История SEGA - подробно
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The 16-bit revolution
The year 1987 found Sega in a most curious
position. On the one hand, it had utterly failed to shake
Nintendo's grip on the videogame industry with its 8-bit Sega Master System (SMS).
On the other hand, that same industry's base technology was fast
becoming obsolete. New and more powerful personal computer
systems, predominantly of the 16-bit variety, had made and were
continuing to make significant inroads into the market.
New and revolutionary systems such as the Commodore
Amiga and Atari ST
were causing home consumers to re-evaluate how videogames should
look and play. This new generation of personal computers
were finally powerful enough to deliver a videogame experience
every bit as good as that found in the arcades of the day.
Why not the same for home videogame consoles?
The answer was simple. The home
console market was still trapped inside its 8-bit prison, with
a certain Italian plumber of Japanese extraction as its erstwhile
jailer. Nintendo had a virtual iron grip on the industry
and was not about to let go for any reason. It held a 95%
share of the Japanese market and a 92% share of the U.S. market,
and those two illegal monopolies gave Nintendo all the profits
it could ever want and more. Other vendors in the field
didn't stand a chance on the fertile ground that Nintendo had
exploited for years. Even Sega, which arguably had the superior
8-bit console with the SMS, fared no better against Nintendo's
venerable NES than had its predecessors. Sega was not
going to get anywhere playing by Nintendo's rules on Nintendo's
turf. The answer was to join the fight on a new battlefield,
with new rules and standards of play, in a venue over which Nintendo
had no control. That venue was the nextgen wave of its day
- the arrival of the 16-bit generation of home consoles.
By this time Sega had already enjoyed
considerable success in the arcades with 16-bit hardware.
Sega games such as Afterburner 2, OutRun, Shinobi, Space Harrier,
and Super HangOn had become extremely popular with
gamers. Sega had a reputation for producing arcade games
like nobody else on the scene, due largely to its use of the high-end
16-bit Motorola MC68000 central processing unit (CPU) - or in
some cases twin Motorola CPUs - in conjuction with the best 16-bit
video display processors (VDPs) and sound systems that the company
could devise. The major iteration of this design scheme
at the time was called System 16, and many a Sega game based directly
on or derived from it could be found with a crowd of eager gamers
clustered around in most arcades. The considerable success
of System 16 in the arcades coupled with its console woes on the
home market caused Sega CEO Hayao Nakayama to start thinking.
The time seemed ripe, he reasoned, to literally "bring the arcades
home." If Sega could come up with an all-new console, one
that was radically different from Nintendo's, one that would appeal
to an all-new user base, then Sega might find the niche market
upon which it could build. Producing a 16-bit videogame
console, as opposed to yet another system based on tried-and-true
8-bit technology, would put Sega on a technological cutting edge
that no competitor could match for some time. This would
be the new system's main selling point. By the time the
competition - meaning Nintendo, of course - did catch up, Sega's
box would already be the established leader with a healthy software
base and the tables would be turned. For once, the plumber
would be the one trying to catch up. Furthermore, the time
was now to bring this new system to market.
The new customer base was already there, and Sega did not want
Nintendo to snag them first.
It was a good thing for Sega that they
chose to act when they did. Nintendo already its own 16-bit
console in the design pipeline. This was the system that
would later become known as the Super Famicom
in Japan and the Super NES (SNES) in the rest of the world. Nintendo
CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi had warned his company that they needed to
be poised to seize the 16-bit console market by 1990; however,
his statement did not have the binding edge of command that his
pronouncements usually carried. Nintendo was still reaping
huge profits from the NES, so there was no hurry to come up with
a successor system. There was also another reason for the
delay - Nintendo was having development problems with this newest
box. It was little more than a design concept and a few
barely working prototypes at this point, but already certain issues
had surfaced that demanded attention. The system as originally
designed was way too expensive to be produced in a version affordable
for the average consumer, let alone cost-effective for Nintendo.
On top of that, project leader Masayuki Uemura was unable to meet
Yamauchi's demand that the new box be back-compatible with the
NES. The back-compatability feature was eventually abandoned;
however, that only saved about US$75 on the anticipated end-user
price tag. The chief culprit of the cost was, of course,
the all-new graphics and sound processing suite upon which Yamauchi
insisted. Designed in anticipation of the coming multimedia
boom, it drove up the cost of the system so much that Nintendo
was again forced to cut costs elsewhere or scrap it and risk being
left behind. The problem was eventually solved by installing
a slower CPU - a Motorola-based WDC65816 CPU - instead of the
faster 10 Mhz MC68000 that Uemura originally intended. This
meant that the new box would not be that much faster than the
NES itself, so a math coprocessor (as cheap as Nintendo could
cobble together) was thrown in to ease the processing strain a
bit.
Meanwhile, over in Sega R&D, a team
of engineers under the direction of Hideki Sato proceeded at a
rapid pace on development of Sega's new 16-bitter. This
new system was little more than a redesigned System 16 arcade
board that had been scaled down and shoehorned inside a sleek-looking
black case. An RF adapter and SMS-style audiovisual port
replaced the custom monitor connections for an arcade cabinet,
and a cartridge slot for interchangeable games replaced the on-board
EPROMs. In fact, the resulting design worked so well that
Sega would turn right around and use it as the basis for three
more arcade boards (MegaTech,
MegaPlay, and System
C). The similarity between existing arcade hardware
and Sega's new 16-bit home console meant that it would not be
terribly difficult to convert existing System 16 games for the
new console. The resultant ports would be almost letter-perfect
versions of the arcade originals, allowing Sega to build up a
large library of games fairly quickly until its console programmers
had found time to develop all-new titles specifically for the
new system. Of course, all of those games - both old and
new - would be running on 16-bit hardware as opposed to 8-bit,
so gamers would be able to tell the difference between Sega's
and Nintendo's consoles right away.
There was also another advantage to Sega's
new system that was exploited right away. Sega typically
built its arcade games using a layered approach - adding a layer
or two of new technology to older designs for the interim until
the new stuff proved itself, then designing a successor system
using the new technology throughout. This was the case with
System 16, as it still retained vestiges of its 8-bit ancestor
boards. The components in question were practically identical
to those found the existing 8-bit SMS console save in layout and
the absence of the SMS boot ROM. In finalizing the design
for its new 16-bit console, Sega R&D made sure that the system
had a mode that would make it back-compatible with existing 8-bit
SMS games. The only thing lacking would be the SMS boot
ROM and the appropriate adapter for the cartridge port, so an
external accessory was designed just for this purpose. This
automatically added the entire 8-bit SMS library to that of the
new console, comprising some 80 games or so as far as the U.S.
was concerned and a somewhat greater number of releases in Japan
and Europe. The back-compatibility feature made another
good selling point - Sega gamers could play their old 8-bit favorites
on the new system while saving up money to buy new and better
16-bit games.
As with Sega's earlier home consoles,
a number of peripherals were planned for use with the new system.
The half-moon shaped controllers that are taken for granted nowadays
were the first to be done. Next came the SMS cartridge adapter,
which by now had gained the unwieldy but workable title of Power
Base Converter. Third was the Mega
Modem (aka Telegames Modem), designed expressly for a series
of modem-playable games that Sega planned to market in Japan in
cooperation with Sunsoft. Three other accessories were also
planned at this point - a keyboard, disc drive, and SG-1000 style
drawing tablet . Their eventual market materialization depended
largely on how well the Mega Modem sold. If it failed, then
there was no point in wasting money on the additional peripherals.
Besides, Nintendo was already experimenting with modem-based technology
for the NES, so it seemed a logical choice.
The last issue to solve was giving the
new system a name. The official in-house designation of
MK-1601 was not about to sell anything. After a great deal
of debate, Sega's Japanese executives finally settled on MegaDrive. It would be one that their small
but loyal customer base would understand. Most Japanese
have a basic training in the English language, and English loanwords
are quite common and frequently used in the various multimedia
industries for the purpose of emphasis. The English loanword
mega was already in use as part of Sega's SMS advertising
campaign to promote games that were supposed to be more powerful
than their ancestors. Tack on another English loanward,
drive, and the resultant name conjured up a mental image
of some massively powerful engine churning away. Unfortunately,
Sega of America would not be permitted to use the name in its
respective market. Another American firm had already registered
the term megadrive as a trademark, so Sega's new console
was to be renamed Genesis for its U.S. launch. It was a fortuitous
choice in retrospect. The name's Biblical connotations would
not be lost on conservative-minded American parents, many of whose
kids would want to buy the new system. There was also a
hidden meaning within the console's new name. Genesis
in Hebrew means "in the beginning," and that is exactly what Sega
was doing - beginning the nextgen wave of consoles with a Sega
system. Up to this point Sega had been playing catch-up
to Nintendo. Now it would be leading the way.
Here are the final specifications for
Sega's new 16-bit home console as they stood prior to the official
system launch. It is not surprising that they are almost
identical to a stock Sega System 16 arcade board save for the
obvious cabinet issues.
Sega MK-1601 (aka Genesis/MegaDrive)
|
Component
|
Description
|
|
Processors
|
- Motorola MC68000 CPU running at 7.61 MHz (main system
functions) (1)
- Zilog Z80 CPU running at 3.51 MHz (sound suite control) |
|
Graphics
|
- 16-bit VDP for playfield and sprite control
- 3 graphics planes, 1 sprite plane, and 2 scrolling playfields.
- 64K VRAM
- 64x9kbit CRAM (dedicated color RAM)
- 64 simultaneous colors on-screen from a 512-color palette
- 320x224 native graphics display mode
- 40x28 text display mode |
|
Sound
|
- 8 KB sound RAM
- Texas Instruments TI-76489 PSG (programmable sound generator)
- Yamaha YM-2612 FM synthesizer (2)
- 14db signal-to-noise ratio |
|
Memory
|
- 1 MB system ROM
- 64 K system RAM |
|
Connection
|
- 1 sidecar expansion slot
- 1 cartridge port
- 2 joystick ports
- Commodore-style A/V port
- internal RF adapter |
|
Storage
|
- videogame cartridges (3) |
|
Other
|
- back-compatible with all Sega Master System (SMS) games
through use of the Power Base Converter accessory |
(1) The original System 16 arcade hardware used a 10 MHz
MC68000 CPU. Certain variants used twin MC68000s.
(2) The original System 16 arcade hardware used a YM-2151
FM synthesizer
(3) System 16 boards had their games burned into ROM on
the board itself. |
In short, Sega planned to deliver nothing less than a full-fledged
arcade-quality gaming console to the homes of average consumers.
It was a bold move for a bold company and would cost a lot of money
up front, but Hayao Nakayama was confident that the new system would
succeed in creating its own market. After all, given Nintendo's
continuing dominance of the old market, Sega had nothing to lose.
The only real wild card in the deck at
this point was NEC. The Japanese computer giant, sensing potential
profits in a new field, had decided to join the resurgent videogame
market. Not only did this prospect disturb Sega, but it also
worried Nintendo as well. NEC had everything going for it
- plants, resources, personnel, and a hefty bank account that dwarfed
anything that even mighty Nintendo could muster. Nintendo's
total net profits were roughly about the same as what NEC budgeted
its R&D division ... all by itself. They had the best
hardware they could make or money could buy, they could afford the
best developers in the business, and work was already underway on
a home console that they called the PC Engine
(PCE). Not a lot was known
about NEC's new box, but one thing was certain - it would be one
of the best-designed consoles to ever hit the market. As long
as it had the games to match, it might prove a worthy competitor
to Nintendo and derail Sega's carefully laid plans. The threat
of the PC Engine was an ever-present shadow over Sega as they labored
long hours across many nights in order to bring their newest home
console to market.
It is now the third quarter of 1988 - that
part of the year in which new products are generally released to
the public.
The first of the great console wars is
about to commence. The initial campaign
There are those who would say that the
first of the console wars took place from 1982 to 1983 among Atari,
Mattel, and Coleco. Be that as it may, any real battle among
them was prematurely terminated when the bottom fell out of the
U.S. videogame market at the end of 1983. What most videogame
historians define as the first of the great console wars did not
come about until almost a decade later, by which time the playing
field had been cleared of its American pioneers and a new breed
of Japanese contenders had entered the fray. Say what you
will about the early days of console videogames, but it was not
until Sega decided to challenge Nintendo's illegal videogame market
monopoly with the Genesis that the real fighting began. There
had never been a battle for dominance like this in the entire history
of the videogame industry up to this time, and the titanic struggle
between Nintendo and Sega for control of the U.S. market would set
the stage for all others that followed. The Japanese and European
markets were mere side players in the ensuing fracas. They
simply could not generate the large revenues that could be reaped
from millions of cash-toting, materialistic American buyers.
The videogame industry's lesser two main markets will receive mention
from time to time, but it was in the U.S. starting in 1989 where
the first great console war began to unfold before everybody's eyes.
The staging area for the first great console
war (and subsequent ones) was the island nation of Japan.
It was home to all three of the major players in the fight - Nintendo,
the veritable 900-pound gorilla of the industry and longtime dominator;
Sega, the presumptive rival with a reputation for talent (and a
hidden ace up its sleeve); and newcomer NEC, the resource-rich dark
horse who was fully capable of outspending both. In the words
of a common American clichй, it promised to be "a real knock-down,
drag-out fight."
NEC got the jump on everybody by releasing
the PC Engine on 30 October 1987, approximately one full year before
the Sega MegaDrive would enter the fray. It was an impressive
bit of hardware - for an 8-bit system, that is. In truth,
the PC Engine was actually driven by an 8-bit CPU, same as the NES,
but NEC had used its technical prowess to develop a console with
enough graphical processing oomph that it could make a justifiable
claim to belong in the 16-bit generation. The resultant games
looked and sounded better than anything Nintendo had done or was
going to do for the NES ... and therein lay the problem. They
didn't play any better than NES games; in fact, many of the early
PCE games played decidedly worse. There were two reasons for
NEC's tragic blunder in this regard. First, Nintendo had the
best among the third-party software community in Japan eating out
of the palm of its hand with its restrictive yet lucrative development
contracts. Second, NEC's own stable of programmers were not
yet up to speed on the full capabilities of their own system.
It was an awesome box for its day and many great games would eventually
be written for it a few years later, yet by that time NEC would
no longer be a contender. However, we digress. We are
getting a bit ahead of ourselves. First-year PC Engine sales
were decent, but did not so much as put a dent in Nintendo's market
share.
What would prove to be the true contender
in the first great console war joined the fight on 29 October 1988.
On that day, Sega launched its 16-bit MegaDrive home videogame console
in Japan. The initial asking price was _21000, and the first
two games available for the system were Space Harrier 2 and
Super Thunder Blade. Both were ports of the Sega arcade
games of the same name. The new console was respectfully acknowledged,
and then everybody went right back to buying and playing Nintendo's
products. Nevertheless, Sega went ahead with its schedule
of planned direct arcade ports and detailed some of its in-house
programming teams to develop new games for its system. It
was early, and Japan would the hardest market in which the new box
would seek a foothold. It was going to take time.
Sega got its first big break the following year when Namco, the
number one third-party developer in Japan and creator of the classic
arcade game Pac-Man, abruptly joined the MegaDrive fold.
Up to that time, Namco was one of the few companies to enjoy a sweetheart
deal with Nintendo, made during the early days of the Famicom (NES)
when Nintendo was trying to sign anybody and everybody they could
to code for the new system. Namco's lucrative contract ended
in 1989, at which time Nintendo's Yamauchi bluntly informed Namco
representatives that they would have to sign the same standard development
contract as everybody else. This would cut Namco's profit
margins and severely restrict the number of Famicom titles it could
develop, as well as making said titles exclusive to the Famicom.
In other words, no more side benefits. Namco CEO Masaya Nakamura
is said to have exploded into a fit of rage when given the bad news,
and he promptly decided to do what no other Nintendo licensee in
Japan had yet dared. In a carefully worded interview with
Japan's top-selling newspaper, the Nihon Keizai Shinbun,
Nakamura accused Nintendo of holding an illegal monopoly on the
Japanese videogame market, quick to silence any company that dared
question its judgement. To question Nintendo would be the
same as committing virtual suicide, claimed Nakamura - and some
in the industry wondered if Namco was about to do just that.
The resulting war of words was quite predictable.
Yamauchi promptly gave his own interview, in which he publically
chided Namco for not being gracious about the profits it had earned
as the Famicom's very first licensee. As a result, Namco's
"privileges" would be withheld in any future contract. Namco
quickly responded that they would support the console market's newcomer,
the Sega MegaDrive, instead of Nintendo's aging warhorse.
Nintendo said that Namco's threat was hollow and again accused it
of welshing on its exclusive privileges. Namco then responded
with a federal lawsuit filed with the Kyoto District Judiciary,
charging Nintendo with anti-competitive behavior and monopolistic
practices. Yamauchi laughed it off. "Frankly, Namco
is envious of us," he said in a published interview with Zakai
magazine. "If they are not satisfied with Nintendo and the
way we do business, they should create their own market. That
is the advantage of the free market." The comment was not
entirely truthful - the market was not free no matter what Yamauchi
claimed - and Namco was force to face that sad reality soon enough.
It did not take long for Namco to go crawling
back to Nintendo. They had a half-dozen or so arcade ports
already under development for the MegaDrive (Phelios, Klax,
Burning Force, Megapanel, and Dangerous Seed),
but none of them would be ready for market until the middle of 1990.
In the meantime, Namco's bottom line took a royal pounding from
the loss of its Nintendo license. Several months after the
fireworks had first commenced, Namco quietly withdrew its lawsuit
against Nintendo. Masaya Nakamura sullenly instructed his
staff to make arrangements to secure a standard Nintendo development
contract. There would be no argument - he had Namco's latest
financial returns before him in all their dismal splendor.
Namco's new contract would include Nintendo's standard restriction
clauses, severely limiting Namco's ability to develop for the Sega
MegaDrive and other competing platforms. The behemoth of the
industry had flexed its muscles. Even so venerated an outfit
as Namco, one of the founders of the arcade videogame industry,
had been forced to toe the Nintendo company line. Nakamura
would never forgive his humiliation at the hands of Yamauchi, nor
did the latter particularly care how Namco perceived his company's
behavior. The affair would come back to haunt Nintendo in
later years, however. As soon as it was able, Namco dropped
out of the Nintendo fold and openly developed software for the systems
of its competitors. It is a grudge that has separated the
two companies to this day, and it is a rare and notable event whenever
a Namco title makes an appearance on a Nintendo console.
Over at Sega, Hayao Nakayama got the message
loud and clear. Despite fielding a superior console for the
second time in a row, Nintendo was not about to let Sega make any
serious inroads into its home turf. Sega would have to take
its new console abroad if it had any chance of surviving and growing.
That is exactly what Sega did. Hyakumandai!
Once again, NEC tried to get the jump on
Sega. Having met with unimpressive results in Japan, NEC executives
felt that the system might stand a better chance in North America.
Rechristened the Turbo GraphX 16
(TG16), NEC's powerful 8-bitter hit U.S. store shelves
approximately six months prior to the scheduled launch date of the
Genesis. Unfortunately for NEC, its initial U.S. lineup was
even less impressive than it had been for the system back in Japan.
The best title it could field for the TG16 launch was the rather
bland side-scroller Keith Courage in Alpha Zones. Being
a neophyte on the console market, NEC had yet to grasp a lesson
that Nintendo had learned early - good software drives console sales.
Nintendo is reported to have been delighted with the subsequently
poor market performance of the TG16 during its early troubled years.
It really didn't have to do anything about combating the NEC threat
- the befuddled computer giant was doing their job for them.
In time, the TG16/PCE would see some excellent titles that truly
showcased the system's power, but by then it was too late - it had
been effectively eliminated from the console wars. It would
survive as the most notable of the lesser niche systems, acquiring
a small yet doggedly loyal following in all markets, and over the
years would gradually gain the reputation of being the system that
should have won the first great console war. It did not, because
thanks to NEC's initial fumbling of its software library, it never
had the chance.
In the meantime, Sega of America remained
unruffled by NEC's early launch of the TG16. Their response
was to issue an official press release describing the impending
arrival of the 16-bit Genesis to North America. Here is how
that document opened:
Only Sega, the master of arcade entertainment, could
introduce a whole now dimension in home video entertainment -
the Genesis System. The first and only system with true
16-bit technology to bring you the ultimate in game play fun and
excitement. Your world will never be the same again once
you've experienced Genesis' high-definition arcade quality graphics,
stereo music and sound effects, realistic voices and unsurpassed
gameplay.
The rest of the press release went on to describe the features of
the new system, stressed Sega's experience in creating top-notch
arcade games and how that resulted in the Genesis, gave an initial
release date (09/01/1989), and some initial pricing information
("under $200" for a complete system). Other idata was made
available in subsequent announcements. There were about a
dozen titles scheduled for release at launchtime, most of them being
ports of popular Sega arcade games that were already on the MegaDrive
market in Japan. Sega's own Altered Beast, the third
game released for the system, was to be a pack-in title with every
console sold. Michael Katz, the man hired by none other than
company founder David Rosen as the new president of Sega of America,
was taking no chances on the system launch and was putting all of
his ducks in a row. He was still betting that the Genesis
and not the TG16 would be the only worthy competitor that could
take on mighty Nintendo.
The Sega Genesis saw its official U.S.
launch on 14 August 1989 in two cities, Los Angeles and New York.
The rest of the country got the system on 15 September 1989, along
with a launch lineup of six games. The15 September 1989 date
is generally regarded as the official launch date of the Genesis
due to the limited nature of the earlier event. The original
retail price for a complete system was US$190, some US$10 less than
had been originally planned. Altered Beast was the
system pack-in game, as promised, but new Genesis gamers could also
purchase Last Battle, Space Harrier 2, Super Thunder Blade, Thunder
Force, and Tommy Lasorda Baseball. The advertising
tag line for the new system was coined by Sega of America CEO Michael
Katz: "Sega Genesis does what Nintendon't." Right
away, U.S. gamers could tell that the Genesis was quite a different
animal than the aging NES. It was blazingly fast. It
had eye-popping graphics. It had stereo sound. It had
accurate ports of some of the best-known arcade games of its day.
There were other, less obvious features that they noticed as well.
It was black, and black was cool. It had a straightforward
top-down cartridge port design - no damn door and spring-mounted
loading bay like a certain other console. This meant that
the Genesis Game Genie, once it
arrived (and everybody knew it was coming) would not be the
convoluted affair that Nintendo had forced for its NES after much
legal wrangling. Intial launch sales of the Genesis were respectable
enough, although they were not about to break Nintendo's 92% market
share, but more importantly a lot of gamers and game magazines began
talking about Sega's newcomer. To them, the Genesis was a
speedy black Porsche in comparison to Nintendo's lumbering two-tone
Volkswagen. Now, if it could only get some really great games
to go with it - can you imagine that?!
Europe would not get Sega's 16-bitter until
November of 1990. The island nation of Great Britian, Sega's
predominant European stronghold ever since the early days of the
SMS, was the first to receive its MegaDrives. Originally retailing
for _190 per system, the initial shipment of some 30,000 consoles
first went on sale in such major British department stores as Dixon's
and Rumbelow's. Its arrival in the Old World was welcome news
to gamers across the continent, who had long enjoyed the fruit from
the Sega vine. It was not good news for Nintendo, whose still-struggling
European division was then in the process of opening a major distribution
center in Grossheim, Germany. Nintendo may have dominated
the Japanese and U.S. videogame markets, but it was Sega who ruled
the roost in Europe. Nintendo's measly 10% market market share
stood in stark contrast to its utter dominance outside of Europe,
and that inescapable fact pretty much dictated its European strategy.
They let Sega of Europe's new MegaDrive go largely unchallenged
while they worked on increasing their market share to a modest 25%
and concentrated on more profitable products, such as their GameBoy
handheld system. Thus it was that the Sega MegaDrive took
Europe by storm and would remain the dominant home videogame console
until the mid-1990s. In fact, it would outsell all other Sega
systems, even the 32-bit Saturn, until it was officialy discontinued
by Sega of Europe in 1998. Nintendo of Europe had no choice
but to let it happen. It simply did not have the resources
and market share to compete. Let us take
a moment to focus on a common observation made by most gamers about
the Genesis in those early days. The biggest complaint by
far was about the games. It wasn't that they lacked in ear
and eye candy - that much was obvious. What they lacked was
good gameplay. Sega knew full well that good games would push
system sales, so they had made sure that top-notch ports of many
of their hit arcade titles were available as soon as the system
was launched. Unfortunately for Sega, what worked well as
an arcade game did not necessarily work well as a home console game.
Players did not have to worry anymore about having a pocketful of
quarters to learn how to beat the bad guys and move on to the next
level. They could take as much time as they wanted, and many
of them did. Soon, complaints such as "short," "shallow,"
and "repetitive" became all too common on the Genesis scene.
The expected success of Sega's near-perfect arcade ports never materialized.
For example, the pack-in arcade conversion of Altered Beast
was soundly criticized by all hands as being far too short for a
home console game. Michael Jackson's Moonwalker, a game upon
which Sega had reportedly spent millions in securing the rights,
was derided for endlessly repetitive gameplay. A common theme
was beginning to emerge regarding Sega's first-generation Genesis
games - great-looking but no gameplay. Even Sega's early dedicated
Genesis efforts suffered from this affliction. Castle of Illusion
and Fantasia, both Mickey Mouse games produced under license
from Disney, set new standards for sprite animation in a videogame
yet played little better than their ported arcade predecessors.
Sega's games may have looked better than Nintendo's, but they didn't
seem to play any better. It was evident that better-playing
games would have to be produced before the Genesis suffered the
same fate as NEC's new system. Genesis as yet had no "killer
app" to push console sales, becasue Sega did have its own Shigeru
Miyamoto (Super Mario Brothers) or Alexey Pajitnov (Tetris)
as did Nintendo. Actually it did, as we shall soon see, but
it had yet to appreciate this fact.
In the meantime, an American cavalry rode
to Sega's rescue in the form of noted software powerhouse Electronic
Arts (EA) The
company was already a legend in its own time: it was well known
in the personal computer industry for such groundbreaking fare as
M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities
of Gold, and now it wanted a share of the highly profitable
console market. EA had originally passed on an NES license
during that system's early days in 1984, when it could have gotten
one on favorable terms, and was a mistake that the company had rued
ever since. Now, EA president Trip Hawkins was eyeing the
emergence of the 16-bit consoles and came to the conclusion that
the Sega Genesis would be the next big system. His R&D
teams had already examined the hardware and come up with good proposals
for porting and developing EA games on Sega's new system.
In early 1990, Hawkins directed his staff to enter into formal negotiations
for a licensing deal with Sega on terms favorable to EA. The
gist of it was that EA would get to make as many games as it wanted
- something Nintendo had not offered them - and a reduction in licensing
fees. Sega said no. It planned to impose a restrictive
contract on EA just as it had done its other licensees, one that
echoed similar Nintendo arrangements. Hawkins had anticipated
this, however, and pulled a one-two sucker punch on Sega.
Acting on his direction, EA's negotiators brusquely informed Sega
of America that it didn't have that kind of clout to throw around;
furthermore, EA had already reverse engineered the console and knew
how to manufacture its own unlicensed Sega cartridges. It
was at this point that Sega caved - after all, EA was right about
Sega's market presence and both wanted to advance Genesis sales.
The two eventually settled on a licensing agreement that, while
it was not everything Hawkins has originally wanted, came close
enough for his purposes. In exchange, Sega got one of the
best third-party software houses in America on its side and their
best programming teams to boot. EA games began to appear for
the Genesis as fast as the company could churn them out, and this
sudden influx of new and more sophisticated titles helped push console
sales. Three of these early hits were Will Harvey's The
Immortal (an isometric-view RPG), Budokan: The Martial Spirit(a
fighting game), and the first installment in the now-legendary John
Madden Football (aka Madden NFL) franchise. Madden
competed directly with Sega's own Joe Montana Football, and
a friendly rivalry grew between the two company's sports game divisions
that would eventually result in some of the best 16-bit sports videogames
ever created.
By now, it had become evident who was going
to make up the nextgen console market - the niche in which Sega
was struggling to establish its beachhead. These were the
older kids, mostly teenage boys, that had comprised the original
Nintendo masses of the mid-1980s. In the case of certain sages
among them, they were the the forgotten gamers of the Atari generation
almost a decade before. You must remember that this generation
had grown up on a steady diet of computers and videogame systems,
and was the first such one in America to do so. Their tastes
in videogames had grown more sophistcated as they aged, and they
had for the most part moved beyond the simple and safe family-oriented
fare that Nintendo was still force-feeding upon them. They
envisioned themselves as anti-establishment, living on the edge
(as a popular Aerosmith music video put it), and desirous of the
most that they could get out of whatever experience they had.
They were already attracted to the looks and power of the Genesis,
and the arrival of EA on the console along with its reputation for
excellence impressed them. In their minds, if you wanted to
play baby games, you played Nintendo. If you wanted a real
game, especially a real sports game, you played Sega. Their
respect for Sega's new system got a big boost with the arrival of
Capcom's Strider later that year. A perfect port of
an arcade game that had largely been ignored when it first arrived
in the U.S., it was the title that finally offered these gamers
something of the mind-torturing, thumb-callusing, hell-on-wheels
lengthy quality gameplay that they so desired from the new
box. Strider would win Capcom the prestigous Console Game
of the Year Award for 1990, but more importantly, it helped build
Sega's reputation with its growing fans. It also marked the
beginning of a long-standing relationship between Capcom and Sega
that has continued over the years to the present day.
Genesis was beginning to become the embodiment
of all that was cool in a videogame console. The only thing
still lacking was a killer app to put the final seal on that oft-whispered
opinion. By the summer of 1990, sales of
the Sega Genesis had surpassed the 1 million mark in the North American
marketplace. This figure had been Nakayama's original first-year
sales target for the console, and he had even gone so far as to
have Sega employees chant "Hyakumandai!" (Japanese for one
million) at the end of each day's morning briefing sessions.
By the end of the year, Sega's new console had raked in over US$100
million in sales. It was a modest profit, to be sure, but
it was a definite profit. It was not enough to satisfy Nakayama,
however, who was still irked by the fact that Nintendo had stubbornly
clung to its 92% market share despite Sega's best efforts.
He therefore sacked Katz in January of 1991 and replaced him with
longtime friend Tom Kalinske. Despite this, latter-day videogame
historians credit Katz with the successful launch of the Genesis
in the U.S. market. It was upon the solid foundation that
Katz built during his turn at the helm from which all else sprang
forth.
1 million Genesis consoles sounds like
an impressive number today, until you do a little digging and discover
that Nintendo had an installed user base of 31.7 million NES consoles.
Thirty-to-one against - those were odds that no Las Vegas bookie
in his right mind would take. It was a good thing that this
was not Vegas, because Hayao Nakayama probably would not have listened
anyway. He was used to getting his way, and he wasn't going
to let a trivial thing like long odds stop him. Besides, he
had more immediate concerns. Nintendo was beginning to stir.
The sleeping giant had at last awakened
to the fact that its next intended market was being stolen right
out from under its very nose by an upstart - one that it thought
it had buried back in Japan years before. With this shocking
realization in mind, Nintendo promptly swung into action.
Work on the company's nextgen console was wrapped up and the system
was hurriedly rushed to market. Shigeru Miyamoto and his team
of developers hurredly put together a new Mario game for
it. Nintendo of Japan officially announced the Super Famicom
in October of 1990; by early November pre-orders had reached 1.5
million units and the company was forced to stop taking them.
All night long on 20 November 1990, a large assortment of panel
trucks drove up to the main Nintendo warehouse in Kyoto, were quickly
filled with cases of boxed consoles and cartridges, then departed
to select retail locations all across Japan in an event known as
"Operation Midnight Shipping." It was a mess - there were
simply not enough consoles to meet customer demand despite Nintendo's
best production efforts. Over 300,000 Super Famicoms were
sold the next day, along with copies of the system's two launch
titles (Super Mario World and F-Zero), but Nintendo
could have sold considerably more had it not been caught napping.
Things had settled out by year's end, though. By the first
quarter of 1991, Nintendo had sold some 2 million Super Famicoms
in Japan, and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the system would
be as big a success as had been the NES.
With the Japanese launch of the Super Famicom
now under its belt, Nintendo made ready to launch the SNES (the
export version of the Super Famicom, remember) in the U.S. market
on 9 September 1991. The company had every reason to believe
that the U.S. launch would be even more successful than the Japanese
launch. Besides, its American division would have a full year
to iron out the kinks and ramp up the system with the usual full-court
press advertising campaign. It even had a tag line for the
new system, throwing Sega's own right back into its face - "Nintendo
is what Genesis isn't." Nintendo was now poised to do something
that no other player in the videogame industry had yet pulled off
- dominate the market two generations in a row with two successive
systems. It was guaranteed to succeed, because Nintendo still
owned the U.S. market lock, stock, and barrel. Nothing would
stand in its way. Nothing could go wrong.
Nakayama was not about to let Sega get
caught again under Nintendo's thumb. He planned to unravel
his rival's stranglehold on the U.S. videogame market long before
the SNES arrived. When that time finally came, Sega would
break Nintendo's monopoly with a market-shattering sonic boom that
would be heard around the world and still echoes to this very day.
Move over, Mario
It was now a full-blown war - the first of the great console wars.
According to Nintendo of America's Minoru Arakawa, Sega had fired
the first shot by challenging its right to "cultivate" the U.S.
market. According to Sega of America's Tom Kalinske, Nintendo
had started the whole thing just by dominating the market in true
yakuza fashion. Whatever the reason, whatever the cause,
both were now locked in a wrestler's embrace and both were determined
to pin the other guy to the mat. Nintendo had the obvious
advantages - size, reach, strength. Sega enjoyed the adrenaline
rush of someone who had nothing to lose and was willing to try anything.
It had everything it needed to beat the 900-pound videogame gorilla
save two items - a corporate mascot and a marketing campaign.
Like the plumber, Sega's mascot would have to be instantly recognizable,
easily associated with the company, and star in one really bad-ass
game. Like the marketing machine, Sega would have to come
up with a new advertising campaign that would let the average consumer
know within the space of a few seconds exactly who Sega was and
what the company was all about. The issue of the mascot was
addressed first, for it allowed Sega to kill two birds with one
stone and develop what it hoped would be the system's first true
killer app. The ensuing marketing campaign could then use
the new game as a starting point and build from there.
It was time to take on Mario.
Hayao Nakayama was, if anything, a meticulous planner. When
it came time to take on Nintendo's corporate mascot, he had his
staff analyze everything about the plumber and try to determine
just exactly what made him tick. Once that was established,
then it would be time to develop a character that was as much the
opposite of Nintendo's rotund spokesman as possible. Nintendo
considered the arrival of the Sega Genesis on the U.S. market to
be nothing less than the coming of the Antichrist. Fine, then.
Sega would take the antithesis one step further. It would
come up with its own corporate mascot that was everything Mario
was not. Even as 1990 continued to roll along and the early
U.S. sales figures began to come in, Nakayama put out the word to
Sega's R&D teams worldwide. He wanted them to come up
with a corporate mascot and videogame to match that could compete
against Nintendo's Mario. His instructions were quite specific.
The new mascot would have to be as easily recognizable as Mario,
yet as unlike him as possible. The new mascot would have to
be a rather unorthodox character, and the game developed for him
would have to reflect this. Above all else, the new mascot
could not and would not be cute.
A number of proposals were submitted and
rejected. The one that came the closest to acceptance was
by American programmer Mark Voorsanger. His submission was
a pair of "funkadelic" aliens named Toejam and Earl, who were both
very hip and very cool. Nakayama liked the idea and liked
the game, but he had two problems with it. First, Toejam and
Earl were too laid back for his sensibilities. Second, they
were too American in nature. It was a noble effort, but Nakayama
wanted a mascot that would have worldwide appeal. Toejam and
Earl were subsequently rejected as the new Sega mascots, although
they were deemed good enough to go ahead with the creation of their
game. If anything, it would be yet another completely original
offering in the growing Genesis library. The answer to Nakayama's
problem was still out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered.
"Ah, if only we had the likes of Shigeru Miyamoto on our staff!"
Nakayama would often reflect to himself.
It was about this time that Nakayama heard
from someone in his own back yard. One of Sega of Japan's
programming teams - Sega Consumer Department #3, aka AM8 - had come
up with an idea for a mascot and a game to go with it. Intrigued,
Nakayama contacted the team leader, Shinobu Toyoda, and asked to
see it and the man who would be responsible for the game.
Toyoda complied, and together with project director Naoto Oshima
and lead programmer Yuji Naka took their work up to Nakayama's office
for his review. When all was said and done, Nakayama nodded
his approval. The presentation had been most impressive, and
it was obvious to him that AM8's lead programmer was a very talented
young man.
Nakayama had found what he sought.
Sega had found its Miyamoto. Yuji
Naka was born on 17 September 1965 in the old provincial
city of Osaka. A bright, energetic young lad, he found himself
as a teenager attracted to the music of Riyuchi Sakamoto and his
Yellow Magic Orchestra. His love for Sakamoto's synthesized
strains were what led him into his lifelong attraction to computers,
especially the new phenomena known as videogames. Naka not
only played every one on which he could get his hands, but he also
analyzed them and tried to figure out how they worked. Shortly
thereafter, he began coding his own. The gifted young student
could have had his choice of any of the top colleges in Japan, but
he passed on enrollment. This was a daring move given Japan's
cultural stresses on a good education, but Naka did not feel like
wasting four years or so at university when the personal computer
revolution was unfolding about him. Four more years of academics
did not offer much in the way of opportunities in this rapidly growing
field.
In 1983 the newly graduated Naka moved
to Tokyo and applied for employment with Namco, the world's leading
arcade videogame company at the time. His lack of a college
degree hampered any chance he had, and it turned out to be the main
reason why Namco did not offer him a job. Undaunted, he shopped
his talents around and by 1984 found himself working as an entry-level
coder for Sega. The mid-1980s were not good years for Sega,
as they were struggling against Nintendo like everybody else, but
Naka made the most of it. After all, it was a steady job,
and creating videogames was one of the things he truly liked to
do. He quickly gained a repuatation as a micro-managing perfectionist,
and it was not unusual for him to be heard arguing with his co-workers
over some seemingly insignificant coding detail. "Not just
programming," Naka would comment many years later, "everything ...
the graphics, the pictures. I'm really careful about everything."
It was a personality profile that fit well with Nakayama's autocratic
management style, although Naka was hardly known to Sega's boss
until his programming efforts bore fruit.
Naka's very first effort for Sega was Girl's
Garden for the SG-1000, its original home console system.
Over the next seven years, Naka's programming excellence demonstrated
itself in a number of impressive original videogames and console
conversions for Sega. His credits during this period include
such legendary titles as Space Harrier, OutRun, and
the groundbreaking RPG Phantasy Star - widely regarded as
the best game ever released for the SMS. In 1988 his team
was detailed to begin developing software for the MegaDrive, Sega's
new console, and again Naka made his programming presence felt.
He was the one responsible for Super Thunder Blade, a port
of the arcade original and one of the system's two launch titles,
and no one but he could have been called upon to develop the system's
first hit RPG, Phantasy Star 2 - the sequel to his earlier
8-bit effort. After that monumental effort, he assisted in
the port of Capcom's Dai Makai Mura (aka Ghouls 'n' Ghosts)
and spent part of his spare time trying to figure out how to make
Nintendo cartridges work with the MegaDrive. His efforts would
eventually result in the world's first videogame system emulator,
although he knew it could never be released. All this and
more gained him the respect of his fellow AM8 team members.
They were willing to put up with his idiosyncracies because he was
obviously one helluva good coder.
It was in the opening months of 1990 that
AM8 got the directive from Hayao Nakayama to come up with a new
company mascot and a game to go with it. Team leader Shinobu
Toyoda and his staff bounced around ideas. The first character
they came up with was a rabbit-like being with long ears that could
extend and pick up objects and then throw them at his enemies, but
it proved difficult to execute and the concept eventually went nowhere.
Looking at the rough sketches one bright April day, Naka remaked
to fellow team member Naoto Oshima that what was needed was something
fast. Oshima was intrigued, so Naka continued. Years
ago, Naka had conceived of a videogame featuring a character that
could roll himself into a ball and then slam into his enemies, knocking
them over.
"You're talking about a hedgehog," Oshima
replied.
"Yeah," said Naka, "you're right."
Both grinned as the realization dawned upon them.
The concept for the new character quickly
evolved over the next few days. He would be blue because that
was the color of Sega's corporate logo. Since a round ball
did not offer a lot in the way of graphics and quills could not
be easily depicted on screen, the blue hedgehog was given spiked
hair. Since he would be a fast character and hedgehogs are
not known for speed, he was also given a pair of running shoes.
The sneakers might also serve as a good power-up in the game that
Naka was by now beginning to code. One day, Naka gave his
fellow AM8 team members a demonstration of his earliest efforts
on the new game. They watched in amazement as the speedy blue
hedgehog zipped around the screen.
"You know, that fellow's supersonic," one
of the team members remarked. "Super-sonic."
Naka never forgot the comment. Sonic
would be the hedgehog's name from now on.
Sonic's very look defined his attitude, so Naka built his new game
to showcase as much of AM8's new star as he could. He was
a fast, impudent little fellow who blazed his way through the game's
intricately designed levels. Originally conceived as a power-up,
what would become Sonic's trademark red sneakers soon became an
essential part of the character. He needed them, because he
would be on the move almost constantly. Sonic was not limited
to simple running. He could put on extra bursts of speed when
needed, and could go even faster when he rolled up into a blue,
spike-haired ball. Since Sonic seemed to always want to be
in motion, Naka added an extra programming touch to emphasize this.
If he stood still in one place for too long due to player inaction,
he would give the gamer a cross look and begin tapping his foot,
impaitently waiting to start running again. Naka did not stop
there. Each and every move that Sonic made was exqusitiely
animated - running, jumping, leaping, falling, spinning, and so
on. Sonic had a unique pose and facial expression for every
single move in his repertoire. The levels were large, colorful,
highly detailed, and were best played with Sonic running at full
tilt all the way. The game that Naka wound up creating for
Sonic has more than once been compared to a 2D side-scrolling roller
coaster ride, and it is an apt assessment. It also helped
emphasize the differences between Sonic and Mario. In comparison
to the speedy little blue hedgehog, with the spiked hair of a punk
rocker and the rebellious attitude to match, Mario took on the appearance
of a slow, fat, lackadasical old fart. The rest of the game
was built around Sonic's colorful and stylized world, and he was
given a suitable archnemesis that could kick King Koopa's ass any
day of the week. Dr. Ivo Robotnik, aka "the Eggman" (as he
is known in Japan), didn't have to recruit his underlings - he created
them. Naka tapped into a common Japanese storytelling theme
of enroaching mechanization and made the Eggman into a mad scientist
bent on mechanizing the entire world. His goons were actually
Sonic's fellow animals trapped inside mechanical shells, which Sonic
could rescue by cracking them open with his trademark rolling "spin
attack." It all seems so obvious now that
gamers today tend to take Sonic's success for granted. What
most of them fail to understand are the circumstances that brought
about both the game and Sonic himself. Sonic was Sega's answer
to Mario. If Sonic was anything less than a total success,
then it would have been quite easy for Nintendo to bury the Genesis
under tons of SNES hype. The fate of the company was now resting
in the hands of Yuji Naka and his fellow team members at Sega AM8.
Nobody, not even Naka himself, was sure that the gamble would succeed.
Nakayama was betting the company's future
on Naka's efforts, but he was not about to bet the bank. Under
his direction, Sega quietly built up a US$400 million dollar contingency
fund. It would see the company through the hard times to come
should Sonic fail to deliver the goods, paying the necessary bills
until some fresh ideas could be developed.
Years later, former Sega of America president
Michael Katz would have this to say about Sonic: "We thought
it was silly, but to the credit of [Naka's] game, which was so good,
the character [of Sonic] became established .... The character could
have been anything, but it was a hedgehog which would have died
a dismal death had it not been for a very good game."
The very first inkling that the gaming public got of Sega's new
mascot was on 7 November 1990. Dreams Come True, a new J-pop
band that had just hit the Japanese music scene the year before,
went on their second nationwide tour. It was to promote their
second album, Love Goes On, which had produced the hit single
"Warai Gao no Yukue" (The Whereabouts of a Shining Face).
Dedicated otaku will instantly recoginize it as the theme
song to the hit anime TV series Graduation. Splashed
across their tour bus and equipment trailers that made the long
journeys from town to town was the image of a blue, spike-haired
hedgehog. What was unknown to the public at that time was
that the band's composer, Masato Nakamura (no relation to Namco's
CEO), had contributed the music for Yuji Naka's new videogame.
The image caused quite a stir, because nobody knew what it meant.
As for the game itself, it would not be released until the summer
of the following year. Nakayama had decided
to entrust the game's debut to newly installed Sega of America president
Tom Kalinske. His was the market where the game would debut,
because it was in the U.S. where the stakes were the most critical
for Sega. Kalinske immediately realized what Sonic could do
for Sega and designed his ad campaigns accordingly. More about
Kalinske's marketing efforts will be said later, but his tag line
for Sonic the Hedgehog was that this was "the fastest videogame
in history."
Yuji Naka's latest Sega videogame, Sonic
the Hedgehog, rushed its way into videogame history on 23 June
1991, when it made its worldwide debut in the United States.
It found its way back to its native Japan approximately one month
later on 26 July 1991. Naka used the extra month to put in
a few additional graphics enhancements that had been left out of
the U.S. version, such as scrolling clouds and improved water effects.
Sonic did not make it to Europe until June of 1991, but by
that time it needed no introduction.
To say that Sonic the Hedgehog was
a success would be an understatement. Players had never seen
anything like it before. Sonic's cocky attitude coupled with
the sheer speed, great music, and brilliant graphics of the game
became legend and struck a chord with many a rebellious-minded American
youth. No other videogame at the time, not even Nintendo's
much-lauded Super Mario World for the SNES could compare
with Sonic. Not only did Nakayama
finally get the corporate mascot he so desperately wanted, Sega
finally got its "killer app" for the Genesis. Sonic
sold out wherever it was on sale. Sales of the console skyrocked
as news about Sonic spread among U.S. gamers. The same
thing happend for the MegaDrive in the overseas markets, although
not quite to the same extent as it did in the U.S. To commemorate
its newfound success, Sega launched a massive US$10 million, two-day
nationwide media blitz on 15-16 September 1991, the week after the
SNES launch, touting the proven capabilities of Genesis and Sonic
against Nintendo's new arrival and its own platformer, Super
Mario World. "This is war!" Sega of America's Al Nilsen
declared, and Sega's new ad campaign touted the "Sega advantage"
- over 100 titles available or in development for Genesis, including
Sonic, in comparison to the limited, lame, and rather weak
offerings being fielded by Nintendo for the SNES. It was now
easy going for Sega, for by this time Sonic had become almost
as well-known as Nintendo's acerbic plumber.
While most critics insisted that Super
Mario World was actually the better game, the general public
wasn't paying any attention to them. Independent market research
conducted at the time showed that 7 out of 10 young gamers, Nintendo's
traditional audience, preferred Sonic to Super Mario World.
Nintendo's first reaction was to belittle Naka's achievement.
"It was not a great game," comments unofficial Nintendo historian
David Sheff in his book Game Over. Richard Brudvick-Linder,
who was one of Nintendo's top accountants at the time but later
left to work for Sega, has his own opinion as to what happened.
"[People were saying,] 'Look, they're trying to copy us with Super
Mario Brothers and it's the same kind of game. They can't
do anything really as good as we do it.' Over time, there
was this kind of dawning realization that this was ... not such
a bad product." Even so noted a figure as Nintendo of America
president Minoru Arakawa admitted, "They [Sega] came up with a darn
good game." Arakawa's statement was made in sworn testimony
during the hearings conducted that year as part of the ongoing Nintendo
v. Atari lawsuit. He more than anybody else recognized
the fact that Sonic the Hedgehog had hit Nintendo like a
hard body blow to the stomach, and it was a blow from which the
aging NES would never recover.
Thanks to the instant and steadfast popularity
of Sonic, over 2.3 million Genesis consoles were sitting
in the homes of proud U.S. owners by the end of 1991 in comparison
to just under 2 million of the newly arrived SNES consoles.
The figure was way off the mark from the 4 million units that Nintendo
had originally predicted. "[Nintendo's] failure to blow Sega
away with the SNES was a sobering cold shower," notes David Sheff
in Game Over. Sonic had turned back the Nintendo
tide. In fact, Sonic became so popular among U.S. gamers
that Kalinske convinced Nakayama to let Sonic become the
new pack-in for the next batch of consoles. The Sonic
pack-in versions of the Genesis base system would sell for only
US$150 - a substantial drop in retail price. It was a great
bargain for a great console, and best of all, you were going to
get Sega's best game free with it! That was the public perception,
anyway, and Kalinske's plan worked. Genesis sales continued
their rapid climb, and Sega's overseas branches subsequently followed
suit.
It would not be
long before Sega would become king of the hill in the U.S. videogame
industry, and it all started with this one silly little game.
The Sega scream
One of the most popular shows on MTV from 1991 to 1996 was Mike
Judge's first full-length animated TV series. Beavis and
Butt-head dealt with the hilarious misadventures of two moronic
juvenile delinquents, along with their Mystery Science Theater
3000 style commentary on a number of selected music videos that
regularly ran on the popular cable TV service. Beavis and
Butt-head could do just about everything most American males had
wanted to do in their misguided youth. The pair terrorized
their home town of Highland, Texas - often at the expense of their
high school, local businesses, or nearby neighbor Tom Anderson.
The show was an instant success and considered to be very cool by
its audience - this author included. I was a zealous fan of
the show, videotaping it every night while I was away at work and
then dubbing off archival copies on the weekends, editing out the
commercials in the process. Starting in 1992 and continuing
well into 1993, I began noticing a series of commercials for a well-known
videogame company that were so off-kilter and fit so well with the
anti-establishment theme propounded by the show that I left them
in place. The passage of time and two moves have long ago
claimed my Beavis and Butt-head videotape archive, but one
of those crazy videogame commercials has forever stuck in my mind.
I am told that it is probably from the back half of 1993, when this
particular ad campaign had already been in full swing for almost
a year, but it will suffice to illustrate my point.
The setting is a dark and somber parlor.
Bookshelves and hunting trophies are in ample evidence. An
elderly yet vigorous and imposing gentleman seated in an easy chair
sharply raps his cane on the wood panel floor and bellows at the
young man in front of him, "What TIME will my DAUGHTER be HOME?!!!"
The expectant girl looks to her erstwile suitors but comes away
disappointed. Two are dispatched in short order - a nerd and
a dweeb, who are both thoroughly intimidated by the angry old man.
Not so the third - a rather roguish looking young chap with long
hair and a mischevious twinkle in his eye. As the pleased
girl looks on, he sneers at her father and snarls in reply, "You
want her BACK?!!!" Immediately the viewer is barraged
with a cacophany of fast-moving and fast-playing videogame images,
while a self-assured announcer plugs away in the background, accompanied
by a blast of hard rock music, extolling the virtues of the games
and that of their maker. At the end, the camera cuts to a
close-up of one of the stuffed animals, who opens its mouth and
screams just one word. "SEGA!"
That is my recollection of the original
Sega scream - perhaps the most
memorable videogame advertising campaign in U.S. history.
If you will recall, Nakayama's Genesis success strategy was two-pronged.
First would be a corporate mascot and accompanying videogame worthy
to take on Nintendo's plumber. Second would be a full-scale
advertising campaign to promote both game and system, the likes
of which would dwarf all such previous efforts in comparison.
There was an edge of desparation in Nakayama's efforts. First-year
Genesis sales, while moderately successful, had not been as well
as had been hoped and had done little to erase Nintendo's lead.
Nakayama felt that they might not be enough to boost sales of Sonic
the Hedgehog and thereby offset the arrival of the SNES.
The new ad campaign would be his ace in the hole - his insurance
policy to guarantee Genesis sales. Desperate times called
for desperate measures, so one of the very first things he did was
fire Sega of America president Michael Katz and bring in a longtime
friend to manage Sega's American affairs.
Tom Kalinske
had a proven track record for success. A long-time advertising
executive with a reputation as a maverick, Kalinske had graduated
from the University of Wisconson with a degree in marketing.
His first major job was with the Mattel toy company, where his boldness
and self-assuredness caught management's eye. Moving quickly
up the ranks, he was soon put in charge of Mattel's highly lucrative
Barbie accounts. In the twelve years that followed under Kalinske's
oversight, Barbie grew from a US$42 million to a US$1 billon dollar
a year franchise for Mattel. Kalinske was also one of the
Mattel executives that oversaw the swift rise and fall of the Intellivision
videogame console. By this time he was a member of the corporation's
board of directors, and he was prudent enough to spin off Mattel's
new electronics division into its own separate company, Mattel Electronics.
His action helped Mattel better absorb its losses once the videogame
market crashed in 1983. Kalinske spent the last three years
of his stay at Mattel as its president, during which time he helped
create and market the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe
animated TV series and product line. It was during this three-year
period that he went toe-to-toe with the American television industry,
learing firsthand the lessons of television marketing. Kalinske
got his virtual baptism of fire in creating, promoting, and selling
a successful product advertising campaign with the He-Man
account, and it would prove him in good stead in the years to come.
The first thing that Kalinske did upon
his arrival at Sega of America was to learn everything he could
that his staff would teach him about the videogame industry.
They did so with some reluctance, because many had been supporters
of Katz and felt that he had been unjustly dismissed. They
were not overly fond of Nakayama's "Ken doll," as some staff members
sarcastically nick-named him due to his time with Mattel, yet they
eventually complied and helped Kalinske find his way around.
Once he had a grasp on his duties and the market he was supposed
to conquer for Sega, Kalinske promptly swung into action.
He surrounded himself with an executive team comprised of some of
Sega's top people and some talents quitely spirited away from rival
Atari. Together, he and his team analyzed the market performance
of the Genesis from launch to present, noting what had succeeded
and what had failed. He welcomed the services of the Goodby,
Berlin, and Silverstein advertising agency, who had just won the
US$45 million account to promote the Genesis by converting their
board room into a Sega videogame arcade and inviting a team of Sega
executives over to enjoy the spectacle. They had a number
of good ideas on how Sega should change its advertising, and Kalinske
incorporated these into his team's own internal analysis.
It was during this phase in Kalinske's tenure that Sega of America
began to gain confidence in its new boss. He might not know
videogames very well, but he was a quick student and his management
style was one of detatched confidence. Kalinske was quite
capable of making the big decisions, but he also made a point of
listening to his subordinates and trusting to their judgement in
lesser matters.
When all was said and done, Kalinske made
the long Japan and confronted Sega of Japan's board of directors
in an executive meeting that is now the stuff of Sega legend.
It opened with Sega CEO Hayao Nakayama questioning Kalinske's idea
to attack Nintendo head-on. "I don't understand," Nakayama
is reported to have said. "Why do you want to do it this way?
I don't like it." Kalinske then proceeded to explain his plan,
and its scope went beyond anything in Sega of Japan's worst nightmares.
What was needed, Kalinske argued, was a radical change in the way
Sega of America was doing its business. He then boldly spelled
out his proposals to his shocked Japanese counterparts:
- Sega would have to aggressively market
the Genesis in the U.S. Aggressive marketing
was a concept that was completely unknown in Japan, where subtlety
was a time-honored tradition. Americans were aggressive,
Kalinske argued, and so was its market. Sega would have
to be aggressive in order to take that market away from Nintendo.
If Sega did not come out swinging, he warned, Nintendo would
surely crush it yet again.
- Sega would have to pitch the speed
of the hardware itself. Sega was at heart an
arcade videogame company. They made the best-looking,
best-sounding, best-playing arcade videogames in the business.
That reputation would have to be transferred to the Genesis,
and straightforward ports of old arcade games weren't going
to cut it. Genesis was a fast console. A fast console
needed fast games. Sonic was just a start.
Genesis needed more games like Sonic - faster and with
more flair than their Nintendo counterparts.
- Sega would have to grab and hold the
attention of its newfound audience. It did
the company no good, Kalinske argued, to know it had discovered
a new audience yet did little to tailor its marketing to suit
their tastes. Theirs was a very hip bunch, and to them
the Genesis was the epitome of cool. Now that they had
these kids' attention, Kalinske reasoned, Sega needed to grab
it and hold onto it with both hands with a marketing campaign
specifically geared to their attitudes. If Sega failed
to do this, then they might lose interest and drift back towards
Nintendo again.
- Sega would have to drop the price of
key products. In keeping with his common theme
of aggressive marketing, Kalinske proposed two specific changes
to the Genesis product line. The first was to lower the
price of the Genesis console itself from US$200 to US$150.
Second was an annoucement that caused the board of directors
to sit bolt upright in their chairs. Kalinske cooly informed
them that he planned to replace Altered Beast with Sonic
the Hedgehog as the console's new pack-in title. Sonic
was Sega's best-selling game, went his reasoning, so prospective
buyers would be more inclined to buy the system with the Sonic
pack-in than they would with Altered Beast. Kalinske
was a keen student of the "razor and blades" school of marketing,
having learned his lessons well during his tenure at Mattel,
and reminded his Japanese audience that software was the true
money train for any computer system. It meant losing money
up front on standalone Sonic cartridge sales, but the
popularity of Sonic would help sales of consoles and
additional software, thereby offseting any potential lost
revenue.
Needless to say, Sega of Japan's board of directors was outraged.
How dare this impudent American tell them how to run their
own company! He had no experience in the videogame industry.
Who the hell was he to tell them what to do?!
"Are you out of your mind?" one of them yelled, and then others
chimed in. "You want to lower the price until we don't have
any profit at all? You want to take out our regular software
and put in our best software? You want to take on a company
that has 92% of the market in an advertising campaign?"
All eyes now turned to Hayao Nakayama,
who sat quietly at the head of the table. The aging, autocratic
ruler of all that was Sega seemed unpreturbed by the ruckus that
Kalinske had caused. He sat quietly as the others prepared
to leave. When he began to speak, everybody froze in their
seats.
"I hired him to make the decisions for
the U.S. market," Nakayama slowly said. "If that is what he
thinks needs to be done, then he should go ahead and do it."
He now looked directly at Kalinske. "It's your call.
This is why I hired you. Do whatever you think is right."
Nakayama's support was absolute in every
sense of the word. The Sega scream advertising
campaign was based upon the research of Irina Heirakuji, associate planning director for
Goodby, Berlin, and Silverstein. "We knew that we would have
to make Sega a cultural phenomena if we were going to beat Nintendo,"
Heirakuji said in an interview with Wired magazine.
The GBS staff spent many months during 1991 observing American youth
in their own homes, "... filming what kids wanted, what kids said,
and why kids thought Sega was cool." Their research not only
mirrored Sega's own earlier analysis but also expanded upon it.
Here is how Wired described their findings:
Heirakuji's research and the frenetic ads that sprang
from it captured the post-MTV mores of a culture hooked on visual
images, an impaitent culture that absorbs and processes information
literally in four-frame riffs. In schoolyards, living rooms,
workplaces, even in bars and other "grown-up" venues, perfectly
normal folk might look at each other, pause for a pregnant second,
then exclaim with lunatic eyes: SEGA!
The first 35 commercials were produced in just four months and made
their debut not during Saturday morning cartoons - traditional Nintendo
stomping grounds - but at the 1992 MTV Music Video Awards, where
Sega's core audience was more prone to be found on the TV dial.
New sets of commercials were cycled every few months. Why
so many? "Kids don't want to see the same commercial over
and over again," commented Greg Stern, director of the Sega account.
"We focused on new games and branding the Sega image." Shortly
thereafter, Sega expanded its coverage to include many of MTV's
top shows at the time, and that is how this author was able to stumble
across the Sega scream in all of its original glory.
The Sega scream was not just limited to
Genesis, either. Kalinske had the campaign expanded to cover
the entire Sega product line. One of the most controversial
Sega scream adverts ever produced was for Game
Gear, Sega's color 8-bit handheld portable that had been
developed in response to Nintendo's monochrome GameBoy. The
scene, filmed at a Batman-esque cocked angle, is of a family
of stereotypical Southern rednecks taking great delight in the power
of their bug zapper. "Some people are content to be entertained
by simple one-color electronics." ZAP!!! The
rednecks snickered and chortled in delight. "Somehow these
people have never heard of Game Gear, the multicolor portable from
Sega with tons of new titles." ZAP!!! Snicker-snicker-snicker.
"Yeah, some people are like that, but then --" and with this the
family's fat patriarch reached into a greasy looking jar, "-- some
people like to eat pickled pork lips, too." Chomp-chomp-slurp-slurp.
ZAP!!! goes the bug zapper, and the newly fallen fly screams,
"SEGA!" Nintendo executives were outraged.
Company attorney Harold Lincoln promptly promised a lawsuit, accusing
Sega of slandering its customers. Sega was eventually forced
to pull that particular ad, but by then it had done its job. The
rest of the Sega scream campaign continued unhindered.
Europe has its own fond memories of Sega's multimedia marketing
from this time. Most remember a character called Jimmy, a
rather irritating young man who helped promote the launch of the
MegaDrive back in 1990. While Europe did not get the notorious
Sega scream, they got an ad campaign that in their eyes was every
bit as worthy. The new campaign opened with the infamous Apocalypse
Now advert, inspired by the Francis Ford Coppola movie
of the same name. It depicted a group of adventuresome gamers
piloting their boat up the Mekong Delta to a lost temple.
Once inside, they discovered Sega's newest console, the MegaDrive.
It was was without doubt one of the most controversial adverts to
ever air in the United Kingdom. That one ad alone is rumored
to have cost Sega of Europe some US$500,000, but it was apparently
worth every penny spent. In its wake followed the Pirate
TV ad campaign, created by Philip Ley, in which Sega
of Europe played off the romanticism that the continent's hackers
had for their nonconformist brethren for all it was worth.
All of the adverts began the same way - a faux cat food or washing
detergent commercial would start to air, only to be jammed and then
knocked off the air by Pirate TV, an unlicensed television station
presumably operating from inside a mobile studio somewhere in England.
Pirate TV's punkish announcer, actor Steven O'Donnel ("Spud Gun"
from the comedy TV series Bottom) would then extoll the virtues
of Sega and its MegaDrive games. The old commercial would
then morph into something more cool and hip right before the viewer's
eyes, and the announcer would rejoice in glee at the way Sega could
change the world. The Pirate TV adverts shared several things
in common with the Sega scream: they were radical and hip,
there was a vertiable multitude of them, they were designed to appeal
to Sega's core audience, and all of them ended the same way.
Each Pirate TV commercial closed with the image of a skull and crossbones
and the tagline "To be this good takes ages." It was a deliberate
wordplay on the Sega name, because ages spelled backward
is Sega. Soon, Sega's big black Pirate TV truck would
be as familiar to European Sega fans as was the Sega scream in the
United States. Pirate TV would eventually prove to be so successful
that it would result in another wild round of Sega advertising.
The best of these was the award-winning Cyber
Razor Cut commercial, one of the most famous videogame
adverts ever made in the United Kingdom. It was produced by
Geoff Boyle, who also did Sega's famous Howdedodat! advert. "It
is clear that a rebellious image sells," noted professor Graham
Barfield in an article about Sega for the UK's Living Marxism
newsletter. He continued by saying, "No amount of hysteria
will stop them coining it. If anything, the latest video nightmare
scenarios were made in marketing heaven. After all, who needs
to pretend to be a pirate station when every columnist and news
broadcaster is already telling your target audience that you're
the devil incarnate?" While you may not agree with Barfield's
politics, he did score a telling point and one that was borne out
by Sega's own market research. This attitude is best put by
American actor Corey Haim, one of the stars of the Sega CD game
Double Switch who at one time courted the possibility of
becoming Sega of America's celebrity spokesman. "Sega is definitely
where it's happening," he told a Wired reporter in an interview.
"Like, have you seen their ads? Far fuckin' out. I want
to be in them. I want to be, like, the Sega boy." A
lot of other young men across North America and Europe felt the
same way, too. Cory Ker, who is now the editor of the Internet
site Gaming Target, put it this way. "While Nintendo appeared
to barely squeak out its name in a pre-pubescent whisper, Sega went
right for the balls. You couldn't help taking notice of this
company when it was yelling "SEGA!"
A lot of attention has been given to the fact that Sonic
the Hedgehog helped define Sega's corporate identity.
What many people forget is that both the Sega scream and Pirate
TV gave the company its reputation for rebelliousness. Together,
they tapped a deep vein in the psyche of Western youth, who promptly
responded to its call and made the company into the success that
it became. When Sega of America finally abandoned
the Sega scream in 1996 as part of the company's effort to reshape
itself for the Saturn, many gamers quickly assumed that Sega was
no longer hip. Instead of being anti-establishment, Sega had
become the establishment. This impression would prove to be
a major blow to the company's image and helped contribute to its
rapid decline during that time. It would not be until the
arrival of the Dreamcast's SegaNet online gameplay service in 2000
that the Sega scream would once again roar across America in all
of its outspoken brashness, and its return would be triumphantly
welcomed by the Sega fans of old. The period
of time from 1992 to 1993 were the salad days for the Genesis.
Nakayama's gamble had paid off handsomely, and Sega's 16-bitter
would now enjoy the fruits of his long labor. These were the
best days that Genesis would ever see, and it had the taken the
likes of Yuji Naka, Tom Kalinske, Irina Heirakuji, and Philip Ley
to bring his plans into reality. Right off the bat in the
opening days of 1992, many of the third-party holdouts from the
early days of the Genesis threw their support behind the console.
Acclaim, Capcom, Micronet, Namco, Electronic Arts, and other early
supporters were now joined by the likes of Activision, Core, Konami,
Tecmo, Taito, and many more. Yuji Naka made the long trip
to the U.S. in order to work with his fellows at the Sega Technical
Institute, Sega of America's exclusive playground for its own stable
of videogame programmers, and the end result was Sonic the Hedgehog
2 - the best-selling Genesis game of all time. While Nintendo
may have kept Sega away from Capcom's lucrative Street Fighter
2 franchise for a few years by signing an exclusive contract,
that didn't stop Sega's programmers from coming up with the now-legendary
Streets of Rage in reply. Sonic 2, Streets of Rage, Toejam
& Earl, and other such irreverent fare spearheaded Sega's
1992 marketing assault on Nintendo. The low price of the console
combined with a 10-to-1 ratio in software availability to the SNES
library and Sega's radical philosophy on both advertising and games
resulted in an assault that Nintendo was simply ill-equipped to
handle. According to official U.S market
data compiled by the NPD Group, Sega passed Nintendo in 1992 to
become the #1 vendor on the U.S. videogame market.
Sega finished 1992 with a 55% market share, whereas Nintendo limped
into second place with 45% - a far cry from the 92% that they had
held a mere two years before. Sega had sold an additional
2.2 million Genesis systems in 1992 and now had over 10 million
of the consoles in the homes of young American gamers, whereas Nintendo
had only managed to sell just under 2 million SNES consoles - an
offical NPD TRST figure that Nintendo still disputes to this day.
In fact, Sega was so popular by the end of 1992 that when Sony ran
its initial U.S. videogame market surveys, they discovered that
most gamers who owned an SNES refused to admit it to their friends.
"They always claimed that there was a time after the [SNES] launch
when they pulled ahead of us, but our research said there wasn't,"
Kalinske would later comment. In reward for the support of
his customers and in response to new Nintendo measures, Kalinske
had the price of the Genesis base system cut again from US$150 to
US$130.
The great console war was not without its
casualties, however, and 1992 saw it claim its most prominent victim.
NEC had never been able to keep pace with its two older and more
established rivals in the U.S. marketplace, and the best that its
Turbo Grafx 16 could do was establish a small yet vocal niche market
for itself. The console had a loyal cult following in Japan,
where it was the #2 system on the market, but its dreadfully small
North American market share was not large enough for it to successfully
compete there. In 1992, NEC made the decision to cut its losses
and quit vending its videogame console in the U.S. marketplace.
It turned over responsibilities for the system to a smaller vendor,
Turbo Technologies. The new company would fold up shop approximately
two years later, and with it would go what some would say was the
last and greatest of the 8-bit consoles.
By the end of 1993, Nintendo was still
playing catch-up to Sega. Sega maintained its lead over its
rival, for it now controlled 56% of the market and had over 12 million
consoles in the homes of gamers all across North America.
It also controlled a healthy two-thirds of Europe and showed no
signs of giving ground anytime soon. Sega's net Western sales
for 1993 came to some US$230 million dollars, which was a sizeable
sum by any measure. This, of course, was music to Nakayama's
ears. The company was now at the top of its form, with the
Genesis established as the market's dominant console and its successor
system, Sega CD, just emerging into its own. While it remained
a distand third in the East, behind both Nintendo and NEC, Sega
was the undisputed master of the West. It had been one helluva
a ride for Nakayama, Kalinske, and company, but it had been worth
it. Thanks to their tireless efforts and that of those who
supported and worked with them, Sega had grown from a US$813 million
company in 1989 - the year that the Genesis launched - to a US$3.6
billion dollar conglomerate by the end of 1993.
Within five years, Sega would throw it
all away. Setting a legal precedent
Before we continue with the story of the
Genesis, we need to take a moment to examine an important lawsuit
that involved Sega's revolutionary 16-bit console. It was
a classic case of restrictive licensor versus creative licensee,
in which a third party vendor sought and found a way out of the
limitations of a development contract. Together with the Nintendo
action against Atari that ended about the same time, the case of
Sega v. Accolade would set a new precedent
for computer videogame development. It would also have profound
indications for a sub-genre of the computer industry that for the
most part was still considered to be in the domain of the hobbyists
and hackers. If you will recall from our
earlier discussion, it was none other than Electronic Arts who first
determined how to bypass the proprietary Sega code in the Genesis
and thereby produce its own videogame cartridges. In response
to EA's actions, Sega developed a new security system for the Genesis
and quietly incorporated it into the system boot ROM starting with
the 1991 production batches. Sega called this proprietary
code the TradeMark Security System (TMSS).
In essence, it was a simplified version of the 10NES lockout chip
that Nintendo had used in the NES. Sega had elected not to
go to the 10NES route because they felt that a complete lockout
solution was needless overkill. Their solution, the TMSS,
was based on very simple principles of intellectual property law.
A piece of code burned into the Genesis boot ROM would look for
a header code that was supposed to be part of every Genesis program
stored in cartridge format. If the header code contained certain
unique characteristics, then it was a legitimately licensed Sega
product. If the TMSS did not find what it sought, then it
would refuse to boot up the system. If the system booted correctly,
then the TMSS would display the phrase PRODUCED
BY OR UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA ENTERPRISES LTD. on the
screen for a few seconds before running the program contained inside
the cartridge. Both pieces of code, the one in the TMSS and
the correct cartridge header code, were copyrighted Sega property.
The TMSS also generated a trademark display every time it was activated,
that being the Sega name itself. In essence, the TMSS was
a double tripwire for anybody trying to produce unlicensed Genesis
cartridges. If you made an unlicensed cartridge that activated
the TMSS, then you were in violation of both copyright and trademark
law. If you could figure out a way to get your game running
without tripping the TMSS, then you were legally in the clear.
It is an established fact that some of
EA's early cartridge releases cause problems with all except the
earliest Genesis consoles - those that were produced between 1989
and 1990. These EA games are the same that would cause headaches
for Genesis emulator developers at the end of the decade due to
the non-standard way in which they interfaced with the system.
The answer is simple - the earliest Genesis consoles do not contain
the TMSS, so the older EA cartridges work just fine. EA apparently
had the program code ready to burn into the cartridge ROMs during
its dispute with Sega for negotiating leverage, and then used it
anyway once the contract was secure. Since this code was made
prior to the introduction of the TMSS, the resultant games do not
work on the later consoles. EA eventually released new versions
of some of these games with the offending code removed, but those
that didn't sell well weren't reissued. As a result, EA's
early workaround was out there waiting for anybody with the programming
skills and a good ROM dumper to discover.
Accolade was founded in 1984 by Bob Whitehead and Al Miller, two
of the original team of VCS programmers who revolted against Atari
and started Activision. They started out by releasing high-quality
games for personal computers, with the most notable being the original
Test Drive. When the Genesis was released in the U.S.
in 1989 and they were finally able to get their hands on the system,
they knew that it would be dreadfully easy to convert a number of
their Commodore Amiga games to work with the console. Both
were based around the MC68000, so porting would only be a matter
of reallocating program resources to match the rest of Sega's hardware.
With this in mind, Accolade approched Sega about obtaining a Genesis
license. Sega offered the standard contract under which 30
or so other third parties were working at the time. Accolade
found the terms too strict to its liking and rejected the contract.
That should have ended the matter then and there, but it didn't.
Like EA before it, Accolade instead chose to find some means of
releasing its own unlicensed Genesis cartridges. To that end,
they bought a number of already available Genesis games, dumped
the ROMs inside the cartridges, dumped the system ROMs inside the
Genesis, and began to analyze the code. They also created
a semi-independent subsidiary, Ballistix, to market their new console
games.
Steven Kent, in his book The First Quarter:
A 25-Year History of Video Games, gives an excellent description
of how Accolade went about reverse-engineering Sega's products in
order to come up with its first unlicensed Genesis game, Ishido:
The Way of the Stones.
Mark Lorenzen led a team of Accolade engineers who purchased
a Genesis console and three game cartridges, then wired the console
so that they could make printouts of the executable code of the
games. They compared the code of each of the games to locate
identical chains, believing that all of the games would use the
same programming instructions to disable any security locks Sega
placed in the Genesis. They used this information to create
a "development manual" for making Genesis games.
The current record does not indicate which three games Lorenzen
and his associates purchased. If the batch had included one
of the early EA efforts, then the situation would have been ironic
indeed.
Like other unlicensed developers at the
time, Accolade was caught flat-footed by the introduction of the
TMSS. Sega demonstrated the console's new security system
at the 1991 Winter Consumer Electronics show in a manner that must
have been a nightmare for Accolade's staff. At the show, a
Sega representative pulled out a copy of Accolade's Ishido
and stuck it into the redesigned system. The cartridge failed
to boot up. The meaning of the demonstration and to whom it
was aimed was clear.
Once they learned about the ability of
the TMSS to lock out their programs, Accolade accellerated its efforts.
They got their hands on one of the new consoles and a new batch
of games as soon as they could, wired them up to Lorenzen's Rube
Goldberg apparatus, then collected and analyzed the results.
There had been a significant change to the header portion
of the game programs. A new string of code had been inserted
into a previously unused location which corresponded to the "power-up
function" portion of the program header. This new code also
happened to include the word SEGA at a specific location.
Lorenzen and his team had already noted this previously unused portion
of the header in their earlier efforts, and had commented that "...
it is possible that some future Sega peripheral might require it
for proper initialization." With five new games already in
development and nowhere else to go, Accolade executives decided
to take a risk and incorporate the new header code into its programs.
It was the only way that they could get the games to market on time.
As soon as Accolade's new games came
out - Star Control, Hardball, Turrican, Mike Ditka Power Football,
and Onslaught - again without the proper license, Sega of
America swung into action. It had its engineers disassemble
them. Onslaught was the only one of them that would
not work on anything but the older consoles. The rest worked
just fine on the new consoles, including the activation of the TMSS
display. Sega's engineers were not surprised to discover that
Accolade had copied its new proprietary TMSS header code in order
to get the games to work. The only reason Onslaught
would not work with the TMSS was that the new TMSS header code had
been copied incorrectly and the word SEGA was in the
wrong place.
On 31 October 1991, Sega sued Accolade
in the 9th Circuit Federal District Court on one charge of trademark
infringement and one charge of unfair competition. On 29 November
1991, Sega added a copyright violation charge, claiming illegal
reproduction and adaptation of a copyrighted work. Accolade
counter-sued, claiming injury of its reputation and contending that
its efforts were protected under the fair use doctrine of copyright
law. Accolade had hoped that the judge for the case would
be Robert Peckham, who was already familar with similar cases and
"was felt to be sympathetic." Unfortunately for Accolade,
he suffered a heart attack and was replaced by Barbara Caulfield,
a new appointee to the bench. Caulfield was a strict interpreter
of federal law, and she ruled for Sega on all counts. She
also issued an injuction barring Accolade from its reverse engineering
efforts, forbade it from issuing any games it had not yet released,
and ordered to recall all of its unlicensed Genesis games within
ten business days. Accolade promptly appealed and got the
last part of the injunction reversed on 23 April 1992, but the rest
of Judge Caulfield's order remained in effect. They were now
stuck with thousands of unsold Genesis cartridges which would be
going nowhere until the legal battle was resolved, and that had
already cost Accolade about US$500,000 in attorney and court fees.
The costs were only going to get higher, but Accolade felt it had
no choice in the matter. Reverse engineering was a common
practice in the computer industry, even if it was not entirely sanctioned
under federal law, and Judge Caulfield obviously did not understand
that important factor. "This was a fundamental step backward,"
said Accolade's Alan Miller many years later, "from the way product
development had always been done in [Silicon Valley] and in general
throughout the world."
If Accolade did not win its case on appeal,
then the affair would probably put them out of business for good.
The first inkling of how the case would
be decided was going to go came on 28 August 1992. Both Sega
and Accolade had spent days before the federal bench in both courts,
arguing their respective positions and demonstrating their supporting
evidence. Sega had every right to believe it would win - it
had wowed Judge Caulfield with a demonstration by Sega engineer
Takeshi Nagashima of how to make a Genesis game that would not trip
the TMSS nor make use of its code. They had denied Accolade's
demand to examine Nagashima's efforts, and Judge Caulfield had sided
with them. She had also ruled in their favor on all counts,
with the trademark and copyright issues being the most important.
Those were the legal protections that the TMSS had been designed
to trip, and it was looking like that the courts were going to do
Sega's dirty work for it exactly as planned. For its part,
Accolade stuck to its guns and insisted that it had done no wrong,
clinging stubbornly to its fair use defense. Sega expected
to win and Accolade expected to lose. Both were surprised
when 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt reversed
in full the original injunction by District Court Judge Barbara
Caulfield and announced that a decision would soon follow.
When it did, it was a decision brief that would rock the computer
industry. In the following quotations, Judge Reinhardt is
speaking on behalf of the full court. The complete decision
brief is available at many locations on the Internet and can be
located by use of your favorite search engine.
We conclude based on the policies underlying the Copyright
Act that disassembly of copyrighted object code is, as a matter
of law, a fair use of the copyrighted work if such disassembly
provides the only means of access to those elements of the code
that are not protected by copyright and the copier has a legitimate
reason for seeking such access. Where there is good reason for
studying or examining the unprotected aspects of a copyrighted
computer program, disassembly for purposes of such study or examination
constitutes a fair use. We conclude that Accolade copied Sega's
code for a legitimate, essentially non-exploitative purpose, and
that the commercial aspect of its use can best be described as
of minimal significance. An attempt to monopolize the market by
making it impossible for others to compete runs counter to the
statutory purpose of promoting creative expression and cannot
constitute a strong equitable basis for resisting the invocation
of the fair use doctrine. Because Sega's video game programs contain
unprotected aspects that cannot be examined without copying, we
afford them a lower degree of protection than more traditional
literary works. The fact that an entire work was copied does not,
however, preclude a finding a fair use .... In fact, where the
ultimate (as opposed to direct) use is as limited as it was here,
the factor is of very little weight. The fact that computer programs
are distributed for public use in object code form often precludes
public access to the ideas and functional concepts contained in
those programs, and thus confers on the copyright owner a de facto
monopoly over those ideas and functional concepts. That
result defeats the fundamental purpose of the Copyright Act -
to encourage the production of original works by protecting the
expressive elements of those works while leaving the ideas, facts,
and functional concepts in the public domain for others to build
on. Under the Copyright Act, if a work is largely functional,
it receives only weak protection .... Here, while the work may
not be largely functional, it incorporates functional elements
which do not merit protection. The equitable considerations involved
weigh on the side of public access. We
conclude that where disassembly is the only way to gain access
to the ideas and functional elements embodied in a copyrighted
computer program and where there is a legitimate reason for seeking
such access, disassembly is a fair use of the copyrighted work,
as a matter of law.
Although Accolade was not completely absolved of wrongdoing, neither
did Sega get the absolute victory it desired. Quite the contrary.
The real winner here was the computer industry. The principle
of reverse engineering was now legal under case law.
Sega v. Accolade is one of those
few precedent-setting cases that made legal history, and it has
been cited in almost every major court battle involving the computer
industry ever since. It established once and for all the right
of a software owner to make as many copies of a legitmately obtained
program as was needed for a reverse engineering effort, so long
as none of the copied code wound up in the final product.
This would prove to be a key issue in the battle over the legality
of videogame emulation almost a decade later. It would be
another seven years before the notion of reverse engineering itself
would eventually be made a part of federal copyright law.
So what did Accolade get for its trouble? It got about US$20
million in lost profits and legal fees, along with the realization
that it was going to have to accept a Genesis contract on Sega's
terms if it wanted to keep making games for the console. And
Sega? Its TMSS was vindcated, but that was about it.
Anything else Sega would gain would have to be from Accolade's hide,
for it had decided to settle rather than continue the legal fight.
Under the terms of the contract that Sega forced upon them, Accolade
was required to produce five original Genesis games for every one
that it made for "another system." It was a contract worthy
of Nintendo's strong-arm tactics, but there was nothing Accolade
could do about it. The new contract would ensure that Accolade
would do its part to bring original efforts to the Genesis software
library - and more importantly, practically guarantee that Sega
would earn a hefty amount of royalties from a steady stream of Accolade
products.
It is ironic that Accolade may have
had the last laugh after all. In order to meet its contractural
obligations, Accolade's programmers produced anything and everything
that they could for the Genesis. A large part of it, such
as the Accolade Sports series, was not particularly good software.
Some of it, such as Super Off-Road and Warp Speed,
was pure junk. Accolade's Genesis titles were never the top
sellers that the company had originally intended. In fact,
things got so bad at one point that industry observers complained
that a situation had been created "... where Accolade felt obligated
to [produce] titles for the Genesis whether they sucked or not."
Winds of fortune
As the fateful year of 1994 began to unfold, Sega was still the
dominant force in the North American videogame market and was poised
to remold the industry in its own image. By the end of the
year, Sega was a troubled company. It was beset within by
disputes between its Japanese and American branches. It was
operating under a mountain of debt and practically nonexistent profits.
It was having great difficulty supporting all of the various products
it had on the market. It was having an image problem with
both developers and gamers, who felt Sega had become fat, sassy,
and directionless. Those were not its only problems.
Sega was under assault from without by its rivals. It was
already seeing the rise of the new nextgen wave, the 32-bit consoles,
and could ill afford to be left behind. It would watch as
a resurgent Nintendo would reassert itself and win the first great
console war. It would also see the arrival of a new player
on the console scene, a former third-party vendor for both Sega
and Nintendo that would unveil its own nextgen videogame system
before the year was out and thus initiate the second great console
war.
The time had come for the Genesis to step
aside. It is a rule of thumb within the
videogame industry that the average market cycle of any given console
is five years. As the year 1994 opened, the Genesis
was already six years old and showing its age rather badly.
This was the time that another vendor would have had its nextgen
system ready to unleash upon the public, taking over the market
in place of its aging predecessor. Unfortunately, Sega was
having problems doing just that. Sega CD had gone nowhere,
and both Sega of Japan and Sega of America were fighting over the
correct vision regarding the path to a 32-bit videogame system -
the hallmark of the new nextgen wave that was already beginning
to wash over the marketplace. This particular issue is best
addressed elsewhere; suffice it to say that a definite successor
to the Genesis was not certain in 1994. Sega's Japanese executives
blamed Sega of America president Tom Kalinske for mishandling the
American business and reasserted themselves. By 1995, Sega
of Japan was in effect running Sega of America as it tried to deal
with what it perceived to be Kalinske's bad judgement.
Actually, it was back in 1992 that the
winds of fortune started to blow against Sega. Sega was the
new master of the U.S. videogame market at that time; however, its
continued rule in that coveted position was not completely assured.
Having seized the throne from longtime rival Nintendo the year before,
Sega had wasted no time in committing many of Nintendo's same mistakes.
In fact, Sega had already begun the process years before their swift
ascendancy to power. You can go right down the list:
the restrictive licensing agreements (not as harsh as Nintendo's,
perhaps, but still quite strict), the all-too-familiar and carefully
manipulated "inventory management" techniques, the expensive (and
not always successful) side ventures, the emphasis of product over
substance, and so on. Almost every single
mistake that both Atari and Nintendo had made in their respective
turns in the catbird seat were now being committed by Sega; and
just as its predecessors had behaved before, Sega seemed blind to
its own growing corporate arrogance. Sega made
grandiose plans for a videogame future molded in its own image,
confident that the new systems and software it already had on the
drawing board or beginning production would redefine the industry
as everybody knew it. Nobody at Sega was listening when former
ally Trip Hawkins tried to warn them in 1993 that they simply did
not have the resources to support all of those systems. Not
that he had any credibility anymore with Sega - he had jumped the
Sega fold by backing the launch of Panasonic's ill-fated 32-bit
3DO console that same year.
Of course, Sega's behavior did not go unnoticed.
It was more sensed than known at this point by its loyal customer
base, who were becoming confused and more than a little annoyed
at Sega's seemingly never-ending array of expensive software, peripherals,
upgrades, and systems. It was indeed noted by the industry
watchdogs, who tried to warn Sega of what was happening just as
Hawkins had tried - even though Sega still wasn't listening.
It certainly did not escape the ire of the third party developers,
the one group that represented the key to success for any videogame
system. One licensee put it rather bluntly when he said, "As
often happens, a revolutionary accomplishes a coup and becomes the
next despot. Sega was as bad as Nintendo becasue Sega wanted
to be Nintendo." They neither forgave nor forgot
the cold shoulder treatment that they were now beginning to receive
- something to which they were already accustomed from Sega's rival.
Interestingly enough, though, many of their eyes were looking back
at a resurgent Nintendo - who was suddenly all smiles and warm hugs
again. "Come back to my fold," the plumber promised.
"I'm sorry. I'll do better this time." The third parties
had no problem with this proposition - after all, healthy competition
among multiple platforms, with them providing the requisite software
(and pocketing the profits along the way) was what they had wanted
all along.
More than anybody else, Nintendo had watched,
endured, and studied Sega's sudden takeover of a market that they
could rightly claim to have single-handedly revived from certain
death almost a decade before. Nintendo had expended over US$25
million on the SNES launch back in 1991 and everything had seemed
to be on the right track, only to see Sega not only survive the
launch but almost blow the SNES out of the water in 1992.
Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi commissioned a study by the independent
Market Data Corporation (MDC) as to Nintendo's future in the videogame
industry, and MDC's results were delivered at a special meeting
of the board of directors. That report, combined with the
insights of Nintendo's own analysts, spelled out in cold and inescapable
logic why the Genesis had succeeded against them. It was a
sobering assessment.
- First, Nintendo had failed to grasp
the significance of sewing up the nextgen market even at the
expense of current market sales. The success
of the Genesis in a market that by all reason should have been
Nintendo's was evidence enough for this observation.
- Second, the SNES needed a strong library
of games if it was ever to have a chance of catching the Genesis.
Sega's Sonic franchise and the ever-popular EA Sports
library, both popularized by Genesis, were cold proof of that
inescapable fact.
- Third, Nintendo needed to diversify
its software libraries if it wanted to retain its
customer base. The young kids, Nintendo's traditional
targets, would always be there, but the original generation
of Nintendo gamers were getting older and developing more diverse
tastes. Sega's new system and games better appealed to
them; therefore, they were buying Sega and not Nintendo.
To borrow a quote from the Star Trek episode "Shore Leave,"
"The more sophisticated the mind, the greater the need for the
simplicity of play." Nintendo still enjoyed its near-synonymous
identity with videogames as a whole, but it would have to release
new and better games and expand its presence in other genres
in order to recapture the older gamers that it was losing to
Sega.
The aging 8-bit NES was by now too old to maintain Nintendo's monopoly.
The 16-bit SNES was superior to the Genesis in almost every aspect
save raw processing power, but it lacked market presence and good,
diverse software. The SNES was all Nintendo had, for despite
its announcements of its own nextgen console (Project Atlantis,
aka Ultra 64, aka N64), Nintendo's executives knew full well that
the new system would not be ready until 1996 at best. They
would have to remold the image of the SNES in the eyes of Western
gamers in such a way that it could successfully take on Sega's current
and nextgen systems simultaneously. With this in mind, Nintendo
reasserted itself and began a comeback the likes of which has yet
to be duplicated in the history of the videogame industry.
One of the very first things that Nintendo did was to start revamping
its software library with higher quality and more diverse titles.
It secured an exclusive deal with Capcom in 1992 to make the console
ports of the populr Street Fighter 2 arcade games exclusive
to the SNES. That didn't stop Capcom from squeezing out a
Genesis port of Street Fighter 2 Special Champion Edition,
but it did mean that the console port of Super Street Fighter
2 would be a SNES exclusive for four long years. It was
a blow to the Genesis software library that would see no solution
until the following year, and then by from a different vendor entirely.
Another approach that Nintendo tried was
augmenting the processing power of the console through the use of
external processors fitted inside specially designed SNES carts.
The Super FX is the best known
of these, and StarFox is the best known Super FX title.
It was a well-designed space shooter featuring 3D polygonal ships
whose game engine was almost exclusively handled by the Super FX.
This freed up the system resources inside the SNES and made for
one very fast, great-looking, and great-playing game. It was
impressive, and it made Nintendo a lot of money, but there would
be few other Super FX games. These and other such customized
co-processor carts were very expensive to produce, and it was not
long before Nintendo began other, cheaper avenues of assault on
Sega.
On 1 May 1992, Nintendo of America president
Minoru Arakawa lowered the price of the SNES to just $150.
This was partly to celebrate the legal victory that Nintendo had
just won over Atari and its unlicensed Tengen games, but it also
gave Nintendo the chance to better position the SNES to potential
customers. The price reduction was a move that Nintendo's
Peter Main, vice president of marketing, heartily approved.
He had wanted the US$150 price tag right off the start at the U.S.
system launch. "I could have sold an extra million,"
Main said. Sega's Tom Kalinske promptly dropped the price
of the Genesis to US$130 in reply, but at least sales of SNES consoles
began to pick up. The Genesis was still the cheaper console,
but not by much anymore. There is one key
event in 1993 that bears on the first great console war. It
is the "violence in videogames" debate and how became the political
quagmire that it did. This is not the place to deal with that
particular subject in great detail, though. That is
better left to the history of the Sega CD, which played a more prominent
role in the ensuing debate than any other single videogame system.
Instead, let us examine the true cause of the affair. Not
surprisingly, Nintendo was behind it.
The videogame sensation known as Mortal
Kombat was first released to U.S. arcades in 1992. A Midway/Williams
product, it was an instant hit. A fighting game in the best
Street Fighter 2 tradition, it distinguished itself with
its own character mythos and array of secret and finishing moves.
It was the latter that caused the biggest stir. Once an opponent
had taken enough of a pounding to be near collapse, he or she would
stand in place and begin to sway dizzily. An unearthly voice
would then solemnly intone "FINISH HIM!" - at which point
you were supposed to execute your character's trademark finishing
move. If performed correctly, the results were spectacularly
bloody - disembowling, decapitation, flaying, spines ripped out,
hearts ripped out, and so on. That had been a deliberate choice
of the game's production team. "It became a huge part of the
game," noted designer Ed Boon. "We didn't know that was going
to be such a big attraction. It just happened."
Acclaim Entertainment owned the exclusive
rights to any console ports of Mortal Kombat and its successors.
Both Sega and Nintendo wanted the game badly, and both paid Acclaim
well to get it. There was just one minor difference between
the two, but it would prove to be the distinguishing selling point
between them. The Genesis port was faithful to the arcade
original, right down to the bloody finishing moves. Nintendo's
was not. Acclaim was forced to remove the finishing moves
from the SNES port due to Nintendo's strict quality control standards.
"Having a toned-down version for Nintendo - do you guys really want
us to do that?" Acclaim reps warned. "Does that really make
sense?" It did not to many of Nintendo's American members,
but they were not the ones running the company. Both were
released in September of 1993. Guess which one sold better?
That's right - you win the booby prize. The Genesis port of
Mortal Kombat outsold the SNES version by a ratio of 4-to-1.
"Street Fighter 2?" Genesis fans would sneer. "Who
needs it?! We've got Mortal Kombat - and uncensored
to boot." SNES owners were furious at the decision to deliberately
gymp up their port, and they let it be known to Nintendo.
There was only one thing Nintendo could
do to stop this unexpected surge in sales for the Genesis.
Fight dirty. If Sega was going to take
a stand on violent videogames as a positive selling point, then
Nintendo would have to come up with a way to pull the rug out from
under them. Nintendo began lobbying the U.S. Congress
about the rise of violence in videogames, and willingly provided
carefully edited videotapes containing footage from the Genesis
port of Mortal Kombat and the Sega CD game Night Trap
to anybody who would listen. One of these was U.S. Senator
Joseph P. Lieberman (D) of Connecticut. He had heard some
of the hubbub and was curious as to what it was all about.
Lieberman obtained a copy of Mortal Kombat as a favor to
his chief of staff, Bill Andreson, who son was interested in the
game but who also had misgivings about buying it. "I was startled,"
Lieberman would later recall. "It was very violent, and as
you know, rewarded violence." The rest, as they say, is history.
The one thing that Nintendo got out of
the U.S. congressional hearings of 1993-1994 into videogame violence
was the smearing of Sega's reputation in the minds of America's
parents. They would now begin second-guessing their children's
judgement and seek to protect them from the perceived threat.
By openly promoting such violent fare, Sega was guilty of poisoning
the minds of America's youth. Whether or not that was true
was beside the point. Nintendo had caused a shift in public
opinion against Sega, and it was all that they needed.
By the beginning of 1994, both Sega and Nintendo had their respective
consoles marked down to US$100 each. The two were now on an
even playing field as far as the more informed gaming public was
concerned, who had cared little for the congressional hoopla, so
all eyes now turned to the software. Sega's was the same as
always - the expected Sonic titles, the usual array of platformers
and action games, and some kick-ass sporting games. No change.
Not so over at Nintendo. They were the ones who were innovating
now. 1994 would see Nintendo release the two SNES games that
finally brought it back to a position of strength in the videogame
market. The summer of 1994 would herald the coming of Super
Metroid, considered by Nintendo fans as the greatest platform
shooter ever made. Metroid had been one of the hit shooters
for the venerable NES and its fans had been clamouring for Samus
to return in an improved SNES sequel. They got their wish,
and the game sold by the truckload. Super Metroid sales would
pale in comparison, though, to the monster hit that Nintendo was
about to unleash just in time for the fall shopping season.
One of the most noted programming houses
from the glory days of the NES was a company called Rare. They were best known for their Double
Dragon and Battle Toads fighting games, both of which
were hits at the time. It was not long after that Rare dropped
off the radar screen and did not re-emerge until 1994. When
they did, it was with the killer app of the year. Donkey
Kong Country, based on the original Nintendo arcade
game, was without doubt one of the best-looking platformers to ever
grace a 16-bit console. Rare's development teams had found
a way to convert 24-bit animation sequences into a format that a
16-bit console rich in system resources could handle - a console,
say, like Nintendo's SNES. The game's pre-rendered graphics
were all created on a high-end SGI workstation and then ported to
the SNES. The game's humor was lifted straight from the dry
wit typical of England. Oh, yeah - it was a great-playing
game, too. It was also the videogame hit of the 1994 holiday
shopping season. Over 2.2 million copies of Donkey Kong
Country were pre-ordered - far more than Nintendo claimed
it could deliver in time for Christmas. The initial shipment
of 500,000 cartridges were already sold even before they had a chance
to be put on store shelves, and a second shipment sold out within
the week. It would go on to sell over 9 million copies during
the official lifetime of the SNES, making it Nintendo's second-best
selling game (behind Super Mario Brothers 3 for NES).
The roles were now reversed. In comparison, Sega's Sonic
and Knuckles seemed rather lame. There was a cooler Sega
game out there, but Star Wars Arcade required the 32X to
play and most folks simply did not want to buy the expensive peripheral
required to play it. Sega still outperformed Nintendo in overall
holiday sales, but Nintendo had the #1 game of the season.
The genre diversification issue was also addressed by Nintendo in
the years following the MDC study, and one genre in particular deserves
special mention. The lack of role-playing
games (RPGs) had always
been a glaring weakness of the Genesis software library. It
was not the the console did not have them; rather, it did not have
enough to satisfy fans of this rapidly growing genre. This
is ironic once you consider the fact that it was none other than
Sega who first introduced the U.S. videogame market to console RPGs
back in 1987 with Yuji Naka's groundbreaking Phantasy Star
for SMS. Naka's game eventually evolved into its own franchise,
with three more titles in the series released by Sega for Genesis.
There were also the two Shining Force games by Climax Graphics
and two other early efforts for the console - Will Harvey's The
Immortal and Yu Suzuki's Sword of Vermillion. While
we are at it, let us not forget Ancient's Beyond Oasis and
Falcom's Ys 3: Wanderers of Ys. This handful of games
were the best RPGs that the West would ever see for the console,
and there weren't that many more of the average or bad ones, either.
Japan was lucky in that they managed to get a few more, but only
a few. These included a special edition reissue of the original
Phantasy Star in all its 8-bit glory, Falcom's Dragon
Slayer: The Legend of Heroes series, Hot-B's Blue Almanac,
Compile's charming Madou Monogatari, Namco's Nadia: The
Secret of Blue Water (based on the anime TV series of the same
name), and Japan Media's Surging Aura. All in all,
even by liberal estimates there were only some two or three dozen
RPGs in a worldwide software library of several hundred official
titles. Unfortunately, even the best of these simply could
not measure up to the avalanche of RPGs that were being released
by Nintendo for the SNES. It was a lost opportunity for Sega
upon which its competitor eagerly seized. "While Super NES
pushed out Final Fantasy and its sequels," noted Game
Players in their holiday 1995 issue, "Sega almost entirely ignored
the role-playing audience."
Nintendo had openly courted the RPG community
ever since the days of the NES, and the resource-laden SNES made
the prospect of producing better and more sophisticated efforts
all the more tantalizing. It was not a big niche, to be sure,
but was growing fast - and its many denizens would willingly pay
full retail for quality software. Since Nintendo need all
of the market share it could get to regain its former prominence,
it quickly moved to claim RPGers for its own before Sega took them
away. There were dozens of RPGs being released for the SNES
back in Japan on a regular basis, and Nintendo's quality control
people made sure that many of the best of these made it to Western
shores. The company had already enjoyed success on its own
with two Zelda games for the NES, so it made sure that Zelda:
A Link to the Past for SNES would be the best yet. In
fact, it turned out to be one of the console's best selling games.
In addition, Nintendo managed to keep its two best third-party RPG
programming houses in the fold, and they are names that are whispered
in revered awe by RPGers even today. Both Enix and SquareSoft continued their efforts for Nintendo,
although Square did take the time to dabble with the Genesis hardware
with Bahamut Bahant Senki - which was later reissued in a
superior remake as Bahamut Lagoon for SNES. It would
be the only Square title to ever put in an appearance on a Sega
console.
Enix is best remembered for its Dragon
Quest (aka Dragon Warrior) series, which made the successful
transition from NES to SNES and is still in production for today's
current crop of videogame systems. Other notable Enix titles
for the SNES include the ActRaiser series, Evo: The Search
for Eden, Star Ocean, and Terranigma. Square, on
the other hand, needs no introduction. Their best-known calling
card, the Final Fantasy franchise, first made its debut on
the NES and against all odds became one of the console's hit titles
in Japan. As with Enix, Square's most notable franchise also
made the successful transition to the SNES. The steampunkish
Final Fantasy 3, one of several Final Fantasy titles
released for the SNES, is considered by all hands to be the finest
example of a fantasy RPG ever burned into a cartridge ROM.
It does not receive the title of best RPG ever created for a cartridge-based
console, though. That belongs to another Square title, 1995's
legendary sci-fi RPG Chrono Trigger. Other notable
SNES RPG efforts by Square include such well-known titles as the
Breath of Fire series, the Romancing SaGa series,
Secret of Evermore, Secret of Mana, and the delightful Treasure
Hunter G. Square was also responsible for the RPGs based
on two popular franchises at the time - Bandai's Sailor Moon:
Another Story and Nintendo's Super Mario RPG: Legend of the
Silver Stars.
All told, there were well over a hundred
or more RPGs from a dozen or so different vendors available for
the SNES, and at least a good two-fifths of those made it to Western
shores. They pushed the console for all it was worth, and
since RPGs generally do not require as fast a processor as an arcade
or sports title for decent gameplay, they made the SNES shine.
It was no wonder that Sega's best RPGs for the Genesis, from the
few that were available, seemed rather pale and shabby in comparison.
Genesis lacked the audiovisual resources that Yamauchi had insisted
on including with the SNES, and the difference was telling once
the two began to duel it out in side-by-side comparisons.
However you chose to interpret the causes
and effects, there is no doubt that Sega missed a golden opportunity
by failing to exploit the rise of the RPG genre more thoroughly
than it did. They left the door wide open for Nintendo, with
the inevitable result that SNES became the console of choice for
RPGers. Remember, it was but a small niche of the market,
but it grew rapidly as the 1990s rolled on. This sudden surge
of interest in RPGs came at a critical time for both companies,
and it would eventually prove to be one of the mainstay forces driving
the videogame market from that point onward. Sega may have
been the one to bring the first RPG to the West, but it was its
rival Nintendo who would wind up reaping the bounty of this particular
harvest. By the end of 1994, Nintendo was
back on top of the game. Sega's market share had shrunk to
only 35% - a drop of some 30% within the space of one year.
Sega executives claimed that the slump was due to a traditional
summer rollback in its advertising campaigns, but everybody knew
better. Nintendo's new marketing campaign had succeeded.
The SNES was now the dominant 16-bit console, with the aging Genesis
reduced to the role of second fiddle. The SNES would remain
the dominant 16-bitter from now on. That was not Sega's only
problem. By the end of 1995, Nakayama was forced to confront
the reversal of his company's fortunes and the rise of the 32-bit
videogame systems. It was an acknowledged fact that the new
kid in town, Sony Corporation, had an excellent videogame system
in the Sony PlayStation and was
not about to go away anytime soon. Nakayama's reaction was
to make a decision that would decide the course of Sega's fortunes
for the next three years ... and possibly more. Twilight
time In his book The First
Quarter: A 25-Year History of Video Games, author and longtime
videogame industry reporter Steven Kent has this to say about Nakayama's
decision to kill the Genesis in favor of the Saturn. "Concentrating on Saturn proved to be a tactical mistake that
cost Sega millions, if not billions of dollars."
It was not that Nakayama made his decision in the dark. He
knew full well that Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi was spending millions
of dollars that Sega could not hope to match in arranging secret
alliances with technology companies and software houses, many of
whose products would be destined for the SNES. "No one can
stop us," Yamauchi is reported to have said in December of 1992.
Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa, Yamauchi's son-in-law,
was not afraid to let his opinions be known. "I don't think
the other companies understand that they do not have what Nintendo
has," he said in a 1993 interview. "It is why we will grow.
Maybe that growth will not always be as fast as it has been, but
it will continue." That was a clear warning that Nintendo
was playing for keeps. No matter how long it took them, no
matter what they had to do or to what lengths they had to go, they
fully intended to put Sega "back in its place" - and they had the
ready cash, company resources, and sheer force of will to do it.
Even Sega's own Tom Kalinske went on the record in 1994 when he
said, "The 16-bit business ... is going to be very, very strong
for at least another two to three years." It was as candid
an assessment that could be heard from a senior Sega executive;
the only problem was that his superior was not listening to him
anymore. Nakayama's 1995 decision to discontinue Genesis support
made no sound business sense unless you were part of the narrow-minded
corporate culture at Sega of Japan that brought it about.
Within that context, focused as it was on the rise of the 32-bit
nextgen market in Japan alone, it made perfect sense and all other
opinions be dammed.
Kalinske was ultimately vindicated when
his prediction came true. The 16-bit market remained strong
all through 1994, 1995, and well into 1996, when it finally gave
way to the new 32-bit systems in the fall - and even then, 16-bit
software sales remained a significant (if no longer leading) factor
in the market for another year or so. Nakayama practically
handed the 16-bit market to Yamauchi on a silver platter when he
made his ill-fated decision near the end of 1995, and all of Sega's
lost potential profits went with it. Nintendo now had the
16-bit console market all to itself, and its performance during
the 1996 holiday shopping season would be the most profitable that
any vendor would enjoy in the U.S. videogame market.
By then, it was too late for Genesis. It was no longer a significant
presence in the market.
Once Sega made its abrupt official announcement
that it was dropping the Genesis in favor of the more expensive
Saturn, with its obvious dearth of games, there was a sudden rush
by the retail community to dump their inventories in order to make
room for products by Nintendo and Sony. Both Sega and its
largest third-party licensee, Acclaim, were now stuck with warehouses
literally filled to the brim with unsold Genesis carts and no one
willing to buy them. Both took a financial beating in the
fiasco, but Sega lost more than just money. It lost its hard-won
reputation with the gaming public. Sega was no longer cool
to its fans because Sega was now acting like an arrogant ass.
Nakayama's decision was a direct slap in the face of Sega's core
consumer group, pre-teen and teenage boys, and it was a perceived
insult that would take years to heal.
Nintendo had won the first great console
war. The irony here is that Sega deliberately chose not to
win. It was from Nakayama's choice that all of Sega's subsequent
misfortunes would come. Tom Kalinske resigned
his job as president of Sega of America effective 15 July 1996.
He had arrived five years earlier as an outspoken, self-confident
executive with a reputation for success and the resume to prove
it. He left five years later an embittered man, knowning full
well that his foes at Sega of Japan personally blamed him for all
of Sega's misfortunes regardless of cause. Perhaps the worst
part of it was that his former friend and confidant Hayao Nakayama
seemed to have bought into the anti-Kalinske propaganda of his colleagues
and eventually turned his back on him, taking away direct control
of Sega of America bit by bit until he was left as little more than
a figurehead. Perhaps it was the fact that he knew what was
wrong with Sega, had said as much time and again, only to see his
actions and suggestions continually thwarted or overruled.
Michael Lantham, a former Sega producer who was acquiainted with
Kalinske during his days at Sega, remembers all too well the final
years of Kalinske's tenure. "He was not allowed to do anything.
The U.S. side was basically no longer in control." Kalinske
would write surly or sarcastic memos to subordinates whenever they
made obvious mistakes. Rarely would he argue for very long
about the decisions of Nakayama or his representatives, who were
by now paying frequent visits to Sega of America and dictating how
it would conduct its affairs. Oftentimes, people would come
into his office to see him doing nothing but staring out the window.
We may never know the full story, but Kalinske left Sega a very
different man than he was when he first arrived.
Even though the Genesis was now officially dead in North America
and Japan (it would not be discontiuned in Europe until 1998), Sega's
16-bitter was about to roar back to life in South America.
Tec Toy, Sega's Brazillian
distributor, had already enjoyed considerable success with the 8-bit
SMS and decided to give the newer console its turn at the wheel.
The MegaDrive had been actively produced in Brazil as early as 1991;
however, now was the time to pull it out from under the shadow of
the SMS. It was a guaranteed success, because Tec Toy and
its Sega lineup had held 75% of the Brazillian videogame market
since the beginning of the decade. Rival Dynacom, who pushed
Nintendo's systems, never came close to beating them.
As with the SMS before it, both MegaDrive
consoles and games were produced at Tec Toy's main plant in Manaus
- Brazil's rather unique take on Tokyo's world-famous Akihabara
district. Anyone who has been there will tell you that conducting
business in Manaus gives whole new meanings to the the terms "trade
free zone" and "carry-on luggage." It was an apt place for
Tec Toy to place a plant, for it reflected perfectly the company's
free-wheeling, free-dealing nature - often to the benefit of Brazillian
gamers across the nation.
The MegaDrive hit its stride in Brazil
from 1996 to 1998, just as the popularity of the SMS was beginning
to wane. It officially replaced the SMS on Tec Toy's production
schedule as of 1997, and both consoles and games continued to be
produced until the end of 1998. Those three short years would
also see a handful of software releases that are unique to Brazil,
including the only 16-bit console version of Duke Nukem 3D
ever produced. In late 1997, a New Jersey
based company named Majesco Sales approaced Sega with the idea of
refloating the Genesis as a low-budget alternative system to the
higher-priced Sony PlayStation and Nintendo N64 in the U.S. market.
Majesco felt that there was still enough value left in Sega's name
to make a go at it, and it offered to handle everything it could
- marketing, distribution, sales, and so on. In exchange,
Sega would receive royalties on every piece of hardware or software
that Majesco sold. It did not take long for Sega to assent;
after all, it was still sitting on warehouses full of unsold Genesis
inventory and needed to move them any way it could. Due to
a shortage of consoles, Sega went ahead and produced for Majesco
what would be the very last iteration of the Genesis.
The Genesis 3 was released to little fanfare in early
1998. It was a decidedly no-frills version of the console
that had originally brought about the 16-bit revolution a full decade
earlier. Gone were the sidecar expansion bus (for Sega CD)
and Z80 processor (creating some minor incompatability problems).
The new system was a tightly integrated box about the size of a
man's outstretched hand and resembled a cross between an oversize
hockey puck and a space-age portable CD player. The original
asking price was US$50 - a far cry from the original 1989 U.S. launch
price of $190 and only half that of the system's last offical price
tag of US$100 back in 1996. Along with it came the first new
Genesis game in three years - Frogger, a perfect port of
Konami's original 1981 arcade hit which Sega had vended in the U.S.
and was now owned by Hasbro Interactive. It would be the last
officially licensed title ever released for the console.
The re-emergence of the Genesis after an
enforced absence of two years also brought about a brief revival
of the first console war. Nintendo had also been trying to
clear its back inventory of SNES stocks, having produced its own
budget version of the SNES in 1997 and filling the shelves of any
willing retailer with excess SNES inventory. Once Majesco
horned in on the action with its US$50 Genesis 3 console, Nintendo
matched its price. Majesco then dropped the price of the Genesis
3 to US$40 and again to US$30, with Nintendo matching them dollar-for-dollar
every step of the way. Software prices for both systems remained
stagnant, ranging anywhere from US$10 to US$25 per title.
By this time 16-bit sales only accounted for 10% of the total U.S.
console market, but it was a brisk and fiercely fought share.
"I think you may see some sharpening of the SNES price in the holidays,"
said Nintendo vice president George Harrison. "It's the best
kept secret in the industry," noted Majesco's Morris Sutton.
"Retailers have been making a lot of money on 16-bit."
Majesco would wind up selling between 1
and 2 million Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 consoles, along with 10 million
or so Genesis cartridges for fiscal year 1998. In comparison,
Nintendo would only sell 1 million SNES consoles and 6 million SNES
carts. As with the American Civil War, the rebels would win
the last battle - if not the war itself. In
retrospect I know that there
are going to be a lot of SNES fans and folks associated with Nintendo
who will read this article and get terribly upset. They will
dispute my observations and throw all kinds of statistics in the
air to prove their point that the SNES was and always will be the
superior 16-bit console. I have three words for those of you
who belong to this crowd.
Competition promotes
excellence.
The SNES would not be what it is today
had it not been for the Genesis. The actual nonbiased historical
record shows that Nintendo was in no hurry to release the console,
let alone decent games, until the Genesis came onto the scene.
Sega's 16-bitter was the benchmark system around which the fortunes
of the SNES revolved, and even several top Nintendo executives have
grudgingly admitted that fact. Just look at what software
was available for the SNES before 1992-1993 and the stuff that followed.
Can you honestly say that there would have been a Super Mario
RPG, Super Metroid, Donkey Kong Country, a Chrono
Trigger, or hundreds of other such excellent SNES titles from
1993 onward had it not been for the competition fueled by Sega's
console? I think not.
Okay, so your system won the first great
console war. Big deal. The Genesis is still there, along
with almost 30 million former users in silent tribute to the fact
that Nintendo's monopoly on the U.S. videogame market was forever
broken, never to be regained again. Even after Nintendo clambered
its way back to the top, it was knocked off again two short years
later by Sony and its PlayStation. Crow all you want.
I for one don't care for pyrrhic victories.
Whether you like it or not, whether you
ever admit it or not, the Sega Genesis was the system to beat.
That is something no Nintendo loyalist from the time will ever admit,
and the mere thought will forever stick in their craw.
SEGA!
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Genesis/MegaDrive factoids NOTE: For the sake of convienence I shall
abbreviate the phrase "Genesis/MegaDrive" as GMD
throughout.
- The Genesis is Sega's all-time best selling console
as of this date. It enjoyed total worldwide sales of some
28.5 million units.
- There are three primary variations of the GMD as depicted below. All
appear identical in Sega's various worldwide markets save for small differences
in case color schemes and product labels.
- Genesis/MegaDrive Model 1 (MK-1601) - Produced by Sega of
Japan or under license to other vendors from 1988 to 1992, this is by far
the most ubiqutous version to be found in Japan and North America.
It is the only model with a volume control for the headphone jack.
The North American Genesis version includes a set of tabs on the cartridge
port to prevent the use of overseas MegaDrive carts with the console.
Certain early accessories - such as Power Base Converter, the Sega CD/Mega
CD Model 1, and Sega's karaoke unit - are designed specifically around the
case styling of this particular model and must be modified to work with later
models. There are two different unique production batches as well.
GMD MK-1601s made from 1989 to 1990 have only limited firmware protection
and will work with any vendor's cartridges, both licensed and unlicensed.
This includes the early non-standard Electronic Arts and Accolade carts.
Units produced starting in 1991 include the TMSS code in firmware and will
only work with cartridges that can properly interface with the TMSS.
- Genesis/MegaDrive Model 2 (MK-1631) - The sudden success
of the Genesis caused Sega to redesign its entire product line in 1992 for
a sleeker, more "cool" look, and these redesigned products began hitting
store shelves in 1993. The GMD MK-1631s has a more streamlined case
and smaller planar than its ancestors, and are missing the headphone volume
control as well. Other than the reduction in size, it has identical
internal hardware to that of the older GMD MK-1601. This is the version
of the console that is better known to European, Brazillian, and Australian
gamers. As with the GMD MK-1601, North American Genesis versions include
a set of tabs on the cartridge port to prevent the use of overseas MegaDrive
carts with the console. Certain accessories designed for the case styling
of the older GMD MK-1601 cannot be used with the GMD MK-1631 without significant
adaptation. All GMD MK-1631s incorporate the TMSS into the system firmware.
- Genesis/MegaDrive Model 3 (MK-1641) - This, the very last
version of the Genesis console itself, is believed to be unique to the North
American market. It has the smallest footprint of any version of the
console, and is about the size of a older model portable CD player.
Another significant external difference is the lack of the tabs on the cartridge
port, thus permitting the use of overseas MegaDrive carts. The major
internal difference is the complete absence of the Z80 processor from the
sound processing suite, and change this has been documented to cause compatability
problems with certain Genesis carts. It also lacks the sidecar expansion
port; hence no possibility of adding a Sega CD unit to the system.
Hardcore Genesis fans avoid the GMD MK-1641 like the plague and have derisively
nicknamed it "the hockey puck."
- That's not all, folks. There are many more Genesis-based systems out
there. You want to seem some other variations of the Genesis by both
Sega and other vendors? Well then ... hang onto your hat, because here
we go!
- Sega's 16-bit Genesis portable was conceived by Sega of Japan in 1992
as a means of developing a portable Genesis along the lines of Game
Gear. It was based on the MegaJet, an earlier screenless Sega portable originally
developed by Sega of Japan as a promotional item for Japan Air Lines.
The end result was the Sega Nomad handheld
portable, which came to market in October of 1995. It featured a backlit
color LCD screen and works with almost every single cart in the entire GMD
library. It was expensive (US$180) and went through batteries in record
time (about 3 hours of gameplay); nevertheless, it was quite popular among
hardcore Sega fans. It was discontinued by mid-1996 along with the
Genesis itself so Sega could focus its resources on Saturn support.
Because of its heritage, the Nomade works with both Japanese MegaDrive and
North American Genesis carts. There never was a PAL Nomad
released for Europe, although I've heard from one of my sources that a lone
prototype exists. Im told that the Nomad was the first iteration of
the console to drop the Z80 and therefore suffers from the same compatability
problems as the later Genesis 3 console. Because of its self-contained,
portable nature, the Nomad is the most sought-after version of the console
to be had. They were last priced for retail sale at US$40 (brand new
in the box) at Toys 'R' Us in the spring of 1999 and promptly sold out shortly
after the announcement was made. If you can find a used one for that
price, then consider yourself lucky.
- The Sega TeraDrive combined a Genesis
and an IBM compatible personal comptuter into a single unit. It was
designed in conjunction with Amstrad and first marketed in 1991. Originally
intended for the Japanese home market, they quickly became the darling of
the Sega development community overseas - which was a good thing, because
the system failed to impress Japanese consumers. There are two, possibly
three different versions of the system. The first one sported a 10
MHz i80206 CPU and came with 2.5 MB of RAM, a 20 MB HDD, and 800x600 SVGA
graphics. The second is the MegaPlus, about which I have no
hard evidence. The third, also known as the Amstrad Mega PC, had the beefier 25 MHz i80386SX CPU and
came with 4 MB of RAM and a 40 MB HDD. Both are about the size of an
IBM PS/2 Model 30 and have the Genesis hardware incorporated directly onto
the system planar. Japanese versions were almost always black, while
overseas versions tended to be white. According to one of my U.S. sources,
the original asking price for Sega TeraDrive was US$750. Another source
in Europe says that the Amstrad Mega PC originally retailed in the neighborhood
of US$3000, but that price included the full-blown official Sega MegaDrive
Software Developer's Kit (SDK).
- It is ironic that the Genesis, itself based on Sega's System 16 arcade
hardware, was itself the basis of three more Sega arcade boards. All
of them used plug-in carts for their games, like the Genesis, but these were
in a custom format and are not compatible with Genesis consoles. They
are the single-game System C (1990) and
the multigame MegaTech (1991) and MegaPlay
(1992) arcade boards The MegaTech is also designed to work with Master
System games, again in its own unique format that is not compatabile with
either the SMS or Genesis consoles. While I'm at it, I would like to
thank the folks at the ShinobiZ's Home website for providing all of the Sega
arcade planar pics used in this document.
- MSX was the Japanese attempt at defining a worldwide standard
for 8-bit personal computer systems. It may surprise you to know that
there are two MSX computers, both produced by Sakhr under licence from Universal,
were produced for distribution in Kuiwait and Yemen. Based on the Yamaha
AX-330 and AX-990 MSX2 computers, the Sakhr versions included built-in MegaDrive
hardware and a cartridge port. In fact, Sakhr's AX-990 variant included
additional firmware with 50 games in Arabic burned into its ROMs.
- The latest standalone Genesis clone hails from South Korea. Produced
in 2000, the Noritul FX was vended by Unitech and retailed for 95,000
won (US$85). It is nothing more than a Genesis disguised inside an Dreamcast-like
system. It has 14 games built into the console, most of which are believed
to be unlicensed. Sega has refused to offer public comment on Noritul's
unit, but most authorities are of the opinion that it was produced without
Sega's permission. This also goes for Shinco's DVD-868 unit, a DVD
player with a built-in MegaDrive emulator, PlayStation-like controllers,
and no cartridge port. Shinco also distributes nine CD-ROMs for the
player that contain ROM dumps of almost every GMD game ever released.
- All Sega-produced GMD consoles and official derivatives include firmware
market locks to prevent cartridges produced for one market to be used in consoles
from another. There are a series of well-known hardware hacks to get
around this that can be found with the use of your favorite Internet search
engine. North American owners of Model 1 and Model 2 Genesis consoles
will also have to break off the tabs located on either side of the cartridge
port in order to accomodate the slightly wider MegaDrive carts.
- The Super NES, Nintendo's answer to the Genesis, was launched in the U.S.
on 09/09/91. The Sony PlayStation, which would take over as the dominant
system on the console scene in the back half of the 1990s, made its U.S. debut
on 09/09/95. The Sega Dreamcast, the first of the 128/256-bit nextgen
wave of consoles, made its U.S. debut on 09/09/99. 9
September seemes to be something of a sacred date in the U.S. videogame industry
because of the widespread belief among videogame vendors that companies who
launch their systems on that day will see their products enjoy successful market
runs. Coincidence? Superstition? Perhaps ....
- The Mega Modem was developed partly in
response to the Nintendo Network, which was
first unveiled in Japan in 1989. Nintendo's NES-based telecommunications
system was geared largely towards businesses, so Sega decided to take up the
slack on the modem gameplay front. The Mega Modem failed miserably; there
just wasn't enough of a market at the time to support modems for videogame
consoles. Only two games were ever released for the device, Sunsoft's
Tel-Tel Baseball and Tel-Tel Mahjong. Its Western counterpart,
the Telegames Modem, was announced but never released. There were a small
number of Western videogames designed for use with the Telegames Modem, with
the unreleased Combat Aces coming immediately to mind. Sega did
not abandon the concept of networked videogames, however, and would pick it
up again approximately five years later.
- The Sega Channel was a joint venture by
Sega, TCI, and Time Warner that used existing Genesis technology to deliver
a game-on-demand systems to users of TCI's and Time Warner's various U.S. cable
TV franchises. Test-marketed all through the summer and fall of 1994,
the service saw its debut in Pittsburgh, PA in December of 1994 and launched
nationwide in both the U.S. and Canada in March of 1995. It was eventually
introduced in Europe in June of 1996 through a variety of distributors - Flextech
for the UK, Detusche Telekom for Germany, Eneco in the Netherlands, and Telenor
in Norway. For US$15 a month, Sega Channel subscribers could download
their choice of up to 50 different Genesis games inside specially build combo
modem/RAMsave adapters based on Catapult's X-Band modem hardware. Many
of these were previews of up-and-coming games, such as Time Killers;
others were custom versions of existing games, such as the 24-bit version of
Super Street Fighter 2: The New Challengers and a custom port of the
Sega CD's Earthworm Jim Special Edition (sans FMVs, of course); and
still others were titles were never released in their subscriber markets, such
as MegaMan: The Wily Wars (a European market exclusve that only U.S.
Sega Channel subscribers got to see in those days). Downlink transmission
of the Sega Channel was carried nationwide across the U.S. on transponder 1
of the Galaxy 7 communications satellite. At its peak of popularity in
1997, the Sega Channel was carried by over 100 cable TV systems in 140 U.S.
cities and enjoyed a steady subscriber base of some 250,000 users.
The Sega Channel was officially discontinued in the U.S. on 30 June 1997 due
to declining popularity in the wake of the Sony PlayStation.
- If you ever hear the term J-cart, then
this is referring to the special cartridges released by Codemasters that had
two extra joystick ports built into the cartridge. This permitted four-way
gameplay without a multitap adapter. Only six J-carts were ever released:
Pete Sampras Tennis, Pete Sampras Tennis 96, Micro Machines
2, Micro Machines 96, Micro Machines Military Edition, and
Super Skidmarks. All were later released as standard carts but
retained their distinctive J-cart curved housing (sans extra ports, of course).
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