Stay with me. Childhood of ingenious games

Stay with me. Childhood of ingenious games

Three years ago, the American writer Tom Bissel met at the DICE event with the editor -in -chief of Game Informer Nick Akhrenes. Peering into the crowd of people around them in jackets, worn over T -shirts with the World of Warcraft logo, the journalist in passing dropped in a conversation that the developers managed to turn his childhood into business. Gamemenia decided to find out where and how people who turned the industrial entertainment industry grew up, and whether their children's impressions helped in the development of modern games.

Descent

The famous game designer Sigeru Miyamoto was born on November 16, 1952 in the city of Sonobe, Prefecture Kyoto. A small place away from megacities. The family lived in a house from a cedar with thin paper partitions. It was worth going outside, a huge rice field of dazzling green color opened before my eyes. After harvesting, when the earth dried up, an impromptu park appeared there, in which Sigeru and friends played baseball.

Miyamoto's parents did not have a TV. But the family often went by train in Kyoto, went shopping and attended cinemas, where the future game designer first saw Snow White and Peter Pena. Of course, he did not ride the city every day, but more often invented other ways to take himself. At home, the boy read the novels of Isaek Azimov and Arthur Conan Doyle. In the attic, he arranged a small club for local children, where the guys came up with secret codes and passwords (their favorite occupation of many games developers), but the greatest pleasure in Siger was a study of nearby territories.

A huge house where the protagonist GEARS of WAR has grown, lies in ruins, but in his memories he is still intact.

Nature occupied a special place in Miyamoto's life. He loved to walk through meadows, examine fields, steep hills and ornate streams. During his travels, the boy made sketches. From an early age, the artist showed amazing attention to details. Super Mario Bros. , The Legend of Zelda And even a series Mother (to which Miyamoto is related only as a producer) are saturated with childhood impressions. There are a lot of greenery, transparent water and sun in games. But there were other, darker discoveries in the life of a sigra.

Once he found a failure in the ground next to the hill. Several times the boy returned to this place, but did not dare to go down. During thorough studies, it turned out that this hole was entering the cave. Armed with a homemade lamp, the creator Donkey Kong went inside and found the entrance to another, even larger cave. Siger returned there several times, moving further and further. He was proud that he had enough courage to go down. Until now, the gamed -designer recalls Fruity Chance Casino those moments when he was overwhelmed with a sense of extreme excitement, and this is clearly visible in games Nintendo. In every large series from Miyamoto there are definitely large caves filled with secrets and dangers.

Subsequently, the passion for research gave way to comics and drawing. The future developer created dozens of different characters. This hobby in the end helped Miyamoto to get to work in Nintendo, having melted at the interview the stone heart of director Hiroshi Yamauchi.

Children's hobbies

Three favorite games of the Scriptwriter Ghost Recon: Future Soldier

Writer and developer Richard Danski from Red Storm Entertainment ( Ubisoft Red Storm ) In high school, I drew a game about the conquest of the Europeans of the New World. Despite the many historical inaccuracies, the balance was observed. Today Richard is one of the main scriptwriters of the games released under the brand of Tom Clansy. All militants from Rainbow Six 3 to Splinter Cell: Conviction , And also Far Cry And Blazing Angels were created with his participation. Oddly enough, in his childhood and youth there were three big games, but not one of them was connected with the computer.

“Parents bought us a bunch of various desktop entertainment. There were classic projects and all sorts of rarities – Monopoly, Risk, 1776, Skirmish!, Dogfight. I cut into them like crazy, but most of all I remember three projects: Pente, Family Business and Villains and Vigilantes.

I learned about the existence of Pente from Games magazine and just fell in love with it. I took her with me to the summer camp, played with friends, tried options with six players. It was deep enough and simple at the same time.

Villains and Vigilantes – beloved RPG of my school company. Perhaps the popularity of this project determined that it was necessary to come up with a secret personality (it seems like Bruce Wayne invented Batman). This is cool! We cut into the game every week.

In Family Business, I still compete with conferences with colleagues. I remember how in college we played it all night long before my friend's wedding! Twenty years have passed, but many of my friends can easily tell about their style of behavior on the battlefield. I had much more time with Family Business than with video games. ".

Become a crankcase

In the distant seventies, when Miyamoto was already studying at the Kanazava art college, at the other end of the world, in London, the outstanding jazz musician Dizzy Gillespi met his close friend's son. The powerful trumpeter leaned toward the boy and asked him who he wants to become when he grows up, and he replied: “I will be a robber of banks”. This guy was called Sam Hauser.

It seemed that the love of crime was in his genes, although his parents had no direct attitude to crime. But … it's how to see.

Sam's mother, beauty Geraldin Moffat, in 1971 starred in the film “Get Carter” with young Michael Kane. A cruel criminal film received bad criticism for violence and an incredible amount. Sam's father, Walter Hauser, was a talented musician and owner of the most fashionable jazz club in England – Ronnie Scott’s in Soho. The businessman could not resist the charm of the film actress, shortly after the premiere of Carter, their firstborn was born. When your mother is a star of gangster films, and dad on a short leg with the coolest musicians in the world, the career choice is not so and great.

Sam met video games in the eighties. Parents took him with his younger brother Dan to Brighton south of London so that the guys could take a walk, breathe sea air and drive gulls. Instead, Sam spent time after a brightly painted arcade automatic. One of the favorite games of the future founder Rockstar Games It was surrealist Mr. Do! – The terrible clown dug underground tunnels and collected cherries (it was a clear clone Dig Dug production Namco ).

Parents bought all the prefixes existing in the world. At that time, the games were not yet considered universal evil and the boy could enjoy all the delights Omega , Atari And Spectrum ZX. At first, his brother was not fond of interactive entertainment, but Sam forced him to take the joystick in his hands. If he refused, war began in the house. Once in revenge for unwillingness to cooperate, Sam sent his brother to the hospital, feeding him with poisoned berries. Dan soon grew his relative and one fine morning jumped on the offender from the balcony, breaking his hand.

The passion for video games did not leave Sam and later when he discovered for himself Elite – The famous space trading simulator from Acornsoft And David Braben. The boy was drawn into this fantastic world, where he chose the role of a cosmic thief.

The Legend of Zelda remains one of the most popular games among all Western gaming publishers.

Another important impression in the life of young Sam was a private school ST. Paul located on the shores of the Thames. In the institution founded in the sixteenth century, outstanding people studied-poet John Milton, artist Ernest Shepard, who came up with original illustrations for Vini Pooh, and many others. Here Sam and his brother received the most important knowledge for representatives of the English elite, played cricket, and got acquainted with Russian history. However, like the hero Bully , Sam did not particularly fall in love with strict requirements and school uniforms. He was brought home on Rolls-Royce, but he walked in sneakers, wore long hair and listened to a deafening hip-hop recorded at the Def Jam Records New York Studio.

It was the love of music that later played the most important role in Sam's life, reflected both on the name of his company and on the quality of the soundtrack of future games. At the eighteenth birthday, the father first took the teenager to New York. It was love at first sight. But that birthday was remembered by Sam another meeting. Walter Hauser introduced his son to one of the top managers of the recording company BMG – Hinnets Henn. He complained that the company was not able to break through to the youth audience, to which Sam with his characteristic straightforwardness asked: “And why everything is in the musical business of the old people? Why not hire someone younger?»This phrase helped Sam get to work in BMG and get acquainted with the studio DMA Design , where the series was started Grand Theft Auto.

Delight

Liberty City City in the game Grand Theft Auto 4 almost completely repeats New York. One of his districts – Duchs – became a virtual copy of Kuins. In this place (or rather, in the Blashing microdistrict), in 1966, the famous game designer Ken Levin was born.

His parents were the exact opposite of the Hauser Brothers family. Mother is a housewife, father is an ordinary accountant. Since Levin was lucky enough to be born in New York (although he grew up in a suburbs of New Jersey), young Ken discovered Broadway and fell in love with the theater. This loyalty to dramatic art is perfectly traced in Thief: Deadly Shadows And System Shock 2.

The second passion of the boy after the plays became video games. He often looked into the arcade hall Adventure Land , When I went to visit my grandmother. The main pleasure was the machine Maneater , attracting attention with a full -fledged video with the participation of a large white shark. The appearance of this arcade deserves a separate description. Instead of a boring metal box, Maneater was the upper body of a predatory fish with a screen built into a mouth. It seemed that the monster that sailed from the ocean to the city made his way through the ground and froze in a deadly throw right in front of the dumbfounded Ken. It is clear where Levin had such awe in front of the underwater world, a delight from the creation of the city BIOSHOCK. A great influence on the developer acquaintance with serious games was had his brother, who early introduced him to the Genre of the Sooper and the Project Panzer Blitz from the company Avalon Hill. It was a military tactical strategy requiring the player a remarkable mind and the ability to calculate the party several moves ahead.

The sad desolation of the surrounding Park mansion at the Imaginary Place level shows how Cliffi Bi is longing for a native house.

But perhaps the biggest shock for young Ken was his trip to Connecticut to his older sister, who studied at college. Not at all the free life of boys and girls on a campus struck him, but an unusual text game Star Trek , which was launched on a universal computing machine, intended for completely other purposes. At first glance, there was nothing special in the project (compared to Maneater so for sure). There was no graphics. The Enterprise spacecraft was designated "E", the alien warriors of the Klingons were marked "K", and distant stars – the symbol "*". However, behind these schematic combinations of letters and numbers, the future author BIOSHOCK I saw flights to other worlds, Captain Kirk and an endless cosmic opera. After meeting with the interactive version of Star Trek, Ken Levin's life has changed forever.

Another discovery was the famous The Legend of Zelda , Created at that time already recognized genius Siger Miyamoto. The journey through the huge virtual world turned out to be so important for him that Ken had to part with his first girl – there was simply no time left for her.

Nevertheless, Ken's first love remained the theater. Going to Vassar College, he began to study literature and write plays. One of his works even fell into the hands of large filmmakers. Ken has a chance to work on the script of the film for the studio Paramount. Cinema with the surname Levin did not work out in the credits, but the student bought a console from the money received from the money received Sega And a video recorder. A few years later, the young writer who did not break through in Hollywood saw a message about the vacancy in the magazine Nextgen and got to work in the company Looking Glass Studios , Starting a step closer to the main game of your life.

Grandmother's gift

What was the time of Half-Life Ihomeworld as a child?

Jeff V Andteri – Head of the American Studio Hidden Path Entertainment , Doctor of Technical Sciences – can be considered a kind of gaming multi -divergent. During his long career, he managed to work both in independent firms and in large corporations (Sierra on-line, Microsoft) in various positions (from the programmer to the producer). He put his hand to Half-Life , Arcanum , Ground Control And Homeworld: Cataclysm. Talking with Gamery, Jeff remembered what games influenced him in childhood:

“My grandparents gave me a home console Pong. At that time, it was very cool, because such a game was available for us except in restaurants (then sometimes they put special machines there). Later we got Atari 2600 , And we appreciated football and some projects Activision , including River Run And Starmaster. The last two took a bunch of my time. Then it seemed that home entertainment really evolved.

In the arcade halls, I spent tokens on militants with vector graphics: Red Baron , Battlezone , Tempest. Later, when I got to a normal computer with a keyboard (Atari 800xl), I launched Transylvania from Penguin Software. All these games had a huge impact on me ".

Life was a success

Of course, not everyone had childhood so safely, but even negative experience finds a reflection in games. Cliffi Bi – superfluous confirmation. This nickname stuck to him like a chewing gum. The school was far behind, and it continued to pursue the poor man. In 2008 alone, the already held man asked representatives of the media to never use the name Cliffy B in the press. Now he could be called as his mother did – Clifford Blezhinsky, or just a cliff.

Cliff was born in February 1975. According to his memoirs, his father was always very tense and nervous, because of which he passed away early. When the future star of the game industry found out that dad was dead, a militant logo glowed on the TV screen in the house Blaster Master. Since then, Blezhinsky has never touched this game again, although the memories of a sad event continued to pursue the developer. No wonder the centaur tank, which the soldiers used in GEARS of WAR 2 , So reminds the same military unit from Blaster Master.

Even without this severe loss, the life of a teenager can hardly be called especially joyful. Blazhinsky was the same guy in the school bus, with whom there were constantly troubles: acne jumped on his forehead, soda spilled into trousers. The guy felt a complete loser.

[Bullet]] Miyamoto always remained for Cliff the main inspirer, and all the more valuable this photograph of two amazing gamemeracies.

Video games were a big outlet for him. At 13, Cliff set a record at Super Mario Bros., His name got to the 99th page of Nintendo Power magazine. The favorite boyish entertainment (like Levin) became The Legend of Zelda. Then Blezhinsky began working in a local suburban club and clutched by all his might for a flying childhood, which symbolized a tireless link. Like Miyamoto, in childhood, Blezhinsky spent a lot of time on the street. True, unlike the Japanese gamemarator, the author GEARS of WAR Wandered through cemeteries and old villages in New England. This is clearly visible from his games. Where the sun shines at Miyamoto and grass greens, the cliffs eternal twilight reign and ruins crumble.

In 1991, the mother bought her son the first computer, and he began to make his own games. The code was not particularly successful, and the graphics are even worse, but at the dawn of the formation of the computer entertainment industry, the lack of skill could easily be compensated by remarkable zeal. A year later, Blazhinsky sent to the studio Epic Megagames your development. The twenty -year -old Executive Director of the company Tim Pork appreciated the project called Dare to dream. In this game, the boy is sharpened in his own dream. At that time, 60 home -made programs per month came to the studio, but most of them were filtered. As a result, five of the Cliff’s adventure went to production).

[[Bullet]] Passion of Passion in Bioshock was not so much a reflection of children's worries as a demonstration of Levin's skills.

On this childhood ended – work began in EPIC, thanks to which the developer managed to release the main Xbox 360 exclusives of this generation. If you carefully played GEARS of WAR, then probably remember the level of Imaginary Place, where Marcus Phoenix returns to the generic nest. Blazhinsky admits that he often sees dreams about the house of his childhood in Boston. By the way, the author borrowed the name for this location from the film “The Country of Gardens” with Zak Braff, where they call a “group of people who miss the same imaginary place”.

Behind every big modern game, and sometimes behind a whole series, is not only a team of developers, not only a publishing house, but often boys with their childhood dreams and fantasies, complexes. But, as Tom Bissel correctly noted, responding to his colleague’s commentary on Dice: “Childhood is an exhaustive resource”. Sooner or later, developers have to leave their often naive fantasies and desires behind and begin to be inspired by more mature, serious emotions. Judging by Red Dead Redemption , Portal 2 , Heavy Rain , Braid And Mass Effect , Many of them have already ceased to consider old photo albums in search of inspiration.

Children's games

What games did the developers make before they met a computer

One of the leading programmers Age of Empires And Age of mythology now closed Ensemble Studios – Mark Terrano – made his first games back in school. His homework in the economy included a game field from plywood, cards and chips. The teacher did not believe at first that the child created such a miracle. The game turned out to be so large that when the project had to be brought to school for demonstration, it did not get into the school bus.

The first love of many developers remained board games, since there were no computers at home, and the arcade halls demanded a large stack of quarters. The main designer of the studio Telltale Games Dave Grossman made an epic cosmic desktop adventure, which had to be placed on two floors of the house. The game card turned out to be six square feet (1.8 m2). Grossman's friends – captains of the opposing factions – were sitting in different rooms of the house. So they did not know what the rivals were doing. But the Gammaster had to run up and down the stairs. By the way, Dave now continues to come up with games, in addition to his work in Telltale Games. For example, he invented an extreme type of competition "3-second chess".

Designer GEARS OF WAR 1-3 and Unreal Tournament 3 Josh Jay from Epic Games He also painted the tables, but unlike colleagues he did not throw away children's developments and still stores them. His first games were sets of multi -level cards, on which it was possible to move, throwing bones. The developer admits that he liked collecting 3D models from cardboard more than composing rules. Then Josh began to turn into cards for D&D adventures ordinary newspaper crosswords. The labyrinths and strange drawings subsequently helped him better get used to the industry and understand the principles of the structure of large three -dimensional structures.

The whole future fate of the designer Comix Zone , ODDWORLD: Stranger’s Wrath , Diablo And Diablo 2 Steg Hedlund determined precisely board and card games. According to him, from an early age he thought about how such entertainment function. In addition, he was fond of Tolkin, reading not only the Silmarillion, but also began to study the ciphers and the system for building languages ​​in depth. At twelve years, he was first presented with a box with Dungeons & Dragons, and at sixteen it has already become a professional gammaster. In many years, this experience helped in working on Diablo D&D For the company Wizards of the Coast. Today, Hedlund is far from the RPG genre – its new company Turpitude engages in casual projects for girls.

But what about his children's games told us the famous creator of levels to Duke Nukem 3D And Sin Richard “Levelord” Gray: “In the days of my childhood, no video games were found. But I had my favorite Major Mat Mason and Gi Joe. I also liked the designers Tinker Toys. In general, my parents were artists, so we had a lot of all kinds of art attributes (colored pencils, paints, clay, cork tree) at home). I also dreamed of drawing for a long time ".