Inside the Video Game Industry

The video game industry is home to a cast of characters as quirky, rebellious and diverse as the world they create. Like anyone who owns a television, CliffyB is well versed in the importance of reinvention in holding the public eye. He turns before the mirror in the men's room. White suit, white snakeskin shoes, hair bleached white to match. Looking good, he thinks, although, in truth, his arms and legs are gangly under his suit, his chest thin beneath a black shirt and tie, and his hair, capping a somewhat sallow complexion, is more brassy blond than white.

Ten years ago, CliffyB was that kid on the school bus who got Coke poured on his head and gum smeared in his hair. Back before he was transformed into a pimp suit wearing game designer, Cliffy was an acne riddled, miserable at home, small town kid, filled with unbridled fury at his low status in life a feeling that years later left him sympathizing terribly, albeit secretly, with videogame fans Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the iconic misfits who in 1999 shot up their classmates, their cafeteria, and then themselves at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. It still brings tears to Cliffy's eyes to think about it not only the horror of the kids who lost their lives, but also how deeply, awfully alone Harris and Klebold most have been to do such a thing. Cliffy thinks he knows exactly how they felt. He still refers bitterly to the hysteria that swept the country afterward as "geek profiling."

"Yeah, but who has the last laugh now?" Cliffy says about his old high school tormenters. "They're all working at gas stations. And look at me." Arms spread wide in his ill fitting white suit.

Indeed, that was then, and this is now. At twenty six years old, CliffyB is a nine year veteran of the industry, lead designer at Epic Games and co creator with Digital Extremes of the smash success first person shooter franchise Unreal. This is the year that sales of videogames in the United States have surpassed movie box office receipts, a stamp of success the industry believes is its passport to legitimacy. People who haven't thought about videogames since their Space Invaders days more than a decade ago are saying to one another over coffee and the Times: Did you know the videogame industry made $6.35 billion dollars this year? Ads for Sony, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, and Xbox are beginning to creep from cable channels like MTV2, Nickelodeon, and TechTV onto prime time slots on the networks. Billboards for hit games such as Grand Theft Auto III are vying with movies for space on city street corners. Nongamers around the world are awaking, startled, to the ascendance of a medium about which they know little or nothing.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3 as gamers call it, is the yearly event of the International Digital Software Association, the industry's chief trade group. The gathering was founded in 1995 when videogames got too big to remain an adjunct of the Consumer Electronics Show. E3 is where game publishers, console makers, and related companies show their upcoming wares to retailers and industry press. As CliffyB likes to say, videogames used to be like porn: everyone's got a stack under their bed, but no one admits it. In 2001, however, as young men everywhere are pulling their consoles and games out from under the bed, E3 has come to stand for something much bigger than just a trade show. In 2001, it stands as proof that videogames are here and aren't going away any time soon.

The enormous lobbies and hallways of the Los Angeles Convention Center, where E3 is held, are tiled with wall sized monitors, banners of all sorts, and constellations of loudspeakers. The noise is deafening, and the bleating and blinking they emit is potentially epilepsy inducing. Crouched like a spider beneath its web, a full scale model of the futuristic Lexus from Spielberg's Minority Report guards the escalator to the main convention hall, and a matrix of sixteen or so huge flat panel screens tease passersby with the images from the videogame of the yet to be released movie. The demos loop over and over, Tom Cruise endlessly fighting off jetpack wearing attackers. On a wall across the aisle, a digitalized Ewan McGregor is firing up his light saber above a display for a litany of upcoming Star Wars game releases. Though Lucasfilm's digital counterpart LucasArts has been around for more than a decade, in 2001 most movie studios and production houses are just discovering the advantages of tag teaming their blockbusters with videogames.

On the expo floor, the game companies have gone all out. There are fifteen foot tall dungeons and faux Grecian temples surrounded by pillars of red billowing silk that give the impression of flames. There's a small skate ramp in the South Hall replete with professional skaters promoting the newest installment of the multimillion dollar franchises Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and Tony Hawk's Underground. The king himself, Mr. Hawk, occasionally steps out from the VIP section to monitor the proceedings, sporting the goofy smile of a tycoon who at heart remains an enthusiast.

When Cliffy gets out of his panel discussion, he chats a bit with reporters and other industry folk outside the meeting room. He bounces on the toes of his snakeskin shoes, excited, as if he can't quite believe he's here himself. Then he heads down to the expo floor.

Cliffy lives for videogames. Time spent on the Nintendo Entertainment System, playing with Mario and Donkey Kong, are some of his fondest childhood memories. His preteen years were spent on the PC with Doom and Quake, and then SimCity and the Ultima series. By the time he was a teenager, he was making games of his own on a souped up PC in his bedroom. Cliffy has never had any formal game design training until recently the very idea of formal training in game design would have been considered absurd. Nevertheless, Cliffy's been making games professionally since he was seventeen years old. After sending one of his games in a Ziploc bag to a publisher in California, Cliffy found himself a professional game designer before he had even graduated high school.

Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, the three console makers of the moment, as well as three of the biggest software publishers in the business, dominate the South and West Convention Halls, respectively. Each company has an inner sanctum, erected the day before, complete with passageways and little rooms where executives take meetings and give interviews over plates of melon and grapes. Like a solar system with a collection of satellites, each company is surrounded by its subsidiaries, divisions, and allies. Cliffy checks out a couple of displays, and soon spots dozens of people he knows other designers, gaming journalists,vca copy necklace, fans of his. People know Cliffy because he makes a point of being known. He accepts panel spots, poses for photographs, and even has a Web site called CliffyCam that lets you watch him while he works, or allows you to rifle through a collection of his photographs, including a prominent one of him in a big fuzzy bunny suit.

After a few minutes of meeting and greeting, CliffyB turns to a friend with the exhausted but excited look of a congressman just returned from a visit with his constituency. Cliffy explains to a reporter that a rumor has been spreading through the convention center like a virus, growing until the grumbling on the subject has become another layer of noise on the expo floor a rumor that there's been a moratorium on the Booth Babe.

The Booth Babe is a time honored tradition of E3 to the extent that a tradition less than a generation old can make such a claim and the Booth Babe issue has everything to do with what videogames have been, and what they're trying to become. Despite the rumored moratorium, Booth Babes appear to be everywhere you look. There's a woman dressed as Lara Croft, the long legged, gun toting archaeologist hero of Eidos's Tomb Raider. (Angelina Jolie played her in the movie version of the game.) There are women in tiny pieces of chain mail positioned outside elaborate gothic sets, women wandering the show rooms in pink latex bikinis. A group of them outside the South Hall are tossing Hawaiian leis around the necks of pale young men, cooing "Want to get lei'd?" There would appear to be many, many scantily clad young women, but, apparently, there aren't as many in 2001 as there used to be. And once the rumor takes hold, a dearth of Booth Babes is perceived by one and all, and the judgment of every male queried is that there are not nearly as many as there should be. "Ban the Booth Babe?" you hear in the hallways. "Come on!" People know this is the year the industry is making its big push for the mainstream, and they clearly understand that they aren't to alienate anyone with acts that could be perceived as depraved or immature or in any way foster the general impression of videogame makers as crazed, violent, or immoral freaks. But on the Booth Babe issue, the conventioneers are like dieters looking forward to being thin yet balking at the idea they must disavow pizza.

CliffyB, statesmanlike, sums up the general feeling. "Give me a break," he says. "The Booth Babe is an institution. If people don't have a sense of humor, f 'em!"

The irony is that while it's true Douglas Lowenstein, president of the Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA), hardly wants to project an image of pimply faced boys taking Polaroids with chain mail clad young women, he's the last one to hear the rumor. To his knowledge there's been no official moratorium on the Booth Babe. He's certainly issued no such edict. Perhaps the vendors are cleaning up their act on their own, he muses. Perhaps it's been entirely imagined, or perhaps it's a fantasy that became a reality once enough people believed it. Amidst the chaos and clamor of the sprawling video game shantytown set up by the corporations on the floor of the convention, it's easy to see how that could happen.

Lowenstein is a slender man in his mid fifties who favors thin polo neck sweaters tucked into pleated trousers. He's going bald and has a beak nose. Were his posture to worsen, he would somewhat resemble Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. Yet, there's something natty about him he's polished and professional looking in a way most people in the videogame industry are not. He shakes Cliffy's hand as they pass in the hall. Lowenstein has his own speech to give. lobbyist who's had his work cut out for him, trying to transform America's perception of the videogame from that of an artifact of an ailing society to a respectable and fun entertainment product. He's named the 2001 conference "Touch the Future," and, like Cliffy's attempts to vanquish his Coke wielding demons, he's determined to flip the whole paradigm once and for all. He wants 2001 to be the dawn of a new era. He kicks off E3 with an enthusiastic and statistic filled address.

"Seven years ago," he says, "videogames were played mostly by teenage boys, usually in the basement or the bedroom. No longer. Today, videogames are mainstream entertainment: they're played by people of all ages; they're played by people of all tastes; and they've become as important a part of our culture as television and movies. . . . They're in the center of the home, they're on the Internet, they're in movies, they're in schools, they're on cell phones; they're on PDAs and airplanes; and they're even in medical research labs. In short, videogames are everywhere."

He chuckles a little, along with his crowd, when he says, "Of course, politicians are still grumbling about videogame violence." It's as if he and the audience were high schoolers, sniggering at a hopelessly out of date teacher tramping the halls with toilet paper trailing from his shoe.

Lowenstein is clearly thrilled he finally has the luxury of laughing off angry politicians. economy as a whole during the same time period, and more than double the rate of either the film industry or the computer hardware business. The average age of a gamer has finally exceeded eighteen years "Please, please, can we put that stereotype to rest once and for all!" Lowenstein mock pleads. It's predicted that by 2005, videogame consoles will have penetrated 70 percent of all American homes, giving it one of the fastest adoption rates of any consumer appliance in history. The PlayStation 2 alone, for example, made it into 10 million homes its first year on the market, something it took the telephone thirty five years to accomplish.

Ubiquity is what the industry has been after for years, and ubiquity seems to be what it is finally getting. One study, from investment analysts at Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown, has just concluded that the potential market for videogames had grown from 20 million people in 1980 to 96 million in 2001 and is now growing exponentially 106 million people in 2005 and onward, as every baby born takes to the videogame habit.

"Fun. That's what this . . . industry is about," Lowenstein says. Then he reads from a May 2001 article by Bob Schwabach for the New York Times: "'The videogame industry has been on the threshold of seizing dominance in entertainment for several years,'" he quotes. " 'Ultimately it will. It's inevitable. . . . I don't see any way out of this.'"THE FOLLOWING YEAR, 2002, CliffyB's plans for industry dominance aren't panning out quite as he'd hoped. At E3 2001 he'd been riding high on the recent release and resounding success of Unreal Tournament. But in the spring of 2002 at the International Game Developers Conference, the release of his next title, Unreal 2,van cleef and arpels clover copy necklace, is still seven months away, and Cliffy has taken to muttering "you're only as good as your last game."

If you didn't know that Cliffy introduced a new look at every industry gathering, you might not recognize him right away at the 2002 Game Developers Conference. This year, CliffyB's hair is brown and brushed into his face 88 la early ER George Clooney. He's wearing a silky shirt and a stiff black leather jacket; a heavy silver chain lies around his neck. Cliffy is well scrubbed and moussed, like someone from New Jersey going to a Manhattan dance club. He's hanging out by the bar of the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, California, which serves as the headquarters for the Game Developers Conference. It's March,replica van cleef and arpels butterfly necklace, almost exactly one year after the rumored Booth Babe moratorium, and attendance at the GDC, an event as different from E3 as San Jose is from Hollywood, is strong. E3 may be for the companies, but GDC is for the developers. For an industry on the verge of reaching cultural critical mass, it's hard to imagine that a tight sense of community could be maintained among developers, but Alan Yu, the bald, hip twenty nine year old organizer of the event, is doing his best to make that happen. He has a dream of a videogame community that crosses cultural, geographical, and company lines. He's lured designers from as far away as Japan, Hong Kong, Italy, Scotland, France, and England. E3 may shock and awe with its eye popping display of the electric sprawl of the videogame industry, but GDC opens a portal into the hearts of those who keep it thriving.

Every year, in early March, just before the mad scramble in the months leading up to E3 begins, twelve thousand or so game developers from around the world descend on this four block stretch of downtown San Jose. They fill up every hotel in the area, every meeting room in the convention center, and every ballroom in the Fairmont Hotel.

They crowd into seminars ranging from programming with geometric computations,van cleef arpels imitation necklace, to composing interactive music, to managing online societies, to understanding female gamers. There are educators from universities such as Stanford, MIT, and University of Michigan who want to know how to create degrees in game making and videogame theory. There are business people from wireless companies hot on the trail of multiplayer games that can be played over cell phones. And there are others, like Peter Molyneaux of Lionhead Studios (Black White and Fable) who are acknowledged masters of this strange universe. GDC is a place where it's possible for the lowest coder to rub elbows with the likes of Will Wright, maker of the most popular PC game of all time, The Sims, or Raph Koster, the visionary leader of the current charge into massively multiplayer online gaming, or even Jonathan "Seamus" Blackley, the man behind the Xbox.