On the heels of Sony's sexy new platform, the medium produced its first character whose appeal reached far beyond the Q*bert set -- the gun-toting hottie Lara Croft, star of the Indiana Jones-inspired Tomb Raider. ''At the time 3-D was starting to show up everywhere in games,'' says Wilson. ''Tomb Raider showed what you could actually do with it.'' It also showed that industry players could -- should -- be thinking like movie studios. ''We began to look outside gaming at brands that transcended their original medium,'' says Paul Baldwin, VP of marketing at Eidos Interactive. ''We began to treat Lara like a superstar and the brand much like Disney manages their stable of brands.'' This meant not only licensing Lara for comics, action figures, and film but marketing her like a Hollywood release. ''It was a very exciting moment for the industry,'' says Wilson. ''It was their chance to point and say, 'Look! We're as big as the movies!'''
Ironically, at a time when the industry's potential has never been more apparent, so, too, are its shortcomings. Take Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The game is a blockbuster, moving a whopping 1.4 million copies and grossing $68 million in its first five days alone. Its rollicking gameplay makes it a roller-coaster ride; its rich evocation of 1980s pop culture elevates it to art; its morally ambiguous hero, whom you can manipulate for good or evil, makes it a cultural flash point. ''GTA really opens up the avenue of what games can be; it gives us a little glimmer of what's to come,'' says Peter Molyneux, the creator of the God Game landmark Populous. ''First of all, it's set in a contemporary environment instead of being all about fantasy figures battling in space or medieval times. And second, you're playing a character that only has your intelligence and morality behind him, which is a major next threshold for games: How can we create an experience where a player can do anything they want, within this story, within this environment?''
Yet GTA also epitomizes the kind of juvenility that has slowed videogames' mass-market acceptance. ''What's happening right now is very similar to what happened to comic books in the 1950s,'' says Sims mastermind Will Wright, referring to the decency movement that effectively put comic books in the geek ghetto. ''We have to start offering things that appeal to a broader group of people.''
Aside from hip-hop and music videos, no other form of pop culture in the past 20 years has so pervasively cross-pollinated other popular media as videogames. ''When it comes to pacing, action, and capturing youth culture right now, it's all coming from videogames,'' says Tom Calderone, MTV's exec VP of music and talent programming. Shania Twain's current ''I'm Gonna Getcha Good!'' video transforms the superstar into a leather-clad Lara Croft on a motorbike, being chased by a hulking anime robot through a digitally animated Blade Runner landscape.
Or look at the NFL's running scoreboard, ref-mounted cameras, and even sound effects: They're all lifted from videogames. ''When we started Fox Sports in 1994, I went out and got...every videogame I could,'' says Fox Sports Networks chairman David Hill. ''What fascinated me was how videogames were so rich and multilayered, while television was two-dimensional. I started thinking 'Couldn't I bring this to TV?' Now everyone's doing it.''
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