The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (45 page)

Yamauchi demanded that Coleco refrain from showing or selling
Donkey Kong
on the Adam Computer, and Greenberg backed off, though he had legal grounds to challenge that demand. Atari had purchased only the floppy disk license; the Adam version of
Donkey Kong
was cartridge-based.

Even with Coleco out of the way, the deal between Atari and Nintendo never took place. Kassar was fired the following month, and no deal was ever signed.

Nintendo was a company ruled by strong personalities. Back at Nintendo Co. Ltd. (NCL), the Japanese parent, Hiroshi Yamauchi controlled his company with an imperial hand, seldom complimenting workers’ successes and often criticizing them harshly for mistakes. One person he openly criticized was Minoru Arakawa, who was both his son-in-law and the president of Nintendo of America.

When Nintendo could not break into America’s burgeoning arcade business, Yamauchi blamed the failures on his son-in-law. Though he never accused Arakawa of ruining the deal with Atari, he did not hesitate to voice his opinion that a more competent person would have no trouble marketing the Famicom in the United States.

Minoru Arakawa was quiet-natured, sometimes jovial, and very determined. He surrounded himself with friends in whom he had complete confidence. During his tenure as president of Nintendo of America, Arakawa sometimes sided with his employees even when it put him in direct opposition with Yamauchi himself.

The Famicom continued to sell extremely well in Japan through 1984. Nintendo managed to sell more than three million game consoles in the eighteen months since its release. As 1985 rolled around, Yamauchi decided to make another attempt at breaking into the American market. There would be no
more discussions of partners. However, he now believed that the best course would be to market the system through his American offices.

In the 1980s, the ideal place to unveil new consumer electronics products was at the Consumer Electronics Show. CES was held twice a year—January, in Las Vegas, and June, in Chicago. Both shows were held in enormous convention centers, with sprawling show floors large enough to hold row after row of spacious one- and two-story booths.

CES served the entire electronics industry, not just the video games branch of it.
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During the CES’s peak years, video and computer game companies reserved nearly half the floor space for the show; the other half sported televisions, stereos, video cassette recorders, refrigerators, car alarms, and the like.

CES had the atmosphere of a carnival. Large companies such as Sony, Panasonic, and RCA generally set up huge, flashy booths with walls of televisions displaying their latest achievements. Stereo and record companies blared music in their booths, and auto alarm companies brought in cars to broadcast their goods. Many companies hired attractive models in sexy outfits to work their booths. Some even brought in actors or actresses.
**
One section of the floor was sectioned off for adult film and software makers. It was not unusual for exhibitors in this section to bring in actors and actresses from pornographic movies to work in their booths.

Companies often spent as much as $5 million on a single show. They could spend up to $1 million alone on floor space and another $500,000 to host a spectacular party one night of the show. CES gave electronics companies an opportunity to impress retailers and journalists, and no expense was spared in that attempt.

Arakawa decided to officially unveil the Famicom at the January 1985 show in Las Vegas. Instead of calling the system the Famicom, a name that both Arakawa and Lincoln agreed might not appeal to American consumers, they decided on Advanced Video System (AVS).

At the time, Arakawa had serious doubts about Nintendo’s ability to restart the video game market. He did not know if retailers would bother looking at a new system, and he had no idea what kind of competition he might face at the show.

Nintendo rented a small booth in a corner of the Las Vegas Convention Center and set up a simple display that included a basic Famicom (with an AVS label), a computer keyboard, a music keyboard, and twenty-five games.

Arakawa manned the booth himself. One person who saw him there described him as a small Japanese man who looked completely lost. Although a few retailers stopped by the booth and several people commented on the quality of the games, no one placed orders.

After returning to Seattle, Arakawa and Lincoln decided to reposition the Famicom. The people who played Nintendo’s games liked them, but buyers for big department stores and toy stores were not interested in reentering the video game business. If the Famicom was going to break into the U. S. retail circuit, it would have to be marketed as something other than a video game system.

The solution came in the form of a light pistol and a little robot.

Nintendo’s arcade division had two successful arcade shooting games called
Hogan’s Alley
and
Duck Hunt.
(
Hogan’s Alley
was popular enough to have been used in Steven Spielberg’s film
Back to the Future.
The hero of the movie, played by Michael J. Fox, was supposed to be completely addicted to the game.) By adding a light gun, which was called “the Zapper,” to the Famicom, Nintendo
turned the system into a virtual shooting arcade—allowing Lincoln and Arakawa to position it as a gun game instead of a video game.

The robot, called Robot Operating Buddy (ROB), was developed by Gumpei Yokoi and the engineers of Nintendo’s Research and Development Team number 1, the same team that developed the Game & Watch handheld games and the arcade hardware for
Donkey Kong.
ROB was a small plastic robot that worked in conjunction with two Famicom games—
Gyromite
and
Stack-Up.
Technologically speaking, ROB was a pretty simple toy that offered very little play value. It was mostly a decoy designed to prove that the Famicom was not just a video game.

As they prepared for Summer CES in June, Lincoln and Arakawa came up with a new name for the Famicom. Instead of calling it the Advanced Video System, they changed the name to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

As he had done in January, Arakawa chose to run a small, quiet booth at the 1985 show. Although this booth, about 600 square feet, was larger than the one he had rented in Las Vegas, it was tiny compared to most booths on the floor. Arakawa purposely positioned ROB as his center attraction.

Though the NES was far from the hit of the show, several buyers expressed interest in it. As Lincoln and Arakawa had predicted, retail buyers were more receptive to gun and robot games than they were to video games. They inspected the NES carefully, and many commented that they liked the games. At the end of the show, however, there were again no orders.

Though he was disappointed by the lukewarm response, Arakawa did not give up. In an attempt to test whether the retailers’ hesitance reflected consumer opinion, he hired a marketing firm to test the NES on focus groups. The response was disappointing.

Arakawa observed sessions as they took place. From behind a one-way mirror, he watched a random sampling of young boys play the NES and heard them say how much they hated it. Typical was the comment of an eight-year-old who said, “This is shit!”
³

Arakawa faced several low points during his career with Nintendo of America. He faced hardship when he tried to establish Nintendo’s arcade games. He faced another low point when Ron Judy and Al Stone, the men distributing Nintendo arcade games, wanted to leave him. He’d also braved the threats of Sidney Sheinberg, president of Universal Studios, but his latest challenge was the toughest. This was the first time Arakawa ever actually talked about backing away.

After the focus tests, Arakawa called his father-in-law and suggested giving up. He began to believe that the American video game market had shut down for good.

By 1983, Joel Hochberg had been in the arcade and coin-operated game business for twenty-seven years. He had started as a repairman in 1956 and worked his way into the executive team of Allied Leisure in the 1970s.

While at Allied, Hochberg traveled to Europe and Japan to attend amusement industry trade shows and seek out international partners. One relationship he created was a partnership with Zilec, a small British company that made arcade conversions.

During one of his frequent trips to England, Hochberg attended a trade show and met Chris and Tim Stamper. Chris Stamper was a 19-year-old game designer for Zilec. Tim, his 16-year-old brother, was still in school.

The Stampers were a unique team. Chris was an electronics genius who, as a boy, had built an oscilloscope. Chris often took Tim to work with him. Both brothers—Tim in particular—had an air of confidence. They felt that they knew what made some games good and others bad.

Hochberg met the Stampers during the end of the
Space Invaders
era. A lot of changes were taking place within the industry. Centuri had bought Allied Leisure, and Hochberg decided to start his own business. Although the game business had fallen off in the United States, the worldwide market was still fairly strong. The Stampers wanted to leave Zilec and start their own company.

During one of Hochberg’s visits, Chris Stamper revealed that he wanted to leave Zilec. He wanted to start a company with Tim, now nineteen, for more creative freedom and larger rewards. Hochberg’s first reaction was to try and convince him to stay at Zilec, but Chris was determined. When that failed, Hochberg decided to set up a partnership with the Stampers.

Chris and Tim Stamper set up a game company called Ashby Computer Graphics (ACG) and began publishing games for the Sinclair Spectrum, a tiny computer that sold very well in Europe but never caught on in the United States.

One of Tim Stamper’s first games,
JetPac
, was a major success by Sinclair standards. Nearly one million people owned Sinclair Spectrum computers in 1983, and ACG sold more than 300,000 copies of
JetPac.