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 (78 page)

The retail community, on the other hand, greeted the news about 32X enthusiastically. Sega could not keep up with the demand among retailers, but when the unit actually went on sale, the public did not bite. One problem was that only six games were available at launch. While two of the launch titles were strong—
Virtua Racing
and
Doom
—other 32X games were inexplicably bad. One, a fighting game called
Cosmic Carnage
, looked and played so poorly that reporters made jokes about it.

As some members of the press predicted, 32X did not sell well. Within a few months, Sega dropped its price to $99 and it was ultimately cleared out of stores at $19.95. And Sega’s woes were just beginning.

The late November release of
Donkey Kong Country
stood in stark contrast to the gloom and doom faced by the rest of the video game industry. After three holiday seasons of coming in second to Sega, Nintendo had the biggest game
of the year. Sega still outperformed Nintendo in overall holiday sales, but the 500,000 copies of
Donkey Kong Country
that Nintendo sent out in its initial shipment were mostly sold in preorder, and the rest sold out in less than one week. Shortages were inevitable, and many retailers accused Nintendo of purposely undermanufacturing the game to drive up demand.

By the end of the 16-bit generation, Nintendo would go on to sell 9 million copies of
Donkey Kong Country
, making it the bestselling game since
Super Mario Bros. 3.
Donkey Kong Country
made Rare, Ltd., Nintendo’s most important second-party developer. It established the Super NES as the better 16-bit console and paved the way for Nintendo to win the waning years of the 16-bit generation. More important,
Donkey Kong Country
sounded the death knell for Jaguar and 3DO by convincing consumers that the first systems in the next generation of game consoles had little to offer that could not be found on Super NES.
Donkey Kong Country
may not have destroyed the competition, but it certainly cleared the way for the more impressive competitors that were about to arrive.

The “Next” Generation (Part 2)

By 1995, the video game industry appeared to be dying. According to the toy market-tracking NPD Group, the U.S. console market netted $4.55 billion in 1993. By 1995, that number was down to $3.07 billion. The NPD Group’s TRST data showed a 17-percent drop in 1994, followed by a 19-percent drop in 1995.

Having lost the temporary boost it received from
Street Fighter II
and
Mortal Kombat
, the arcade business was in even worse shape. Taito, the company that ushered in the golden age of arcades with
Space Invaders
, closed its U.S. offices in 1995, and Data East sold its pinball division to Sega of America. That year’s Amusement and Music Operators of America show, held in Dallas, was even smaller than in previous years, and rumors of companies closing were rampant around the floor of the show. One Data East employee was so unsure of his company’s future that he applied for jobs at the show in a unique fashion. Data East was demonstrating an arcade machine that took people’s photographs and printed them on sheets of half-inch stickers. The employee made stickers of himself holding a little sign that said, “hire me,” attached them to his business cards, and handed them out to other companies.

The two companies hit hardest by the 1994 and 1995 drops in the market would ultimately be the 3DO Company and Atari. They had failed to build sufficiently solid customer bases to withstand the storm that was about to strike in Japan.

On November 22, 1994, Sega released a 32-bit video game console called Saturn in Japan. Breaking with tradition, the launch took place on a Tuesday, causing added annoyance for Tokyo commuters because the response to Saturn was so
phenomenal. The 200,000 consoles that Sega shipped sold for 44,800 yen, or approximately $469. Most stores had customers pre-reserve their consoles and sold out their entire inventories more than a month in advance. Days before the launch, lines formed in front of those stores that sold their Saturn inventory on a first-come, first-served basis. Their supplies came nowhere near to meeting the demand. But the star of the day was not the Saturn console but a Saturn game—
Virtua Fighter.

It was developed by Sega’s most famous internal development team—AM2, led by Yu Suzuki. Suzuki was Sega’s answer to Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto. Having created such arcade classics as
Space Harrier
,
Hang-On
,
Out Run
, and
Virtua Racing
, Suzuki had reached minor celebrity status. But Suzuki’s biggest console hit was the Saturn version of
Virtua Fighter
, a fighting game featuring 3D polygonal combatants using a variety of authentic fighting styles, ranging from Kung Fu to professional wrestling.

Suzuki’s games reflected his wide-ranging tastes. Suzuki was a man of sophisticated discernment who collected fine wines and drove a Ferrari to work. His game designs often reflected his style, offering a nearly perfect mixture of realism and fantasy, wrapped in the most technologically advanced arcade cabinets on the market. Suzuki constantly pushed his managers to allow him to add features to his designs. His games generally had force-feedback controllers that rumbled or shook in response to action in the games and the largest and highest-resolution monitors of any games on the market. When his bosses balked at the cost of building his proposed
Space Harrier
cabinets, Suzuki promised to return his salary if the game bombed. It was a major success.

In the early 1990s, Suzuki was one of the first arcade designers to experiment with 3D polygonal graphics.
*
His first use of this technology was a game called
Virtua Racing
, which went on to become an international arcade smash. Suzuki followed up with
Virtua Fighter.

The brawlers in
Virtua Fighter
were not as ornate as the 2D combatants in
Mortal Kombat
or
Street Fighter II.
Because of the early technology available at the
time, the artists who created the game had to create each character with less than 1,200 polygons. This resulted in fighters with square shoulders and boxy-looking arms. Although Suzuki’s foray into 3D graphics did not compare well against the polished cartoon look of other fighting games, it paved the way for beautifully fluid body movements.

As an arcade game,
Virtua Fighter
was one of Sega’s most successful games in Japan. The incarnation of
Virtua Fighter
that appeared on Saturn was almost indistinguishable from the arcade game. It did not come bundled with Saturn (no games were packed in with the console), but at a price of 7,800 yen (more than $80) the
Virtua Fighter CD
sold at nearly a one-to-one ratio with Saturn consoles.

On December 3, 1994, Sony launched a new console called PlayStation into the Japanese market. Unlike Sega, Sony was not an established game company, and only 100,000 consoles were shipped at a retail of 39,800 yen. The launch was not as highly anticipated, and many people who had not preordered consoles were able to purchase them at stores before the inventory ran out. Unlike Sega, Sony did not have famous in-house design teams. The most notable game for PlayStation was
Ridge Racer
, a solid translation of an arcade racing game. Namco published both the arcade and PlayStation versions of this game.

To show that consumers would choose Saturn over PlayStation, Sega waited until the day the Sony console launched to ship more Saturns. Once they did, and the systems were sold side-by-side, Saturn proved the more popular system.

Back in the United States, Nintendo and Sega continued to wrangle for leadership of the video game industry. Sega lost the battle over the rating system, but a new struggle erupted over trade shows.

Since the early days of Atari, video game companies had unveiled their products at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), a show run by a trade organization called the Electronic Industry Association. CES was about more than interactive games, however. It was the place where manufacturers unveiled new televisions, car sound systems, telephones, and refrigerators. Despite the bad years for video games, more and more computer software companies were publishing games, and floor space was becoming a limited commodity. In an effort to keep the game makers happy, the Electronic Industry Association proposed a show called CES-I.

With the creation of the Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA), the video game industry had its own trade organization and was large enough and prosperous enough to run its own show. As the Electronic Industry Association made plans for CES-I, a large international publishing company called IDG Communications approached the IDSA with a proposal for an annual show called the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) that would supplant CES as the show for the interactive entertainment industry. Sega, Sony, Atari, and several leading software publishers immediately announced support for the show, while Nintendo and Microsoft threw their weight behind CES-I.