Hollywood's New Game

Level One: Start Game

Ready to play? The point of this game is this: Take an existing product and zap it with so many elements that it transforms into something else entirely. Technology collides with movies, which collide with video games, nightclubs, architecture, design, restaurants, sexual politics, amusement parks. And as these collisions occur in front of you, and as you watch each collision produce the next fantastic fusion, you think, Yes, of course! These different forms and factors, separate for so long, had to converge sooner or later -- didn't they?

"Everything good, all at once." That's an old GameWorks motto, a corporate philosophy that also happens to describe the core of a nuclear reactor: If you carefully put together the already-existing right elements and then ignite them in the right way, you get a hell of a lot of power. And you can probably make a lot of money doing it. Which is exactly what GameWorks is all about: daring. If there is a model for creating a whole new industry, this might be it. Set up the reactive elements, and then watch as technology and entertainment super-accelerate, super-collide.

It started like this: In the early 1980s, Paul was in Chicago attending a consumer-electronics show when Warner Communications's legendary chairman Steven Ross told him to grab a ride back in the company Gulfstream. "There's a young director we want you to meet," said Ross. Paul and the "young director," Steven Spielberg, hit it off. Spielberg began stopping by Paul's office, where they played games, talked games, thought games. Why, Paul and Spielberg asked, do we think of video games as distinct things, as units of and by themselves? Why do we segregate them into arcades, separate them? If video games use pictures and motion and sound and atmosphere and set design and plot and character, why was there such a sharp line between them and movies, or theme-park rides, or the music industry?

The answers to those questions were, in large part, embedded in Paul's career trajectory. Even if he'd planned it, he couldn't have had a better education in how to negotiate this level of the game, the part where you grow the concept. After Atari, one of the earliest video-game companies, skyrocketed and then imploded back in 1984 ("Bad business," says Paul simply), Sid Sheinberg and Lew Wasserman, the heads of MCA, asked Paul to join their company. As a lawyer in Silicon Valley, Paul had already been exposed to venture capital and computer technology, and so now he began his schooling in theme parks and their marketing. He put together Universal Interactive Studios, which created Sony PlayStation mascot Crash Bandicoot and made Universal lots of money.

He also started to work with a guy named Ron Bension, and in 1992, the two of them were part of a group that bought some land for Universal Studios Florida. Working for Wasserman, Bension, 46, and Paul found themselves studying with the quintessential entertainment master. "When we opened the 'Back to the Future' ride at Universal Studios Florida," recalls Paul, "Ron and I sat with Lew Wasserman and watched people coming off the ride. Lew said, 'It's a hit.' I said, 'How do you know?' He said, 'Just look at their faces.' " Near the end of 1995, Sheinberg and Spielberg (who had been tracking his friend's progress) decided that it was time to get serious about creating a new company. So Paul started searching for a chief architect who could realize Spielberg's vision.

Over at Disney, Jon Snoddy happened to be looking for something new to do. "You see Snoddy walking around," Paul says, observing Snoddy's long, silver ponytail and utterly mellow manner, "and you think he's putting together the reunion tour for the Dead." Snoddy had started at Lucasfilm and then jumped to Disney, where he created the "Indiana Jones" ride. " 'Jones' was a modified roller coaster," says Snoddy, "and I learned a lot from it: how to mock up a system, how to deal with motion problems, and how to use hydraulics to make bumps feel bumpier." Now Snoddy wanted to set up his own shop, a super-environment post-production company that animated something he loved: video games. So he went to see former Disney honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg. "Funny," Katzenberg said, "I've been looking for you. Have you ever met Skip Paul?"

Snoddy said that he had not met Paul and asked who he was. Katzenberg explained that GameWorks was just being formed and asked Snoddy if he could come back once the company was established. Snoddy, struck by the secretiveness, agreed.

A short time later, when Paul and Snoddy finally met, "I knew that I wanted to do business with him," says Paul, who immediately arranged a meeting in Spielberg's office. The three men pulled up chairs, and Spielberg talked about his gaming vision.