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1998: The irrational exuberance of 3dfx

If the idea of three video cards in one computer seems a bit outrageous today, imagine what it must have been like in 1998. That's when 3dfx introduced its add-on Voodoo2 graphics accelerator. A normal 2D VGA card was required, with the Voodoo2 taking over only when a 3D game like GLQuake was running, and to get optimal 3D performance you would actually need two Voodoo2 cards which then ran in scan-line interleave (SLI) mode. Whether you had one Voodoo2 card or two, the effect was stunning. While the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 had been doing 3D graphics for years already, the Voodoo2 marks the start of a race to faster, smoother consumer-level computer graphics the likes of which we haven't seen since.

3dfx soon found itself competing with NVIDIA and then ATI, both of whom began offering superior products which not only played GLQuake better, but did so at a lower price and in true 32-bit color. The software market itself began to rely on 3D cards, creating games which could not be played without one, like Kingpin: Life of Crime from Xatrix.

Runner-up: In November 1998 Valve software released Half-life to the acclaim of players and critics alike. The cinematic, immersive action-adventure sold over 8 million copies and represented a standard by which players would measure for years to come. It also hosted what is undoubtedly the most popular modification of a commercial game to date, Counter-strike. On this success Valve went on to build Half-life 2 and, perhaps more importantly, Steam.

1999: An online dream cast aside

Despite its ultimate failure, the Sega Dreamcast will stand as the starting point of modern online console gaming. Earlier online console services were rudimentary and required additional hardware. The Sega Dreamcast was the first home console that could go online out of the box, and the first to offer pay-to-play online games. These features clearly affected Sega's primary rival, Sony, who promised many online features for the upcoming PlayStation 2 in press reports from 1999. Once Sega abandoned the Dreamcast, Sony quietly dropped its plans for online gaming and movie distribution, and settled for a much less ambitious patchwork strategy. Sony left room for a competitor to pick up the pieces and build the next natural step in console console games. Even so, Sega's dedication to the online Dreamcast lasted through 2007 when it finally shut down its Phantasy Star Online servers.

2000: Seinfeld, the videogame

Can you sell a game about nothing? Many game developers had tackled this open problem, first posed by Nolan Bushnell in 1978, but it would take one of the greatest game designers of all time, Will Wright, to provide the proof. In 2000 he showed that you can sell a game about the minutiae of people's lives. To date, 16 million copies of his proof have been sold to consumers, along with millions of copies of corollaries (or expansion packs) which extend Wright's results.

All mathematical joshing aside, The Sims in 2000 reached the audience that many companies, like Nintendo, seek today: casual gamers. If nothing else, The Sims is a proof that the casual market exists, but like many existence proofs it fails to be practical, for it does not provide details on just how to attract and extract money from those casual gamers. In fact, The Sims Online showed that even Electronic Arts didn't know how to extend its initial success very far at all.

2001: A sandbox named Liberty

Some will say that the videogame world is too parochial, but Grand Theft Auto III proved that the industry could make products that would engage all parts of society: precocious children, inattentive parents, state and federal legislators, and of course Jack Thompson. Regrettably most of these people were blinded by the violence of GTA3 and missed the point.

What really makes Grand Theft Auto III special is not cop-killings or hooker-beatings, although those have an undeniable charm, but the feeling of standing on a street corner in a living, breathing city knowing you can choose to go just about anywhere and attempt just about anything. It's the freedom to choose to kill cops or beat hookers -- or do something else entirely, like drive a taxi or a fire engine. A player learned the ebb and flow, the night life and gang territories, the shortcuts and secrets of Liberty City much as well as he knows his own hometown. The rich, intriguing sandbox set the standard for not only its own sequels but also for countless other games from other companies.

2002: Live from Redmond

If the Dreamcast dragged consoles online in 1999, Microsoft pioneered the coherent online experience in November 2002 with Xbox Live. The idea: provide a seamless, uniform experience for any online game on the Xbox. The system uses a single user identity across all Live games, called a gamertag, which players use to connect to the system and communicate with friends. A player's gamertag also carries a reputation, an attempt to temper online misbehavior similar to eBay user feedback. Since each Xbox contained a hard drive, Microsoft could offer downloads of additional data, like extra levels, to complement Xbox Live-enabled games. Many games even included online voice communication, a technology which was still uncommon in computer games where users had been more likely to have the necessary hardware.

Of course Microsoft didn't give away their new service for free. The original starter package cost a cool $50, and included 12 months of service along with a headset. After the first year Microsoft began charging $50 for 12 months of service and bumped the starter packages to $70. By the end of 2003, Microsoft began offering Premium Content, downloadable add-ons for games for a modest price of $5 or more. Microsoft's killer-app, Halo 2, launched in 2004 with Xbox Live multiplayer and within 12 months the number of Xbox Live accounts doubled to 2 million.

Xbox Live did more than line the pockets of Microsoft, however. It made an online service essential to the modern console. Even recalcitrant Nintendo, previously dismissive of consoles online, put its new Wii online within months of its Holiday 2006 launch.

Runner-up: Microsoft wasn't the only company dreaming of selling 0s and 1s online. Valve released its Steam 1.0 client along with Counter-strike 1.4 in early 2002, sowing the seeds for what would eventually become an empire of virtual game sales. While it was initially limited to game patching, Steam eventually grew into a large content-delivery system and online community. By 2004, Steam was used to pre-install Valve's Half-life 2 before the game reached store shelves and in 2007 is selling games for independent developers and traditional publishers alike.

2003: Virtual violence begets violence?

Two horrible incidents in 2003 would influence public opinion on videogame depictions of violence and murder. On June 7th, after being booked for car theft, 18-year-old Devin Moore shot and killed two policemen and a dispatcher in the Fayette, Alabama police station. He fled in a patrol car but was later apprehended, telling the Associated Press "Life is a video game. Everybody's got to die sometime." A later report by the television news magazine 60 Minutes would make the connection to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a game that Moore had played heavily. Just weeks after Moore's crime, stepbrothers Joshua and William Buckner (ages 14 and 16, respectively) shot a .22-caliber rifle at cars on Interstate 40 in Tennessee as they claimed they'd seen in Grand Theft Auto. Their bullets killed one person and wounded another.

In both cases, the criminals were found guilty despite their claimed videogame inspirations. Separate civil suits against Take Two and other videogame companies are still pending in both the Moore and Buckner cases, however. Pressure on the industry has mounted since 2003 as they have fought restrictive legislation in a variety of states. Recently Michigan, Minnesota, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Illinois have all passed laws to limit the sale of videogames. In response, courts have struck down all of those laws, a clear victory for the industry.

Still, a cloud of suspicion hangs over videogames. Within hours of the murders at Virginia Tech this year Jack Thompson was on Fox News attempting to make a connection to videogames, even though no such connection apparently exists.

2004: Married to the company

Working conditions for videogame developers were deplorable before November 2004, but when EA_Spouse, an anonymous blogger, explained the cost in plainly human terms the world took notice. She called Electronic Arts, her spouse's employer, a "money factory" that granted time "off for good behavior" and thereby unleashed an outpouring of grief and disgust across the industry. Electronic Arts and many other companies soon found themselves rethinking development crunch strategies while simultaneously trying to contain class action suits filed by their employees.

By 2005 EA had settled one such case brought by graphic artists for $15.6 million, and then in 2006 negotiated a $14.9 million settlement in a similar case brought by programmers and engineers. In June 2007 Sony Computer Entertainment America settled a February 2005 case with a group of current and former employees for unpaid overtime to the tune of $8.5 million. Activision is currently being sued by California employees for overtime pay denied them because the company claims they are exempt under state law.

Since the original outrage, some changes have apparently been made. The original EA_Spouse, since identified as Erin Hoffman, has recently said "From what I understand, the [EA] Los Angeles studio [where her husband, Leander Hasty had worked] has made a really big turnaround".

2005: Everyone wants to be a Hero

After the abstract music games FreQuency and Amplitude failed to take off, developer Harmonix took a more familiar road to fame: the electric guitar. Despite minimal fanfare and a premium $80 price, Guitar Hero became the sleeper hit of 2005. With a plastic guitar controller and a truckload of popular music tracks, gamers snapped up as many copies of the game as the publisher, Red Octane, could provide. Dance and karaoke games had been around for years, but with nothing quite approaching the popularity of Guitar Hero. The game represents an essential realization: singing or performing isn't enough on its own. Instead, people want to be a star, and the little plastic guitar gives them that.

Activision quickly bought up the rights and Guitar Hero II for PlayStation 2 launched to record sales during Holiday 2006, priced $10 higher than its predecessor. Then in 2007 the Xbox 360 received its own version of Guitar Hero II (priced at a hefty $90) and the PlayStation 2 version received a compilation of 1980s music. Month after month, the Guitar Hero games take spots in the top 10 software sales.

The effect on the market has been profound. Electronic Arts quickly cut a publishing deal with Harmonix, the original Guitar Hero developer, and will soon crank the amp up to eleven with Rock Band. More importantly, the revenues from Guitar Hero have made Activision the largest third-party publisher in the industry, displacing Electronic Arts which had held that title since the early 00s. Combined with Nintendo's moves in 2006, Guitar Hero marks two major shifts in the industry. First, developers have taken steps away from traditional videogame controllers and toward more intuitive models. Second, Nintendo and Activision are now in the controlling positions that Sony and EA held for several years.
2006: Why didn't the Wii launch with a lightsaber game?

Nintendo is used to skepticism. With the exception of the Game Boy, they've had difficulty attracting support outside their core constituency since the time of the Nintendo 64 and Virtual Boy. The industry initially looked with doubt upon the Nintendo DS but is now falling all over itself to cash in on the handheld's success. With a decade's experience as underdog, only Nintendo could have presented the unusually monickered Wii and its motion controller to the world so proudly, so brazenly. And, as with Nintendo's faith in the DS, they knew precisely what they were doing.

You need look no further than Sony's own palindromic Sixaxis controller -- which also responds to motion -- and Microsoft's pledge to appeal to children and casual gamers to realize that Nintendo is in the industry's driver seat. The Wii's intuitive controller has opened up the system to a giant audience of customers, that majority of human beings who don't like hunkering on the couch tapping out abstract patterns on a button-studded hunk of plastic. Wii Sports, the pack-in game, is instantly understood by everyone, from little 3-year-olds up to great grandparents. Even older games like Resident Evil 4 are getting new life with judicious Wii controller integration. This isn't theoretical appeal, however. The Wii continues to sell as many systems as Nintendo can put on the shelves, and could sell in its first year as many systems as the Xbox 360 will have sold in two.

Now the industry is struggling to understand Nintendo's success. Is the market really growing? Are casual games the future? Are the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 akin to the final glorious generation of Cretaceous dinosaurs? Ask us again in 30 years.

Interesting...