2000.Game - A Gaming Documentary Series

A new decade, a new age and a whole lot of games. The year 2000 brought us another wave of “best games ever made”, many of them not just being highly regarded, but still actively played. And at the same time, it brought us one of the first great hype disasters in history.

January 1st 2000 came and the world was still here. Nuclear bombs didn’t explode, satellites didn’t fall from the sky, a meteor didn’t hit, the rapture didn’t happen, and a lot of people were disappointing by this. As it turns out, they weren’t living in a special time, that made them special. There would be another year, and then another one, and the ages would roll on with or without them.

2000 has a very good ring to it, it’s a very round and large number, which is why you would see it slapped onto the end of everything, not just video games, for almost a decade. It spoke of that novelty, the changed that people wanted to see in the world. And change they would get. After being shook to pieces by the US Government, Bill Gates decided that maybe taking over the world wasn’t really the right thing for him, so he stepped down from his role as Microsoft CEO, leaving Steve Balmer in charge, and turning more towards charitable causes, like wiping out malaria. Just a month later Microsoft would release Windows 2000, a fairly beloved operating system… later that year they would also release Windows ME. The least popular version of Windows until Vista and 8 would come along.

This was also the year when the compa ny that brought us the 3D accelerator began to slowly vanish. 3DFX made a few unfortunate business decisions, which lead it to become unable to support itself. So, instead, it opted to be purchased by Nvidia, and over the course of the next two years it would cease to function and become just a memory.

Sadly, the same was true for Looking Glass Studios. Although that very year it released Thief 2: The Metal Age, a superb game that refined the sneaking genre to a point that some say has yet to be truly surpassed, the studio went belly up. Mostly it was the fault of the then publisher, Eidos Interactive, that would still try, in various ways to continue the Thief series. People that had left Looking Glass Studios before this happened, among them Warren Spector, went on to work with one of the creators of Doom, John Romero, at a company called Ion Storm. At that time, it had two branches.

One of them, the main one, had spent years and many millions of dollars making Daikatana. A game so aggressively marketed that it downright insulted the audience. A hype train so utterly full of itself that it brought downright glee to many when it derailed, the game featuring many bad design decisions regarding save games, terrible AI and numerous other blunders. It was the first major hype disaster . Although there had been games that didn’t really live up to their promise, Daikatana stands out for being so badly mismanaged and overhyped, that the end result became a black stain upon the games industry. For a decade to come, Daikatana would be a punchline to jokes, a punching bag and in general, a game that no one really admitted to enjoying. And while it did become one of the main reasons for the death of Ion Storm, the studio created with the motto that “Design is King”, the other one is why the name will live forever.

Ion Storm Austin created Deus Ex that year. A combination RPG and first person shooter, in the vein of System Shock 2 and with a lot of influence from the immersive sims that Spector had worked on back at Looking Glass, this is without a doubt one of the greatest games ever made. The lineage of its gameplay can be traced all the way back to the ancient Ultima games, letting the player decide how to proceed, how much violence to use and how much to exploit the games attempts to simulate the real world. But Deus Ex stands out for more than just its gameplay. Its world, the interaction with its characters and the story it had continues to make it relevant even today. A story of terrorism, conspiracy, manipulation and… prophecy. We’ll get to that next week. It’s said that every time anyone mentions Deus Ex, someone will reinstall it. But when it came out, it couldn’t muster enough sales to balance out Daikatana, leading to the closure of the Dallas branch of Ion Storm, and the purchase of the Austin one by Eidos Interactive. And from there, things went a bit down hill.

One of the reasons why Deus Ex couldn’t become a monster hit back then was that the market was filled with phenomenal games across the board. And the Playstation 2 also launched, and would become the dominant platform for the next five years. Sure, new consoles will be released, but in terms of success they were nothing but a fraction. Not that the launch line-up of the console inspired that much confidence. Not that Timesplitters, SSX, Summoner, Midnight Club, or Dynasty Warriors 2 were bad games, but compared to what that platform would get in just one year, they were not very large, in terms of sales. Some of the other consoles were still getting great games as well, like Rare’s followup to Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, the The Legend of Zelda Majora’s Mask, or Paper Mario for the N64… but when it came to Nintendo, the big hit that year was the fact that the Gameboy reached 100 million units sold. And the Sega Dreamcast got classics like Jest Set Radio Phantasy Star Online that year, the first MMO RPG created for consoles. The concept wasn’t really possible in prior generations, because none of them had an internet connection by default. And the original Playstation itself would get games like Driver 2, where you’d be driving cars one moment and the go around on foot the next. That idea will get expanded on really soon, by some other developer.

I know that I may be glossing over some really great console games in this show, and I am sorry for that. It’s not my intention to ignore them or tone down their importance, but with the limited time I have, I must carefully choice what to focus on. And in this case, the year 2000 was just filled with great multi-platform and PC games. Blizzard released a followup to Diablo, made after years of crunch mode, where developers worked themselves nearly to death, resulting in a game that is still considered as being the best of the series. Although there were a lot of attempts at making hack and slash RPGs, a notable other being last year’s Darkstone, or to a lesser degree this years Nox, none of could hold a candle to Diablo 2. It had hacking, it had slashing, it a fantastic loot system, tough bosses to beat, many different classes with different builds to experiment with, and Battle.net. The ability to have fun with friends, strangers, and just chill out while crawling through the sewers of Lut Gholein. Diablo 2 was an immense success for Blizzard, and would be followed up by an expansion a year later. But it was also the last game actually released by Blizzard North. The studio that was once Condor would soon start losing people and fade away.

At the opposite spectrum of the RPG stood Bioware’s Baldur’s Gate 2. An RPG that meant to give you another taste of classic D&D gaming, with a great story, great characters, and slightly improved gameplay over its predecessor. Meanwhile, Icewind Dale tried to go even deeper into D&D by making every party character your own, while maintaining the same basic gameplay established by Baldur’s Gate years before, and reused in Planescape Torment, and would continue to be a staple of the Infinity Engine era of D&D games, much like the first person exploration/top down combat was a staple of the Gold Box era of D&D Games a decade earlier.

It’s probably worth highlighting just how much changed within a decade. We went from this. To this. A leap that we hadn’t seen in the decade before, and haven’t seen since. Maybe with the advent of raytracing we’ll get something similar, but until then, that period from 1990 to 2000 was a golden age for graphics, and a painful one at the same time, what with so many competing standards, and hardware manufacturers vanishing in the night. Sure, graphics are still evolving, slowly, and some would say that’s the only thing actually being worked on in video games these days, where as everything else is a watered down rehash of what’s currently popular, with no new or innovative ideas. It’s up to you to decide if that’s right nor not. What I can say for sure is that back in 2000, there was room for the improvement of technology, graphics, story, characters, worlds and gamaplay, resulting in some really strange things. We had the likes of the action-strategy game Sacrifice, created by some of the people that brought us MDK, or Giants Citizen Kabuto, created by more of the people that brought us MDK. A game that stands outs as being utterly ridiculous and glorious at the same time, not taking itself serious, with a lot of humor everywhere, gigantic levels to explore set on an alien planet and an asymetrical multiplayer mode where creatures of vastly different abilities vied for control. And since I mentioned alien planets with giant levels, I apologize for omitting Outcast from last week’s show.

There were so many other great games this year, a few of them being some of my all time favorites, like Red Alert 2, Hitman Codename 47, American McGee’s Alice, No One Lives Forever and Need for Speed 5. Fun fact, Need for Speed 5 was at one time meant to be followed up by a racing game named Split Second. I don’t precisely remember the details, but that’s what was one of the developers of Need for Speed 5 said in an interview for the classic Cybernet show that people in the UK and even here, in Eastern Europe, got to enjoy… as long as it was hosted by Lucy Longhurst. Now, sure Cybernet was mainly a really shallow succession of trailers, but at the time, it was awesome. And Sea Dogs was also awesome, a pirating RPG, that let you manage a crew and conquer the seas, with excellent tactical combat and a high enough degree of realism that the game felt believable. The same kind of believably you’d see in Soldier of Fortune, from the reactions of the enemies to being shot, where you could even shoot guns out of their hands and watch them cower in fear.

I should probably also mention that a certain studio called Paradox Development Studio really got started, with the release of Europa Universalis, the first of what would soon be called Grand Strategy games. Sort of like a 4X, but not really. And then there was Siege of Avalon, that combined the age old shareware model of distribution, where the first part of it was free, with the internet. You wouldn’t order the rest of the game, you’d buy and download it off the web. Although it was a nice enough game, internet distribution, payment systems or the infrastructure itself weren’t yet at the level where such a model could succeed. I mean, if it was all free, then yes, absolutely, which is why some people were hesitant to outright buy the recently released Counter-Strike and stuck to the Mod version, for a while.

As for what was the game of 2000. Well, Deus Ex is one of the best games ever made, and you can close the video now and pretend that I gave it the honor of the game of the year 2000. But if you’re sticking around… it’s The Sims. I know that today The Sims is considered a joke, an excuse to sell DLC, but it was at its time the best selling PC game ever made, and it was a very different type of game compared just about everything else was on the market, a notable exception being maybe Seaman for the Sega Dreamcast. The Sims was a life simulator, it was a game about managing the day to day life of a human being, of a family, building their home, furnishing it, and enjoying the sight of their success or… most likely, giving in to your dark desires as God of this mortal and bring doom upon it. And unlike other games that tried to do similar relationship based gameplay, or some of Chris Crawford’s more esoteric works, this was as mainstream as possible. This was popular and promoted by one of the bigger publishers of that age.

Now, the fact that the series devolved into a DLC filled IKEA advertisement shouldn’t take away from how big of an impact the game made. At the time it seemed like it would usher in a new age of video games… instead of being the dying breath of the innovation present throughout all the ‘90s. That was kinda the theme of the year 2000. This was when we saw the web soar to new records, there being a new million dollar company rising seemingly ever week. Everyone wanted a piece of it, throwing money left and right at every site and service with an idea. And then it peaked. And by the end of the year, those sites were going belly up, because even though they had raised a lot of money in funding, they had no actual way of earning money on their own. This spiraled and amplified, and what became known as the .com bubble burst, leading to many people losing a lot of money in a very short time.
But at least we got the first USB Flash Drive this year, the first camera phone, the first draft of the human genome, Honda’s cute little ASIMO robot walked into everyone’s heart, and Deviantart launched, for better or for worse.

And if you think something’s missing. Let’s just say it’s on purpose. Next week we’re in for a doozy. See you then.