So, I'm talking gaming history. After Nintendo's unassailable reign in the 8-bit era of the NES (the number of bits handled by a console's processor used to be a rough pointer to its overall power, though with modern machines this is mostly meaningless), and after the gruelling fight for dominance between Nintendo and Sega in the 16-bit era of the SNES and Mega Drive, the next console cycle would see the lines of power redrawn dramatically.
A new contender
Nintendo had been developing a CD add-on for their SNES with Sony, but after the relationship between the two companies crumbled Sony refocused their efforts into a standalone console that they would release themselves, termed the PlayStation.
Based on 32-bit architecture, with games running off CD-ROMs, the PlayStation was to be epoch-defining. It was released in Japan at the end of 1994, then a year later in the rest of the world. Nintendo's next console was still a couple of years away, and so it was to Sega, and their new 32-bit system, the Saturn, that Sony initially took the fight.
Sony gained the upper hand even before the PlayStation's US release. They undercut the price of the Saturn by $100. And Sega's problems just ran from there. The Saturn was rushed to market, and had too few games. Its architecture was more complicated to develop for than the PlayStation, and Sega were still pushing 2D games, where Sony had more fully embraced the move to 3D. And on top of this Sega were still putting resources and attention into their existing Mega Drive and its add-ons, confusing consumers, where Sony were free to push one simple message: PlayStation.
Ravers
But there was something more fundamental at work, something that would ultimately seal Sega's fate and kill off the Saturn for good. Sega still saw gaming as appealing to a version of a teenage boy that didn't really exist, the type of surly kid epitomised by Edward Furlong's John Connor in Terminator 2. This was the image that many people pictured when they thought of a gamer.
Sony, however, adroitly judged that the culture was in flux. They saw that many twenty- and thirtysomethings were using their early adulthood as a kind of prolonged adolescence, working jobs they didn't care about and spending their earnings on rave nights, pub sessions, recreational drugs, and, yes, videogames.
Sony went for the jugulars of these disaffected kidults. They sponsored club nights. They brought in electronic acts such as Orbital and the Chemical Brothers to perform on and produce their games' soundtracks. They handed out PlayStation-branded cards at festivals that were perforated along lines to make for slips in which to dispose of chewing gum - or, perhaps, not that Sony knew anything of this, to be rolled into roaches for spliffs.
The quintessential PlayStation gamer was not John Connor, but Simon Pegg's character Tim Bisley from his zeitgeist-capturing sitcom Spaced. Tim would not have looked right playing Nintendo or Sega games. He watched cult horror movies. Read graphic novels. Listened to underground dance music. Went skateboarding. Smoked joints. And when he sat up for marathon gaming sessions to unfurl his brain after taking too much cheap speed, the controller he clutched in his hands belonged to Sony's PlayStation.
The 90s and 00s saw the rise of nerd culture, and nerd identity, as something that tied to, and in some areas even subsumed, other subcultures like those of film buffs, record-collectors, and stoners - and not only were Sony poised to capitalise on this, they even had an instrumental hand in its development.
The PlayStation was home to an enormous library of diverse titles like the horror-themed Resident Evil, the fighting game Tekken, car-based Ridge Racer, RPG-to-rule-them-all Final Fantasy VII, crime-em-up Grand Theft Auto, rhythm-music game PaRappa the Rapper, and temples-n-tits extravaganza Tomb Raider, starring the perpetually back-strained Lara Croft. Sony had created an institution, and with each of their consoles since they have done little to deviate from the strategy implemented by the first PlayStation.
Yet, as I said before, I was always more of a Nintendo kid. The Nintendo 64, apparently twice as powerful as the 32-bit PlayStation, launched in Japan midway through 1996, and then over here in March 1997.
To the moon and back
In many ways Nintendo made more mistakes with the hardware than Sega. It was an esoteric machine, again difficult for developers to get to grips with. The external design was clunky and cheap and toy-like. Nintendo stuck with the more expensive cartridge format for game storage, when the rest of the industry was moving to CDs. Carts had the advantage of almost non-existent loading times (original PlayStation owners will remember the uniquitous creaking door animations that masked the loading of the next room every time you opened a door in Resident Evil), but CDs could hold far more image and audio data. PlayStation games had full voice-acting, and lavish pre-rendered backdrops, where N64 games had to resort to horribly compressed audio, and more basic textures that were rendered on-the-fly by the machine. And Nintendo still charged exorbitant licensing fees to studios, which forced up the costs of the games even further, and didn't exactly incentivise developers to jump ship from Sony.
But Nintendo did have that 64-bit processor, more powerful, as they liked to proclaim, than the computer that sent man to the moon. And they did have Shigeru Miyamoto. And they did had Mario.
One reason the N64 launched so late, in fact, was so that Miyamoto and his team could take another year perfecting Super Mario 64. And the system's controller, with its central joystick, had been built with Mario in mind.
The wait was worth it. Few developers understood how to make games work in 3D before Mario 64. Few, to be honest, have got it as right since. Mario 64 was a marvel to see running, and it was more of a marvel to play. I remember seeing a display cabinet connected to the game in Beatties model shop when I was in town with my mum, then standing in frozen awe in front of this new devilry while my mum left to do the shopping, returned, and finally had to drag me away. I was 26 at the time. I wasn't. I was 11 or something.
The N64 was the first home console I owned new. The first time I had been involved during the period when games were being released, when the future of the machine wasn't set, when you could buy games magazines and read the previews and dream about what the upcoming games would be like. It was magical.
Chief among the objects of my dreams was the new Zelda. I'd scour every issue of N64 magazine for more news of when it was coming, what it would be like. I'd stare into blurry screenshots printed on the pages and imagine the adventures that awaited me.
Finally, in Christmas 1998, it arrived, and translated the formula of past Zelda titles into 3D as successfully as Mario 64 had done with the platformer. Subtitled Ocarina of Time, its world of sweeping vistas and tranquil towns and ancient dungeons felt so vivid, so dynamic, so alive. It might still be my favourite ever videogame.
Bop the world
Sony sold three times as many consoles in this era as Nintendo, had a games library nearly ten times the size, and helped define what it meant to be a gamer for years to come. Yet the N64 was an important system. It showed the world more confidently than any of its competition how 3D games should be made. It was the home of multiplayer, with four controller ports to the PlayStation's two, and great four-player games like Rare's Goldeneye 007, one of the slickest and most solid first-person shooters of all time, and Nintendo's own Lylat Wars, Mario Kart, Mario Party, and Super Smash Bros.
But more than this, what Nintendo at their best could do was appeal to something fundamental inside us. PlayStation was for adults, sure, hip and sophisticated, but the N64, when they got it right, was for that part of us that exists before sophistication, that part that looks out at the world with fresh eyes of wonder and joy.
The pleasure of playing Mario 64 was the pleasure of being a child, or maybe a Zen master, delighting in things for being precisely what they are. Run through the grass. Leap over the blocks. Head down, arms out, charging forwards. Everything is worth clambering on, poking, twisting, pulling. Bop the world, for the sheer sake of it. We're all going to die. Before then: have fun.
We all have this person deep inside us, and it is to this person that Nintendo, more than any game studio, is able to speak. There should always be enough space inside us to appreciate the inherent glee of the universe. There should always be space for Nintendo.
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