Chip off the old block: video games and the film industry have become a billion-dollar father-son act. Our resident industry observer Graham Leggat takes it to the next level

Film Comment, Nov-Dec, 2004 by Graham Leggat

No longer merely a puerile distraction for maladjusted teens, video games are today a significant form of mass entertainment. More than half of all Americans play them regularly, and annual game industry revenues in the U.S. are around $11 billion. Three-quarters of this comes from software; the rest is from hardware sales. This $11 billion is frequently compared to Hollywood's $9 billion annual domestic box-office take, leading to the erroneous conclusion that the game industry is now bigger than the movie business. In fact, robust as it is, the game industry is a much smaller enterprise: a film's grosses are only the tip of the iceberg, with gobs more cash coming from ancillary sales and DVD. Three companies dominate the game industry: Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, makers of the so-called next-generation consoles--the PlayStation2, Xbox, and GameCube, respectively--on which most games are now played. Models of vertical integration, these hardware giants also publish games. Not unlike the Hollywood majors, each develops and produces new titles via both in-house (or "first-party") development teams and outside companies, some of which are signed to exclusive deals. Of the few thousand games released each year, the majority are developed and published by these third-party companies. The largest is Electronic Arts, which publishes nearly a quarter of all releases, including bestselling sports titles Madden NFL (89-) and NSA Street (02-) as well as such blockbuster franchises as The Sims (00-), The Lord of the Rings (02-), James Bond 007 (01-), Need for Speed (95-), Medal of Honor (99-), and more.

Like the movie business, the game industry has its calendar and seasons. It dumps its trash in the first two months of the year. It holds its Cannes--the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3)--each May in Los Angeles. And from Thanksgiving to Christmas it floods the marketplace with truckloads of product and spends hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing and advertising to attract both paying customers and year-end awards. (The major distinction between the two industries comes during high summer, when relatively few, and usually more modest, games are published.)

As with movies, the cost of making and marketing games has skyrocketed in recent years. According to Variety, in 2001 the average production cost was $5 million, while marketing added another $2 million. Today, as the game industry follows the film industry in becoming increasingly hit-driven, the average budget over a game's two-year development cycle is $15 million, with marketing upping the total to $25 million. As a result, there is a Hollywood-like trend toward "safer" titles: annual revised editions, sequels, and licensed products.

Beyond the mainstream there are numerous small game development companies attempting to break through with more or less singular visions, and tight groups of PC garners, influenced by hacker culture, who modify source code to produce original and sometimes brilliant variations on existing games. And there are independent designers making simple but often artful games for mobile phones and websites. But there is as yet no game-making analogue to the indie film scene. Nor, unsurprisingly, given that video games surfaced as a legitimate medium only in the early Eighties, has there been a game-world equivalent of neorealism, the Nouvelle Vague, or Dogme 95.

The game world has, however, produced a pantheon of titans--producers, designers, and programmers not unlike, say, Porter, Melies, and Griffith, whose strokes of genius or signature styles have shaped the medium, minted genres, and forever changed the industry. The list begins with Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of some of the most venerable and best-loved titles in the world, including the numerous editions of Mario (83-), Donkey Kong (81-), and Zelda (86-). Miyamoto's so-called hop-n-bop or "platforming" titles, which marry fairy-tale whimsy with heroic adventure, are the foundation on which the industry is built, and each new iteration--like this fall's Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door--breaks new ground.

There are two other Japanese game gods: Yu Suzuki, creator of Virtua Fighter (93-), which brought new finesse to the martial-arts beat-'em-up genre; and self-confessed "movie nut" Hideo Kojima, father of the cult Metal Gear series (87-), which helped codify and popularize the stealth-espionage techniques that now appear in many action/adventure games and find their apotheosis in Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell (02-). Influenced by anime, Metal Gear, along with the Final Fantasy franchise (90-) set new standards for the full-motion video cut scenes--interstitial animated movies--that most games employ to set up and advance their narratives. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (01) and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake-Eater (04), in particular, are games that you watch as much as play.

The polygon world's Mt. Olympus also includes several Americans, most notably John Carmack and Will Wright. Founder and head of id Software, Carmack created (with John Romero) the blindingly fast, ultraviolent Quake (96-) and Doom (93-) franchises, almost single-handedly inventing the run-and-gun first-person shooter, online "clan warfare," and, through the release of the game's source code, the "game-modding" underground. Wright is the deviser of The Sims, in which players control the minutiae of the everyday, near-real-time lives of characters, neighborhoods, and cities. At once extraordinarily complex and stunningly banal, this peerless game has inspired numerous community-building, relationship, and simulation titles.