Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  The following year Cinemaware took the union of TV coverage with sports games to its logical conclusion with TV Sports Football, a title that offered all the razzmatazz associated with broadcasts of American football matches. “I saw that people related to sports through television and that the way to do it was to emulate the TV broadcasts,” said Cinemaware founder Bob Jacob. “We had scores, the half-time show, we had marching bands, adverts. We had everything.”

  In the same year that TV Sports Football came out, Hawkins tried once again to realise his dream of making the best sports video games with John Madden Football, a American football title endorsed by the former Oakland Raiders coach turned sports commentator. Electronic Arts’ first effort, created on the Apple II, was a dud. Compared to the showbiz trappings of TV Sports Football and the depth of Earl Weaver Baseball it was an underwhelming effort that only offered full-size teams because Madden himself intervened when he discovered that the developers planned to make it a six- or seven-a-side game. “The first version was exceptionally crude,” admitted Roger Hector, the Electronic Arts producer who oversaw the game once Hawkins decided to concentrate on other projects. Scott Orr, the founder of GameStar, felt it was dull. “It emphasised strategy over action,” he said. “Unfortunately, the graphics – even by Apple II standards – were unimpressive and the game play was boring. Not surprisingly sales were disappointing too.”

  “Madden became known around Electronic Arts as ‘Trip’s folly’,” said Hawkins. “Everyone other than me thought the project should be killed. The accountants insisted that all the money, including Madden’s advance, be written off as unrecoupable. But I am a determined fellow and eventually got it right.”

  At Hawkins’ insistence Electronic Arts tried again with John Madden Football. To help reboot the series it handed control of the project over to Rich Hilleman, who had just finished producing the company’s 3D racing simulation Indianapolis 500: The Simulation. Hilleman immediately brought in veteran sports game designer Orr, who had sold GameStar to Activision in 1988, as the lead designer. While Hilleman and Orr set about rebooting the game, Sega’s Katz called Hawkins pleading for help. “I called him up and asked him did he have any back up Madden football games we could use under the Montana name,” said Katz.

  Up to that point Electronic Arts had focused on home computers. It distrusted Nintendo’s dominance of the console market and had made minimal effort to expand into the NES game business. “Part of Trip Hawkins’ original founding vision was that the future of gaming would be on PCs, not consoles,” said Hector. “At the time I joined Electronic Arts, they were committed to this strategy and to speak otherwise was heresy.”

  But the Sega Genesis had caught Hawkins’ attention. “When I heard that Sega would introduce a $189 console based on the 68000 microprocessor in late 1988, it was a revelation,” he said. “Electronic Arts had significant experience and software assets for the 68000, which had been in the Lisa, Macintosh, Amiga, Atari ST and also in many coin-op arcade systems. I was also excited that Sega might give us an alternative to Nintendo.”

  Sega was in trouble and Hawkins, knowing he had the upper hand in negotiations, pushed for a licence to make Genesis games on his terms. “Since he was doing us a favour and it was critical he took the opportunity to say ‘I’ll do that but I want a break on the royalty that we have to pay you guys for each unit of Sega software that’s sold’,” said Katz, who readily agreed, seeing the advantage of having a major publisher like Electronic Arts supporting the Genesis. Despite using a stripped-down version of its still-in-development Madden game, Electronic Arts missed Sega’s Christmas deadline and Joe Montana Football eventually came out in January 1990. But for Electronic Arts the deal had given it a chance to bring its new version of John Madden Football to the Sega Genesis.

  Orr and Hilleman’s reboot had changed the game significantly. “The Genesis and subsequent versions of Madden had nothing in common with the Apple II version other than John’s name,” said Orr. “Rich wanted an action game with realistic strategy. I remember several testy meetings between Rich and Trip regarding the direction of the game. Trip wanted a more computer-oriented feature set while Rich insisted on keeping our shared vision for a realistic arcade action game designed for console gamers. Fortunately, Rich prevailed.”

  Orr and Hilleman also sought to get Madden more involved in the game’s design. Madden’s input into the original title came mainly from discussions with Hawkins that took place on a two-day train journey, but now the team wanted to get more input from the football star. Madden’s belief that American football games are won or lost on the results of individual confrontations on the field became crucial to Orr’s thinking. “The biggest innovation was one-on-one confrontations between the on-field players,” said Orr. “Another innovation was a significant use of individual player skill ratings to create more sophisticated dynamics and play results. The final innovation was the end zone's 3D look and pop-up windows showing close-up views of the receivers. Up to then most football games used 2D side-scrollinor top-down views.”

  The Genesis version of John Madden Football would become a defining moment in sports games – a shift away from the overt statistical modelling of Earl Weaver Baseball towards a more action-based experience where the mathematical elements subtly enhanced the action rather than dominated it. John Madden Football’s marriage of action and simulation became the template for the majority of sports titles that followed it.

  By the time the Genesis version of John Madden Football was released in 1990, Katz’s daring head-on assault on Nintendo seemed to be working. Half a million Genesis consoles had been sold in North America and Nintendo’s new Super NES was still a year away from launch. But Sega knew it had to do better. “My mantra was to sell a million units. I was supposed to do this chant every morning: ‘hyaku man dai’ – one million – to represent the units we wanted to sell,” said Katz. Relations between Katz and Sega’s Japanese bosses were worsening. They wanted to know why Katz had not broken the million sales mark already and they felt he wasn’t doing enough to keep them informed on his progress. “I wasn’t on the phone every day telling them how great I had been doing since that wasn’t me, which probably would have been good to do if I wanted to stay in the favour of the Japanese, but I do my own thing and people either like it or they don’t. I only did half a ‘hyaku man dai’ and that wasn’t good enough.”

  Sega’s Japanese bosses decided to fire Katz. “The Japanese didn’t really understand that you don’t destroy a 90 per cent franchise, which is what Nintendo had, in one year. It takes a while,” said Katz. Katz’s replacement Tom Kalinske, a former president of Mattel, decided Sega needed to use the time it had before the arrival of the Super NES to secure its position in the market. He ramped up the anti-Nintendo adverts, slashed the price of the Genesis and ditched the Greek mythology-influenced Altered Beast as the game sold with the console because he feared its imagery would be equated with “devil worship” in the US’s bible belt. To replace Altered Beast he picked Sonic the Hedgehog, the latest game from Phantasy Star creator Naka.

  Sonic the Hedgehog was the result of an internal competition to create a character-led game that would provide Sega with a new mascot to replace Alex Kidd, the platform game hero that Sega touted as its answer to Mario during the late 1980s. Naka wanted his game to address his own dissatisfaction with Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros series. “When I played Mario I was really frustrated that even though I became better at it, the first level took the same amount of time,” he said. “I wanted that time to get shorter and my play to get faster as I got better at the game, so I came up with Sonic.” Naka made speed the overriding quality of his game. He cred worlds that were a cross between a pinball table and a rollercoaster ride.

  There were pinball bumpers to rebound off, rollercoaster-style loop-the-loops that allowed fast-moving players to travel upside down for brief moments and steep slopes for the game’s character to slide or roll down. By c
omparison Super Mario Bros dawdled. “The way I see it, we tried our best to think like Sonic and come up with the kind of world he would like to run through,” said Naka. The game also needed a distinctive character suited to the velocity of Naka’s world. He initially decided on a rabbit. “Sonic was supposed to be a long-eared rabbit, but a rabbit needs to stop before they can bring down an enemy, so we went for the hedgehog character that can keep running while bringing down its foe with its spines,” said Naka.

  Sega wasn’t too keen on Sonic being a hedgehog, primarily because few people in Japan or North America were familiar with the prickly nocturnal mammal. While Sega didn’t pick Sonic as its mascot, it realised that Naka’s exhilarating platform game was one of the best titles created for the Genesis. Sonic the Hedgehog arrived in the US in June 1991, a few months ahead of Nintendo’s Super NES. It became an instant success, giving Genesis owners a Mario of their own. Genesis sales rocketed both in North America and Europe ensuring there was no way Nintendo could recapture the level of dominance it had enjoyed in the days of NES. “Nintendo introduced the Super NES too late and allowed Sega to get in,” said Katz. “They let Sega develop a very strong sports line. I guess we were willing to take Nintendo on and spend the money necessary to do a decent launch for a period of 18 months. Sonic turned out to be lucky.”

  Nintendo had underestimated Sega. Many of the video game publishers who once refused to work with Sega for fear of upsetting Nintendo, now signed up to make games for both machines. Nintendo’s total control of the home games business was over. But Nintendo was far from finished. It sold 4 million Super NES consoles within a year of its November 1990 Japanese launch and still had millions of loyal fans in the US. By the end of 1991 – just over three months after the Super NES reached North America – market analysts NPD Group estimated that the Super NES had already taken 45 per cent of the post-NES market compared to Sega’s 55 per cent. NPD didn’t even bother to measure how NEC’s TurboGrafx-16 was doing. The next few years would see Nintendo and Sega engaged in a bitter battle for consumer attention, hoping to grab that extra slice of market share. Exclusive games were their weapons.

  To challenge Nintendo on the exclusives front, Sega set up a new game studio in San Francisco called the Sega Technical Institute, which was tasked with developing games for the US market. “The Sega Technical Institute was a specially created isolated research and development centre, where the best Japanese development talent could work with American developers in an ideal environment that would foster creativity and produce internationally successful games,” said Hector, who replaced former Atari coin-op game designer Mark Cerny as its general manager in 1992. The core members of the original Sonic the Hedgehog team, including Naka, were among those transplanted to West Coast of the US. “I believe that the influence of living in the US had a profound impact on the games and was a huge contributing factor to the success of the games, so much so that when I returned to Japan I wanted the creative team for the Sonic games to be based in the US and so we set up Sonic Team USA and continued to develop Sonic there,” said Naka. “Having American children nearby and being able to observe their reaction to the game influenced the final product greatly.” The studio produced many of Sega’s flagship games during the first half of the 1990s including the sequels to Sonic the Hedgehog and Comix Zone, an action game that took place within the panels of a comic book brought to life.

  Nintendo’s arsenal of exclusives included a number of games based on its existing franchises including The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, Super Mario World and Super Mario Kart, a go-kart racing game for up to four players starring the company’s best-known characters that spawned the kart-racing genre. Both companies also arranged exclusives with their licensees. Nintendo’s relationship with Japanese arcade game manufacturer Capcom gave it two of the arcades’ most popular martial arts-based fighting games: Final Fight and Street Fighter II, both of which were designed by Yoshiki Okamoto.

  Although fighting games can be traced back as far as 1976’s Sega coin-op Heavyweight Champ, the genre really took off in 1984 with the arrival of the genre-defining Karate Champ and Kung-Fu Master. Both of these Japanese arcade games took their cues from the kinetic kung-fu movies produced in Hong Kong during the 1970s, such as Raymond Chow’s 1971 film The Big Boss, which turned Bruce Lee into a international star. Irem’s Kung-Fu Master envisaged the fighting games as a journey, challenging players to battle through hordes of attackers to reach an end goal. Data East’s Karate Champ, meanwhile, drew on martial arts tradition, pitting players against a computer or second person in a bout of one-on-one combat. Released within weeks of each other, these two games provided the blueprint for almost every subsequent fighting game.

  Final Fight was a descendant of Kung-Fu Master. Set in a New York-inspired city riddled with crime, it let up to three players join forces to punch, kick and bash their way through the streets in order to take out the city’s crime lords. While Final Fight was popular, the groundbreaking Street Fighter II marked the most significant leap forward for fighting games since Kung-Fu Master and Karate Champ. At heart it was a Karate Champ-style one-on-one fighting contest with a range of fighters for players to choose from. But its big breakthrough was its use of powerful secret moves that players could unleash by moving the joystick and pressing buttons in the correct order. Okamoto also divided the types of attacks players could do into fast-but-weak and slow-but-strong moves to give the game a tactical edge where players needed to decide if a making a slower-but-more-powerful punch would leave them too exposed to a counter-attack. It was an approach that countless fighting games would follow. Street Fighter II became one of the biggest arcade successes since the collapse of Atari in the early 1980s, with more than 60,000 machines sold worldwide. Nintendo’s exclusive deal with Capcom proved to be a major coup that prevented Sega’s console from carrying two of the most popular arcade games of the early 1990s.

  Sega’s licensees responded with games such as Ecco the Dolphin, a 1992 game developed by Hungary’s Novotrade where players controlled a dolphin in search of the rest of his pod, boutique Japanese developer Treasure’s shoot ’em up Gunstar Heroes and Virgin Interactive’s McDonald’s Global Gladiators, a 1992 tie-in with the fast-food chain programmed by British game designer David Perry.

  “I got a call from the head of Virgin USA saying would you like to come to the US and help us get a game done in six months,” said Perry. “He said whatever you’re earning now we’ll pay it with royalties on top, we’ll give you a car and an apartment. How could I say no? I went out to California and the game was for McDonald’s. We didn’t do it the way McDonald’s wanted it, we did it the way we wanted it. It got game of the year.”

  The clash between Nintendo and Sega, together with the more advanced technology of the new 16-bit consoles, raised consumers’ expectations of video game quality and drove up the cost of game development. And as development costs grew, the game industry began to think more carefully about what types of games would sell, rather than giving game developers free reign. “Back in the 8-bit days, literally anything you thought of you’d just do it because there was such little cost – you could make a game for $3,000,” said Perry. “But then, when you start to get into 16-bit, prices went up because the development was more expensive: there’s more work to be done, more graphics to draw and that started to get people more serious about the whole thing, a bit more careful. You didn’t quite go with the crazy ideas anymore, you were thinking about what’s actually going to sell.”

  Perry’s 1995 platform game Earthworm Jim 2 reflected the changing nature of the games business with its ISO 9000 level, named after the international set of management standards. “Virgin was becoming very big and very powerful, and so they hired middle managers to take care of us,” said Perry. “I was basically given a boss and he had little books on how to manage people and he kept talking was about ISO 9000. I was quite enraged that I had to deal with this guy. He had no
clue what he was doing there.”

  Perry’s frustration with his new boss and the long hours he and the development team were spending creating Earthworm Jim 2 eventually came to a head. “I would literally sleep in my car when I worked at Virgin because I was working so hard and then in came the middle manager asking me to detail out everything that was going to be done in the game,” said Perry. “There was a watershed moment where I made up a whole load of rubbish; I just made up fake stuff that didn’t make any sense. I presented that as the plan and because he didn’t understand any of it anyway he was like ‘ok, this sounds good’.” “I lost all my respect for him. We were rebelling against it, the whole let’s make video game companies into corporations, into ISO 9000 corporations where you pretend to follow those standards.”

  The team’s run-ins with the middle manager turned into a level built out of mountains of folders and files where Earthworm Jim battled angry filing cabinets that spewed out paperwork and masked lawyers that jumped out when least expected. Earthworm Jim 2’s defiant level would do little to challenge the direction of travel, however. The video game industry, fuelled by the quality arms race between Sega and Nintendo, was growing up.

  [1]. Sega had been so dismissive of the PC Engine that it even allowed its arcade shoot ’em ups Space Harrier and Fantasy Zone to be remade on NEC’s console.

  [2]. The US version – released as J.J. and Jeff – removed the game’s toilet humour.

  [3]. Strat-O-Matic’s sports games first appeared in 1961 and used a combination of dice rolls and player statistics to simulate sports matches.