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 (77 page)

Although Atari never solved the dearth of games issue, two British game designers appeared on the scene to give the system a couple of outstanding titles. The first was by Jeff Minter, a former Vic 20 designer, who was known throughout the industry as “The Yak.”
Tempest 2000
, Minter’s first game, was a brilliant recreation of Dave Theurer’s coin-op classic, updated with shaded polygonal characters and a techno-rock soundtrack. With its great sound and fast action,
Tempest 2000
proved that Jaguar could be a great game machine, given the right software.
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Alien vs. Predator
, Jaguar’s second big game, came from a British developer named Andrew Whitaker.
Alien vs. Predator
was a first-person shooting game of the
Doom
variety that could be played from the perspective of the space parasites from the movie
Alien
, the intergalactic hunter from the movie
Predator
, or a space marine. Each character had its own goals, strengths, and weaknesses. It took Whitaker seventeen months to create
Alien vs. Predator.
The hardware was not completed when he began work on the project, and Atari engineers changed their design four times during the time that he worked on the game.

For every
Alien vs. Predator
or
Tempest 2000
that appeared on Jaguar, there were many more games such as
Kasumi Ninja:
a weak attempt at emulating
Mortal Kombat
, with characters such as a Scottish brawler who shot fireballs at opponents from beneath his kilt. Despite outselling the $699 3DO in 1993, Jaguar fell behind 3DO in 1994. In an effort to salvage his sales, Tramiel even tried running television infomercials.

The 1994 Summer Consumer Electronics Show (CES), held in Chicago, was the scene of grand battles, with Atari and 3DO claiming technical superiority while Nintendo and Sega clashed on other fronts.

Nintendo entered the show on an unusual up-note. Having spent the last few years looking helplessly beaten by Sega in image marketing, Nintendo scored a hit with a game called
Super Metroid.
Designed by Gumpei Yokoi’s Research and Development Team Number 1, it was built off an earlier game that they had created for the NES.
Super Metroid
was not enough to turn the tables on Sega, but it at least served notice that Nintendo was not to be ignored.

In 1994, Nintendo used CES to trickle out announcements about Ultra 64, the new 64-bit game console it was developing with Silicon Graphics. Company executives hired a bus and shuttled small groups of reporters to a hotel suite, where they were to be shown private screenings of Ultra 64 hardware. The groups were led into a small showroom with four televisions peering out of ceiling-high curtains. The reporters never actually saw the console, which they were told was nothing more than a prototype. Instead, they were shown a fighting game called
Killer Instinct
that they were told ran on Ultra 64 hardware. Nintendo did not announce a precise release date for Ultra 64 in those private screenings but indicated that the system would come out in the fall of 1995 for $250. That was the most Nintendo would release.

More salient to Nintendo’s plans for 1994 was a curious little game adapter called Super Game Boy, which enabled consumers to run Game Boy cartridges on Super NES with some muted colors. At the time, Super Game Boy seemed like a ridiculous idea. Game Boy sales had slowed, and the Super Game Boy sold for $60, more than Game Boy itself.

Nintendo’s other hope was a game that was designed using a new technology—
Donkey Kong Country.

Though Rare, Ltd., had dropped out of active game development, the company did not remain silent for long. Chris Stamper began work on technology that would allow him to create games with 24-bit graphics on a Silicon Graphics workstation, then convert them into the kinds of two-dimensional images that would run smoothly on the 16-bit Super NES. Once operational, Stamper’s device would give Rare an edge over every other game company. While competitors would still be creating cartoon sprites, Rare would be able to pre-render art on high-end workstations. As Chris Stamper completed the device, his brother Tim began designing a boxing game that would serve as a demonstration of the new technology. Then they invited Nintendo of Japan out to their headquarters in the tiny English town of Twycross to see what they had created.

One of the strengths of Chris Stamper’s design was that it showed objects on the Silicon Graphics workstation with the same amount of detail that they would have when displayed on the Super NES. Hence, when the Stampers showed
Takeda their boxing game on a Super NES the next day, it looked almost identical to the game they had shown him on the workstation the day before.

Impressed with what he had seen, Takeda returned to Japan and reported the invention to Nintendo chairman Hiroshi Yamauchi. When Yamauchi responded by asking the Stampers what kind of game they wanted to make, Tim said that he wanted to make a game with the character Donkey Kong. With Yamauchi’s and Donkey Kong creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s blessing, Stamper and his design team began work on the game.

Knowing that they were working on an all-important holiday release, the people at Rare went to great lengths to ensure the quality of their game. Their in-house musician created several themes to accompany the game. The art was inspired by concept drawings that Miyamoto sent over, but Tim Stamper’s team had license to take the concepts in their own direction. Stamper mapped out the levels for the game by drawing sequences of sketches on Post-it notes, then arranging them in a straight line.

The process for creating the objects and characters in
Donkey Kong Country
involved building 3D images using flat polygons. Once the shapes were complete, the artists would assign textures and colors to various polygons to add skins for their wire-frame creations. The artists used objects from Rare’s converted farmhouse-headquarters to create images. When they needed textures for trees, they plucked leaves from a tree. When they needed a texture that resembled rusted metal for a wheelbarrow, they scanned an old shovel.

The end result was a side-scrolling game with characters that moved smoothly but looked as real and three-dimensional as the dynamations in a Ray Harryhausen movie. Rare had created new characters for the game, and the storyline was filled with British puns and humor.

When editors and buyers saw their first demonstrations of
Donkey Kong Country
at CES, they immediately knew what the big game of 1994 was going to be.

Sega’s big CES product was 32X. Originally named “Mars,” 32X was billed as the poor man’s entry into “next generation” games. It was a mushroom-shaped peripheral that snapped into the cartridge slot of the Genesis console, giving it 32-bit processing power that Sega said would enable the system to work 40 times faster. In the heart of 32X sat two Hitachi 32-bit RISC chips, a 3D graphics processor capable of rendering 50,000 polygons per second, and some minor enhancements designed to work in tandem with Genesis audio and visual technology. Sega had already announced plans to release a superior 32-bit CD-based system called Saturn in Japan; but retailing at $159, 32X was supposed to be a much less expensive alternative for people who already owned a Genesis. The one question Sega was not answering, however, was whether a Genesis with Sega CD and 32X would be able to read Saturn software. Always happy to report his competitors’ flaws, 3DO-founder Trip Hawkins charged that it would not.

Sega executives argued with Hawkins’s rhetoric, furiously telling people that he did not know what he was talking about. Even as they did this,
however, they refused to state once and for all whether the 32X and Saturn were compatible.

Hawkins, of course, had been correct. The 32X was not powerful enough to run Saturn software. It was, however, a huge improvement over the original design that was created by Sega of Japan. The project, which eventually turned into 32X, began as an entirely new console that was developed in Japan. When the unit was demonstrated to American executives, however, the reaction was less than favorable.

Joe Miller, head of Sega of America’s research and development, fought against the idea of releasing an entire new game console that was little more than a Genesis with a larger color palette. At his suggestion, 32X was changed into a peripheral and made more powerful with a new set of processing chips. At Miller’s suggestion, Sega of Japan made 32X a more significant product. What the company would not do is make it into a Saturn.

Once the design specifications were completed, Sega worked hard to evangelize the new platform in the third-party community, but the system was a tough sell. The top developers knew about Saturn and Ultra 64. They also knew about a new console that Sony planned to release in 1995. Anybody who had read the design specifications of any of the new consoles knew that 32X could never hope to compete, and no one felt any enthusiasm about its chances.

Sega got the same response from journalists. More seasoned journalists, such as
Electronic Games
editors Arnie Katz, Joyce Worley, and Bill Kunkle, questioned the logic of releasing inexpensive and full-priced game consoles that basically played the same games.

In an effort to win journalists over, Sega held a huge party at a San Francisco dance club. The event turned out to be a fiasco. Sega flew journalists in from all around the country and put them up in the Sofitel, a hotel located beside Sega’s Redwood City headquarters.
*
That evening Sega hired buses to drive the journalists to the dance club. The party began with Tom Kalinske giving a speech, then a local rapper performed a lengthy piece about the greatness of 32X. The music was too loud and the 32X games that Sega had placed around the dance club were so unimpressive that no one wanted to play them. Most attendees crowded into the lobby of the dance club to escape the loud
music. Some journalists tried to leave, only to discover that the buses had departed and would not return until the party was over.