Build a better mouse trap, catch more mice. Build a better online gaming server, get yourself sued. That is what’s happening to the developers of bnetd, a software program for Web servers that duplicates the functionality of Battle.net, Blizzard Entertainment’s hugely popular online gaming service.
Ross Combs and Rob Crittenden, two of the lead developers on bnetd, say all they ever wanted to do was create a place to play best-selling Blizzard games like Starcraft and Diablo in a friendly online atmosphere free of the technical bugs that plague Battle.net.
Anyone who has ventured on to Battle.net to wage war against aliens or to hack and slash through dungeons is likely to appreciate the sentiment. Battle.net’s popularity has been one of its great drawbacks. Frequent crashes and slow response times due to a huge crush of players — especially right after the release of a new game — can often make Battle.net an unpleasant experience. The technical problems are exacerbated by social malfunctions: the malicious killing of some gamers by other players and the proliferation of hacks that give some players unfair advantages.
It all added up, recalls Combs, into making Battle.net a scene that “just wasn’t a fun place to be.” So, in classic geek fashion, coders like Combs wrote their own, free software version of Battle.net. With bnetd’s code anyone could set up their own server for playing Blizzard games, and since the code was open to the general public, they could even modify it themselves if they so pleased.
For Blizzard, fun isn’t the issue. The problems are copyright infringement and the promotion of piracy. And with a highly anticipated new game, Warcraft III, poised for launch this summer, the company is playing hardball. On Feb. 19, Blizzard sent a cease-and-desist e-mail to Internet Gateway, the ISP that hosts the Web site for bnetd. In language that is fast becoming the scourge of the Internet, the letter declared that “pursuant to the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act” (DMCA), the bnetd code was “circumvention technology” which permitted the violation of Blizzard’s copyrights.
Specifically, Blizzard charges that bnetd allows the use of pirated copies of its games to be played on servers running bnetd. (In comparison, pirated Blizzard games won’t work with Battle.net.)
In response, the bnetd team, unable to face the legal costs of contesting Blizzard in court, removed the bnetd code from the bnetd.org Web site. But this did not satisfy Blizzard. On April 5, Blizzard filed suit against Internet Gateway and bnetd.org’s system administrator, Tim Jung. (Other defendants, perhaps those who contributed to bnetd’s code, may be added later.) This time around, Blizzard did not cite the DMCA. Instead, Blizzard now says that bnetd serves as a way to allow unauthorized public performances of Blizzard’s copyrighted work (its games).
It is unclear exactly what the reasoning was behind the change in legal tack. Blizzard’s legal team may have decided that the charge that the bnetd code itself was a copyright violation would not stick — the code “emulates” the functionality of Battle.net, but it does not actually copy any of Battle.net’s code. It’s also possible that the new legal language was a pre-emptive attempt to protect a new, subscription-based version of Battle.net that will debut for the upcoming World of Warcraft.
In a statement sent by e-mail to Salon, Michael Morhaime, Blizzard Entertainment’s president and co-founder said, “We always have been and will continue to be diligent in protecting our trademarks and copyrighted materials. We are convinced that certain members of the bnetd project illegally copied parts of our code and bypassed the game’s CD-Key authentication process. We further believe that emulators damage our efforts to prevent piracy, and they create safe havens for players using illegal copies of our products.”
Whatever the case, to some observers, the new charges are even worse than the original.
To say that bnetd allows unauthorized public performances implies that it is a copyright violation just to create software that “interoperates,” or is otherwise compatible, with Blizzard. Interoperability — which enables software to work with other software — is a core principle of how the Internet, or any computer network, works.
The stakes are high enough that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has joined the fight, agreeing to provide legal representation for the bnetd team. Bnetd thus joins the fast-growing list of other software causes célèbres — Dmitry Sklyarov, 2600 Magazine, Napster — that have emerged in the hotly contested war over intellectual property and the Internet. How the Net works in the future could be decided in skirmishes like these.
“It is unfortunate that the state of U.S. law has fallen to such a low as to affect programmers in this way,” says Crittenden, 34, who lives in Lithicum, Md. If the bnetd team happens to lose its case, he speculates, “Any company could create their own mini-monopoly on network communications. It could bring down the interoperability of the Internet.”
Bnetd’s roots go back to the 1998 launch of the real-time strategy game Starcraft. Mark Baysinger, a Starcraft fan who was reportedly dissatisfied with the experience of playing the game on Battle.net, created a program called Starhack that duplicated the functions of Battle.net. Baysinger also received a cease-and-desist letter from Blizzard, but after a few weeks of back and forth, no legal action resulted.
Baysinger eventually moved on to other things, but his decision to “copyleft” his code under the GNU General Public License (GPL) ensured that other coders could pick up where he left off.
The basic principle involved reverse engineering the functionality of Battle.net by intercepting the packets of information that a game on a user’s computer would send to Battle.net and figuring out what those packets were supposed to do. According to some legal experts, such reverse engineering is not in and of itself illegal, although the language of the DMCA has muddied the waters considerably on the question of what is and what isn’t allowed.
As for Blizzard, the company’s statement declares flatly that “it would have been impossible for a third party to recreate specific authentication code embedded in their games by analyzing or ‘packet sniffing’ network traffic between a Blizzard game and Battle.net.” According to Blizzard, the lawsuit filed on April 5, 2002, “alleges that members of the bnetd project violated copyright law by illegally copying portions of code from Blizzard’s computer games.”
Specifically, the statement declares that “in order to make the bnetd software work, certain programmers at bnetd copied Blizzard code relating to password and username authentication, and incorporated it into the bnetd server program.”
But according to the bnetd developers, there was never any intent to encourage piracy or to otherwise financially gain at Blizzard’s expense.
The 27-year-old Combs, one of the programmers who picked up the reins from Baysinger, says a big motivation behind the creation of bnetd was to facilitate private gaming sessions among friends and online colleagues who would be respectful of one another. When the first Starcraft game was released in 1998, he says, problems soon became apparent with its Internet gameplay feature. Many players on the Battle.net servers seemed to thrive on abusing others. Playing with strangers often resulted in unpleasant surprises: It wasn’t atypical for the person you were teamed with as a partner to unexpectedly switch sides and become your opponent (that wasn’t intended as a feature of Starcraft’s gameplay on Battle.net). The use of program hacks, which let some players cheat, was also a rampant problem.
“Now, I’m sure it wasn’t all bad,” says Combs, “but I know several people that were burned early on and never went back. My personal reason for working on bnetd was to provide a nicer gaming environment for my friends.”
The open-source nature of the project has other implications as well, which may have inspired some of the legal problems. In February, Blizzard released a beta, or test, version of Warcraft III that could be played only on Battle.net. Shortly after the beta release, some programmers began an offshoot of bnetd called WarForge that would allow Warcraft III beta testers to play without jumping through Battle.net’s hoops.
But many of the bnetd developers say they opposed adding Warcraft III support before the game’s official release (tentatively slated for this summer), because they were concerned that it would encourage the pirating of the beta for playing on servers running bnetd.
“We had nothing to do with the addition of Warcraft III support,” says Crittenden. “[But] we are an open-source project and anyone is free to [develop] their own version, and this is what WarForge did. We don’t agree with their use of hacks to get Warcraft III to work.”
Did WarForge’s appearance trigger the latest round of legal fire-fighting? Blizzard isn’t saying, but along with the upcoming release of Warcraft III, Blizzard is reportedly planning a new World of Warcraft multiplayer online version of the game that will be subscription only.
In any event, now that Blizzard has turned on the legal heat, bnetd has become a symbol of a fight that means a little bit more than just the opportunity to play Diablo online without getting killed by another player: It has become the latest hot-button for intellectual property and the DMCA. So the bnetd developers, with help from EFF, are going to fight.
“I have complained about the DMCA regularly for years,” says Combs, “so it is only right that I would not roll over when it was waved in front of me.”
“[The cease-and-desist e-mail] was one of the more egregious examples of overreaching we’ve seen under copyright law and the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA,” says Cindy Cohn, a legal director with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We at EFF have been alarmed at the growing number of cases where the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA and claims of copyright infringement have been misused to try to scare people out of exercising their rights. We saw Blizzard’s letter as another of those, and one that clearly had no foundation in the law.”
EFF, which has also taken a lead role in defending Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov on charges of violating the DMCA, decided to jump into the fray.
“We thought that the attack — [on] a volunteer project that simply sought to create an interoperable computer program — could have broad ramifications for the future of reverse engineering, especially for the free-software and open-source communities,” says Cohn.
Combs and Crittenden say they have been receiving strong support from other programmers and software developers. The few negative responses sent their way have been based on misunderstandings about bnetd’s purpose.
“Many seemed to think that we were simply around to let people who had pirated copies [of Blizzard games] play against each other, which isn’t the case,” says bnetd developer Crittenden.
To address this matter the bnetd developers would like to offer Blizzard a concession: to include code that would make bnetd servers work only with legitimate copies of Blizzard games, not pirated ones. Doing this, though, would require cooperation from Blizzard, since such a security check would need to access Blizzard’s online database that identifies legitimate copies of its games.
However, Cohn points out that putting in anti-piracy measures isn’t even something that the bnetd team is legally obligated to do: “The bnetd code has many reasonable uses that have nothing to do with piracy. It should not be banned just because it can also be used by infringers to play games. In fact, the bnetd code is even further away from piracy than the VCR. The VCR actually makes infringing copies. Here, the bnetd code doesn’t do the infringing — it just allows both infringing and noninfringing games to play.”
“This reminds me a bit of the Aibo pet case, where Sony threatened one of its customers who wrote a computer program that made the Aibo do more tricks than Sony intended,” says Cohn. “Fortunately, Sony had the wisdom to withdraw their threat once public outcry began. Here, Blizzard is suing its customers for making a server that has more functionality and provides a better experience — by letting you play with just your friends and other things — than they do.”
Aside from the piracy issue, Combs says that he doesn’t “understand how we are threatening [Blizzard's] business. Battle.net is a free service to anyone with a copy of any recent Blizzard game.” Blizzard makes money from the games sold, whether they are used on Battle.net or not. Just as Battle.net exists to improve Blizzard’s sales by adding value to its games, bnetd does the same, the bnetd developers argue.
But what happens if, as speculated, Blizzard turns Battle.net into a subscription-based service? The company’s upcoming World of Warcraft will be a persistent online world where the gameplay runs nonstop, and for which players will probably need to pay. Combs says that even then Blizzard still needn’t be concerned about bnetd. Updating and maintaining the gameplay for a persistent online world requires much more time and money than hobbyist programmers and gamers could ever provide.
However, he admits that bnetd does remove a large measure of Blizzard’s control over its products. Through Battle.net, the company can keep track of a game’s popularity and usage patterns, and force players to view advertisements hyping its upcoming products. Additionally, Blizzard can alter features of the games on Battle.net. When Blizzard decides that bots — automated software assistants — are no longer allowed, then that decision is final. When moderated private chat channels are disabled, there is no recourse. The bnetd developers feel that users should be able to choose whether they want to accept these changes or not.
While the EFF confidently believes that bnetd’s chances of prevailing over Blizzard are “very good, and even better if Blizzard’s customers begin to speak up,” Cohn points out what could happen if things turn out otherwise: “If bnetd can be successfully sued, many other reverse engineering projects, both open source and not, are at risk.”
A loss for bnetd could also have implications beyond emulation. Theoretically, it could affect companies and hobbyist programmers who create programs that are compatible with other products. The very concept of compatibility as a feature in software and hardware could be brought into question. And that’s a loss that could be a bit more severe than the typical bloody ending to a game of Warcraft.
It’s the summer of 2001 and the video game industry is bigger and hotter than ever. In the feverishly contested hand-held market, Nintendo’s GameBoy Advance and Atari’s 2600-compatible VCSp are the must-have consoles. But fans are also eagerly awaiting new releases for popular consoles, like Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty for Sony’s PlayStation 2 and Elevator Action for the Atari 2600.
Wait just a second. Elevator Action for the Atari 2600? In the 21st century? Isn’t the Atari 2600 the archaic console that only plays those games with the rinky-dink graphics and sound and simplistic play, like Combat and that godawful version of Pac-Man? The one with the goofy pseudo wood-grain trim on its casing that started the whole video game console market 24 years ago?
Yep. The Atari 2600 ceased production in 1989. But practically speaking it never really went away. The abandoned system has been adopted by online fans, who nurture it with loving care. And they’re doing more than just keeping it on life support; the Atari 2600 is actually growing — new games are being written, and new hardware is being manufactured. Affection for the system and its classic games may be strongest among those who were kids or teenagers during its heyday, but even though the 2600′s technology is Neolithic compared with present-day systems, it’s still gaining new fans. Some are programmers who want to test their skills against the severe restrictions forced by primitive hardware. Some are attracted to games that emphasize playability over whiz-bang graphics. And some just think the system’s hip.
The Atari 2600 certainly used to be the hippest console on the block. Long before the PlayStations and Dreamcasts and GameBoys ruled, the Atari 2600 (also known as the “VCS” for “video computer system”) was king of the consoles. During the so-called golden age of console gaming, from 1977, the year when the 2600 first appeared, to 1983-84, when the gaming market crashed thanks to a glut of lousy games and bad marketing decisions, Atari was preeminent. Over its 11-year production life span the 2600 sold more than 30 million units, far surpassing its major competitors, Intellivision and Colecovision.
That dominance survives. “The 2600 is far and away the most popular classic system,” says Alex Bilstein, a 29-year-old Web developer in Austin, Texas, who is one of the webmasters of a popular Web site dedicated to the Atari 2600. “Every system has its following, but I don’t think any compare to the VCS, partly because it was popular in its lifetime and is therefore nostalgic for a lot of people. ‘Atari’ is retro-cool in certain youth groups today.”
In an era when realistic 3-D graphics and sound and complex game play are the norm, the question of why there is still a significant following for the ancient 2600 may strike many gamers as mystifying. Yet to those who keep the faith, interest in the technically simpler Atari 2600 has been growing precisely because gaming technology is now so darn sophisticated. Many 2600 games are simple to learn, which makes them appealing to certain groups, says Bilstein: “People who normally wouldn’t touch a video game will play a game of Atari because you don’t have to learn a complicated manual in order to play. My mom can play Space Invaders.”
Atari’s popularity is far from confined to Space Invaders fans, however. What makes the Atari revival unique is the amount of active software and hardware development that continues to this day on the platform. Perhaps most amazing, today’s Atari fans can buy a hand-held 2600, the VCSp, that uses the old 2600′s game cartridges. Its inventor, Benjamin Heckendorn, builds each unit for his customers by hand, and says he is having difficulty keeping up with demand. Another community effort currently underway is to devise step-by-step building plans so that nostalgic hardware hackers can build their own 2600-compatible game consoles from scratch.
No console can survive without games, however, and it is in the software arena that the online 2600 enthusiasts are concentrating most of their energies. Some programmers have even taken it upon themselves to write new games for the platform. While such “home-brew” games are written for the other classic game systems by their fans as well, there’s simply more interest in game programming for the Atari 2600.
Bob Colbert, a 34-year-old systems analyst in La Vista, Neb., fulfilled a lifelong dream when he wrote a game for the 2600. Using information about the console that he found on the Web, he created a puzzle game called Okie Dokie — one of the 2600 revival scene’s first home-brew games. His original intent was for it to be played using software-only Atari 2600 emulator programs that are freely available, but he received so many requests for Okie Dokie in cartridge format (so that it could be played on actual 2600 consoles) that he produced a limited-edition run of 100 cartridges. That didn’t even begin to meet demand, but he couldn’t keep up production. (“The cartridges took a lot of time to make,” he says.)
Don’t be deceived by the simple look of these games — programming the 2600 is actually quite tough. “Making any discernible graphics display on the 2600 is difficult,” warns Colbert. Home-brew game makers are rediscovering the hurdles that the original programmers who were hired to make games for the system faced — a system with a mere 1 MHz CPU and 128 bytes of RAM does not allow a lot of room for sloppiness or error. Creating a good game for the system requires a keen sense of technical resourcefulness. Undaunted, most of the newfound game developers see taking on the 2600 as a kind of Zen exercise in which programming skills are put to the ultimate test.
Joe Grand, a 25-year-old in Boston who works in computer security, can attest to this challenge from his experience making his 2600 game, SCSIcide. He points out that “the hardware was originally designed to play Pong-type games.” But during the system’s latter years, after the golden age of video games ended, titles like Pitfall II and Klax featured impressive graphics, sound and game play. Grand is still in awe:
“The programmers stretched the hardware to limits unintended and unimaginable even by the hardware designers! A lot of times while I’m programming, I’ll throw on some disco music, pretend it’s 1979 and imagine what the designers had to work with,” says Grand. “The design/debug cycle was much more drawn out then, and the programmer couldn’t just write some code, compile it and immediately test it on an emulator as we do now.”
Making their own games isn’t the only way that 2600 fans satisfy their jones for new Atari thrills. Some in the scene have taken it upon themselves to hunt down fabled “lost” titles — prototype games developed years ago by Atari and other companies that were never released for sale. Several prototypes have been discovered over the past few years.
A prototype tends to turn up when the programmer who worked on it reveals its existence to the 2600 revival scene, or when a collector happens to find a prototype cartridge at a thrift store or acquires it through someone who once worked for a company that made games for the system. Once the existence of a lost game is confirmed, the goal among the gaming community is to politely encourage the person in possession of it to “dump” the code in the cartridge to software form so that it can be played on an emulator and freely enjoyed by others.
(There are obvious copyright issues associated with releasing old games on the Net, even if they have never been commercially marketed. If the company that made the game is still around, permission might be sought. Or a game’s original programmer(s) might be asked if the code can be released.)
Bilstein’s Web site, AtariAge, has introduced several prototypes to the public, including Kabobber, a fully playable game from Activision that was never published by the company. Games based on the comic strip “Garfield” and Disney’s “Snow White,” an incomplete but playable translation of arcade classic Tempest and even a sequel to Combat, the game that originally came packaged with the 2600 console, have all turned up in the past two years. The aforementioned Elevator Action was a recent discovery; cartridge versions of it, complete with old Atari-style packaging, will be sold to the public at the Classic Gaming Expo in August.
“There’s a surprisingly large number of prototypes available for the 2600, certainly more so than for any other system,” says Albert Yarusso, a 31-year-old programmer who has worked in the modern-day gaming industry at Looking Glass Technologies and Ion Storm. He runs the AtariAge Web site with Bilstein. “When the market crashed in 1983, most companies were very active in 2600 development. There were many finished (or near-finished) games that never made it to store shelves because of the crash. Looking through the database we have at AtariAge, there are around 70 prototypes listed for the 2600. Amazingly, new prototypes are still being discovered to this day.”
Several highly sought-after prototypes have yet to be found. “Holy Grail” titles include games based on “The Lord of the Rings,” “The Incredible Hulk,” “Rocky and Bullwinkle” and Dungeons & Dragons, as well as 2600 versions of classic arcade games like Scramble, Turbo, Zookeeper and more. Bilstein believes some of these titles will eventually be discovered. “Just as a wild guess, I wouldn’t be surprised if 10 to 20 more turned up,” he says. “At least 10 games were seen at [consumer electronics shows] back in the ’80s that nobody has been able to find, so they may just be waiting in a storage locker somewhere.”
Atari’s future may extend beyond the revival of prototypes and the creation of simple new games for hobbyists. Some Atarians predict the emergence of 2600-style games made to appeal to a broad audience. During the golden age of video games, a single person could program an entire game for the 2600. With today’s state-of-the-art consoles, such video game auteurism is an impossibility. But Bilstein says, “I see a parallel between classic games and mobile gaming, as it requires fewer people to design the small games that mobile gaming requires. I know a few classic-era game programmers who went into [mobile gaming development] because they enjoy being the sole developer of a project.”
There may be a market opportunity here. International video game publisher Infogrames, the latest company to own the Atari name and its games, recently announced that it will bring Atari classics like Asteroids and Missile Command to PDAs and Java-capable cellphones. The simple game play and graphics of such games lend themselves well to these devices. Mobile gaming is projected to grow in the next few years, and Infogrames is one company looking to capitalize on the moment.
Above all else, Atari 2600 aficionados believe that their favorite console remains relevant because there are lessons about making games for it that every developer for more technically advanced consoles needs to be reminded of: Keep it simple and remember that it’s all about the play. “While most of the 2600 games may not be very aesthetically appealing, they have [what] counts: Namely, they’re fun to play!” says Yarusso. “It should be mandatory to sit and play through the best games of the 2600 library before designing games for modern systems.”
Have you seen “The Dark Redemption,” the “Star Wars” prequel film set days before the events of the original “Star Wars”? What about “Bounty Trail,” which features the further adventures of “Star Wars” intergalactic bounty hunter Boba Fett? Or how about that episode of “The X-Files” in which Mulder and Scully investigate the death of Elvis Presley? If “Star Trek: Voyager” isn’t doing it for you, then take a look at the other Trek series, “Hidden Frontier.”
If the above sound like fanciful ideas dreamed up by fans, that’s because they are. And the odd thing is, they also actually exist for you to watch and enjoy.
These are products of the “fan film” scene — an offshoot culture of independent digital filmmaking. Fan films feature the characters, settings or premise of popular genre properties in stories that audiences will probably never get to see on the movie screen or television. Most fan filmmakers go through the same hard work involved in making a typical independent short film — scriptwriting, casting, on-set production and post-production. The difference is that they work with a property that belongs to somebody else, in most cases without the consent of the original creator or copyright holder.
“I think with many of these properties the creators have crafted such fully realized universes that someone can come in and create their own story alongside the ‘big boys,’” says Justin Young, a 21-year-old college student and fan filmmaker who has produced his own films based on the “Highlander” movie and TV series.
But creating your own sequel or prequel to these “fully realized universes” has only recently become feasible for the average fan. Once upon a time, fans had to be content with penning a fan-fiction story (or writing the script for a “virtual season” for a TV show, for instance); these days, they can create and distribute actual films that, in their special effects at least, are not so far behind what’s being releasing in theaters. Armed with inexpensive digital camcorders and broadband Net connections, fans now have the means to create and distribute their own audiovisual productions.
For a small group of devotees, fandom is becoming a matter of participation rather than just spectacle. In the process, fan filmmakers may be helping to change the way we experience the movies.
Fan filmmakers generally give credit for the current interest in fan films to “Troops,” the well-received parody film that crossed “Star Wars” with reality TV show “Cops.” Produced two years ago, “Troops” was distributed as large video files downloaded from Web sites, the same way most fan films are released today.
What’s striking about “Troops” is the effects. Here’s a film, produced on a home PC, that does a not-half-bad job of mimicking the kinds of million-dollar bells and whistles George Lucas brought to the screen in “Star Wars.” The technological success of “Troops” inspired fans to broaden their approach: Why make only parodies when you can do “serious” short films set in the “Star Wars” universe?
Several “Star Wars” fan films are available online or in production. “For some reason we thought we were the only doofuses with this idea, that we’d be alone in kick-starting this new minigenre,” says Devon Read, a 20-year-old graphic designer who’s finishing up production on his “Star Wars” fan film.
While “Star Wars” remains the most popular subject by far, the world of fan films has grown to include unofficial films based on other properties like “Star Trek,” “The X-Files,” “Highlander,” “Batman,” “Spiderman,” “The X-Men” and more.
One obvious question from all of this: Why bother making a film based on somebody else’s property, rather than something of your own creation?
“Hey, it’s ‘Star Wars’!” explains Jeff Vitkuske, a high school student from Ontario, Canada, who is busy producing fan films based on “Star Wars” and “The X-Men.” “It’s great to make up something yourself,” he says, “but let me tell you — there’s nothing like watching yourself wielding a light saber!”
In fact, there’s nothing new about fans co-opting their favorite media sensations. According to Henry Jenkins, director of comparative media studies at MIT, humans have always reinterpreted the stories they hear. “Throughout most of human history, people operated according to a folk culture model — that is, they saw themselves as entitled to add to or retell the core myths and stories of their culture.”
Jenkins points out that more than 200 appropriations of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” were published in the 20 years after the novel first appeared and many of them circulated commercially.
If anything, what’s recent is the inflexibility of media corporations in responding to fans’ creations. “Contemporary mass culture assumes that the average citizen consumes but does not participate,” says Jenkins, “whereas fandom holds onto the ideal of a culture where everyone is free and able to participate.”
Not that many fan filmmakers would turn down an offer to join the big studios. Both “Troops” and “Bounty Trail” helped their creators move on to work in the film industry. “Bounty Trail” caught the attention of Lucas, who subsequently hired the fan-film director to work on the production of the second “Star Wars” prequel.
While technology enables fan filmmakers to achieve near Hollywood effects, it has not delivered the key to good filmmaking. The acting and screenwriting in most fan films are not exactly of Oscar-winning quality, and other production values tend to betray the films’ amateur origins. In the “Star Trek” knockoff “Hidden Frontier,” you can’t help speculating on the little things — like if those among the cast who actually look good in their Starfleet uniforms are the aspiring actors, while those who do not are the regulars at “Trek” conventions.
“My opinion on fan films (and I’ve only really seen the ‘Star Wars’ ones) is that on the whole they’re mediocre,” says Scott Middlebrook, who has reviewed more than 60 fan-made films for Force Flicks, a “Star Wars” multimedia fan site. “A lot of the more popular films are fairly average — nothing more than light saber duels with little or no story. Parodies seem to come up better than the serious films. I guess if the film’s not taking itself too seriously, it’s easier for the audience to do the same. Plus, ‘Star Wars’ fans can get a tad anal and nit-picking (myself included) about the more serious stuff.”
But, again, the effects aren’t half-bad. That’s partly due to the immense amount of sharing on the Internet among fan filmmakers when it comes to special effects and other production techniques. Many designers who have made their own 3-D models of “Star Wars” vehicles and droids are willing to share their work for credit on a fan film.
A plethora of tutorials — essentially constituting a “‘Star Wars’ Filmmaking for Dummies” — show filmmakers everything from how to create light saber and laser blast effects to making authentic-looking costumes and props. Says Justin Young: “We will always be a step or two behind ILM [Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic], but I think how close we have come would shock most people.”
As for the legal issues, fan films appear to fall within a gray area between fan fiction and parody, both of which are legally protected under U.S. law. Within the fan-film scene, de facto rules keep most fan filmmakers from selling their work.
Still, at least one fan film has landed its producer in trouble with the law.
Marc Kimball, a 40-year-old animator for a video production company, took an old 8 mm movie that he had shot in 1980 of himself starring as Superman, updated the film’s effects with modern computer graphics and distributed the revised film for free on the Internet.
Lawyers representing DC Comics, the company that owns Superman, sent Kimball a cease-and-desist letter a week later. It stated that Kimball’s work was unauthorized and accused Kimball of using a DC Comics property without the express written permission of DC Comics. Kimball promptly took down the site he had set up for distributing his film, without contesting the company’s claims.
“I thought I had done everything right. The movie had original music and legal music-library stuff, an original story, original special effects,” says Kimball. Furthermore, there were no ad banners on his Web site, and he did not sell or make videotape copies of his film. He insists, “I treated Superman with respect. The only thing was I used the Superman logo, name and costume, and they shut me down.”
(When asked for its official stance on fan films based on its properties and for comment on the Kimball matter, DC Comics’ publicity manager responded to Salon: “DC Comics has a long history of energetically protecting its copyrights and trademarks. Therefore, we stand by our cease-and-desist letter in this particular case.”)
While DC Comics takes the hard line, other media giants may be opting for a more enlightened approach — drawing their fans into the fold.
Lucasfilm, the production company behind the “Star Wars” series, has an informal agreement with “Star Wars” fans: “We love our fans, and we love it when they express their creativity and enthusiasm for ‘Star Wars,’” emphasizes Lynne Hale, Lucas’ publicist. “When it does cross the line, or when we do have a problem, is when they use ‘Star Wars’ copyrighted materials for commercial use.” Otherwise, “Star Wars” fan filmmakers have the blessing of Lucas himself.
On Nov. 6, the official Web site for the “Star Wars” movies and AtomFilms announced that they will partner to launch the Star Wars Fan Film Network later this year, which will feature fan-made movies. Lucasfilm is going so far as to make sound effects — from Darth Vader’s breathing to the equally recognizable light saber hum — available from its library for fan filmmakers to use. The Star Wars Fan Film Network even plans to pay fan filmmakers through royalties generated from advertising and sponsorship related to the site.
“Soon, [copyright holders] are going to need those active fans more than ever before,” says MIT’s Jenkins. “In a world with multiple media options, video on demand and micropayments, fans may become the new gatekeepers who help direct consumers toward interesting and engaging media content. The smart media executive should figure out which direction the media-consuming public is moving, run around in front and shout, ‘Follow me.’”
What motivates most fan filmmakers is the desire to see other stories based on their favorite movie, TV series or superhero. Young says fan films can also help to supply a missing piece of the story that, without their creative efforts, might never have been pursued by the original creators.
Young points out that there are no new episodes or shows based on “Highlander,” the inspiration for his own creation. And after the critical and box-office drubbing of the last movie, “Highlander: Endgame,” the future of this franchise’s film series is in doubt. Similarly, Lucas has stated that he will not make a sequel trilogy to his “Star Wars” saga.
“I see the ‘Star Wars’ fan-film community only growing more once [Episode III is released],” says Young. He feels that fan filmmaking has grown to such a point that “if the creators won’t give you more, now you can simply create more yourself.”
Considering the extent to which digital filmmaking and broadband Internet technology have already advanced and converged, some of the more extreme possibilities of the fan-film scene may not sound so far-fetched: Will there come a time when fans “take over” TV shows, movies or other media properties? Will fan filmmakers create the next “Star Wars” trilogy in Lucas’ place?
“In a few years, there could be 50 [fan-made] ‘Star Trek’ series online,” says Young. “That is very exciting. It also forces the professionals to work harder and really pay attention to what fans want. Hey, we’re making what we want to see. If that’s not what they’re producing, then they should catch a hint.”
It takes only a few minutes for Tony Lastowka to get queasy: “I’ll start to feel nauseous and jittery. Then I get hot flashes and my vision gets hazy,” he says. “At this point, I throw up.”
The 21-year-old systems administrator in Philadelphia isn’t talking about an allergic reaction or the aftermath of a wild night of drinking. Nope, this is his thanks for creeping around abandoned missile silos and evading ruthless assassins in Half-Life’s Black Mesa Federal Research Facility or emerging victorious from a death match in Unreal Tournament. These fast-action games make him sick. Literally.
Paul Tomblin, 39, faces similar problems. A programmer and small-plane pilot, Tomblin overcame the motion sickness that plagued him during flight training, but when he’s careening through the virtual terrain of games like Half-Life and Quake III, he still gets nauseous. “Sometimes, after a long session of playing, I have to go lie down — I definitely feel like I’m going to throw up,” he says. “I also get bad headaches and a feeling like my eyeball muscles are tired.”
These two men are afflicted with “simulator sickness.” Once used to describe the motion sickness that many astronauts experience in flight simulators, the term is now commonly used by gamers whose equilibrium is upset by the realistic graphics in 3-D computer games or other virtual reality environments. The U.S. military has conducted extensive research into “sim sickness” since the 1950s, finding that 60 percent of military pilots using a flight simulator suffered at least one symptom. But as yet, there are no similar figures quantifying the number of affected gamers, and scant formal research about sim sickness and gaming.
The topic does pop up periodically on gaming sites and message boards like Slashdot.
Yet, oddly, sim sickness is rarely acknowledged by game makers, much less addressed in gaming technology. As Steve Polge, a programmer for Epic Games, which made the Unreal titles, admits: “I don’t think it’s a focus of game development [throughout the industry]. When play testers complain of simulator sickness, we try to address it if we understand how to alleviate the problem, but it’s not an issue we spend a lot of time on.”
Maybe they should. It “really is a problem,” says Henry Duh, a research associate at the University of Washington’s Human Interface Technology Lab (HIT Lab) and one of the few researchers looking into the effects of sim sickness on gamers. Most of the lab’s work focuses on virtual reality environments that involve the user wearing a head-mounted display, but the HIT Lab is also studying computer technology that creates realistic-looking, 3-D graphic worlds — similar to what most of the latest video games do.
Duh’s group is looking into the psychological and physiological effects that people experience while being in a virtual 3-D environment. “Currently, we are doing research to answer the following questions: How do people get sick in a virtual environment; what psychological mechanism is behind simulator sickness; and how [can we] alleviate it,” he says.
There are several theories about what causes sim sickness. “The well-known and widely accepted one is the ‘sensory conflict theory,’” Duh says. “In the simulated 3-D environment, you receive visual information telling you that you are moving. On the other hand, you receive information from your vestibular system [in your inner ear] telling you that you are stationary.” The mixed signals confuse your mind, which can’t decide if you’re really moving or not, and quickly make you dizzy.
Scott Miller, an owner of 3D Realms Entertainment, the makers of the Duke Nukem franchise, did his own research into this matter back in 1992, when his company released Wolfenstein 3-D — one of the granddaddies of the 3-D action game genre. The conclusion that he drew then was that sim sickness is caused by unrealistic-looking graphics. Thanks to better graphics technology, he says, it’s not a big problem these days.
Sim sickness is “not a topic I’ve heard discussed as an important matter at all,” says Miller. “I hear much less about it nowadays than several years ago. I heard about this problem the most when we released Wolfenstein 3-D, and that game had very unrealistic graphics compared to games today. I would guess that graphics realism has a little to do with it.”
Maybe. Or maybe most of the people made sick by Wolfenstein 3-D and its many descendants have just quit complaining, or even stopped playing image-rich games. “Better CPUs or video cards can reduce sickness to some degree,” Duh says. “However, if the causes are psychological or cognitive, the problem will be there still even using the better hardware.”
Indeed, Tomblin, the pilot, says he used to play the original Quake at the office and suffered no ill effects until a fellow employee installed a patch to improve the game’s graphics. For Tomblin it was a miserable improvement. Quake appeared “smoother and more 3-D looking, and I very suddenly got very ill and had to quit playing immediately,” he says.
Basically, no one knows what causes sim sickness — and nobody knows how to alleviate its symptoms either. “We don’t really understand what can be done to avoid simulator sickness,” says Epic Games’ Polge. “If we did, we would certainly try to alleviate the effects.”
Of course, game developers have proposed a number of solutions, and most are contradictory. Scaling down a game’s screen resolution in order to increase the rate at which the monitor refreshes the image seems to help some, including Lastowka. But others find that higher resolution makes them feel better.
Miller thinks a game screen that’s large enough to fill out a player’s peripheral vision could be a solution, but Duh highly doubts this. “In our experiments, a wide field of view disturbed [subjects' sense of] balance, which is a good, objective measurement of simulator sickness,” he says.
In another experiment, HIT Lab researchers found that sim sickness is prevalent when people feel a frequent need to react to the scene they’re presented with, regardless of the quality of the graphics. “When you are playing a 3-D driving game, you will get a stronger effect from turning your steering wheel a lot than just driving the car straight,” Duh offers as an example. Does that mean the people who suffer from sim sickness would be better off playing games that require less action?
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. “Frankly speaking,” says Duh, “there is no good way to reduce simulator sickness.”
But one of Duh’s colleagues has a more optimistic theory. In his “rest frame hypothesis,” Jerrold Prothero states that the human brain processes sensory information to form a mental image, in which we know which objects in our environment are stationary as we physically move through it. Our subconscious perception of these stationary objects helps us maintain a sense of balance. If this internal model is disrupted, simulator sickness can happen.
If Prothero’s theory holds true, game makers could help players reduce sim sickness by including a visually noticeable object in a game’s environment, which cannot be ignored and which doesn’t move on the screen much, if at all. That would explain why games set in a third-person viewpoint, like the Tomb Raider games, as opposed to a first-person shooter don’t cause sim sickness as readily. (Who would have thought staring at Lara Croft’s butt could be good for your health?)
In the meantime, sim sickness can leave gamers physically debilitated even after they quit playing a game that has superrealistic graphics and intense action. “I have to lie down in a dark room for several hours, or sleep for at least an hour to shake off [the effects],” Lastowka says. “Until I do that, the feeling won’t go away. Walking, watching TV or driving will cause it to get worse.”
Duh thinks that game developers should learn the basic psychological and physiological effects created by a 3-D graphic environment before drawing the first sketch of a new title. “They should develop the 3-D world based on real human perception — such as depth perception, motion parallax, etc. I have seen how a ‘wrong’ 3-D graphic world makes people very sick,” he says. “We hope that the game industry will notice this problem during the development of 3-D games because simulator sickness presents a significant problem for a number of users. Though technological causes may diminish with time, those caused by psychological and cognitive factors may not.”
As for what gamers who suffer from sim sickness severely can do in the meantime — well, not much. Even Miller of 3D Realms can only offer this: “People who have this problem can easily avoid playing games that have this effect on them.”
But that’s hardly a solution for an avid gamer like Lastowka. “The games are too much fun not to play,” he says. Like a junkie who knows the risks of his habit to his health, Lastowka has an addiction that’s simply too strong to resist. “Even when I’m lying in bed, dreading how much my head hurts, I still want to play.”
I witnessed a blood bath in the downtown Dallas offices of game developer ION Storm — though a virtual one: four young men blasting each other in a multiplayer shoot-out on a beta of the company’s premier game, Daikatana. The guys were finalists who had beaten a slew of challengers in an online demo of Daikatana earlier in the year and had been flown in by ION on the morning of Dec. 17 to slug it out in the “big play-fortress” office built of steel, glass, wood and overhead canopies dramatically perched in a tall skyscraper.
The shootout and the extravagant party that followed were held to celebrate the long-delayed release of Daikatana. There was just one problem: ION missed its pre-Christmas target date for the game, just as it had missed a calendar’s worth of scheduled launches over the previous year and a half. Since the party, talk of a mid-January launch has come and gone, and no game has been released. At this point, gamers have stopped asking when Daikatana will hit store shelves. If they think of Daikatana at all, they’re more likely to ask: When ION eventually gets this terminally late game out the door, will anyone still care?
Daikatana players battle scores of monsters across four different time periods — such as Greece 1200 B.C. and San Francisco 2030 — in a quest to find a magical katana sword, the game’s namesake. Of course, the version I saw was a beta used for the tournament — it lacked the monsters since the tournament players were playing the role of each other’s enemy — but I got a sense of its environments, which, as any first-person shooter enthusiast knows, can be as important as the characters. While most new first-person shooters have brought attention to themselves by focusing on a single environment and presenting it “realistically” down to the smallest details, Daikatana looks rather, well, dated with its disparate settings. It has more in common with earlier titles, like Quake II, which showcased a mishmash of gloriously rendered settings and themes but paid little regard to a cohesive story line.
There was a time — about three long years ago, when John Romero founded ION Storm — when gamers eagerly anticipated Daikatana, the first-person shooter Romero’s been building since he left Id Software, where he’d become famous as the designer of Doom and Quake. But while Daikatana inches ever more slowly toward gamers’ hands, competing game-makers have released technologically sophisticated titles like Half-Life (from Sierra Studios), with its “intelligent” monsters, and Unreal (created by Epic MegaGames and Digital Extremes), with superadvanced graphics and artificial intelligence-enhanced enemies.
ION, too, is hoping that artificial intelligence (AI) programming will prove a boon to Daikatana. But rather than give the power to your enemies, Romero is handing it to you: Players will be able to issue commands to two computer-controlled sidekick characters for assistance — for example, they’ll cover you as you dash into a room filled with heavily armed monsters, or you can send in a sidekick first to do the work for you. Well, that’s the idea. It sounds cool, but the logistics involved in coding even basic humanlike attack behavior into a computer-controlled character is pretty daunting — coordinating two such characters with your own play strategy is really tough.
“Friendly AI coding is the Holy Grail of video games — people have been trying for years but never quite hit it on the head,” says Sacha Howells, who writes about video games for the entertainment site CheckOut.com. He cites Sierra’s SWAT 3, in which you play the head of a SWAT team with two teams at your command, as a recent example. It’s a good game, says Howells, but it has its faults. “You issue orders on the fly, and for the most part your men respond well, but their mistakes remind you that you’re dealing with lines of code, not real people. If Daikatana’s artificial intelligence is so good you actually believe for a moment that they’re being steered by real people when the action hits, then it will be a huge leap forward.”
“Nothing I’ve seen suggests it will actually be that good,” he says, “but then again, I haven’t seen anything of the [final product].”
With its rich colors and large maps, Daikatana’s settings are artfully designed, but the game is similar in feel to those far-out fantasy settings seen in first-person shooters of the past. Its time travel premise is really a pretense to glue together the different architecture styles and environments; it doesn’t contribute anything to actual game play. Jumping forward and back through time in a single setting, a city or neighborhood, and seeing how the environment changes by the decade, or encountering a past version of one’s self, would be a far more provocative use of time travel in a first-person shooter — and a more complex game to create.
ION Storm has reportedly burned through $26 million since its creation more than three years ago, and though it has three games in development, the company has yet to release a single homemade title. (It did buy the rights to a nearly finished game developed by one of its founding members and published it in 1998 to meet a contractual obligation. Real-time strategy game Dominion: Storm over Gift 3 was a critical bomb and sold poorly.) Daikatana, regarded as the first “real” ION Storm game, was slated to take over desktops in the fall of 1998, and a notice to that effect is still up on the site of longtime Romero backer Eidos Interactive, which acquired a majority stake in ION Storm late last year.
After the acquisition, speculation abounded that Eidos would push Daikatana out the door for the holiday season — ready or not. That didn’t happen. Now, a recent e-mail newsletter from Eidos glibly announcing that the game is “coming soon to your PC in this millennium” is prompting jokes like: What century?
How did things get this way? A series of ego clashes by the top talent at ION Storm, chronicled a year ago in the Dallas Observer, may have been to blame. Former CEO Mike Wilson moved on and started a game-making company called the Gathering of Developers, or G.O.D. He was soon joined by eight key designers and programmers who had been working on Daikatana. At the time, Romero posted a note to ION Storm’s Web site expressing that these people left “at an opportune time,” since “most of the levels are in a final state [and] much of the coding has been completed for most of the game.” But those departures happened more than a year ago — and the “completed” coding has yet to appear as a game.
One of the finalists in the December Daikatana tournament, Phillip Marcus, a 20-year-old from Virginia, whose expression is locked in a permanent, asymmetrical smirk, happens to work as a first-person shooter game designer himself. He offered his insightful, albeit cynical, observation of modern game-making: “This is how you design an actual first-person shooter: You make sure the first two levels are completely beautiful so the reviewers love it. You make sure you have half-naked women in it, so the players love it. And you make sure there are big guns in it and they have big explosions. And there you go: There’s your successful first-person shooter.”
Fortunately for ION Storm and Romero, the views of Marcus’ fellow competitors are more optimistic. “Daikatana is cool from what I have seen,” said Phil Kennedy, 19, who came from Florida to play in the Daikatana Deathmatch in December. Another tournament player, Eric Hong, 21, from New York, said he preferred Daikatana over Unreal Tournament or Quake III.
The Daikatana release party, attended by approximately 300 guests, had open bars, plenty of catered Tex-Mex food and a band covering pop tunes from the ’80s and ’90s. It was quite a spread to celebrate the “release” for a game. Maybe the event was less for Daikatana and more a victory party of sorts for ION Storm itself for having survived so long.
During the evening, I asked Romero: “After what’s been a tumultuous year for you and ION Storm, what’s one of the important things you’ve learned?”
He gave a wistful chuckle and said: “Having the right people” — an acknowledgement of the fracas that erupted over the departures of Daikatana’s designers and programmers.
Amid the people dancing, eating, drinking and schmoozing, Kennedy and Hong spent most of their time at one of the computers demoing Daikatana. Between bites of food, the young men tinkered with the game, eyes locked on the monitor. They didn’t look like they were playing but, rather, studying it. “The top players do not play for fun — they play for blood! It is like any other professional sport: Money and fame control man’s direction,” said Kennedy.
Kennedy and Hong were the few at the party who actually bothered to play Daikatana. After all the hype and rumors, what ultimately matters isn’t Romero or his company, but maybe young men like these two. Is this game going to ravage the first-person shooter world or be a flop? Or will there even be enough gamers to care when Daikatana is finally released sometime “in this millennium”?
Kennedy thinks so: “I still believe Daikatana will be extremely successful. It is one of the most anticipated games on the market.”
Even Marcus is willing to concede. He’ll buy the game when it comes out, though “only out of an odd form of respect for what Romero attempted with it.”
