Playing Mogul - Vide Games as Art - Bruno of Atari
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/21/magazine...nted=print&position=
Playing Mogul - Vide Games as Art - Bruno of Atari By JONATHAN DEE
December 21, 2003
No appointment with Bruno Bonnell ever begins on time, and here's why. Our first meeting takes place just after Bonnell, the French C.E.O. of Atari , has returned from a 15-city, cross-country ''road show'' designed to rally skeptical investors behind a new issue of Atari stock. The company founded in 1972 (and bankrupt in 1998) was scooped up by Bonnell three years ago as part of an acquisition binge. There was a great deal at stake for him -- and for the company that once was to video games what Ford was to cars -- and so the first question posed to him is, simply, How did it go?
''Before I go into your question,'' he replies, ''can I just go back a little?'' And I think, Fine, he wants to contextualize his answer with a quick overview of Atari's checkered history -- or perhaps of the booming video-game industry as a whole -- but no. He means to go back to the age of the caveman.
''At that time,'' Bonnell says, ''they had two ways of entertainment. One was the chief of the tribe telling about the hunting of the day -- how big the tiger's teeth were, how brave this guy was when he went to hit the mammoth with the stick or whatever. And that was to impress the crowd. The fun, the thrills, were coming from this impression that you got from outside. Then they moved into painting on the cave walls, then writing stories, then the stories started moving, like cinema, and the cinema went to television. Still the same system. The media of impression.''
Born 45 years ago in Algeria, Bonnell now divides his time between New York and France. He speaks an excellent but heavily accented English. Transcription cannot do justice to his idiosyncratic pronunciation of a word like ''gratuitous,'' or ''ethical,'' or ''Xbox.''
''The second way of entertainment they had was to take two sticks, beat them together and dance around the fire,'' he continues. ''And here the thrill was not about being impressed but about expressing yourself. That moves into the invention of musical instruments, getting different emotions from different styles of music, growing the music experience into opera or whatever. And that really leads into the video game. Playing with a joystick is basically the same move as playing a piano; the thrill is not what you get from outside, but what you express from inside. Whether it's a piano or a chessboard or a joypad, that's your technology, and you express yourself through it.
''Very often, people talk about the video-game business from a pure financial point of view. Numbers, percentages, market share, all those subjects -- we don't care. And the mass market, they don't care either. What they want is to see if, at the end of the day, this form of entertainment is going to be a part of their life or not. The answer is yes. Big time.''
As he gets rolling, Bonnell twists around in his seat, as if barely able to contain his energy. Compact, round-shouldered, with a clean-shaven head and tiny wire-rim glasses, he resembles a human bullet.
''The golden age of movies is gone. That's it. It's a fact. What they do today to survive is they multiply the special effects to catch up with what the kids want, because they've seen it in the incredible universes of these video games. It used to be, 'Well, let's make a movie and then make a video game version as a licensed product.' The next step to this will be the collaboration between the stories, between the complexity of their stories and the personal expression of the video game. This product doesn't exist yet, but it will. Think about this kind of game, where you'll be in a kind of Star Wars environment, you'll have X thousand people playing together at the same time; you could just spend your day watching the screen and waiting for the stories to happen, or else you can decide to enter the game and take your own little path, all in real time. Or let's say you see a movie and your character is in the jungle, there's a snake there, you see the snake but he hasn't seen it, he's smoking a cigarette, talking to his girlfriend. You're like: 'The snake! The snake!' And the character on the screen says: 'A snake? Where?' But if you choose not to say anything, then he just goes on doing what he's doing. The movie people don't anticipate this revolution. They better watch their back. We're right there. Big time.
''Wake up! Something is happening there! I was trying to convince my boy to learn Chinese. You know what his answer was? 'Why do I care about learning Chinese? By the time I master Chinese, we'll have computer phones where you'll be able to talk in French or English and it will be translated into Chinese in real time.' And he is right! I am wrong! I mean, who cares about speaking in Chinese, because we'll be able to communicate like in 'Star Trek.' We'll have automatic translation, and we'll be able to talk. And you know the wonder of this? This is all video games. This is why it's so interesting. And we haven't even touched the depth of all the education that you can derive from there. But just in terms of fun, that's where we're going. So all this is a big loop to get back to your question.''
Question? Oh, right: the road show. Turns out it was a big success; Atari recapitalized to the tune of $200 million, wiped out all its toxic long-term debt practically overnight and lives to fight for market share another day. It's difficult to imagine even those roomfuls of analysts and number-crunchers not bending at least a little bit beneath the charismatic intensity of Bonnell's vision. (''You can't send him out there with a script,'' says Nancy Bushkin, director of corporate communications for Atari, ''because that's just not Bruno.'') As with anyone who sees the future, you might start out listening with a little smile on your face, but in the end it's awfully hard not to pay attention.
as there ever been a cultural sea change as stealthy as the one represented by the rise of interactive entertainment? To anyone who came of age after, say, the introduction of the first Sony Playstation in 1995, video gaming is every bit as central to the pop-entertainment universe as movies or music, while to anyone older than that, it seems like one of those strange customs indigenous to the country of the young, in which the revenge fantasies of lonely teenage geeks are harmlessly siphoned off in some vaguely Dungeons-and-Dragons-like fantasy setting. No one would think of denying that video games are big, but few grown-ups outside the business have an understanding of just how big they've become.
Globally, the industry earned $28 billion in 2002, and in the United States, it's growing at around 20 percent a year. According to Fortune magazine, Americans will spend more time playing video games this year -- about 75 hours on average -- than watching rented videos and DVD's. A nationwide survey found that the percentage of last year's college students who had ever played video games was 100. Two games from the industry leader Electronic Arts, Madden NFL Football and FIFA Soccer, have each earned in excess of a billion dollars. (This year's Madden edition made more than $200 million alone.) For new and established musicians alike, games are the new radio; landing a spot on a video-game soundtrack is arguably more prestigious than landing a similar spot in a movie, a function not just of sales figures but also of the fact that the average Madden NFL 2004 buyer, for instance, will spend 100 hours in front of the game. Each statistic is more mind-boggling than the last, and together they certainly pose a challenge to conventional wisdom about which of these media is the tail and which is the dog.
For the completely uninitiated, a primer: There are games made to be installed and played on your personal computer, and then there are games that require a separate machine, or ''platform.'' The best known and most widely used platform is Sony's Playstation 2, and Sony has sold about 60 million units worldwide. In 2001, Microsoft, seeing which way the wind was blowing, introduced its own game platform, known as Xbox. Because it contains its own hard drive (thus cutting down on a game's ''loading'' time, and also making it more easily adaptable to online play), it's considered the superior machine -- at least until Playstation 3 debuts, probably in 2005 or 2006, to be followed thereafter by Xbox 2. Sony is also poised to introduce a portable version, the PSP (''the interactive Walkman,'' Bonnell calls it), to compete with Nintendo's ubiquitous GameBoy hand-held system and Nokia's new, hacker-bedeviled N-Gage.
Then there is the holy grail of gaming, the target at which the arrow of technology is squarely aimed: competition online, in real time, against friends or total strangers in remote locations. Known by the unwieldy abbreviation M.M.O.R.P.G. (''massively multiplayer online role-playing game''), this experience is available but has yet to catch fire; Xbox Live suffers from a dearth of game offerings, and even EA's phenomenal Sims franchise has sold poorly in its online version. Bonnell is more cautious than most about committing too many resources to this future too early; you can have the fanciest software in the world, he says, but until broadband access has really saturated the market, information will travel back and forth too slowly to make the customer's massively multiplayer experience satisfying enough to pay for. Still, the most popular current M.M.O.R.P.G., Lineage, has four million subscribers worldwide, primarily in South Korea, where the game is an outright phenomenon. In the long term, the revenue potential of online role-playing games is generally viewed as bottomless.
It's a gold rush, in which the very prosperity of the landscape is what makes it treacherous to inhabit; and so, over the past five years, Bonnell's unapologetic, Amazon.com-like survival strategy has been to get huge quickly and at virtually any cost. ''It's been a turbulent few years for Atari,'' says Edward Williams, an interactive-entertainment analyst with the investment firm Harris Nesbitt Gerard. ''But the critical piece for them was to reduce the debt burden'' -- which the new stock-issue accomplished -- ''and so I would say at this point they're in a pretty good position.''
Bonnell naturally agrees. ''If you look at the structure of our business today,'' he says, ''you have Electronic Arts running the pack, like 20 percent market share, and then you have a pack of five companies -- Activision, Atari, Take-Two, THQ, Konami -- which are all fighting in the range of 5 to 7 percent market share. At the end of the day, you'll end up with probably four to five players each controlling something between 15 and 20 percent market share, and probably a significant number of smaller players around. To be there, to be in this league, is critical. Because I believe that the big will be bigger and then the small will be smaller. And mechanically, if you're not in the right league -- it's like winning the Tour de France, right? You have to be in the first pack to have a chance. If you are too far behind, you can't really come back.''
It's a credo he reiterated earlier this fall at a yearly New York gathering known as the Playtime Conference, in which various new-media entities mount a series of sober pep rallies in front of an audience of institutional investors. As always, he spoke off the cuff, with a minimum of PowerPoint-ish bells and whistles, and in the end he charmed the room.
''We like the stock,'' whispered an analyst sitting next to me in the Grand Hyatt ballroom. ''It's a great story. We just started coverage yesterday.''
A half-hour earlier, in the standing-room-only ballroom next door, the chief financial officer of the mighty Electronic Arts offered his own vision of the future; globalization was its major theme. The atmosphere was like a war room; the numbers may not have been news to this audience, but they command respect just the same, and as the C.F.O. spoke in his quiet, even voice, the hush in the room was awesome. Bar graphs flashed across the video screen -- Return on Invested Capital, Profit Growth Rate -- and the surprising thing was not how EA dominated its competition in all these categories, but who, at this point, they consider their ''competition'' to be. Those little, squat bars next to EA's great big towers weren't representing Atari, Sega or Take-Two. Instead they symbolized Walt Disney, Time Warner and Viacom. That's the new playground that the self-styled ''Yankees of the industry'' are sizing up. ''We're not trying to win a championship,'' EA worldwide Studios president Don Mattrick tells me later. ''We're trying to build a dynasty.''
Anyone who thinks that just getting into the video-game business is a license to print money need only consider the history of Atari, and of how Bonnell came to own the name. An electrical engineer named Nolan Bushnell founded Atari (a Japanese word that approximates the chess term ''check'') in 1972, in Santa Clara, Calif., with two partners. Bushnell's initial investment was $250. The company's first full-time employee was a 17-year-old receptionist who used to baby-sit for Bushnell's kids, and its second was a young engineer named Al Alcorn, who, later that same year, invented what would become the primordial mother of video games, Pong. (One of Alcorn's own subsequent hires was a scruffy teenage dropout named Steve Jobs.) Four years later, Bushnell sold Atari to Warner Communications for $28 million. Two years after that, he was forced out of the company.
Despite its early leadership not just in the field of games but also in home computers themselves, Atari was, over the next two decades, mismanaged right into the ground. It was sold off in 1984, and again in 1996, until finally the Atari Corporation became the property of Hasbro Interactive after its parent company at the time, a disk-drive manufacturer called JTS, filed for bankruptcy.
Meanwhile, back in France around 1983, Bonnell and a high-school classmate wrote a primitive but seminal video game called Autoroute, in which a player guides a frog across a busy highway (similar to another popular game called Frogger). He parlayed that success into a gaming company called Infogrames, which over the next 15 years mushroomed into Europe's largest electronic-games publisher. As it grew, so, too, did Bonnell's ambitions for it as a global force; the biggest market, though, was still across the ocean in the U.S. So Infogrames began buying up American gaming concerns, including, in 2000, Hasbro Interactive -- primarily, it seems, because owning HI meant owning the rights to the Atari name. With that, Bonnell's company had an American pedigree. He went right on buying up game studios throughout the U.S. and bringing them under the new Atari umbrella. Has it worked? Infogrames still has some vultures circling it -- less than a year ago it laid off 280 of its 460 employees in France -- but Atari's market share has risen by 77 percent since 2001.
Unquestionably, Atari's boldest and most controversial venture under Bonnell was Enter the Matrix, the video-game version of the three-volume sci-fi juggernaut directed by the brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski. Released in 2003 on the same day as the second movie in the trilogy, the game worked off a 244-page script written by the Wachowskis themselves, and included scenes shot on the movie's sets and with the movie's actors, but exclusive to the game. It came closer than any game ever has to realizing Bonnell's own vision of the equivalent interplay of a story you passively watch and a story you choose to enter; it was also one of the best-selling games of the year. The controversy has to do with what Bonnell reportedly paid for it. Not only were other game publishers shocked by his agreement with the Wachowskis (considered so shamefully generous that it was posted on the Smoking Gun Web site), but in his single-minded pursuit of the game, Bonnell spent some $50 million to buy the entire studio, Shiny Entertainment, that already held the Matrix license.
To top it all off, Enter the Matrix received generally poor reviews from hard-core gamers. Still, Williams says that ''in general it probably helped them. It gave them a higher-profile property. It remains to be seen how beneficial it was economically. The acquisition of the studio was more than just the one game, so you have to see how that pans out over time.''
Mattrick offers a more interesting, if less sanguine, prediction for Atari's immediate future. ''Bruno is definitely provocative, incredibly passionate, an adventurer at heart,'' he says. ''The biggest challenge he's facing is that there's only one Bruno inside that company.''
hen Atari acquires a new company, it generally tries to keep the talent happy by not forcing anyone to relocate. So a significant part of Bonnell's schedule consists of traveling to these offices and development studios -- in Dallas, Seattle, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Newcastle, in northern England -- to get updates and offer input. The largest studio, employing about 120 people, is in Beverly, a suburb of Boston; the office building itself, deep in the woods off Route 128, came as part of the Hasbro Interactive acquisition. Bonnell visits there every six weeks or so.
When I arrive at the Beverly office (Bonnell has been in Boston for a few days already, holed up with his son, who is preparing to take the SAT), the first thing I see is a kind of vindication of Bonnell's scrupulous hyping of the reborn Atari brand: the sign at the end of the driveway, with its distinctively retro logo, has been stolen. The office is as unprepossessing inside as out: on each of its three floors, offices run around the perimeter, enclosing a warren of small, low-walled cubicles festooned with personal photos and company advertising. The days when scruffy dropouts could show up and be hired are long gone.
At a conference table shaped like a giant staple, framed by windows looking out into a wall of past-peak foliage, Bonnell receives a daylong parade of game designers and marketing executives. The designers themselves conform only vestigially to the computer-age stereotype of the socially unskilled, Cheetos-eating genius, although they are all male, and at least one of them (who demonstrates, on a giant video screen, his in-progress game about global warfare) looks young enough to trigger a child-labor investigation. But theirs is no longer some marginalized culture of renegades. Some of the industry's best-known, name-above-the-title game designers (like Sid Meier, creator of the classic Civilization series) get a movie star's reception at trade shows and conventions. Perhaps their status as the technocultural advance guard is more widely acknowledged now, or perhaps it's just the fact that this is the one day every six weeks when they have to shine themselves up and impress the C.E.O.; but in a roomful of corporate honchos, the code writers don't stick out the way they used to. Still, when a bug appears in another in-progress game (a character walks past his airplane's control panel and his legs disappear), the glazed, deep-focus expression on the young designer's unlined face clearly says that he can't wait to get away from all of us and figure out where the error is.
Meanwhile, the mostly female marketing executives talk about how to further saturate the preschool market (a sample PowerPoint exhortation: ''Emphasize: PC Games Are Good for Your Kids'') and how to promote a new title called Kya: Dark Lineage, considered ground-breaking in that it CREATED=1072164417
