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 (84 page)
Authors: Steven Kent
These were busy months for Sony. On September 5, Sony released a game called
Crash Bandicoot.
The term
bandicoot
referred to a class of Southern Pacific marsupials that included Tasmanian devils. Hence, it surprised no one when the animal in Sony’s new game turned out to be a dim-witted brute with a spin attack. Critics charged that as a game,
Crash Bandicoot
was too derivative. Like Mario and Sonic, Crash ran around jumping on enemies and collecting things—mostly apples. But Crash was a character with a strong personality, and the people behind the game had a great eye for gameplay. Hence the character seemed destined to become Sony’s marsupial mascot. The character certainly took a step toward mascot status when an actor dressed in a Crash Bandicoot costume did a television commercial in which he visited Nintendo headquarters.
The commercial began with a quick glimpse of the sign outside Nintendo’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters. (Except for that initial shot, none of the filming was done at Nintendo.) In the commercial, the actor playing Crash stood in Nintendo’s parking lot, calling the “plumber boy” out for a showdown, until
Nintendo security escorted him away. While
Crash Bandicoot
was Sony’s big game of 1996 and Crash became a popular character, Kaz Hirai and the rest of the Sony staff refused to acknowledge him as their mascot, though he would not have been Sony’s first spokes-cartoon. Around the time of the first E3, Sony briefly flirted with the idea of using a character called “Polygonman” as its spokesperson. Polygonman looked like a stained-glass version of a
Simpsons
character. After E3, Sony quickly abandoned him and company spokespeople claimed to have never heard of the character.
And if you take a look at Sony advertising, they never used any sort of celebrity or character endorsements. We never intended for Polygonman to be a character in a game. He was never going to be a Sonic or a Mario. He was always supposed to be something like the Master Game or something out there in the ether that was always challenging you. It was the challenge of video games that he was supposed to represent.
And the Japanese took it much more literally and thought that this was something that we were trying to do that was going to supplant Sony. We introduced Polygonman at E3. The Japanese saw it and went postal on us.
—Steve Race, former CEO, Sony Computer Entertainment America
The American launch of Nintendo 64 was more phenomenal than the one in Japan. Nintendo made a press event of the shipping process by inviting a television crew to film pallets of consoles being loaded onto a plane. After more than a year of waiting for Nintendo to unveil the new game console, the media became a willing accomplice and the event made the national news. Nintendo originally announced that the release date would be Monday, September 30, then moved the launch up one day to the 29th. Having already presold their entire inventory, many stores started handing out their consoles on Friday the 27th, and all 500,000 units that Nintendo had shipped to the United States were gone by weekend’s close. Though the stated plan had long been to release a very limited number of Nintendo 64s in the United States in 1996, Nintendo executives recognized what a vital market they were dealing with and scrambled to find more.
To accommodate the red-hot U.S. market, Nintendo rerouted consoles earmarked for the Japanese and European markets. Rerouting Japanese consoles was of little consequence; demand for the unit had slowed by mid-July. The fact that Nintendo had plundered the few consoles targeted for Europe, however, offended certain European retailers and game publications.
Back in the United States, demand for N64 held strong, but a problem that plagued the Japanese market was becoming apparent in the United States as well. The predictions of gloom and doom appeared to have been correct. Due to the cartridge format, there simply were not enough games for the new console, and many games that came out were expensive or small.
Super Mario 64
and
Pilot Wings 64
, the first games Nintendo released for N64, both came from Shigeru Miyamoto’s design team and received rave reviews. The next titles, however, did not fare as well.
Cruis ’n USA
, a Williams arcade game published under the Nintendo label, had a slow frame rate, causing the game’s motion to look jerky.
Now, I’m going to be very direct with you. The very best games out there right now are N64 games. On the other hand, when it comes to
Cruis ’n USA
, I wouldn’t be honest if I said that
Cruis ’n USA
was much of a game; but that product is selling. I think it would be fair to say that we know that some of the N64 software is not better than [the software you find] on other platforms. The challenge for us is to continue to try to keep that quality on the way up. Hopefully, we’re going to succeed most of the time, but occasionally we’re not. It’s like saying to MGM, “You made
Gone with the Wind.
How come all the rest of your movies are not
Gone with the Wind?”
It just doesn’t work that way.—Howard Lincoln
There were other disappointments, too.
Mortal Kombat Trilogy
, a game that many people thought would only come out on N64, was released on other systems. The PlayStation version was superior.
When played side-by-side, the PlayStation version makes the N64 version look like it’s on a SNES [Super NES]. Then there’s the sound: The digitized sound effects are utterly atrocious. In fact, it’s so muffled that players may as well put their speakers on the other side of a cement wall
before starting the game. The music is typical of a non-CD game—that is to say, worthless. It’s tinny and very electronic sounding.Mortal Kombat Trilogy
proves that the Nintendo 64 is merely mortal. While it surpasses the PlayStation version in regard to load time, it still suffers a three or four second delay when loading a new character in multiplayer fighting. Ultimately, only
Mortal Kombat
addicts, who don’t already own a PlayStation, will find this game worth picking up.
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When asked about these titles, Nintendo executives often defended them by pointing out that consumers had voted with their wallets—nearly every title released for Nintendo 64 was a million-seller. Nintendo’s statistics were accurate: the company quoted TRST data with nearly religious reverence. The numbers, however, did not reflect the entire story. Millions of people purchased N64 hardware in the first year, then had only a few games to choose from. Every game for Nintendo 64 had reached bestseller status, but the sales were only being spread across a handful of games, whereas Saturn and PlayStation software sales were spread across five times as many games.
Nintendo did publish some brilliant games in the early days of Nintendo 64. During the first year after releasing the console, Nintendo released a few games that appealed to mainstream audiences, including
WaveRace 64, Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye 007
, and
Star Fox 64.
But the Nintendo 64 library was limited and expensive. By the end of 1997, PlayStation and Saturn had hundreds of games, most of which sold for under $50. By comparison, there were merely dozens of games for N64, some of which sold for nearly $80, and rumors were that future third-party cartridges might cost as much as $100. People outside Nintendo speculated that the console manufacturer had to sell its games at a loss and subsidize costs for other companies to keep prices down. Nintendo of America adamantly denied these stories, and the price of cartridges never reached $100. By 1998, the cost of cartridge manufacturing came down, and Nintendo 64 cartridges generally retailed for $10 more than PlayStation games.
During this crucial time, Nintendo lost an important third-party partner called Square Soft. Square Soft specialized in publishing role-playing games (RPGs), adventure games in which players traversed elaborate worlds, gaining experience
and learning fighting techniques while completing a quest. Although Square Soft published many highly respected games, its crown jewel was a series of games called
Final Fantasy
, created by Hironobu Sakaguchi, one of the world’s most respected game designers.
Sakaguchi did not start out making RPGs. After joining Square Soft, he made three computer games, then switched platforms to Famicom and made
Highway Star
(released in the United States as
Rad Racer
),
King’s Knight
, and
World Runner.
Sakaguchi was not excited by any of these games. His bosses assigned him to make 3D games because the programmer working with him, a notable Apple II game designer named Nasir Gebelli, was good at coming up with 3D code. Square sold approximately 500,000 copies of
Highway Star
and
World Runner
, pleasing Sakaguchi’s employers. But Sakaguchi had become bored with game design.
In an effort to get more excited about his work, Sakaguchi decided to switch genres and work on a game that would be more interesting to write. He decided to create an RPG and brought the idea to his boss.
The only person you had to go to at that time was the president [of the company], and he didn’t really understand games that well. Selling him on the concept of an RPG wasn’t that hard. I just went up and said, “I want to do an RPG.”
He said, “Is that good, is that interesting?” and I said, “Yeah, it’s fun.” So he said, “Okay.”
—Hironobu Sakaguchi, president, Square USA
Since he planned to quit making games after this first RPG, Sakaguchi named his game
Final Fantasy.
The basic concept was really a mythical concept of the whole earth, with fire and water representing everything on earth. I took that concept and represented those elements into a crystal, and that essentially became sort of the core theme for
Final Fantasy.I took a preexisting idea—the four or five basic elements of the world; sort of an orthodox and mythical concept—then molded it into an original fantasy story.
—Hironobu Sakaguchi
Creating
Final Fantasy
was a much larger and more involved task than making
World Runner.
Though he was able to create his earlier games with a three-person team, he needed a fifteen-person team for his RPG.
I started with the story and the overall worldview of the game. I had the graphics designer do the drawings.
Initially, the process was different from what we do now. Currently, we write the story completely and work from the storyline.
When we first started
Final Fantasy I
, we were really limited, technologically. So what I had to do first was make a basic rough idea for the game [then we would test it]. We had to deal with the hardware first. By doing so, we would come up with the graphics on the screen and figure out, based on the limitations and the capabilities of the hardware, how big the world was going to be and how many locations I could have.After that, I would incorporate my rough ideas and build up a story based on what I had to work with. It was kind of working backwards.
—Hironobu Sakaguchi
A huge bestseller,
Final Fantasy
was not the swan song Sakaguchi intended it to be. It resonated so well with Japanese audiences that Nintendo published it in the United States under its own label, and an unshakable relationship was forged between Square Soft and Nintendo.
*
In the early 1990s, as other companies flocked to Sega, Square Soft remained exclusive to Nintendo, publishing games like
Chrono Trigger
and
Secret of Mana
and always having its biggest sales with Sakaguchi’s
Final Fantasy
games. Square Soft became one of Nintendo’s most influential partners, a partnership that was covered by such publications as
Businessweek.
The American audience was never as interested in RPGs as the Japanese. Though Square Soft’s RPGs had a loyal U.S. following, sales were not as high as company officials hoped, and the company did not release
Final Fantasy V
in the United States. Then in 1994, as the market entered its major slump, Square released
Final Fantasy VI
for Super NES. (As there had been no American versions
of the previous three games, it published game six as
Final Fantasy III
.)
Final Fantasy III
was one of the top-selling games of 1994, but Square Soft employees were not satisfied.
When you look at that game and the numbers in Japan … It sold 3 million copies in Japan. Judging by the [U.S.] population alone, we predicted millions. So, it didn’t do that well.
—Hironobu Sakaguchi
Square Soft’s final title for Super NES was
Super Mario RPG
, a game that took Square Soft’s signature in-depth stories and turn-based combat and applied them to the Mario universe. With the game’s great graphics and a slowly growing base of RPG players,
Super Mario RPG
sales exceeded Nintendo’s rather conservative expectations. Then, as Nintendo prepared to unveil Nintendo 64, Square Soft announced that it was switching allegiances. Like Namco before it, Square Soft was going to make console games exclusively for PlayStation. The split was bitter. So bitter, in fact, that even after Nintendo reestablished relations with Namco in 1999, Yamauchi still refused to work with Square Soft. When asked if Nintendo would allow Square Soft to publish games for a new console called “Dolphin” that would not be released until the year 2001, Minoru Arakawa quietly replied, “I do not think it is yet time for Square Soft.”