Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  Pokémon’s journey to global domination began 10 years earlier, when Japanese game designer Satoshi Tajiri became interested in making a game based on linking together Nintendo’s handheld Game Boy consoles. “Everyone was using the link feature to compete,” he told Time Asia. “The idea I had was for information to go back and forth.” Tajiri’s information-sharing idea dovetailed nicely with his own interest in entomology. As a child, he had been fascinated with collecting creepy crawlies, so much so that he earned himself the nickname ‘Dr Bug’ for his obsession with beetles and other invertebrates. He envisaged Pokémon, a game where players set out to collect ‘pocket monsters’ that they could share with each other or use to battle creatures in other players’ collections via the Game Boy’s link cable.

  Pokémon was also Tajiri’s response to the changing attitudes to childhood in Japan. He worried that the pressure on Japanese children to study was isolating them from each other and that increased urbanisation was separating them from the natural world. He hoped Pokémon would help reconnect children with one another and offer them the chance to experience the joy he used to get from fishing creatures out of streams and searching for unusual beetles hiding under rocks. It took Tajiri six years to complete Pokémon. The result was nothing if not Japanese. Its childish ‘kawaii’ visuals owed a clear debt to Hello Kitty cuteness and manga comics, and the game itself fitted comfortably into the Japanese role-playing game mould. But with the original Game Boy in its twilight years, Tajiri’s publisher Nintendo expected Pokémon would fare poorly at retail. Indeed, Tajiri was surprised that Nintendo even bothered to release his game.

  The simultaneous 1996 release of the first two Pokémon games, Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green, however, struck a chord in Japan. Within three months, more than three million Pokémon game cartridges had been sold and its popularity only grew from there. Pokémon’s international success became a tipping point for the spread of Japanese pop culture, paving the way for the rapid spread of anime and manga into North America and Europe. Pokémon’s global appeal became a source of national pride in Japan, a confirmation that the country was a cultural, as well as economic, power capable of influencing culture on a global scale.

  Given the huge success of Pokémon and Japan’s continued dominance of the home console market, Okano’s view that the golden years of the Japanese gaming were over seemed out of step. But it turned out that Okano was right. Although the Japanese economy had sunk into a long drawn-out recession back at the start of the 1990s, the country’s video game industry initially seemed immune. But after peaking in 1997, video game sales in Japan began to drop. In 2002 North America overtook Japan as the world’s biggest consumers of video games, the following year European game sales edged above those in Japan.

  And while sales in North America and Europe continued to grow, sales in Japan flatlined. By 2009 the UK had displaced Japan as the world’s second biggest consumer of games, after the US. Few had more to fear from this fall than Nintendo, the former king of the video game industry. While it was still enjoying spectacular profits from Pokémon and its Game Boy handhelds, Nintendo’s share of the home console market was melting away. The PlayStation 2 had not only wiped out Sega, but also utterly eclipsed Nintendo’s rival Gamecube console. To add to the pressure, Microsoft had just stormed into the console business with its Xbox.

  Until the Xbox, Microsoft had sat on the fringes of the video game business. It had a few popular PC games to its name, most notably the Microsoft Flight Simulator series and the historical strategy game Age of Empires, but it had never really challenged the likes of Electronic Arts. It was a situation the Xbox set out to change for good. Backed by Microsoft’s deep pockets and its flagship first-person shooter Halo: Combat Evolved, an elegant and dynamic burst of sci-fi action that liberated players from the confined corridors of most games of the genre, the Xbox became the first American-made games console to gain a significant share of the market since the Atari VCS 2600 in early 1980s. Microsoft managed to sell 24 million Xboxes, almost entirely in North America and Europe, just ahead of the 22 million Gamecubes sold by Nintendo.[5]

  Nintendo’s defeat led to speculation that the Kyoto giant may end up going the way of Sega, swapping console making for publishing. As a dedicated video game company, Nintendo lacked the sprawling business interests of Sony and Microsoft to fall back on and, while Pokémon was keeping the Kyoto firm profitable, it was hard to imagine Pikachu could carry the company indefinitely.

  The situation forced Nintendo’s new president, Satoru Iwata, who replaced Hiroshi Yamauchi in 2002, to rethink the company’s whole approach to console and game design. He concluded that the game industry had become enslaved by its pursuit of the latest technology, producing ever more complex games for ever more expensive consoles. It was a trend, he concluded, that opened up a chasm between the dedicated game player and the broader mass market who wanted simpler, less involving entertainment. Iwata decided it was time for Nintendo to do something different, something surprising. As he put it: “You can’t open up a new market of customers, if you can’t surprise them.”

  In November 2004 Nintendo unveiled the first fruit of its soul-searching: the Nintendo DS, a handheld console that flipped open like a book to reveal two screens, one of which was a touch screen that players interacted with using a stylus. It resembled the multi-screen Game & Watch handhelds that Nintendo introduced back in 1982 with Oil Panic. In addition to its unusual twin-displays, the Nintendo DS had an in-built microphone and wireless connectivity, so people could play together without the need for cables.

  Most game designers greeted the Nintendo DS with confusion. Many were at a loss as to what to do with the Japanese company’s strange new handheld. Sony dismissed it as a gimmick, a “knee-jerk reaction” to the launch of its hi-tech PSP handheld console.The initial scepticism quickly melted away, however, when Nintendo began serving up games such as Nintendogs, a virtual pet game where players brushed or stroked their digital hound using the touch screen and talked to it through the microphone. While Nintendogs’ pixellated puppies won over younger players, Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training (known as Brain Age in North America), a puzzle game based on the ideas of Japanese neuroscientist Dr Ryuta Kawashima, captured an older audience attracted by its collection of mental agility tests and Sudoku.

  The Nintendo DS, the ‘gimmick’ handheld, appealed far beyond the standard game-player demographic and its sales far outstripped those of Sony’s more traditional PSP. By 2009, more than 125 million Nintendo DS handhelds had been sold making it one of the most popular game consoles ever created. The DS experiment confirmed Nintendo’s hunch that the expensive battle to provide players with the most technologically advanced games was a zero sum game. The rush for technical complexity and depth had narrowed the audience for video games. The next move was to apply those lessons to its next home console, which Nintendo had appropriately codenamed the Revolution.

  “The industry places more value on the look and complexity of a game than it does on the amount of fun a person has while playing,” Iwata wrote in Nintendo’s 2005 annual report. “In today’s world people are busy and the time and energy required to play games are seen as a burden. This is why more people are now saying ‘video games are not for me’ before they begin to play.”

  With this in mind, Nintendo made reinventing the game controller the focus of the Revolution project. The basic concept behind video game controllers had not changed since the launch of the Famicom back in 1983, but an ever-growing number of buttons, triggers and sticks had turned them from simple two-button pads into dauntingly complex control panels. For those unfamiliar with these devices, they were confusing annatural to use, making it near impossible to play any game. Nintendo’s solution was to create a new type of controller, one that was instantly understandable. Nintendo were far from the first to try and find an answer to the controller problem.

  In 1984, just before it was broken in two, Atari was touting its Mindlink syst
em, a headband controller for the VCS 2600 that let players control games by moving their forehead muscles. But, thanks to its tendency to induce headaches and Atari’s financial troubles, it was never released.

  More successful was the Mattel Power Glove, a glove controller for the NES released in 1989 that tapped into the hype about virtual reality. The $100 Power Glove measured the movement of wearers’ fingers and the location of the players’ hand in a room. It was a heavily pared-down version of the Data Glove, a $8,800 glove controller developed by VPL Research, the virtual reality research firm founded by former Atari Research employees Jaron Lanier and Thomas Zimmerman. “The first prototypes of the Power Glove were on the Amiga and we actually had some 3D glasses and had some really impressive, interesting games we’d done – 3D ball games and other wild surreal things,” said Lanier. “But the commercial opportunity that came up was for a lower-end platform and a bigger market than the Amiga, which was a shame.”

  The Power Glove was promoted heavily. It got a star billing in the Nintendo-promoting feature film The Wizard and advertising that boasted about how it was bringing virtual reality to the shops “years ahead of schedule”. It sounded incredibly exciting for the time, but the reality behind the hype disappointed many with its inaccuracy and underwhelming games. It was also uncomfortable. “When you closed your fist when wearing the Power Glove there was a little bit of plastic that would dig into your hand,” said Lanier. Although it never lived up to the promise, the Power Glove was one of the first virtual reality devices to be made available to a mass audience. “Whatever’s said that was the glove that got out there,” said Lanier. “It got a lot of gloves out to people who could hack with it and play with it. There was a real Power Glove community for a while.”

  Virtual reality technology also inspired another attempt to escape the limitations of video game controllers around the same time when US singer-songwriter Dean Friedman formed his own virtual reality business: InVideo Systems. “I’d witnessed a demonstration of camera-based virtual reality at an Amiga computer convention,” said Friedman, who is best known for his 1977 hit single Ariel. “People stood in front of a chroma key screen and were able to see themselves on a large TV, while interacting in real-time with animated objects.[6] No helmet, no gloves. Peripheral free. I tried it myself and it was like magic. They were selling developers’ kits and I was so amazed that I bought one.”

  Friedman teamed up with US children’s TV channel Nickelodeon to create a game called Eat a Bug for its Sunday morning show Total Panic. “The idea was akin to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” said Friedman. “The player stood against the screenand saw themselves shrunken in a garden environment – grass, dandelions – surrounded by animated insects. The object was to grab all the little bugs like flies and mosquitoes while avoiding the big bugs like the spider, bee and centipede.”

  While Eat a Bug was a popular addition to the show, the game’s technology cost $15,000 – making it unviable as a consumer product. So instead of trying to reach the home market, Friedman’s company sold its camera-based games to theme parks, museums and arcades around the world. “As soon as people walked into a game they understood the game play intuitively and loved it,” he said. “Millions enjoyed InVideo games, but it still took almost two decades for the technology to finally be embraced by the mainstream video game industry. Cost was a huge factor, but so was the job of acclimatising the industry to the idea that the public would so easily embrace a brand new mode of full-bodied game play.”

  Fourteen years after Friedman started experimenting with camera-based games, the home games business finally caught up with the pop star when Sony’s London game studio produced the EyeToy. Released in 2003, the EyeToy was a camera that let players interact with games just by moving, thanks to its ability to recognise players’ movements and gestures. Millions of PlayStation 2 owners bought the EyeToy after seeing the simple but fun games available in the accompanying EyeToy: Play collection that – just like Eat a Bug – fed their image directly onto the screen, such as Wishi Washi, where players had to vigorously wipe the air in front of them to clean a dirty screen, and Kung Foo, where players karate chopped miniature assailants.

  Encouraged by the success of the EyeToy, Sony agreed to publish Buzz! The Music Quiz, a 2005 TV quiz show game that came with its own set of replica game show buzzers. While most quiz games available at the time suffered from low production values, Buzz!’s British creators Relentless Software focused on delivering a polished game that could justify the extra cost of its set of four controllers. “At the time a lot of developers would put their B or C team on such a game,” said David Amor, the co-founder of Relentless. “We really bought into it as an idea and gave it our all. Just because it wasn’t a first-person shooter didn’t seem like a reason for the production values to be any lower.”

  For Relentless, the custom-designed buzzers were a vital part of the game. “When we announced the buzzers at the 2005 E3 trade show, some people’s reaction was to point out that the same functionality could have been achieved with a regular controller,” said Amor. “That’s missing the point. We asked people to play our game show game using a game show buzzer, which really lowers the barriers to entry. There’s no learning curve. Additionally we could ensure that four players could play at once, which is important for creating off-screen interaction.”

  Around the time that Buzz! The Music Game became a popular game on the PlayStation 2 in 2005, Nintendo’s bid to reinvent the controller were beginning to take shape. While developing its 1996 console, the Nintendo 64, the company had briefly explored the idea of creating a wristwatch controller that tracked the movement of the player’s wrist. It proved too confusing for players and the company shelved the idea, but with the company out to tear up the rulebook, the concept of motion-controlled games was revived. Nintendo built a simplified game controller designed to look like an unthreatening TV remote that allowed people to play simply by moving the remote around. And in keeping with Iwata’s belief that the latest graphical breakthroughs were no longer impressing game players, the Revolution console itself was simply a souped-up Gamecube rather than a brand new machine. Nintendo called their new console the Wii.

  Ahead of Wii’s launch in November 2006, the video game industry greeted it in much the same way as the Nintendo DS: intrigued but wary. Microsoft had already launched its new Xbox 360 console, which boasted high-definition graphics, a larger hard drive and more support for online multiplayer games. And in the same month as the Wii reached the shops, Sony released the PlayStation 3 with boasts of even more high-definition visuals and a in-built Blu-Ray movie player. The Wii looked severely underpowered by comparison.

  But Nintendo’s instincts were spot on. The Wii’s flagship launch game, Wii Sports, demonstrated the potential of the console’s Wiimote controllers perfectly with its mix of tennis, baseball, golf, boxing and bowling. Millions of people, many of who had never owned a game console before, headed to the shops to get themselves a Wii. The Wii’s appeal to a broader audience received an additional boost the following year with the release of Wii Fit, a collection of exercise games that producer Shigeru Miyamoto was inspired to make after going on a diet. Wii Fit came with the Balance Board, a controller similar to a bathroom scale that measured the position and weight distribution of players who stood on it.[7] The game acted as a virtual personal trainer, berating players for not exercising enough or being overweight and trying to get them fit with its selection of exercise-themed games ranging from yoga and push-ups to skiing and jogging.

  By late 2009, Nintendo had sold close to 68 million Wiis. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 had both sold around half that amount. Nintendo’s decision to break from the pack had taken them back to the top of the video game tree and prompted Sony and Microsoft to start developing motion controllers of their own. Nintendo had also taken games back to their coin-op roots, reviving the simple spirit of the arcades to provide lucid video games that were accessible,
designed for short bursts of play and – above all – pure entertainment.

  But while Nintendo won over millions of people previously alienated by the complexity of video games with its ‘all-access gaming’ mantra, other game designers were seeking to expand imaginative scale of video games by creating epic, big-budget titles that, like Shenmue, offered a vision of electronic entertainment that was more about art and ambition than concentrated fun.

  [1]. The cel-shading technique gives 3D games the look of a hand-drawn cartoon. The style became popular with developers during the early 2000s appearing in a diverse number of genres including car racing (Capcom’s Auto Modellista) and first-person shooters (Ubisoft’s XIII). Most famously Nintendo used cel-shading in 2002’s The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, which divided fans of the series who disagreed on whether its more child-like visuals were a welcome development.

  [2]. So many people were involved in making Shenmue that it took 10 minutes for the credits to roll.

  [3]. Shenmue’s story was to be told over a series of six games. Only two got released leaving the story unfinished.

  [4]. The arrival of Pokémon was not always welcomed. In March 2001, the Supreme Council for Research in Saudi Arabia issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, banning Pokémon on the grounds that it promoted evolution, encouraged gambling and included a ‘Zionist’ symbol (a hexagram).

  [5]. The Xbox struggled in Japan hampered by a lack of big name Japanese games and Japan’s lack of interest in western games such as Halo: Combat Evolved. The Gamecube, meanwhile, sold better in Japan than in North America and Europe.