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The System of the Millenium (Part II)
by Steven Kent for Gamers Today
There are only a few solid contenders for the title of Game System of the Millennium: Magnavox Odyssey, the first home console; Atari Video Computer System (a.k.a. 2600); Nintendo Entertainment System; Game Boy; and PlayStation. As a follow-up to our investigation of the Odyssey and Video Computer System (or 2600), we now turn to the other top systems: Nintendo, Game Boy, and Playstation.
Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)
The video game market died in the United States in 1983, leaving overly optimistic retailers with millions of dollars worth of useless cartridges and game consoles that they eventually sold off in discount bins. People simply stopped buying video games in mass, and retailers stopped speaking with game company representatives.
Then in 1985, Nintendo experimented with the New York City market by setting up a warehouse in New Jersey and sending flocks of company representatives around Manhattan. They offered to build in-store NES displays to any retailers that would carry their products through Christmas. To allay calm retailers fears, Nintendo also offered to buy back any merchandise that was not sold by Christmas.
Retailers managed to sell about half the merchandise Nintendo brought in, but that was enough to convince them that video games still had life in them. Though the NES had the same basic eight-bit chip as the Atari 2600, it had more memory and more powerful components. Arcade conversions for the 2600 looked like approximations of the original games; NES conversions looked like the games themselves.
While the NES was not the first system to use game pads instead of knobs and joysticks-that began in the late 70s with Nintendo's Game & Watch series and was introduced to consoles by Intellivision, it popularized pads over joysticks. Every major system since the release of the NES has had pads instead of sticks.
The popularity of the NES raised video games to a new stature, and NES cartridges became the biggest selling items at toy stores. Thanks to the NES, the video game market became a year-round success rather than the seasonal commodity it had been in the past. The NES was also the most dominant video game console of all time. During its heyday, Nintendo controlled 93 percent of the game market internationally.
Game Boy
The best-selling and longest-living game system of all-time, Game Boy was released in 1989 and continues to top the charts. The top four best-selling games of 1999 in the United States are all Game Boy games, thanks to Pokemon.
Game Boy has a peculiar history. It was the creation of Gumpei Yokoi, a man that was hired to maintain machinery around Nintendo's Kyoto plant back when the company only made playing cards. Yokoi was one of the driving forces who brought Nintendo into video games--he designed the company's first toys, its first electronic games, and its first arcade games. Donkey Kong, which was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, ran on hardware designed by Yokoi and his team of engineers.
Unlike many engineers, Yokoi always cared less about technology and more about fun and getting toys into customers' hands. Hence, it should be no surprise that Game Boy was cheap, durable, and obsolete at birth. Within months of Nintendo releasing Game Boy with its eight-bit processor and monochrome screen, Atari released a handheld system called Lynx that featured an excellent backlit, color screen. Less than one year after that, NEC released TurboExpress, a handheld color game system with a hybrid 8-/16-bit processor.
Sega, SNK, and Tiger all eventually released technologically superior handheld game consoles as well. Ask the engineers at all of these companies what they thought of Game Boy when they first saw it, and they pretty much say the same thing; they laughed at this weak little game system with its antiquated processor and its low-resolution, monochrome screen. Of course you can take all of the Lynxs, Game Gears, TurboExpresses, Nomads, Game dot coms, NEOGEO Pockets, NEOGEO Pocket Colors, lump them together, and you won't even get one quarter of the sales Nintendo has had with Game Boy.
Which brings up the obvious question of why? Game Boy has always enjoyed the biggest library, but only a handful of its games offer long-term play value. It has generally been less expensive than its competitors and it has always done better on battery life. (NEOGEO Pocket Color, the latest contender, actually gets more life out of batteries. This is a first.)
One thing is certain, Game Boy has fallen in and out of the popular market in its 10-year lifetime. It was nearly forgotten by 1994, when Nintendo breathed new life into the system by creating a new line of Game Boys with color shells-it had originally only come in a sterile beige. Game Boy got another small spike in popularity with the release of Super Game Boy--an adapter that let people play Game Boy games on a Super NES.
Game Boy's biggest boosts have come from the 1998 releases of Game Boy Color, a highly upgraded system with a color screen, and Pokemon. This year's Game Boy sales are up 250 percent over the same period last year.
Playstation
Of all the game systems ever made, PlayStation is the one that rose from the ashes. It was the product of an abandoned partnership between Sony and Nintendo-they were working together to make a CD-ROM drive for the Super NES. When Nintendo ditched Sony at the altar, so to speak, Ken Kutaragi, Sony's lead engineer, proposed making a stand-alone console.
Nintendo should have gone through with the deal just to keep Kutaragi in hand.
PlayStation was the first successful game console to play CD-ROM-based games; it redefined the demographics of the video game market; and it totally dominates the current generation of video games. Nintendo will be lucky to sell 30 million Nintendo 64s worldwide; Sony has already shipped 70 million PlayStations.
PlayStation is as noteworthy for its smart handling as for its technology. Sony was exceptionally aggressive about attracting developers and creating exclusive agreements with several game manufacturers-most notably Namco and Square Soft. Preparing for their American release, Sony executives set up a deal with Williams (now known as Midway Games) which gave PlayStation the latest version of Mortal Kombat six months before Sega could get it for Saturn.
Within a few months of launching PlayStation, Sony had set itself in the driver's seat as far as console prices were concerned. Saturn launched for $399, PlayStation launched for $299. Sega tried to resist but had to lower its price. In May, 1997, Sony dropped its price to $199. Sega said they would not follow, then followed the very next day. Nintendo, was planning to release Nintendo 64 for $249, but found itself forced to follow suit as well.
