The Serious Quest for Totally Addictive Digital Fun : Forget The Novel, Ditch That Screenplay. The Ultimate Break in the ‘90s is Writing the Perfect Video Game.

“WE GOT BOGIES!”

Jon Horsley, a genial 29-year-old computer-game producer, watches as a swarm of Drak-sai assault ships blasts the bejesus out of StarBase BRAVO on the giant-screen TV in front of him.

“The Drak-sai are these aliens way off in a distant galaxy,” Horsley explains as the meticulously rendered StarBase BRAVO, a gyroscope-shaped space station, dreamily fragments in a zero-gravity explosion. “And, um, they are a very predatory culture, and they have this big Sun Dagger that they drag around which destroys the suns of these systems--in this case Earth--and leaves them there in sort of the cold emptiness of space to die, which pretty much brings everyone to their knees. The player is this hotshot pilot who, of course, is the last chance to save Earth, and he’s got this hotshot plane called the FireWing, and he and his commander go on missions designed to hurt the Drak-sai.” Horsley shrugs. “It’s supposed to be a pretty powerful experience.”

A powerful experience that will take Horsley and a four-member team of computer artists and programmers almost a year to perfect. But on this sparkling May morning in Palo Alto, Horsley is scrutinizing the game’s opening act, a preview that gives players an overview of the space war they are about to engage in. Horsley’s enemy, however, is time. His employer, Crystal Dynamics Inc., an upstart Silicon Valley video-game company, wants Total Eclipse ready in time for this Christmas season.

On the screen, attacking Drak-sai fighters swoop down and fold their wings under their fuselages, a maneuver that resembles a bodybuilder flexing his latissimus dorsi. “The Arnold ships,” Horsley chuckles as huge shards of the hapless StarBase BRAVO go flying again. Suddenly, the images freeze; the screen goes black. Horsley shrugs some more. “It crashed,” he says.

His nonchalance aside, Horsley and his team are under blinding pressure to ready a preliminary version of Total Eclipse for presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, just a week away. Troy Gillette, 29, one of the game’s programmers, recently set a company record by working 36 hours straight, and fellow programmer Eric Knopp, 28, and artists Dan Colon, 30, and Suzanne Dougherty, 29, are likewise bleary. The stakes are enormous. The show is the last chance to show off the game to retailers before they place orders for the crucial Christmas selling season. And because Total Eclipse is a new game released by a new company, it risks being overshadowed by entrenched titles such as the phenomenally successful Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario Bros. series.

Then again, the possible payoff makes a few all-nighters seem inconsequential. The video-game industry, left for dead after the crash of Atari in 1983, has resurrected itself completely, thanks largely to the astonishingly shrewd U.S. arm of Nintendo Co. U.S. sales of home video-game software--the cartridges or disks containing the games--catapulted from $48 million in 1985 to $3.4 billion in 1992. In 1993 alone, Americans will spend about $6.8 billion purchasing nearly 100 million games and 20 million game players. According to David Sheff in “Game Over,” his exhaustive history of the Nintendo juggernaut, that company’s pre-tax profits in the early ‘90s have routinely topped $1 billion a year, as much as all the American movie studios combined.

Not that Hollywood hasn’t taken notice. Faced with whipsawing revenues and stagnant movie attendance, the industry is actively striking alliances with game makers, licensing digitized footage from hits like “Jurassic Park” that is used in cross-promoted video games. Long-term, some analysts see the studios merging with the software side of the game industry as a hedge against the day when movies, records and video games blend into synergistic grist for the home-entertainment mill.

“That’s why you see people like Mike Ovitz taking meetings in Silicon Valley,” says Valerie Hennigan, marketing manager for Infotainment World, a San Mateo-based publisher of video-game magazines. “Everybody is waking up to the fact that those who control the software are going to win.”

Crystal Dynamics became a symbol of this Hollywood/Silicon Valley romance last summer when Strauss Zelnick, president of 20th Century Fox, left the studio to head the company--a remarkable leap of faith since Crystal Dynamics then employed only 28 people and had yet to sell, or even complete, a single game.

“I’m sure there was a bit of trepidation of what a Hollywood person would do,” says Zelnick, a 35-year-old Harvard MBA. “But we’re focused on the entertainment business, and in that way, it’s a good fit.”

“The reason Hollywood is biting,” adds Judy Lange, one of Crystal’s founding partners, spouting the current game-industry party line, “is that game design is where the movie business was in the Keystone Kops era. In two years, games as we know them will be different.” Meanwhile, the hardware that plays these games is undergoing exponential leaps in technology that will make this year’s state-of-the-art look like an Etch-a-Sketch. Since 1985, video-game machines powered by eight-bit microprocessors such as Nintendo’s original NES have been superseded by machines with faster processors, each increase upping the ante for game designers.

Total Eclipse is one of a handful of original games created to run on a new, extremely powerful and extravagantly hyped player developed by The 3D0 Co., a Redwood City-based firm founded in 1990 by Trip Hawkins, former chairman of game manufacturer Electronic Arts. The 3D0 “box,” as it is inelegantly known, attaches to a television and plays compact disc-based video games, standard audio CDs and still-photo CDs. Combining its powerful processor with a CD’s 650 megabytes of memory allowed Horsley’s team to create vastly more complex graphics, high-fidelity sound effects and seamless playing action. (CD-based players by Sega and other companies are already being sold but are wedded to slower processors.)

Eventually, the 3D0 player may become the heart of interactive home entertainment systems that will allow one to play games, order movies, pay bills, shop at home and marshal the 500-channel capabilities of future TV systems--an off-ramp between the fabled information superhighway and the living room. But for now, interactive multimedia’s only proven moneymakers are video games, which means that the fate of 3D0’s pricey $700 player rests largely on the success of software like Total Eclipse and Crash ‘N Burn, a car-racing game that for now is Crystal Dynamics’ only other product. A co-dependency common to the video-game industry thus informs the fates of both ventures: 3D0 needs games like Total Eclipse to attract customers, and Total Eclipse needs 3D0 for exposure, since the game cannot run on lesser hardware without a high-tech lobotomy.

Total Eclipse will have a suggested list price of $59.99 and will be sold at electronics stores that carry the 3DO player. (Crystal Dynamics won’t say how many copies of Total Eclipse it is shipping to retailers, but given that about 100,000 3DO players will have hit stores by year’s end, presumably a like amount of game units will be available to play on them.) The target audience for the game, says Crystal product manager Scott Steinberg, is “definitely male. He’s 18-24 years old, a hard-core gamer. He’s probably got more than four video-game systems and more than 20 video games.”

Some of which, it can be assumed, fall into the category of violent games that California Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren charges, encourage America’s joystick-addled youth to “demean and destroy.” While Lungren recently called for video-game makers to withdraw titles that “have a deadening, desensitizing impact on young, impressionable minds,” neither Total Eclipse nor Crash ‘N Burn are remotely as graphic as the notorious Mortal Kombat.

“They’re fairly cartoony as far as the violence goes,” Steinberg says, adding that “games and game play are king, as opposed to shocking people with gratuitous violence. No one here is interested in living with some cheesy game for an entire year of development. To us, a good game will sell.”

WHILE VIDEO-GAME HARDWARE IS DOMINATED BY JAPANESE TITANS such as Sega and Nintendo, most of the games themselves are still hatched inside the low-slung, faded-redwood corporate parks that dot Silicon Valley, birthplace of Pong, the mother of all video games. Pong, which debuted in 1972, made its creator, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, a very rich man. But Bushnell is to the current generation of designers as Jerry Garcia is to Kurt Cobain. If slogging through Tetris is an acquired skill for a fortysomething, it’s as natural as breathing for the average 20-year-old. And if selling a screenplay was the baby boomers’ version of the American dream, writing the next Sonic is the siren song for young game designers who head to the Valley looking for their Main Chance.

Salaries for programmers, artists and producers range from $30,000 to $100,000. But as in the film and music industries, the real money comes from stock options and back-end deals. Like the composer of a hit single, video-game developers share royalties from sales, replete with net points, gross points, incentive bonuses and the like. While truly humongous paydays are the exception, Horsley says, “if you make a Sonic 2 or a Street Fighter II, there’s a lot of money that comes through there.”

But money isn’t necessarily the draw. “You play games all day,” says Infotainment World’s Hennigan. “That’s a young man’s dream job.”

Literally: Despite Crystal’s female executive force, the video-game industry is still dominated by young men. “Considering the hours and the demands, it seems to attract more of a lifestyle (choice) than a monetary choice,” Horsley says. “These are just folks who love to play games and are technically literate, and along the way if they make a lot of money, it’s looked at as a natural byproduct of quality. I don’t see a lot of them cashing out. It’s more: ‘Oh, cool, I can buy a better car.’ ”

Not every aspect of the industry is as enticing. A game designer’s purgatory is slaving over creations designed for a hardware no longer in the technological vanguard. The fact that Crystal Dynamics staked its immediate future on designing games for 3D0’s sexy new player was what tempted Horsley and others to quit their jobs at companies like Sega, Electronic Arts and Strategic Simulations Inc. “They want to be in the front end of the next movement,” says Crystal Dynamics’ Lange.

Total Eclipse was hatched last year at one of Crystal Dynamics’ employee-wide brainstorming sessions. There is--the arrival of Strauss Zelnick notwithstanding--little hierarchy within the company. Madeline Canepa, a deceptively soft-spoken refugee from Sega’s marketing department, is the nominal authority figure among the programmers and artists.

By design, there are no regular hours or requirements for dress. In keeping with the standard of decorum set by Trip Hawkins’ Electronic Arts, where the lowliest programmer could frag the boss with a Nerf ball, a sort of New Age fraternity-house atmosphere pervades. A box of plastic toys--helpfully labeled TOYS! TAKEONE!--rests near a chessboard with the pieces arranged in permanent checkmate. The rank-and-file politely ignore these contrived attempts at levity but for one: Day and night, viciously competitive Ping-Pong matches rage on a table set up outside the War Room, a conference room with mock bullet holes in the door, where Horsley has been debugging Total Eclipse.

“The things we actually play here are the most simple games,” says Crystal artist Steve Kongsle, whose cubicle is adorned with a stuffed Stimpy toy. “Ping-Pong, or we play a video game called Bomber Man,” he adds. “It’s the most loser system in the world, but it’s the one we play; it’s kind of sadly ironic. There are people here who are just so competitive. They love games. And they like them much better when they win. And if they don’t, they’ll work on it until they can crush you and make you sorry you ever beat them.”

“That’s one of the hallmarks of the game player,” Horsley says. “He never gives up. The people here, they’re all game players, looking for that high score.”

Once the rough concept for Total Eclipse was nailed down last summer, Horsley and Daniel Arey, a 29-year-old Crystal techie, began thrashing out story lines.

“You say, OK, what are some neat scenarios that would motivate someone to play this game?” says Arey, whose credenza is decorated with a holographic skull next to the framed snapshots of his children. “People go to the movie theater to not do anything. People buy a game to be challenged--it’s very separate from watching movies or TV.”

With the consensus that one of the company’s first two products should be a space war--a genre well-proven in the marketplace--Arey seized on a “colliding empires, you-are-the-last-best-hope-for-mankind” fable. “It’s a story that is safe and understandable for a shooter,” he says.

Adds Horsley: “We’re an action game. We’re concerned primarily with the sensation of speed and flight, of reacting to enemies and bullets. But it would be nice if we could layer it with a story that gives the player a compelling reason to shoot back. I mean,” he laughs, “why exactly is he involved in this war?”

All of these notions, along with the game’s six characters, dialogue and scenarios, were codified in a 52-page internal document that looks and reads suspiciously like a movie script. Orion, the commander of StarBase BRAVO, is rendered thus: “He is an older man, but still strong. A jagged scar sweeps down one cheek and ripples down his neck. He is violent looking, his face edged and hard, hair the color of steel. He is Earth’s last hawk.”

The player assumes the role of a plucky fighter-jock lieutenant. You’re briefed by Orion on your mission before winging off to acquire and destroy targets in some decrepit outpost of the Drak-sai empire. In keeping with the fight-and-fly doctrine, the heart of the game--its narcotizing, play-till-you-drop hook--is overcoming the onslaught of the Drak-sai’s defense armament.

To keep the players alert--and playing--Total Eclipse is strewn with subversive trip wires. Thermals from lava floes upset the plane’s attitude; doors inside tunnels close at varying rates; flying through certain force fields causes the plane to accelerate wildly, while traveling through others slows it. “You look at each component,” Horsley says. “Is the music good enough to listen to by itself? Are the visuals good enough? If they all come together and you look at your watch and you’ve played till 3 in the morning, you know you’ve got a good, addictive game.”

There are, of course, limits to benevolence in a space war. “We’ll put a decelerator right in front of a door that’s closing,” Horsley adds. “So right when the player thinks, ‘I’ve made it,’ we slow him down, and he’s like uh-ohhh . . . ohhhhhhh !”

CRASH!

The hyper-realistic sound of breaking glass rips from speakers in programmer Eric Knopp’s office, drowning out a purring Kate Bush CD and prompting cries of “Louder!” from another cubicle. It’s around 9 at night, four days before the Consumer Electronics Show. Knopp, programmer Troy Gillette and a shifting gang of kibitzers gnaw take-out pizza while Knopp plays digital sound effects from a remarkably comprehensive library. Gillette reads, awe-struck, from the manual: “Magical Poof. Followed by Magical Zing and Magical Zap.” He turns a few pages. “Six samples of roofs on Alfa Romeo convertibles going up. Six of them!”

The heart-stopping whoosh and thunk! of an arrow slicing through the air and hitting home tears through the office.

“Now,” Gillette continues, turning pages, “do an Omni’s wipers sound that different from an Imperial’s? And do we need between them, oh, 18 samples?”

The sound of a Krakatoa-sized explosion rocks the room.

“Damn,” marvels Knopp, whose sandy hair hangs to the middle of his back, “that one was deep !”

“Game programmers,” Horsley says later. “A playful, unruly lot. But they have to be precise and professional and on the mark. Artists are passionate about art, but the programmers, geez, they have to make it live and breathe. The artists write the song, but the programmers make the machine sing it.”

It is Knopp’s and Gillette’s assembly-language computer code--written in strings of zeros and ones--that tells the processor in the 3D0 player what to do: from calling up Total Eclipse’s very images to making the FireWing turn left, right or explode. It is exacting, exhausting work, because, as Horsley points out, “with the computer it either is or isn’t--there’s no in-between.”

“Eric and Troy balance each other out,” he explains. “Troy’s a scholar, very thorough if very meticulous. Eric tends to be on the hacker side. He’s been doing this since he was 16, and he knows all the tricks in the book. Together, they do some pretty cool stuff.”

Horsley became a little alarmed when, around the 28th hour of Gillette’s recent programming marathon, he noticed the ordinarily reticent programmer “getting pretty damn silly. Then he’d get quiet. He was having trouble compiling his code. It was kind of scary, because at that point he’s the only one in the whole world . . . .” Horsley trails off, apparently unwilling to contemplate what would happen if Gillette, whose code, like Knopp’s, is so idiosyncratic that even Knopp couldn’t unravel it, had to bow out. “Some projects have failed because the programmers have just lost it,” he says.

Happily, Gillette, at 29 an old hand at closing crunches, soldiered through. Nevertheless, the vagaries of computer logic make him wary. “You can test the heck out of it yourself,” Gillette says. “Then you take it to a show, and somebody sits down, and they have no idea what they’re doing, and they crash it . And you’re like, ‘ What did you do that for? ‘ “

Burned into Gillette’s memory is a Japanese executive from Panasonic, the company manufacturing the 3D0 player, who dropped by Palo Alto one day and sat down at an early version of Total Eclipse, prepared to be impressed. “The thing is flying along,” Gillette says, “and, yep, turns out there’s a bug: If you fly fast enough into a corner, you’ll launch clean out of the tunnel. We hadn’t found it. So we’re just trying to fill up all the holes we can before the show.”

Back in Knopp’s office, the explosions and calamities are reaching a sublime crescendo.

“I found an earthquake sample,” he yells. “If you turn it up just right, the windows go deerrrr rrrrrr . . . .”

It’s 10 o’clock, and the kibitzers start drifting back to their cubicles. Chicago looms, just around the bend.

“Ooooh,” says Knopp reverently, “I bet this chain saw sounds good . . . .”

IT’S THE DAY BEFORE THE show, and McCormick Place is filled with clammy air gushing off Lake Michigan. The finishing touches are being added to the 3D0 booth, where Crystal Dynamics’ games will play on monitors mounted on refrigerator-size consoles. The competition is here, too--Electronic Arts, Spectrum HoloByte, Intellimedia Sports, ReadySoft and the other 3D0 licensees, each within spitting distance of Crystal Dynamics’ space. Nobody’s games are finished, but it turns out that Total Eclipse and Crash ‘N Burn are further along than most, and the opening sequence Horsley slaved over is playing endlessly on a gigantic bank of monitors at Panasonic’s booth.

Lange and Canepa scuttle around the Crystal booth, getting ready. Canepa has brought jewel boxes containing CDs of both games, which were pried from the programmers after a nightmarish 24-hour crunch. But these are mere insurance. In the game-industry custom, key members of the team--Horsley, Gillette, Knopp and Crystal’s chief technologist, Mark Cerny--remain in Palo Alto, grinding out still newer versions to be dispatched to Chicago in waves as the team wings in from the coast. Today’s shipment is due in on the 4 o’clock plane with Crystal’s Scott Steinberg. Lange is getting edgy. Trip Hawkins is due at the booth at 6 to choose the games he will showcase at 3D0’s press conference tomorrow.

At last Steinberg hustles into the booth, extracts the precious CDs from his suitcase and relates a tale that Preston Sturges would have been ashamed to invent. Steinberg dropped by the office at 6 a.m. to pick up the latest CDs, only to have the programmers put him off until all was nearly lost. Halfway to the San Francisco airport, he realized that he’d left his ticket at Crystal. He relayed an SOS to Knopp, who corralled a passenger and torpedoed up the 101’s car-pool lane, but Steinberg’s flight to Chicago was oversold, and he was 20th on the wait list. Then the gate agent called a name that sounded like his. He approached the desk. “Steinberg?” he asked cautiously. “Whatever,” said the agent, who handed him someone else’s ticket and waved him on.

While Steinberg comes down from his odyssey, Canepa loads the latest discs. The techno-funk prelude for Crash ‘N Burn begins playing. Steinberg suddenly looks stricken.

“What the hell is that?” he gasps. “The music is out of sync.”

It quickly develops that both games have bugs. Lange seizes a phone, reaches Cerny in Palo Alto and runs down the problems. The phone cord won’t reach, so Lange, crouched on the floor, shouts Cerny’s suggestions underneath a partition to Canepa. “To Sir With Love” floats from a karaoke demonstration booth.

From the coast, Cerny’s analysis is relayed in a sort of bucket brigade.

“He says skip the full-motion video stuff; it’s always jerky.”

“Not this jerky,” Canepa says.

After an hour’s alarms and excursions--including a memorable moment when an exasperated 3D0 technician blows on the Crash ‘N Burn CD and briefly brings it to life--it’s determined that the prototype 3D0 machines at the Crystal booth aren’t the ones used to develop the games back in Palo Alto. The games are matched to the correct players, and the problems subside. But the main problem is that both the 3D0 machine and Crystal Dynamics software are works in progress.

“It’s a hideously ugly part of the birthing process,” Hawkins says when he arrives at the 3D0 booth. “You can’t really get the software done until the hardware is done, but the software people can’t wait. So you try to do the two things simultaneously. It’s a very unnatural act.”

Natty in a cardigan and wool trousers, Hawkins takes his place at the Total Eclipse console for a test spin. Surrounding him is a knot of Crystal employees who don’t even try to affect nonchalance. When Hawkins moves to Crash ‘N Burn, the gaggle shuffles over with him. On his way out, Hawkins casually gives his benediction: Both games make the cut. The Crystal team, secretly thrilled, resumes attitudes of genuine nonchalance.

The next afternoon, Horsley arrives with yet another set of CDs. He looks haggard. “I’ve had nine hours of sleep the last five days,” he says. The airline has lost his suitcase so he wears a bizarrely mismatched shirt and tie dragooned from a colleague.

Eyes rimmed red from exhaustion, he stands in a crowd of conventioneers gaping at the opening sequence from Total Eclipse playing on Panasonic’s wall of monitors. The Drak-sai Arnold ships swoop in for the attack, and great hunks of StarBase BRAVO sheer off flawlessly, just as they did when Horsley and his team were barricaded in the War Room, pulling all-nighters. The sight seems to rouse him.

“Yeah,” he says softly. “Yeah, that was tough. But it was worth it.”

MONTHS LATER, BACK IN California, with Christmas weeks away and Total Eclipse all but finished, Horsley sounds almost wistful about the project’s end. “We are very close. We’re tweaking some bugs. It’s at the strange stage where the game is pretty much done. It’s kinda cool now to play it.”

As Horsley’s ultimate deadline approached, Crystal corralled, from malls and software stores, hard-core players who were paid $20 an hour to play the almost-finished game. Their suggestions: Tighten the handling of the Firewing; make the Drak-sai harder to kill; enlarge the “power up” targets that enhance the plane’s fire power. “We heard them,” says Steinberg. “We changed it.”

Given the chance, Horsley and his team would probably fine-tune Total Eclipse indefinitely--an understandable compulsion for game developers to whom the process of creating dwarfs the creation itself. “After it ships, it’s done, baby,” Horsley says. But he’s already gearing up for his next project. It will be, he promises with some heat in his voice, “the most amazing action-graphic game anyone’s ever seen.”