| Hollywood Malaria
Bill Jahnel, Senior Editor
I was planning to cover the joys and sorrows of interface concerns, continuing my series on the five "I"s of gaming, but a conversation I had with Jay Usher of Sierra FX changed that. You see, he and I had been discussing the industry in general, and I was making some comments based on a column I expected to write after my "five I's" columns. The next day, Sierra announced that it was merging units and that Sierra FX would be no more. This eerily prescien moment has led me to turn my eye to a discussion I have been having with myself of late: How Hollywood won the war of computer gaming.
Perhaps you don't remember it, but in the mid-1990s a new technology had been introduced into gaming: The "FMV," or full-motion video. With this powerful new tool, it was predicted, games would now learn how to be made from Hollywood types; we'd have professional actors taking up more and more roles. FMV would be more than an opportunity for cut scenes, but would become an interface in and of itself.
The result? A few good voice performances by familiar Hollywood faces. A few more jobs for Brian Dehenney, Malcolm McDowell, and Mark Hamill. Some good games, such as Phantasmagoria and Gabriel Knight II. Some truly atrocious games, or highly non-interactive games, such as Mummy and The Daedalus Encounter. And, in a few cases, the ultimate in slumming it, Dana Plato (late of Different Strokes and prison) returning to "glory" in the execrable title "Night Trap."
In fact, FMV was more VFM: The virtual fad of the moment. FMV was too expensive for the payoff, and games with FMV more often than not seemed to lack interactivity rather than enhance it. Hollywood was great at making movies, but we wanted games. Add to that enormous file sizes that created high production costs in terms of multiple-CD games, the margins on FMV made it look less and less attractive. Then, the production lemmings were led to the sermon on the mount of polygons, and everyone ran off the cliffs of "3D first person" and "real time strategy."
I suppose it hardly sounds as if Hollywood won; after all, with FMV relegated back to cut-scenes and not as a dominant technology around which all games would be built, it would seem that we gave Hollywood the boot. However, the war was never ultimately about a technology, but about the way games and game production came to market. Somewhere in the FMV past, I honestly believe, the gaming industry sold its soul to Jack Nicholson and the ghost of Samuel Goldwyn.
Consider the recent trends in gaming and how they parallel the "maturation" of Hollywood. The single most powerful trend in gaming nowadays is the rapid consolidation of business. Companies are being bought and sold by conglomerates faster than you can shake your stick. These mega-mergers lead to media giants that lead off with fewer titles, but most of the "A" titles are only released at one or two "crucial" times of the year (In movies, that's summer: in gaming, that's fourth quarter / Christmas.) Further, just as in the movies, distribution channels have become increasingly and distressingly tightened to where only a few major opportunities of distribution exist for a few major titles. . . either in terms of theater marquees or shelf space for games (and if the metaphor holds true, Mac games have been relegated to the art houses). The world wide web and gaming periodicals have served as our equivalent of the Sundance festival, a place where tiles looking for alternative distribution or good word of mouth might breathe a second life on a shoestring budget.
The worst Hollywoodization of the gaming market has been the adoption, it seems, of "the pitch." We've all heard of this, where in order to sell a screenplay, it has to be explained within reductionist terms fitting into one sentence. "Pretty Woman meets Joan of Arc!" has translated into "Pretty Woman meets Indiana Jones!" (Laura Croft). Like many summer action titles, our advertising has geared itself to two main sell points: Boobies and violence. Not, mind you, there's anything wrong with boobies and violence, or even the occasional violent boobie. But the production and marketing side of gaming, never our most innovative arm amongst us, has adopted Lemmings not as a game title but as a mantra. "Disney has a movie coming out about ants? Well, by golly, we'll make a movie about ants and put it in the theaters three weeks before them!" "By God, if Blizzard and Cavedog can make money on real-time strategy, so can I!" Just try and push a 2D game design to market today. The only good news is that the rejection slips you'll yield with be able to substitute for toilet paper for a good month or two.
Hollywood won. Not in its movies, or actors, or voices. It left us living in its business model. Jay Usher, late of Quest for Glory V, whose previous work included Phantasmagoria, Gabriel Knight I and II, and others, agreed with me. And in 72 hours he fell victim to Hollywood Malaria. Good luck, Jay, to you and the rest of the crew over at Sierra FX.
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