Age of Intellivision(s)

Back in the '50s, in Paris, London, or New York, guys who would have been novelists a generation earlier were now attracted by a different muse. Young writers were abandoning their typewriters in favor of experimental filmmaking. The smartest media and tech overlords of 1996 made the opposite bet: that many of the 21^st century’s best new artists of the moving image would abandon their movie cameras for keyboards.

Video games were then leaving their shoot-‘em-up phase, entering a realm of creative potential to equal Hollywood’s century of narrative arts and eventually to surpass them with new storytelling forms we can scarcely imagine. The limitless possibilities of interactive storytelling and video games would continue the evolution. That era, they reckoned, would begin around the dawn of the millennium. To what degree did that happen?

Video gaming took flight in the 1970s and ‘80s, with PC gaming as a distinctive subculture of its own, including low-bandwidth online games. But living rooms didn’t tend to have computers; around the household couch, simplified, hot-rodded video game consoles still had the lure of being easy to use, with much lower prices than computers and faster screen performance.

From the mid-‘80s, there was a near-duopoly in living room console gaming between rivals Nintendo, a century-old maker of card and board games (think: the Japanese equivalents of Bingo and Monopoly), and Sega, which dominated Japan’s public video arcades (think: pool halls, juke boxes, and the Mob). Sega achieved a win in the home gaming wars with the Genesis. For a long time, Nintendo and Sega were like the Leno and Letterman of their field. It was a stable rivalry.

Intellivision was a clever brand name. It was Mattel’s early video game system and stood for “intelligent television.” This was both a bit of an insult, earned or not, to TV-as-it-existed, and it was Mattel’s proud but inflated boast of what their plastic toy could do to make it smarter. (Alas, Intellivision, like rival Atari v.1, crashed around 1983.)

A new rivalry emerged between the kings of the home computer and the kings of the living room television; which empire would conquer the other? Gaming consoles could present email and proto-web pages on ordinary pre-HD TVs. In an era of 56K modems, before broadband or online multimedia, would that level of tech have been enough to win what was then called ‘the living room war’? How much more help from cheap tech would it take to turn a “toy” game machine into a family’s digital entertainment center? It was a pragmatic, bottom-up way of looking at household computer needs circa 1985-’95.

Check out this June 24, 1993, article in the Chicago Reader: “One of the most telling moments of my ordeal-by-NPR came while Linda Wertheimer was interviewing a computer developer on what will happen when computers are linked into televisions—the so-called intelligent TV. He predicted the development of literally hundreds of new interactive television networks and services “that would give the individual TV viewer an incredible amount of power to program for their own tastes rather than have to rely on these programming guys.” Replied a perturbed Wertheimer: “Is there any way we can dodge this bullet?”

In the mid-Nineties, video game graphics made a major jump in quality, partly thanks to what SGI (Silicon Graphics) had learned from designing expensive workstations for motion picture FX use. 64-bit 3D graphics (not stereoscopic 3D, the kind you see with glasses) were a cinematic-level advance in visual realism. The Nintendo 64 was a clear winner over rival Sega’s Saturn, but now there was a massive and determined new player in video games. Sony, leveraging its assets in consumer electronics and manufacturing, would launch its successful invasions of the movie and music industries with a limitless war chest.

Nintendo would survive, then and later, by knowing its market and tacitly dividing up the battlefield with a rival. They didn’t compete on the latest and coolest of fast game hardware. Nintendo generally marketed less expensive consoles and a smaller game library. That was the root of their success: they aimed their products squarely at kids and families. Their most popular game characters, like Mario and Zelda, were as popular and influential as classic Disney. In the insular world of Japanese business, Nintendo left most over-15-year-olds to Sony.

Meanwhile, in PC gaming, games like Myst and The Seventh Guest began exploring cinematic settings. Unsurprisingly, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and the rest of Microsoft had a top-down view: Could a PC be stripped down into an un-computerlike push-button game console? It could already do all the big stuff. Could it do the small stuff cheaply and flashily enough to take over the living room? They’d bet billions that it could and would.

One sidelight of their mission statement was the central conviction that if Microsoft created the finest, in-class platform for graphic and narrative art, the strongest artists in video gaming would just naturally migrate to the Xbox. There’s some truth in that proposition, but there were many conflicting tradeoffs to make. How much better? How much more does it cost to achieve it? Looking ahead, how long are they likely to be able to maintain a lead in a competitive market? How big is the installed base of consoles? What’s the royalty fee structure? What’s the fickle public perception of the platform and its gameplay characteristics? Cool or utterly sad?

By the end of the decade, a new generation of “super consoles” was being developed that would eventually include Sony’s 2000 PlayStation 2 and Microsoft’s so-far on-paper-only 2001 Xbox. The first super console out of the gate, Sega’s 1999 Dreamcast, sold a million copies in Japan its first year, but it didn’t acquire much worldwide momentum. The console was so expensive to develop and manufacture that Sega soon threw in the towel and became a pure games software company.

That seemed to leave both Sony and the upstart Microsoft with so much money from other businesses that they could afford to slug it out, nearly forever. The Xbox finally premiered in New York in November 2001, less than two months after 9/11. (Neither company seems to have paid much pre-launch attention to Nintendo’s GameCube, a solid win that kept Nintendo in contention.)

Dean Takahashi’s Opening the Xbox (2002) is a better-than-average instant history. It’s set in a work environment familiar to anyone who’s read Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer-winning The Soul of a New Machine from 1981. Seventeen-plus years after Kidder’s tale ends, there are young teams in internal competition, designing hardware or writing software.

Aside from tech, the world of 25-30 years ago is on the surface mostly like today’s, but as you read 2002’s account of the late '90s, differences emerge. For example, though there are women with roles in the story, in 1998 it’s still a 95% male cast of characters. Because Microsoft is (at least supposedly) so stodgy and buttoned-down, team building for the Xbox game team seems to be performative jerk behavior, stupidly over-compensating for nerdiness by bragging, “We got kicked out of the restaurant at Comdex for being rowdy! We bought matching leather jackets in Tokyo and got matching Microsoft tattoos! Oh yes! Then we hired strippers and models to wear slutty outfits and serve green vodka Jello shots! Xbox green, get it? We are so-o-o cool!!”

As predicted, even with a better-than-decent launch and a must-have hit in Halo, it took a while to build up an Xbox game library, even one quarter of PlayStation’s. One risk that paid off was the Xbox’s internet-only, no-dial-up-modem design. It made things consistent for developers and brought online gamers to a new degree of visual quality, but broadband took a couple of years to reach most people. The Xbox console’s fate with Japanese consumers, a matter of some initial optimism to Microsoft, would be a lastingly disappointing one. Far from being an American samurai, it was a flop.

But in most of the rest of the world, Xbox games would eventually compete well with Sony PlayStation’s, and in some years surpass them. Big hits transcended their platforms, becoming pop culture events, like World of Warcraft (2004) and Minecraft (2011).

Game publishers tried to expand their markets to women with some success, especially with The Sims, but the competitive nature of online gaming, especially against anonymous vicious mobs of foul-mouthed young men, has tended to limit women’s eagerness to participate in mainstream MMOs.

When kids graduated from cuteness and wanted a protected, but slightly more grown-up game experience, there was Fortnite. Looking for originality that extends beyond the core of gameplay? League of Legends has a rich expanded universe, much of it fan-generated.

For decades, all three giant companies, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, remained in the game console business, and PC gaming has continued alongside the consoles. A rich ecology of games like Call of Duty and Dark Souls has had the kind of sales and impact that Nineties investors dreamed of and planned for.

Recently, the Microsoft games world was rocked by the news that Xbox’s iconic, launch-day hit Halo would finally be non-exclusive to Xbox. It’s not exactly like Sony’s bitter day when it was finally forced to make VHS players, but it did seem to mark the possible end of one phase of an ambitious era, conceived in the no-limits world of the Nineties.

Once, mighty Hollywood deigned to buy into Silicon Valley to keep in touch with what might happen tomorrow. Today, humbled Hollywood anxiously welcomes its tech overlords. But one of the original dreams remains elusive: There hasn’t been a game or an interactive game-like story whose impact and popularity made conventional films and TV seem obsolete, roughly the way 1927’s The Jazz Singer rapidly led to the end of silent movies.

There hasn’t been yet. But who knows? For one thing, from this point on, AI is going to change video games. Maybe the '90s tech visionaries will be proven right. Most of the time, given long enough, they usually are.