most popular
home video games.
The only Space Invaders.
The only Asteroids.
(cheering)
The only Pac-Man.
(cheering)
And the only way you can play any of them
is on a home video system made by Atari.
(cheering)
¶ Come and play Atari today ¶
The first game that I ever remember playing
was Space Invaders on the Atari 2600.
I was six years old and was at my friend's house,
and I was just blown away by the fact that
you could manipulate an image on your television.
My first console I remember playing
was the Atari 2600.
We played everything. We had Donkey Kong, obviously.
Baseball.
I loved BurgerTime.
I remember my brother saying like,
"Wow, look at the graphics."
Pitfall! was like a wonderland,
because, you know, like there were so many colors,
you know, you could only really run--
you know, it was a side scrolling game,
but it was amazing.
You just see the same screen over and over again.
You're like, "Oh, they added an alligator head that time,"
or, "Oh there's a vine."
The fact that you could go underground in Pitfall!
like totally blew-- like, oh, you can go there?
You know, I knew enough about computers to know
that it was a computer game, and this was--
but it was simulating, you know, this alien invasion
with one ship on the ground, like, defending Earth
from this alien invasion, and to me,
it was almost like being there.
Even with those rudimentary graphics,
it was just the first time I'd ever had control
over something on the television
or something on a screen.
¶
Probably the most memorable console of my entire life
and one that I miss, that I wish I still had,
was my original Nintendo Entertainment System.
The Nintendo Entertainment System.
Your parents help you hook it up.
What's it like to play
the Nintendo Entertainment System?
¶
When you play the system with the most arcade hits,
you're playing with power.
The Nintendo Entertainment System,
now you're playing with power.
I think that one of the reasons we get nostalgic about things
is it's not necessarily the thing that we were doing.
It's not that song, it's not that game
or that movie, or that book,
it's what was happening in your life at that time.
It hit at exactly the right time in my life.
And the NES then was an amazing, amazing game system.
Games got better fast it seems like.
Before I made it to my teens,
everything was kinda...
it didn't look as great as the games did in the arcade.
But by the time Nintendo came out,
things started getting a lot better.
¶
I was fortunate to first be exposed to Nintendo
as a consumer.
And for me, that very first system
that I was exposed on was the Super NES.
And I have many fond memories and many great stories
around my interaction with that system.
Playing for many, many hours.
Playing games like The Legend of Zelda
Link to the Past, games like Chrono Trigger,
all of these fantastic experiences that, for me,
were my very first gaming experiences.
And I eventually got a Super Nintendo,
and then I was all about Star Fox.
And I was so into Star Fox
and the story and what was gonna happen next.
Most of the games when we got into the Super NES,
all of a sudden, you had a reason to go do this
because you were tryin' to save somebody.
And so just that little bit there
brought story elements into the game.
And what I think was really great
about Nintendo during that era
is they really wanted to make sure that
all the games on the system were really high quality.
But Sega Genesis was an entirely different thing.
Sega Genesis was to my experience in college
as the Nintendo was to my experience in high school.
You know, that was a very state-of-the-art console
back then.
¶
I think the next time I bought a console
was the PS1.
And I was like, "All right.
These games are getting ridiculous."
So, I got a PlayStation 1.
Hey, plumber boy, mustache man.
Your worst nightmare has arrived.
Pack up your stuff.
I got a little surprise for you here.
Check it out.
What do you think about that?
Sony PlayStation has more than 150 games,
NHL Faceoff '97, Jet Moto,
Tobal No. 1, Destruction Derby 2,
Crash Bandicoot, I could go on.
I'm gonna give you a personal demonstration.
You can't stop, grandma.
You can't.
Oh, you go, girl!
PlayStation.
I'm gonna have to ask you to leave.
You're hurting my elbow.
¶
All of a sudden, you had this incredible amount of data
on one disc that could also play music and everything else.
To me, it was a portal to modern gaming today.
When Tomb Raider came on the scene in 1996,
it brought people into a world
that they hadn't really participated in before,
the 3D world.
It was an immersive world in a time
when there wasn't many games like that.
And I think over the years that has grown,
people latched onto that one.
When I talk to developers, and I talk to fans
around the world, they always hark back
to their first experiences playing Tomb Raider.
And it touched them, and it was something special.
¶
And I begged my mom for a console.
I begged her.
And it wasn't until the N64 came out
that she finally gave in.
If we go to the PlayStation and the Nintendo 64,
you started to see 3D for the first time.
¶
What that allowed the vision of Mr. Miyamoto to do
was to say now that I have the ability
to manipulate polygons in real time
at a fast enough frame rate,
then instead of just going back and forth,
now I can run around in circles,
or move into or out of the screen.
So, it brought a whole new dimension
to the gameplay.
And the controller was actually designed
with an analogue joystick to be able to control
that movement.
It started to add a whole new dimension
into what gamers were used to.
And so, for a long time, it had been this 2D,
sort of parallaxing 2D planes.
But as you sort of moved into that 3D era,
you started to see people start to play with,
you know, what are the kinds of mechanics
we can do now?
What are the things that we can actually play with?
What's this new world of this other dimension?
And so, you know, it was painful at first.
Certainly, there were good examples of it,
but it was hard.
It's hard to give the players this whole
other level of freedom that they weren't used to.
And then we started getting consoles that were
bigger and better, and you could bring in,
you know, more of a 3D environment,
better frame rate and better sound.
And then you could put more polygons on the screens
so the guys could look more realistic.
¶
Finally, with the PlayStation and the PlayStation 2,
you started to see some really interesting stuff happening.
You started to get, you know, avatars on screen
that were more representative of people.
They're easier to understand what they were tryin'
to make you go through.
Especially on the PlayStation 2,
it started to feel like we have enough graphics
to really render interesting people.
You know, they weren't real,
but they were real enough.
And so, you could sort of start to believe in them more.
I had grown the PC business pretty well
and was starting to look at the console business and thinking,
"Wow, that would be a nice business for us to be in."
But we really didn't know anything about it.
And then one day, these guys walked into my office.
They were from the DirectX team,
and they said they had this idea to put DirectX
into a box.
It was gonna be this DirectX box.
And DirectX is the name of the Windows API for gaming.
So this DirectX box was basically it was
gonna act like a game console on the outside,
but on the inside, it was really gonna be
a PC running Windows and DirectX.
That was the original plan.
And so what I think we didn't really understand at the time
was that we were really bridging these two worlds,
that Xbox was gonna be this bridge
between what was happening in PC gaming culture
and what was happening in console gaming culture.
¶
And then when we got to the PlayStation 3,
we really said, "Okay, this thing's
gonna give us enough power to really go back
and revisit that idea of telling an interesting,
character-driven narrative in a way that we might
be able to do that no one's done before."
First time that I held a Wii controller,
it was a piece of plywood
with some electronics taped onto it,
and they had a demo of a tennis game.
And when I first picked it up
and started playin' it, I thought,
"This is gonna be a hit."
That was the first thing that popped into my head.
It was just so much fun.
The Xbox 360's a spectacular console.
It's just fantastic.
I absolutely love it.
And I like the PS3 as well.
Not really interested in, you know, the holy wars
about which one is better.
I guess they're fan boy arguments is how you can say it.
Like, "I like Nintendo."
"I like Sega."
"I like Sony," you know, it's--I think
this is actually what happens, because I was a kid,
I would've had a Genesis and a Super Nintendo.
I would've had a Nintendo and a Sega Master System,
if I could've afforded it, but, you know,
you're a child.
You can't afford all that stuff.
So, then you start defending the one you have,
and I think that's where that comes from.
"Xbox," "No, PlayStation."
I still, to this day, stay up till four in the morning
playing the latest Xbox 360 that came out yesterday
or whatever it may be I'm, you know, always constantly
still immersing myself in it.
¶
With the continuous waves of technical and artistic changes
sweeping over the industry
and games getting better and bigger,
the video game industry began to anchor itself
within the public consciousness,
many starting to argue that games
are as much an art form as... anything.
The trouble is with art is it's a subjective term.
You know, one person's art is another person's rubbish.
And this is where, you know, you come back to the semantics
of the word "art" which is problematic.
Whether that is a film, or whether that is a book
or whether that is a painting or whether that is
a computer game, it elicits a response.
It makes you think about the world
or look at the world in a slightly different way.
I've always believed that games are absolutely
an art form.
You know, as Phil Fish said, it's the culmination
of every form of art and expression
that mankind has ever had goes into a game.
You look at the staff that builds a video game.
You have a music composer.
You have a writer.
You have an artist who does sketch work.
You have a technical artist.
You have level designers who create spaces
much like architects.
It really is kind of the Avengers of talent
when you really think about it.
Nowhere is it more obvious than in video games.
You have these artists creating
these beautiful three-dimensional worlds.
And the technology allowing players to come
into those worlds and have them be
as real as possible is the ultimate example
of art and science working together.
The best description of art I ever heard
from a professor of mine when I was going for my MFA,
was that art is somebody whose put together something
that deliberately provokes a response in an audience.
The consumer actually is a participant in the art.
It's almost like being part of a great art experiment
about a living art experiment.
Yeah, there's a lot of, like, basic logistics.
Like, you push "X" and this happens,
or you push "up" and that happens.
But if that's all games were,
we wouldn't be playing them anymore, you know?
We would've lost interest a long, long time ago.
¶
Surprisingly, modern game technology is still based
on the same fundamental concept of early game tech,
combining new layers of science and art to reach higher levels
of innovation and expression.
(sirens wailing)
¶
Modern game systems represent not only quantum leaps
in hardware and graphics
but also the utilization of parallel data processing
and memory within the Cloud.
What does all that mean?
Simply put, it means from here on out,
anyone will be able to play any game, anywhere, at anytime,
with amazing speed and quality.
The Cloud is something that you hear a lot about these days,
and there's really two very different concepts.
The first one is the one that we all sort of understand
as being the Cloud.
You know, I've got a picture
I wanna upload it, I wanna tweet.
This is all being uploaded into the Cloud
and stored on hard drives.
So, think of the normal version of the Cloud
as a lot of storage space.
There's another very, very big idea which is,
why not use the computers and the Cloud
to give you computing power that's far beyond
what you would generally want to purchase for yourselves?
And what that means is that the software
that you would love to experience
will be running there and then the actual...
the video or the output from the game
is delivered directly to wherever you are
on whatever device you're on.
There's more processing power in the Cloud
behind Xbox One than the complete processing power
that was on the planet in the year 1999.
We're now able to put scenes on screen
that are almost beyond lifelike in some ways.
But then you have the power of the Cloud behind that box
that allows us to draw upon thousands of servers
to help make the box that's in your home
actually significantly more powerful
than it is by itself.
¶
But there was a time when the future of this now mega industry
was in serious jeopardy.
After the explosive financial and cultural success
of the first generation of video games,
the industry began to think it was invincible.
¶
You know, when all these companies
saw that there was a market for video games,
and they just, you know, they flooded the market
with so many games.
You know, there were a few companies out there
that really wanted to show they have a really awesome game,
but then there were, you know, for every one
really awesome game, there were 100 really crappy games.
What happened was there was this manufacturing
of great expectations that the next Christmas
would be better than the previous one.
And people just sort of moved on.
People got tired of being sold the same thing
again and again with pretty poor entertainment experience.
People started to produce games
at a kind of very accelerated rate.
And the quality of the gameplay went down substantially
to the point of where some of the games
were so bad that they ended up havin' to throw
a lot of them in landfills.
With scores of new game developers
springing up overnight
and venture capitalists pouring money
into what seemed to be a "sure thing" product,
the writing was on the wall.
The market was becoming saturated and in 1983,
the final nail was driven home.
Atari made a deal with Universal Studios
to create a video game adaptation
of the popular movie, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial.
¶
Only from Atari, made especially
for systems from Atari,
the video game that lets you help E.T. get home.
Just in time for Christmas.
Happy Holidays.
With only 5 weeks to make the game,
Atari scrambled to put out a subpar product.
Overconfident and high
on their previous success,
in the fall of 1982, Atari shipped millions
of E.T. cartridges, despite its poor quality.
The backlash was legendary.
It caused a ripple effect
throughout the entire games industry
and by the summer of 1983, consumer confidence
in video games had reached an all time low and Atari,
along with many other rising game companies,
went down like the Titanic.
¶
So, there came a lot of conflict
and the whole management style blew up
and Warner basically took over.
They put their man in, Ray Kassar,
who was from the east coast,
no experience in entertainment,
in games, technology, or Silicon Valley.
And he just didn't really understand
or play games.
So, when you're that way, it's really hard
as a president to really assess
the quality of what's going on.
It was that kind of attitude
and creating terrible product
that was driven by advertising and marketing
and not by any content and guess what?
It didn't sell.
The one story about E.T.'s cartridges
being buried in the desert is actually a true one.
The fact that Atari rushed this game
just to have it out with the movie
to use the license of E.T,
'cause E.T. was huge in the '80s.
Both the E.T. and the Pac-Man games,
those were two of the games that didn't do well,
they were trying to cram something
into the Atari 2600 that it did not want to do.
The big crash happened in '83
and toy stores were unloading consoles
for next to nothing.
Everybody just thought they could schlock
any sort of games onto the system
and it was the first lesson that the industry learned
in the fact that the consumers are smart,
especially gamers, and you can't
just put shuffleware out there and fool them.
They will not buy it.
But, after the crash,
they realized that, you know,
for a lot of people, it'd been a fad,
but for a core group of people,
they still wanted to play games.
¶
For a couple of years after the crash,
many people thought that American video games
would be relegated to the "popular fads" section
of 21st century encyclopedias and forgotten.
Enter Nintendo, a Japanese toy company
who understood that the popularity
of classic games like Pac-Man,
Donkey Kong, and Pitfall proved
that people liked to play as a character,
not just a spaceship or nameless block of pixels.
Even with the crudity of the early 8-bit graphics,
the concept of "immersion" and "being" a character
was still very appealing to the public.
And little did the world know,
their favorite videogame character
was just around the corner.
¶
This is Nintendo, a flashy little computer
that lets you play video games on your TV set.
This is called Game Boy and industry analysts
say that there may be a run on this
as the holiday demand exceeds the supply.
This is Super Mario 3,
it's been a long-awaited game.
Super Mario, of course, was very, very popular,
Super Mario 2 was extremely popular,
now Super Mario 3 is coming out.
It's been the best selling toy in this country
for three years running.
Twenty million of these things
now inhabit American living rooms.
"Inhabit" is a very good word.
Because of the crash, no retailer wanted
to touch a, quote-unquote, "video game system."
And so, a lot of what we did
was to try to come up with something
that was uniquely different,
it wasn't just a game system,
it had other features to it.
And, eventually, we came up with R.O.B.,
the Robotic Operating Buddy and the Zapper Gun
and two cartridges,
and we sold it as an entertainment system.
Even with that, it was a hard sell
to get the retailers to take it,
but it was fairly successful.
And during that first initial phase,
Super Mario came out and that sold like hot cakes.
It was an extremely successful title.
Nintendo Entertainment System was, I think,
you know, a big landmark system,
you know, because before that
there was a real question mark about whether or not
video games were gonna be able to stay popular.
You know, there's the big video game crash
and then Nintendo showed us how we can bring them back
and make them really popular again.
I remember seeing Super Mario Brothers
for the first time and just being
completely blown away, it was like,
"Wow, there's an arcade in my house!
This is the coolest thing ever!"
And Mario Brothers was great
and Zelda was great and so,
I put a lot of hours, as a player,
into those early Nintendo games,
I love those early Nintendo games.
I saw the Nintendo Entertainment System
and said, "Wow, this is new,
unique, different,
bringing new experiences to the consumer.
I saw the original Mario Brothers and said,
"Wow, this is new, this is different."
The same for the original Legend of Zelda.
So, after the video game crash,
I kinda fell out of love with games for a while
and just ignored them.
And then, one day, a neighbor kid down the street,
I go over to his house and he has this gray box
with this R.O.B. the Robot and he has the Zapper Gun
and we're playing this Duck Hunt game
and then he fires up the Super Mario game
and I was like, "Okay, this is some next-level stuff."
And I remember the first time that I jumped
and I hit a block that was there
that I didn't know was there,
one of the secret blocks with an extra life in it,
my mind just... exploded
'cause, like, here are secrets in games now.
¶
With the rebirth of the U.S. games industry,
a new breed of gamers was rising.
The appetite for simple maze-based games was waning.
Gamers were ready for more.
Becoming a character, living out a virtual story
and being absorbed in something otherworldly
was not just technically possible now,
but the expectations for deeper,
more immersive experiences was growing.
As the game business evolved,
um, people were making larger
and more complicated games, requiring 30-page manuals
and 80 hours of gameplay to get into.
You never really cared about
the characters in Gauntlet, you know?
It was just that Gauntlet was an addictive game.
But now, we not only spend more money on games,
but we see them as entertainment mediums
where we want to be invested in the story,
we want to be invested in the world.
The huge difference is that the older games,
I think, were a lot tougher.
Like, if you did not get your jump exactly right
to land on a platform, you were not
getting through that level.
Timing was everything, now you have a lot more freedom.
You can-- you can kill a boss
many different ways.
It used to be before that
the whole point of a game was, literally,
shooting pixelated aliens that were falling
out of the sky, but we didn't know
why those aliens were falling out of the sky,
we didn't care why those aliens were falling
out of the sky, we just wanted to shoot them.
But, nowadays, not only do we know
why those aliens are falling out of the sky,
we know the names of their moms
and we know their future children's names
and we know we have to destroy all of them.
I feel like games as they've developed
throughout time, have kept a lot of
the same traits, they've just sort of,
um, manipulated how they act in the game world,
because people have different desires for games.
They want to be more involved, they don't want
to just sit down and sit at a bar
for a little while and play Pong,
they want to actually be invested
in that game world a little more.
In the beginning, it was simply
the industry understanding, "What are these mechanics?
How do players interact with an interactive medium?"
As we started to understand those rules a little bit better,
other aspects of crafting something
really high-end or beautiful get worked in.
And so, high-end graphics start to become more relevant
because we're, you know, learning how visuals
interact with the storytelling
and interact with the gameplay.
In those days, the game designer's main job
was to create the rules of a game, that is all.
It was very much like chess or cards.
In the '90s with PlayStation
and more powerful technology arriving,
we had the gift of expression.
Games became 3-D, characters could talk,
music could be created, characters could emote
through detailed facial expressions.
In the late '80s and early '90s
the industry was reinvigorated
with new technology, new customers, and new talent.
A renaissance in game design was arriving,
which not only gave birth to some of
the greatest video games of all time,
but eventually a new industry
that would generate billions of dollars
and a new generation of game designers.
¶
In the fall of 1972, a small group
of computer science students at Stanford University's
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
got the idea to convene the very first
"Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics"
with the use of the computer lab's
very own PDP-10.
Contestants fought it out on the machine's, at the time,
impressive 10-inch raster display.
Two events were held: A five-man free-for-all,
and a team competition.
In Spacewar,
five distinctively rendered vessels,
nicknamed "Pointy Fins", "Roundback", "Birdie",
"Funny Fins", and "Flatback", battled to the death
in the display's circular arena, dominated by a star,
whose gravitational pull drew them to the center.
This was the very first video game tournament
and the beginning of a community
that would soon become a culture.
¶
In my dorm room, we would throw cables
over the balcony down to other people's computers
and start these kind of home-brewed LAN competitions
where we were playing all kinds of games
from shooters to RTSs to anything
that we could just play together.
Doom was like a bomb dropped on my 20s.
I lived in a house with a bunch of other geeky guys
that I used to play Dungeons and Dragons with
and we first got Doom and built a LAN in our house
and we had network cable going from each room
and oh, my God, that was all we did
for, like, the next year, I could swear,
it was just play Doom and Doom 2, four players.
And just something about blowing your friend
in half and then hearing him in the next room, like,
curse at you, like, nothing is more satisfying.
Growing up in America, the one place you go
was the mall, I was like that as a child
and I remember there was an arcade at the mall
near our house called The Dream Machine
and it was this stygian cave of noise
and all these portals to all these other worlds
you could go in and out of, Mr. Do!, Dragon's Lair,
Joust, Centipede, Frogger, all of them.
And every time a new game would show up,
I would be around it and on it
and there would be crowds around it.
And, eventually, to the point
where fighting games became a thing later on.
You would literally go up and put your quarter
next in line and try and take down
that one kid who's kicking everybody's butt as Chun-Li.
There was a time period where kids in arcade games
who could rule, like, at Chuck E. Cheese
or at the mall arcade or at the,
in my case a lot of time, the bowling center,
people would crowd around you if you were owning a game.
¶
A global society was born.
A society that now not only plays
and connects online, but has produced
life-long friendships, thriving communities,
even marriages.
And this community doesn't just exist
for entertainment's sake.
Gamers are not only one of the most connected
and vocal groups,
they are some of the most loyal.
Friendships forged within a game experience
somehow yield a bond that isn't easily broken.
¶
One of the things that is really exciting
about games in general is that they've evolved
far beyond the local community aspect
of being able to, you know, just play the game
or enjoy your game with some of your local friends
into truly global experiences
where you can share your passion
with people all around the world.
I love the connectivity, I have lifelong friends
that I've met online and we started out
just playing together and then ended up, you know,
meeting up for competitions or just meeting
to go hand out and kind of actually
meet each other in person and it sounds silly,
but a lot of those friendships are really solidified
around that joint experience that you have
while you're playing a game and I think that
that's something special, it's something magical.
That's something I saw working
kinda in the internet industry all through the '90s
and the early '00s was people, um,
who would meet other people online
and become really enamored with them
and sometimes move to another city
to try living with this person or, you know,
people would get married or meet that way
and that's a whole new kind of human relationship
that didn't exist 10 or 15 years ago.
It's like a new thing, people can meet
and fall in love and not have ever met
in the real world.
I can't tell you how many stories we've gotten
of people being hookups because of--
people eventually getting married
because of the game,
people that have gone through you know,
some sort of horrible medical condition
that they've had to deal with and the games
kind of let them work through that.
I see that, you know, deaths of key characters
really affected people and made them cry in the game,
or they got tattoos of the logo of the game
on their bodies, or a man and his wife
met on Xbox Live playing the game
and now they play co-op every night.
There are kids out there who exist now
because their parents met in World of Warcraft, you know?
Like, um, video games have changed the, you know,
the course of human evolution to some degree
and created whole new mating rituals
and ways of social interaction that didn't exist
and that's as a result of the internet
and video games, so it's gonna be interesting
to watch all of that evolve, video games are gonna get
more and more real and connect
more and more people around the world.
I used to play EverQuest quite a lot,
as many EverQuest players did.
A guy that I met in South Karana DVPing,
we became friends, I ended up going
to his wedding, ten years later,
we're family friends now and it's phenomenal
because we have this shared passion for games,
we had a lot of similar values and ideas,
and we had a lot of great shared experiences online
where we really formed a deep bond
and true friendship and has blossomed
into a great, long-lasting friendship in the real world.
I saw someone recently speaking about, he, uh,
a boy whose parents were killed in a car accident,
so he was left alone in the world and--
and without video games to sort of fall back into,
he'd be sitting in his room, depressed out of his mind
and his video game world, and all his friends
in his video game world really supported him
through that really painful time
and the guy who was observing this
was basically saying, "You guys don't
really understand it, 'cause I know you hear this
all the time, that violent video games
are the problem in the world, et cetera, et cetera,
but games are so meaningful to people
and the friends that they build around it
and the, sort of, the creativity
and the immersion and everything else
that comes with it is actually very valuable
and it's something you learn a lot from.
I walked into the stairwell here
and I-I, this shooting-- I can't even really describe it,
but I basically fell down the stairs, um,
'cause I had had a stroke, as they later revealed to me.
I ended up in the hospital for about nine, ten days,
and you're really scared and you really don't know
where to-- I mean, you're, like, sad
and you have all this anger and you don't know
where to aim it and my friends started bringing
stuff up to me and at first it was food
and then, they started bringing ways
to play games up, I got a little Nintendo DS,
um, and I was playing Zelda on that
and I had a laptop and I was playing,
I mean, I had Steam on there and I had just TF2
and Left 4 Dead and Borderlands
and that really was the turning point,
at the hospital, where I-I...
I wasn't as scared, I guess, anymore?
I wasn't as mad, I had something to do, um.
'Cause part of the stroke that was awful
was I went blind out of my right eye
and it's sort of crazy how not just the games
in the hospital that really got me through it,
it's been everyone around me in this industry.
In all different companies and all different states.
So, yeah, in a very literal way,
I think video games really did kinda save my life.
¶
The world is now engulfed in an artistic, social,
and technological revolution like never before.
Interactive entertainment is the ultimate expression
and delivery format but who will determine
what stories are told and how
we will experience them in the future?
The answer is simple.
¶
Children have a limitless capacity
for wonder, imagination, and creativity,
and they aren't afraid to fail.
When I learned history in school,
it was the most boring...
old books with black and white images in them
and I saw a girl in a video recently
from Carnegie Mellon that was talking
about trebuchets, which is this old,
medieval siege weapon.
But she had actually experienced using one,
because, of course, she had done it
in a virtual world.
And to have, I think she was six,
to have a six year old girl telling you her opinion
of medieval siege weapons versus my version of it,
which was so incredibly boring, is a fundamental change
to education through entertainment
that can make history and things like that
much more engrossing.
My kid, he is 12, and he is faster
at things that I'm not as fast at.
He is better at things and it's because
while his mind was developing, he had access
to interactive media that was much more advanced
than the interactive media that I had
and the interactive media that I had
was the first time.
My parents didn't have any interactive media
when their brains were developing.
Video games, I think, they provide a space
for learning how to fail safely and successfully.
I think, as a culture, we have a real obsession
with always getting things right.
We're afraid of failing.
Video games provide us this very safe space
to learn how to problem-solve, to think through an issue
that we can't quite get right, to help us realize
that it's okay to fall on our face occasionally
if we learn from that and we eventually can succeed.
Because it's simulation, we can do things
and experience things, and practice things,
and test things that either aren't feasible
or aren't safe in real life, in the real world.
¶
Despite the mainstream acceptance
of video games in the '80s and early '90s,
by the late '90s
the term "gamer" still seemed to be
a close cousin to "geek" or "nerd."
If you were a serious, dedicated gamer,
you were seen as part of a strange subculture.
But the winds of change were blowing
and this perception would soon shift.
Being a gamer would soon be en vogue.
¶ I can feel it burn ¶
¶ We're taking over, we're taking over ¶
¶ Now, I try to lead them, will they ever learn ¶
¶ We're taking over, we're taking over ¶
¶ Every time I breathe in, I can feel it burn ¶
¶ We're taking over, we're taking over ¶
¶ Now, I try to lead them, will they ever learn ¶
¶ We're taking over, we're taking over ¶
¶
¶ Hands up in the sky, let me hear you say ¶
¶ Every time I breathe in, I can feel it burn ¶
¶ We're taking over, we're taking over ¶
It's a borderline religious experience
to stand in the middle of an eSports stadium,
packed full of tens of thousands of players,
cheering for their favorite teams.
It's just awesome to see because it's easy to doubt
that that kind of passion would actually manifest
in a physical environment and people would pay
hundreds of dollars or travel thousands of miles
to come to these events to watch people
play video games and they do and they love it.
I've always been kinda frustrated
by the perception of video game nerdiness
and things like that.
Um, for my career, making games that feel
like summer blockbusters and don't feel like, you know,
D&D basement games, to having the courage
to put myself out there on camera and put on
a clean shirt and kind of change that perception as well
to just evangelizing games overall
and to also evangelize the career.
And so, over the course of my 20-plus year career
in this business, I've always hoped
that there are some kids out there who see
a football player or, you know, astronaut
and they're like, "Yeah, that's awesome,
but, you know, maybe video games?
Maybe that's where I want to be?"
And there are a lot of people who'll message me
or send me e-mails, and they...
they are just miserable because they're super lonely,
they haven't found their friend group, you know?
And I think that's sort of like my mission
is to connect people and make people happy
and give people friends, 'cause I never
had that growing up, I never had my nerd group.
I think that's how communities have really started up,
it's just being able to find people
with similar interests.
You know, when you're a kid, it's really only like
if your next door neighbor played,
but now, we're all adults and have the ability
to reach out and connect with someone else.
It's clearly a culture where everybody's having fun,
everybody's got a smile on their face.
They're living their life in a very, very,
you know, powerful way.
The old way of sort of, "Oh, computers
are for geeks and stuff and video games are for geeks,"
has died, is dead.
No one doesn't have Facebook.
Angry Birds, people don't--
almost don't even think of that as a video game.
People don't think of--
There's become this blur of like
what is a video game and what isn't.
Is Facebook a video game?
I kind of think it is.
I mean, it's interactive like a video game
and you can do stuff on it.
The world's really different now
and I think it's because those of us that grew up
being ostracized and looked down upon
and treated like we were radioactive
by mainstream culture created our own culture
and we took the things that we love.
We took the video games and we took the technology
and we took that engineering and we built our own world
out of those things and that world
is so awesome that the mainstream culture
that made fun of us when we were kids
for loving this culture that's so awesome
could not deny it and could not help
but be seduced by it.
¶
We're celebrating video game week starting today.
¶
From Studio 6B in Rockefeller Center,
the National Broadcasting Company presents
Late Night With Jimmy Fallon!
Look, it looks slick, come on.
Well, it's the most powerful
video game console ever made.
We were targeting about ten times the performa--
-Ten times, really? -Yeah, ten times.
I didn't think you can get better than PS3,
but you can, ten times, I guess.
We're gonna play this together.
So, this is Super Mario 3-D World.
Yeah, yeah, that's my man!
I love Mario.
(yelling)
I broke a sweat on that video game.
Ladies and gentlemen, here's a professional actor
reading the line, "It's-a me, Mario,"
in a very dramatic way.
It's-a me...Mario.
Hey, Conan O'Brien here.
Once again, I know absolutely nothing
about video games which is why I've decided to review them.
-Take a girl for a ride. -Oh, my God.
I've never licked a remote before.
I look like John Tesh after he's been dead a year.
-What did she just say? -"I hate tombs."
Yeah, guess what, than don't be a tomb raider!
Oh, I'm sorry, I meant to compliment her
and I almost kicked her!
¶
In the late '90s, with realism in games
reaching new levels and more visceral,
action packed fare appearing on game shelves,
a new conversation started.
Violence.
...home video games isn't holding back the violence.
Mortal Kombat, two of the bloodiest games
to date were released yesterday.
This game encourages players to shoot this gun,
which is called a Justifier.
Kids who play video games too often
are more likely to be violent.
That's the finding of a new study
out of Japan's Tohoku University.
There was no rating on this game at all
when the game was introduced.
...have a great deal of information
that is racist, sexist,
and promotes models of violence.
...recommendations on guns after that series
of meetings and, as you mentioned,
the latest with video game makers who said,
"Don't blame us."
There's always a lot of media talking
about violence in video games
and, certainly, there are violent video games,
but that's not how you describe the medium of gaming.
If I were to go to the cinema
and I were to just watch Saw movies
and I came away and you asked me
what I felt about the cinema, I would say,
"It was the most disgusting, violent, gratuitous thing."
And that's what the media has done
is it's focused on a few titles
and that has ended up, in consumers' minds,
defining what this industry is.
It's weird how, when you watch the people,
you know, they go to Congress and they're angry, you know?
"Our kids are being corrupted," I'm like,
"Yeah, exactly, your kids.
You should be not corrupting them."
"I leave 'em alone ten hours a day."
I mean, it's like finding your dad's Playboys
under the bed and then blaming Playboy.
You know, we're just like any other industry that...
that we have these ratings systems in place
and there's gonna be something for everybody.
We put measures in place, ESRB are our guidelines.
We make sure that we build our game to the rating.
It gets checked on a regular basis.
The interesting thing, I think, with games
is that we actually have an even better
ratings system than movies, but there's still
kinda this, this general misunderstanding
with the elder generation that somehow all games
are like Grand Theft Auto.
People like to make just kind of a causal link
and say video games cause violence
and it's like, "Well, let's see,
so, there's more crime in the summer
and more ice cream is sold in the summer,
therefore, ice cream causes crime."
That's not how legitimate scientific research works.
Violence, unfortunately, is a part of human nature
and last time I checked, Cain didn't bludgeon Abel
with a Game Boy,
Genghis Khan didn't have an Xbox Live account,
and, you know, Hitler didn't play Crash Bandicoot.
We have unfortunately had a lot of gun crime
in the United States recently and I remember someone tweeted
after one of the most recent incidences
that when people started accusing video games
of being an influence for this, they were like,
"Wow, I wonder how all those other countries
with the same exact video games as us
don't have as much gun crime."
You know, it'd be like saying,
"We don't want anyone to go watch movies
because all movies are violent."
But people don't say that
because everyone really understands
movies as a medium.
I don't believe that video games are murder simulators.
If anything, what the statistics prove
is that it's exactly the opposite.
We've survived a lot of things as gamers
for a really long time.
We've survived Congress, we've survived busybody parents,
we've survived religious-based hysteria.
You realize that it's about imagination
and invention and a connection to a world
and it doesn't have these big trappings
that people apply to them.
So, I think it's a problem that's just gonna
naturally evolve away and we just have
to defend the industry until that evolution happens.
¶
(musical beeping)
¶
The campfire.
We've all been there,
whether an actual campfire
or just listening to someone tell a great story.
As humans we have always had the ability and desire
to suspend our disbelief.
If only for a few minutes a day
we want to escape from the treadmill of life
and "give it up" to be immersed in something outside ourselves.
We have this opportunity to be storytellers,
to be able to give the consumer the opportunity
to lose themself in a world
for as long or as little as they want.
We have the realities of life every day,
whether it's the economy or whether it's getting by
or whether it's a job and earning money,
but we have a medium that we can lose ourselves in.
Day-to-day life isn't always that exciting,
and if at the end of the day you can turn on a tablet,
a PC, a console,
and just kind of escape into another world,
I think it's a wonderful thing that essentially allows you
to kind of live the dream.
The storytelling in games
is just as good as movies.
It's just as good as reading a book.
¶
With the resurrection and renaissance of the industry
coming into the '90s and early 2000s,
games began another evolutionary step forward.
Story.
¶
This fundamentally changed the audience's expectations
of what a "good game" really was
and raised the bar for game designers everywhere.
Storytelling in games is a tricky, tricky beast to tame.
As game makers, we have to set up rules,
we have to set up universes that make sense
and have their own sense of logic,
and once we've established what that logic is,
then we let the player's mind and imagination solve problems
and work their way through those worlds.
I think one of the things we've really learned
over the last maybe decade is ways to tell stories
without a cut scene, without stopping the interactivity,
to have the story be something that emerges
from the play itself.
Video games are a lean forward experience
whereas film and television are a lean back experience.
You're driving every moment of the game.
A friend of mine a while back
actually compared games to novels
in the fact that if you stop reading,
the novel doesn't keep going.
Video games are very much the same.
Telling a story in video games
can be a lot more difficult
because then you have to-- you have to anticipate
the actions of the player,
whereas in a movie, you decide what both characters say
and then you write it down and that's what they say.
Storytelling in games is an interesting problem right now
because we don't fully understand it.
The movie industry has been around
for a hundred years or whatever
and they have a really good idea
of what it means to tell a story
in that kind of visual medium,
and the game industry doesn't have all those rules yet.
Either reading a book or watching a movie,
it's completely passive.
You're letting the storyteller give you their vision
of their world or whatever story they want to tell you,
and you are-- you're listening to it,
it's unfolding for you.
You're not affecting that.
With a game, the journey is the reward
more than, say, the ending or the payoff.
This is our routine.
Day and night, all we do is survive.
It never lets up.
¶
(grunting)
¶
The idea of spontaneity within storytelling
is something that's unique to video games.
You can't just change how a song sounds midway through.
You can't just change the end of a book
while you're reading it,
but in certain games,
your decisions have a direct outcome
on the ultimate fate of characters,
and that's unique and sweet.
And I think that's what people respond to.
Can you imagine if you were redoing Star Wars,
and you get to Empire Strikes Back
and Vader says "Join me," and you, as Luke Skywalker,
go, "Okay."
And then the rest of the movie and all of Jedi
are completely different because you made that choice.
And that is where I think video games
fundamentally and vastly differ
from every other kind of nerd media that I love.
¶
Who lives, who dies?
I get it. We're meant to choose.
Heads up, there he goes!
Guns down.
¶
You don't have to get involved.
We must choose.
¶
If you insist.
I do not see how I could save
the lives of other people.
I also lost someone I loved.
¶
Whether the classic Arthurian legends
or more modern translations,
one thing humanity has never had a problem with
is the willing suspension of our disbelief.
The earliest storytellers saw the primal power
in writing, reading, and telling stories,
true or fictional.
I think that once you show a player
what a world looks like and how a world functions,
they get into the world, and then that is their reality.
And so I think as modern game makers,
we have to keep remembering that the suspension of disbelief
comes from the creation of a universe
and the creation of a world, and an immersive world
that has rules that are predictable
and that are logical,
and not from the visual eye candy that we get, you know,
with all this horsepower.
And now that we have these consoles
that deliver mind-blowing graphics
and beautiful explosions and immersive worlds,
there's something more to it.
We've taken our inspirations from outside of games
with emotion and character development and storytelling
in a way that we've tried to break new ground
that you have an association and an attachment
with a character in a game
that makes you want to feel for that story,
makes you want to feel like you're there
making the decisions all along the way.
Good storytelling is not just entertainment.
Good stories can help us grow.
They can teach us about the past
and challenge us to aspire
to higher and greater things.
The story experience in a video game is no different;
the campfire is just a bit brighter and more colorful.
¶
So many things have to perfectly sync up for it to work.
You have art, you have writing,
you have music, you have backgrounds,
you have timing, you have the voice actors,
you have acting, and then video games,
you have everything on top of that
it has to be an engaging user experience as well,
so I think a good video game
I think is probably the hardest thing to make.
¶
If you want emotion, you need the human face,
and in the world of film,
that is the cheapest thing that you can get.
You point the camera at somebody
and you have it instantly.
But in the world of games,
you have a multi-million investment in technology
before you see anything that looks like a human face.
I think the most exciting part about this industry
is that we're constantly inventing
and being fearless about that challenge of invention.
And invention's difficult
because if you already knew
what it was going to be,
you wouldn't be inventing it.
It would already exist, right?
So whenever we invent,
whether it's a design idea
or a stylistic thing,
or, you know, something related to the story,
we kind of depend upon this trust
that there will be inspiration,
that there will be revelation.
Then you gotta get in and start prototyping stuff,
so you build a bunch of prototypes
and you start trying to understand,
hey, are the ideas we had really fun
once you put them into an interactive environment?
You know, I think at the alpha stage,
hopefully we'll see the fun.
It's pins and needles time
because it's that awkward teenage years
that, you know, you've got-- could be an awesome experience,
it could really come together nicely,
everyone's really enthusiastic
because there's something there to play
from beginning to end, but, you know,
there are some weird elements to it,
and, you know, you just had a bunch of people come through
and point out all your, you know, awkwardness,
your buck teeth and your, you know,
crazy-lookin' eyebrow and all that stuff,
and you're sort of hoping that,
okay, I see that, I understand it,
now I need to kind of go back and fix those things
a little bit, make myself a little prettier,
get back out on the street,
and show myself off again.
You start layering on all the really rich assets,
things like a great story,
the high fidelity art,
the fully detailed characters,
and once you start marrying the super high production quality
with those original bare bones prototypes of your design ideas,
you can start really bringing the product together.
¶
And then the work to go from alpha to beta
is generally speaking a laundry list of things
that we have to check off
and make sure are working properly.
We don't touch those as much at alpha,
but they certainly are on our minds at that point
as we start to kind of polish up the game,
make those adjustments to the gameplay,
really try to hone down on what's working well
and maybe give it some more resources and time to develop
and sort of put aside those things
that aren't working as well.
One of the big revolutions we had in the 1990s
was we started bringing in people to play our games
and watched them play. That's it.
But it transformed the way that we make games.
I mean, up until that point, we'd pretty much been
making the games for ourselves,
and so if we thought it was fun, we were done.
You sort of had to make a game and then do, you know,
kind of one of these. Did it feel right?
You know, you'd have your QA department,
but, you know, they were paid employees,
so you never know if you're getting the best feedback.
But now we have this beta testing
and ability to talk with the fans,
and if you're utilizing that correctly,
it's really powerful.
So you hand this, what you think is the gold master
off to the first party, in the console world, anyway.
The PC side's definitely still more of a wild west,
but there's a lot of backlash certainly
if you can't deliver quality
or you have lots of bugs in a PC product.
So you hand it off to Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo,
and you wait and you wait and you wait.
And usually it's, you know, a ten-day waiting game,
and, you know, it's always the most nerve-racking time
is that, okay, is this gonna make it through?
And so, you know, we get that call maybe or email, you know,
maybe ten days later or so,
and you know, it's, "Hey, looks good."
Celebration ensues.
Or, "You've got these critical issues
and these minor issues,
and you need to fix, you know, the critical issues
and as many minor issues as you can and resubmit."
And, yeah, and then it hits the streets.
People either love it or hate it,
most of the time both.
You get--you know, you get both ends
no matter how good your game is.
And you sort of have to-- you roll with the punches,
you let people say their piece.
I look out today, things have changed beyond belief.
Titles we saw, 1,000 man years
of programming art work and design work went into them.
It's astonishing.
It's making a movie times a thousand.
It is daunting.
I don't know why I do it.
(laughing)
The evolution of great storytelling in video games
couldn't have come at a better time.
It seems as if the technology rose to the occasion
at precisely the right moment.
From the turn of the century to now,
games have never looked better,
felt better or played better.
Enter the next-next generation.
¶
¶ I'm feeling so good, so incredible ¶
¶ Some sort of chemical is spreading thick
around my brain ¶
¶ I've got the sun and I won't let it go ¶
¶ It burns a fire in my veins ¶
¶
¶ Let's get out tonight ¶
¶ You've got the fire, I've got the fight ¶
¶ Whoa ¶
¶ In my young blood ¶
¶ Let's light up the dark ¶
¶ You've got the fuel, I've got the spark ¶
¶ Whoa ¶
¶ In my young blood ¶
¶ Our RPMs are in the red ¶
¶ Driving closer to the edge ¶
¶ Up on Flagstaff Road ¶
¶ I still remember what you said ¶
¶ "Are you living?" ¶
¶ "Are you dead?" ¶
¶ You better let me know ¶
¶ Put on display just like a cinema ¶
¶ Standing naked on the stage ¶
¶ And I'm unashamed ¶
¶ It's so easy to be cynical ¶
¶ Let's turn around and start again ¶
¶
¶ Let's get out tonight ¶
¶ You've got the fire, I've got the fight ¶
¶ Whoa ¶
¶ In my young blood ¶
¶ Let's light up the dark ¶
¶ You've got the fuel, I've got the spark ¶
¶ Whoa ¶
¶ In my young blood ¶
¶ Oh ¶
¶ Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh ¶
¶ In my young blood ¶
It's funny because every few years,
the industry really kind of reinvents itself,
whether that's we figure out a new way
to give that experience to players,
or there's a new piece of hardware out there,
or some new technology, some new interface.
There's always that new challenge.
Right now is a really difficult time for the industry.
We are in transition of consoles,
and we are seeing--a lot of the economic score cards
have come in about what games do and do not make money
and which are the best to be doing.
Honestly, it's so hard to predict.
I mean, no one would predict that the platforms
that are most popular right now--
five years ago or ten years ago, no one would have predicted
that that's what would be the norm now.
Every new console generation we get more and more horsepower,
and every console generation there are people who say,
"Is this enough?"
"Okay, oh, this is really awesome."
And then five minutes later, "Eh,
guess it wasn't that awesome.
I need a new awesome thing," you know,
because we're just so spoiled with it.
The medium has grown up a lot from the early days.
I think part of it is that we finally have the technology
to render characters in a believable way.
As we look as a studio how we're gonna evolve our new IP,
and moving into this next phase, the next generation of consoles,
we're having to think outside the box.
We're having to look at how we set
the foundation of a structure
for the next ten years.
¶
I think at this point, we're in
a pretty interesting crossroads
in the history of games.
Publishers, especially in companies,
are fairly risk averse right now
because everybody foresees a big change happening
and nobody knows what it is.
I often compare indie developers
and big huge studios
to a couple of guys in a Zodiac raft
and an entirely fully-loaded battleship.
Each one has its own strengths,
and I think where the indie guys
literally and figuratively run circles
around the big publishers
is that they're a lot more mobile.
They don't have to make as many complicated,
boardroom-based decisions.
They can focus on the kind of game that they want to make,
and because of things like Steam,
they can take their game, make it awesome,
and then get it directly to players
who then spread the existence of their game
because they love it so much
that they're telling other people about it,
they're sharing it on forums,
they're giving it to their friend lists,
and they don't really need to make that investment
of ridiculous amounts of money on advertising and marketing.
The AAA games have beautiful graphics, big budgets,
incredible art teams,
but that's not always necessarily
what makes a great game.
Really, whenever a platform has opened itself up
to allow hobbyists to be able to create products,
you get incredible amounts of innovation.
The interesting thing about that
is when you get to a team of like 200 people,
the ability to innovate is pretty much zero.
You have to basically go with what was designed originally,
and that's what the game becomes.
The smaller the team, the more you can discover
the really important flashes of lightning
and flashes of insight that happen
after large parts of the game are done.
And then you're like, "Oh, you know,
what would be really cool is in this section
and that section if we could do this."
You know, and if you have a 200-person team,
you can't pivot on a dime like that,
you have to be like, "Well, that would be nice,
but we don't have time and we have to get done."
I do think that there's like a revolution afoot in gaming
where people are interested in finding those games
that have more character and soul
than what they've experienced before.
A large game developer might not be able to take big risks
on a virtual reality title that only works in VR
and really utilizes it.
But in indie, they're driven by passion,
by wanting to make the best game possible.
They're usually not sitting there saying,
"How can I make something that really gives me
a nice return on investment?"
And I think that that's going to become
more and more important in the game space
in the coming years.
¶
Where do we go from here?
Many think that when it comes
to the next-next generation of the campfire,
the traditional game controller
tied to a screen gameplay experience
may have its limitations.
One of the things I'm most excited about
is virtual reality.
I think a lot of us can remember back in the early '90s
when movies like The Lawnmower Man came out
and VR was gonna be the next big thing,
and it never really was 'cause the headsets
were big and clunky, the graphics were crappy.
Well, thanks to recent advances in smartphone technology
and screens and tracking devices,
VR is set for a big comeback.
I didn't actually start out
to create a virtual reality headset,
I set out to buy a really nice one.
So I tried buying all manner of different head mounts,
and none of them was really what I wanted
for playing video games immersively.
And so I said, "Oh, shoot, well,
it looks like I'm gonna have to actually try to make my own."
And I actually found that it was something
that there was a lot of technology
that had advanced over the last few years
and it was actually something that was finally possible to do.
How do you walk around in a virtual world?
How do you physically move in a natural way
beyond just sitting down and using a keyboard and mouse?
That's why we developed the Omni.
It's an interface that allows you to walk
and move freely and naturally in your favorite game.
¶
Well, when you break it all down,
I hope we never get rid of the kind of gaming
where I just get to sit on a couch
and push some buttons for a while.
¶
Could those early pioneers,
whose ideas eventually gave birth to an industry,
have guessed what it one day would become?
¶
Would it be foreign to them?
Or did they have a feeling from the beginning
that the ideas and creativity
of each generation of new designers and artists
would forever reinvent the medium?
¶
You know, back when we were
working on games on the Atari 800,
I think people would have laughed if you said,
"This is gonna be a meaningful art form
and it's gonna be in The Smithsonian one day."
I never thought it would amount to anything.
Nolan was running around saying,
"Oh, it's gonna be a big industry!
We're gonna sell millions of games
and it's gonna take over!"
And I fully expected that Atari was gonna fail
until the day Nolan and Joe
came back from visiting Warner.
He informs us they want to pay this money for us, you know,
like 20 million or 30 million dollars.
It was like, "What?"
The amazing thing for us, you know,
back in the early days, is we envisioned this.
We really did look forward to a day
where video games would be interactive movies,
would look like interactive movies.
And, I mean, we are there.
The spirit of curiosity and invention
that was there at the industry's creation
is still its driving force.
¶
Today's game designers continue to give audiences
new and fresh interpretations of classic stories.
What began as a single pixel has now redefined
what storytelling is for the 21st century and beyond.
The future of games inherently gets tied up
into the future of technology in a lot of ways.
And it's really hard to know beyond a couple of years
where technology is gonna go.
We have a faster rate of invention
than probably any medium before it.
I think video games in the next 30 to 40 years
are going to be unimaginable,
where you can't tell fantasy from reality
and you can live the dream that you've always wanted to live.
They have a lot of really intelligent people
becoming intelligent through the use of this stuff.
Video games, I feel like, are inching towards the holodeck,
because that's the end goal is to have to be
as much like real life as possible.
Couldn't the whole world just be digitized
and that make it an easier, safer, and better place?
I could see us getting there,
and getting there quick.
What is the ineffable sort of characteristics
that make real life important?
I think this is what video games
are going to start challenging in the next 20 years.
¶
The size and scope of the modern video game industry
might well be far beyond the greatest expectations
of the men who began it.
But games will continue to be created as they always have,
by drawing on history and culture,
imagination and technology,
to deliver stories and experiences
that delight and challenge generations to come,
whatever form the games may take.
¶
I think that's why a lot of "nerds" play video games
because we have it pretty tough, we don't quite fit in.
But in a game, we always fit in.
Always.
Even though I make them every day,
even though I play broken games
for years before they're perfect
and we put them on a shelf, and, you know,
there's so many issues that go along with that,
I still have the capability of being transported back
to that little kid wrapped in a blanket
staying up way too late
sitting in front of a tiny television,
obsessed.
And I really, really wanna give that
to another eight-year-old kid
and have him feel the same thing
thirty years from now as well.
It's the same reason that kids
play cowboys and Indians when they're young
or you saw Star Wars, you wanted to be that.
It's fantasy fulfillment,
and being able to do fantasy fulfillment
on the level of fully interactive worlds
that you can explore and get lost in.
It was how to get my game
to delight as many people as possible.
And it's coming back to this fundamental thing
that we do in the games industry
is delight people, is entertain people.
You know, I used to say to people, you know,
"Someday everybody'll be a gamer."
And, you know, that was like an aspirational thing.
Now I can't even use that line anymore because everybody--
'cause it's like, duh, well, everybody is.
There is something which we never expected,
which was an assumption you'd have in the film industry
to some degree, that you'd make a film
and people could archive the film
and see it decades or hundreds of years later.
In the game industry, I never thought that would be the case.
And seeing people who are still loving these old games
means that they'll probably be surviving
for decades to come in some form or another.
¶
There are a lot of people that have dreams.
I like to say everyone who has ever had a shower
has had a good idea.
It's the people who dry off and do something about them
that make the difference.
I think the world is way too interesting
to dwell on your past.
And I'm proud of my participation
in this industry,
but I think that what is really more remarkable
is how we can take all the things we've learned
and push it yet one step further.
¶
¶ You know I said it's true ¶
¶ I can feel the love, can you feel it too ¶
¶ I can feel it ah-ah ¶
¶ You know I said it's true ¶
¶ I can feel the love, can you feel it too ¶
¶ I can feel it ah-ah ¶
¶ I can feel it ah-ah-ah-ah ¶
¶
¶ You know I said it's true ¶
¶ You know I said, I said, I said ¶
¶
¶ You know I said it's true ¶
¶ You know I said, I said, I said ¶
¶
¶ You know I said it's true ¶
¶ I can feel the love, can you feel it too ¶
¶ I can feel it ah-ah ¶
¶ You know I said it's true ¶
¶ I can feel the love, can you feel it too ¶
¶ I can feel it ah-ah ¶
¶ Na-na-na-na ¶
¶ No, oh, oh, yeah ¶
¶ No, no, no, no, all right¶
¶
¶ I gotta tell you ¶
¶
¶ I gotta tell you ¶
¶ Tell you ¶
¶ I gotta tell you ¶
¶ Tell you ¶
¶
¶ I gotta tell you ¶
¶ Tell you ¶
¶
¶ You know I said it's true ¶
¶ You know I can feel it too ¶
¶ I can feel it now ¶
¶ You know I said it's true ¶
¶ I can feel the love, can you feel it too ¶
¶ I can feel it ah-ah ¶
¶ You know I said it's true ¶
¶ I can feel the love, can you feel it too ¶
¶ I can feel it ah-ah ¶
¶ You know I said it's true ¶
¶ I can feel the love, can you feel it too ¶
¶ I can feel it ah-ah ¶
¶
¶ I can feel it, I can feel it ¶
¶ I can feel it, can you feel it too ¶
¶
¶ Too ¶
¶ Ah ¶
¶
I can still remember some of the music.
(imitates game music)
I think my favorite memory from playing video games
was when I first played Bonk's Adventures.
The one with the TIE fighter and the one with
the motorcycle things.
¶
BurgerTime. I loved BurgerTime.
Oh, Crystal Castles! Ghosts 'n Goblins.
I would close my eyes and see falling Tetris blocks
and that's when I knew Tetris was going to be
my favorite video game of all time.
(imitating game sounds)
And the elevators.
(imitating game sounds)
It's something my family and I have always bonded over.
It's the common topic around dinner tables,
and it's molded and sculpted my life into what it is today.
My wife is kinda like my mom when it comes to video games.
She tries to regulate how much I play.
First game that I actually remember playing was Pitfall!
for the Atari 2600.
It's from that point on that I had a special place
in my heart as a gamer.
And also, the Atari had so many problems.
Like, if it got dusty, your games didn't work,
so you'd have to blow on the games
and bang the games.
-This is really cool. -Excuse me.
Being an engineer,
I think this place needs more cross bracing.
One of my favorite gaming memories ever
is the first year that I signed up for Extra Life.
and in the first year I raised over 1,000 dollars
for the children's hospital of my choice
and it made me so proud to be a gamer.
(imitating game music)
Thank you.
And playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein
and met a lot of great guys during that,
some I still consider friends
even though I've never met them in real life.
Wherever the industry takes us next,
I will definitely be there for the ride.
Gamer forever.
People kill each other at a toy store
in order to get that Nintendo 64 game.
I'm one of those people.
¶
I'm in space.
The end.