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 (70 page)
Authors: Steven Kent
Okamoto’s next few games did not do well. As Okamoto struggled to come up with new ideas, Fujiwara created such Capcom classics as
Commando
and
Ghosts ’N Goblins.
Okamoto became worried about his job. He created a “soft porn” version of Mahjongg, a tile game that is popular in Asia, but in the meantime, he needed a special project—something big. The answer came from another Osaka-based game company—Taito. While looking at competitors’ games, Okamoto ran across
Double Dragon II: The Revenge
and realized that with some of Capcom’s newer technology, he would be able to improve upon this style of the game.
Double Dragon II
was a two-dimensional side-scrolling gang-fighting game in which players walked along streets, fighting off muggers of all types. It featured simplistic three-button combat controls, with one button for attacking
enemies to the left, one for attacking to the right, and one for jumping. One problem with the game was its antiquated graphics. The combatants looked short and childishly scrawled. Capcom’s research and development engineers had recently come up with new and more powerful hardware that could make much more realistic-looking characters and backgrounds. The end product was a game called
Final Fight.
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With its simpler controls and much more sophisticated graphics,
Final Fight
improved upon the
Double Dragon
formula. Instead of having three buttons and a joystick, Okamoto’s game had only “attack” and “jump” buttons. Players could execute several moves as they fought off attackers, but they did not have to master these moves to have fun with the game. The art was the biggest improvement. The characters in
Final Fight
looked cartoonish and moved stiffly, but they had human proportions and detailed faces. One of the enemies was a giant who looked and fought like Andre the Giant, a real-life professional wrestler. Released in 1989,
Final Fight
was one of Capcom’s most successful games to date, but it was Okamoto’s next game that made him famous.
Okamoto’s next project was a sequel to a 1987 game called
Street Fighter.
The original
Street Fighter
was a one-on-one martial-arts fighting game. As Okamoto’s team members created their version of what a
Street Fighter
game should be, they decided to include three elements from that game: secret moves that allowed players to throw fireballs, a character named Ken, and a character name Ryu.
The sales division said that we needed to make another
Street Fighter;
they had been asking for it for a long time. At one of the trade shows,
Final Fight
was shown with the title of
Street Fighter II
, but all the operators said,
“Hey, that’s not Street Fighter.”Originally, I wanted to change all the characters, but some of the players still liked Ryu and Ken.
—Yoshiki Okamoto
It took ten months to complete
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior.
The game was a major undertaking and several artists worked on each of the fighters. The team created multiple hidden moves for each of the eight main characters in the game. Okamoto personally believed that this game would be just as successful as
Final Fight
, but once the concepts and art were complete and the fate of the game was in the hands of the programmers, he became nervous. Restless by nature, he found it impossible to sit around the office waiting to see the final results, so he often went off to play baseball to distract himself. These were nervous times for Okamoto. He had committed a great deal of time and resources to
Street Fighter II.
Like
Final Fight
before it,
Street Fighter II
brought marked improvement to an already existing genre. Not only did it have the same kind of clean, ornately detailed, yet somewhat cartoony look that distinguished
Final Fight
, it also had a colorful cast of international brawlers. Along with returning martial artists Ryu and Ken, it featured ten other fighters, including a fire-spitting Hindu mystic, a lumbering Sumo wrestler, and a one-eyed kick boxer. Each character had unique abilities and special moves. Okamoto was well aware of the arcade prestige given to players who master hidden moves and difficult games, and he wanted to use that prestige to his game’s advantage.
The game was a major international success. Its combination of brutal action, hidden moves, humorous characters, and bright graphics appealed to players all over the world. Released in 1991,
Street Fighter II
brought much-needed business to the dwindling American arcade industry. This was the first game since the mid-1980s that actually attracted players to arcades. More important, arcade owners bought multiple
Street Fighter II
machines and set them up in rows, the way they used to set up
Pac-Man
machines a decade earlier. Capcom will not release the final numbers, but some outsiders have estimated that more than 60,000
Street Fighter II
arcade machines were sold worldwide. According to a former Capcom spokesperson, the arcade version of
Street Fighter II
earned more money than the movie
Jurassic Park
made in box office receipts.
Street Fighter II
was even more successful as a game cartridge for Super NES. Capcom released it exclusively for the 16-bit Nintendo console and went on to sell more than 2 million copies of the game, making it the first third-party hit for the Super NES. In 1992, as Genesis started to pull away in sales, having the only home version of
Street Fighter II
gave Nintendo a needed edge.
Was Genesis ever as advanced a machine as Super NES? Technically, no. I thought we were able to do better software then they were. They both are good machines, but I think the big advantage we had was we initially were able to do better software and it took them a long time to get up to speed on doing as good a [job on their] software.
—Tom Kalinske, former president and CEO, Sega of America
Nintendo sold 3.4 million Super NES consoles in 1991, a long-lasting record for first-year sales of new game hardware. This gave Nintendo a good share of the market. But with a one-year lead and more sales overall in 1991, Genesis continued to have the larger 16-bit install-base in the United States.
*
They [Nintendo] always claim that there was a time after the launch when they pulled ahead of us, but our research said that there wasn’t. They had a phenomenal initial launch. If you mean in terms of a month, I’m sure there was a month when they outsold us. You know, I’m sure they outsold us for a few months.
—Tom Kalinske
The fact is that the home video game market is made up of three categories, and having a good year in one category does not give you the right to claim overall superiority.
1—Peter Main, vice president of marketing, Nintendo of America
Going into 1992, Sega had several advantages over Nintendo, including a much lower sales price and a larger library of games. Nintendo was slow in
getting games to market, and some of the early Super NES games such as
U.N. Squadron
and
Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball
were not particularly fun. There were too many golf games early on, and the anticipated third-party titles, such as Konami’s
Contra 3: The Alien Wars
, were slow in coming. Sega had ten games for every game on Super NES, and Sega’s internally produced titles were getting better and better. Sega had a long line of arcade hits to draw from and several licensed contracts with Disney, as well as with such sports stars as Joe Montana and David Robinson. Capcom may have released only a Super NES version of
Final Fight
, but one of Sega’s internal development teams created
Streets of Rage
, a similar side-scrolling gang-fighting game with bigger levels, tougher enemies, and amazing original music.
Not only were there more games for Genesis, but Sega also continued to produce titles at a faster pace. The market seemed to stop and take note every time Shigeru Miyamoto released a new
Mario
or
Zelda
game, but those games generally arrived at the rate of one per year. Sega released several anticipated games like
Streets of Rage
and
ToeJam & Earl
throughout the year. These games may not have been as widely anticipated as a
Mario
game, but they often had an edgy irreverence about them that helped shape the way people perceived Sega. More important, they gave Genesis owners something to look forward to buying in the near future, while Super NES owners had to wait for the Christmas season.
Every week we would have an executive review of the games we had in progress. And the meeting would involve anybody who wanted to join…. marketing, manufacturing executives would be there, producers, etc. We would review the games in a conference room that was called the Loony Bin. It was kind of funny.
When you watch the television commercials, they’re very irreverent, very cutting edge, and this kind of … this attitude pervades throughout the entire company. When we had these meetings with Tom Kalinske and all the executive VPs in the room, you could say anything you wanted to. It was very interesting because people were swearing in the meetings and making off-color remarks. But it was all accepted. It was just part of the company culture, people could say anything about the game. They’d say things like, “That thing really sucked.” Or, “That character really blows,” and the executives were right there, taking it all in and very serious about it.
—Terry Huang, former public relations manager, Sega of America
Sega’s advertising continued to evolve as well. While Nintendo’s advertising seemed stuck in a Mario-esque world of cute images appealing to preteen kids, Sega turned to a noisy underground image. Sega commercials always ended with the “Sega Scream”: some character screamed “Sega” into the camera. This new marketing approach, combined with an emphasis on sports games,
Sonic The Hedgehog
, and new lines of edgy games, changed some basic market demographics. Sega was becoming cool to high-school students, and the cooler Sega became, the less people were ready to admit that they liked Nintendo. When a Sony marketing team ran focus groups, they found that teenage boys who owned a Super NES console would not admit it.
I saw that our primary audience was over eighteen years of age. Nintendo tended to focus on younger kids. We attempted to focus on an older crowd. Forty percent of our business is over eighteen years old. Teenage and college-age kids have adopted the Sega Scream. I was backstage at a rap concert, and I watched rappers who did not know who I was meet each other with the Sega Scream.
—Tom Kalinske
As the year progressed, Nintendo sought to eliminate one of Sega’s advantages by lowering the price of the Super NES console from $179 to $149. Nintendo of America vice president of marketing, Peter Main, would later comment that he wished they had gone with a $149 price tag from the start. “I could have sold an extra million,” said Main. Sega responded to the Nintendo price drop by reducing the price of Genesis to $129.
According to the TRST data, sales information recorded by the industry-tracking NPD Group, Nintendo sold 5.6 million Super NES consoles in 1992, edging out Sega by 10 percent. Sega still had a larger install base and sold more software, but the momentum seemed to be moving in Nintendo’s direction.
As Nintendo and Sega squared off for top honors in the 16-bit arena, NEC officially pulled out of the market, turning the sales of TurboGrafx over to a newly created company called Turbo Technologies Inc. that it formed with Hudson Soft. The writing was on the wall for TurboGrafx and had been since before the release of Super NES. The system had developed a cult following but it would never have a genuine hit game in the United States. Even
Bonk
, its mascot game, was almost unknown to the general consumer. (By comparison, a 1993 study showed that
more American kids recognized Mario and Sonic than Mickey Mouse.) Turbo Technologies continued marketing various versions of the TurboGrafx into 1994, then closed shop as Atari and 3DO entered the market.
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In what may have been the oddest race in video game history, Sega and Nintendo began developing devices for a new storage format called CD-ROM and raced to deliver CD-ROM peripherals to retail. In truth, CD-ROM was anything but new. Computer companies had been using them as a method of mass storage for years prior to Nintendo and Sega making their discoveries, and NEC beat them by two years with TurboGrafx-CD. Sega announced plans for the Mega-CD, the Japanese version of the CD-ROM, drive in early 1991. The plan was to release the unit in Japan by late 1991, then in United States the following year.
Around Sega of America, the general reaction to the Mega-CD announcement was euphoric. The drive was seen as a way of turning the technological tables in Sega’s favor and driving yet another nail into Nintendo’s coffin. Sega of Japan and its partner on the project, Sony, handled all of the design work, shutting out Sega of America executives until the project was completed. As late as mid-1991, Japanese executives continued to keep the unit hidden from Sega of America, finally sending a crippled “dummy” drive to the U.S. that summer to show them what it looked like.
When you work at a multinational company, there are things that go well and there are things that don’t. They didn’t want to send us working Sega CD units.
**
They wanted to send us dummies and not send us the working CD units until the last minute because they were concerned about what we would do with it and if it would leak out. It was very frustrating.Somehow they had sent some ROMs, or we had procured ROMs somehow, and we had a dummy unit that was missing its ROM. I always liked to work late at night, and so did Shinobu Toyoda,
*
so it was like one in the morning and he came to me with this chip and with the Sega CD and the ROMs and said, “Can you actually make this work?”I thought, “Yeah, I probably could.” So, I put the chip in. There were a couple of other things that were unhooked, but we fixed it and plugged it in. So Shinobu and I were the first people in the U.S. to see the Sega CD boot up. Our take on it was one of wonder from the product development side, but as soon as we started to program for it, I think … I think the wonder went away quickly.
It was literally a mass storage extension of the Genesis. It wasn’t a new system, and that was always the confusion internally. The internal people believed it to be a completely new system with new abilities. It did have small expansion abilities, but they were not significant.
—Michael Latham, former executive producer, Sega of America