Wildest Birthday Party EVER
The 1996 Computer Game Developer's Conference had just ended. The big news was DirectX 2 - which now included "Direct3D," an API that promised to allow the poor PC game developers to not have to write custom code for every single piece of brand-new 3D hardware that was coming down the pipe. So immediately after the conference, Microsoft was holding another big party and one-day conference about DirectX.

Early History of Windows Gaming
They did this, because they needed to get game developers on their side. See, the gamers - normally the early adopters of bleeding-edge technology - were mistrustful of Windows 95. After all, initial attempts to get anything approaching a cutting-edge game running on Windows 3.1 had proved disasterous. It was adequate for games of chess and solitaire, but little else. The gamers largely ignored Windows 3.1 and stuck with DOS - Microsoft's original operating system. The one they didn't want to support anymore. The one that gamers wouldn't pay to upgrade anymore.

Only very late in Windows 3.1's lifecycle had Microsoft released WinG, a gaming library that actually made Windows 3.1 adequate for gaming. They managed to get some old arcade games running in a Window - an improvement, but gamers still weren't too impressed at seeing 15-year-old titles finally running under Windows. They were still skeptical.

In 1994, cutting edge was Doom. It was only after John Carmack managed to port Doom to WinG that gamers began to see a glimmer of hope, and think that abandoning DOS might not be a horrible thing for gaming after all. But they needed more convincing. And for that, they needed more games. They needed 3D games, running better than they had in the DOS days.

Alex St. John (now the head of WildTangent) was Microsoft's DirectX Evangelist. Yes, Evangelist is an official position at Microsoft. He managed to convince Microsoft's marketing department to approve a sum of around 1-2 million dollars for this big party and conference to get game developers (and, thus, the gamers) on the side of Windows 95 and DirectX. At least that was his claim when he initially pushed for the party. The truth of the matter was, Microsoft was winning the propoganda war, and game developers were already starting to align themselves with the new platform. So he would be unlikely to get this chance again.

So he threw a really big party. A toga party.

And it just so happened that this party - which my company paid for me to attend - fell on my birthday.

TOGA! TOGA! TOGA!
My wife was very understanding of delaying our family celebration so I could stay on the road and attend this event which would be so critical to my work. (Well, okay, it never was, though I was supposed to be working on PC ports of our titles, they pretty much left me on Playstation stuff until DirectX 5 was the big thing).

Microsoft rented out the basketball stadium at San Jose State University for this event, and chartered busses to take us from the CGDC venue out to the party. As we checked in, they issued us a toga, two cans of Silly String, and a bunch of game tokens minted out with the DirectX logo to be used in the "colliseum" for "the games."

And oh, my, what a party. Donning our togas over our game-conference clothes (CGDC / GDC attire is pretty much jeans-and-T-shirt), we entered "Rome."

First, we got to walk past one of two LIVE LIONS, kept in check by its trainer. Ahead and below, in the center of the stadium, was the food and alcohol. The food was modern approximation of Roman party food - big turkey drumsticks, grapes (of course!), and various other items for over-indulgence by hungry game developers. I can't comment on the alcohol, as I didn't drink any, but it seemed that over-indulgence was planned there, too.

Around the perimeter of the stadium were The Games. Pretty much everything you'd expect to see at a local fair or carnival in an indoor venue. They had human bowling, where one person would get inside a cage-like ball and get rolled into a set of giant pins by a partner. They had tons of inflatable obstacle courses and race tracks, the big sumo-suit wrestling games, and so forth. They also had various "vendors" of game companies that had already signed up as partners to do Win-95 / DirectX games. They'd sell merchandise like T-shirts and hats for the coins that we were issued. The trick was, you were to gamble coins at the games at the games, and thus increase your spending power. In reality, that was really only an issue for the first hour --- once vendors started running out of goodies (and attendees started running out of sobriety), it got kinda sloppy and nobody really cared anymore.

I managed to score a Mechwarrior 2 hat and an ATI sweatshirt.

The Emperor Arrives
Rumors filled the air that some "royalty" or "The Emperor" from Microsoft (keeping vaguely with the Ancient Roman theme, I guess) would be appearing later in the evening. People hoped for Bill Gates himself. And so they stocked up on Silly String. Apparently, Microsoft had purchased 24,000 cans of Silly String for this event! They couldn't give enough cans away. When the trumpets began to blair, and the imperial procession came out, the game developers were ready - armed with multiple cans of silly string.

It was Alex St. John being borne on a litter, with several attendees dressed in roman attire. By the time they got to the stage at one corner of the stadium, Alex St. John was a MOUND of silly-string, and his attendants were cloaked in smelly multicolor robes of the stuff. St. John managed to dig himself out of the pile, though he was still draped in the residue sticking to his hair and clothes. He offered a few comments which I can't remember, and then aired a video of Bill Gates pretending to be the Doom Guy. This video was first shown at a party the previous year - and until it was leaked out onto the Internet last year, it hadn't been seen since.

(It's hard to imagining Bill or any other major corporate figure doing this in the post-Columbine world... ah, those were more innocent times).

Aftermath
The next day, Alex St. John appeared in front of the conference of hung-over game developers (he himself was looking a bit hung-over), and offered a few comments and some demo presentations of what was happening in the DirectX world.

He told us that during the festivities, one of the lions escaped. It didn't escape for long - it's handler managed to get it back on it's leash pretty quickly - but he said he was plagued all night with nightmare visions of newspaper headlines reading, "Drunken Game Developer Mauled By Silly-Stringy Lion."

In the future, he said he would remember that booze, gamers, silly string, and live lions should NEVER mix. Not that he could figure how he could convince Microsoft to part with that much money to let him throw a party like that again.

He also showed some impressive demos. The first was one of my favorite games (at the time, and still): Mechwarrior 2. Being played in right then and there OVER THE INTERNET against another player out in Redmond. Sure, that's old hat now, where you get dozens of players teaming up on a server of thousands on a raid against a dragon in a persistant world in full 3D real-time glory. But back then, this was pretty novel.

The other demo was a little "virtual reality" chatroom (yes, "Virtual Reality" and "Cyberspace" were terms still in use in 1996... it's only after they became commonplace and non-science-fictiony that they went out of favor). Chatting in real-time with voice over the Internet. Again - commonplace and the maker of businesses today. But pioneering stuff at the time. All done with the miracle of DirectX.

A scant few months later, I'd go on to play Mechwarrior 2 regularly over the Internet through a little program called KALI that convinced your computer than the Internet was just one big LAN. The game played horribly, ill-suited to deal with the lag issues of the Internet as opposed to a local LAN. But we still had a blast playing it.

But those were wild, pioneering-feeling times back in 1996. The games industry was a lot different from how it is now. PC games were hot, 3D and Internet play were going to usher in a new era of gaming, and a whole bunch of BIG MONEY were placing high-roller stakes on game developers to try to push the industry into maturity and fabulous levels of profitability.

I doubt we'll see times like that again - at least not in video games. But for a while, it was a party. And Microsoft threw me the wildest birthday party ever!

Labels: retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:00 AM (Permalink)