The Infinite Arcade
Forget plastic discs. Downloading games to your console is the new way to play – and it could revive the industry.
Stephen Cakebread dreamed of making games. Really big games. He toiled away on medi-cal software until he landed a gig at Bizarre Creations, the UK developer behind the Project Gotham Racing franchise, a driving simulator for the Xbox. PGR is famous for its meticulously rendered 3-D vehicles and hyper-detailed environments so rich they can barely be squeezed onto a single DVD.
But being a cog in the 30-person PGR machine didn’t much satisfy Cakebread, now 26. Each title required him to spend hours squashing bugs in the code. “I was getting bored,” he says. So, in 2003, with a budget of approxi-mately nothing, he designed and programmed a game of his own. It was the opposite of the photo-realistic PGR games; it was more like Asteroids, the arcade classic. Players pilot a two-dimensional spaceship around the screen, blasting the hell out of incoming squares, circles, and diamonds. He called it Geometry Wars.
Fast-forward to November 2005. The new Xbox 360 console launched, and so did two games that Cakebread had worked on. Players mobbed stores and happily shelled out $50 for Project Gotham Racing 3. Meanwhile, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved was a best-selling title on Microsoft’s pay-per-download service, Xbox Live Marketplace. The tweaked upgrade of Cakebread’s baby – same simple shapes, now with prettier explosions – was available to anyone with 400 Microsoft Points (around $5) and a broadband connection.
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved has a fraction of the total sales of PGR3. But Cakebread’s simple hobby project is at the forefront of a new trend: digital distribution of console games. From 2004 to 2005, console disc sales in the US dropped by $700 million, according to market research firm NPD Group. Meanwhile, game companies earned $143 million from online console gaming in 2005, a figure JupiterResearch predicts will grow to $2 billion domestically by 2011. At a panel discussion this February, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of interactive entertainment, Peter Moore, described the future of gaming: “Years from now, the concept of driving to the store to buy a plastic disc with data on it and driving back and popping it in the drive will be ridiculous,” he said. “We’ll tell our grandchildren we did that, and they’ll laugh at us.”
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