1
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 MI 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.
The only Pac-Man.
And the only way you can
play any of them
is on a home video system
made by Atari.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
And the elevators.
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.
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.