Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  Few game publishers minded. Most were happy to trade creative and business freedom for the huge profits to be made from NES games. As in Japan, much of the US video game industry was now subject to the will of one company alone. Nintendo’s competitors Atari Corporation and Sega watched their 7800 ProSystem and Master System consoles get savaged in the retail market and starved of games as Nintendo licensees decided it was safer not to jeopardise their relationship with the increasingly monolithic Nintendo by flirting with the opposition. “I couldn’t get any arcade exclusives on the 7800 because Nintendo had exclusive agreements – formalised or not,” said Katz. “We couldn’t get the hot arcade games for the 7800. So I thought I should try and get the hottest titles from the old computer game companies. It was the only strategy we could employ.”

  By 1989 Nintendo products accounted for 23 per cent of all toys sold in the US. Macy’s and Toys R Us devoted whole sections of their store to Nintendo, shrines to the new messiah of video gaming. Nintendo Power, Nintendo’s promotional magazine, became the US’s biggest-selling children’s magazine with a monthly circulation in the region of five million copies. Nintendo’s premium rate helpline for players wanting tips on how to beat games was taking more than 50,000 calls a week. And there was enough Nintendo merchandising for fans to literally eat, sleep, drink, dress and study shrouded in Nintendo branding. There were Mario cereals, Zelda trunks, Nintendo notebooks, wallpaper, bed sheets, rulers, tennis shoes, birthday cake pans, portable radios and soft toys.

  Nintendo’s success did, however, make it a target for Americans upset about the growing influence of Japan on the US – a concern that peaked at the end of the 1980s when the NES was at its zenith. After defeating it in the Second World War, the US set about turning Japan into a democratic free market outpost in As. The US bankrolled improved infrastructure, helped Japan gain membership of international trade associations and encouraged US companies to share technology with the Japanese. It also sought to make it easier for Japanese companies to sell their products in the US by reducing trade barriers and agreeing a fixed exchange rate between the yen and the dollar. Japan, meanwhile, introduced protectionist laws that kept foreign firms out of Japan and helped kill off Atari Japan.

  By the end of the 1970s Japan was being described as an “economic miracle” and, aided by low wages, Japanese corporations were making massive in-roads into the US market at the expense of American manufacturers. Many Americans hated this. They saw Japan’s protectionism and the US’s openness as an unequal arrangement that was destroying American companies and jobs.[2] But despite the domestic pressure, the strategic importance of Japan as a Cold War ally often caused attempts to address the issue to be sidelined. Measures such as US President Richard Nixon’s decision to restrict Japanese TV imports only made matters worse by encouraging Japanese companies to open US factories or buy out US businesses. Nowhere was the row about Japanese influence more fraught than in the debate about the car industry. The US car industry was more than a collection of business to Americans; it was a symbol of national economic virility. So as Japanese companies made in-roads at the expense of iconic companies such as General Motors and Ford, the anger boiled over. There were incidents of people smashing up Toyotas, while others made patriotic appeals for people to buy American motors.[3] Wild-eyed commentators compared Japan’s economic success in the US to a “second Pearl Harbour”.

  To some, Nintendo’s success was just another example how American business was being crushed by Japan’s economic steamroller. For Nintendo, however, the anti-Japanese feeling only came to a head when Washington State senator Salde Gorton asked if the company would buy the Seattle Mariners baseball team to prevent it moving out to Florida. Yamauchi, hoping to give something back to the country that had made Nintendo so huge, used $60 million of his own money to buy a majority stake in the club. Yamauchi didn’t even like baseball. “Baseball has never really interested me,” he told reporters at the time.

  He explained it as returning a favour to the US that helped make Nintendo one of the world’s most profitable companies. Furious baseball fans did not see it that way, however. They saw it as another example of the Japanese buying America.[4] Nintendo found itself the latest focus of anti-Japanese sentiment. A poll conducted at the time found 61 per cent of Americans wanted the Japanese out of Major League Baseball. When news of the row reached Japan, Yamauchi found himself being criticised by the Japanese for inflaming American ill feeling. Japan was well aware of anti-Japanese sentiment in America at the time. One Japanese company, SystemSoft, even responded with a video game called Japan Bashing, where, as the Americans, the player’s goal is to change Japan by trying to make the Japanese eat wheat or to stop hunting whales. The computer-controlled Japan, meanwhile, fights back by trying to turn hamburgers on the US coast into sushi.

  Nintendo faced other sources of criticism as well. Its huge success prompted accusations that the company was engaging in monopolistic practices that stifled competition. However, the attempts to challenge Nintendo on these grounds in the courts came to nothing. Health campaigners, meanwhile, blamed Nintendo for making American kids fat. The National Coalition on Television Violence released figures in November 1988 suggesting 83 per cent of NES games were violent in nature.

  More troubling for Nintendo was the work of Eugene Provenzo Jr., the professor of education at the University of Miami. Provenzo had become fascinated by Nintendo’s huge success and noticed there was very little research into video games from a cultural perspective. He decided to conduct one of the earliest studies of video games examining the portrayal of gender and violence within the 47 highest-selling NES games.

  “My colleagues thought I was a lunatic and crazy to be working in this area,” he said. “I got kind of stubborn and really got fascinated with it and thought this was a very important emerging phenomenon. They sort of humoured me.” Provenzo started looking for funding. The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, which funds studies into new media and violence, was his first port of call. “They kinda laughed me out of the place. I went to the Spencer Foundation, the US Department of Education. They all basically said ‘charming, but who would possibly care about this?’. Bear in mind at that, at the time, the notion of looking at film sources, new media and popular culture as an area of serious research wasn’t there yet, least of all looking at it in terms of kids’ culture.”

  Provenzo finished his book Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo off his own back and sent it to Harvard University Press. “I sent it in on a Thursday and I got a telephone call, which was very unusual, on Monday morning,” he said. “The editor basically said this is a breakthrough book.” In his book Provenzo accused many of the NES games he examined of promoting aggression and containing racist and sexist stereotypes. His work marked the start of academic study of video games, but it was not the kind of conclusion the game industry, and Nintendo especially, wanted to hear. “The game industry was extremely hostile afterwards,” he said. “Nintendo of America’s publicity office and legal office were intimidating enough that the original title of the book was going to be The World According to Nintendo, which is the Nintendo motto, but the publisher decided they didn’t want to take the risk.”

  The criticism, however, did little to detract from Nintendo’s success and, with North America and Japan wrapped up, Nintendo turned its attentions to Europe. The NES started to arrive in Europe in 1986, but Nintendo’s lack of a European office and patchy distribution, meant the console only really started to appear in most countries during 1987. By then, however, European game players were aspiring to own one of the new home computers such as the Commodore Amiga or Atari ST – machines that offered visuals no NES game could match. The four-year-old NES just looked old hat compared to the work of game developers such as the UK’s Bitmap Brothers.[5] The NES and its games were also expensive for a continent weaned on that budget games costing as little as £1.99 and dirt-cheap home computers. “When Nintendo originally exhibited the N
ES nobody was very impressed with it compared to Amiga and stuff like that,” said David Darling, co-founder of British budget game publisher Codemasters. “It looked really quite old technology, the cartridges were expensive and no-one in the industry could foresee it as being a success.”

  The terms of Nintendo’s NES licences also shocked the freewheeling European game industry. “It was restriction of trade. I still find it totally amazing,” said Geoff Brown, the founder of US Gold – one of Europe’s largest publishers at the time. “It not only told you how many products you could put on that format, it also says Nintendo has to see it in advance. They approved the release of them when they are your biggest competitor. It was incredibly expensive to manufacture and you couldn’t manufacturer it yourself. It was a total lock down of the format. I just thought it was outrageous. If I want to make a game for a console and it’s terrible and I want to spend the money it’s my problem, not theirs. I wasn’t alone in this, there was a negativity amongst publishers – they didn’t want to support it.”

  Others saw it as a creative affront. “It would have been impossible for us to develop a creation such as Captain Blood on a console because we would never have obtained the concept approval,” said Philippe Ulrich, the founder of French game publisher Ere Informatique. Not that Nintendo cared. It already had the cream of Japanese and American games for its console and saw little need to pander to the game publishers of Europe. “They couldn’t care less,” said Brown. “They didn’t really need regular UK publishers. They had brilliant games of their own. We didn’t go to them and they didn’t come to us.”

  Nintendo also found itself faced with stronger competition from Sega. While Nintendo’s distribution arrangements were patchy, Sega had struck deals with leading European video game distributors such as the UK’s Mastertronic and Ariolasoft in West Germany. Sega’s Master System went on to outsell the NES in Europe, although neither came close to weaning European game players off their home computers.

  There were also a few abortive attempts by European companies to challenge the Japanese systems. British electronics firm Amstrad had enjoyed huge success with its CPC home computers and its founder Alan Sugar, who like fellow British computing pioneer Clive Sinclair later received a knighthood, thought his company could be a European answer to Nintendo. Amstrad repackaged the CPC as the GX4000 console, which Sugar presented to UK publishers as an alternative to the draconian licensee terms of Nintendo and Sega. “All we did was pay lip service to it, because the Amstrad CPC had been incredibly successful. We thought we’d better do a game just to keep him happy,” said Brown. “We went to a meeting with Sugar where he said: ‘We’ve got a driving game’. I said: ‘Yeah, but you haven’t got Out Run’. He says: ‘What the bloody hell’s Out Run?’. I said: ‘It’s just a brilliant, brilliant driving game’. He says: ‘But we’ve got a driving game, mate, that’s all we need’. What he couldn’t understand was that a driving game is not just a driving game. Out Run was Out Run. For me it was a significant point in Alan Sugar’s understanding of the video game market: he was great at moving boxes, but he was a seller of hardware rather than softwae.”

  The GX4000 sank without a trace, selling little more than 10,000 units compared to the two million CPC computers sold throughout Europe. The NES performed far, far better, but still came second to Master System and neither format achieved the level of support that the Amiga and Atari ST would in Europe. Even Luther De Gale, the former UK head of Konami – one of Nintendo’s closest Japanese partners, who was hired as a consultant to help try and save the NES in Europe, admitted to the press that Nintendo had failed to win over European consumers.

  But while European publishers resisted getting involved with Nintendo at home, they were more than happy to try and crack the US NES market. Especially when they realised the popularity of the NES on the other side of the Atlantic. British game designer Philip Oliver was one half of the Oliver Twins, a game development duo consisting of him and his fraternal twin brother Andrew that had gained success making cheap and cheerful budget games for Codemasters such as Fruit Machine Simulator, Grand Prix Simulator and Dizzy, an arcade adventure starring an anthropomorphic egg that became the UK’s answer to Mario.

  He was shocked at the scale of the NES market in the US compared to the UK industry: “We went to America to a show in Las Vegas and just couldn’t believe the size of the show and the size of Nintendo’s exhibition and the number of games. On the ST and Amiga the sales numbers of the best games would be a few hundred thousand, then you looked at the NES in America and the average game sales were about a million a piece and some of the better games like Super Mario Bros was like 28 million. You were just going ‘oh my god’. We just thought this is what we need to be doing.”

  The Oliver Twins’ publisher Codemasters had come to the same conclusion. It developed a device called the Game Genie that plugged into the NES and allowed players to cheat at games by giving themselves extra lives or unlimited ammunition. “We licensed it to a toy company in Canada and they set up a licence for an American toy company,” said Darling. “The American toy company took it to Nintendo and they couldn’t get a licence to sell it. We looked into the whole legal side of it and there was no reason why we needed a licence. So with the toy company and the lawyers we decided to go ahead and market it anyway.”

  Codemasters also decided to release games on the NES without Nintendo’s approval. Its first release was the Oliver Twins’ 1991 game The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, a NES-only addition to the Dizzy series. Codemasters hoped would bring the eggy hero to a new legion of fans. It barely registered in the huge NES market. “I don’t think it was massively popular, but since America is so big it still sold a lot,” said Oliver. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it sold 100,000 or 200,000 units, but it didn’t reach a level of saturation.”

  More successful were Chris and Tim Stamper, the founders of Ultimate Play The Game – the iconic Spectrum publisher that had created the groundbreaking Knight Lore. They turned their back on the UK market and reinvented themselvs as Rare – a NES developer for hire. “The Stamper brothers did this very clever thing,” said Geoff Heath, managing director of the UK’s Sega Master System distributor Mastertronic in the late 1980s. “They reverse engineered the Nintendo and then went to Japan, saw Nintendo and said ‘hey, what do you think of these games?’. Nintendo went ‘wait a minute we don’t understand what’s going on. You don’t have a licence, how have you done this?’. They said we just reversed engineered all your technology and here are the games. Nintendo were smart enough to say since you’re that brilliant, we’d better give you a special deal. They got a very, very sweetheart deal from Nintendo.”

  Rare devoted itself to pumping out games designed to appeal to the US audience. They created TV and film tie-ins (Wheel of Fortune, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?), converted arcade games (Narc, Marble Madness) and developed a smattering of original titles (R.C. Pro-Am, Battletoads). Unlike the Oliver Twins’ effort, Rare’s NES titles sold millions, turning the Leicestershire siblings into the UK’s most successful game designers of the late 1980s.

  For Nintendo, the failure to conquer Europe made little difference, as the incredible success of Super Mario Bros 3 underlined. Nintendo marketed the game in much the same way as a movie studio might nurture hype about its latest blockbuster film, spending months building consumers’ anticipation to fever pitch. The pre-publicity effort included the 1989 feature film The Wizard, a Universal Studios picture about three kids who go to California to take part in a video game tournament. Essentially a 100-minute-long Nintendo advert, The Wizard gave Super Mario Bros 3 a starring role. Nintendo also joined forces with McDonald’s to offer Mario Happy Meals in its US stores to coincide with the game’s February 1990 launch. It was a marketing operation of a scale unheard of for a single game.

  Super Mario Bros 3 also marked something of a creative comeback for Miyamoto and Tezuka, who had ended up working on different visions for Super Mario Bros 2.
Tezuka’s Super Mario Bros 2 was darker version of the original featuring levels designed to challenge the very best players. While it came out in Japan, Nintendo felt it was too hard to bring to the US market and instead asked Miyamoto to rework his Japanese NES title Doki Doki Panic into a Super Mario Bros 2 for the US market.[6] Neither game matched the brilliance of Miyamoto and Tezuka’s original effort. Super Mario Bros 3, however, revived tsense of wonder that made Super Mario Bros so special with features such as chain chomps, black balls with gnashing teeth constrained by a chain that were inspired by Miyamoto’s memories of his neighbours’ aggressive dog, and a range of ability-changing costumes for Mario to wear.

  Super Mario Bros 3 became, both critically and commercially, the culmination of Nintendo’s journey from unknown Japanese toy maker to global video game giant. The game sold more than 17 million copies worldwide, grossing around $550 million – more than Steven Spielberg’s film E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. In 1990 the Q Score survey measuring the popularity of celebrities and brands reported that Mario was now more famous and popular than Mickey Mouse. Miyamoto became a world-famous game designer, even attracting the attention of former Beatle Paul McCartney and Spielberg, both of whom travelled to Kyoto to meet him. Nintendo, meanwhile, became the focus of business acclaim and anxiety. In 1989 the Japanese Economic Journal named Nintendo as Japan’s most profitable company ahead of both Toyota and Honda. Nintendo’s average employee was earning the company $1.5 million of profit a year. Apple Computer’s president Michael Spindler went so far as to name Nintendo as the company he feared most during the 1990s. The business acumen of Yamauchi and the creative abilities of Miyamoto had turned the laughing stock of 1984 into one of the world’s most formidable companies.

  Nintendo’s success reconfigured the games industry on a global level. It brought consoles back from the dead with its licensee model, which became the business blueprint for every subsequent console system. It revitalised the US games industry, turning it from a $100 million business in 1986 to a $4 billion one in 1991. Nintendo’s zero tolerance of bugs forced major improvements in quality and professionalism, while its content restrictions discouraged the development of violent or controversial games. The NES also put Japanese games at the centre of the world’s video game industry. Japan was seen as having the best game makers and instead of looking to California, game players started looking to the Japanese archipelago for the next amazing game.