Console Wars

by Blake J. Harris

  When Wieden finished, he was pelted with applause, both from Sega’s marketing team and from his awestruck colleagues. He waited for the clapping to energize the room, and then he began to discuss a possible programming schedule. As he started to explain how his agency could get airtime at unmatchable discounts, Kalinske subtly elbowed Nilsen. “What do you think so far?” Kalinske whispered.

  Before whispering back, Nilsen quickly flipped through the vidspeak sampler. “Mostly whammy jammy, but every now and then a bit hedgy wedgy.”

  And just like that, Al Nilsen became the first gamer to express himself in vidspeak.

  Before Sega of America could officially select Wieden+Kennedy, they needed to sit through one final pitch. It was all but a formality at this point, but they owed Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein the courtesy of at least allowing them to believe that the competition was wide open. Besides, what was the worst that could happen? They liked some tiny aspect of the Goodby campaign and passed it along to Wieden+Kennedy? Thoughts like these swirled around Kalinske’s mind as he walked into the lobby of the Foster City Crowne Plaza. Like W+K, the guys at GB&S had opted to pitch outside a dull office environment, though it’s hard to say that the Crowne Plaza engendered feelings of joy and enthusiasm. But any doubts about the venue instantly evaporated when Kalinske and a dozen colleagues entered the ballroom.

  “Welcome!” Jeff Goodby shouted, ushering the Sega employees into what had once been an unspectacular ballroom with frumpy velvet curtains and asparagus-colored carpeting. “Welcome to the Next Level.”

  The breathtaking what-the-huh sensation of swinging open those ballroom doors felt slightly on par with stumbling through a closet and suddenly falling into Narnia. In the center of the room, sixteen giant television sets had been multiplexed together to create one mega-sized screen. This beautiful monstrosity looked like what you might expect Transformers to use if the Autobots and Deceptions decided to momentarily put aside their differences and watch the Super Bowl together. Standing in front of the TVs was a twelve-year-old boy suavely playing Sonic The Hedgehog on the IMAX-sized screen. Sounds from the game blared through a booming sound system that had been installed by the roadies for the Grateful Dead. The speakers, the boy, and the tower of televisions were all on top of a massive stage that had been fashioned by George Coates Performance Works, a San Francisco–based ambient art company renowned for developing innovative types of theatrical performance. Part of this performance required a large ensemble cast, which explained the rows of stadium-style seats up against the walls. These seats, all of them filled, were occupied by employees from Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein. As the team from Sega was shown to their own seats, Kalinske concluded that this had to be greatest presentation he had ever seen in his twenty years of corporate meetings. And it had only been going on for about fifteen seconds.

  “Thank you all for coming to our humble presentation,” Jeff Goodby said. He spoke from atop the stage, joined by Rich Silverstein, Jon Steel, Irina Heirakuji, and Harold Sogard, the agency’s director of account management. They were each wearing a school letterman’s jacket they had made, featuring a patch of Sonic on the shoulder.

  Silverstein nodded. “We’re psyched to show you a little bit of what we’ve cooked up,” he said. “And we hope that you’re prepared to be blown away.”

  “We’ve spent the past month traveling around the country and living with gamers,” Steel said. “We got to know them and understand what they want.”

  “To search for any clue about how their minds work,” Heirakuji said. “We even raided their backpacks, bedrooms, and closets.”

  “It’s true,” Sogard said. “Jeff even turned our conference room into a ten-year-old’s bedroom. Right down to the dirty clothes!”

  As laughter emanated from the Sega crowd, Goodby gave an unapologetic shrug. “Hey, I’ve never had a problem with getting my hands a little dirty,” he said. “But before we get into the campaign, I wanted to first show you how committed to Sega our agency really is. So in preparation for the pitch, I went around the office and assigned everyone a Genesis game to master.” Goodby took a step forward and pointed to his employees in the stadium seats. “Over there, we’ve got an expert on every single game that you guys make. Go ahead and ask them any question about any game. I’m totally dead serious.”

  When the Sega folks realized that Goodby was, in fact, totally dead serious, Nilsen was selected to come up with some brain busters. “In Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom, what is the name of the main character in the First Generation?”

  The agency employee assigned to Phantasy Star III stood up. “That’s a tough question,” he said, making Goodby sweat for a second. “But only because there are six playable characters: Rhys, Lyle, Mieu, Wren, Lena, and Maia. If I had to narrow it down to one, though, I’d go with Rhys, the Crown Prince of the Orakian Kingdom of Landen.”

  “I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Nilsen said amidst applause for the Phantasy Star III expert.

  After his employees correctly answered a few more of Nilsen’s questions, Goodby moved on to the campaign. “Welcome to the Next Level,” he said. “That’s not just the tagline, but the entire essence of our campaign. ‘Welcome to the Next Level’—that says it all. It’s a badge of honor; it’s the ultimate challenge; it’s an invitation to join the revolution. It represents the only thing that a player cares about when he’s locked into a game. Shut off the real world, dive into the game world, and just keep going-going-going at all costs until you get there. It means wake up and let’s get started. Put away your toys, put away that juvenile Nintendo, and go get a Genesis if you want to find out what life is really all about. Welcome to the Next Level. It means that you have finally arrived. And just in time, because we’ve been waiting for you.”

  Kalinske loved everything that Goodby had to say. The guy got it—he just totally and completely got it. But as spot-on as his words continued to be, they were nothing more than that. Beyond the theatrical presentation, was Goodby’s “Welcome to the Next Level” really that different from Wieden+Kennedy’s “You are here”? And if it came down to a matter of execution, Wieden+Kennedy would get the benefit of the doubt based on their track record. By this point, however, Kalinske wanted Goodby to win the account. He wanted to give the business to a bunch of guys as smart, scrappy, and subversive as his own. In order to do that, however, he needed proof that “Welcome to the Next Level” could be more than just words. He had to know that this would be the weapon used to assassinate Nintendo. As if reading his mind, Goodby screened some commercials that the agency had prepared in advance.

  The ads shown at the pitch were unrecognizable as those the focus group had seen. Following that barrage of atomic suck-bombs, Goodby and Silverstein had decided to take a step back. As they reflected upon what had gone wrong, they concluded that the agency’s account planners had conducted incredible research and the creative teams had written great copy, so the problem had to be a matter of execution. The dots were all there, but they needed a better way to connect them. After further examination, however, what they realized was that they shouldn’t even connect the dots at all. Beneath the focus group’s insults and criticism, there was a lesson to be gleaned: kids notice everything. For example, when one of the respondents had said, “That footage you showed wasn’t even from Sonic 2!” what he really meant was, “To you, all game footage looks the same.” And then when he’d said, “It was from the original Sonic, and it was from level two, which isn’t hard at all,” what he really meant was, “Unlike you, I can see a split-second frame from a level, identify it, identify with it, and also have an emotional reaction to it.”

  These kids, their minds just operated at a much faster speed than anyone gave them credit for. In the same way that dogs can hear things that humans cannot, this generation of kids could see things that adults couldn’t even process. Not only that, but they remembered them too. So the best way to speak to them was to invent a dog whistle that play
ed something only they could hear. This was kind of what they had been trying to do with the semi-subliminal messaging (“speed,” “babes,” “midnight”), but that was too obvious. That was like an old man wearing baggy pants and a backward hat. Kids were too smart for that; they could spot a poser from a million miles away. With this in mind, the agency had their editor, Hank Corwin, go back through the material and create some kind of beautiful chaos that spoke up for kids and, for once, not down to them.

  What Goodby unveiled at the Crowne Plaza was unlike anything Kalinske and his colleagues had ever seen before. Quick cuts. Crazy zooms. Wild camera angles. It felt less like watching a regular commercial than like fast-forwarding through one on the VCR. Loud punk music. Intense lens flares. Aggressive close-ups. It looked sort of like a music video, but only if that music video was suffering from manic-depression and had just ingested a cocktail of heroin, cocaine, and speed. Weird lighting, unpretty actors, nonlinear storytelling—the whole thing was off-putting, migraine-inducing, and offensive to the senses, but it was absolutely incredible. And to tie it all together, at the end of every spot some maniac shouted, “Sega!”

  “And just remember,” Goodby said as the video presentation came to an end, “we’re only a short drive away.” He then played a short video clip of himself, Silverstein, and a few other guys whacking golf balls off the roof of their office building. Except whenever they hit the ball, the real reaction shot was replaced with footage of golf balls hitting Sega of America headquarters.

  During the ground-shaking applause that followed, Nilsen subtly elbowed Kalinske. “What did you think?”

  Kalinske blinked for a second, then replied, “I think vidspeak just became a dead language. Sorry, hedgy wedgy.”

  He was practically in a state of shock. This was it—everything he had wanted. The tone was edgy, but not too sharp. It cut, but only deep enough to leave a cool scar. It was sex without a condom, smoking two packs a day, and watching the speedometer break a hundred miles per hour; and the best part was that none of it hurt because it was only a videogame.

  If there had been any lingering doubts that Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein was the right choice, they disappeared when the Sega people got back to their office and saw that the entire parking lot was covered in chalk markings. At first it looked like teenage vandalism, but upon closer inspection it turned out to be a single message written over and over: “Welcome to the Next Level.”

  32.

  THE KUTARAGI DREAM MACHINE

  While Sega was preparing for the next level, and Nintendo seemed to finally be adjusting to this one, Sony was trying to decide if they even wanted to be in the game. To figure this out once and for all, Sony held a pivotal management meeting at their Japanese headquarters on June 24, 1992.

  From the outset, it was quite clear that Sony’s board of directors wanted nothing to do with developing a console. The R&D costs of creating proprietary hardware were astronomical, and the long development cycles would create an endless money pit. More abstractly, the videogame business was little more than an offshoot of the fad-driven toy industry, and that just did not fit with Sony’s brand. The software, however, was a different matter, and the board was okay with this less risky endeavor. In the same way that Sony’s Columbia Pictures made movies and CBS Records distributed music, Olafsson’s software division would be permitted to keep producing games. In fact, the board had just recently allowed him to work with Sega in this arena. Was software not enough? Why this continued fixation on hardware? If Nintendo were involved, things might be different, but following last year’s public humiliation at the Consumer Electronics Show and some recent failed attempts to test those waters once more, that prospect looked highly unlikely. Given all of these factors, plus the aging board of directors’ you-will-understand-when-you-grow-up sensibility, they believed it was time to put Sony’s PlayStation to rest.

  Judging by the many nods of support, this sentiment appeared to be unanimous. These powerful men who once upon a time had shaped Japanese culture, back in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, were now all ominously agreeing like a fleet of bobblehead dolls in the trunk of a car headed off a steep cliff. Needless to say, not everyone agreed with Sony’s elder statesmen, but nobody in that boardroom disagreed with them more than Ken Kutaragi, the father whose baby the board of directors intended to kill.

  Ken Kutaragi was one of Sony’s top engineers, a sharply charismatic forty-one-year-old man with a proclivity for aggressively questioning authority. This was a rare quality in Japanese culture, one not generally welcomed at large corporations, but Kutaragi’s defiant spirit had served the company well in the past and was the primary reason that Sony was even considering videogames in the future. Originally they’d had no interest in videogames (not just consoles, but even manufacturing parts for Nintendo), and neither had Kutaragi. He was not a gamer by nature, but his interest in the art form changed in 1988 when watching his daughter play the 8-bit Famicom. It wasn’t so much what he saw on the screen, but the potential he saw for videogames: a way to bring computers out of the office and into the living room. Or more specifically, what he saw as a Sony employee: the mainstream consumer electronics appeal of vast computing power.

  Although this revelation changed Kutaragi’s perspective, it had not persuaded most of Sony’s executives, and this frustrated him. But instead of pleading his case to deaf ears, he decided to do something much more proactive. He knew that Nintendo was in the late stages of developing a 16-bit console, and he also knew that they were worried about the sound capabilities of Sega’s soon-to-be-released Mega Drive. Sega had worked with Yamaha to create an advanced audio processor capable of FM synthesis, which led Nintendo to Sony in the hopes of finding something superior. Sony’s executives, however, did not want to gamble on manufacturing videogame components and balked at the opportunity. Or so they thought. Without their knowledge, Kutaragi continued the conversation with Nintendo and developed an audio chip called the SPC700. When Kutaragi revealed his secret project, Nintendo’s designers were thrilled. This was exactly what they had been searching for. Sony’s top executives, however, were much less enthusiastic and wanted Kutaragi fired, which likely would have happened if he had not been protected by Sony’s chairman, Norio Ohga. As angry as the executives were about the defiance, they weren’t angry enough to start a civil war. And those tempers soon softened even more when Sony received a lucrative contract for Kutaragi’s sound chip. Kutaragi had gambled and, amazingly, had won. But more important, his win was really a win for Sony, and this propelled the company to reexamine the videogame industry. If there was this much money to be made with an audio chip, imagine how much could be made with an entire console. This was the logic that had guided Sony into working with Nintendo, first as a supplier for the Super Famicom and then as a partner on the PlayStation. But that logic spontaneously combusted when Nintendo snubbed Sony for Philips.

  Now everything was in limbo. That’s why this boardroom was overwhelmed with so much frustration. There had been a brief window when these executives could see the potential in what Kutaragi had shown them, but now they were blind to that promise. And as Kutaragi watched this supposed discussion of possibilities evolve into a monologue of foregone conclusions, he realized he could wait no longer to try to open their eyes.

  “Having listened to what everyone is saying,” Kutaragi began, addressing Sony’s board of directors, “I can see three options. First, to continue indefinitely with the traditional, Nintendo-compatible 16-bit game machines. Second, to sell game machines in a format proprietary to Sony. Third, to retreat from the market.” Kutaragi paused for a moment to let it all sink in. “Personally, I believe Sony should choose the second option.”

  The board members looked at him with suspicion. Of course he believed they should choose the second option. This was not news; this was how he had always felt.

  Kutaragi knew that his words alone would indeed not be enough to change anyone’s mind. That was why he had com
e prepared with something more than words. Kutaragi looked around the room and smiled with anticipation. As he had done with the Super Nintendo audio chip, he had once again been working in secret, and finally the time had come to reveal what he had been working on.

  33.

  A QUICK LAP AROUND

  VICTORY LANE

  Nintendo of America’s employees felt such head-to-toe reverence for Minoru Arakawa that there was not a thing in the world they would not do for their beloved leader. Or so they thought. In the summer of 1992, however, it dawned on NOA’s employees that there was actually one small thing they were not willing to do: go swimming.

  “But the water, it’s perfect,” Arakawa pleaded to a group of guests loitering beside the long pool in his backyard. They had come to his home in Medina for the barbecue that he and his wife hosted every year for Nintendo’s highest-ranking employees and their spouses. For people working in a speed-of-light industry, the annual summer celebration provided one day per year when Nintendo’s employees were encouraged to step back, relax, and smell the burgers being grilled to perfection.

  If burgers didn’t do the trick, there was also a full-color spectrum of sushi rolls from one of the city’s finest Japanese restaurants, as well as slivers of succulent king salmon that Howard Lincoln had brought back from his recent trip to Alaska. Mountains of food crested everywhere, and drinks could be found wherever the food was not—wine, champagne, and umbrella-topped cocktails, as well as a wide variety of beers from both America and Japan. There were about a hundred guests in total, all happily eating, drinking, and swapping stories, but even so, none of them were willing to take a plunge into the pool. After failing to entice a different group of guests to let loose and go swimming, Arakawa returned to his post at the grill. Yet he remained patient and undeterred, confident that by the end of the day the pool would no longer be left unrippled.