The Inception

By: Jesse Lowther, Medaverse Studios CEO and Lead Designer

Before I was old enough to understand the concept of God, I had already found religion in video games. At the tender age of four, I was worshipping the Intellivision and Atari systems on a daily basis, my tiny hands clutching comparatively large controllers as I stared wide eyed at the screen. As I grew older, I found my way into Sega territory and wound up preaching the "Gospel of Sega Genesis" to all of my NES-owning friends. I'm glad no one ever stepped up to challenge me on which mascot was better. I'd be the first person ever to kill in the name of Sonic the Hedgehog (a notion that sounds even sillier today).

Yes, all of us are guilty of worshipping Gods at one point in our lives...

Games were life for me. Reality was just the boring, worthless time spent between sessions of gaming. It wasn't uncommon for me to wake up at 5 AM and go downstairs to play a game my parents had purchased for me just recently, using the early hour to procure coveted "TV time" for me and me alone. Playing games, no matter how bad they might've actually been, always gave me this warm, glowing feeling as a kid, as if the game was providing nourishment for some deeper part of the human psyche that our best psychologists have yet to unearth.

As I went into my teen years and acquired a circle of friends, gaming was always the activity of choice for us. I actually met my first artist and programmer through searching for "fresh meat" for my weekly sessions of playing Bungie's "Marathon" (the Mac-only predecessor to "Halo") on the networked computers of my parents home office. Each friday, we'd gather and try out the new multiplayer maps I had made during the week. These were fun times, though we didn't communicate during matches as we were all in different parts of the house. Only after a match did we come together to discuss the scores and highlights and I feel this was what prevented Marathon from being the true apex of my gaming life.

Before there was Halo, Jesse and friends had Marathon

Though Marathon shaped a large part of my teen gaming years, it was nothing compared to the event that was Super Smash Bros. I actually didn't like SSB when I first saw it. I watched a kid playing it at an EB Games kiosk and thought nothing of it. Months later, I rented it with the last of the money I had on a Blockbuster gift card. I first played it with three friends. Having come away from Ocarina of Time with nothing but fondness for the game, I chose to play as Link while my friends picked Samus and Pikachu.

If only they knew what they were getting into...

There was absolutely nothing eventful about the first match of SSB I ever played. In fact, for the remainder of the time the game was rented, everyone in my circle tried it and felt the game was average at best. I returned it to Blockbuster and went on with life, unaware that a time bomb was now ticking in my head, one that would change how I looked at multiplayer gaming forever.

Pretty soon, Super Smash Bros. became a significant gaming experience for the folks at Medaverse Studios

About a week after returning SSB to Blockbuster, I had a strange urge to play the game again. I conferred with my friends on the subject and they too felt that they'd like to play some more. It was a "Yeah, that was kinda fun..." sentiment and that was enough to warrant heading out to a local department store and picking up the game. The rest, as they say, is history. We logged over 700 hours on that N64 cartridge. Any time two of us were in proximity of the N64, the controllers came out. I would duel with my coworkers during lunch breaks. I bought a $600 32-inch TV just to play the game in my room in the basement. Many a friday was spent with up to seven people, swapping off controllers in front of that TV as we played round after round of SSB.

The game was like a drug, the most powerful one we had ever experienced. Whenever we were playing together, the warm glow of gaming was in full force. SSB wasn't just a game but an event. We imagined that we'd be in our 60s and still playing it, our children and grandchildren having no idea why we were so obsessed with it. We joked that we'd one day have the "Smash Van", a conversion van with Samus and Link painted on the side in mid-combat, and a TV, couch and N64 set up in the back. It sounds silly now, but for what this game did for us, it was a perfectly reasonable notion and it might give you an idea of just how in love with this game we all were. Unfortunately, as time went on, everyone got jobs, moved further away and our group gaming sessions became a thing of the past, but I clung to the memories and took what lessons I could from those times.

I've never had a multiplayer game since that could do for us what SSB did, not even its sequels. The same magic was just never there. The game served not only as a basis for generating many fond memories but as a lesson in the power of same-room multiplayer gaming. I've played many multiplayer games since SSB, most of them online, but none of those games would ever match SSB. Without the room full of friends, there was just no replicating the experience.

After that, my gaming began to decline. Nothing in gaming seemed terribly new to me and with a dwindling interest in what was once my passion, I had already decided that the Gamecube was going to be my last console, ever. I was the proverbial "lapsed gamer". Where my friends and I had once toyed with the idea of developing games, we were getting to the point where gaming was no longer going to be a part of our lives at all.

But come Fall of 2005, all of that would change...

As you can clearly see, social gaming meant a lot for the people at Medaverse Studios, and it's the reason why they decided to make their first WiiWare title, Gravitronix, a multiplayer game with up to eight players at once.

Today's lesson: The best games can serve as inspiration for up and coming developers.