In a medium dominated by blood-spattered shoot-’em-ups like Quake, sword-and-sorcery role-playing games like Everquest and innumerable versions of chess, checkers and bridge, Majestic is sure to shake up the online gaming world when it launches this spring. And it’s just one part of Electronic Arts’ efforts to blend the casual gaming experience (games that you can quickly pick up, play for a few minutes and walk away from) with the richness of software that you’d buy on a CD-ROM (detailed graphics, realistic sound and compelling gameplay). “There are people who want to play online games, but as an industry we tend to lose some of those people because we haven’t offered them a [quick] 15-minute fix or a 30-minute fix,” says Majestic producer Neil Young. “This game will do that.”
Over the past couple of years, EA has been beefing up its online presence beyond its flagship title, Ultima Online. In late ‘99, the company acquired Kesmai, the Virginia-based developer of military-style online games like Air Warrior and Warcraft; last year it entered into an agreement with another game publisher, Boxerjam, to provide EA.com with trivia and word games. But the biggest coup of all was EA’s deal with AOL to become the exclusive game provider for the world’s largest online service. “If you’re not No. 1 on the Web, you don’t matter because No. 2 is a distant second,” says Mark Blecher, EA.com’s VP for marketing and sales. The deal didn’t come cheap: over the next five years, EA will pay AOL a mini- mum of $81 million, with EA collecting subscription fees and AOL handling ad sales for the joint venture.
To make that back, the folks at EA know they have to attract a wider audience than the 225,000 or so people who pay $10 a month to play Ultima. EA.com launched last October with several free offerings: card games, knockoffs of arcade hits like Frogger and rejiggered EA classics such as Madden NFL for the Sega Genesis. Those games were supported by sponsors and advertising; next month EA.com will debut the paid areas of the service. For a $4.99 monthly fee, users will be able to play online versions of three of EA’s popular sports franchises: NASCAR Racing, Tiger Woods PGA Tour Web Golf and Knockout Kings Boxing, with games like FIFA Web Soccer to follow.
Unlike Sony and Microsoft, which seem to be counting on widespread adoption of broadband for their online plans, EA.com’s games are made for the majority of home computer users who have 56K or slower dial-up modems; Knockout Kings, for instance, is a mere 2.5MB download that comes with two boxers (Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier) and a single arena, but users can download additional rings and fighters. True, the graphics aren’t quite on the order of today’s state-of-the-art PC titles. But the responsive gameplay and nifty details like sweat spray and vivid sound effects will get you caught up in the action within minutes. The fact that you can access the games via your browser, without any need to mess with complicated plug-ins and settings, makes it much less intimidating to newbies.
As excited as the folks at EA are about bringing their sports games to the Web, they’re especially jazzed about Majestic, privately calling it the gaming equivalent of “The Sopranos.” Producer Young, who previously supervised the 1997 launch of Ultima Online, thought that something was missing from early online games. “One of the things I was struck by was that while you could get a great sense of the world in Ultima Online, you didn’t have a great sense of story. People need to be at the center of stories that involve them.” Taking inspiration from Orson Welles’s famed “War of the Worlds” broadcast and David Fincher’s paranoid movie “The Game,” Young and a small team experimented with using a host of everyday technologies–e-mail, instant messaging, streaming video–to make players feel as though the game was actually responding to them. A good example is the way Young’s team modified online customer-service technology–bots designed to answer users’ queries–to make players believe they’re instant-messaging real people instead of a computer. And since Majestic keeps track of everything you do, the experience becomes more and more tailored to you as you keep playing. “A character in the game might ask me the name of my wife. A few months later I might get a call saying, ‘Neil, if you don’t stop snooping, you might find Laurie in a pool of blood’.” Not for the faint of heart.
In fact, the ingenious Majestic is so aggressively different that it runs the risk of being too far out there for people raised on Quake and Everquest. But EA’s got more tricks up its sleeve. If Majestic is the company’s “Sopranos,” Sims Live and Sims Online will be its “ER” and “Friends,” popular hits that could turn online gaming into the next mass medium. They’re not due out until later in the year (April and December, respectively), but EA granted NEWSWEEK an exclusive first look. Sims Live promises to revolutionize chat by combining instant messaging with entertaining 3-D alter egos that users can animate with the press of a key. Sims Online cleverly reimagines last year’s most popular PC game (3 million copies sold) for the Internet, letting players compete against each other to become the richest, most popular or most powerful Sim of all. And because Sims Online cleverly incorporates instant messaging and e-mail into the game, along with social lubricants like virtual spin the bottle, it will be interesting to see just what real people do when they get their hands on it. The Web may never be the same again.
