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What is going on? According to psychologist Sherry Turkle, author of The Second Self, the key lies in the rates of development of young boys and girls, which to their mutual pain and embarrassment are usually out of synch. Girls in their pre-teen years tend to mature faster than boys -- socially and sexually. Normal day-to-day interactions with these girls can be stressful and troubling for the boys, who tend to withdraw to a safe place -- sports, scouting, computer gaming -- where they can hang out until they are ready to hold their own with the girls, a process that can take years. Most home video games, unfortunately, are derived from coin-operated arcade models that were designed not to build up a lad's fragile ego but to defeat him and take away his quarters.
Over the past decade, video-game companies have struggled to extend the market beyond that audience of preteen boys. Games built around characters such as Barbie and the Little Mermaid are clearly pitched to girls. On the other end of the spectrum are sports games like John Madden Football (an early Trip Hawkins hit) designed to give older boys and men an excuse to extend their game-playing habits well into adulthood.
But nobody has yet found a way to make video games broadly attractive to that part of the market that consumes the biggest share of books, movies and television drama: adult women. That's where Hollywood comes in. The idea is that nobody knows better than moviemakers how to put stories on a screen and bring them to life. "My own belief," says Voyeur's Zabriskie, "is that the sooner the better actors and the better directors get involved, the sooner this will be a medium that everybody will want to get into."
The Hollywood-Silicon Valley connection goes back to the early 1980s, when movie companies and video-game makers found it mutually convenient to license cartoon and film characters (usually for a modest 5% to 10% of net sales) for use in video games. At one point Atari had deals lined up to make video games out of Peanuts, Mickey Mouse and the Muppets. Then in 1982 Atari licensed E.T. for $23 million and proceeded to turn it into one of the worst video games ever made. The resulting disaster, known in the industry as "the crash of 1984," brought Atari into bankruptcy court and nearly dragged down its corporate parent, Warner Communications, as well. Some of those unsold E.T. cartridges can still be found on the dusty back shelves of retail stores.
The licensing game never died, however. Now Hollywood is making movies and TV shows out of video-game characters (witness this summer's Super Mario Brothers feature and the two Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon shows coming this fall), and kids assume that any film or series with any action in it will come out in a game cartridge within six months. Besides Aladdin, vidkids this Christmas will be able to choose from games based on Cliffhanger, Last Action Hero, Ren and Stimpy, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Home Improvement, Jurassic Park and a whole subgenre of Bart Simpson adventures, including The Simpsons: Escape from Camp Deadly, Bartman Meets Radioactive Man, Bart vs. the Space Mutants, Bart vs. the Juggernauts and Bart vs. the World.