Day 86: Spliffs

Much coffee is required today. I'm not in work, thankfully, but I'm so tired from yesterday. I turned off my alarm at seven and slept until ten, because I'd only had about four hours, and I was destroyed. Not going to be hard on myself. I can focus on how I've failed to get up early this once, and let the word failure reverberate around my skull, or I can think about how I've succeeded five times, and how much better that is than any week in recent memory- and then I can get back to business.

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.

Day 85: War!

Mangmangmang. That's the noise you make when you've been up since seven writing and walking to town and working a crazy Tramlines Saturday shift and walking home and eating soup for tea and nodding off at your desk and then desperately trying to get a blog on the history of videogames done before you pass out.

I'm seriously too tired to write properly, but I'll do what I can do.

Where were we? Umm. The NES had taken over the world and Nintendo had brought the gaming industry back from the brink of collapse, thanks to some canny marketing and the talents of their wonderful designers, among them the young Shigeru Miyamoto, inventor of Mario and Donkey Kong.

Heyday

So. The NES continued its reign through the late 80s. Super Mario Bros. 3 (the second had been a naff re-skinning of an unrelated title) was a reinforcement and amplification of everything that had made the first unique, with chunkier and more vibrant pixel art, expansive level design, varied enemies and power-ups, and a world map that you traversed between levels, further grounding the sense of journey and belonging.

Then the Legend of Zelda was for the thrill of exploration what Mario had been for the thrill of movement: a capturing of its essence in gaming form. You played as an unassuming lad named Link - it always elicits a sigh and rolling of the eyes when an outsider refers to the playable character of the series as Zelda: the protagonist is Link; Zelda is the princess. As Link you explored labyrinths and collected items and battled monsters. The game was an example of a style of game called role-playing games, or RPGs - although Zelda was iconoclastic enough, like most Nintendo output, to transcend genre. (If you want an RPG on the NES bound by the tropes of the genre, then look to Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest or Mother.)

So going into the 90s Nintendo were untouchable. There was competition from other consoles, Sega's Master System and a couple of machines from Atari, but these were but flies that the NES laughed and swatted away. They had the market wrapped up tight. But they were also developing an arrogance they have ever since struggled to shake off.

Developers had to pay an expensive licensing fee for the privilege of releasing their games on the NES, and Nintendo forced draconian restrictions upon them, such as only allowing each developer to release three games per year. As I've said, these moves were designed to keep a deluge of low-quality software from drowning customers in choice, but it rankled developers nonetheless, though there was little they could do about it.

War!

But then came Sega's new console, their Mega Drive (known as the Genesis in the US). It was decidedly more powerful than the NES, and managed to steal both developers and players from Nintendo. Sega's approach was to release arcade-style games - meaning games originally designed for the cut-throat arcades, where peacocking cabinets all vied for attention and the goal was to wow players upfront, usually with action-oriented gameplay and impressive visuals, to convince them to part with their coins in a pay-per-game format, as opposed to the more slow-burn, measured approach that was afforded on home consoles where the player had already paid and attention was guaranteed.

The NES had been moving away from arcade experiences, but Sega focused heavily on the fast and frenetic approach, as well as marketing themselves as the "cool" choice for sullen teens, going so far as to mock Nintendo's family-friendly image. Nintendo were careful to censor violence on their console, acting as moral arbiters, but Sega were more relaxed, claiming to have more of an adult focus ("adult", of course, as it has done throughout gaming's history, really meaning "for 13-year-old boys").

The Mega Drive did strong business in the US and Europe. Then Nintendo responded with their successor to the NES, the Super NES, or SNES, a year after the Mega Drive had been released. Competition between these two comparable systems through the first half of the 90s would come to be known as the "console wars", a paradigm that has stuck, and been repeated, with a revolving collection of companies, through every console cycle since.

The Mega Drive had the violence and the visceral allure, and it had Sega's new mascot, Sonic the Hedgehog - a spiky-haired spinning blue hedgehog who starred in games that played like Mario platformers on amphetamines.

But Nintendo had the portly plumber himself, who didn't need to speak in precision-engineered teen parlance or wear Michael Jackson-like trainers to win over fans, because he had Super Mario World, one of the greatest games ever made. Mind you, the Sonic games were pretty great as well. But Nintendo had Zelda: A Link to the Past, and Mario Kart, and F Zero, and Star Fox. But Sega had a line of sports games, and shooting games, and thrilling arcade ports, and a much larger pool of available titles in general.

It was a close thing. For my part in the war, I mostly played an independent observer. My parents had always had zero interest in games, we didn't own a PC until we got my grandma's old one years later, and there was never enough money at Christmas or on birthdays to pay for something as extravagant as a home console. Most of my friends had Mega Drives, and I would spend all my available time in their bedrooms playing them. But a few friends had Nintendo systems, and I was more drawn to the worlds of Mario and Zelda and Star Fox, often only from snatched glimpses of gameplay, or even from pouring over instruction manuals sat leaning against beds while the friends collected together all their toys so we could make our action figures fight each other in the garden all afternoon. I felt an affinity with Nintendo, I guess, that I didn't with Sega. I was always more excited by the gestalt experiences and aesthetics of games than the actual skill structures - even now I'll drive up high in GTA and stand looking out at the city spread far below me in preference to beating my high score or winning shootouts online or whatever - and in this regard Nintendo were always the company for me.

I can't tell what words are coming out of my brain anymore, so I need to stop, and I'll continue tomorrow - wherein we'll see how a soured deal over a CD add-on for the SNES led to a complete upheaval in the power-structure of the industry, because the company developing this add-on was Sony, and, spurned by Nintendo, they would take their product away and turn it into their own competing console by the name of the PlayStation...

Day 84: Plumbers

I'm just going to continue waffling about games here, because I started yesterday and it's all in my head now and I want to get it out. Feel absolutely free to tune out for a few posts, if you want.

So yesterday I was talking about the birth of videogames, and how the gaming industry boomed in the 70s and early 80s, and then crashed monumentally. The industry by 1985 was like that newly-hatched monster at the end of Studio Ghibli's film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind: an enormous beast rearing up to take over the world, but not being able to support its own weight, and collapsing back into itself.

Maybe that image is in my head because it was Nintendo, a company very like Studio Ghibli in its focus on the importance of childlike wonder, that would emerge during this period of turmoil to nurture gaming's nascent form and ultimately transform it into the shape in which it still exists to this day.

Great ape

Nintendo had started life as a trading card company in the late 1800s, transitioning into a toy manufacturer in the 1960s, and by the 70s were focusing on the burgeoning arcade gaming scene.

They achieved some success with arcade games in Japan, but America proved a tougher nut to crack, and by 1981 they were stuck with a heap of arcade cabinets for their mediocre shooter Radar Scope that they were unable to sell, and were teetering on the verge of financial collapse. Their president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, tasked a young apprentice designer with converting the wasted Radar Scope cabinets into a new game. That young designer's name was Shigeru Miyamoto, and the game he rapidly came up with was called Donkey Kong.

One of the earliest platform games (a genre involving running and jumping between platforms), Donkey Kong was an immediate and sensational success, and helped reverse the fortunes of the ailing Nintendo. It also introduced the world to its protagonist, a portly Italian carpenter named Jumpman. You might know him, however, by his name in the American translation: Mario. He would go on to become the most recognisable videogame character in the world, and the face of the industry for decades to come.

Nintendo, harnessing the game design genius of Miyamoto, continued to find success in the arcades, through sequels to Donkey Kong, and then a two-player game involved Mario, now a plumber, and his brother Luigi, leaping about the sewers of New York jumping on the heads of turtles and crabs. This game was called Mario Bros.

Entertainment systems

Buoyed by profits from these titles, it was to the home console market that Nintendo now turned. They released their Family Computer, or Famicom, in Japan in 1983. It included ports of their arcade hits, and sold well. But then the North American videogame market crashed, and the industry appeared doomed.

Nintendo, however, simply refused to let this happen. Retailers in the US were loathe to stock consoles on their shelves, believing they wouldn't sell, so Nintendo redesigned the Famicom into a Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES for short, threw in a light-gun and toy robot peripheral, and convinced retailers that this all made for a product sufficiently removed from the consoles that had gone before. Not even a console, in fact, but an "entertainment system". The wave of the future.

And where a glut of knock-off, low-quality games had flooded the market and confused consumers of the earlier consoles, Nintendo set in place a practice, since becoming commonplace, of licensing third-parties to produce games for their system. They stamped these games with their "seal of quality", minimising choice while maintaining worth.

And lastly, bundled with the NES, they gave away Miyamoto's follow-up to Mario Bros. This new game was something not available in the arcades, taking the platforming concept and expanding it into a continuous adventure from left to right, a journey, through varied, interesting levels, with power-ups and collectables and hidden areas. They called the game Super Mario Bros., and it was nothing short of a revelation.

It brought together previous concepts and theories and encapsulated them, galvanised them, into something greater than had ever gone before, with elegant game design, perfectly precise controls, but also a focus on character, narrative, and structure. Mario's new world, the Mushroom Kingdom, was a place surreal yet strangely archetypal. Goombas, Koopa turtles, fire flowers, warp pipes - it was as if this stuff had arrived fully formed, from some other dimension; as if it had, somehow, always existed. You could plonk your friend, your neighbour, your nan, down in front of Super Mario Bros., and they would all instinctively and instantly get it. They would understand what they had to do, and why they had to do it, and they would love it.

Thanks to Nintendo, and Mario, and Miyamoto, videogames had finally arrived.