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 (63 page)

The Year of Hardware

By 1989, Nintendo had become a regular fixture in the news. The media reported on the company’s phenomenal record sales and press events and sometimes covered curious anecdotes associated with the company. The “Hands-Free” Controller, developed by Nintendo engineers to enable quadriplegics to play games, earned the company print and broadcast attention. To use this special controller, players rested their chins on a lever that worked like a steering device. A tube running from the controller to their mouths replaced the “A” and “B” buttons. “A” button functions were accessed by blowing into the straw, and “B” button functions were accessed by sipping.

The press also covered humorous human-interest stories such as an incident involving a burglar who noticed a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and couldn’t resist trying it. Somebody noticed the criminal and reported him to the police. On arrival, the police found the burglar in front of the television, playing a game.
*
In another story, a bomb squad blew up an NES on the runway of Los Angeles International Airport. Airport security officers X-rayed the NES inside a suitcase and, unable to identify it, called the bomb squad. Fearing the unfamiliar object to be a bomb, the police detonated it.

Nintendo guarded against unlicensed companies making unauthorized NES, Game Boy, and Super NES cartridges, but an Arizona-based company, Wisdom Tree, slipped through its net unchallenged.

Wisdom Tree was the offshoot of Color Dreams, a company founded by U.S. engineers who reverse engineered the NES and found a way around the lock-out chip. Using this technology, Color Dreams published games such as
King Neptune’s Adventure, Pesterminator
, and
Metal Fighter.
One of the company’s titles,
Menace Beach
, featured material considered highly risqué by NES standards. The goal of the game was to help a hero rescue his kidnapped girlfriend. Pictures of the chained-up woman were flashed throughout the game, and she had on less clothing in every shot. In the beginning, she wore a blouse and skirt; by the end of the game she was in a bikini.
*

In 1989, Color Dreams spun off Wisdom Tree, a company that made NES games with Christian themes. For the most part, Wisdom Tree games were fairly indistinguishable from other video games and had the same basic side-scrolling, object-finding, enemy-shooting play. Some of the games had biblical trivia quizzes between rounds, and the themes of the games were adapted to convey biblical ideas. Wisdom Tree’s first game,
Bible Adventures
, was released in December 1990. After a slow start, the company sold approximately 350,000 copies.

Wisdom Tree eventually published seven NES games, along with four games for Game Boy,
**
three for Sega Genesis, and one for the Super NES. The company’s library included several original games published by outside contractors and a couple of cosmetically altered Color Dreams games.
Sunday Funday
, for instance, was a thinly disguised version of
Menace Beach.
While the owners of Wisdom Tree were openly Christian, their game designers did not necessarily share their beliefs. People who later worked with the man who programmed
Bible Adventures
say that after working day and night on the project, he went to Las Vegas and blew his earnings in less than a week.

Wisdom Tree presented Nintendo with a prickly situation. The general public did not seem to pay close attention to the court battle with Atari Games, and industry analysts were impressed with Nintendo’s legal acumen; but going after a tiny company that published innocuous religious games was another story. In 1994, Wisdom Tree tested Nintendo’s ability to turn the other cheek by licensing the mazes and code to a game called
Castle Wolfenstein 3D
and converting them into an unlicensed Super NES game called
Super 3D Noah’s Ark.
This was this one of the few unlicensed games to appear on the Super NES. In
Castle Wolfenstein 3D
, players ran through dungeons killing Nazi soldiers and guard dogs as they hunted for Hitler. In
Super 3D Noah’s Ark
, which featured the exact same mazes, players shot food at little goats that had escaped from their pens.
*

Ignoring Wisdom Tree was the only logical course of action.
Super 3D Noah’s Ark
was released toward the end of the 16-bit generation, as growing numbers of people began using computers to play games. Though Wisdom Tree was one of the last companies to manufacture and sell NES and Super NES games, the company’s focus eventually turned to publishing games for PCs.

Sega’s alliance with Tonka did not prove completely satisfactory for either company. Despite its strong toy distribution network and a very generous advertising campaign, the Minnesota toy truck company sold considerably less than one million Master System game consoles in two years. When the con
tract expired, Sega quietly took back the system and inherited large inventories of unsold game consoles and cartridges. Clearing out Master System inventory, however, was not a major priority at the time. Sega had spent the last two years developing a powerful new game console that had twice the processing power of the NES/Famicom, and the product was finally ready for release in Japan.

Sega’s new system, called the Mega-Drive, featured an impressive array of hardware. It was built around the 16-bit Motorola 68000 processing chip, the same chip that Apple used to power the Macintosh computer. This chip could process twice as much data per cycle as the 8-bit MOS Technologies 6502 chip Nintendo used in the Famicom. The Mega-Drive had a 512-color palette and could display as many as 64 colors on screen at any one time, compared to the NES’s 52-color palette. The Mega-Drive even had a separate 8-bit processor for sound. All of that power translated into games with larger and more detailed characters, more complex graphics, faster action, and a game console that could compete with coin-operated game machines in the arcades.

With its headquarters in Tokyo, Sega Enterprises had the infrastructure needed to market the Mega-Drive in Japan. Bringing the system to the United States was another story. Hayao Nakayama, CEO of Sega Enterprises, and David Rosen, the chairman, had already experienced the problems of launching a game console through a small start-up operation. Nintendo, a company that had only recently entered the home video game market in the United States, had completely smothered the Master System out of the market by 1988. Attaching itself to Tonka, a strong company that knew little about the game business, also failed. In an interesting twist, Rosen decided to enlist the same company that Nintendo had tried to enlist before launching the NES—Atari Corporation.

Video game companies have a certain incestuous relationship, and it is not uncommon for top employees to take jobs with their competitors. Bruce Lowry, for instance, resigned his job as Nintendo vice president of sales to become the president of Sega of America. When he left Sega, he moved to Europe to help Ron Judy run Nintendo of Europe. But of the many job shifters in the industry, few have had as illustrious a career as Michael Katz.

In the late 1970s, Katz, as marketing director at Mattel, oversaw the creation of the first handheld video games. From there, he moved to Connecticut to become vice president of marketing at Coleco. After five years at Coleco, he received an intriguing telephone call.

Katz became the president of Epyx in February 1983 and changed the company’s entire focus. The company had severe financial problems and only had enough cash to maintain operations for approximately six months. Under Katz’s direction, the company created three new product lines and hired Chiat Day, the same advertising agency that handled Apple Computer. Another of Epyx’s new directions was the acquisition of outside software developer StarPath,
which was led by Bob Brown, one of the engineers involved in the creation of the Atari 2600. StarPath had abandoned a project based on the Olympic games. With the real Olympics only a year away, Katz had the company finish the project, which was released for the Commodore 64.
Summer Games
was released in 1984 and was followed up in 1985 with a sequel,
Winter Games.
Over the following years, these thematic “Games” titles became Epyx’s signature series and included a tremendously popular product called
California Games.

Katz’s biggest interest, however, was in marketing hardware, not software. When two inventors named RJ Mical and Dave Needle approached Epyx in 1986 with a design for a color handheld video game system, Katz urged the board to adopt the project (which later became the Atari Lynx). Epyx eventually did work with Mical and Needle, but by that time Jack and Sam Tramiel had already lured Katz to accept a position at Atari Corporation.