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 (79 page)
Authors: Steven Kent
When we decided to create a trade show, everyone, including Nintendo, supported a dedicated trade event for the industry. Two organizations were presenting and seeking our support at the time and we had to decide which one to endorse. EIA (Electronic Industry Association) had put together a version of its CES Spring show that was very broadly defined as interactive television entertainment. At the same time, IDG had developed the concept for the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Both organizations were pitching for our support, and, ultimately, we voted to endorse E3, and Nintendo made a decision to sign up with the CES Philadelphia show.
—Douglas Lowenstein
Nintendo became isolated. As more companies queued up in support of E3, Nintendo eventually had to fall in line.
At the end of the day, after some period of time … Nintendo recognized that the industry had essentially voted with its feet, with an overwhelming
number of companies signing up with the E3 event. They [Nintendo] then eventually joined the rest of the industry in signing up.—Douglas Lowenstein
The Electronic Entertainment Expo was about to become the next great battlefield.
The other thing that really helped us, and this is important, is that when you put those four letters on a product, S-O-N-Y, it gives you tremendous credibility. It gives the customers great permission to buy, particularly when they’ve been burned by the 3DOs and the Jaguars of the world.
—Jim Whims, former executive vice president, Sony Computer Entertainment of America
Ken Kutaragi, the engineer who created PlayStation, faced many obstacles while completing the game console that would eventually be known as the Sony PlayStation. His final unit bore almost no resemblance to the Play Station CD-ROM device that he was creating for the Super NES. He designed the final version around the 32-bit R3000A RISC chip, a processor that was supposed to be capable of rendering up to 500,000 texture-mapped polygons per second. PlayStation’s performance, however, rendered approximately 350,000 polygons per second. While Saturn and PlayStation supposedly had fairly similar capabilities on the surface, there were several very important differences in both design and marketing.
PlayStation had a single processing chip with a 3D geometry engine in its CPU. This processor, along with the excellent development tools Sony made available, made PlayStation extremely easy to program. That ease of programming, along with Sony’s liberal $10 per game licensing fee and its aggressive marketing plans, made PlayStation an attractive prospect for game designers. Nearly 100 game companies had signed licensing agreements with Sony by the time PlayStation launched in the United States, and more than 300 individual game projects were planned or underway.
Before Sony could become a serious contender in the game market, it would have to overcome its past. Along with being humiliated by Nintendo over the Super NES CD-ROM drive, Sony also had a dismal history as a entertainment software publisher. Sony Interactive, a small and unsuccessful software arm of the giant electronics company, had earned critical success with a game called
Mickey Mania
for Super NES, Genesis, and Sega CD, but most of its games were panned by the press and ignored by consumers. Sony published a series of ESPN Sports simulations that were generally acknowledged to be among the worst sports games on the market.
In what seemed like a poorly aimed attempt to buy its way into respectability, Sony bought Psygnosis, a Liverpool-based software company, for $48 million. At the time of the purchase, it seemed a strange move. Psygnosis’s only hit, a game called
Lemmings
, had been created by outside developers; yet Sony paid top dollar for the company.
We got into this business for one and only one reason, and that was to become leaders in the next generation marketplace. And eight months ago we were the new kids on the block, with a lot of hopes and dreams and aspirations and an absolutely 0 percent market share.
—Jim Whims
When it came to marketing PlayStation in the United States, Sony left little to chance. Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA), the American organization charged with the task, was built around a group of experienced game-industry veterans.
Steve Race, the president of SCEA, had been the vice president of Atari’s European division during the heyday of the 2600. After the crash of 1982, Race and several friends founded Worlds of Wonder—the company that created Teddy Ruxpin and helped market the Nintendo Entertainment System. In 1990, as Tom Kalinske became the new CEO at Sega of America, he brought Race in as a marketing consultant.
Race’s senior vice president of marketing was Jim Whims, who, like Race, was an ex–Worlds of Wonder executive who had a long history with video games that included stints with iMagic and Data East. Tall, comfortable around strangers, and athletically built, Whims had the look of a leader.
For his head of third-party relations, Race hired Bernard “Bernie” Stolar, whose roots in the industry reached all the way back to Marty Bromley and David Rosen. In earlier days, Stolar headed a small arcade company called Game Plan that made the 1981 game
Shark Attack.
Knowing that Sid Sheinberg, head of Universal Studios, might approach him about a possible infringement on the movie
Jaws
, Stolar met with and outsmarted the intimidating studio chief. Thinking he was giving Stolar a break, Sheinberg said that he would not demand a royalty on the first 1,000 machines. Stolar responded by cutting his manufacturing run after building the first 990.
As the person responsible for working with third-party companies, Stolar played a major role in luring outside developers to make games for PlayStation. Some of his decisions proved absolutely brilliant. Stolar actively courted Williams Manufacturing and arranged a six-month exclusive deal for the highly anticipated game
Mortal Kombat 3
, a move that virtually guaranteed PlayStation sales among members of the game’s rather large cult following. On the negative side, Stolar felt that role-playing games, while very important in the Japanese market, were unnecessary in the United States.
Race hired an old friend named Peter Johnson away from Sega to handle marketing and communications. Though Sony was new as a company, its administrative team was composed largely of seasoned game executives.
We had a lot of people with very, very good industry experience, and qualified guys who I could trust and women who I could trust who had either been in the industry or I had worked with before in some capacity. We got enormously lucky with the talent pool that we had, and we got dealt a great product, and then the rest we just put together.
—Steve Race
In October 1994, tragedy struck Sony. Peter Johnson, the man Race had hired away from Sega to run marketing communications, was killed in a plane crash while traveling to the East Coast on business.
I was a basket case for a long time. Peter and I had worked at three different companies together and he was a close personal friend. The night before the
crash, I had gone to a Rolling Stones concert with him and his wife. I was devastated by it.—Steve Race
There was never any question about the quality of the PlayStation hardware or the personnel Race hired, but other issues plagued SCEA. Kutaragi and other executives at Sony did not always share Race’s vision for how to run the company. They fought over everything from the length of the cords connecting the PlayStation’s game pads to the launch price for the console itself.
I’d been over to Japan a couple of times and we disagreed about pricing, positioning, advertising, color, and ninety-nine other things that you would do for a product to Americanize it or to make it acceptable in the United States.
It was funny. I would say, “Why are we doing this controller? It should look like this or it should be this size.” Norio Ohga was the president of Sony at the time, and they’d sort of say, “Oh, no, no, no. Mr. Ohga wants it this way. Mr. Ohga designated this one.”
I kept thinking to myself, what is a guy running a $44 billion company doing going around with controllers for a game system?
—Steve Race
Race’s problems with Sony Computer Entertainment in Japan were well-known throughout the industry. Rumors about Race being fired were widespread. Opinionated and outspoken, Race sometimes seemed like a strange fit for the role of an American executive working in a Japanese company. The battles continued as Sony prepared for the official American unveiling of PlayStation at E3.
Clearly, Sega broke some promises about times and dates and all that. If you look at the recent legacy with Sega, between Sega CD and 32X and … well, I guess Nomad’s still around, there were a lot of disappointing products that
[Sega said] were next-generation systems that weren’t fulfilled. They certainly weren’t supported by the third-party community.—Jim Whims
As Trip Hawkins had predicted, Sega had stretched its resources by maintaining too many incompatible platforms. By the end of 1995, Sega of America found itself juggling seven separate and incompatible game platforms—Saturn, Genesis, Game Gear, Pico, Sega CD, 32X, and 32X CD. Amazingly, even Master System was rumored to still be active in some South American markets. There was no way one company could support every one of those systems. With an eye toward the future, Sega Enterprises CEO Hayao Nakayama made the logical choice to concentrate on Saturn.
From the Japanese perspective, Nakayama made the only possible decision. Mega-Drive, the Japanese name for Genesis, never caught on in Japan. Saturn, on the other hand, was outselling PlayStation and looked to be the dominant system. What made sense in Japan, however, was about to become a disastrous move in the United States.
I would absolutely defend the American management on that. Tom knew that the 16-bit business was going to be there. Paul Rioux knew it, and so did Shenobu Toyoda; but Japan refused to believe. They were convinced, and they would not listen to Tom [Kalinske]. They would not listen to Paul [Rioux]. They would listen to no one and they absolutely bullied the U.S. into launching the system. It very much compromised their ability to keep the 16-bit business.
—Michael Latham, former head of Omega Team, Sega of America
Back in the United States, the magazine
Next Generation
ran an article in which the internal components of PlayStation and Saturn were shown side by side. The editorial staff had developed a preference for PlayStation over Saturn, based on game performance, and that preference became far more pronounced as more games were published.
Next Generation
’s editors described PlayStation’s design as “elegant” because all of the components fit neatly on one single circuit board. The Saturn design, by comparison, seemed jumbled, with its CD-ROM controller placed on a separate daughterboard.
I think a lot of people are confused about that. I’ve heard a lot of people say, “Oh gee, look at all these chips they’ve got.” Well, there’s a reason for it and the reason is that our people feel that they need the multiprocessing to be able to bring to the home what we’re doing next year in the arcades. That kind of power requires what we’ve got and we don’t think the other machines can take advantage of.
—Tom Kalinske, former CEO, Sega of America
In theory, Saturn, which featured two Hitachi SH2 32-bit central processing chips, was more powerful than PlayStation. The truth was that the SH2 chips were somewhat inferior to the chip Sony had selected. There was even a rumor that Nakayama had selected the chip as a favor to a golf buddy. All rumors aside, programming Saturn was difficult, and allotting different operations to both of the processing chips proved nearly impossible. In an interview with the press, Sega star arcade-game designer Yu Suzuki openly admitted having trouble with the dual-processor design while working on the Saturn version of his hit game
Daytona.
As E3 approached in mid-May, Sega announced that the release of Saturn would take place on September 2—Sega Saturn Saturday. Behind the scenes, however, Sega was preparing an E3 surprise.
I realize that Nintendo keeps saying [that the Ultra 64 will be released in] 1995, but there is absolutely no evidence to support that. What they did in Chicago [at the 1994 Summer Consumer Electronics Show] was show people the coin-op hardware, which has absolutely no connection with the Ultra 64 from an internal standpoint. No way, Jose. It’s a big promotional head fake.
If he [Nintendo vice-president Peter Main] told you six months, mark your calendar and call him on that date. He’ll tell you, “No, six months from now,” and he’ll still be blowing smoke at that point.
—Trip Hawkins
On August 23, 1993, Nintendo announced plans to collaborate with Silicon Graphics on “Project Reality,” a new technology that would be incorporated
into a future game console. The pairing seemed perfect. Silicon Graphics was the leading company in high-end computer graphics. Hollywood special-effects studios used their workstations to create the effects in such movies as
Terminator 2
and
Jurassic Park.
The new system, which Nintendo claimed would be released in 1995, would include a modified version of the technology used in Silicon Graphics’ expensive Indigo workstations and would sell for under $250. Nintendo would not give many specifics on what the system’s architecture would look like, but it was stated that the final product would have a 64-bit processor.