High Score (2020–…): Season 1, Episode 6 - Level Up - full transcript
Nintendo goes 3D with Star Fox. Wolfenstein 3D popularizes the first-person shooter format, while Doom ups the ante with networked gaming.
[narrator] It's 11:59 p.m.
December 9th, 1993.
In one minute,
a PC game will be uploaded to a newly
popular platform called the internet.
[man] There were
hundreds of people on the server
and they were dying to get this game.
[computer bleeps]
[narrator] The game was Doom.
[man] Everyone was initiating
the file transfer at the same time,
so the server just crashed.
It was the game that everybody
had been waiting for, evidently.
[man] It's a dark and scary
broken military base
that's been invaded by demons from hell.
There's a dark environment,
a light is strobing,
demons are coming at you,
and you just see silhouettes and fireballs
coming toward you.
[explosions]
We wanted to scare the crap out of you.
And nobody had ever seen
anything like it before.
[narrator] This is John Romero...
game designer turned legend...
[chainsaw buzzes]
...for freaking out
a generation of gamers.
[Romero] We wanted to make
something dark and scary
and so we released one of the most violent
video games that's ever been made.
[narrator] He had opened the door
to a new era of gaming...
-[groaning]
-[gunshots]
...where players could enter,
explore,
and play against each other.
And it came at a pivotal moment
when both computers and consoles
were about to enter a new dimension.
Romero's machine of choice...
was the PC.
It started in 1989
when Romero began making games
for a subscription service
called Gamer's Edge.
[Romero] Every month you would get a disc
for whatever computer
that you were subscribing for
and on that disc would be
a bunch of random stuff.
Whether you like it or not,
you're getting it,
and hopefully there'll be a game
or something fun on it.
Twenty-two-year-old Romero paired up
with another young hotshot programmer
named John Carmack to make games that were
actually worth it for the subscriber.
I asked him,
"What is it that you want to do
on this game, since we're going to make it
together? What are you interested in?"
He said, "I'm interested in graphics
and, like, the architecture of the games."
And I said, "Okay,
I'll do the game designs and the levels
and programming
and stuff that you don't like."
[narrator] Romero had a partner in crime.
Now they needed the perfect lair
for their team to code in.
Gamer's Edge was at
a fluorescent light company,
which to me is non-creative light.
I prefer darkness.
[heavy metal music playing]
But I got a room at the office
and we made our environment
that we wanted to work in.
It was a dark cave.
We had a window
that we could let some sunlight in,
but we hated that too.
We had a Nintendo in the corner
that was just playing Life Force, Zelda,
Mario 3 on loop.
We had our own giant refrigerator in there
packed full of drinks.
And I had a kick-ass '80s boombox
and each person got a whole day to play
anything that they wanted.
It was mostly metal.
[heavy metal music playing]
We spent tons of time there.
It was funny, because...
we were starting to code
on our spare time after the normal hours.
I mean, this is what we want to do.
Nobody's telling us not to do it.
This is great.
[narrator] Out of that metal-induced mania
came the foundation
for something truly groundbreaking:
smooth side-scrolling on the PC.
[Romero] On the Nintendo,
side-scrolling was extremely smooth
and the PC really couldn't do that
because, at the time, the PC graphics
just weren't that advanced.
There were some side-scrolling games
that were like Mario clones
that moved the screen in chunks,
but the chunking doesn't feel real.
It takes you out of it.
That's as good as it got back then.
If we can figure out how
we can get it smooth horizontally,
that's huge.
If we can make a Mario-type thing,
like... that's unbelievable.
So this one night,
Carmack decided
that he was going to try to do it.
[narrator] That night, he'd take a trip...
[distorted voice]
...through the mushroom kingdom.
Nah, not that mushroom kingdom.
This one.
I came in the next day at ten o'clock.
They put a little demo on my desk
called Dangerous Dave
in Copyright Infringement.
Dangerous Dave is a game
that I had made the month before.
So I was like, "Hmm,
they must have been
doing something last night."
So I put it in the computer and ran it.
The screen starts up with
Super Mario Brothers 3
with Dangerous Dave on the screen.
And he runs across the screen
and the whole screen smoothly scrolls.
I could not believe that
this was on a PC.
I could not believe
that he got it working.
No one has done this.
This is the first time this has happened
on a PC.
[narrator] In a single night, Carmack
figured out something no one else had
and it opened up a whole new world
of possibilities.
[Romero] It was validating the PC
as an actual game-playing machine.
And I was like,
"This technology is big, it's huge.
We need to start a company
and make our own game."
[narrator] Romero saw that the PC
could compete with
the gaming consoles of the time.
But even in the world of Nintendo,
there was still a limit to how deep
a player could go.
Up to that point,
Nintendo titles played out
in two dimensions.
Run left, run right, jump up, jump down.
So far, they hadn't figured out
how to place the player inside the game
from the first-person perspective
with 3D polygonal graphics.
Meanwhile, over in the UK,
a brash high school dropout
named Dylan Cuthbert
was spinning his wheels on the idea.
[Cuthbert] I left school when I was 17.
I applied for a job
at a company called Argonaut Software.
At the time, it was
a very leading-edge 3D games company.
[narrator] Argonaut was trying
to make a name for themselves
among the gaming giants,
and they were counting on 3D
to make it happen.
[Cuthbert] Immediately I was thrown into
making a game for Game Boy,
a 3D game, sort of fly everywhere,
shooting kind of game.
[narrator] Making a 3D game
for the Game Boy was unheard of,
but that wasn't
the only problem facing the team.
Nintendo fiercely guarded
their trade secrets.
So if you wanted to legally develop games
on any of Nintendo's systems,
you needed a permission slip,
which Argonaut didn't have.
But they went forward
with the project anyway,
just to see if it could be done.
[Cuthbert] And we had
no official dev kits, no official license,
nothing at all. We just had a Game Boy.
We just kind of ripped everything apart
and just attached wires,
and basically hacked in the connections
on the chip to come out
so we could actually give it
different data.
[narrator] Dylan figured out how to code
a wireframe-based space demo
that ran in 3D.
That's how we knocked up the initial
3D sort of demo on the Game Boy,
um, very unofficially.
So we kind of got away with it.
[narrator] Or so they thought.
[ominous music playing]
Six months into that project,
it got seen by someone from Nintendo.
[narrator]
Hacking Nintendo could mean trouble,
pretty deep legal trouble.
But, more than anything,
Nintendo seemed curious.
[Cuthbert] Suddenly my boss says,
"The people who made the Game Boy
don't believe that...
that 3D can run on the Game Boy.
So, in two weeks you're flying to Japan."
I think I was 18.
I didn't have a passport,
so I had to go and quickly get a passport.
And, really, without thinking about it,
I just got on the plane with my boss.
The next morning, we went to Nintendo
and we're sitting there
in this big white room.
And suddenly about 30 Nintendo staff
just come in from the other side.
And they're all wearing Nintendo jackets.
And we're kind of there like this
with our t-shirts and jeans.
And they all sit down,
basically a whole bunch of,
like, luminaries...
[chuckles]
...on the other side of the table.
And there's me,
an 18-year-old kid, basically,
showing them
what I'd done on the Game Boy.
And they said, "Oh, this is amazing.
Okay, we're going to sign this game up."
[narrator] So, instead of a lawsuit,
Argonaut got a contract
to officially make their game.
But that wasn't all.
Nintendo star designer Shigeru Miyamoto
had another secret project up his sleeve:
their next generation gaming console.
[Cuthbert] Miyamoto brought over this,
like, pre-release Super Nintendo.
And, like, with no--
I mean, I hadn't signed an NDA.
There's no security or anything.
And he said, "Well,
this is where we're trying to do 3D.
Is this something
that Argonaut could help us with?"
[narrator] It was too late to change the
hardware for the Super Nintendo console,
so Dylan fell back on what he knew best,
hacking,
and proposed putting a chip
that could handle 3D
inside the cartridges.
Miyamoto's eyes kind of lit up,
and that kind of began
the super effects chip.
[narrator] The super effects chip
allowed Miyamoto
to envision a whole new perspective.
He had already mastered 2D games
like Mario and Zelda.
Now, he'd pair up with Dylan
to create a 3D experience,
bringing players inside
the world of the game.
But, back in the US,
Romero and team were already
full steam ahead on 3D.
They say that all work and no play
makes Johnny a dull boy…
[narrator] Cracking the Nintendo code
on the PC was just the beginning
for Romero and his team.
We're already way past that.
[narrator]
It empowered them to quit their jobs
and form their own company, Id Software.
And by 1992,
they had taken their newfound
smooth-moving side-scrolling tech
and turned it inside out...
[newscaster] It's three-dimensional.
It's texture mapped.
It's Wolfenstein,
one of the hottest-selling computer games
in the world.
[narrator] ...creating a hit game
and popularizing a new perspective:
the first-person shooter.
We just decided that we wanted
to make something more serious
in 3D, and not do
the side-scrolling stuff anymore.
So Wolfenstein 3D came out
on May 5th of 1992,
to instant massive success.
People loved blowing away Nazis
as you're trying to shoot your way
out of the castle.
It was a 3D game
going at 70 frames a second,
in full color with real digital sound
for the first time.
CPUs were just fast enough
to make Wolfenstein run fast.
And so,
we were just on the edge of technology.
[narrator] In just a few short years,
Romero and his team
built a successful company
and transformed the personal computer
into an immersive
and action-packed gaming platform.
These were the building blocks
for their ultimate masterpiece.
Basically, with every game that we made,
we were just trying to
do something new and different
and better with each game.
And that's it. That's all we cared about.
So we were starting to think about
what our next game would be,
and we wanted to improve the technology
and make the game even more
immersive and more exciting.
So the bullet-point list
that we came up with
that was going to go in the game
was just, like, super ambitious.
We wanted diminished lighting...
[narrator] For creepiness.
-[Romero] ...high speed...
-[narrator] For realistic movement.
[Romero] ...most importantly,
multi-player functionality.
[narrator]
For playing with all your friends.
We need to have the ultimate ultimate,
which is let people play each other
on a network or over the modem.
-[dial-up tone]
-[narrator] Hold on for a second.
Hear that?
If you're Romero's target demographic
in the '90s,
that's the sweet sound of a computer
connecting to the internet.
Back then, you'd hook your computer
to the telephone landline,
dial up your modem...
[keypad tones beeping]
...and wait...
[dial-up tone]
and wait...
and wait.
[computer voice] Welcome.
[narrator]
And if someone had to make a call,
you were booted.
-[computer voice] Goodbye.
-[boy] Mom, get off the phone!
[narrator] It was all new,
and people were still figuring it out.
Once you've learned how
to get online yourselves,
you'll start seeing web pages everywhere.
Can we do something fun?
Maybe play a game?
Let's go to the Yahooligans home page
and find a game!
[Romero] There were games
that were multiplayer on modems
but they weren't games that were
high-speed that were networked.
[narrator] At the time,
computers could connect online
and mostly just play slow,
simple games like...
War,
Golf,
strategy games that played out in turns.
[Romero] That was the limitation.
And I was thinking about
how cool it would be
to finally play an action game
with somebody that's on
a completely different computer,
running around
and shooting each other online.
Carmack got to work on figuring out
simultaneous remote gameplay.
And Tom Cruise came up with
their game title.
[Romero] There's a movie called
The Color of Money.
And Tom Cruise is in a pool hall
and he's about to play against some guy
and he brought his own cue stick.
So, the guy comes up and he's like...
What you got in there?
[Romero] And Tom Cruise looks down,
he goes...
Doom.
[laughs] And it was like,
wow, what a great name.
Come on, boy. Let's play.
Yeah, let's play.
[narrator] And with absolutely nothing
programmed yet,
Romero got to work on the press release.
[Romero] We put a press release out
just saying how awesome
this game is gonna be,
which is crazy, because nobody does that.
You put a press release out
when you release something.
So it was nuts to even say that
before you create it.
We didn't care.
That's what we were like then.
Even worse, the press release said
this game will be the loss of productivity
around the world when it comes out.
[narrator] With that, the team at Id
inadvertently gave themselves
a hard deadline and a lot of hype.
And then we had to work like hell
that year to make it.
[narrator] Romero was confident
their idea would have mass appeal.
But for Dylan in Japan,
Nintendo's attempt to get into 3D
was all under seal.
Behind closed doors,
he was preparing to show
that the super effects chip
was up to the task.
[Cuthbert] We showed them a demo,
where you kind of fly around in all 3D.
It had, like, sort of missile trails.
It was actually quite a nice little demo.
[narrator] But not everybody thought so.
[Cuthbert] Miyamoto couldn't really get
his head around the fly everywhere thing.
He didn't like the fact that the player
has to really think about
not just here, but like all around.
So Miyamoto said,
"Go back for Christmas,
you know, everybody,
and then come back in the New Year,
and we'll carry on development,
and I'll see what I can think up
to kind of help this."
So we got back from our Christmas break
and Miyamoto came to us and he said,
"I had a great idea over the New Year."
Every year, the Japanese go
for a sort of pilgrimage to shrines.
They call it Hatsumode.
Miyamoto went to the Fushimi Inari shrine
very near where Nintendo was at that time.
And it has these thousands
of vermilion-colored gates
Miyamoto said, "I was moving through
the gates and I thought,
wouldn't it be great if we just
were flying through these gates,
enjoying that thrill
of going through things
rather than just shooting things
all the time."
And so we went, "Oh, okay, that is
actually a pretty interesting concept."
[narrator] Miyamoto had discovered
a fix for his problem.
By allowing the gamer
to fly through gates,
he could control the action.
so the player would not have
to worry about what was behind them.
It was the foundation of what would become
an iconic Nintendo game.
[Cuthbert] Something interesting is
the Fushimi Inari shrine itself
the word inari means "fox."
And so that's basically where
Star Fox was born.
It all really originated
from that walk that he had.
[narrator] But it would take
more than a walk at the shrine
for these groundbreaking visuals
to take off.
So Dylan called in his wingman,
Giles Goddard.
I'm Giles Goddard.
I was a programmer on Star Fox.
Giles is one of the first people I met
when I joined Argonaut Software.
His personality is very... dry.
Dylan is extremely driven.
-Very droll.
-Stubborn.
Very... different.
Argued a lot.
[laughs]
[narrator] And this dynamic duo
was ready to take Kyoto by storm.
[Goddard] Twenty years ago,
Japan was a very different place.
There were very few foreign tourists,
very few foreigners at all.
It was scary, but it was fun
because we were 18,
and we'd just been on a first-class flight
from London,
all expenses paid.
So we just thought we were rock stars.
[narrator]
Two blokes in Kyoto, all expenses paid.
What could go wrong?
Pretty cool.
Look at the sign, it's still broken.
[Cuthbert]
There was a bar called Backgammon.
Grungy and gritty and dirty,
you know, just a lot of fun.
Do you remember the days when, if you saw
a foreigner come at you, you'd wave?
[Cuthbert] About 25 years ago?
We had little white dictionaries
that we'd always had in our back pockets.
[Cuthbert] We'd take them
with us around bars
and use those to try and talk to people.
-And also with plenty of drinking...
-Cheers!
-Chin-chin.
-Bottoms up.
...our Japanese gets
smoother and smoother.
[speaking Japanese]
At least, we think it does.
[narrator] And when Dylan and Giles
did squeeze in work,
they found
they were truly outsiders in the office.
[Goddard] They'd never had anybody
outside of Nintendo
working in the building.
They actually made
a separate office for us,
in one room, on our own,
basically segregated out.
[Cuthbert]
And the only place in the office
where they allowed Miyamoto to smoke
was in the area where we were. [laughs]
He'd light up behind us
and he's, like, smoking away.
And we're, like, programming away,
and we're like, "Oh, he's back again.
Oh, no." [laughs]
So we'd be trying to implement
something quite interesting,
and then, he just starts talking
about trees or something.
Just something completely out there.
But we realized after a while
that that's actually the reason why
he's so much a creative genius
is because his brain
is kind of thinking about
all these different things
at the same time.
[narrator] And one of the tasks with
Star Fox that Miyamoto was so focused on
was the perspective of the camera.
In a 2D game, the camera moves are simple.
The screen syncs its movement
with the character.
Left, right, and so on.
But things get a little more complicated
in 3D.
[Goddard]
That was the biggest feature of 3D,
the ability to move the camera.
And it was Miyamoto's main job
to figure out the camera.
If the camera’s right behind the Arwing,
it would feel like you weren't turning,
but if it was fixed it would feel like
it's going all over the place.
You've got to have a lag between
the camera and the ship movement,
otherwise
it feels like you're not turning.
But you can't do too much of that.
Otherwise the player feels like
things are moving too much,
and they feel disorientated.
It's a balance game
between looking cool and playability.
[narrator]
So programming on Star Fox was happening.
Ships were flying.
Lasers were lasering.
It was all coming together.
And then the art department got involved.
[Cuthbert] For a long time on the project,
it really was just like an old school
Star Wars-style, kind of,
a little bit more hardcore.
No... people.
But Nintendo was known for its cute,
family-friendly characters
and that sacred shrine
that Miyamoto loved so much
was dedicated to… a fox.
[Cuthbert] Suddenly the artists
at Nintendo started coming up with
all these cute little character designs,
fluffy sort of animals
and things like that.
To be honest,
I thought they were quite lame.
[laughs]
[Cuthbert] It felt a bit odd
because they're animals,
and we're like,
"Why are animals flying spacecraft?
I don't know what's going on here."
But one thing that
Miyamoto really instilled in us all
is that we take a step back,
kind of look at it and go,
"Okay, no,
this needs to be made more fun."
He approaches things from,
not just the player point of view,
but also from how
he can design the experience.
And I think that was a pretty good lesson
for all of us.
It did slowly grow on us.
And we didn't realize how much
everything came together at the end,
and it just became this,
like, really full-on experience.
[narrator] The camera movement,
the cute animals, the gates.
Combined, they created
the trademark Nintendo experience,
but in 3D.
Fox McCloud could chat with his sidekicks
Peppy Hare, Falco Lombardi,
and Slippy Toad
to present mission objectives
and to make the game more engaging.
[Cuthbert] One of the unique things
about Star Fox
was that it was on a console
because, up until that point,
there hadn't really been
any 3D games on consoles.
[announcer] The first and only game
powered by the Super FX microchip.
[narrator] The combination of Dylan
and Giles' coding wizardry
and Nintendo's design magic worked.
The game would go onto sell
over four million copies
and blast Nintendo into the 3D realm.
[announcer] Only for the Super Nintendo
Entertainment System.
[narrator] But pretty soon,
3D wouldn't be enough.
Back in the US,
another group of young rule breakers
would take the first-person perspective
and push it even further.
[Romero] After putting out
the press release,
we knew that Doom was
gonna be a pretty big game
because we had people calling the office
to ask when is the game going to come out?
[man 1] Yo, where's Doom?
-[woman] Is Doom out?
-[man 2] What's Doom all about?
And so, like, people were so excited,
like, it was crazy.
[narrator]
Romero's press release promised gamers
they'd be "knee-deep in the dead"
before the end of the year.
Now, all they had to do was...
make the game.
The team that made Doom was pretty small.
It was just five people,
so it was a lot of work.
Like, what is Doom?
And the first major idea was that
we would be fighting
a demon invasion, uh, somewhere.
These are some sketches
of what levels could possibly look like.
How 'bout we have walls
with blood dripping down them,
or maybe there's some
organic walls in hell, you know,
maybe that's what
the engine could render.
This here...
this is one of my favorite pages.
It has some original ideas for demons.
Highly original ideas.
Some of them are pretty funny.
It's like, what's going on... here?
[laughs]
You know, if they actually
looked this way in Doom, uh...
history would've been
a little bit different. [laughs]
We eventually decided that
you'd be space marine in the future
on a military base
and this is like a research thing
gone bad,
and here come the demons.
[narrator] But the story was
just a backdrop for cyberdemons,
exploding chunks of flesh
and the insane weapons.
We wanted to have conventional weapons
that the players could totally get into.
Like shotguns, chainsaws.
Why wouldn't you want to chainsaw a demon?
And just like a fist,
just punching demons in the face,
but then we could add a couple
of spacey-type weapons
to kind of spice it up.
So that's where we came up with
the plasma gun,
and we really liked the idea of
shooting rockets at demons.
That was just nuts.
[narrator] And then there was the BFG.
The B is for big, the G is for gun.
You can fill in the rest.
And then the BFG was the ultimate weapon.
If you can get a hold of that
and enough cells to power it,
you can destroy everything.
[narrator] In the fall of '93,
Romero and the team
were approaching their launch.
And Carmack finally figured out
how to let players battle each other
over the network
in multiplayer mode.
When Carmack got the game working
between two computers,
where he's shooting one computer
and the other guys getting hit,
it was like, "Oh, there it is!
It's happening!"
[narrator] That’s right. Strategy in Doom
would completely change
in multi-player mode.
Instead of battling demons,
you could battle your friends.
When there's another player in the game,
it's totally different
than playing monsters.
People play so differently than the AI.
They're luring you.
They're hiding.
And that is a real challenge,
you know, playing somebody else.
After seeing the characters
shooting each other,
I was thinking, "What would we call this?"
It's like a cage match kind of thing.
Except you're killing
the other person over and over.
It's like a death match.
"Deathmatch is great.
That sounds cool.
I think I'll name it that."
[narrator]
Romero knew the game was going to be cool.
But he still wanted to make sure
everyone got hooked.
So he and his team decided
to give players a free sample.
Shareware in games was to take a game
and split it into three parts,
and the first one is fully free,
as a downloadable file,
but if you wanted more,
then you would order the other
two parts of the game on diskettes.
It was a pretty revolutionary
marketing idea at the time,
and it worked really well.
We knew that at the end of the day that
we would be able to make money because,
number one, we believed
it was the best game in the world
and because it was so good,
we believed people
would want to buy the rest of it.
You know, that they would want
to get all three episodes
because playing those first nine levels
is gonna get old at some point.
You're going to want
the rest of the story.
So finally, when the game
was about to be released,
the server was packed full of people
who can't wait to download the game.
And I'm like, "Oh, my God, yes!"
[narrator] That's how kids
in computer labs around the country
found themselves at midnight
on December 10th, 1993,
ready to download
the first chapter of Doom.
Everyone was initiating
the file transfer at the same time.
So the server just crashed.
And then they brought the server back up,
all those people reconnected.
They did it again
and the whole thing crashed.
But then,
people started to copy it
onto other servers all around the world,
sharing with each other,
and then everybody started playing.
[narrator] Online multiplayer games
would become a pretty big deal.
Deathmatch and online game play
changed everything.
-[man] Oh, what?
-[man 2] Ah!
[narrator] Players could connect
over a network and interact,
-Look at the death.
-...immersing themselves in a new world...
-[man] Boom!
-...but with each other.
[Romero] For the first time,
you can play in a high-speed 3D world
where you're blowing your friends apart.
-God damn it!
-[laughs]
It's really fun to play
against each other in Deathmatch,
and it influenced everybody
in wanting to make games.
[narrator] And then the guys at Id
handed players the keys to their kingdom.
We fully opened the game.
Then we gave out the information
on the way that levels were created.
[narrator] Doom was opened up to modding.
Tech-savvy players could now replace
the existing characters,
sound effects, textures, you name it,
with their own creations.
[Romero] People starting to make
new graphics, new weapons
and new sounds for stuff.
And it was basically everything
that you see in the game can be changed.
But we didn't allow anyone to modify Doom
if they didn't buy it.
[laughs]
So if you have
the shareware version of Doom
you can't run levels or mods or anything.
So that was actually
kind of a way of forcing people to buy it.
But also, players want to be creative.
It's a lot easier to modify
than to try and make a whole new thing.
So, letting people mod a game
kind of gives them a taste
of what it's like to make a game.
And now the game,
you know, fits them better.
Doom was put in the hands of players,
and they made it their own.
The game lives on forever.
[man 1] Oh, what?
[man 2] Oh, no!
[narrator] In a way, Romero's story
is the story
of the entire video game industry.
Each new game was built upon
the foundation crafted by the game before.
And because of that, it can be hard
to remember the humble beginnings
of what would become this billion-dollar
entertainment juggernaut.
But there's one man who remembers.
-[laughing]
-This man,
the so-called godfather of video games,
Nolan Bushnell.
In my mind, there is a huge payoff
for being...
indisputably number one
in whatever you do.
It was 1964 when Bushnell stumbled upon
an idea that would spark a new industry.
I was in college,
and one of my fraternity brothers
said, "Hey.
Meet me at the engineering building
at midnight
and I'm going to blow your socks off."
I said, "Huh?" You know.
Always willing to have my socks blown off,
I showed up.
And he had jammed the lock
on the computer center,
and we went in
and, for the rest of that evening,
played Spacewar!.
And I was mesmerized.
[narrator] Spacewar! was unlike
anything Bushnell had seen before.
It had been invented two years earlier
by a bunch of kids at MIT
who were part
of the tech model railroad club.
They were the original hackers.
In fact, they coined the term.
And, just for fun,
ended up transforming a computer
into an entirely new contraption:
the video game.
[Bushnell] You'd fly around
and you could shoot a missile.
And you could push a button and thrust.
In order to slow down,
you had to reverse thrust
in the opposite direction,
totally followed Newton's first law.
And it was really fun.
[narrator] Spacewar! was
an underground hit on any college campus
with a computer that could run it.
And I knew that if I could put a coin slot
on that screen that it would make money.
[narrator] Bushnell saw that video games
were for more than just computer nerds.
They were for everyone.
And so he founded a company
called Atari. And...
We were off to the races.
He was the first in a long line
of visionaries.
Visionaries who changed the way we play...
[Amano in Japanese]
We wanted to create an entirely new world.
There's really no end
once you get started.
[narrator in English]
...who dared to fail greatly...
[Warshaw]
I did my best. I tried to do what I could.
I needed a mountain to climb,
and I felt like I climbed the mountain.
...who fought for their place to exist...
Anyone of color
often has to justify themselves.
Video games remove
all those physical differences.
...who were compelled by imagination...
I was so driven to do this,
and I kept thinking, "Why?"
...and wouldn't take no for an answer.
[laughs]
What we did back then
was ahead of its time,
but the time is now.
[Mario] Here we go!
[narrator] It was a monumental era,
one that defined video games
as a place to get lost,
a place to become someone different,
and go to faraway lands.
But, most importantly,
it defined that any player
could be a game creator.
So now that technology
can fully blur the line
between fantasy and reality,
the question is... where will we go next?
December 9th, 1993.
In one minute,
a PC game will be uploaded to a newly
popular platform called the internet.
[man] There were
hundreds of people on the server
and they were dying to get this game.
[computer bleeps]
[narrator] The game was Doom.
[man] Everyone was initiating
the file transfer at the same time,
so the server just crashed.
It was the game that everybody
had been waiting for, evidently.
[man] It's a dark and scary
broken military base
that's been invaded by demons from hell.
There's a dark environment,
a light is strobing,
demons are coming at you,
and you just see silhouettes and fireballs
coming toward you.
[explosions]
We wanted to scare the crap out of you.
And nobody had ever seen
anything like it before.
[narrator] This is John Romero...
game designer turned legend...
[chainsaw buzzes]
...for freaking out
a generation of gamers.
[Romero] We wanted to make
something dark and scary
and so we released one of the most violent
video games that's ever been made.
[narrator] He had opened the door
to a new era of gaming...
-[groaning]
-[gunshots]
...where players could enter,
explore,
and play against each other.
And it came at a pivotal moment
when both computers and consoles
were about to enter a new dimension.
Romero's machine of choice...
was the PC.
It started in 1989
when Romero began making games
for a subscription service
called Gamer's Edge.
[Romero] Every month you would get a disc
for whatever computer
that you were subscribing for
and on that disc would be
a bunch of random stuff.
Whether you like it or not,
you're getting it,
and hopefully there'll be a game
or something fun on it.
Twenty-two-year-old Romero paired up
with another young hotshot programmer
named John Carmack to make games that were
actually worth it for the subscriber.
I asked him,
"What is it that you want to do
on this game, since we're going to make it
together? What are you interested in?"
He said, "I'm interested in graphics
and, like, the architecture of the games."
And I said, "Okay,
I'll do the game designs and the levels
and programming
and stuff that you don't like."
[narrator] Romero had a partner in crime.
Now they needed the perfect lair
for their team to code in.
Gamer's Edge was at
a fluorescent light company,
which to me is non-creative light.
I prefer darkness.
[heavy metal music playing]
But I got a room at the office
and we made our environment
that we wanted to work in.
It was a dark cave.
We had a window
that we could let some sunlight in,
but we hated that too.
We had a Nintendo in the corner
that was just playing Life Force, Zelda,
Mario 3 on loop.
We had our own giant refrigerator in there
packed full of drinks.
And I had a kick-ass '80s boombox
and each person got a whole day to play
anything that they wanted.
It was mostly metal.
[heavy metal music playing]
We spent tons of time there.
It was funny, because...
we were starting to code
on our spare time after the normal hours.
I mean, this is what we want to do.
Nobody's telling us not to do it.
This is great.
[narrator] Out of that metal-induced mania
came the foundation
for something truly groundbreaking:
smooth side-scrolling on the PC.
[Romero] On the Nintendo,
side-scrolling was extremely smooth
and the PC really couldn't do that
because, at the time, the PC graphics
just weren't that advanced.
There were some side-scrolling games
that were like Mario clones
that moved the screen in chunks,
but the chunking doesn't feel real.
It takes you out of it.
That's as good as it got back then.
If we can figure out how
we can get it smooth horizontally,
that's huge.
If we can make a Mario-type thing,
like... that's unbelievable.
So this one night,
Carmack decided
that he was going to try to do it.
[narrator] That night, he'd take a trip...
[distorted voice]
...through the mushroom kingdom.
Nah, not that mushroom kingdom.
This one.
I came in the next day at ten o'clock.
They put a little demo on my desk
called Dangerous Dave
in Copyright Infringement.
Dangerous Dave is a game
that I had made the month before.
So I was like, "Hmm,
they must have been
doing something last night."
So I put it in the computer and ran it.
The screen starts up with
Super Mario Brothers 3
with Dangerous Dave on the screen.
And he runs across the screen
and the whole screen smoothly scrolls.
I could not believe that
this was on a PC.
I could not believe
that he got it working.
No one has done this.
This is the first time this has happened
on a PC.
[narrator] In a single night, Carmack
figured out something no one else had
and it opened up a whole new world
of possibilities.
[Romero] It was validating the PC
as an actual game-playing machine.
And I was like,
"This technology is big, it's huge.
We need to start a company
and make our own game."
[narrator] Romero saw that the PC
could compete with
the gaming consoles of the time.
But even in the world of Nintendo,
there was still a limit to how deep
a player could go.
Up to that point,
Nintendo titles played out
in two dimensions.
Run left, run right, jump up, jump down.
So far, they hadn't figured out
how to place the player inside the game
from the first-person perspective
with 3D polygonal graphics.
Meanwhile, over in the UK,
a brash high school dropout
named Dylan Cuthbert
was spinning his wheels on the idea.
[Cuthbert] I left school when I was 17.
I applied for a job
at a company called Argonaut Software.
At the time, it was
a very leading-edge 3D games company.
[narrator] Argonaut was trying
to make a name for themselves
among the gaming giants,
and they were counting on 3D
to make it happen.
[Cuthbert] Immediately I was thrown into
making a game for Game Boy,
a 3D game, sort of fly everywhere,
shooting kind of game.
[narrator] Making a 3D game
for the Game Boy was unheard of,
but that wasn't
the only problem facing the team.
Nintendo fiercely guarded
their trade secrets.
So if you wanted to legally develop games
on any of Nintendo's systems,
you needed a permission slip,
which Argonaut didn't have.
But they went forward
with the project anyway,
just to see if it could be done.
[Cuthbert] And we had
no official dev kits, no official license,
nothing at all. We just had a Game Boy.
We just kind of ripped everything apart
and just attached wires,
and basically hacked in the connections
on the chip to come out
so we could actually give it
different data.
[narrator] Dylan figured out how to code
a wireframe-based space demo
that ran in 3D.
That's how we knocked up the initial
3D sort of demo on the Game Boy,
um, very unofficially.
So we kind of got away with it.
[narrator] Or so they thought.
[ominous music playing]
Six months into that project,
it got seen by someone from Nintendo.
[narrator]
Hacking Nintendo could mean trouble,
pretty deep legal trouble.
But, more than anything,
Nintendo seemed curious.
[Cuthbert] Suddenly my boss says,
"The people who made the Game Boy
don't believe that...
that 3D can run on the Game Boy.
So, in two weeks you're flying to Japan."
I think I was 18.
I didn't have a passport,
so I had to go and quickly get a passport.
And, really, without thinking about it,
I just got on the plane with my boss.
The next morning, we went to Nintendo
and we're sitting there
in this big white room.
And suddenly about 30 Nintendo staff
just come in from the other side.
And they're all wearing Nintendo jackets.
And we're kind of there like this
with our t-shirts and jeans.
And they all sit down,
basically a whole bunch of,
like, luminaries...
[chuckles]
...on the other side of the table.
And there's me,
an 18-year-old kid, basically,
showing them
what I'd done on the Game Boy.
And they said, "Oh, this is amazing.
Okay, we're going to sign this game up."
[narrator] So, instead of a lawsuit,
Argonaut got a contract
to officially make their game.
But that wasn't all.
Nintendo star designer Shigeru Miyamoto
had another secret project up his sleeve:
their next generation gaming console.
[Cuthbert] Miyamoto brought over this,
like, pre-release Super Nintendo.
And, like, with no--
I mean, I hadn't signed an NDA.
There's no security or anything.
And he said, "Well,
this is where we're trying to do 3D.
Is this something
that Argonaut could help us with?"
[narrator] It was too late to change the
hardware for the Super Nintendo console,
so Dylan fell back on what he knew best,
hacking,
and proposed putting a chip
that could handle 3D
inside the cartridges.
Miyamoto's eyes kind of lit up,
and that kind of began
the super effects chip.
[narrator] The super effects chip
allowed Miyamoto
to envision a whole new perspective.
He had already mastered 2D games
like Mario and Zelda.
Now, he'd pair up with Dylan
to create a 3D experience,
bringing players inside
the world of the game.
But, back in the US,
Romero and team were already
full steam ahead on 3D.
They say that all work and no play
makes Johnny a dull boy…
[narrator] Cracking the Nintendo code
on the PC was just the beginning
for Romero and his team.
We're already way past that.
[narrator]
It empowered them to quit their jobs
and form their own company, Id Software.
And by 1992,
they had taken their newfound
smooth-moving side-scrolling tech
and turned it inside out...
[newscaster] It's three-dimensional.
It's texture mapped.
It's Wolfenstein,
one of the hottest-selling computer games
in the world.
[narrator] ...creating a hit game
and popularizing a new perspective:
the first-person shooter.
We just decided that we wanted
to make something more serious
in 3D, and not do
the side-scrolling stuff anymore.
So Wolfenstein 3D came out
on May 5th of 1992,
to instant massive success.
People loved blowing away Nazis
as you're trying to shoot your way
out of the castle.
It was a 3D game
going at 70 frames a second,
in full color with real digital sound
for the first time.
CPUs were just fast enough
to make Wolfenstein run fast.
And so,
we were just on the edge of technology.
[narrator] In just a few short years,
Romero and his team
built a successful company
and transformed the personal computer
into an immersive
and action-packed gaming platform.
These were the building blocks
for their ultimate masterpiece.
Basically, with every game that we made,
we were just trying to
do something new and different
and better with each game.
And that's it. That's all we cared about.
So we were starting to think about
what our next game would be,
and we wanted to improve the technology
and make the game even more
immersive and more exciting.
So the bullet-point list
that we came up with
that was going to go in the game
was just, like, super ambitious.
We wanted diminished lighting...
[narrator] For creepiness.
-[Romero] ...high speed...
-[narrator] For realistic movement.
[Romero] ...most importantly,
multi-player functionality.
[narrator]
For playing with all your friends.
We need to have the ultimate ultimate,
which is let people play each other
on a network or over the modem.
-[dial-up tone]
-[narrator] Hold on for a second.
Hear that?
If you're Romero's target demographic
in the '90s,
that's the sweet sound of a computer
connecting to the internet.
Back then, you'd hook your computer
to the telephone landline,
dial up your modem...
[keypad tones beeping]
...and wait...
[dial-up tone]
and wait...
and wait.
[computer voice] Welcome.
[narrator]
And if someone had to make a call,
you were booted.
-[computer voice] Goodbye.
-[boy] Mom, get off the phone!
[narrator] It was all new,
and people were still figuring it out.
Once you've learned how
to get online yourselves,
you'll start seeing web pages everywhere.
Can we do something fun?
Maybe play a game?
Let's go to the Yahooligans home page
and find a game!
[Romero] There were games
that were multiplayer on modems
but they weren't games that were
high-speed that were networked.
[narrator] At the time,
computers could connect online
and mostly just play slow,
simple games like...
War,
Golf,
strategy games that played out in turns.
[Romero] That was the limitation.
And I was thinking about
how cool it would be
to finally play an action game
with somebody that's on
a completely different computer,
running around
and shooting each other online.
Carmack got to work on figuring out
simultaneous remote gameplay.
And Tom Cruise came up with
their game title.
[Romero] There's a movie called
The Color of Money.
And Tom Cruise is in a pool hall
and he's about to play against some guy
and he brought his own cue stick.
So, the guy comes up and he's like...
What you got in there?
[Romero] And Tom Cruise looks down,
he goes...
Doom.
[laughs] And it was like,
wow, what a great name.
Come on, boy. Let's play.
Yeah, let's play.
[narrator] And with absolutely nothing
programmed yet,
Romero got to work on the press release.
[Romero] We put a press release out
just saying how awesome
this game is gonna be,
which is crazy, because nobody does that.
You put a press release out
when you release something.
So it was nuts to even say that
before you create it.
We didn't care.
That's what we were like then.
Even worse, the press release said
this game will be the loss of productivity
around the world when it comes out.
[narrator] With that, the team at Id
inadvertently gave themselves
a hard deadline and a lot of hype.
And then we had to work like hell
that year to make it.
[narrator] Romero was confident
their idea would have mass appeal.
But for Dylan in Japan,
Nintendo's attempt to get into 3D
was all under seal.
Behind closed doors,
he was preparing to show
that the super effects chip
was up to the task.
[Cuthbert] We showed them a demo,
where you kind of fly around in all 3D.
It had, like, sort of missile trails.
It was actually quite a nice little demo.
[narrator] But not everybody thought so.
[Cuthbert] Miyamoto couldn't really get
his head around the fly everywhere thing.
He didn't like the fact that the player
has to really think about
not just here, but like all around.
So Miyamoto said,
"Go back for Christmas,
you know, everybody,
and then come back in the New Year,
and we'll carry on development,
and I'll see what I can think up
to kind of help this."
So we got back from our Christmas break
and Miyamoto came to us and he said,
"I had a great idea over the New Year."
Every year, the Japanese go
for a sort of pilgrimage to shrines.
They call it Hatsumode.
Miyamoto went to the Fushimi Inari shrine
very near where Nintendo was at that time.
And it has these thousands
of vermilion-colored gates
Miyamoto said, "I was moving through
the gates and I thought,
wouldn't it be great if we just
were flying through these gates,
enjoying that thrill
of going through things
rather than just shooting things
all the time."
And so we went, "Oh, okay, that is
actually a pretty interesting concept."
[narrator] Miyamoto had discovered
a fix for his problem.
By allowing the gamer
to fly through gates,
he could control the action.
so the player would not have
to worry about what was behind them.
It was the foundation of what would become
an iconic Nintendo game.
[Cuthbert] Something interesting is
the Fushimi Inari shrine itself
the word inari means "fox."
And so that's basically where
Star Fox was born.
It all really originated
from that walk that he had.
[narrator] But it would take
more than a walk at the shrine
for these groundbreaking visuals
to take off.
So Dylan called in his wingman,
Giles Goddard.
I'm Giles Goddard.
I was a programmer on Star Fox.
Giles is one of the first people I met
when I joined Argonaut Software.
His personality is very... dry.
Dylan is extremely driven.
-Very droll.
-Stubborn.
Very... different.
Argued a lot.
[laughs]
[narrator] And this dynamic duo
was ready to take Kyoto by storm.
[Goddard] Twenty years ago,
Japan was a very different place.
There were very few foreign tourists,
very few foreigners at all.
It was scary, but it was fun
because we were 18,
and we'd just been on a first-class flight
from London,
all expenses paid.
So we just thought we were rock stars.
[narrator]
Two blokes in Kyoto, all expenses paid.
What could go wrong?
Pretty cool.
Look at the sign, it's still broken.
[Cuthbert]
There was a bar called Backgammon.
Grungy and gritty and dirty,
you know, just a lot of fun.
Do you remember the days when, if you saw
a foreigner come at you, you'd wave?
[Cuthbert] About 25 years ago?
We had little white dictionaries
that we'd always had in our back pockets.
[Cuthbert] We'd take them
with us around bars
and use those to try and talk to people.
-And also with plenty of drinking...
-Cheers!
-Chin-chin.
-Bottoms up.
...our Japanese gets
smoother and smoother.
[speaking Japanese]
At least, we think it does.
[narrator] And when Dylan and Giles
did squeeze in work,
they found
they were truly outsiders in the office.
[Goddard] They'd never had anybody
outside of Nintendo
working in the building.
They actually made
a separate office for us,
in one room, on our own,
basically segregated out.
[Cuthbert]
And the only place in the office
where they allowed Miyamoto to smoke
was in the area where we were. [laughs]
He'd light up behind us
and he's, like, smoking away.
And we're, like, programming away,
and we're like, "Oh, he's back again.
Oh, no." [laughs]
So we'd be trying to implement
something quite interesting,
and then, he just starts talking
about trees or something.
Just something completely out there.
But we realized after a while
that that's actually the reason why
he's so much a creative genius
is because his brain
is kind of thinking about
all these different things
at the same time.
[narrator] And one of the tasks with
Star Fox that Miyamoto was so focused on
was the perspective of the camera.
In a 2D game, the camera moves are simple.
The screen syncs its movement
with the character.
Left, right, and so on.
But things get a little more complicated
in 3D.
[Goddard]
That was the biggest feature of 3D,
the ability to move the camera.
And it was Miyamoto's main job
to figure out the camera.
If the camera’s right behind the Arwing,
it would feel like you weren't turning,
but if it was fixed it would feel like
it's going all over the place.
You've got to have a lag between
the camera and the ship movement,
otherwise
it feels like you're not turning.
But you can't do too much of that.
Otherwise the player feels like
things are moving too much,
and they feel disorientated.
It's a balance game
between looking cool and playability.
[narrator]
So programming on Star Fox was happening.
Ships were flying.
Lasers were lasering.
It was all coming together.
And then the art department got involved.
[Cuthbert] For a long time on the project,
it really was just like an old school
Star Wars-style, kind of,
a little bit more hardcore.
No... people.
But Nintendo was known for its cute,
family-friendly characters
and that sacred shrine
that Miyamoto loved so much
was dedicated to… a fox.
[Cuthbert] Suddenly the artists
at Nintendo started coming up with
all these cute little character designs,
fluffy sort of animals
and things like that.
To be honest,
I thought they were quite lame.
[laughs]
[Cuthbert] It felt a bit odd
because they're animals,
and we're like,
"Why are animals flying spacecraft?
I don't know what's going on here."
But one thing that
Miyamoto really instilled in us all
is that we take a step back,
kind of look at it and go,
"Okay, no,
this needs to be made more fun."
He approaches things from,
not just the player point of view,
but also from how
he can design the experience.
And I think that was a pretty good lesson
for all of us.
It did slowly grow on us.
And we didn't realize how much
everything came together at the end,
and it just became this,
like, really full-on experience.
[narrator] The camera movement,
the cute animals, the gates.
Combined, they created
the trademark Nintendo experience,
but in 3D.
Fox McCloud could chat with his sidekicks
Peppy Hare, Falco Lombardi,
and Slippy Toad
to present mission objectives
and to make the game more engaging.
[Cuthbert] One of the unique things
about Star Fox
was that it was on a console
because, up until that point,
there hadn't really been
any 3D games on consoles.
[announcer] The first and only game
powered by the Super FX microchip.
[narrator] The combination of Dylan
and Giles' coding wizardry
and Nintendo's design magic worked.
The game would go onto sell
over four million copies
and blast Nintendo into the 3D realm.
[announcer] Only for the Super Nintendo
Entertainment System.
[narrator] But pretty soon,
3D wouldn't be enough.
Back in the US,
another group of young rule breakers
would take the first-person perspective
and push it even further.
[Romero] After putting out
the press release,
we knew that Doom was
gonna be a pretty big game
because we had people calling the office
to ask when is the game going to come out?
[man 1] Yo, where's Doom?
-[woman] Is Doom out?
-[man 2] What's Doom all about?
And so, like, people were so excited,
like, it was crazy.
[narrator]
Romero's press release promised gamers
they'd be "knee-deep in the dead"
before the end of the year.
Now, all they had to do was...
make the game.
The team that made Doom was pretty small.
It was just five people,
so it was a lot of work.
Like, what is Doom?
And the first major idea was that
we would be fighting
a demon invasion, uh, somewhere.
These are some sketches
of what levels could possibly look like.
How 'bout we have walls
with blood dripping down them,
or maybe there's some
organic walls in hell, you know,
maybe that's what
the engine could render.
This here...
this is one of my favorite pages.
It has some original ideas for demons.
Highly original ideas.
Some of them are pretty funny.
It's like, what's going on... here?
[laughs]
You know, if they actually
looked this way in Doom, uh...
history would've been
a little bit different. [laughs]
We eventually decided that
you'd be space marine in the future
on a military base
and this is like a research thing
gone bad,
and here come the demons.
[narrator] But the story was
just a backdrop for cyberdemons,
exploding chunks of flesh
and the insane weapons.
We wanted to have conventional weapons
that the players could totally get into.
Like shotguns, chainsaws.
Why wouldn't you want to chainsaw a demon?
And just like a fist,
just punching demons in the face,
but then we could add a couple
of spacey-type weapons
to kind of spice it up.
So that's where we came up with
the plasma gun,
and we really liked the idea of
shooting rockets at demons.
That was just nuts.
[narrator] And then there was the BFG.
The B is for big, the G is for gun.
You can fill in the rest.
And then the BFG was the ultimate weapon.
If you can get a hold of that
and enough cells to power it,
you can destroy everything.
[narrator] In the fall of '93,
Romero and the team
were approaching their launch.
And Carmack finally figured out
how to let players battle each other
over the network
in multiplayer mode.
When Carmack got the game working
between two computers,
where he's shooting one computer
and the other guys getting hit,
it was like, "Oh, there it is!
It's happening!"
[narrator] That’s right. Strategy in Doom
would completely change
in multi-player mode.
Instead of battling demons,
you could battle your friends.
When there's another player in the game,
it's totally different
than playing monsters.
People play so differently than the AI.
They're luring you.
They're hiding.
And that is a real challenge,
you know, playing somebody else.
After seeing the characters
shooting each other,
I was thinking, "What would we call this?"
It's like a cage match kind of thing.
Except you're killing
the other person over and over.
It's like a death match.
"Deathmatch is great.
That sounds cool.
I think I'll name it that."
[narrator]
Romero knew the game was going to be cool.
But he still wanted to make sure
everyone got hooked.
So he and his team decided
to give players a free sample.
Shareware in games was to take a game
and split it into three parts,
and the first one is fully free,
as a downloadable file,
but if you wanted more,
then you would order the other
two parts of the game on diskettes.
It was a pretty revolutionary
marketing idea at the time,
and it worked really well.
We knew that at the end of the day that
we would be able to make money because,
number one, we believed
it was the best game in the world
and because it was so good,
we believed people
would want to buy the rest of it.
You know, that they would want
to get all three episodes
because playing those first nine levels
is gonna get old at some point.
You're going to want
the rest of the story.
So finally, when the game
was about to be released,
the server was packed full of people
who can't wait to download the game.
And I'm like, "Oh, my God, yes!"
[narrator] That's how kids
in computer labs around the country
found themselves at midnight
on December 10th, 1993,
ready to download
the first chapter of Doom.
Everyone was initiating
the file transfer at the same time.
So the server just crashed.
And then they brought the server back up,
all those people reconnected.
They did it again
and the whole thing crashed.
But then,
people started to copy it
onto other servers all around the world,
sharing with each other,
and then everybody started playing.
[narrator] Online multiplayer games
would become a pretty big deal.
Deathmatch and online game play
changed everything.
-[man] Oh, what?
-[man 2] Ah!
[narrator] Players could connect
over a network and interact,
-Look at the death.
-...immersing themselves in a new world...
-[man] Boom!
-...but with each other.
[Romero] For the first time,
you can play in a high-speed 3D world
where you're blowing your friends apart.
-God damn it!
-[laughs]
It's really fun to play
against each other in Deathmatch,
and it influenced everybody
in wanting to make games.
[narrator] And then the guys at Id
handed players the keys to their kingdom.
We fully opened the game.
Then we gave out the information
on the way that levels were created.
[narrator] Doom was opened up to modding.
Tech-savvy players could now replace
the existing characters,
sound effects, textures, you name it,
with their own creations.
[Romero] People starting to make
new graphics, new weapons
and new sounds for stuff.
And it was basically everything
that you see in the game can be changed.
But we didn't allow anyone to modify Doom
if they didn't buy it.
[laughs]
So if you have
the shareware version of Doom
you can't run levels or mods or anything.
So that was actually
kind of a way of forcing people to buy it.
But also, players want to be creative.
It's a lot easier to modify
than to try and make a whole new thing.
So, letting people mod a game
kind of gives them a taste
of what it's like to make a game.
And now the game,
you know, fits them better.
Doom was put in the hands of players,
and they made it their own.
The game lives on forever.
[man 1] Oh, what?
[man 2] Oh, no!
[narrator] In a way, Romero's story
is the story
of the entire video game industry.
Each new game was built upon
the foundation crafted by the game before.
And because of that, it can be hard
to remember the humble beginnings
of what would become this billion-dollar
entertainment juggernaut.
But there's one man who remembers.
-[laughing]
-This man,
the so-called godfather of video games,
Nolan Bushnell.
In my mind, there is a huge payoff
for being...
indisputably number one
in whatever you do.
It was 1964 when Bushnell stumbled upon
an idea that would spark a new industry.
I was in college,
and one of my fraternity brothers
said, "Hey.
Meet me at the engineering building
at midnight
and I'm going to blow your socks off."
I said, "Huh?" You know.
Always willing to have my socks blown off,
I showed up.
And he had jammed the lock
on the computer center,
and we went in
and, for the rest of that evening,
played Spacewar!.
And I was mesmerized.
[narrator] Spacewar! was unlike
anything Bushnell had seen before.
It had been invented two years earlier
by a bunch of kids at MIT
who were part
of the tech model railroad club.
They were the original hackers.
In fact, they coined the term.
And, just for fun,
ended up transforming a computer
into an entirely new contraption:
the video game.
[Bushnell] You'd fly around
and you could shoot a missile.
And you could push a button and thrust.
In order to slow down,
you had to reverse thrust
in the opposite direction,
totally followed Newton's first law.
And it was really fun.
[narrator] Spacewar! was
an underground hit on any college campus
with a computer that could run it.
And I knew that if I could put a coin slot
on that screen that it would make money.
[narrator] Bushnell saw that video games
were for more than just computer nerds.
They were for everyone.
And so he founded a company
called Atari. And...
We were off to the races.
He was the first in a long line
of visionaries.
Visionaries who changed the way we play...
[Amano in Japanese]
We wanted to create an entirely new world.
There's really no end
once you get started.
[narrator in English]
...who dared to fail greatly...
[Warshaw]
I did my best. I tried to do what I could.
I needed a mountain to climb,
and I felt like I climbed the mountain.
...who fought for their place to exist...
Anyone of color
often has to justify themselves.
Video games remove
all those physical differences.
...who were compelled by imagination...
I was so driven to do this,
and I kept thinking, "Why?"
...and wouldn't take no for an answer.
[laughs]
What we did back then
was ahead of its time,
but the time is now.
[Mario] Here we go!
[narrator] It was a monumental era,
one that defined video games
as a place to get lost,
a place to become someone different,
and go to faraway lands.
But, most importantly,
it defined that any player
could be a game creator.
So now that technology
can fully blur the line
between fantasy and reality,
the question is... where will we go next?