Grand Theft Auto should make great TV – but so would these gaming backstories

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/06/grand-theft-auto-tv-drama-video-game-industry

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So far, film and television writers have managed to completely overlook the games business, a $60bn a year creative industry that has produced 40 years of sex, drugs and intrigue. Well OK – mostly intrigue. But in April, however, we all discovered that the BBC is planning a drama about Grand Theft Auto publisher Rockstar and its legal face-offs with loose cannon lawyer Jack Thompson. There is considerable star power involved too, with Daniel Radcliffe set to play Rockstar co-founder Sam Houser and Bill Paxton lined up as anti-gamers campaigner, Thompson.

So now the lid has been prised from the Pandora’s Box that is the games industry, what other juicy controversies could be mined for TV material? Here are eight candidates.

Atari vs Magnavox

The story: In 1972, Atari launched its Pong arcade game, effectively kickstarting the global video game industry. However, two years later, tech rival Magnavox, creator of the Odyssey home console, filed a lawsuit against its competitor alleging that Atari had infringed several of its patented technologies. It was the first major video game court case, and could have destroyed Atari if the two hadn’t settled for the comparatively low sum of $700,000, which paved the way for the hugely successful Atari 2600 console. The rest is video game history.

The characters: Basically a who’s who of the early video game scene in the US with Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari, Allan Alcorn, the designer of Pong, and Ralph Baer, the engineer behind the Magnavox Odyssey, who’s widely nicknamed “the father of video games”. You could even sneak in cameo appearances for Apple founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, who helped design Atari’s Pong follow up, Breakout.

The TV drama: The Pong Direction: how one courtroom decided the fate of the games industry. Starring Dominic West as Bushnell and Bob Balaban [Gosforth Park, Grand Budapest Hotel] as Baer.

The death of Imagine Software

The story: Liverpool-based games developer Imagine Software was one of the UK industry’s biggest success stories in the early 1980s, through home-computer hits such as Arcadia and Ah Diddums. However, after signing a multimillion pound contract with publisher Marshall Cavendish, the company descended into artful hubriswhen it announced (and heavily advertised) two “mega games” – Bandersnatch and Psyclapse – that would never be released. Steeped in debt, the company was finally raided by bailiffs – a scene captured by a BBC film crew, which was ironically making a documentary about the studio’s success.

The characters: Founders Mark Butler and David Lawson were the archetypal 80s whizz kids with a penchant for fast cars and custom-built motorbikes. Bruce Everiss was the operations manager who desperately tried to keep the office running while the BBC crew discovered the cracks in Imagine’s PR story, and Ian Hetherington was the elusive financial manager who would later set up pivotal PlayStation studio, Psygnosis.

The TV Drama: Imagine Everything, the tale of ambitious young Liverpudlians who discovered the big time and blew it all in Thatcher’s Britain. The film crew angle adds a nice meta touch. Frankie Goes to Hollywood soundtrack. It writes itself, quite frankly.

Nintendo vs Sega

The story: In 1993, horrified by violent hits like Mortal Kombat and Night Trap, senator Joseph Lieberman called for an official hearing into the video game industry. Warring console manufacturers Sega and Nintendo were called in for questioning, and the two brought their increasingly bitter fight to the senate commission. Nintendo of America president Howard Lincoln used his time in the witness box to accuse Sega of deliberately marketing its horror title Night Trap at children, while a series of psychologists and educators criticised the medium in general. The result was the formation of a video games rating board and a standard age-ratings system.

The characters: This is essentially the Rumble in the Jungle, but in a courtroom and with Lincoln versus Sega of America’s representative Bill White rather than Ali vs Foreman. Lieberman provides a censorious Emperor Palpatine-style presence in the background.

The TV Drama: “Court of Kombat”. The wider console war between Sega and Nintendo is already the subject of an upcoming movie from Seth Rogen, so the TV drama could focus entirely on the tense courtroom-style hearings, when a controversial industry was brought to heel by terrified conservatives.

Codemasters vs Nintendo

The story: In 1990, West Midlands-based game developer and publisher Codemasters created a product named the Game Genie, which could be plugged into a Nintendo Entertainment System console, allowing owners to run a variety of cheat codes. Unsurprisingly, Nintendo wasn’t happy, and a court battle with Game Genie’s US distributor Galoob followed. Eventually, the judge found in favour of Codemasters and Galoob and the Game Genie became a multimillion dollar business with versions release on several other major consoles of the day.

The characters The key players here are the founders of Codemasters, the then twenty-something brothers, David and Richard Darling. The interesting stuff is how their coding teams circumnavigated patent laws by painstakingly reverse engineering the Nintendo hardware and keeping detailed notes of the process. It’s basically the Enigma Code of gaming.

The TV drama: “Out of the Lantern: the Game Genie story”, starring – yes, I’m going to go there – Jedward as the Darlings. Writers could also weave in a related sub-plot – at about the same time as the Galoob case, Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins managed to bypass the security chipset in the new Sega Mega Drive game cartridges. He threatened to tell the rest of the industry how to manufacture their own carts (thereby saving them millions in licensing costs) if Sega did not give EA favourable terms to develop on its system. Sega relented. Jon Hamm as Trip Hawkins, obviously. (And there could be a cameo role for ... me! I helped write and test all the Game Genie codes for the Game Boy. True story.)

The banning of Carmageddon

The story: Developed by Isle of Wight-based studio Stainless Games, Carmageddon is the notorious 1997 driving sim that gave players extra points for running over pedestrians. The BBFC refused to grant the game an age rating when it was submitted, effectively banning it until the blood and gore was removed. However, publisher SCi refused to give in and appealed the decision; 10 months later, the BBFC was forced to provide an age certificate and Carmageddon was released uncut in the UK.

The characters: Stainless Media was (and perhaps still is) an eccentric bunch, led by co-founders Patrick Buckland and Neil Barnden, who had little regard for industry conventions. The game included a range of technical innovations, including destructible environments, while the pedestrian death animations were tested by actually driving a Chevy station wagon into the office handyman, Tony, and filming the results.

The TV Drama: Car Trouble: the story of Britain’s most controversial video game, with the combined casts of The League of Gentlemen and The Inbetweeners as the Stainless Media management and staff.

The rise and fall of Gizmondo

The story: Swedish tech firm Tiger Telematics pitched its ridiculously-named Gizmondo device as a cutting edge handheld gaming console complete with multimedia and text messaging capabilities. However, the company’s founders quickly burned through millions in VC funding, renting shop spaces in Regent Street, organising ornate parties and hiring Jenson Button to star in TV adverts. Launched in 2005, the Gizmondo failed spectacularly, the company collapsed and executive Bo Stefan Eriksson went on to serve prison sentences in the US and Sweden.

The characters: Founder Carl Freer would be the obvious star – if it wasn’t for his colleague Stefan Eriksson one of three key executives linked by newspaper reports to the Swedish mafia. Eriksson later famously crashed a rare Ferarri Enzo on a Californian highway and tried to blame the incident on someone else.

The TV drama: This one has everything – sex, drugs, gangsters, multimillion dollar investment deals and crashed cars. It’s got HBO written all over it. Obviously, we’re thinking True Blood star Alexander Skarsgård as Eriksson.

The making of Daikatana

The story: When Doom co-creators John Romero and Tom Hall left Id Software to set up their own studio, they thought big. Really big. The result was Ion Storm, based in a state-of-the-art $2m office at the top of the luxurious Chase Tower in Dallas. Romero’s pet project would be Daikatana, an ambitious shooter set in Feudal Japan, that would go on to arrive three years late after millions of dollars of investment from UK publisher Eidos. When it finally arrived in 2000, the initially cutting edge title had been massively superseded by rivals like Quake III, Counter-Strike and Hitman.

The characters: John Romero is the star of course, but let’s not overlook the likes of chief operating officer Bob Wright who split from the company and then sued it in 1998, or designer Todd Porter who allegedly led a coup to displace chief executive officer Mike Wilson and install himself as chief executive.

The TV Drama: “Storm Warning”? “Imperfect Storm”? Whatever, the seething power struggles at the heart of the company would provide the focal point, with Daikatana providing the creative background. Mad Men meets Spinal Tap.

The Launch of Xbox One

The Story: When Microsoft invited the world’s press to its Redmond campus in May 2013, everyone knew they were there to witness the unveiling of the new Xbox games console. Everyone, that is, apart from Microsoft. Instead the company billed the Xbox One as a multimedia player, focused its event almost entirely on live TV broadcasting and told potential purchasers that they’d need daily internet access and that second-hand game sales would be controlled via a new digital distribution platform. It was, to put it bluntly, a PR apocalypse.

The characters: There was Xbox chief Don Mattrick, who alienated gamers by telling them that if they didn’t have permanent internet access they should stick with the Xbox 360. And then there was corporate vice president Phil Harrison who sensed the Xbox One messaging was going awry in the hours after the unveiling and even asked reporters back into the interview room to clarify the console’s confusing digital distribution systems. Both have now left the company, but not before Mattrick announced a humiliating u-turn.

The TV Drama: “One Day in Redmond”, a The Thick of It-style behind-the-scenes glimpse at what went on at Microsoft during that fateful launch day. Aidan Gillen as Mattrick, Stephen Merchant as Phil Harrison, and Nolan North as Xbox chief Phil Spencer. Armando Iannucci to write and direct, naturally.

What have we missed? Let us know which gaming controversies you’d like to watch, below