A history of videogame hardware

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By Simon Parkin

Nintendo Game Boy


Year: 1989 Manufacturer: Nintendo Original cost: $89.99

Nintendo’s Game Boy became synonymous with handheld gaming overnight. A system with interchangeable games, it could be played anywhere, combining portability, miniaturization and entertainment – three of the most important attributes of today’s emerging technology – into a single, affordable, power-light device.

Not only that, but the Game Boy is arguably the most iconic piece of video game hardware design. Its light grey casing is punctuated by two maroon buttons and a jet black d-pad, while a single bright red power light winks to life on the left of a square, luminous green screen, a miniature window into a world of two-tone possibility.

The system’s marriage to Alexey Pajitnov’s Tetris is a pairing of hardware and software that is yet to be bettered, establishing the handheld’s place as a near-universally recognizable cultural artefact. Not only that, but this was the system to establish Nintendo’s most successful line of gaming hardware, one that stretches across the years in numerous iterations, leading up to the Nintendo 3DS, a handheld system in whose three-dimensional face the bold likeness of the original Game Boy can still be recognized.

And yet, even at launch, the Game Boy’s components were technically obsolete. Its creator, Gunpei Yokoi, the man almost single-handedly responsible for Nintendo’s entry to the video game market (page 16), had been responsible for Nintendo’s range of Game & Watch handhelds, LCD-based machines dedicated to a single game. The Game & Watch games were created to make use of cheap LCD screens, a re- purposing of elderly technology that Yokoi imaginatively described as: ‘Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology.’


Game Boy’s success led to a multitude of new iterations of the hardware.

It was this same philosophy that directed Yokoi and his 45 man team of designers, programmers and engineers to create the Game Boy, a system assembled from inexpensive, near-obsolete components that kept manufacturing costs to a minimum. While Sega and Atari busied themselves working with high-powered handhelds with color graphics and impressive sound capabilities (the Game Gear and Atari Lynx respectively), Yokoi and his team opted for a monochrome screen and a tinny speaker. As a result, the Game Boy outlasted its rivals by several times over.

The biggest benefit to Yokoi’s decision to use outdated technology was lowered manufacturing costs. As a result of the team’s insistence on using cheap components inside the Game Boy shell, the launch price was set at just $89.99 in the US, $100 cheaper than Atari’s rival Lynx, and $60 cheaper than Sega’s Game Gear. Nintendo’s competitors were quick to jump upon the Game Boy’s weaker specifications. Sega aired a number of negative advertising campaigns in the US that mocked the Game Boy’s monochrome display in comparison to Game Gear’s full colour display. But despite the jibes, the Game Boy’s popularity rose. The system’s affordability also elevated Nintendo’s own expectations, with company president Hiroshi Yamauchi predicting sales of 25 million within the first three years of its release. In reality, three years after its launch, the Game Boy had sold 32 million units, far exceeding Yamauchi’s seemingly wild speculation.

In contrast to the console side of its business, Nintendo subjected the Game Boy technology to a series of iterations, releasing the Game Boy Pocket, then the Game Boy Color, small upgrades on the original hardware, that allowed the hardware to develop without rendering its back catalog of over 650 games. Later, the Game Boy Advance arrived, a more powerful piece of hardware and one that itself went through a number of upgrades through the SP models and finally to the beautiful Game Boy Micro. With the arrival of Nintendo’s DS, however, the Game Boy brand took a back seat – though many would love to see it return again.

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Neo-Geo

By Simon Parkin


Year: January 1990 Manufacturer: SNK Original Cost: $649

It is the Rolls-Royce of video game systems, a status symbol, a console whose games started at $250 a piece in 1990, and whose rarest titles today can cost upward of $1,000 on the collector’s market. An anomaly, the Neo-Geo was the first home games system to identically match the specifications of its arcade counterpart, an achievement that came with a slogan (‘Pro Gear Spec’) and price tag to match. Sleek, with a thin, black body and two huge robust, arcade-style joysticks, the Neo-Geo remains as desirable today, its library of 130-odd games as sharp and captivating as they ever were.

Shin Nihon Kikaku (‘New Japan Project’) began operations on 22 July 1978, releasing its debut, Maikon Kit, a Breakout clone, before making its name with shoot ‘em ups such as 1981’s Vanguard and 1985’s Arian Mission. In 1986 the company formally changed its name to SNK Corporation and signed a third-party licence deal allowing it to develop games for Nintendo’s home systems. While working as a Nintendo licensee proved lucrative thanks to hits such as the Famicom’s Ikari Warriors and the Game Boy’s Funny Field, SNK’s management wanted to return to the company’s arcade roots in order to reinvigorate an industry flagging in the face of Nintendo’s success in the home.

The idea was inspired: manufacture an arcade board that used interchangeable cartridges, much like those employed by the home consoles of the time. Prior to this, arcade operators were required to physically replace fragile PCBs with new ones or, worse still, buy a brand-new dedicated machine. Based on SNK’s new system, dubbed the Multi Videogame System (MVS), all operators needed to do to change the game in their arcade was to buy a new cartridge and slot it in. In an unprecedented move, SNK then took the exact inner workings of its MVS technology and housed it in plastic casing, ready to release as ahome console. Initially, the company marketed the systems as rental-only machines, thinking the high manufacturing cost of each unit meant the console would be too expensive to sell at retail. But after two months, after a torrent of requests, SNK opted to sell the Advanced Entertainment System in shops, positioning it as a deluxe console that rendered the term ‘arcade conversion’ obsolete.



Word of this magical system that could translate the arcade experience pixel-for-pixel spread quickly, especially in Japan where the thought of owning arcade-perfect games in the tight space of a Tokyo bedsit seemed too good to be true.

The company soon became synonymous with the fighting game genre, its King of Fighters series establishing itself as Street Fighter’s main rival in arcades. This emphasis was primarily thanks to Takashi Nishiyama, who had worked on the original Street Fighter at Capcom before SNK poached him. Nishiyama was the jewel in SNK’s development staff, launching its flagship series, Samurai Shodown, The King of Fighters and Metal Slug.

But the system’s exclusive prices worked against it in the long run. Few parents would pay $600 for a console and $250 per game for their child when they could buy Super Nintendo, a suite of games and still have enough change left over for a holiday. Then, by the mid-1990's, games were popping into 3D, and Yu Suzuki’s Virtua Fighter series had made SNK’s exquisite 2D sprite work appear antiquated. But while fashions shifted, SNK doggedly continued to develop games, releasing some of the company’s finest work such as Metal Slug 3, Last Blade 2 and Garou: Mark of the Wolves, well into the Sony PlayStation era.

On 22 October 2001 SNK finally collapsed, filing for bankruptcy and placing its intellectual property rights up for sale. Later that year SNK’s founder, Eikichi Kawasaki, purchased SNK’s rights through Playmore, a company he set up in anticipation of the company’s collapse.

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Nintendo Super Famicom

By Simon Parkin


Year: 1990 Manufacturer: Nintendo Original Cost: ¥32,000

Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi began planning a 16-bit successor to the Famicom in the mid-1980's. He placed Masayuki Uemura, designer of the original Famicom, in charge of the secretive project, his only request that the R&D team be poised to enter the ‘next generation’ market by 1990. However, Nintendo’s global dominance of the video game industry removed any sense of urgency from the project. Why hurry to make the Famicom obsolete while it continued to bolster company profits month after month?

By the start of the new decade the tectonic plates of the video game world had begun to shift and grind. Sega had sold more than 1 million consoles in the US. While these figures were dwarfed by Nintendo’s 31.7 million sales, Sega was making inroads. Its suite of licensed games and advertising campaigns, emphasizing the 16-bit capabilities of its machine, made Nintendo’s proclamation that it would only enter the 16-bit market when it was ready began to appear bullish.

Yamauchi applied pressure on Uemura and his team, still leaving the technical specifics to the engineers, but requesting that they attempt to make the Famicom’s successor compatible with its predecessor’s games. But the functionality added $75 to the system’s estimated manufacturing cost and Yamauchi decided that the price increase was too significant to warrant backward compatibility.

The team had better luck elsewhere. The new machine, dubbed the Super Family Computer (Super NES in the West), could generate 32,000 colors, a far greater number than the Mega Drive’s 512, providing a useful advertising hook. Likewise, its Super FX chip facilitated some of the earliest 3D effects – put to effective use in games such as Star Fox and Secret of Mana.



The excitement that preceded the Super Famicom’s Japanese launch in 1991 was unprecedented in games. After seven years of market dominance in Japan, Nintendo and its mascot had come to define the medium. On 21 November 1990 the launch of Nintendo’s second home video game system brought unparalleled disruption to Japan’s streets. The company had kept the launch date a delayed secret, so pre-orders ran out as the nation panic-bought.

Some stores required customers to pay the full ¥32,000 (£169) in advance to secure a system, while others opted for a lottery system to decide which would-be buyers would receive a console. Nintendo shipped 300,000 units the night of the console’s launch in ‘Operation Midnight’. 100 ten-ton trucks each carrying 3,000 machines were used to collect the stock from secret warehouses in an effort to outwit the Yakuza (gangsters), who were rumored to be planning to hijack some of the trucks.

While high drama may have been part of Nintendo’s launch plans, much of what happened next could not have been anticipated. With 1.5 million pre-orders and just 300,000 units in stock across the country, four out of five customers were to be disappointed. One toy shop near Shakujii Koen train station in Tokyo received just six units. Adults called in sick in order to go shopping and, as a result of traffic problems, the Japanese government requested that in future, console launches take place at weekends. Within a year 4 million Super Famicoms were in Japanese homes.

However, the US launch was less auspicious. Sega’s system had taken root and despite a $25 million marketing plan, by the end of 1991 the system had only shifted 700,000 units. Nintendo’s machine caught up with, then overtook, Sega’s. The company encouraged quality third-party releases by limiting licensees to three games a year. Any game that earned 30 or more points in the Nintendo rating system didn’t count toward the three and would be featured in the company’s magazine, Nintendo Power. The incentive worked and the Super Famicom library of games is one of video gaming’s strongest. When the system was discontinued, Nintendo had sold 49.10 million units worldwide, the best-selling console of its era.

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Sega Saturn

By Simon Parkin


Year: 1994 Manufacturer: Sega Original Cost: ¥44,800

In a reversal of the Mega Drive’s fortunes, in Japan, where 2D shoot ’em ups and fighting games were still fashionable, the Saturn enjoyed far greater success than its forebear. While the seeds of Sega’s retreat from the game hardware business were sowed here, a clutch of important and enduring classics also grew from its fertile creative soil.The story of Sega’s Saturn is often told as a tragedy: the tale of a console born too late, a 2D powerhouse released just as the gaming world popped into 3D. In the West, Sega’s follow-up to the Mega Drive was without doubt a wretched failure, losing the company much of the ground and goodwill its 16-bit machine had clawed from Nintendo.

Sega’s plans for the Saturn were drawn up in 1992, under the codename Giga Drive. The decision was made to use CD-ROM technology for its games, and the machine was specifically designed to better the 3DO, the only other 32- bit console available at the time. The internal architecture was based on Sega’s Model 1 arcade hardware, adapted by its creator Hideki Sato and his team. A number of prototypes were built in 1993 and, as the team approached a design they were happy with, the name was changed from Giga Drive to Aurora and, finally, Saturn.

However, this machine was very different to the one that would launch almost two years later. In December 1993, almost a year before the Saturn’s planned launch, Sony revealed the system specifications of Ken Kutaragi’s PlayStation project. These alluded to 3D graphical capabilities that matched Sega’s cutting edge arcade hardware, and the capacity to handle complex 2D processing, too.

When Sega CEO Hayao Nakayama obtained a copy of the PlayStation system specs and compared them to those of his company’s Saturn prototype he called an emergency meeting with his R&D department. One staff member reportedly said of the meeting that his boss was “the maddest I’ve ever seen him”. Nakayama was furious at the way in which Sony had bettered his own machine. Sato was charged by Nakayama to ‘fix’ the Saturn so it could compete with the PlayStation. With less than a year till launch, Sato handpicked a team of 27 Sega engineers to start work. There was no time to commission a new chip for the machine, so Sega was forced to look to existing components. The team opted for a dual-processor architecture, despite the fact that Sega’s US head Tom Kalinske had contacted Silicon Graphics, one of the companies behind the PlayStation’s 3D capabilities, to research a simpler single chip design. Allegedly, Nakayama opted for the dual-processor design as a favor to an old golfing buddy at Hitachi.


This feature is an extract from Simon Parkin’s book, An Illustrated History of 151 Videogames.

The use of dual processors was key to the Saturn’s effectiveness at 2D graphics and relative failure at 3D graphics. Polygonal generation could only be handled through manipulation of the sprite engine, and as a result struggled with texture transparency and playfield rotation, effects that the PlayStation excelled in. While teams familiar with parallel programming could produce surprising results, few developers had this sort of experience.

Despite the troubles in the months leading up to November 1994, the system’s Japanese launch was a success, thanks largely to the release of Virtua Fighter, Sega’s arcade fighting game hit. By Christmas day 500,000 units had been sold, 60 per cent more than Sony had managed with its PlayStation. But the US launch in May 2005 was a disaster. The day Sega announced the price point of $399 (£249); Sony announced the PlayStation would cost $100 less.

Released into just four retail chains, before the dry summer period for the games industry, the Saturn’s lack of a strong launch line-up was clear. The machine’s challenging internal architecture was causing developers huge delays, allowing Sony to take a clear lead.

A year later, the members of Sega’s US marketing team were fired, with Sega of America’s president, Tom Kalinske, handing in his resignation more than a month later. The collapse of Sega in the West meant that many of the system’s best games were never released outside Japan. In a 3D world, Sega’s 2D powerhouse seemed anachronistic at launch.

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Nintendo's Virtual Boy

By Simon Parkin


Year: 1995 Manufacturer: Nintendo Original Cost: ¥15,000

Not only was it the first blemish on Nintendo's unspoiled track record in the video game hardware business, but the Virtual Boy was also the handheld that helped end the illustrious career of its inventor, Gunpei Yokoi. And yet, its innovations in stereoscopic 3D pioneered technology that would reappear 16 years later in the guise of Nintendo 3DS. Whatever the Virtual Boy’s failings, the concept of a 3D game system was not among them.

In some ways, the Virtual Boy came to Nintendo. US firm Reflection Technologies approached the Japanese technology giant seeking a buyer for its new screen technology which used twin mirror- scanning LED displays to deliver separate images to each of the player’s eyes. By arranging each image to match the disparity humans see in real life, the sensation of depth was achieved. In 1992 Nintendo acquired the exclusive worldwide rights to the technology and Yokoi’s Research & Development 1 team began working on a system to employ it.

Codenamed the VR-32, the Virtual Boy went through a number of different design stages, one of which even saw the unit mounted on the users’ head like a VR unit. However, as soon as the decision was made to shun head tracking, the team settled upon a table-mounted design. The delicate internal mirrors meant that any jolt could render the device entirely inoperable, and so what at first glance appeared to be a battery-powered portable successor to the Game Boy, was in fact a stationary, tripod-supported machine.

While the system housed a 32-bit processor, the need to power two screens meant that the additional clout wasn’t immediately apparent. On the system’s launch in July 1995, there were none of the crowds that had greeted the Super Famicom’s arrival. The lack of any top-tier Nintendo-brand software certainly contributed to the lack of consumer interest, but as reports of players suffering headaches during play sessions began to circulate (the red LEDs were chosen for their power-saving properties, but caused considerable eye-strain), the console’s fortunes faded.

Only 22 titles were released for the Virtual Boy over its short lifespan, with only 800,000 systems sold in Japan and the US (the European launch was cancelled). Yokoi, who had expressed dismay at Nintendo’s eagerness to ship the console before it was ready, was blamed for its failure. He left Nintendo under a cloud, the Virtual Boy’s lack of success overshadowing, at least in the short-term, his vital work in taking Nintendo into the video game business.

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Nintendo 64

By Simon Parkin


Year: 1996 Manufacturer: Nintendo Original Cost: ¥25,000 (£249.97)

For 13 years Nintendo consoles had dominated the video game landscape. The Famicom hoisted the industry from the pit into which it had been cast by Atari’s calamitous business decisions in the early 1980's, while its successor had allowed developers around the world to make their fortunes – and swollen Nintendo’s coffers through steep licensing cuts.

In creative terms the company’s internal teams, particularly Shigeru Miyamoto’s EAD division, had helped perfect the art of 2D video game design, maturing those styles of play stumbled upon by the medium’s American pioneers and embellishing them into ever more complex, expressive permutations.

But familiarity breeds contempt and Nintendo’s ongoing market dominance meant that crucial mistakes were made in approaching its next generation of video game hardware. For one, a high-profile snub to Japanese electronics giant Sony in 1991, whom Nintendo was supposed to be partnering with in creating a CD-ROM drive for the Super Famicom, sowed a seed of revenge from which the PlayStation, the system that would eventually usurp Nintendo’s position as market leader in the 1990's, would grow.

Moreover, Nintendo’s confidence in its Super Famicom deadened any sense of urgency for a successor, which, combined with delays to launch title Super Mario 64, ensured the system’s launch lagged behind that of its rivals. The decision to opt for cartridge-based games instead of CD-ROM- based media would prove costly, both in terms of manufacturing, and the way in which Sony was able to step in with its vastly cheaper disc-based games.

Finally, Nintendo’s high percentage cuts from other companies’ games released for its systems had driven a slew of Japanese developers fed up with the Kyoto-based publisher’s tall demands into Sony’s arms – factors that combined to muffle the success of a console that was host to some of its era’s strongest games.

Development of the console began in 1993, when Nintendo partnered with Silicon Graphics, a California-based maker of computer hardware and software whose workstations had been used to generate CGI animations in films such as Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park.

‘Project Reality’, as it was then known, saw the two companies partner to create a low-cost real- time 3D graphics system, its name a statement of intent to create a console whose visuals were indistinguishable from reality.



This feature is an extract from Simon Parkin’s book, An Illustrated History of 151 Videogames.

Two years later at the Shoshinkai Software Exhibition in Japan, Nintendo unveiled the fruits of its partnership, a console now dubbed the Nintendo Ultra 64. Eleven games were shown; two were in playable form. The demos were enough to convince most attendees that the delays had been justified.

In particular, the system’s controller, designed by Genyo Takeda, appeared to represent a paradigm shift for the bridge between player action and on-screen reaction. The controller’s primary novelty was in the introduction of an analog stick positioned on its center prong, an invention that would change the way in which console games were played in crucial ways.

In the next six months, the planned April 1996 release date was missed, reportedly so Shigeru Miyamoto could spend additional time perfecting launch title Super Mario 64, while pressure from game developer Konami saw the console’s name changed to, simply, Nintendo 64.

When the system finally launched in June, Sony’s PlayStation had been on the market for 18 months. The launch line-up was eerily similar to that of its predecessor, with one Mario title, a Pilotwings title and a Shogi game, giving the launch a sense of familiarity that perhaps translated to consumer ennui.

Until the US launch of the system, not a single other title was released for the Nintendo 64. For all Super Mario 64’s startling brilliance, one title cannot carry a system, and this paucity of releases would come to define the N64’s life.

By the end of the system’s life just 387 games had been released. Conversely, more than 1,000 games were available for Sony’s PlayStation, revealing how Sony had convinced third-party developers to defect from Nintendo with its open-publishing model.

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Sega Dreamcast

By Simon Parkin


Year: 1998 Manufacturer: Sega Original Cost: ¥29,800

On the 21 May 1998, Japanese salary men opened their newspapers to find a full-page advertisement showing a picture of a battlefield littered with the bodies of samurai. Overlaid on to the gruesome scene was the text: “Has Sega been defeated for good?”

To most onlookers, the answer was a resounding ‘Yes’. Following a triplet of high-profile hardware disappointments in the Mega CD, the 32X and, to a lesser extent, the Saturn, Sega’s console successes had been few and far between in recent years.

Moreover, despite some strong creative software, the Saturn’s crushing worldwide defeat at the hands of Sony’s PlayStation and the Nintendo 64 had left Sega with losses of $242 million for the financial year ending March 1998. Could there really be a way forward for the beleaguered company?

But the advertisement was one of a pair taken out by Sega itself, the follow-up published the next day in the same papers, now showing the samurai rising to the feet in readiness to fight once again.

Six months later Sega would launch the Dreamcast, the company’s final foray into the hardware manufacturing business, a console on whose shoulders the fortunes of Nintendo’s one-time main rival rested, and in whose innovative design the very future of video games could be perceived.

Two rival R&D teams competed against each other to design a machine capable of placing Sega ahead of its rivals, one based in America and one based in Japan. This unusual gestation period came about when the newly appointed Sega of Japan president Shoichiro Irimajiri enlisted the services of Tatsuo Yamamoto from IBM to work on a design in the United States.

However, when Hideki Sato, head of hardware development at Sega of Japan, caught wind of the plan he instructed his own team to produce a design for a new console, challenging his boss to choose whichever console came out stronger.



This feature is an extract from Simon Parkin’s book, An Illustrated History of 151 Videogames.

At first, Irimajiri opted to go for the IBM design that used graphics processors from the company 3Dfx. But when 3Dfx leaked details and specifications of the then secret Dreamcast project when declaring their IPO, Sega immediately pulled the plug on the project, and instead opted for Sato’s design.

The specifications were impressive. As well as offering four controller ports for multiplayer, and memory cards with LCD screens that could be removed and used as rudimentary handheld systems away from the console, the Dreamcast was the first system to come with a built-in modem for online gaming.

Despite a somewhat tepid Japanese launch, the Dreamcast’s innovative features secured 300,000 pre-orders and 500,000 unit sales in the first two weeks following its US launch.

EA decided not to support the machine, but the similarities in internal architecture between the Dreamcast and Sega’s cutting-edge Naomi arcade hardware meant that the console became home to some of the best arcade-to- home conversions such as Soul Calibur and Crazy Taxi.

The Dreamcast exclusive titles maintained the bright, primary-color aesthetic of Sega’s arcade output with games such as Sonic Adventure and Power Stone while the SEGA Sports label plugged the gap left by EA’s shunning of the machine with NFL 2K1, marketed as the first football game with online play, outselling the official Madden game during its first weeks on the market.

But the announcement of Sony’s successor to the PlayStation dealt a shuddering blow to the Dreamcast’s fortunes, Sony’s marketing promise of a mysterious ‘Emotion Engine’ that would elevate video games to a new art form slackened interest in Sega’s machine, which was soon seen as a stop-gap.

In truth, the Dreamcast was years ahead of its time. Its pioneering work in introducing the first console MMORPG and allowing players to play against one another across the world, established concepts that define video games today.

In March 2001, two years after the system’s US launch, Sega announced it was not only discounting the Dreamcast, but retreating from the console hardware business altogether.

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Sony PlayStation 2

By Simon Parkin


Year: March 2000 Manufacturer: Sony Original Cost: ¥39,800

For a video game system that scraped its way into existence by way of a simple grudge, the original PlayStation exceeded the meager expectations of Sony’s management who had once viewed the idea with such disdain.

By 1999, Sony’s Computer Entertainment division was responsible for a sizable 40 percent of the company’s revenues, establishing itself as a key pillar in the business.

Not only that, but the system had reshaped the way in which developers and publishers worked with console platform holders, reigniting an industry that was lagging in the mid-nineties, much as its rival, Nintendo, had done a decade earlier.

Expectations for the PlayStation 2 contrasted to those of its predecessor. Consumer excitement played a key factor in burying Sega’s Dreamcast, as people held off subscribing to the ‘next generation’ of game hardware in anticipation of Sony’s next creation. Behind the company’s closed doors Ken Kutaragi, the man who had so doggedly believed in the original PlayStation project, was hard at work, now with the benefit of a huge R&D team and the full support and confidence of the Sony board.

The PlayStation 2 was unveiled in March 1999, a year ahead of its release, and exceeded expectations. At the core of both Sony’s marketing plan and the machine itself was the ‘Emotion Engine’, a CPU chip that contained 10.5 million transistors on a die measuring 240mm, power that would, Sony claimed, allow video games to communicate emotion like never before.

Out of context, and with the hindsight of the PS2’s lackluster launch line-up, the claims were pretentious. But there was science behind Kutaragi’s spiel: he wanted to create a CPU capable not just of number- crunching, but of delivering the mathematical capability required to simulate emotion.

When Sony staff first unveiled their academic plans for the Emotion Engine at a silicon chip conference in San Francisco in 1999, few in attendance believed the company could manufacture such a thing, let alone in the volume required for a global console launch.


This feature is an extract from Simon Parkin’s book, An Illustrated History of 151 Videogames.

The system’s other specifications impressed with DVD-playback, backward compatibility, and an extension of the analog functionality of the Dual Shock controller to its face buttons.

But not everyone remained convinced.

At a special showing at the start of 2000, the PS2’s first batch of titles did little to communicate the great potential of this black slab: Fantavision, a firework-exploding puzzle game, and Dark Cloud, a routine Japanese RPG, appearing as if they’d been developed for the original PlayStation, not this brave new world of digitized emotion.

An even greater problem for Sony was manufacturing sufficient numbers of consoles to meet initial demand. On the system’s Japanese launch, on Sunday 4 March 2000, the allocated 600,000 consoles sold out immediately, one empty-handed customer even throwing himself off a roof in Tokyo’s electronics district, Akihabara.

The US launch on October 26 was mixed too, the initial shipment of 1 million consoles revised down to 500,000 at the last minute, while the UK launch on November 24, 2000 offered a mere 80,000 consoles, brought into the country by four chartered Russian jets who flew to Japan to pick them up, aircraft procured by Sony Europe when they heard Europe wasn’t to receive its PS2 allocation in time for Christmas.

Meanwhile, BBC TV show Watchdog targeted the system as part of a ‘Rip-off Britain’ exposé thanks to its £300 price point.

In the system’s first year there were many developer gripes with the system’s architecture, which, according to Capcom’s Shinji Mikami, lacked adequate development tools. However, by the system’s second year, Rockstar’s vast and original Grand Theft Auto III illustrated PS2’s tightly wound potential.

As developers mastered the hardware, and games began to match the machine’s promise, the PS2 gained huge momentum. In 2010 it became the best-selling console ever, with 148 million units sold around the globe, success that took video games into more homes than any other system. The emotion engine had, in part at least, lived up to its lofty name.

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Nintendo GameCube

By Simon Parkin


Year: 2001 Manufacturer: Nintendo Original Cost: ¥25,000

The mighty had fallen. Nintendo, the savior of the video game in the mid-1980's and its definer for the next decade had, by the time of Nintendo 64’s decline, lost its place at the heart of the industry it had established and sustained. While Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time had helped describe the formative language of 3D gaming, Nintendo’s reluctance to abandon cartridge-based games in favor of disc storage had cost the company dearly.

Not only that, but Nintendo’s image continued to primarily be one of a toymaker, while the video game audience was now advancing into its twenties and thirties, a stage of life for which Sony’s PlayStation seemed more tailored, in the marketing, if not the reality. Sega’s early entry to the so- called ‘next generation’ had made the Nintendo 64’s fuzzy 3D look positively archaic. Had Japan’s leading console manufacturer become irrelevant?

Nintendo’s answer to the creative and business conundrum in which it found itself surfaced in 1999, with leaked details of a project codenamed ‘Dolphin’, a new console rumored to use a 128-bit custom processor and optical disc media. At the company’s SpaceWorld event the following year the GameCube, as it had come to be known, was officially unveiled (despite the name change, references to ‘Dolphin’ remained in the system’s model number, DOL-001 and the name of its CPU, ‘Flipper’).

The boxy console appeared to have taken its design cues from Apple’s desirable desktop computers, prizing compactness over bulk and power, but it was the proposed price point, which at ¥25,000 (around £125) was far cheaper than its rivals, that was most arresting. Along with the game casing, a slew of titles were shown. While many of were never released, Meowth’s Party, Perfect Dark and a ‘realistic’ Zelda game all discarded before reaching the market, Nintendo appeared to have answered its critics by altering its business approach on a fundamental level in order to adapt to a changing market.


This feature is an extract from Simon Parkin’s book, An Illustrated History of 151 Videogames.

The system was created by numerous Nintendo teams and affiliates, Western designers such as GoldenEye creator Martin Hollis even pitching into the development of the machine. In anticipation of Sony’s PlayStation 2, Nintendo focused on graphical capabilities, dumping NEC, developer of the Nintendo 64’s MPU in favor of IBM due to the company’s advances in copper chip technology. Following criticism that the Nintendo 64 had been a difficult console to develop for, Nintendo worked to make the GameCube accessible, allowing developers to concentrate their energies on artistry instead of working around the hardware. In testament to this, Sega claimed in 2001 that it was able to create a playable version of Phantasy Star Online Version 2 for the system in less than a month.

Despite the sensible approach to development of the system, the GameCube would flounder following release. Even with strong third-party support and the lowest hardware price of all consoles on the market, Nintendo fast slipped into ‘third’ place, halting GameCube production for a brief period in 2003 to reduce surplus units. The company sold just 22 million units by the end of its lifecycle compared to PS2’s 100 million consoles, and the Xbox’s 24 million by the same point.

In part the lacklustre performance was thanks to the 1.5 GB proprietary disc format, which offered developers far less memory space than PlayStation 2 and Xbox’s 8.5 GB Dual-Layer DVDs. Meanwhile, the lack of DVD playback forced consumers wanting a cheap DVD player to opt for Sony’s machine.

Most problematically, the system lacked a must-have exclusive too, Super Mario Sunshine and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker falling short of the novel greatness of their predecessors. Indeed, the GameCube proved that Nintendo is a company at its best when trailblazing and that flounders when following trends instead of establishing them. In its competent unimaginativeness, Nintendo almost lost its identity, a mistake the company would not make again.

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XBox

By Simon Parkin


Year: 2001 Manufacturer: Microsoft Original Cost: $299

When Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, took to the main stage at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California on 10 March 2000 to announce the company’s long-rumoured entry to the home video game console market, he was full of hyperbolic promise. The X-box (as it was written at the time) was to be a system three times as powerful as Sony’s PlayStation 2, transforming the way in which we consume media in the living rooms of our homes.

It was bullish enthusiasm that few industry watchers shared. Sony was at the height of its success, having clambered over rivals Nintendo and Sega to lead the video game industry into the new century. Each of these three console makers had its own niche on the gaming landscape: Nintendo as purveyor of primary-color game worlds that fired our childhood imaginations; Sega as the creator of adrenaline-rich arcade thrills; and Sony as the mainstream giant in whose slipstream the others were pulled. There appeared to be no room for another to muscle in on the bright-lit frisson of home video games, let alone a developer of routine office software.

The idea for the system came not from the top, but from the middle of the corporation. In the run-up to the launch of Sony’s PlayStation 2, a number of Microsoft engineers became concerned at the Japanese company’s claims that their new console was set to wipe the PC from the home. Ted Hase, Otto Berkes, Seamus Blackley and Kevin Bachus came together to design a home games machine, one based on PC architecture, but that could compete with the traditional games consoles in the living room.

Originally known as the DirectX-box, the project took off when James ‘J’ Allard joined the group. An avid game player Allard was skeptical that an ‘eMachines for games’ device, with a custom version of Windows would be able to compete in the console market. He argued that the console shouldn’t run Windows, the company’s ubiquitous operating system, but instead something tailored to the machine’s strengths. Likewise, it was Allard who maintained that the systems should ship with broadband-only Ethernet connections, sidestepping the dial-up modem users to ensure that online multiplayer gaming was fast enough to allow for competitive play.



This feature is an extract from Simon Parkin’s book, An Illustrated History of 151 Videogames.

While Allard is often cited as being the ‘father’ of Xbox, in truth, there were many creative minds responsible. It was Ed Fries who managed the team that would design and build the system over a course of 24 months, while it was Seamus Blackley’s experience in game development that convinced game makers of the system’s potential. A video game console is only as good as its games, and without Bungie’s exclusive launch title Halo: Combat Evolved, a game that brought about a sea-change in console-based first person shooters and added legitimacy to Microsoft’s bulky box, the story may have been very different. But even with a skilled team of visionaries behind it, Xbox’s place at the console gaming table was, to a large extent, paid for. Following the system’s launch Microsoft fast muscled into second place in the console arms race, but at a cost to the wider company of $6 billion in losses, a financial punch that few corporations could take.

In part, the long haul success of the machine was down to Xbox Live, an online service that allowed subscribers to play online games with others around the world and to download new content directly to the system’s hard drive. While Sega’s online Dreamcast service predated Xbox Live by some margin, Microsoft benefited from a proliferation of faster internet speeds, enabling games such as Halo 2 to be played at a competitive level remotely.

The system suffered in its later years at the hands of modders, who circumvented Microsoft’s system protections to install their own operating systems and run pirated games. But arguably modding helped build grassroots support for the machine, which by the time of its discontinuation in late 2006 had sold 24 million units worldwide.

In five short years Microsoft established itself as a leading developer of console hardware, finding success through a combination of deep pockets, tall luck and a clutch of strong games.

[dlevere]

Nintendo DS

By Simon Parkin


Year: 2004 Manufacturer: Nintendo Original Cost: ¥15,000

For a while it appeared as though Japan’s booming video game business was immune to the country’s drawn-out economic bust. As Japan slumped into a deep recession, the industry flew an inverse trajectory, reaching a dizzying peak in 1997 thanks to the invigorating success of Sony’s PlayStation.

But soon enough the long winding lines of consumers that greeted each new high-profile game release in Akihabara also began to shrink as the nation’s previously insatiable appetite for electronic entertainment waned. In 2002, America overtook Japan as the world’s biggest consumer of video games and in 2003 Europe nudged into second place.

Of all the video game console manufacturers, Nintendo had the most to fear from this decline. Just as game sales were in dramatic regression in the company’s key home territory, so Sony’s PlayStation 2 had cast a long shadow over the GameCube, with Microsoft’s newcomer selling 2 million more units of its Xbox than the one-time Japanese leader of the home console market.

Moreover, for both Sony and Microsoft, video games were just one component of a sprawling empire. If their respective game divisions performed poorly for a time, other areas of the business could take up the slack. For Nintendo, as with Sega before it, there was no fallback. If the company couldn’t turn its speeding decline around, it would have little choice but to follow Sega in turning its back on the console hardware business to focus exclusively on publishing.

It was into this tumultuous landscape that Nintendo’s new president, Satoru Iwata stepped in 2002, replacing Hiroshi Yamauchi at the helm of a company headed for disaster. In November 2003, for the first time in the company’s history, Nintendo announced a loss for the beginning half of the fiscal year.

In the same breath, Iwata-san proclaimed that the company was developing a new system, neither a successor to the GameCube nor the Game Boy Advance, but a system that would “go back to basics” in the hope of attracting gamers of all ages, and players with no prior experience of games.



This feature is an extract from Simon Parkin’s book, An Illustrated History of 151 Videogames.

With the growing success of adult-focused games and online connectivity, the direction made little sense. While the desire to widen the boundaries of the games industry to encompass a broader mass market appeared logical, Iwata’s statement that “you can’t open up a new market of customers if you can’t surprise them” seemed cavalier in Nintendo’s immediate context.

A year later, when the Nintendo DS was unveiled, method still seemed to have been overtaken by madness. The silvery, somewhat bulky handheld system – decidedly not, as Nintendo was only too keen to emphasize, a successor to the GBA – opened like a book to reveal two screens, one of which was a touch screen that could be interacted with using a stylus.

Despite the in-built microphone and wireless connectivity there seemed no way that this Game & Watch style throwback could be anything other than a side-project for the company.

Sony dismissed the system as a gimmick, ‘a knee-jerk reaction’ to its futuristic, widescreen PSP handheld system, while many developers seemed equally skeptical and confused as to how to employ the system’s idiosyncratic capabilities.

Within 12 months, Nintendo had not only proven its detractors wrong, but had turned around the company’s fortunes. In the space of just one year the Nintendo DS sold 13 million units while the handheld accounted for 45 per cent of all software sold in Japan in 2005, enabling Nintendo to leapfrog Sony’s control of the software market. As with the Game Boy, Nintendo began to iterate on the hardware, releasing the DS Lite and then the DSi in various incarnations, and by 2010 over 135 million units had been sold globally.

Most significantly, the Nintendo DS had proven Iwata’s assertion that chasing innovation rather than technological superiority was the key to Nintendo’s future, a simple ideological shift that would have a profound effect.