Tristan Donovan, a U.K. writer who has contributed to Edge and The Guardian, has just released a new book called Replay: The History of Video Games.

Wired.com is pleased to share several excerpts from this exhaustive, wide-ranging book. Previously, we looked at the development of Nimrod, the first gaming computer. In this excerpt, Donovan tells of the earliest days of videogame design in France. (NB: Some of the links below are to French-language sites. Most of them have cool pictures, though.)

Excerpt: Replay: The History of Video Games ——————————————-

Paris was a war zone. Egged on by the Vietnam War and the rebellious rhetoric of the Situationist International, thousands marched on the city streets demanding revolution. They spray-painted slogans onto the city's walls: "Demand the Impossible," "Imagination Is Seizing Power," "Make Love, Not War" and "Boredom Is Counter-Revolutionary."

France's trade unions sided with the protestors and encouraged wildcat strikes across the nation in a show of solidarity. The government had lost control and France teetered on the brink of revolution. For a few days in May 1968 it looked as if the motley coalition of students, trade unions, Trotskyites, anti-capitalists, situationists, anarchists and Maoists would win their fight for revolution. Ultimately they did not. In early June, the protests died out thanks to a combination of government capitulation and crackdowns on the protestors.

But the failed revolution inspired many. Among them was Jean-Louis Le Breton. "I was 16 in '68 and part of the protests in Paris," he said. "Our teachers were on strike and we had a lot of discussions. We thought we could change the world. It was both a period of political consciousness and of utopia."

During the late 1970s and early 1980s Le Breton explored his desire to challenge the status quo via music. Then in 1982 he found a new outlet. "I exchanged my synthesizers for the first Apple computer delivered in France, the Apple II," he said. "At that time, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were presented as two guys working in their garage – such a pleasant image in opposition with IBM. I found that programming in BASIC was easy and fun and I could imagine a lot of amusements with this fascinating machine. It was possible to take power over computers and bring them into the mad galaxy of my young and open mind."

Le Breton had played video games before but didn't like them: "I was interested by the fact that you could move the character, but it was no fun. Too many fights. Not for me."

But after playing Sierra's illustrated text adventure Mystery House, he decided to write a game of his own.

"The graphics and scenario of Mystery House were such bad quality that I thought I could easily produce the same kind of game," he said. The result was 1983's Le Vampire Fou, the first text adventure written in French. "You had to enter the castle of Le Vampire to kill him before he killed you," said Breton. "It was the kind of game that made you crazy before you could find the right answer."

Le Breton earned nothing from Le Vampire Fou. Its publisher, Ciel Bleu, went under shortly after its release. Le Breton teamed up with his friend Fabrice Gille in 1984 to form his own game publishing company Froggy Software, which summed up the essence of its games as "aventure, humour, décalage et déconnade." (Adventure, humor, leftfield and "a willingness to making fun of anything.")

From their base in Le Breton's home, an old bar in the 20th district of Paris, the pair dreamed big. "May 1968 surely had an influence on the way we started the company, with a completely free and open state of mind and a bit of craziness," said Le Breton. Almost all of Froggy's games were text adventures, but with their humor and political themes they were a world away from the fantasy and sci-fi tales that typified the genre in the U.K. and U.S. Même les Pommes de Terre ont des Yeux [Even the Potatoes Have Eyes] offered a comic take on South American revolutionary politics. La Souris Golote reveled in puns about cheese. The sordid murder mystery of Le Crime du Parking touched on rape, drug addiction and homosexuality while Paranoïak had players battling against their character's smorgasbord of mental illnesses. Le Breton's efforts prompted French games magazine Tilt to dub him the Alfred Hitchcock of gaming.

Froggy Software were not the only French game designers taking games in a more highbrow and consciously artistic direction. Muriel Tramis, an African-Caribbean woman who grew up on the French-Caribbean island of Martinique, was also exploring the medium's potential. She left Martinique for France in the 1970s to study engineering at university and, after several years working in the aerospace industry, became interested in the potential of video games and joined Parisian game publisher Coktel Vision. She decided her own heritage should be the subject of her debut game Méwilo, a 1987 adventure game written with help from another former Martinique resident, Patrick Chamoiseau, one of the founding figures of the black literary movement Créolité.

Set on Martinique in 1902, Méwilo was recognized by the Parisian government for its artistic merit.

"The game was inspired by the Carib legend of jars of gold," explained Tramis. "At the height of the slave revolts, plantation masters saved their gold in the worst way. They got their most faithful slave to dig a hole and then killed and buried him with the gold in order that the ghost of the unfortunate slave would keep the curious away from the treasure."

In the game the player took on the role of Méwilo, a parapsychologist who travels to the Martinique city of Saint-Pierre in 1902 to investigate reports of a haunting, just days before the settlement's destruction at the hands of the Mount Pelée volcano.

"This synopsis is a pretext for visiting the city and discovering the daily economic, political and religious life of this legendary city," said Tramis. The game's exploration of French-Caribbean culture won Tramis a silver medal from the Parisian department of culture – making it one of the first games to receive official recognition for its artistic merit.

Tramis and Chamoiseau probed the history of slavery further in 1988's Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness. Set once again in the French Caribbean, the game casts the player as a black slave on a sugar cane plantation who must lead an uprising against the plantation's owner. Freedom mixed action, strategy and role-playing into what Tramis summed up as a "war game."

"Fugitive slaves, my ancestors, were true warriors that I had to pay tribute to," she said. "At the time I made the game, these stories were not known. It was my duty to remember. A journalist wrote that this game was as important as Little Big Man has been in film for the culture of American Indians. I was flattered."

Tramis and Froggy's attempts to elevate video games beyond the simple thrills of the arcades formed part of a wider search during the 1980s amongst French game developers for a style of their own. A summer 1984 article in Tilt reported how French game designers, having cut their teeth on simple arcade games, now wanted to create something more personal, more rooted in reality, more French. Inevitably, opinion was divided about what this meant in practice, but many homed in on strong narratives, real-life settings and visuals inspired by the art of France's vibrant comic book industry. Text adventures provided the natural home for such content. "Back then the adventure game was king," said Tramis. "There were many more scenarios with literary rich universes and characters. There was a ferment of ideas and lots of originality. France loves stories."

The focus on real-world scenarios reflected France's relative disinterest in fantasy compared to the British or Americans. "I have always wanted to base my titles on a historical, geographical or scientific reality," said Bertrand Brocard, the founder of game publisher Cobra Soft and author of 1985's Meurtre à Grande Vitesse, a popular murder mystery adventure game set on a high-speed French TGV train. The player had two hours of travel between Lyon and Paris to solve the mystery and arrest the culprit, who could not escape from the train during the journey.

Other Cobra Soft games reflected current affairs. Among them were Dossier G.: L'Affaire du Rainbow-Warrior, a game inspired by French intelligence service's sinking of Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior ship in 1985, and Cessna Over Moscow, a 1987 game inspired by Mathias Rust – the West German pilot who flew a light aircraft into the Soviet Union and landed in Red Square to the USSR's embarrassment that same year.

For Brocard, however, the French style was more a reflection of the personal interests and tastes of the small group of companies and individuals who were making games rather than a reflection of France itself. "Game production in France was not very extensive," he said. "Production involved such a small number of people that chance, I think, led things in certain directions. To my mind this issue of the 'French touch' is associated with the charisma of Philippe Ulrich. He is an artist through and through."

Ulrich, like Le Breton, he was a musician before he was a game designer. "In 1978 I published my first music album with CBS, Le Roi du Gasoil; I often slept in the Paris Métro at that time," he said. "I wanted to cut a second album with more electronic music. To that effect I took to soldering together my own rhythm boxes. When Clive Sinclair put his ZX80 on the market, I emptied my piggy bank to buy one. I could barely believe the hallucinating results I got after coding my first lines of BASIC." Ulrich threw himself into learning all he could about his new computer, digesting 500-page guides to the inner workings of machine code on the ZX80's Z80 microprocessor.

His first machine code game was a version of the board game Reversi, which he swapped the rights to in exchange for an 8Kb memory expansion pack for his ZX80. Soon after, he met Emmanuel Viau, another aspiring game designer, and the pair decided to form their own publishing house: Ere Informatique. Ulrich wanted Ere Informatique's games to have international appeal – something of a no-no amongst France's cultural elitists – while retaining a French flavor: "Our games didn't have the excellent gameplay of original English-language games but graphically their aesthetics were superior, which spawned the term French Touch – later reused by musicians such as Daft Punk and Air."

Ulrich's most notable realization of the French Touch was 1988's Captain Blood (pictured top), a cinematic space adventure created with artist and programmer Didier Bouchon. The game tells the story of the space-travelling Captain Blood who must hunt down and destroy five clones of himself to stay alive. To hunt down the clones, the player must travel the galaxy and converse with aliens using Bluddian, an alien language created specifically for the game that was based on the use of 150 icons, each of which represented a word. With its H.R. Giger-inspired visuals, fractal-enhanced explosions, accompanying novella and a theme tune composed by French synthesizer musician Jean Michel Jarre, Captain Blood was nothing short of an epic, although its bizarreness often confused.

"I wanted to be an example and to invent new stuff that stood out," said Ulrich. "I wanted to impress the player. I wanted the extraterrestrials to be alive in the computer. When playing The Hobbit I hated the stereotyped answers such as 'I don't understand' or 'What is your name?' The challenge was to make it intelligent. The incredible thing is that the aliens answered all questions, were funny and never repeated the same thing twice." During the game's development Ere Informatique ran into financial problems and was bought by its more commercially minded rival Infogrames, which was less than keen on Ulrich and Bouchon's strange game. With little funding from Infogrames, the pair holed themselves up in the Landes forest in southwest France to finish the game.

"We worked ourselves to the point of exhaustion to complete Captain Blood. I covered several reams of paper with Bluddian dialog; Didier would code the programs and created the graphics. When I showed the game to Infogrames they did not understand. 'Is that a UFO or what?' 'You're crazy,' they told me. After it was released the salespeople at Infogrames told me that the game was selling by the hundreds, they had never seen anything like it."

Top image: Captain Blood, from Wikimedia Commons. Title screen of Le Vampire Fou from Apple II Software Repository. Méwilo screenshot from Pixel Heroes.

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