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 (69 page)
Authors: Steven Kent
The crowning blow came one year late when Mr. Yamauchi called and said, “There is this great Japanese pitcher, Nomo. I want the Mariners to get this guy, and I’ve made arrangements so that the agent will come first to the Mariners with Nomo. I’m not worried about the budget, anything like that. I want the Mariners to sign this guy.”
—Howard Lincoln
Arakawa and Lincoln agreed to have Hideo Nomo try out for the team. He flew out to Seattle, but during a physical, the Mariners’ team doctor said he had a “bad arm.” Lincoln called Yamauchi and told him that they had decided
to turn Nomo down. A short time later, the Los Angeles Dodgers signed him, and he finished the season as Rookie of the Year.
He was a starter in the All-Star game. Both the Mariners and the Dodgers made the playoffs and this is the real tough one. During the playoffs, you’ve got this team with a Japanese owner. They did not broadcast the Mariners’ games in Japan. The Los Angeles Dodgers’ games were being broadcast all over Japan. So Mr. Yamauchi was a little bit torqued.
—Howard Lincoln
*
By comparison, Nintendo sold in excess of 30 million copies of the original
Super Mario Bros.
and Game Boy
Tetris
cartridges, both of which were packed with hardware systems.
*
While Tom Kalinske often takes credit for creating advertising campaigns that challenged Nintendo “head on,” it should be noted that the “Sega does what Nintend-don’t” campaign began under Michael Katz. It should also be noted that Nintendo later responded to this campaign with “Nintendo is what Genes-isn’t.”
*
The “T” in
Sonic The Hedgehog
is capitalized. Sega marketing wizard Al Nilsen had the “The” registered as Sonic’s middle name.
*
Sonic’s foot tapping was not original. It first appeared in
Major Havoc
, an Atari vector-graphics coin-op game created by Owen Rubin.
*
That date was eventually changed to September 9, which would later become the launch date of Sony’s PlayStation and Sega’s Dreamcast as well.
The WarI was tricked into this job!
—Yoshiki Okamoto, producer of research and development, Capcom
Sega of America had this whole Game Institute. Our whole strategy was to hold on and wait for the next game from [Shigeru] Miyamoto.
—Howard Phillips, former “man who plays games for a living” spokesman, Nintendo of America
In 1990, Sega Enterprises CEO Hayao Nakayama called Greg Fischbach, CEO of Acclaim Entertainment, about licensing some of his company’s games for use on Genesis. Fully aware that making such an agreement would infringe upon the exclusivity clause in Acclaim’s licensing agreement with Nintendo, Fischbach agreed. Acclaim had already risen to the top tier of Nintendo’s third-party partners and published several bestselling games. Fischbach welcomed the opportunity to market his products to a new audience and felt it was time to revisit the terms of the licensing agreement. After careful consideration, Fischbach and cochairman Jim Scoroposki attempted to contact Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa to discuss their decision. When they were informed that the Nintendo executives were in Germany on business, Fischbach and Scoroposki called him and asked for a meeting. Arakawa suggested that they get together for dinner on Sunday evening, so Fischbach made travel arrangements and had his German office make arrangements at a restaurant about 25 minutes outside of Frankfurt.
Fischbach and Scoroposki arrived in Frankfurt early Sunday afternoon. They went to Arakawa’s hotel, where they met him, his wife, and Howard Lincoln. The five of them could not fit into one cab, so Fischbach and Scoroposki went in one cab while the Arakawas and Lincoln followed in a second.
Have you been to Germany? Narrow two-lane roads and fast … Everybody drives fast in Germany. And they use Mercedes 300 series sedans as taxicabs—little bright ones, kind of cream color.
We were going to make a left-hand turn into the road that leads to the restaurant, and for whatever the reason, our taxi driver [didn’t] see an oncoming car. We got broadsided and ended up in a ditch on the side of the road. Howard, Mr. Arakawa, and his wife watched this happen, and it looked like we were dead. It wasn’t a good precursor to the dinner or to the conversation.
Nothing really happened, we got scratched up a little bit. The car was totaled, but we walked away. We got into their car and still went to dinner because we were men on a mission. We had a really enjoyable meal. Mr. Arakawa was really quite nice about it and understood what we were doing and why we were doing it.
—Greg Fischbach
When asked about that meeting, Howard Lincoln later remembered it a little differently. Their stories were fairly similar up until the accident; but after the accident, Lincoln remembered a few additional details.
We grabbed Jimmy and we grabbed Greg and put them in our cab and took them to this restaurant. Jimmy had glass in his head and these guys were in a state of absolute shock, and the only thing they wanted to do was to have a couple of Scotches. They forgot what it was that they had come to tell us: that they were going to do third-party publishing on Sega. They completely forgot what they had come for.
Both Arakawa and I knew what they were getting ready to tell us, but we didn’t say anything. The entire night we just sat there and we just got these smiles on our faces, waiting for them, and then we let them go that night. The next day they called and said, “Oh, we remember now why we had come to see you.”
—Howard Lincoln, former Executive Vice President, Nintendo of America
Acclaim was not the only company to break ranks. Within the next few years, Konami, Tecmo, Taito, and nearly every other one of Nintendo’s third-party partners would begin publishing games on Genesis. The two most notable holdouts were Capcom, which licensed a few games to Sega for Genesis rather than publishing them, and Square Soft, which maintained exclusivity with Nintendo throughout the 8- and 16-bit eras.
In 1992, one of Nintendo’s most influential development partners—Rare Ltd., the British-based development company founded by Joel Hochberg and the Stamper brothers—completely vanished from the game publishing world. Rare had become a fixture in the Nintendo camp, creating more than fifty NES games that were published by such companies as Acclaim
(Iron Sword)
, Milton Bradley
(Marble Madness)
, and Nintendo itself
(Slalom
and
R.C. ProAm).
With the outset of the Super NES, Rare created two games for Tradewest—
Battletoads in Battlemaniacs
and
Battletoads & Double Dragon: The Ultimate Team.
Then, after having kept up a pace of designing ten games per year, Rare went silent.
We [Joel Hochberg, Tim Stamper, and Chris Stamper] went to a developers’ conference at Nintendo of America, and we didn’t like what we saw. Too many companies were making 8-bit games for a 16-bit machine.
We had just visited Nintendo, and we went to the Bellevue Red Lion Hotel, and we were talking about company posture and direction. We were busy and we had a lot of opportunity, but there was a situation taking place that I was not comfortable with and I’m sure that they were uncomfortable, and I said, “Let’s do something original. Let’s pay close attention to what our company’s requirements happen to be for moving forward.” Those requirements were not taking somebody else’s products and porting them over from the NES to the Super NES.
—Joel Hochberg, cofounder, Rare Ltd.
As creative people, we didn’t want to be a sort-of conversion house for major third-party developers.
—Chris Stamper, cofounder, Rare Ltd.
The last few years had been particularly lucrative ones for Rare, and the company had enough money to experiment. As an artist, Tim Stamper was not satisfied with the idea of making games that looked like everybody else’s. Chris, his brother, always the technical wizard, suggested that they could develop a new technology that would change the look of games. Chris Stamper was the engineer who discovered the NES’s ability to run split-screen games. If he believed that he could create some new graphics technology for Super NES, there was every reason to believe him. The decision was made, and Rare Ltd. withdrew from actively designing games.
In 1982, Konami hired Yoshiki Okamoto, a young college student studying graphic arts in Osaka, to create posters and character art. The standard Japanese practice was to hire students in March or April, shortly after graduation; but Okamoto was given a part-time job in December with the understanding that he would work full time upon graduating that spring.
Looking back on his time at Konami, Okamoto, who did not particularly enjoy video games before joining Konami, would later decide that his employers never intended to hire a graphic artist and that he was tricked into becoming a game designer. A few months after he started with the company, Okamoto’s boss asked him to try his hand at designing a game. It was supposed to be a driving game in which players earned a license by driving through streets filled with hazards and bad drivers. Okamoto did not like the idea. Since joining Konami, he had become fascinated with a Namco game called
Bosconian
, in which players controlled a spaceship as it flew through minefields, battled enemies, and attacked space stations.
Okamoto, a freewheeling individualist with a penchant for speaking his mind and a notoriously short attention span when bored, decided that creating a space game would be more fun than creating a game about earning a driver’s license. Without telling his boss, Okamoto began work on a game that built upon
Bosconian
rather than the one his boss had asked him to do. This was a dangerous decision. Okamoto’s boss knew him well enough to be suspicious, and the design team had to simultaneously create code for a driving game that they could show whenever executives came to check in on them, at the same time that they made the space combat game.
Then my boss asked if the driving simulation game was finished and came to check up on me. What I showed him was a totally different game concept, and he really got angry. The driving game was supposed to be a real simulation, but when he came, I showed him
Time Pilot.I said, “Why don’t we do a location test?” He did the location test and [the game] got really good reviews, so he forgave me. At that point my boss said, “I told you so.”
—Yoshiki Okamoto
Okamoto designed only two games during his time at Konami, but both games were considered classics. The first,
Time Pilot
, was a space combat game in which players flew a futuristic fighter craft through squadrons from different time periods. It began with waves of World War I-era bi-planes, then went to World War II, and eventually progressed to a futuristic battle against UFOs.
Gyruss
, Okamoto’s second game, was a
Tempest
-like space combat game in which players control a fighter that circles around the outside of the screen, shooting at enemies as they emerge from the middle. Amazingly, having just created two of Konami’s most successful games of the time, Okamoto was fired.
I asked for a raise and they said they would give me a really small raise. But I wanted a little more, so I threatened to quit. So the next day, when I came to work, they fired me.
So I went to Capcom because it was the only company that would take me. At that time, Capcom was a really small company. I was the second person they hired for R & D.
—Yoshiki Okamoto
In 1984, Capcom, which was located in Osaka, was a fledgling company with only two game designers—Yoshiki Okamoto and Tokuro Fujiwara. Both men had seemingly endless talent and energy. A competition formed between them and that competition created enough synergy to make Capcom a leading force in video games.
Okamoto created a couple of little known games after arriving at Capcom, then designed
1942
, a top-scrolling flight game in which players controlled an American fighter flying a World War II mission over the Pacific theater. He then followed up with a similar game called
1943.