Harold Goldberg - All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture

Copyright 2011 by Harold Goldberg

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goldberg, Harold.
All your base are belong to us: how 50 years of videogames conquered pop culture / Harold Goldberg1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Video gamesHistory. 2. Video GamesSocial aspects. I. Title.
GV1469.3.G65 2011 794.8dc22
2010036095

eISBN: 978-0-307-46356-2

Cover design by Kyle Kolker

v3.1

For the Rzepecki Family, who always had game

You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
If this predicament seems particularly cruel,
consider whose fault it could be:
not a torch or a match in your inventory.
Does it descend from there, adventure to nightmare?
Did I battle a snake? Was the treasure intact?
Or did the TRS-80 in my brain get hacked?
It Is Pitch Dark by MC Frontalot

Mechanic: Somebody set us up the bomb.
Operator: Main screen turn on.
CATS: All your base are belong to us.
CATS: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Dialogue from Zero Wing, the Toaplan/
Taito game for Arcade and Sega Mega Drive, 1989

When trouble looms, the fool turns his back,
while the wise man faces it down.
Kenji Kasen in Grand Theft Auto III, written by Dan Houser

We all make choices, but in the end our choices make us.
Andrew Ryan in BioShock, written by Ken Levine

I am Nightmare. I am Nightmare in the deepest darkness and I am Nightmare even when the brightest halogen burns. I am Nightmare when life is tough, and real people around me die. I am Nightmare when I am completely angry at life and need to lash out.

I, as Neil Gaiman says, am a dark and stormy Nightmare. I have the voice, frightening, growling, ready to attack, like Mercedes McCambridge as the demon Pazuzu in The Exorcist. I carry the sword, the long, heavy magical blade called SoulCalibur. Within my chest is a jagged maw. It is forever open to reveal a blood red beating heart engorged after devouring the countless souls whose bodies I chopped and cut with the burdensome SoulCalibur. Always, I wear a black iron mask for I am awesomely ugly and evil. So dont mess with me. You will not survive. Give me more souls. I need to snack.

In real life I am thin and bald, sometimes cute but never handsome. I have Crohns disease and am often half-sick. In my life, I would not punch you or cut you or even insult you (at least, to your face). I would be respectful, understanding, and nice, if somewhat cynical. Inside, I would despair and worry. But when I am Nightmare, I am nearly invulnerable. I feel alive and optimistic, full of life, healthy and strong.

I know one thing. Sick or not, sometimes I cant stop playing. Time ticks away, the half hour, the hour, the whole evening, and then, its three a.m.; Im in the zone, just as I am when writing. Normally, I like to savor a game rather than manically tsunami through it. But I remember spending hours just nosing around in BioShock, the scariest, best game of 2007. At the beginning of the first level, which evokes the first episode of TVs epic Lost, I was tossed from a crashing plane into the ebony ocean, where what seemed to be the skyscraper-tall fires of Hades burned all around me. Panic came over me, and then, a feeling that did not mimic real life, there was beauty in the danger. To gawk at the fireworks that played off the grim, foreboding water, I kept swimming even though the gasoline-induced flames kept shooting deep into the defenseless body that was the night sky. Dream. Reality. Beauty. Nightmare. Give me more.

Briefly as I play, I even feel immortal.

I am not the only one.

You probably have felt some visceral connection to videogames as well, no matter how old you are. In the dank confines of the arcade or the corner dive when the lights were low, you were the plumber who saved the dainty princess in Donkey Kong. As your fingers ached and your joints stiffened, you were the one who couldnt stop playing Tetris. You even had visions of blocks falling softly as snow as you slept. In front of a nineteen-inch TV, you went long and completed the Hail Mary in Madden football. As Master Chief you saved humanity from the gross aliens of the Covenant.

You know it is just a game, a videogame on a plastic disk that bears the computer bits and bytes, endless numbers that meet with a chip to turn you into Nightmare, or Mario or Sonic or Master Chief. But within that disk is magic as big and entertaining as any movie or TV show. And when that disk spins, it is a Sufi dervish who makes celestial pictures and sounds that are an extension of you and me. So forget this sordid keep-up-with-the-Joneses life, with its e-mail spam, inane tweets, bills, mortgages, and recessions. Down the rabbit hole we go to control it all as the hero, for in every videogame there is a hero. We admit it. We are junkies who must save the world. But were game.

Believe it or not, weve been gaming for more than fifty years. Man, how its grown, prospered, and evolved. The videogame industry in the United States is now a $20-billion-a-year juggernaut, surpassing movie, music, and DVD salescombined. Just one game, the Houser brothers Grand Theft Auto IV, earned $500 million in its opening week, far outpacing the movie industrys biggest force, James Camerons Avatar, which earned less than half that amount. Forty-two percent of Americans have videogame consoles. If you add computer games, 68 percent of us are gamers. And the average age of todays gamer is thirty-five. Almost half of online gamers are female, and they play games with competitive zeal and attitude. And videogame consoles are now the guardians of the living room beyond games. They play DVDs. They stream movies from Netflix. They connect to Facebook and Twitter. Thats entertainment.

And videogames have correspondingly become an unstoppable force in popular culture, one that constantly influences other forms of entertainment. From 30 Rock to South Park, videogames are the subject of crucial plot points and full episodes. Even more important, they have changed the way blockbuster action films and TV programs are shot. Cars that blow up in Transformers roll toward you, coming at you like theyre alive, like something out of Need for Speed or Burnout Paradise. Car commercials feature the characters and monsters in World of Warcraft. Beverage ads are informed by Grand Theft Auto. Sonic the Hedgehog and Pikachu are featured balloons in the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade, flying high and proud next to Spider-Man and Buzz Lightyear. Mark Ecko designed a full line of clothing devoted to Halo. And the phenomenon is worldwide. You can even buy a box of Pokmon-branded milk in Thailand.