Video Games: The Movie Page #3

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go underground in Pitfall!

like totally blew...

like, oh, you can go there?

You know, I knew enough

about computers to know

that it was a computer game,

and this was...

but it was simulating,

you know, this alien invasion

with one ship on the ground,

like, defending Earth

from this alien invasion,

and to me,

it was almost like being there.

Even with those

rudimentary graphics,

it was just the first time I'd ever had

control over something on the television

or something on a screen.

Probably the most memorable

console of my entire life

and one that I miss,

that I wish I still had,

was my original

Nintendo Entertainment System.

The Nintendo Entertainment System.

Your parents help you hook it up.

What's it like to play

the Nintendo Entertainment System?

When you play the system

with the most arcade hits,

you're playing with power.

The Nintendo Entertainment System,

now you're playing with power.

I think that one of the reasons

we get nostalgic about things

is it's not necessarily

the thing that we were doing.

It's not that song,

it's not that game

or that movie, or that book,

it's what was happening

in your life at that time.

It hit at exactly

the right time in my life.

And the NES then was

an amazing, amazing game system.

Games got better fast

it seems like.

Before I made it to my teens,

everything was kinda...

it didn't look as great

as the games did in the arcade.

But by the time Nintendo came out,

things started getting

a lot better.

I was fortunate to first

be exposed to Nintendo

as a consumer.

And for me, that very first system

that I was exposed on

was the Super NES.

And I have many fond memories

and many great stories

around my interaction

with that system.

Playing for many, many hours.

Playing games like

The Legend of Zelda

Link to the Past,

games like Chrono Trigger,

all of these fantastic

experiences that, for me,

were my very first

gaming experiences.

And I eventually got

a Super Nintendo,

and then I was all about Star Fox.

And I was so into Star Fox

and the story and what

was gonna happen next.

Most of the games when we got

into the Super NES,

all of a sudden,

you had a reason to go do this

because you were tryin'

to save somebody.

And so just that little bit there

brought story

elements into the game.

And what I think was really great

about Nintendo during that era

is they really wanted

to make sure that

all the games on the system

were really high quality.

But Sega Genesis

was an entirely different thing.

Sega Genesis was

to my experience in college

as the Nintendo was

to my experience in high school.

You know, that was

a very state-of-the-art console

back then.

I think the next time I

bought a console was the PS1.

And I was like, "All right.

These games are getting ridiculous."

So, I got a PlayStation 1.

Hey, plumber boy, mustache man.

Your worst nightmare has arrived.

Pack up your stuff.

I got a little

surprise for you here.

Check it out.

What do you think about that?

Sony PlayStation has

more than 150 games,

NHL Faceoff '97, Jet Moto,

Tobal No. 1, Destruction Derby 2,

Crash Bandicoot, I could go on.

I'm gonna give you a

personal demonstration.

You can't stop, grandma.

You can't.

Oh, you go, girl!

PlayStation.

I'm gonna have to ask you to leave.

You're hurting my elbow.

All of a sudden, you had this

incredible amount of data

on one disc that could also play

music and everything else.

To me, it was a portal

to modern gaming today.

When Tomb Raider came

on the scene in 1996,

it brought people into a world

that they hadn't really

participated in before,

the 3D world.

It was an immersive world in a time

when there wasn't many

games like that.

And I think over

the years that has grown,

people latched onto that one.

When I talk to developers,

and I talk to fans

around the world,

they always hark back

to their first experiences

playing Tomb Raider.

And it touched them,

and it was something special.

And I begged my mom for a console.

I begged her.

And it wasn't until

the N64 came out

that she finally gave in.

If we go to the PlayStation

and the Nintendo 64,

you started to see

3D for the first time.

What that allowed

the vision of Mr. Miyamoto to do

was to say now that I have

the ability

to manipulate polygons in real time

at a fast enough frame rate,

then instead of just

going back and forth,

now I can run around in circles,

or move into or out of the screen.

So, it brought a whole

new dimension

to the gameplay.

And the controller was

actually designed

with an analogue joystick

to be able to control

that movement.

It started to add a whole new dimension

into what gamers were used to.

And so, for a long time,

it had been this 2D,

sort of parallaxing 2D planes.

But as you sort of moved

into that 3D era,

you started to see

people start to play with,

you know, what are the kinds

of mechanics we can do now?

What are the things

that we can actually play with?

What's this new world

of this other dimension?

And so, you know,

it was painful at first.

Certainly, there were good

examples of it, but it was hard.

It's hard to give

the players this whole

other level of freedom

that they weren't used to.

And then we started getting

consoles that were

bigger and better,

and you could bring in,

you know, more of a 3D environment,

better frame rate and better sound.

And then you could put

more polygons on the screens

so the guys could look

more realistic.

Finally, with the PlayStation

and the PlayStation 2,

you started to see some really

interesting stuff happening.

You started to get,

you know, avatars on screen

that were more

representative of people.

They're easier to understand

what they were tryin'

to make you go through.

Especially on the PlayStation 2, it started

to feel like we have enough graphics

to really render

interesting people.

You know, they weren't real,

but they were real enough.

And so, you could sort of start

to believe in them more.

I had grown the PC business

pretty well

and was starting to look at the

console business and thinking,

"Wow, that would be a nice

business for us to be in."

But we really didn't

know anything about it.

And then one day, these guys

walked into my office.

They were from the DirectX team,

and they said they had

this idea to put DirectX

into a box.

It was gonna be this DirectX box.

And DirectX is the name

of the Windows API for gaming.

So this DirectX box

was basically it was

gonna act like a game console

on the outside,

but on the inside, it was really gonna

be a PC running Windows and DirectX.

That was the original plan.

And so what I think we didn't

really understand at the time

was that we were really

bridging these two worlds,

that Xbox was gonna be this bridge

between what was happening

in PC gaming culture

and what was happening

in console gaming culture.

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