Can videogame storytelling stand up to other mediums? What can we learn about the current narrative potential of games from playing older titles?
To answer these questions, Richard Rouse III of Midway Games formed a discussion panel along with Marc Laidlaw (Valve), Steve Meretzky (Blue Fang), and Ken Rolston (Big Huge Games). Interestingly, rather than talking about their own story-driven titles (I’d cut off Chad’s right hand if it meant I could hear two hours of Marc Laidlaw talking about Alyx Vance), these veteran designers each highlighted two of their favorite story games from the medium’s past.
Even ignoring how goddamn fun it was to watch game designers talk about their favorite games which they had essentially nothing to do with, all four men were refreshingly blunt with each other: Ken Rolston, aged though he may be, has a hell of a lot of bite in him.
Hit the jump for a summary of the talk.
Above: Al Alcorn (left), creator of Pong, and Ralph Baer, designer of the first home video game Odyssey, share a joke during their Game Developers Conference panel Wednesday afternoon. At bottom right is the Brown Box — the final prototype of the world’s first game console.
GDC attendees got a rare chance to see two of the men who created the videogame industry appear on stage together today. Ralph Baer, who invented the video game console, and Al Alcorn, the Atari engineer who designed Pong, joined forces to present a panel appropriately titled “How To Create An Industry.”
Wired.com spoke with both of these industry pioneers after their panel, and we’ll have a video of both interviews soon. For now, some notes on the session are below.
Baer, 86, began the panel by taking the audience through a history of early 20th century electronics that he came in contact with as an engineer in the 1940s, from early televisions to an “electronic depilation machine” that he worked on after returning from World War II. Later, working on tech for the military, he built a system that monitored Russian radio communications during the U.S. occupation of Berlin.
Even prior to the 1950’s, Baer says he was thinking about how to use electronics to play board games on a television set. Testing TVs, he said, required the use of pattern generators to test things like vertical hold. Why, he thought, couldn’t this same technology be used for play? (The test patterns, to him, looked like board games.)
Baer sold his idea to Magnavox, who released Odyssey in the fall of 1972, the same year that Atari released Pong.
Baer showed the crowd some historical documents, like a 1966 white paper that described his concept for a “TV Gaming Display,” and his 1973 patent that was the first one issued in the U.S. for video games.
“That patent… later made a lot of money for us,” he said, referring to the many lawsuits that he won based on having come up with the idea first. Including one versus Atari, who ended up paying Magnavox a $700,000 judgment after a court ruled that Pong infringed on Odyssey.
The “Brown Box,” the final model of Baer’s prototype game system, featured about 40 transistors and ran on four D batteries. He showed the innards laid out on the screen, and had the original prototype sitting on the table in front of him.
“Any integrated circuits?” asked Alcorn.
“Couldn’t afford ‘em,” said Baer.
Al Alcorn put on a similar show, walking us through the creation of Pong. It’s a story you can read about most anywhere. Check out a book like The Ultimate History Of Video Games and you can hear about how Alcorn got the eponymous “pong!” sound from hacking hardware that was already built into the game, or hear about the prototype machine filling up with quarters at the original test location, and various other stories that have since passed into video game legend.
Alcorn’s speech was shorter on photos, although he had a fantastic old picture of the younger versions of himself and Nolan Bushnell standing with a Pong arcade machine.
Zing of the day: In response to an audience member who asked if Alcorn thought that videogames were going away after the crash of 1983 sent the Warner-owned Atari into a spiral, Alcorn replied: “Oh, no. Certainly not. All that play value can’t go away… but Warner did!”
Alcorn said he misses the days when games were made by no more than five people, because “no one was around, and I could be the only guy there and look smart.”
While not drawing explicit comparisons between the success of the simplicity of Pong and the recent success of Wii, Alcorn said he admired Nintendo’s ability to take risks: “In general, you’re talking 10, 20 million dollar budgets, it’s very hard to take risks. I appreciate the courage, the risk that Nintendo took to go that way.
“But that doesn’t mean it’s the only way to go,” he says. “I love the graphics of the new machines.”
At the end of the panel, Baer was surprised by game music composer and Video Games Live concert maestro Tommy Tallarico, who took the stage with a representative from the Guinness Book Of World Records, who gave him a special award for Inventor Of The First Home Video Game Console.
Can videogame storytelling stand up to other mediums? What can we learn about the current narrative potential of games from playing older titles?
To answer these questions, Richard Rouse III of Midway Games formed a discussion panel along with Marc Laidlaw (Valve), Steve Meretzky (Blue Fang), and Ken Rolston (Big Huge Games). Interestingly, rather than talking about their own story-driven titles (I’d cut off Chad’s right hand if it meant I could hear two hours of Marc Laidlaw talking about Alyx Vance), these veteran designers each highlighted two of their favorite story games from the medium’s past.
Even ignoring how goddamn fun it was to watch game designers talk about their favorite games which they had essentially nothing to do with, all four men were refreshingly blunt with each other: Ken Rolston, aged though he may be, has a hell of a lot of bite in him.
Hit the jump for a summary of the talk.
If you’ve passed so far on Q-Games charming PixelJunk Monsters, perhaps the forthcoming demo will change your mind. It’s planned to hit the PlayStation Store tomorrow with the rest of the usual updates that North American PlayStation 3 owners have come to expect every Thursday. Q-Games prez let slip that the cheap and lazy will finally get their hands on the unique tower defense strategy game with a PixelJunk twist in our quick sit-down today, the details of which you’ll be reading about soon. Until then, ready the broadband connection and clear some hard drive space.
Xorloser released some useful new developer tools for Xbox360 XEX files.
* XexTool v5.2
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This is simply the best tool i have ever made 
It is the culmination of 3 years of work with the Xbox360 executable/dll containers known as xex files.
With XexTool you can do pretty much anything you want to an xex file except sign it for a retail Xbox360. Some examples of what it can do are:
* Print out all info about an xex
* Patch an xex file with an xexp patch file
* Extract the basefile from an xex file
* Extract the resources from an xex file
* Export information required to disassemble to an IDC file
* Remove all limits from an xex (such as media, region, library versions)
* Convert a retail xex into a devkit xex
* Change the compressed state of a xex
* Change the encrypted state of a xex
This tool is a command line tool. Those who require a GUI are not the kind of people this tool is aimed at. 
[/QUOTE]
* Xex Support for IDA v5.2
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This is an xex loader for IDA, it lets you open xex files in IDA without any fucking around!
If this doesn’t excite you tremendously then obviously this tool isn’t for you hehe.
This works so well it makes me happy just to use it!
This tool uses the same codebase as XexTool and so has the same support (ie works with everything!)
[/QUOTE]
* PPC Altivec support for IDA v5.2
[QUOTE]
This adds support to IDA for the “extra” PPC instructions used by processors such as the one in the Xbox360. This is very useful in combination with the above loader to ensure maximum reversal of xex files.
This was originally developed by Dean Ashton but was added to by some of the xbox-hacker ppl. I just precompiled this for IDA v5.2.
[/QUOTE]
Official Site: http://xorloser.com
Download: XexTool | Xex Support for IDA v5.2 | PPC Altivec support for IDA v5.2
If Ken Levine had it to do all over again, he would tell BioShock’s story a little differently.
Speaking to a packed audience at the Game Developers Conference, 2K Boston’s creative director confessed that he “underestimated” the impact that solving the mystery of Andrew Ryan in the game’s second act would have on the player. Once players knew the truth of Ryan’s identity and purpose, he said, they lost an important and compelling emotional connection with the game.
The lesson to be learned, says Levine, is that “answering questions is not as interesting as asking them.”
Levine likened BioShock to a classic detective story, creating both narrative tension and player interest by sparingly doling out clues about the true nature of Rapture as the player progressed through the game. In order for a such an approach to work, the game must maintain the “mystery balloon.”
“We call it the ‘mystery balloon’ because we’re pretentious,” said Levine.
To illustrate his point, Levine suggested the audience think of a game’s story as though it were a balloon half-filled with helium. The object is to maintain a player’s interest and attention by keeping the balloon in the air. Whenever the balloon starts to fall — perhaps because one of the game’s questions, such as your character’s identity in BioShock, — said Levine, you should give the balloon a gentle tap to keep it aloft and keep your player interested. The trick is knowing how and when to tap — if the balloon goes too high or too low, you’ll lose your audience.
When we discovered Andrew Ryan’s true identity in BioShock’s second act, said Levine with a grimace, “The balloon hit bottom.”
Asking more questions than you answer is just one facet of keeping your audience engaged, however.”if you want people to follow all of your plot, it has to be really fucking stupid,” said Levine. His point wasn’t that players are stupid, simply that by simplifying the plot, you create a “solidity” that grounds the game and makes it easier for the player to accept any “weirdness” you might throw their way. Like an underwater city that’s stuck in 1960 and inhabited by violently insane mutants, for example.
Although BioShock is rich with detail, moral ambiguity, and emotion,the story, said Levine, breaks down into three basic components: Escape Rapture, Kill Ryan, and Kill Fontaine. That simplicity makes the game enjoyable not only for those players who want to listen to every audio diary and read every poster, but also those who simply want to know where to go and who to kill.
Some exciting developments were uncovered at Microsoft’s keynote today, including details on XNA and community games.
Chris Satchell took the stage to talk about Microsoft’s XNA and community games, and he kicked things off with multiplayer co-op gameplay footage from The Dishwasher, winner of the DreamBuildPlay contest. It looked hot, and I’m ready to get my crazed dishwasher killing on.
Several community games were shown off, including the awesome-looking Jelly Car (Tonka trucks and jelly environments), Little Gamers (chainsaws + zombies, or beer + shotguns), Proximity HD, Rocketball, and many more. I don’t have footage for you, but I can offer something even better: demos of many these titles should be on Xbox Live now. Go look!
While we know that these XNA titles can be developed for Windows or the Xbox 360, but Chris Satchell showed off a real-time demo of gameplay on a Microsoft Zune. It was basically just a tech demo that Microsoft whipped up, but the touchpad seemed to provide decent control. XNA allows full development for this music player, and its wireless capabilities even permit multiplayer action.
Allowing games created with XNA to be able to be distributed over Live will surely bring lots of new and interesting titles. I can’t wait to see what happens when they let gamers make their own games.
Peter Molyneux took the stage this morning to talk more Fable 2, and announce two new features that will be making their way into the game. The first is an interesting one: co-op play. Real co-op play. If you own Fable 2, and a friend of yours owns Fable 2, you can jump into their singleplayer world, play along, then leave. Sort of like Crackdown. Except here, any items or experience you accrue in their game you’ll be able to take back to yours. Nifty!
The other feature is a little more unique. A few weeks prior to the release of Fable 2, Lionhead will put out an XBLA title that contains a few gambling minigames. Any and all money you earn in those, you can export into Fable 2 when you get the final game. Sure, it’s a neat gimmick, but it’s also teaching you a lesson: you don’t get money during quests in Fable 2. Because Skeletons in caves don’t carry wallets. The only way you can earn money in the game is to either work for it, or win it by gambling.
Add those to the dog and the fact I really dug the first Fable and yes, Peter, despite my best attempts at ignoring your promises, I’m excited for this game.
In our previous news post I already posted all highlights and official press releases from Microsoft’s GDC08 keynote and now you can download the entire keynote (audio) from majornelson’s blog (mp3, 01:12:01, 32.9 MB).
The new trailer for Gears of War 2 is now available on Xbox LIVE (only in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, UK and US for now). If it’s not available in your country yet, you can watch it below in low res:
Also added to Xbox LIVE (everywhere except Australia, Hong Kong, India, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan) is the ‘XNA Creators Club Game Launcher’:
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Content: XNA Creators Club Game Launcher
Price: Free
Dash Text: [ESRB: RP (Rating Pending)] *Xbox 360 HDD Required* Download the XNA Creators Club Game Launcher in order to play the special preview selection of game demos created by the community using XNA Game Studio. When your download is complete, go to the Games Library, select My Games, and navigate to the XNA Creators Club category along the top. From there, press Y to view, download, and play the available trial games for this limited period.
Note: You will need this launcher to access the free community games which are now available
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Earlier this morning I wrote about Wii Fit being released in the U.S. on May 19th. Now, WiiSpin brings you some Wii Fit screenshot goodness…
Like I said above there are a TON of screenshots… so be sure to hit the link below to see the rest of them.