Read Replay: The History of Video Games Online
Authors: Tristan Donovan
Replay: The History of Video Games (47 page)
But while Nintendo’s console had 3D graphics that could match those of the PlayStation, the company decided to stick with cartridges rather than adopt CD due to its concerns about long load times, durability and illegal copying of CD games. Nintendo’s rejection of CD gave Sony another advantage in addition to its already strong lead over Nintendo: Square, the publisher of the
Final Fantasy
series of Japanese role-playing games.
Since its debut in 1987, the
Final Fantasy
series had only appeared on Nintendo’s consoles but its creator Hironobu Sakaguchi wanted the seventh game in the series to take full advantage of extra capacity of CD. So when Nintendo decided to stick to cartridges on the Nintendo 64, Sakaguchi decided that rather than dilute his vision he would move the multi-million selling series to the PlayStation. It was a major blow for Nintendo as
Final Fantasy VII
proved to be the most popular in the series to date.
Final Fantasy VII
ushered in a new cinematic style to the series using the audio and 3D capabilities of the PlayStation to create an epic tale of fantasy eco-warriors out to stop the ruthless Shinra Energy Power Company from mining the energy of life itself. “I wanted people to be aware that planets are alive too,” said Sakaguchi. “All living creatures are in the circulatory system, which is connected with planets.”
Sakaguchi’s ambitious epic, spread over three CDs, became the first Japanese role-playing game to really make it big outside Japan. It sold more than eight million copies across the world and provided one of the most iconic moments in game history: the unavoidable murder of Aerith, a key female character who helps the player in the game.
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Nintendo’s console never came close to matching the sales of the PlayStation, despite Nintendo of America chairman Howard Lincoln’s assertions that customers would favour Nintendo’s more expensive Cadillac over Sony’s cheaper Chevrolet. Within a year of launching the Nintendo 64, the company’s chairman Hiroshi Yamauchi even admitted to Japanese newspapers that Sony now dominated the market and that Nintendo had lost its edge. But Nintendo still had popular brands and a loyal following. Releases such as
Super Mario 64
,
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
and
GoldenEye 007
, a first-person shooter based on the James Bond film that was created by British game developers Rare, helped Nintendo sell around 30 million Nintendo 64s, but these sales were far below the 100 million plus sales of the PlayStation. It was Sega who took the brunt of the damage. By February 1998 it had stopped making the Saturn.
With Nintendo’s position as the console top dog ended, Sony had got its revenge. The video game business now revolved around the decisions and actions of Sony and Nintendo looked like yesterday’s men. As well as changing the balance of power in the game industry, Sony had reshaped society’s attitudes to video games with its efforts to reach a more mature audience. Video games now had a popular culture relevance that seemed unimaginable just a few years earlier. Sony’s realignment of the video games industry would also have big implications for the coin-op game business.
[
1
]. The PlayStation would also come with a controller that rejected the flat plastic slabs of earlier console controllers in favour of a moulded plastic design that fitted comfortably in players’ hands – an approach followed by al
most every subsequent game console.
[
2
]. Germany, however, remained impervious to the appeal of consoles. A 2005 report revealed that just 15 out of every 100 German households owned a console compared to around 60 out of every 100 UK homes and 30 out of 100 in France.
[
3
]. When PMS Clan formed in 2002 its initials stood for Psychotic Man Slayers – no relation to the Psycho Man Slayerz group that had broken up long before – but in 2005 it changed the meaning to Pandora’s Mighty Soldiers in reac
tion to its increasing mainstream appeal.
[
4
].
Japan Sinks
was an award-winning 1973 disaster novel written by Sakyo Komatsu.
[
5
]. The Nintendo 64 controller featured a thumb-sized version of the pressure-sensitive analogue joysticks mostly usually used in conjunction with PC flight simulator games and an expansion port for a ‘rumble pak’ that allowed gam
es to make the controller vibrate. Sega and Sony quickly followed Nintendo’s example and both features are now standard in game console controllers.
[
6
]. Deaths and tragedies that affect the player are common in Japanese role-playing games compared to North American and European role-playing games. Even as far back as in 1987, when Sega’s
Phantasy Star
included a scene where a deranged father kills his daughter, who is one of the player’s team of heroes.
Dance Dance Revolution
: Rhythm action in Tokyo. Haruyoshi Yamaguchi / Sygma / Corbis
22. Beatmania
It’s the late 1980s and Psy•S are one of Japan’s biggest pop groups. Their brand of synthesizer-driven pop had spawned a succession of hit singles, including the dreamy
Lemon no Yuuki
and the zesty
Angel Night
. Their music, reminiscent of early Depeche Mode, featured on popular anime TV series such as
City Hunter
and their tours packed out the nation’s concert halls. “We were a kind of popular band in Japan, we played on tour, we performed in several places in huge halls,” said Masaya Matsuura, who founded the group with Osaka jazz club singer Chaka in 1983.
Matsuura had become hooked on the musical possibilities of synthesizers as a teenager growing up in Osaka. He loved the way the technology allowed him to manipulate sound and had long been interested in the interface between computers and music. In 1980, aged 19, he became fascinated by
Kaleidoscope
, a 1979 demo created by Applesoft to show off the colour graphics of the Apple II home computer. Thinking that
Kaleidoscope
would be much better if it also had music, he wrote a soundtrack to accompany the demo’s bright, pulsing visuals. His early experiment with computer music on the Apple II came back to him when he began wondering what else computers could bring to his musical work in the early 1990s.
“I was thinking music expression doesn’t have to be a record,” he said. “I had been using a computer for the composing and I would construct the data to play the music. Every time I did this I thought why does the sequencer always look the same or why can’t I release the sequence data to the public instead of making the record? These kinds of thing made me think of a new way of expressing music.”
In 1993, keen to explore the possibilities of computer music, he founded software firm NanaOn-Sha and began releasing multimedia CDs for the Macintosh that fused sound, graphics and interactivity. The more he did with NanaOn-Sha, the more Matsuura became enthused by the possibilities of computerised music. So when Psy•S broke up in 1996 he decided to concentrate on his experiments in software full time. By then he had begun thinking about making a video game for the PlayStation that enabled players to create music. “In the ’80s I always used sampling and the sampling synthesizer is a very strange kind of machine,” said Matsuura. “The most exciting part of the sampling machine for me was sampling the voice so you could play it on the keyboard. It is a very toy-type of thing and I thought if we had phrases it would be much more fun to play.”
Matsuura’s ideas resulted in
PaRappa the Rapper
, a PlayStation game where players had to repeat lines rapped by a selection of colourful characters by pressing buttons on the controller in time with the rhythm of the music. To give the game a sense of purpose Matsuura and his team cast the player as PaRappa, a floppy-eared dog out to woo a female sunflower with his rapping skills who seeks help from various teachers.
Matsuura hired New York City artist Rodney Greenblat to bring the world of PaRappa to life. Greenblat created an eccentric world packed with bizarre characters ranging from a chicken that teaches PaRappa how to make seafood cake by rapping the recipe on a TV cooking show to a Rastafarian frog called Master Prince Fleaswallow. Rather than creating fully-fledged 3D characters, Greenblat designed them as paper-thin cartoon characters that looked and moved as if they were paper cut outs brought to life. “Rodney and I spent a lot of time debating the characters of the game and the paper look,” said Matsuura. “We felt with the hardware that maybe polygons were too blocky to express in 3D.”
As well as straightforward repeat-after-me play, the 1996 game enabled players to be creative with their rapping, provided they stuck to the overall rhythm. “
PaRappa
had a performance function so if you got a cool rating the teacher disappeared and you could play as you liked,” said Matsuura. “This is very like music. I’m still very proud of the scoring system, which rates players on following the song and improvisation. This kind of improvisation feeling is a basic idea for music.”
Prior to
PaRappa the Rapper
, the concept of a game that let players create music had rarely been explored. The most significant attempt prior to Matsuura’s game was
Moondust
, a 1983 game for the Commodore 64 created by virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier. “The play was very weird for its time and if it was introduced now it might be more trendy,” said Lanier. “There were six spaceships and one little spaceman, who bounced around the screen. You hit the button on the joystick and the spaceman drops a glowing seed. You have to the get the spaceships, which you coordinate all at once, to run over the seed to spread it towards the target, which was this sort of writhing, organic, vaguely female-symbolic astral phenomenon.”
And as the player moved the spaceships,
Moondust
created music to reflect their actions. “It had an interesting harmonic model internally where you could improvise on it,” said Lanier. “It always sounded normal, it didn’t go into some weird atonal thing, but at the same time it didn’t have a particular harmonic base. It achieved some intermediate level of harmonic complexity, which is not that easy to do whether writing a computer program or even writing real music.”
Despite its strangeness,
Moondust
became one of the most popular Commodore 64 games of 1983. But while it earned Lanier enough money to start his own virtual reality research company, the music-based play of
Moondust
failed to inspire other game designers to explore the format. The arrival of Matsuura’s
PaRappa the Rapper
13 years later, however, did just that. It became a big seller worldwide and in Japan the game’s rapping hero even became the face of the PlayStation brand for a short time. Its success encouraged other game companies to start making music-based games. And it was te arcades that were first games to adopt Matsuura’s approach.
The arcades in 1996 were in trouble. Coin-operated games had always relied on having the best visuals, the best sound, the best technology, but the arrival of the PlayStation, Nintendo 64 and Saturn had narrowed the gap between arcade and home considerably. The arcades no longer looked like the natural location of the latest in game technology. Their role as social gathering places was also fading thanks to the emergence of the internet. “Arcades in the past were not only a fun place to play games – there was the social interaction between the game players and their friends,” said Howell Ivy, executive vice-president of Sega Enterprises USA. “This social aspect has been taken over by the instant access to the internet. Social websites fulfil most of the needs the amusement arcade visitors craved in the past.”
The losses of the arcade’s social and technological advantages were compounded with the restrictive nature of coin-op game design. Unlike the rich, complex and involving worlds of the home, arcade game designers were still serving up snack-like experiences. “The arcade scene was limited by its economics of short play time,” said Eugene Jarvis, who formed arcade game makers Raw Thrills in 2001. “A short intense experience is the only way for an arcade game to pay its way, but there are so many other ways to play games much more cheaply and more conveniently with many varied formats not subject to intense time pressure. The arcade, like a primordial rat, remained in its primitive evolutionary niche while the rainbow of today’s gaming experience took shape.”
And as interest waned in arcade video games so did arcade operator profits. In 1994, when the PlayStation came out in Japan, the annual sales of coin-op games in the US were $1,570 million. In 1998 this had dropped to $1,129 million and in 2002 it was just $523 million.
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Another development that was tearing customers away from the arcades was the rapid growth of mobile phone ownership that began in the late 1990s. Now players could play games wherever they were, grabbing a quick gaming fix at the bus stop or while waiting for a pal to turn up. The first mobile phone game to make a major impact was Finnish phone manufacturer Nokia’s 1997 game
Snake
, a simple remake of the 1976 arcade game
Blockade
for the Nokia 6610 phone.
Snake
challenged players to steer a constantly moving snake around the screen so it could eat apples that would cause its tail to grow. Crashing into the edge of the screen or your tail resulted in instant death. It was a simple but compelling game designed to be played in short bursts, much like traditional coin-op games, and it introduced tens of millions of people to the idea of playing games on their mobile phones. In many ways the mobile phone game took over the niche once held by arcade games by providing short gaming snacks but with the added advantage of communication features and mobility. This combination of bite-sized games, communications and portability was something that game makers quickly latched onto with early mobile games such as
Alien Fish Exchange
, a fish-breeding game released in 2000 where players raised virtual fish and used their internet-connected phones to swap their fish with other people.
Daytona USA
, a 1993 driving game that allowed people on different machines to race each other, bucked the trend. “
Daytona
was one of the first real simulators that gave the player a first-person view and truly placed the player inside the game,” said Ivy. “It appealed to the full breath of game players, both men and women.”
Coin-op game manufacturers were not, however, about to sit by as the arcades abandoned them. They began hunting for new ways to distinguish their titles from the games on offer in people’s homes and pockets. Many tried creating unique controllers to capture players’ interest, from the train control panels in train-driver sim
Densha De Go!
and the football to kick in Spanish game maker Gaelco’s
Football Power
to leashes in dog-walking game
Inu no Osanpo
.
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Most bizarre of all was the South Korean title
Boong-Ga Boong-Ga
, which challenged players to insert the pointing finger of a plastic hand into the anus of a plastic posterior to punish on-screen characters that ranged from ex-girlfriends to child molesters. Saved games, stored on memory cards or provided in the form of passwords, were also used in games such as Sega’s multiplayer racehorse management game
Derby Owners Club
to try and keep players coming back to the arcades.
A few focused on appealing to loyal arcade-going video game players by producing ever more challenging and intense variants on existing game genres. One of the fruits of these attempts to appeal to the dedicated arcade gamer was the emergence of the ‘bullet hell’ shooter, a sub-genre 2D shoot ’em ups that threw players into ever more hectic fire fights where the screen was often covered in a blizzard of enemy bullets. Arcade game makers Toaplan had paved the way for the bullet hell shooters with its fierce 1993 game
Batsugun
, but the genre really took shape when a group of former Toaplan staff founded Cave.
Cave took the challenge of
Batsugun
to new heights with its debut release, 1995’s
DonPachi
, which pitted players against a daunting storm of enemy fire that could only be survived if players memorised the pre-set patterns of the bullets so they could steer through the maze of enemy fire. For Japanese shoot ’em up aficionados in need of ever tougher games the ability to beat bullet hell games became a source of pride. The sub-genre became so popular in Japan that VHS tapes demonstrating how to complete these games became big sellers.