How Video Games Changed the World Page #4

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I've got here

a listing of the programme that

I have taken off the printer.

And it's a reasonably sized

programme for a microcomputer.

Little wonder the computer itself

had a bit of an image problem.

The BBC was for people

who were a bit posh,

because that was

quite an expensive machine.

So if you were BBC,

you were a bit posh.

I was a BBC Micro guy.

The squidgy keyboard Spectrum...

I mean, I just laughed at it!

Square it may well have been,

but the BBC was soon blessed

with a killer app of its own -

a game that didn't just promise

you the world, but handed you

an entire universe, then let you

do with you wanted in it.

A game called Elite.

These spartan,

monochrome wire-frame graphics,

primitive by today's standards,

were stunning at the time.

But that was only the start of it.

Elite came out in 1984,

and it was really a ground-breaking

game on so many levels.

It was impossibly big.

You know, what Elite did was it

simulated the entire universe.

It didn't do anything by halves.

Elite was made by two incredibly

intelligent university

students called Ian Bell

and David Braburn.

And technologically it was

a massive, massive achievement,

because you have got these enormous

galaxies into 32K,

which you couldn't even open

a Word document without now.

That game feels like

it fell through a time hole

from 20 years in the future, it

shouldn't have existed back then.

Both technologically

and also in terms of what

they were trying to achieve

in creating a living, 3D world.

Elite wasn't just a technical

marvel, but a conceptual one.

Until then, almost every game

told you, the player, what to do.

There were rules

and you had to follow them,

punching buttons like a lab rat.

Elite jettisoned

the rule book into space

and let you get on

with absolutely anything.

It was the first,

what we would call a sandbox game,

or an open world game.

You can play the game in any way you

want, it's not linear any more.

Suddenly you are given

a playing environment

and you can choose to do Mission A

first or Mission D first.

You can also choose not to do

any missions, you can

just go out there

and explore if you want to.

Suddenly you could really control

your entertainment experience in ways

that were never possible before.

The fantasy of exploring a limitless

galaxy is a seductive one,

hence the success of

memorable exercises

in wish fulfilment like the camp

but lovable Star Trek, or the

rambling, picaresque shenanigans of

space-hopping hobo Doctor Who.

Those interstellar bumbags

had all the fun.

Now, thanks to Elite, you could explore

the universe like Kirk or the Doctor.

But unlike them, you didn't have

a deep space travel card, no.

You had to pay your way

by trading goods.

And the quickest way

to earn big money

was to trade illegal stuff,

like slaves or narcotics.

Just like Doctor Who doesn't.

Massive bastards could even

turn to piracy,

blowing up other ships

and stealing their cargo.

I had always seen Elite as...

Imagine the 17th, 18th, 19th century

of sailing ships

going across the Atlantic,

trading all sorts of goods.

You know, should you just cover

the normal things,

or should you cover the things

that were deeply illegal?

We wanted the player to have the

freedom to do good and to do bad.

It was, like,

kind of Thatcher in space.

It was make money in this universe,

however you want to do it.

If you want to sell slaves,

if you want to sell narcotics,

if that's the way to do it,

even though there was

risk involved, that's what you did.

If you can imagine in the mid-1980s,

we were at the height of capitalism

and the economics of life

and the politics of life as well,

were reflected inside the game.

It wasn't overtly meant to be

political at all, but I think

it sort of, as a sort of child of

its time, it sort of became that way

because of the money focus

of the game.

You found yourself playing the game

because you wanted that

docking computer, you wanted

that large cargo bay or whatever.

And you aspired to the next

bit of money

and you would do anything

in the game to just try

and get that little extra bit

because you wanted it so much.

There are so many new

concepts in that game,

it was such a leap forward

that I think for publishers and for

the audience at the time, it took a

while to get their head around it.

But once they understood what was

possible, that you could

create worlds inside a computer,

that was just absolutely amazing.

Elite gave birth to an entire genre

of open world sandbox games,

in which the player is largely free

to create their own narrative.

The most famous example

being the gleefully anarchic

and morally wonky Grand Theft Auto,

which we'll return to later.

So, Britain had enjoyed a mini

renaissance of early gaming,

but the rest of the world wasn't

just sitting around, giving up

and going, "Pffff..."

Thousands of miles away,

somewhere terrifyingly foreign,

a boffin was working on a game

so nightmarishly addictive, it would

soon enslave all of mankind

and destroy the world as we knew it.

Kind of.

You'll have to watch the next part

to see if I've oversold that.

# Try not to use me

# Try not to use me... #

The year is 1985 and as

an audience of millions

pretends to live in harmony

while withstanding

this f***ing excruciating Duran

Duran performance at Live Aid,

the world is in flux.

Riots are tearing

across the United Kingdom

and not even the glittering Royal Premiere

of Back To The Future can stem that chaos,

chiefly because the two events

are entirely unrelated.

Meanwhile, something was about to

happen in the world of gaming

that was on a par with the Beatles

releasing their first single

but with catchier music.

When Mario first appeared

as the protagonist in

the challenging Donkey Kong,

he was known only as Jumpman.

A few years later he popped up

in the somewhat bare-boned

platformer Mario Bros

but it wasn't until 1985 and

the release of Super Mario Bros

that he became an instantly

recognisable icon.

Super Mario Bros is a side scrolling

platform game where basically

you have to run from left to right,

going up ladders, down pipes,

jumping on monsters,

collecting gold coins.

He's just a masterpiece

of minimalist design.

You get his personality from just

this tiny, tiny bit of information.

His design actually came from

the limitations of the console

at the time,

you know, the blue overalls,

the red cap, the moustache,

all of which came about because

they couldn't really render

anything more complex than that.

So it was red, white,

blue and black for a moustache,

it was as simple as that,

and it was born of necessity.

That's why it's curious

that he's become

the kind of iconic brand

character that he is now.

Mario just means games to me,

if I'm being honest.

Always friendly,

always beautiful to play,

like ALWAYS beautiful to play.

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