Frontier Media Columns, The Melbourne Age, 1994

Move Over Nerds, Hollywood's Here!

By David Cox

A healthy investment climate for interactive entertainment in the United States has resulted in brand new companies which build games like movies, adopting the familiar Hollywood style studio structure. Top talents are recruited from many different areas and encouraged to bounce ideas off each other. These new fertile confederacies of geeks and geniuses are rapidly changing the playing field of the whole industry.

Programmers have until recently been the ultimate authority in interactive entertainment. The skill sets involved in assembling a game ensured that the author of the code running a game's system was its prime mover. I spoke to games producer (an ex film maker) Jim Simmons at Electronic Arts last week, and he told me that in the early days of cinema, the camera operators were the ones who wrote the scripts. They were entrusted with the job of determining exactly what would be shot. No one else knew anything about what film making actually involved.

Soon screen writing and all the other sub categories within the production system evolved as the technology became a medium. The lion's share of power in the interactive multimedia and games industries is starting to reside even more than before with those who hand pick the production team and attract finance - the producers. Through producer/directors, talent is converging on video games today from the worlds of design, special effects, and the motion picture and music industries. The rise in the importance of CD-ROM as the main delivery system for interactive entertainment has had much to do with the sea change.

CD-ROMs enable games to now revolve entirely around motion picture imagery. In addition, the market for games in general has expanded to include a much wider and more sophisticated audience. Players over thirty are being targeted by games developers almost as much as the traditional teenage to early twenty year old group. If paying top dollar for a CD-ROM entertainment product, consumers in America expect the title to employ at least some 'full motion video'. This consumer expectation, combined with the fact that most CD-ROM products take over a year to develop and over a million dollars each to produce means that the emphasis is now being placed upon a movie production model for games, rather than the traditional computer software product model.

Hollywood has decided it wants a slice of the vidogame action, and is doing its best to finance structures which reflect a Tinsel town model - where headhunters buy the best team, and the programmers job is to make it easy for the 'creatives' to translate storyboards and graphics into fully playable games. There is a mad rush in the United States, especially here in San Francisco between competing companies to come up with the "Sonic the Hedgehog" or "Tetris" of CD-ROM. The Hit.

Very often, not only are single games up against each other for primacy in the marketplace, but entire systems upon which to play them. Both hardware and software must prove their mettle to even survive. The next generation of home game systems make possible flashy, fast moving entertainment which looks and sounds like music video and expensive television advertising. These new systems include the Sega Saturn, the Sony Playstation X, and the already released 3DO system. Typically a game designed to be released on one platform will also be 'ported' or converted for others.

As always, a solid talent base is the primary strength of a multimedia production company. The difference is that backers, in the United States at least, are today willing to risk Big Money to be part of a potential revolution in media rivalling that of the introduction of television. It was an Australian, 26 year old Peter Barrett, who first suggested the idea for Rocket Science, a company based in Palo Alto and Berkeley. Barret's idea was to build a production studio, which focussed on building proprietary authoring tools to make games construction easy for non technical creative staff.

Barret convinced venture capitalists to invest. His original estimate of 2 million dollars soon ballooned into 20 million! Rocket Science has a lot of the older games firms worried. Many have dismissed it as an expensive gamble, but concede that the days of lone hackers making quick millions are well and truly over. A comprehensive story on Rocket Science can be obtained from the (November 1994) WIRED magazine.

This article is copyright of David Cox. It may however be reproduced as long as this copyright notice remain intact.

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