Invert Look 00 - The Origins Issue

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the new state of play

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The global games industry has no level select. No loading bar documents the march of progress.

But make no mistake: our world is evolving, and the signs are everywhere.

This is a games magazine for changing times. This is our launch issue, and what better way to celebrate our birth than by returning to our Origins? Because to understand the future, we must look to the past. Respect your elders.

Insert coin. Press fire to start.

Welcome to Invert Look: The New State of Play

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ert lnv The New State of Play

by Neon Kelly

Ralph Baer in Conversation

by Andy Davidson

Edgar Wright vs. the World

by Matt Bochenski

Press Start

by Neon Kelly, Matt Bochenski

The Man Behind Miyamoto

by Alan Smithee

The Game of Life

by Ed Andrews

The

State of Play

Two decades after the glory days of BritSoft, the humble bedroom coder is making a comeback. Is this the start of a new era, one in which DIY developers stand toe to toe with the mainstream? Or is Farmville the new face of commercial indie gaming?

Things were so much simpler in the ’80s. Three decades ago there was no casual or hardcore; there were only gamers. The UK was the beating heart of the global games industry – or perhaps more accurately, the brightest of several small fires of innovation and creativity. While Nintendo led the charge in Japan and the US, where the success of the NES revived a market rocked by the financial crash of 1983, there were two brands competing for the itchy fingers of British gamers: the plucky ZX Spectrum, and the mighty Commodore 64. This was the world’s first console war, waged across the battlefields of floppy disks and plastic cassettes.

It was the age of the bedroom coder, an era when it was perfectly feasible for one or two people to cobble together a smash hit from the comfort of their own home, provided that they had the time and dedication. Nigel Alderton was still in school when he sold the first version of Chuckie Egg to A&F Software; a teenage Jeff Minter created Grid Runner after setting up a company with his mum.

Skool Daze, Manic Miner, Elite… these names may not mean much to anyone whose first console was a PlayStation or Xbox, but to gamers of a certain generation, these were the defining titles of a golden age.

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Skip forward to the present day, and once again we’re in a period where individuals or small teams can find fame and success in a crowded market. But while the bedroom coders of the ’80s were the stars of the mainstream, today’s indie kids are scattered across a broad range of media – satellite platforms that orbit the giants of commercial gaming.

From the iPhone to Xbox LIVE Marketplace, from Steam to the growing wave of browser-based social network games, there’s an array of options for anyone who wants to get their work into the public spotlight. And while individually these platforms lack the financial clout of corporate publishers, even the biggest names in the industry recognise that they form a huge part of the big picture.

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“Yes, big blockbusters exist and the likes of Activision have a strategy plan, but that’s not really what the games industry is about these days,” says Paulina Bozek, a former development director at Atari. “There’s a whole wave of much smaller studios with fresh ideas, and that’s the area I’m really excited about. It’s basically driven by digital distribution and the fact that you can access the platforms where you want to reach your users in a very, very simple way.”

At the bolder end of the indie spectrum there are people like Dan Marshall, founder of Zombie Cow Studios. Despite being set up “at the very peak of the global economic meltdown”, Zombie Cow has gradually earned itself a reputation for creating highly original games, sold via the company website and Valve’s Steam service. The studio’s best-known efforts, Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentlemen, Please!, are both point-andclick adventures that equally mock and celebrate the idiosyncrasies of the genre, particularly the early output of LucasArts. Both works are littered with references to other games, particularly those that Marshall encountered in his youth; one puzzle in Ben There, Dan That even involves distracting a character by challenging them to a high score contest on a Chuckie Egg machine.

“I was a kid in the ’80s, so I’m not hugely clued up on how it all worked,” says Marshall. “But in terms of ethos, toolsets and people making games for passion, it certainly feels like the two eras have a lot in common. The difference is that, from what

I know of the period, the guys in the ’80s still needed someone to get the discs out there – a traditional publisher, no matter how rudimentary. As an indie these days, there are pretty much no overheads. You can make a game and sell it online without having to find funding to make physical copies.”

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With easy distribution comes creative liberty. It’s highly unlikely that Activision or Electronic Arts would ever support a game in which Hitler takes over the world with the help of robot dinosaurs, one that features mouse-on-dead-mouse sex scenes and an options screen that boasts a slider for the level of racism. But since Marshall has complete creative control, he can do what he likes – he even gets to cast himself in a leading role. Zombie Cow’s sense of humour might not be for everyone, but that’s not the point; Marshall and his peers are making the games they want to make, without the hassle of outside interference. While mainstream developers are forced to pursue the genres that sell, resulting in a near-endless stream of first- and third-person shooters, independent coders have the power to push gaming in new, experimental directions.

Take Jason Rohrer’s Passage, a provocative slice of interactive existentialism available on the iPhone App Store or free online. In it a tiny Lemmings-like figure travels across a simple landscape, visibly ageing as he goes. Early on in the game you’re given a one-off chance to meet your soulmate; if you take

this option you’ll gain a loyal companion, but you’ll also be hindered from collecting the (ultimately pointless) treasure that litters the lower half of the map. Either way, the end result is always the same: your digital life expires after a few minutes of play, leaving only a pixellated grave and, more often than not, a feeling of bewildered sadness. Passage may not rival Super Mario Galaxy 2 in the happygo-lucky fun stakes, but it’s certainly a lot more ambitious than Paper Toss, the trash-to-bin sim that typifies much of the App Store’s catalogue.

Besides, while gameplay purists may turn up their noses at eccentricities like Passage, they’ll most likely appreciate the fact that indie platforms have led to a resurgence in classic, retro game styles. At the turn of the century, twin-stick shooters seemed to be an endangered species; now, thanks to Sony and Microsoft’s virtual markets, the iPhone and a plethora of online Flash games, we’re positively drowning in Robotron copycats. To a certain extent, this self-reflexivity (or outright plagiarism) is yet another echo of ’80s bedroom coders, who also cannibalised the work of their forebears. Jeff Minter borrowed more than a little Defender for his first game, Andes Attack, while Manic Miner was heavily inspired by Miner 2049er.

“It can feel like everything’s a clone,” admits Marshall. “I guess it depends where you’re getting your leads from. There are a lot of people putting out indie games that riff on classic styles, but that’s how you get into it, you know? Start out making Pong and simple platformers and move up from there.”

Zombie Cow’s next game, Privates, is due for release this summer. While Marshall likens the game to Contra and Gunstar Heroes (“It’s a fairly

traditional shooter… You run, you aim, you shoot”), early media attention has focussed heavily on the fact that the game stars a squad of military phalluses, clothed in prophylactic berets, battling their way through germ-infested vaginas. Aside from being undeniably unique, Privates is notable for being Zombie Cow’s first foray into 3D gaming.

Perhaps more importantly, it will also be coming to Xbox LIVE’s Marketplace – provided that Microsoft can swallow the penile premise.

The Marketplace and Sony’s equivalent on the PlayStation Network are the promised lands for many aspiring developers. Both services play host to a diverse range of genres and game types, catering to immense, persistent user bases. These portals offer a potentially lucrative halfway house between the mainstream and the freedom of the wider indie spheres. Both Sony and Microsoft have communities and toolsets in place to encourage and support fledgling designers, and for those that do find success, there can be a hefty payoff. The bestselling Xbox LIVE Indie Game for 2009 was Ska Games’ I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1N IT!!!1 – a twin-stick shooter that relays its instructions to the player via an instantly loveable theme song (sample lyrics: ‘Welcome to my game / I put zombies in it / for your pain’). By March of this year, Z0MB1ES had shifted over 200,000 downloads, netting creator James Silva $140,000 after a 70/30 revenue split with Microsoft.

There is an argument that success stories like Z0MB1ES are relatively scarce, and it’s certainly true that the smaller-scale Marketplace games tend to get less attention than those made by larger, established studios – like RedLynx’s Trials HD, for example.

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Martyn Brown, studio head at veteran developer Team17, agrees that it’s still the larger indie developers that tend to dominate the limelight. “The iPhone is the standout when it comes to spurring on the indie market, as is Flash,” he says, “but I think the console guys, in terms of Xbox 360 and Sony’s PSN store, have really tried to bring ‘elite’ indie offerings. Making a console game is largely a much more complex task than a smaller game and it’s very rare that such a project is developed by just a couple of people.”

Now in its nineteenth year of operation, Team17 is a name that will be familiar to most seasoned UK gamers – a rare survivor of the original BritSoft movement. Today the studio works on just about every platform going, but the company has largely stuck to its established, hardcore roots. The Worms series recently made the jump to the iPad, while a new 3D reworking of Team17’s flagship series, Alien Breed, will be coming to the PC later in the year, following a successful debut on PSN and LIVE Marketplace. For Brown, it’s these latter services that represent the heart of hardcore indie gaming.

“I think these platforms, when compared to the

App Store, web browsers and such, have really got to be considered the home of harder-core, dedicated players, so I think it’s an obvious home for that type of content. You only have to look at the bestsellers to understand the demographic of people playing on the consoles – it’s gamers. Whereas the casual aspect of App Store and browser pulls in a nonhardcore audience who accept it for what it is, [they’re] not necessarily gamers as such.”

It’s tempting to compare this divergence with trends in the US film industry. These days a Hollywood studio can pump cash into a single summer blockbuster, or use the same money to fund a score of cheap independent films – one or two of which may turn into an unexpectedly big hit, like Sideways or Knocked Up. Medium-budget offerings are becoming increasingly uncommon, and Brown believes that gaming could be heading towards a similar two-tier system.

“I think we’re there already,” he says. “We’re already seeing polarisation with triple-A retail games. You have 20 to 30 huge ‘blockbusters’ per year and then at the other end of the spectrum there’s a lot of indie and smaller projects. There

doesn’t seem to be too much happening in the middle, and that’s caused quite a transition in the games industry.”

There are clear echoes between the two sectors, and yet the comparison can only be taken so far – because at the moment, Hollywood has no real equivalent to Farmville. Of all the growth areas in contemporary independent gaming, social networking titles are perhaps the most controversial.

The self-declared gaming elite loves to moan about the Wii and its impact on the industry, but even the most ardent would admit that Wii Sports Resort is still recognisable as a videogame. Can the same be said for Farmville?

“As first examples of social games on what is still a very young and new platform, I think that there’s a long way to go,” says Brown. “As someone who’s developed traditional videogames for two decades, I really struggle to consider them games as such.

They’re more like interactive diversions.”

The inherently simple design of most social network games means that they’re the most democratic of all the indie platforms. Take Mafia Wars and Mob Wars, a pair of Facebook plug-ins so similar that a fierce legal battle between their respective creators was settled for a rumoured $9 million. While Mafia was developed by Zynga, a San Francisco studio with 760 employees, Mob is the product of one man, former Freewebs employee David Maestri.

If hard cash is your primary objective as a newwave bedroom coder, you could do far worse than follow in Maestri’s footsteps: according to innovation blog VentureBeat, Mob Wars draws in a whopping $22,000 a day, fuelled by the participation of over 574,000 monthly users.

Short of some hitherto unforeseen catastrophe befalling Facebook and the entire social networking sector, it’s hard to see these quasi-games disappearing from view in the near future. Will Mob Wars and its peers inspire a generation of coders in the same way as Chuckie Egg and Manic Miner all those years ago? It seems both unlikely and unpalatable, but it’s interesting to note that mainstream developers are already starting to get in on the act. Rockstar’s open world cowboy adventure Red Dead Redemption is already a strong contender for the best game of 2010; its Facebook tie-in won’t win the same plaudits, but it may well be a harbinger of things to come – because where Rockstar goes, other developers are sure to follow.

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“I guess it’s down to what people class as a ‘game’ or ‘entertainment’,” concludes Brown. “I don’t mean to sound snobbish about it, and I’m obviously excited about the opportunity to develop new games for an entirely new breed of player. I think it’s great that people are enjoying this stuff because it means their experiences will only improve with second- and third-generation social games. But really, I’m sick of hearing who’s got goats and cows on my Facebook page.”

For his part, Dan Marshall seems a lot more cheerful about his new competition: “Anything whatsoever that gets people into gaming is completely fine by me,” he says. “If it means gaming will finally start to shrug off that nerdy tragic feeling you get when discussing them down the pub, I’m all for it.” Neon Kelly

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Ralph Baer in Conversation The Father of Videogames speaks exclusively to Invert Look.

If the name ‘Brown Box’ means nothing to you, it’s time to brush up on your gaming history. As the prototype for the machine that would eventually become the Magnavox Odyssey, the Box was the world’s first games console. It didn’t have much in the way of exclusives, just one in fact – but at the time, Ping-Pong was the only domestic videogame in existence. The game itself was a simple-looking thing: a single white line bisecting the screen to represent a net, two large blocks for the players, and a smaller one for the ball.

That may not sound like much, but the Brown Box and Ping-Pong are the seeds from which everything we know today has grown, and Ralph Baer is the man we have to thank for both. Baer invented the Brown Box in 1966 while working for US firm Sanders Associates, and created the world’s first lightgun two years later as part of an expansion for the Odyssey.

In 2006 he was awarded The National Medal of Technology and Innovation – America’s highest accolade in the field of science and technology. Ralph Baer is, in short, the Father of Videogames – a title used so frequently, it’s pretty much become his official epithet.

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IL How did you begin working in electronics?

Baer I came to New York in 1938 from Germany, just ahead of the Nazis. We left just ahead of the Kristallnacht, so if I hadn’t left then I probably wouldn’t have got out, period. Within six months of coming to the US I saw an ad for a correspondence school teaching television and radio servicing, so I took the course and that’s how I got started. Within a year I was running three stores in New York on the West Side and the East Side, and that was when I got drafted by the Army. After that I went to college. I eventually came out of college at the age of 28 and worked in a television studio servicing equipment, and so I became a television engineer.

In 1966 I was chief engineer or manager of a large company called Sanders Associates – it’s now a BAE company.

That was where I created the Brown Box. I had the idea of doing something with a television set, so I put my TV engineer experience together with a creative mind, which I inherited from some family member, and up came the idea of playing games on a television set. I wrote a four-page paper on this which was published on September 1, 1966, and is considered to be the Magna Carta of the videogame industry. It went on from there. Magnavox licensed the Brown Box and released it as the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972.

How were you allowed to invent the Brown Box while working at a defence contractor for the US military?

We largely made infrared countermeasures, the kind of stuff you put in warplanes to stop them being shot down. We also did anti-submarine warfare, all the typical things. I ran a large division there, and I had the freedom to work on my own interests.

What was the initial reaction to the idea of the Brown Box? People saw a large chassis that allowed me to put two coloured spots up on a screen. We could make the spots chase each other and I had a joystick device that could shoot at them. Whenever I demonstrated that to the board of directors I got long faces and no support. Over the next six months I continued working on it and I mostly got questions like, ‘Are you still screwing around with this stuff?’ Of course, three or four years later, when the licensing money started coming in, everybody told me I was a part of it. And that’s life.

When did people begin to grasp the possibility of videogames?

It took 10 years. It wasn’t until microprocessors came along that it all took off. As smaller, more capable microprocessors became available at a reasonable price, so new games could be produced. On the other hand, the pressure to produce games pushed microprocessors along. When I started in 1967 there were no microprocessors; it was all done by switches.

How did Magnavox see the Odyssey?

Magnavox were not a progressive company. I tried to improve upon the Odyssey by adding extra components, but they weren’t interested in that. I was once told by a Magnavox executive that ‘TV games account for two to three per cent of the business, so you’re going to get two to three per cent of my attention.’ Some people are naturally dumb.

You’re often referred to as the ‘Father of Videogames’. How does that title make you feel?

Well, it makes me feel like I accomplished something. I have 150 patents worldwide and only a few are for videogames. So it’s a small part of what I’ve done, but a very important part. Four weeks ago I went to Washington, where I was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. I was on stage and I caught pneumonia, I guess. Maybe it was being exposed to too many people on airplanes, flying back and forth to Seattle. I do a lot of conferences by Skype and videoconferences, so I use this to appear in places like Malaysia, Japan and Brazil – all over the place. The only place they wouldn’t allow it was China, goddamn Nazi bastards.

What’s your reception like in Japan? Obviously there’s a huge interest in gaming over there.

Oh, they love it. What I always show first is black-and-white footage of Bill Harrison and myself playing a PingPong game in 1967. It’s available on YouTube. Bill Harrison was a tech guy who helped build the Brown Box. In the video we explain how the controls work and then we play a competitive game.

And what’s your opinion on videogames now?

That’s a question like, ‘What’s your opinion on books?’ There are all kinds of books, all kinds of videogames, all kinds of players. Everybody has their particular preferences. Andy Davidson

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Edgar Wright vs. the World

Meet the British director leading a new generation of twenty-first century filmmakers whose videogame-inspired aesthetic is set to take over Hollywood.

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“It’s no big controversy to say that there hasn’t really been a great film based on a videogame,” says Scott Pilgrim vs. the World director Edgar Wright. No shit.

The haphazard collaboration between filmmakers and games developers is a story of creative and imaginative failure. From Super Mario Bros. to Prince of Persia, videogame adaptations have lacked both the visceral thrill of gaming and the narrative strengths of cinema. As Wright describes it, these bastard children of two media are nothing more than “a Xerox of themselves.”

But the winds of change are blowing through Hollywood. Wright is part of a new generation of directors who have a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which videogames can inspire film. It is a generation raised in Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom rather than the old-school picture palaces, one that has an intuitive feel for videogame aesthetics and how to apply them to film in new and surprising ways.

“In terms of videogame films, I can’t see the day when there will be a good adaptation,” says Wright. “If there hasn’t been one in the last 15 years, I don’t feel like there’s going to be one anytime soon.” Instead, a kind of cultural cross-pollination is taking place, one that has given rise to a new kind of movie.

Wright likens the effect to the evolution of the comic-book film in the late 1980s, long before the box office dominance of today. “In the ’80s and early ’90s most of the best comic-book films were not based on comics but were influenced by comics,” he explains. “That was our idea with Scott Pilgrim – can we make a really good videogame film that’s not based on a videogame?

Scott Pilgrim is a film about a guy trying to get with his dream girl, but the aesthetics of it are videogames from the opening frames right through to the end. Essentially, the whole film is like a psychedelic daydream of somebody who has grown up playing consoles – like a dream sequence that doesn’t end.”

Based on the graphic novel by Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World stars Michael Cera as a shy geek who gets together with Mary Elizabeth Winstead, only to discover that he has to defeat her seven evil exes. With its power bars, one-ups and 64-hit combos, the entire film looks like Streetfighter 2 on acid.

It takes its place among a number of films which, together, offer a persistent vision of a new videogame-inspired aesthetic. They include former Halo short filmmaker Neill Blomkamp’s District 9; Matthew Vaughn’s Modern Warfare-infused Kick-Ass; the sandbox-style information overload of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s Crank universe; and the game-within-a-game world of Joseph Kosinski’s TRON: Legacy.

Videogames have been a recurring theme in Wright’s work as far back as Simon Pegg’s Resident Evil freak out in Spaced. But it was actually around this time, in the late ’90s, that he was forced to step back from gaming. “I stopped being a hardcore gamer in my twenties because I had to get the console out of the house – I basically became an addict,” Wright admits. “It was around the time I was trying to write Shaun of the Dead with Simon, and it was like, ‘I’m never going to get to do what I want to do if I spend a solid eight weeks playing Resident Evil.’”

And yet, ironically, videogames are at the root of his film career. Shaun of the Dead eventually hit the big screen in 2004, catapulting Wright into the front rank of young, hip British directors with its perfectly pitched pastiche of George Romero’s zombie movies. But more than Night of the Living Dead and its sequels, “What inspired Shaun of the Dead was playing Resident Evil 2 right into the wee hours of the morning,” explains Wright. “I got up later and went out across the street to the newsagent to get the Sunday papers. It was light and there was nobody on the street, and there was this connection between playing a zombie game in this deserted town and walking around London, which is deserted on a Sunday morning. I couldn’t help thinking about walking back from the corner shop and seeing zombies, which is exactly what happens in Shaun of the Dead.”

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Even in his second film, Hot Fuzz, a Hollywood-style cop movie set in the ostensibly real world of sleepy Somerset, Wright sees the influence of his gaming background. “Me and Simon always felt that the ending of Hot Fuzz played out like a videogame – the action is supposed to be in different environments, and in each environment there’s a boss. I’ve dealt with it in everything I’ve done.”

If Scott Pilgrim has taken this gaming influence to the next level, it’s come with a workload to match. The film was in post-production for almost a year as Wright and his FX team developed a unique visual palette for Scott’s many combat scenes. “In games like Tekken, I always liked the fact that they animated violence without showing blood and bones,” he says. “So you’d get blue shockwaves or different symbols for blocks or for a punch that’s landed. We wanted to bring that into the fight scenes – so Scott Pilgrim is your player.”

The effect has been “like doing an animated film straight after doing a live action film,” which might account for why Wright sounds so rough. He’s still three weeks from locking the final print, and by the rasping coughs he’s emitting, it’s touch and go whether he’ll make it. Is the pressure beginning to tell? “The only possible way you can deal with the pressure is just to work really hard,” he says. “My attitude is, ‘I’ll work harder than ever before, and when people see this film – whatever they make of it – I think everybody will be able to see the enormous amount of work from all the different departments.’”

At the same time as Wright has been working on the film, Ubisoft have been developing the tie-in game – just to add another layer of complexity to the film’s convergent aesthetic.

The director hasn’t been too involved with it himself, but the developers had full access to his storyboards. Having played it, Wright says, “It’s fascinating because it’s like watching a cartoon version of what we shot. When I played the game I’m thinking, ‘That’s not even from the book, it’s from our set!’ It’s actually really cool that the book, the game and the film come out within a month of each other. The book is obviously like the bible but then the game and the film can split off in different directions, and you can have a bizarro Choose Your Own Adventure version of Scott Pilgrim, depending on which media you want to go with.”

These are still early days, but as the likes of Blomkamp, Kosinski, Vaughn, Wright, Neveldine and Taylor cement their position in Hollywood, they augur a lasting change in the relationship between games and movies. As Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn puts it, “The geeks have inherited the earth – it’s their time.” Matt Bochenski

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MARK CHARAN NEWTON

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PRESS START

Every gamer remembers the day they popped their pixel cherry. A group of industry insiders share their first time.

David Jaffe Founder, Eat Sleep Play It was a game called Boot Hill. I was on holiday with my parents and I must have been about 12. There was a machine next to the pool at our hotel and once I played it, that was it – I didn’t want to go swimming any more, and I spent the afternoon asking my dad for quarters. It was the first boner I ever had.

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Jörg Tittel Producer, Breakthru Films

Dan Marshall Founder, Zombie Cow Studios

I remember when I first played Pong in a friend’s basement. Chubby and uncomfortable in my baby skin, I was terrible at sports, and the little squares on screen reminded me too much of ping pong at first, so I started playing with slight trepidation. My school buddy was a sporty guy, so I was a bit intimidated.

But then… I beat him, right there, without any previous training and no sweat. I knew I’d be really good at these games… Prince of Persia was the first time I actually cared for characters in a game. Jordan Mechner managed to tell a story with little dialogue, just through gameplay. I found it incredibly theatrical and emotionally involving. When I finally moved to New York to study at NYU, I found out that Jordan had studied film there. It was clear to me that, slowly but surely, movies and games would come together – that’s where we were all going, especially since our roots are the same.

I remember a Pong machine at a friend of my parents’ house, but that’s such a distant, hazy memory I can’t imagine it’s definitely true. So I’m going to go with Chuckie Egg on a BBC Micro.

I was amazing at Chuckie Egg. It’s one of those games that just brings back very fond memories – that adorable thing you probably can’t even get anymore, where you call the seeds ‘grapes’ because the graphics were too bad to really know what they were. It’s a very simple concept, but really well executed – it doesn’t feel like it was hampered in any way by the hardware like a lot of games of that era.

Martyn Brown Co-Founder/Studio Head, Team17

Francis Pang Sackboy Creator, Media Molecule

There’s quite a few. My strongest memory was playing an original Space Invaders machine on a ferry across to France as a school kid at 12. I was pretty transfixed by it. Then I saw Galaxian and was blown away by the sound effects. I ended up hearing those sounds in my sleep for days. I was lucky enough to get an Atari VCS at Christmas in 1980, and I think I played Space Invaders a little too much as all I could hear and see for days was the game in my head. I’ve not been right since…

My answer would be Secret of Mana. I love those really early 16-bit Square RPGs – just those sprites, those characters. They’re really simple, but there’s so much charm to them, and in some ways I think they look much better then than they do in the current Final Fantasy games. They’re so realistic that you can’t add any of yourself to it, whereas with Secret of Mana, I can imagine that character. With design, you kind of want to leave some gaps so that the person playing can put some of himself into that character, and I think those 16-bit sprites really allowed players to do that. There was a bit of imagination required. The enemies were just circles, but you kind of imagined them as being these ferocious things.

In the new game, it’s all kind of spelled out for you.

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Richard Coyle Actor, Prince of Persia

Mark Neveldine Director, Crank

I remember I had an Atari that I got from one of my older brothers, and I had Indy 500 – lo-fi, really lo-fi, just racing around a track. Then I had a Commodore 64 and I remember I had a game called The Sorcerer of Claymore Castle, an adventure game where you had to type in instructions on the screen. Shocking.

It was amazingly exciting for me as a kid but it was terrible now when I think about it.

I was an addicted gamer when I was a kid – I used to go to the arcade with rolls of quarters. Gosh, it would have to be… I feel like Donkey Kong is the first thing that came to me but when it came to Nintendo, I was such a huge Duck Hunt fan and Mario Bros. fan.

I knew all 300 worlds and I was all about it. That’s what hooked me into the world and got me literally thinking about it as a different place – thinking about it as a second life, if you will. Nintendo, to me, was my second life.

Sam Lake Writer, Alan Wake

Edgar Wright Director, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

For me, definitely with the Commodore 64 it was the Ultima series. I started to play these from Ultima II onwards, and I have to say they really blew my mind back then. I could never have imagined that someone could make a game like that. They are definitely my fondest memories from learning about computer games.

I had the ZX Spectrum, but I also had the ZX81, and the first ever game that I remember was called 3D Monster Maze. It’s an extremely primitive, 3D maze game with a big fucking Tyrannosaurus rex in it. So there was that one, Ant Attack and Horace Goes Skiing. When I got a ZX Spectrum, the ones that I used to really love, and in fact I even played them on an emulator the other day, is the Ultimate games – Sabre Wulf, Knight Lore and Alien 8. I saw Nigel Godrich, who is doing the music for Scott Pilgrim, and we had a big old geek out about Spectrum games, and we were both talking about Knight Lore and how many times we’d played it. There was an emulator of it on YouTube that had the menu music and I was saying to Nigel, ‘Hey, check it out! Check it out!’ Definitely some of the tunes from those games still reverberate around in my head. Me and my brother used to play them a lot.

On the BBC, I used to go round to someone’s house to play Elite. I think for a lot of people, Elite was like the 2001 of games. The other one I used to really love, and I’m sure other Spectrum people would go on about this one as well, was Quazatron where you had to control a robot and you basically had to rape other robots by infiltrating their circuits – you would power up by sticking your robot mandibles into them and then it would go into a circuit game where you would have to blast out their other circuits. Then sometimes your power would get so much that you’d go on the fritz and you would explode because basically you were too powerful. Quazatron isn’t particularly advanced on a graphic level, but it was great gameplay and I know a lot of geeks talk fondly of it.

What’s interesting as well with some of those games – it’s one of the most amazing things about Nintendo – if you’ve got good character design, those games will never go away. People will still play the first Mario Bros. game because the playability is great and the designs are really good. You look at some of the Ultimate games on the Spectrum, and the Knight Lore graphics still look cool even though it seems very archaic by today’s standards. It’s interesting that things like Sonic, in terms of animation and character design, those things have never gone away.

Matthew Vaughn Director, Kick-Ass My first gaming memory is Elite on the BBC. You are flying around planets in a spaceship, fighting other ships. It was a role-play, sci-fi, action videogame. It was one of the most revolutionary games of all time.

Ed ‘Bongboy’ Stern Senior Game Designer, Splash Damage It may well have been a Space Invaders game. On the side of the cabinet there was a picture of a Space Invader and a weird fuzzy ape thing – and of course, it never appeared in the game. I was quite scared by it. I thought, ‘Shit, when do you get to meet those guys?’ Even though the game was incredibly basic, and even though it was just black-and-white images, the controls were so beautiful! Who doesn’t want to fondle one of those old arcade cabinets? The buttons are so clackity, the stick in the middle is so precise and it fits in your hand perfectly. It was one of the most thrilling things I’d ever seen. I must have been about 10, and I honestly could not believe that such things existed.

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The Man Behind Miyamoto The origins of Nintendo’s twenty-first century dominance can be found in the tragic story of forgotten genius Gunpei Yokoi.

Every creative industry has its share of icons; its figureheads, its spokesmen. For gamers, Shigeru Miyamoto towers above them all, synonymous with the enduring popularity of Nintendo both as a brand and a creative factory. But Miyamoto was mentored at Nintendo by another figure, a forgotten legend who had a flair for engineering and games design equal to Miyamoto himself.

Though he invented the Game Boy, tragedy would cut his life short before the wider world recognised his genius. This mysterious individual has a name – Gunpei Yokoi – and this is his story.

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By the 1960s, Nintendo was in a transitional period, attempting to reinvent itself as more than just a manufacturer of hanafuda playing cards. The company dabbled in several ventures – a chain of love hotels, a taxi company, a TV network, a food business selling instant rice – with little success.

In hindsight it was a perfect storm of opportunity, but it might not have seemed that way to Gunpei Yokoi. Born in Kyoto in 1941, Yokoi graduated with a degree in electronics from Doshisha University. He joined Nintendo in 1965 as a janitor and maintenance man, a lowly position from which he expected to gain little.

That’s when fate lent an extending hand. Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi felt it was time for the company to diversify once again, this time into the toy industry. He asked if Yokoi had any ideas, and the young man produced a pincer on the end of a latticework hinge, which he had built and designed in his spare time. Yamauchi was so impressed he instructed Yokoi to develop it further for the Christmas market. In 1966, the Ultra Hand was a huge hit, selling 1.2 million units.

Yokoi continued ploughing the Ultra furrow throughout the late ’60s into the 1970s, designing a range of toys that demonstrated a flair for originality and creativity – like the Ultra Machine, an indoor softball launcher that sold 700,000 units. In the midst of this development, Yokoi met with an employee from Sharp, Masayuki Uemura, who was trying to interest the designer in a new product from his company: solar cells. Yokoi immediately saw the potential for toy design,

and hired Uemura himself. Together they designed a lightgun which, when ‘fired’ at a solar cell in a target, would respond as though it had physically been shot. The Nintendo Beam Gun quickly found an audience, with the company opening a series of simulated clay-pigeon ranges. “It was a time of great fun,” Yokoi reminisced of the period. “I saw myself as a cartoonist who understood movements in the world and created abstractions out of them.”

But there were dramatic changes ahead. Over in America, electronic entertainment was beginning to take shape in the form of videogames, and the technology required to build them was becoming cheap enough for mass-production. It was time for Nintendo to plant a stake in this exciting new market.

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For a brief period, Nintendo joined forces with Mitsubishi to release the Color TV Game 6, a basic console. But Nintendo’s president wanted a product that would truly distinguish them from the competition. Once again, he turned to Yokoi for inspiration. Legend has it that Yokoi was travelling home on a bullet train when he spotted a bored businessman fiddling with his calculator. A thunderbolt struck – what if you could transform this everyday electronic device into something fun, cheap and portable? Something that doubled as both a ‘game’ and a ‘watch’?

The Game & Watch series launched with Ball, a basic juggling game, on April 28, 1980.

As the hardware grew in complexity, new titles required players to move not only horizontally, but vertically as well. To facilitate this, Yokoi developed the ‘D-pad’, a cross-shaped directional button that would become an immutable feature of joypad design, appearing on practically every iteration of Nintendo hardware to the present day.

Between 1980 and 1991, the Game & Watch series grew to a library of 59 titles, translating popular arcade hits into a portable format. The design never stagnated, incorporating a range of hardware modifications and upgrades including dual screens and two-player modes. If there was an enduring lesson from the series, it was that you didn’t need to be on the bleeding edge to be innovative. “The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art,” Yokoi declared, “but to utilise mature technology that can be mass–produced cheaply.”

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Not long after Game & Watch was launched, Yokoi was faced with another challenge. Nintendo’s arcade title Radarscope had flopped, and Yamauchi asked Yokoi to remedy the situation. A new developer, Shigeru Miyamoto, was assigned to the project, and the pair decided to scrap the game and come up with a brand new concept. Rebuilt from the ground up, Radarscope was transformed into Donkey Kong, featuring never-before-seen gameplay elements, characterisation and cut-scenes. It became one of the most popular games of 1981.

But as Yokoi and Miyamoto beavered away on the sequels, and ported the titles to the Game & Watch line, Yamauchi began thinking on a bigger scale. He decided that the time was right to launch a Nintendo-branded home console. Yokoi and his Beam Gun compadre Masayuki Uemura put their heads together once again, striking deals with component suppliers and building a new team of engineers. On July 15, 1983, the Famicom was launched in Japan, along with ports of earlier arcade titles including Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. The US games industry was dramatically imploding.

Surplus copies of E.T. were being dumped into a landfill in the Arizona desert, and retailers were reluctant to stock any new products on their shelves. Nintendo circumnavigated the problem by falling back on their experience in toy-making: Yokoi designed the Robotic Operating Buddy, a one-foot-tall automaton that did little except whirr, buzz and consume batteries. Bundling it with the Famicom in 1985, Nintendo convinced retailers it was just a hi-tech toy, not a games console. The stealth gamble worked – in its first year, the Nintendo Entertainment System (as it was known in the West) sold in excess of a million units. Having served its purpose, Yokoi’s R.O.B. was quietly dropped the following year. At the back of Yokoi’s mind, however, he was still tinkering with the Game & Watch series. It was a sound concept and it still had life in it.

What to do next?

That’s when Yokoi had another one of his thunderbolts. Why not take the NES with its cheap, solid hardware and brilliant games library of interchangeable cartridges, and shrink it down for the handheld games market? At a stroke, the Game Boy was born: a handheld games device with a monochromatic screen, a cartridge slot, and powered by only four batteries. Released in 1989, it sold out in just two weeks in Japan, and shifted 400,000 units in the US in one day. It would go on to sell over 118 million units worldwide.

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Yokoi continued to produce blockbuster software titles for the Game Boy and the newly minted Super Famicom/NES, but already he was looking ahead to his next big idea. In 1992, he began working on a second-generation portable games system, this one featuring 3D graphics.

But when the Virtual Boy was unveiled in 1994, the reaction was distinctly underwhelming.

The marketing blurb promised a revolutionary new experience; the reality was a poorly designed set-up which presented games in two colours – red and black – and induced headaches and nausea. Unsurprisingly, the Virtual Boy was a public relations disaster and a commercial flop in Japan and the US. Nintendo didn’t even bother selling it in Europe.

At the Computer Entertainment Show in 1995, Yokoi was asked to explain the thinking behind the Virtual Boy’s development. “I saw that the market was so saturated with videogames that it became nearly impossible to create anything new,” he said. “There were a lot of creative ideas for games for the NES and for Game Boy. But there are not so many new ideas for games for the Super Nintendo. I think games companies ran out of ideas. I wanted to create a new kind of game so that designers could come up with new ideas.”

Yokoi was crushed by the failure of his latest invention. Nintendo were equally disappointed, and tacitly blamed him for bringing embarrassment to a company whose record in the industry was hitherto unblemished. Thereafter, he was stripped of his creative freedom and tasked with rudimentary projects. His last real contribution was the Game Boy Pocket, a small and sleek redesign of the Game Boy. In 1996, he tendered his resignation.

Beaten but unbowed, Yokoi launched a new company that same year, Koto Laboratory.

Its grand mission statement was to reinvigorate the ‘creative genius in contemporary Japan’.

The first project was a partnership with Bandai on a new handheld system called the WonderSwan, an appealing refinement of everything that Yokoi had done before with handheld devices, but with one curious new feature; owners who bothered to learn the intricacies of the operating system would be able to run their own code on it. Tragically, Yokoi wouldn’t live to see it brought to market.

On October 4, 1997, while travelling on the Hokuriku Expressway in Ishikawa Prefecture, Yokoi and Nintendo businessman Etsuo Kiso were involved in a minor car accident. When he stepped out of his vehicle to check for damage, Yokoi was sideswiped by an oncoming car. Although rushed to hospital, he was declared dead two hours later. He was 56-years-old. Conspiracy theorists muttered darkly that Nintendo and the Yakuza were somehow involved, but the police found nothing suspicious.

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Gunpei Yokoi demonstrated an inventive flair for videogames design that is almost without peer. He was one of the first individuals to straddle the worlds of traditional toy-making and this fresh new medium, and he grasped the opportunities it presented through a series of remarkable innovations. Innovations, it should be noted, that were done by re-purposing existing hardware rather than expending millions of dollars on research and development.

Even with his last invention, the WonderSwan, Yokoi had a hand in creating a homebrew scene in which bedroom coders could experiment with their own software on established platforms, prefiguring the Apple App Store, WiiWare, the PlayStation Network and Xbox LIVE Marketplace.

And while Yokoi’s name is not as closely identified with Nintendo as Miyamoto, his spirit is very much alive today. His philosophy, ‘Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology’, was vocally adopted by current Nintendo CEO, Satoru Iwata. What is the Nintendo DS but a re-purposing of touch-screen technology, available for years on PDAs? What is the Wii but a low-fidelity console equipped with a simple infrared remote? And after more than a decade, the company is addressing the embarrassment of the Virtual Boy in the Nintendo 3DS, sticking a giant plaster over a difficult episode. It proves that Yokoi is still important to Nintendo. And by extension, he’s still important to us.

On March 6, 2003, Yokoi was posthumously honoured with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards. The award, which was presented by game designer Yuji Naka, was received by Yokoi’s wife and son. Prior to that, the only commemoration he had received was the release of a CD of his musical compositions. It’s unfortunate that he never became an icon, a figurehead, a spokesman. So the next time you take a bow at the altar of Miyamoto, give some thanks to Yokoi while you’re at it. Bulent Yusuf

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THE GAME OF LIFE Those who dismiss gaming as a frivolous pastime should know one thing: the instinct to play is a serious evolutionary business.

“You may have thought it was a game, but it was also a test. Aha, a test!” says Centauri to Alex Rogan in 1984’s The Last Starfighter.

Alex is a frustrated teen stranded in a Midwestern American town. A local arcade hot shot, his skills pay off big time when the game’s inventor reveals that it’s really a training tool designed to find a pilot to rescue a beleaguered alien race – and Alex is The One. Far-fetched? When it comes to the purpose of games, maybe not as much as you might think.

After years of being derided by critics as trivial, adolescent ephemera, videogames have emerged as the most lucrative entertainment industry on the planet. And why not? Videogames are just a modern incarnation of a much deeper compulsion embedded within our DNA. Civilisations throughout history have all had their own recreational distractions.

Take the game of Nine Men’s Morris – a board-based strategy game similar to draughts. Boards found in the cloisters of Canterbury and Westminster cathedrals date back to 1300AD, while others etched out of roofing slabs found at the site of a temple at Kurana in the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes can be traced all the way back to 1400BC. For three and a half thousand years people have enjoyed indulging in this quick game of skill and strategy.

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And it’s not just Morris; chroniclers of classical antiquity mention many games in their work. Homer’s Iliad includes a form of backgammon enjoyed by Ajax and Achilles in the Trojan War. The game of Wei Qi (aka Go) turns up in books from China’s Henan province dating back to 625BC. Archaeologists have discovered chess-like boards from the Sumerian royal cemetery of Ur in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) that are nearly 5000-years-old. And that’s just a snapshot.

Though the form and technology has evolved, gaming is a universal human instinct, a product of socialisation and development that relates to the wider notion of ‘play’. It’s what author and sports historian Wolfgang Decker calls an ‘anthropological constant’. And play isn’t exclusive to the human race. It can be observed in most cognitively sophisticated mammals with long life spans and extended periods of juvenile development. According to Dr Michael Price, a lecturer in psychology at Brunel University, play “prepares the brain for adult cognitive activity.”

This can be seen in the most basic of games revolving around physical activity, providing exercise and developing skills for survival. These serve a distinct evolutionary purpose – a species more inclined to play learns to eat, hunt and avoid hazards, and so has a much greater chance of survival.

This may well help explain the juvenile motivation for playing games, but what of ‘adult’ games – those like Nine Men’s Morris, chess and backgammon that have existed for millennia? What purpose do these recreational activities fulfil that has made them so ingrained in the human psyche? According to Price, “it’s something like play, but the function isn’t to prepare yourself for any future development. The recreational activities that adults enjoy are deploying psychological adaptations that evolved to serve other functions.”

The answer may lie in the fact that these games are competitive. Humans – and males in particular – are naturally competitive, an evolutionary response to the battle for resources and reproduction. Society and cultures may change over time, but basic instincts remain.

Says Price: “Males’ ancestral environment was one of coalitional violence, a universal characteristic of hunter-gatherer societies. Those societies may have changed, but males remain adapted for physical competition both in groups and as individuals. Competitive sports and games allow us to indulge these combative adaptations and satisfy these ancestral urges.”

This competitive streak gives humans a desire to prove themselves to their peers. “They have this need to know where they stand in a status hierarchy in terms of competitive ability in an activity where skill is valued,” explains Price. “Games and sports allow this quite unequivocally as you have winners and losers. It gives unambiguous confirmation of your place in a hierarchy. They assign you a rank.”

Games that have survived through the ages, from cards to dominoes to dice, share the thread of competition. But how does this relate to videogames?

Some videogames are clearly an audiovisual extension of the age-old impulse – a way of allowing players to prove their prowess in this digital age. But though this may be true for Tekken, Wii Sports or Halo deathmatches, this only tells part of the story. How and where do you place the likes of The Legend of Zelda or Final Fantasy? These games exist aside from ideas of competition. Okay, you may be ‘competing’ with an AI or simulation, but you aren’t trying to attain a greater social status than your computer.

Here you need to return to the most fundamental aspect of play: its practical function. Much like Alex’s Starfighter, such games act as a training device. These modelled situations of challenge and anxiety are practice spaces for dealing with real-life activities. Despite the development of complex engines, AI and dynamic graphics, these games present you with the same procedural dilemmas and obstacles that allow you to critically assess and evaluate different strategies of overcoming them.

The usefulness of such games has been recognised throughout history. Chess, for instance, has long been understood as a simulation of war. In their 1979 book The Study of Games, Elliott Avedon and Brian Sutton-Smith stated that ‘[Chess] is enjoyable to the player because it consists of a symbolic statement of these conflicts, and because in the course of the buffered learning the game provides, the player develops confidence and competence to handle the real-life situations toward which the original anxieties point.’ In short, gaming gives you the confidence and self-affirmation to go out there and face the world.

This idea blends into a deeper psychological motivation to play games. By absorbing themselves in a game, players find welcome distraction from the realities of life. Games can provide a catharsis to relieve tension and provide a measure of wish-fulfilment by letting players act out scenarios that bridge dreams and reality. It’s this wish-fulfilment that has alarmed critics, who claim that games like the Grand Theft Auto series speak to our sociopathic urges.

But far from encouraging the dangerous loners of critics’ imaginations, it is important to remember that games have a sociological dimension too. They act as a bonding activity, bringing people together with a common purpose, even if their goals may be competitive.

Videogames may still receive scorn in some quarters, written off in neopuritanical terms, labelled ‘adolescent’ and ‘trivial’. But gamers are in the vanguard of cultural and sociological evolution. Games encourage physical dexterity, problem solving, strategic thinking, empathy, stress relief and escapism – attributes that are essential to our self-identity, even, indeed, to our humanity.

The ability to play and enjoy games is a test of our existence.

When you are next pushing your analog sticks, clicking on a mouse or tapping on a touch-screen, remember that you have more in common with Alex Rogan than you think. Ed Andrews

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Invert Look is a quarterly magazine inspired by videogame culture. Rejecting the old formula of news, reviews and previews, we’re focussed on informative, entertaining and grown-up features that get to grips with the new ways in which videogames are exerting an influence over all areas of our pop-culture landscape. We’re calling it The New State of Play.

This issue is merely a hint of what’s to come. Issue 01 will be released later in 2010, and will be over twice the size of the taster you’re holding right now. In the meantime, we’d really like to get your thoughts and input. Head over to our new Invert Look website at www.invertlook.com, check out our blog and let us know what you think of the mag or if there’s anything else you’d like to see in it.

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