The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (56 page)

Nintendo’s most important message was game quality. According to Lincoln and Arakawa, the game companies of the Atari age had gotten sloppy and released too many identical games. To prevent this, Lincoln created very strict terms that gave Nintendo unflinching authority over the licensing agreement that publishers had to sign to make games for the NES. American companies such as Activision and Electronic Arts, which did not have to deal
with these restrictions when they made games for personal computers, took a wait-and-see approach with the NES.

When Nintendo of America first began marketing the console, the only licensees making games for the system were Japanese companies. These companies reaped tremendous benefits during the first year that the NES was out. The first three games that Capcom released for the system—
1942, Ghosts ’N Goblins
, and
Commando
—all sold over one million copies. By 1987, several U.S. firms recognized the value of doing business with Nintendo and signed licensing agreements.

Over the next decade, Lincoln learned that controlling third-party games was not as important as having a healthy library of original games. When a company named 3DO launched a highly sophisticated game console in 1994, Lincoln commented that he was not worried about 3DO as a competitor because it did not publish its own games. When a reporter later asked why he’d been so confident, Lincoln responded, “The first-party games are the products that differentiate your hardware.”

With more than 60,000 units sold in the United States,
Donkey Kong
was Nintendo’s biggest arcade hit. The arcade industry began its long collapse the year after
Donkey Kong
was released, and Nintendo’s arcade fortunes eroded quickly. Nintendo released
Donkey Kong Junior
in 1982 and sold only 30,000 machines, 20,000
Popeye
machines (also 1982), and a mere 5,000 copies of
Donkey Kong 3
(1983).
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In 1982, Universal Sales made arcade history with a game called
Mr. Do!
Instead of selling dedicated
Mr. Do!
machines, Universal sold the game as a kit. The kit came with a customized control panel, a computer board with
Mr. Do!
read-only memory (ROM) chips, stickers that could be placed on the side of stand-up arcade machines for art, and a plastic marquee. It was the first game ever sold as a conversion only. According to former Universal Sales western regional sales manager Joe Morici, the company sold approximately 30,000 copies of the game in the United States alone.

In 1983, Nintendo released the VS System, a line of arcade games with double-screens on which two players could face off against each other or play alone. In 1987, Nintendo replaced the VS System with Play Choice 10, a line of arcade machines that worked like a jukebox with ten interchangeable boards. All of the games for Play Choice 10 were modified versions of NES cartridges.

Despite the strategic move away from creating original arcade games, Lincoln and Arakawa did not take the arcade business lightly. Play Choice 10 had great marketing potential. They could prerelease highly anticipated games on Play Choice 10 to build public awareness with negligible development costs. Wealthy from home game sales, Nintendo remained the largest advertiser in
RePlay
, a magazine that tracked the arcade business, for years after the company stopped developing arcade content.

With its software development focused on home games, Nintendo began churning out the most detailed and diverse game lineup ever seen in the consumer market. In 1987, Nintendo released three extremely significant games.

Nintendo’s biggest game in 1987,
The Legend of Zelda
, was created by Shigeru Miyamoto, the same man who created
Donkey Kong
and
Super Mario Brothers.
By this time, Hiroshi Yamauchi, the president of Nintendo Co. Ltd. in Japan, recognized Miyamoto as a rare talent upon whom his company’s future would depend.

The Legend of Zelda
was a role-playing game in which players helped a young elf boy named Link explore a huge territory as he fought monsters, collected treasures, and explored dungeons. The ultimate goals of the game were to defeat an evil monster named Ganon and rescue Zelda, the princess of Hyrule. Before you could do that, however, you had to locate pieces of a magical tablet called the Triforce that were scattered across a vast playfield. In many ways,
The Legend of Zelda
was Miyamoto’s most brilliant game. It combined a well-thought-out fairy tale with perfectly crafted game mechanics. It was also Miyamoto’s first free-roaming game. Unlike
Super Mario Bros.
, a side-scrolling game in which players could move only forward or backward,
The Legend of Zelda
was played from the top-down perspective, allowing players to move the hero in any compass direction.

When the first prototypes of
The Legend of Zelda
arrived in the United States, Minoru Arakawa was not sure how people would respond to a complex game with text windows in it. He worried that perhaps the game was too complicated for American audiences. To test this out, he had several employees try the game. In order to give the game a fair chance, Arakawa arranged for Japanese-speaking workers to sit with American employees and translate any Kanji that appeared in the text boxes.

As he tested
The Legend of Zelda
on his employees, Arakawa noticed a disturbing trend. Most American workers who played the game did not warm up to it instantly. They all ended up giving the game high marks, but Arakawa noticed that some people needed as much as ten hours before they understood the game and enjoyed it.

Housed in a shiny gold cartridge, the American version of
The Legend of Zelda
required more megabits of storage space than any other game released for the NES up to that point, and it came with an internal ten-year battery, enabling it to store three players’ progress so that they would not have to start again after every game.
The Legend of Zelda
was the first game to include an internal battery. It also came with more documentation than earlier games, including a thick instruction booklet that identified most of the monsters and weapons in the game and a large fold-out map of the fantasy land of Hyrule. As a final precaution, Arakawa added a toll-free telephone number that players could call if they needed help with the game.

Customers called nonstop and asked questions about more than
The Legend of Zelda
—they wanted to know about every game. To cover the calls, Arakawa expanded his telephone bank to ten full-time operators, but it wasn’t enough.
He continued expanding the telephone operation, running ads in the help-wanted sections of the
Seattle Times
and the
Seattle Post Intelligencer
for people who “want to play games for a living.” By 1990, more than 200 people were working on the help lines, and the toll-free number became too expensive to maintain. Expecting to reduce the number of calls, Arakawa approved the suggestion to keep the help center as a free service but eliminate the toll-free number. Throughout the 1990s, the help center continued to maintain a staff of 200 operators, fielding an average of 100,000 telephone calls, 3,500 e-mail messages, and 1,900 letters per week. During the holidays, the staffing grew to 500 operators fielding as many as 250,000 calls.
*

The second major game of 1987 was
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out
, a home adaptation of an arcade game that Nintendo had released in 1983. Both the arcade game and the NES cartridge were designed by Genyo Takeda and Nintendo Co. Ltd.’s Research and Development Team 3, a team of engineers that generally focused on hardware.

The original arcade game, which was simply called
Punch-Out
, was a boxing game in which players took on five fictitious fighters as they fought for a shot at a championship belt. An early first-person game, players saw the game from within the head of an “up-and-coming boxer.” The fighter the player controlled was depicted as a wire mesh character. Although
Punch-Out
was ostensibly about boxing, it was really a puzzle game. In order to win, players had to learn the patterns used by the computer-controlled boxers. A fighter named “Bald Bull,” for instance, would charge at the player. If he landed a punch at the end of his charge, he would score an instant knockdown. The player could either dodge Bald Bull’s charge and respond with a properly timed counterattack, or hit him at a precise moment in his charge to knock him to the canvas.

The home version of
Punch-Out
featured more than twice as many opponents as the arcade game. While the home version did include three of the original fighters—Glass Joe, Bald Bull, and Mr. Sandman (who was the world champion in the arcade game)—it also had five all-new opponents, including Mike Tyson, who had recently been crowned heavyweight champion of the world.

Arakawa thought up the idea of licensing Mike Tyson himself. He attended one of Tyson’s early fights during a trade show and was impressed by the young boxer’s power and skills. Arakawa decided that adding the super-powerful heavyweight’s name to the upcoming boxing game would make it more attractive. Nintendo’s legal team approached Tyson with an offer that was rumored to be $50,000
*
for a three-year period, and the fighter agreed. (It should be noted that Nintendo took a chance licensing Tyson, since the agreement was signed prior to his winning the WBC title from Trevor Berbick on November 22, 1986.) When Arakawa told Takeda the idea, Takeda agreed and began adding Tyson’s image to one of the fighters in the game.

Unlike the arcade game, the home game was played from the third-person perspective. Players controlled a tiny boxer in a black tank top named Little Mac, who was so short that his head barely reached his opponent’s belt lines. As he prepared to release the game, Arakawa confided to Howard Phillips that the Little Mac character was designed to look like him.

If Takeda’s team members wanted Little Mac to look like Howard Phillips, they failed. Little Mac had black hair; Phillips’s hair was red. Their faces were also unalike.
*

Nintendo, a company that worked hard to maintain a clean image, came to regret its association with Tyson. After winning and unifying the heavyweight crown in 1987, Tyson became involved in a well-publicized divorce from actress Robyn Givens. During the proceedings, Tyson was accused of beating Givens. When Nintendo’s three-year agreement with Tyson ended, the company quietly removed his name and image from the game and re-released it as
Punch-Out!
with a new champion named “Mr. Dream.”