And Then There Were None

  • Post last modified:Saturday, March 27th, 2021
  • Reading time:25 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part three of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under the title “Culture: Five that Fell”.

For all its immaturity, you can tell the videogame industry is getting on in years. With increasing, even alarming, frequency, the faces of our youth have begun to disappear – forced from the market, absorbed into conglomerates, restructured into oblivion, or simply retired from the grind.

The first big wave hit back in the mid ’90s, when increased development costs, the demise of the American arcade, and the shift from 2D development left dozens of small and mid-sized developers – from Toaplan to Technos – out in the cold. Those that didn’t die completely – Sunsoft, Vic Tokai – often pulled out of the US market, or even out of the videogame business. Western outfits braced for the storm by merging with larger and ever larger publishing conglomerates, rationalizing that it was the only way to survive in an uncertain market.

The second wave came only a few years ago, after the burst of the tech bubble. In effort to streamline costs, parent companies began to dump their holdings left and right, regardless of the legacy or talent involved. Those that didn’t often went bankrupt, pulling all of their precious acquisitions down with them. Sometimes the talent moved on and regrouped under a new game; still, when an era’s over, it’s over.

This article is a tribute to five fallen icons of the videogame industry – developers and publishers who made their mark, changed the world, then vanished into history. Sometimes they went with a bang; sometimes a whimper. All, however, leave a hole that will never entirely be filled. The industry would be very different, were they all with us today.

Atari Games

Back in 1976, when Atari was preparing its VCS console, it turned to Warner Communications for backing. Production would be expensive; Warner would take care of that, in exchange for ownership of the company. Seemed like a good deal to Nolan Bushnell.

Over the next few years, Atari would explode into its own, transforming from a producer of popular clones of other people’s games to one of the most creative and influential game studios in history. Much of this progress can be attributed to the new blood of the late ’70s, in particular Asteroids and Centipede designer Ed Logg. Even the best efforts of Atari’s studios, however, had no influence against the great crash of ’84.

Warner, seeing the writing on the walls for the videogame industry, divested itself of Atari’s computer and home console division; that portion was taken up by the Tramiels and renamed Atari Corporation. It petered on in some form or another until the mid-’90s; after the failure of the Atari Lynx and Jaguar, Atari packed it in. Today the name and catalog live on as part of Infogrames.

The arcade division, however, Warner hung onto – for a while, at least – taking much of Atari’s creative staff along with it. The year after the transaction, Ed Logg came up with the four-player arcade action-adventure Gauntlet. Throughout the ’80s, Atari Games would continue to produce some of the most solidly-designed, imaginative games anywhere: Marble Madness, I Robot, Paperboy, Rampart, the Road Blasters, Xybots, Klax, the original arcade Tetris, the seminal polygonal racers Hard Drivin’ and Race Drivin’.

In the late ’80s, Atari Games even tried to get in on the Nintendo craze, taking advantage of the old Activision argument to produce some of the first unlicensed NES software. Used the name Tengen (another term from the game “Go”), so as not to conflict with Atari Corporation’s home consoles interests, Atari Games ported many of its most popular arcade hits, as well as the best of unsigned Japanese developers like Namco and Takara. This situation led to the Nintendo Tetris fiasco, and the start of Atari Games’ real problems. The protracted lawsuit drained the company’s resources to a point from which it never truly recovered.

As it happens, in 1989 – the year of Tetris – Time-Life bought out Warner, forming the first of our modern way-too-big media conglomerates. A couple of buyouts later, Atari Games found itself one studio of many owned by former competitor Midway. Within a few years, it found itself renamed “Midway Games West”, supposedly to avoid confusion with the “other” Atari. Amazingly, though, the studio remained more or less intact until 2003, continuing to produce some of Midway’s most profitable arcade cabinets.

After Midway retreated from the arcades in 2001, Atari Games found itself focusing exclusively on home releases. Apparently those didn’t sell well enough, as on one cold day in February 2003, all of the studio’s employees were, without warning, led off premises as the building was locked behind them – much to their collective confusion and dismay. It was not until later that employees were allowed to return for their personal effects. Thus ended the thirty-one history of Atari – save the endless Midway compilations that place Atari Games productions front and center, as the shining gems of Midway’s history.

Atari’s catalog will probably never be complete as a single archive holding: Midway depends on the latter Atari Games half for much of its income, and Infogrames is hardly about to part with its name-brand legacy after all the money it paid for it. So barring an unusual act of cooperation between the two, we’ll never see – say – a proper Ed Logg or Bob Flanagan retrospective: Super Breakout to San Francisco Rush.

Well, never say never. Give it a couple of decades, for the historical value to set in. In the meantime, there’s always MAME.

Origin Systems

If all console games stem from Pong and Spacewar!, then all PC games owe their origin to Dungeons & Dragons. To this note, 1979 held two milestones: Infocom was founded, and began translating its Zork text adventure to home PCs – and Richard Garriot, a young role-player from Clear Lake City, Texas, roughly adapted AD&D to the Apple II, for his own personal use; he called it Akalabeth, after a portion of Tolkien’s Silmarillion, and sold it in Ziploc bags.

A year later, the PC world exploded: Zork was released; Sierra was founded, and released Mystery House; and Richard Garriot completed a pseudo-sequel to Akalabeth, that he called Ultima. Unlike the previous game, Ultima was designed from the ground up as a commercial product. Also unlike the wireframe graphics of Akalabeth and Mystery House (or indeed of its nearest competitor, Wizardry), Ultima featured innovative tile-based visuals, allowing for fast, versatile, and appealing design. In particular, a grid of tiles lent itself well to overhead maps – which was perfect for a Tolkienesque fantasy adventure.

Although Ultima was devised for the Apple II, Sierra quickly began to port the game to the variety of other contemporary PCs – and then began to press Garriot for a sequel. A little irritated, Garriot shoved a follow-up out the door to appease his new publisher. Even more annoyed with royalties over Sierra’s IBM PC port, Garriot pulled out and – along with his father and brother – formed his own company, Origin Systems.

The same year – 1983 – Origin released Ultima III: Exodus; with its animated graphics, focused plot, multiple party members, defined dungeons, battle transitions, and complex battle tactics, Exodus would become the basis for virtually every computer RPG developed from that point on. Three years later, Toru Iwatani would strip down Ultima III, combine it with the battle system from Wizardry, and publish it under the name Dragon Quest – thereby changing the Japanese game industry forever.

In 1984, despite some personal misgivings on Garriot’s end, Origin began a distribution agreement with Electronic Arts – founded two years earlier as an “artist-oriented” publisher. The following year, Origin published Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, pulling the rug out from under Garriot’s own franchise. Now, in response to the crime and slaughter of the earlier games (and nearly every RPG since based on them) Garriot chose to steep the player’s every action in morality. The game shied away from D&D-based statistics, in favor of hard ethical questions to determine the player’s personal priorities and character growth. Unlike Exodus, few games have followed up on this design model – and yet it would come to define the rest of the Ultima series.

Fast forward to 1990, and Origin was both one of the most powerful game companies around and one of the most deliberate, never releasing a product until it was perfect. Cue Chris Roberts’ Wing Commander series, famed for its drama and blatant Star Wars ripoffery. The first game was such a success that Origin nearly went bankrupt acquiring enough floppy discs to meet demand. Also as a result of the new design needs, the staff required for a single game increased by a factor of five or more. At the same time, the Apple and Commodore markets vanished, taking with them much of Origin’s income.

Sucking up their pride, the Garriots turned to EA for help. A few months after Origin published Ultima Underworld, to lackluster sales, the deal was complete. Flush with a new cash reserve, Origin went nuts, hiring hundreds of new and inexperienced staff, starting up dozens of projects, and blowing through EA’s backing like a brushfire. In response, EA began to clamp down on Origin’s development, demanding games be held to a strict schedule, a strict budget; in strict contrast to Origin’s culture, games were released when they were supposed to be released, whether they were done or not. The quality of Origin’s output began to slip.

In 1996, much to the dismay of Electronic Arts, Origin began work on a highly experimental game – an Internet-based spin-off of its Ultima series. As time wore on, and deadlines loomed, Origin was forced to pull all staff from its flagship title Ultima IX to finish up Ultima Online for a fall ’97 release. Two years later, Ultima IX would finally be complete, to dismal response. Since – unexpectedly – Ultima Online was Origin’s only recent success, EA decided to shift Origin into an online-only developer. In 2000, before any further projects came to fruition, EA canceled all development at Origin – causing Richard Garriot to leave the company he founded twenty years earlier.

And effectively, that was it. No Garriot, no Origin. In name, the company puttered along for another four years, serving as a support system for UO. Clearly, though, that couldn’t last. In 2004, EA pulled the plug entirely.

Until money came into the picture, Origin was almost a dream come true – for Garriot, for his employees, and for the game industry as a whole. From the very beginning, Origin pushed the limits and defined the potential of videogames as a medium. Based in Garriot’s own nerdy fantasies, their focus was always on fostering personal engagement with the games at hand: defining a world, drawing the player in, and asking them to make believe. And those games would always meet the player halfway – no matter how long they took to complete. It was the user’s experience that mattered in the end, and nothing was allowed to interfere with it.

And then disaster struck, and men with suits came along and told everyone to grow up. And just like that, the dream was over. Our industry has switched leaders from a man who dresses up in a cape and crown to men with shiny shoes who “do lunch”. If videogames today seem like they’re lacking something, perhaps there’s good reason.

Sierra On-Line

For all its royalty issues and later ickiness, Sierra also had its wonders to offer. Where Origin created its own abstraction of Dungeons & Dragons, Ken and Roberta Williams built on the original: the MIT mainframe game Colossal Cave (aka Adventure). Whereas Infocom directly refined Adventure, improving the text parsing, commissioning such high-profile authors as Douglas Adams to write the scripts for future games, the Williamses went for the retail jugular: they added graphics.

Based Roughly on Agatha Cristie’s Ten Little Indians, Mystery House was your typical text adventure, married with monochrome vector art – kind of like Garriot’s Akalabeth, from the previous year. Like Garriot, at first they sold the game in ziploc bags with a floppy and Xeroxed instructions. And like Garriot, they brought the game to their local Apple retailer for distribution – to immediate and massive success.

In 1983 – the year Garriot threw up his hands at the Williamses and formed Origin – IBM approached the couple in secret about a possible showcase for its new PCjr line. The PCjr offered an astounding 16-color EGA graphics array, enhanced sound, and a faster processor than standard business PCs; IBM wanted a system seller, to show off what a real gaming PC could do. At a time when the average game was programmed in perhaps a month, by one person, Sierra responded by hiring half a dozen programmers, spending over seven hundred thousand dollars, and taking eighteen months to produce the blockbuster of all blockbusters: the first animated, sixteen-color, “three-dimensional” adventure game. They called it King’s Quest. And… at first, it kind of flopped.

That wasn’t the game’s fault; it was the system. No one cared about the PCjr. Simple enough; Sierra was good at porting. Just ask Richard Garriot. About a year later, people were actually able to play it – and when they did, Sierra hit the record books for real. Whereas Origin represented the “hardcore” PC market, Sierra – with its colorful pictures, loopy fairy-tale world and puzzle-oriented design – had just created a market for casual gamers. Above all, King’s Quest was created by a woman, with more of a gender- and age-neutral sensibility – therefore attracting a wide range of players who would never go within arm’s length of Zork or Wizardry. The side effect, of course, is that the pure text adventure’s days were numbered.

Through the ’80s and early ’90s, Sierra spun off King’s Quest into zillions of different graphical adventure games – Space Quest, Police Quest, Hero’s Quest, EcoQuest, Leisure Suit Larry – each with its own theme and quirks. With King’s Quest IV, Sierra was first in line to support the new AdLib and Roland sound cards. In the fifth game, they moved to full VGA graphics, a mouse-driven (rather than text-based) interface, full voice acting, and a CD-ROM release. Never one for humble statements, Sierra.

Sierra hit its creative peak around 1993, with the release of King’s Quest VI on CD-ROM – usually recognized as the best of the series – and Gabriel Knight, a nonlinear adventure game with a much more adult theme – often cited as one of the best adventure series of all time. After 1993, Sierra would never be quite in control again. You see, this same year, CD-ROMs started to catch on; multimedia became the new buzzword; and both Myst and the 7th Guest were released.

Suddenly, Sierra’s style of graphical adventure was no longer hip. Everything was all pre-rendered backdrop and haunting scenery and horror and full-motion video. Rather than making the trends, Sierra found itself chasing them – indeed, chasing whatever promotion it could get its hands on. King’s Quest VII was a stripped-down children’s game with early ’90s Disney-style hand animation. In the wake of the LA riots, Sierra signed on Daryl Gates for their next Police Quest game (then changed it into an FMV series – then an RTS, then a FPS). Phantasmagoria was a full-motion gorefest from the same Roberta Williams who had done King’s Quest VII just the year before. Lighthouse was a Myst clone. Shivers was a 7th Guest clone.

While all this was going on, Sierra had also become hungry, buying up smaller developers by the bucketload: Dynamix (Willy Beamish), Impressions (Lords of the Realm), BrightStar (Talking Tutor), even the famed Berkeley Systems (flying toasters!).

For Sierra’s part, all its noodling got it into hot water. With its ultra-adult content, Phantasmagoria put the company onto a lot of people’s hit lists – and by the time its sequel came out, nobody cared about expensive FMV games anymore. It bombed, and pretty much brought the company down with it. In ’96, Sierra got sold to an early online mall company; Ken Williams soon saw no reason to stick around. Within the next year or so Sierra’s parent company merged, changed its name a few times, and went up on fraud charges. Sierra was soon sold off to a French publisher that was immediately acquired by Vivendi. Once that happened, the restructuring began.

In 1998, Roberta Williams gave one last stab at game design with King’s Quest VIII – a violent 3D hack-and-slash that bore almost no relation to the earlier games in the series. And that was that for the reputation of King’s Quest. Soon after, Sierra was reorganized once more; in the process, many internal studios were shut down – including the main branch, in Oakhurst. A hundred thirty-five people lost their jobs, and Sierra was transformed from a game developer to a publishing brand.

Today, Sierra still exists in name, as part of Vivendi’s empire. It’s essentially irrelevant, though; just one more word on the packaging. With all the enthusiasm Infogrames holds for the Atari brand, you could more easily pretend they’re really Atari than this living death is the Sierra of old. And yet, to a certain extent, Sierra kind of got what they were asking for. Their path is the path of the PC game industry, from the early ’80s to the late ’90s. They started the fads, they grew fenced in by them, then they got blinded by their own self-importance and snookered by the hype of the mid-’90s. Even so, it’s a real shame they never found salvation.

In the end, Sierra did far more good than evil; they paid for their sins, such as they were. And their death – along with the retreat of LucasArts up Obi-Wan’s behind – nearly signaled the end for the PC game industry. Of course, you know how it goes with darkest hours…

Black Isle Studios

The same year that Origin was founded and Richard Garriot released Ultima III, Brian Fargo led his own exodus, evacuating several members from one tiny developer to form a new game studio. Calling itself “Interplay”, this group churned out some of the most influential computer games of the ’80s. Michael Cranford’s The Bard’s Tale was a response to both Wizardry and Ultima, which not only borrowed from each; it also allowed players to import characters created in either game. The result cemented the first-person “dungeon hack” genre later expanded on by games like Might & Magic and Ultima Underworld.

In the late ’80s, Interplay came out from under EA’s wing and began publishing for itself; soon after, it started to publish for other developers. Then in 1997, Interplay released a pseudo-sequel to its 1988 post-apocalyptic RPG Wasteland; since EA retained the rights to Wasteland, the follow-up was set in an alternate world and renamed “Fallout”. Fallout proved such an enormous success for Interplay – so great was its effect that it spurred a whole new generation of computer RPGs, just as it seemed the genre had petered out – that Interplay chose to spin off the internal division – led by Feargus Urquhart – responsible for the game.

The resulting studio, Black Isle, became soon renowned as the leading force in computer RPG design – both internally and as a host for the young BioWare. The two studios began to build on each other’s achievements: Baldur’s Gate essentially infused Fallout with the 2nd Edition AD&D rule set, while Planescape: Torment – often cited alongside Fallout as one of the best computer games of all time – built on the Baldur’s Gate rules and technology, to produce a sort of anti-RPG.

Through the early 2000s, Black Isle chugged along, putting out about one game a year to the Fallout/Baldur template, most of which garnered huge praise and somewhat diminishing sales. Then in December of 2003, in the midst of Interplay’s financial woes and a long and ugly divorce with BioWare, Interplay abruptly laid off the studio’s entire staff; to date, no official explanation has been made. A number of ex-Islers started up a new studio called Obsidian, to resume their relationship with their old chums at BioWare.

At the time the studio was disbanded, it was in the middle of development on Fallout 3, due to have been its most ambitious project in years. Interplay soon sold off the rights to the series; as chance had it, Bethesda picked up the property and has begun work on its own version of Fallout 3, using the engine from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

So it’s not like Black Isle has vanished completely. All the same – just, man. Talk about a smack in the face. One of the most influential and intelligent design teams, riding high on a cushion of critical acclaim and the knowledge that, in the void left by Origin and Sierra, they – to some degree – helped make PC games relevant again, just as the hammer seemed to be coming down. And then, bang. Down it went. Everyone fired; years of hard work up to the highest bidder.

Looking Glass Studios

If in the late ’90s Black Isle was the master of gaming literature, using existing templates to tell some of the most progressive tales around, Looking Glass was the master forger for everyone else’s templates.

In 1992, Blue Sky Productions – a small developer with no real credits to its name – approached gaming bigwig Origin Systems about a new style of “simulation RPG” that would cross the Bard’s Tale type of first-person dungeon hack with cutting-edge 3D technology, to produce a real-time texture-mapped 3D world for the player to explore and manipulate at will. Experimental as always, Origin gave ’em the go-ahead and some extra manpower, eventually tying the game into its flagship Ultima series.

The result, Ultima Underworld, is a game that might have changed everything, had anyone played it. Actually, one man – John Carmack – was so inspired by an early tech demo of the game that, much like Nolan Bushnell before him, he stripped down the premise to its bare essentials, then wrote his own, somewhat simpler code, that could be run on nearly any system. Carmack’s partner, John Romero, then injected a dose of broad Miyamoto-inspired design. The team then distributed the game as shareware, meaning that anyone could get a copy ostensibly for free. The result: Wolfenstein gets the credit for starting off the modern 3D era; Underworld is relegated to a footnote, setting up a pattern that will be repeated many times.

Soon after Underworld, Blue Sky merged with another small developer, reformed itself as Looking Glass Technologies, and set about a sequel. The second game was a little more advanced, and it was even tied more directly into the main Ultima series. It didn’t sell much better, though.

In 1993, id followed up Wolfenstein with Doom, signaling the age of first-person shooters. Though well-made, Doom and its knock-offs were relatively primitive; they were designed on a single plane, involved little actual environmental interaction, and weren’t even really 3D. Building on Underworld, Looking Glass responded with its own “anti-FPS” of sorts, a first-person adventure game called System Shock. Unlike Doom, the player could pick up and throw items, or store them in a massive inventory. Since the game involved real 3D space, the player could look around, climb, duck, jump, and even lean to the side. The flip side of all this control is that the game was confusing as hell to get into. And again, you needed a monster machine to run it. Result: even fewer people really noticed the game.

At this point Origin had its own problems, and Looking Glass moved on to attempt self-publishing. In 1996 they released Terra Nova, a sci-fi squad-based first-person shooter – again with incredible system demands. The player had given multiple visors, including zoom and infrared modes. On the mainstream front, id released Quake and Apogee unleashed Duke Nukem 3D. Once again, simplicity won out; sales of Terra Nova were the worst yet. Meanwhile, id got all the credit for bring true 3D to the masses.

Soon after, three former Looking Glass employees jumped ship to form their own studio, Irrational Games. While that was going on, Looking Glass turned to pragmatism, and set to work on its most commercial game to date. Since its inception, Looking Glass had been emphasizing nuance and exploration and environmental interaction over mindless gunplay – so why not boil that down to an archetype: the anti-warrior. The kind of adventurer who avoids conflict as much as possible, who uses the environment as his biggest tool. Something like a thief.

With Thief: The Dark Project, Looking Glass hit its minor gold mine. The premise was simple; the controls were straightforward; the game didn’t necessarily need a wonder rig to run it. In a sense, Thief was little more than a mainstream FPS with stealth and thieves’ tools in place of shooting. There was more going on beneath the surface – modern lighting and sound were used as actual game elements; nearly everything in the game was there for a purpose – and yet that’s kind of the point. It was all under the surface. At an entry level, the game was elegance personified – and people responded. Suddenly Looking Glass was a big-name developer, and everyone was waiting to see what they’d do next.

The answer is, not much. Looking Glass collaborated with Irrational on a sequel to System Shock, that got far more attention that its predecessor, particularly for its horror and role-playing content. Unfortunately, it also happened to be released at about the same time as Half-Life – against which all the hype would have meant nothing. Meanwhile in 2000, Looking Glass delivered a sequel to Thief – greatly polished over the original game, and somewhat more focused in its level design. And then they were gone.

Two months after the sequel hit shelves, then-publisher Eidos shut Looking Glass down for good. Its members scattered, to make names for themselves elsewhere: Warren Spector, Seamus Blackley, Doug Church. Irrational has made waves with its S.W.A.T. Series. Arguably, with games like Deus Ex, Spector has done a better job proselytizing the Looking Glass ideal than Looking Glass ever did on its own.

The story of Looking Glass is the familiar ahead-of-their-time tale. Now we can easily look back and say, hey – these guys are responsible for most of the best things that have happened in the last decade, so why did they take so long to get recognized? The answer’s pretty simple: there was almost always someone cheaper, faster, simpler, or louder. If Ultima Underworld had been free, easy to run, and easy to play, Wolfenstein wouldn’t have stood a chance against it. On the other hand, it also wouldn’t have been Ultima Underworld. For nearly a decade, Looking Glass pushed so far that nobody could keep up. It’s only after they vanished that it became clear what we had all been missing.

In the End

There are so many companies I could have discussed here. I contemplated Compile, Data East – even WARP. Except it seems that, unlike Western companies, that get absorbed into some conglomerate glob, whose properties you never see again, whose talent gets scattered to the sea breeze, Japan has this tendency to spring back. Just look at SNK, and what Aruze tried to do to ’em. Five years later and they’re more relevant than they’ve been in ten. Technos is kind of back, in the form of Million. Kan Naito has dug Climax out of mothballs. Heck, even Kenji Eno is getting back into game development, inspired by the Wii, of all things. (Now if that’s not the most promising development in years, I don’t know what is.)

Companies like Hudson, who pulled out of the US market ever so long ago, are now popping back up like mushrooms. The little guys, who five years ago you’d never even imagine would find a publisher here — Nippon Ichi and D3 and Yuke’s – are opening up foreign branches. That’s all promising as hell, and it warms the cockles of a jaded, grumpy heart. All glory goes to the underdog.

No; for all its burps, the Japanese game industry is doing pretty okay. At least they know what they’re doing. It’s the Western industry that concerns me. We’ve lost all our old guard. Over here it’s like you can’t do anything right, you can’t innovate, you can’t change the world without someone steering you over a cliff or absorbing you into the great corporate sponge. Where are our Capcoms, our Nintendos, our Namcos, our Konamis? Where are our Enixes, our Segas? We don’t got none. They’re all dead. No leaders here.

All we have are men in ties, and a truck full of tiny developers fighting the clock, hoping they won’t get shut down because their publisher got out of bed on the wrong side. And that’s scary – not just for the little guys; it’s scary for everyone. For the whole industry. Without a leader, without history, where on Earth are we headed to?