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

by Steven Kent

  Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out

  The second major game of 1987 was Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, a home adaptation of an arcade game that Nintendo had released in 1983. Both the arcade game and the NES cartridge were designed by Genyo Takeda and Nintendo Co. Ltd.’s Research and Development Team 3, a team of engineers that generally focused on hardware.

  The original arcade game, which was simply called Punch-Out, was a boxing game in which players took on five fictitious fighters as they fought for a shot at a championship belt. An early first-person game, players saw the game from within the head of an “up-and-coming boxer.” The fighter the player controlled was depicted as a wire mesh character. Although Punch-Out was ostensibly about boxing, it was really a puzzle game. In order to win, players had to learn the patterns used by the computer-controlled boxers. A fighter named “Bald Bull,” for instance, would charge at the player. If he landed a punch at the end of his charge, he would score an instant knockdown. The player could either dodge Bald Bull’s charge and respond with a properly timed counterattack, or hit him at a precise moment in his charge to knock him to the canvas.

  The home version of Punch-Out featured more than twice as many opponents as the arcade game. While the home version did include three of the original fighters—Glass Joe, Bald Bull, and Mr. Sandman (who was the world champion in the arcade game)—it also had five all-new opponents, including Mike Tyson, who had recently been crowned heavyweight champion of the world.

  Arakawa thought up the idea of licensing Mike Tyson himself. He attended one of Tyson’s early fights during a trade show and was impressed by the young boxer’s power and skills. Arakawa decided that adding the super-powerful heavyweight’s name to the upcoming boxing game would make it more attractive. Nintendo’s legal team approached Tyson with an offer that was rumored to be $50,000* for a three-year period, and the fighter agreed. (It should be noted that Nintendo took a chance licensing Tyson, since the agreement was signed prior to his winning the WBC title from Trevor Berbick on November 22, 1986.) When Arakawa told Takeda the idea, Takeda agreed and began adding Tyson’s image to one of the fighters in the game.

  I watched Tyson fight during CES. This was before he became champion. He was so powerful and strong and we all fell in love with him, so we decided to license him. Japan liked the idea, too. Fortunately, the Punch-Out game was under development for the home [console], so I contacted Mr. Takeda and asked him to convert it to Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out.

  He changed the master board to include Tyson, and Tyson [the boxer] was quite successful. He won every fight before he became champion, so we were very pleased.

  —Minoru Arakawa

  Unlike the arcade game, the home game was played from the third-person perspective. Players controlled a tiny boxer in a black tank top named Little Mac, who was so short that his head barely reached his opponent’s belt lines. As he prepared to release the game, Arakawa confided to Howard Phillips that the Little Mac character was designed to look like him.

  When he first got Punch-Out, Arakawa said, “Little Mac, that’s you.”

  I said, “What are you talking about?” and he said, “It looks just like you.”

  I told him, “He looks nothing like me,” but Arakawa kept saying that repeatedly. I don’t know if he was just pulling my leg.

  —Howard Phillips

  If Takeda’s team members wanted Little Mac to look like Howard Phillips, they failed. Little Mac had black hair; Phillips’s hair was red. Their faces were also unalike.*

  Nintendo, a company that worked hard to maintain a clean image, came to regret its association with Tyson. After winning and unifying the heavyweight crown in 1987, Tyson became involved in a well-publicized divorce from actress Robyn Givens. During the proceedings, Tyson was accused of beating Givens. When Nintendo’s three-year agreement with Tyson ended, the company quietly removed his name and image from the game and re-released it as Punch-Out! with a new champion named “Mr. Dream.”

  Both Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out and The Legend of Zelda became million-sellers.

  Metroid

  Metroid, the third major game to be released by Nintendo in 1987, was a futuristic adventure in which players controlled a space explorer named Samus. Created by Nintendo’s Research and Development Team 1—the team led by Gumpei Yokoi, the man who created the hardware for Donkey Kong—Metroid was a difficult game to beat. It involved a lot of precision jumping, one of the tougher skills in video games. It featured several large side-scrolling and vertically scrolling maps and stands out for having some of the most innovative and challenging levels of any NES game. It was also one of the first games to feature a female hero. Samus wore a large space helmet throughout the game. She could have been a man, a child, or a robot. Once she destroyed the final enemy character, a creature called “Mother Brain,” she removed her helmet. Only then did players find out that Samus was a woman.

  Metroid became a symbol of Nintendo’s ability to make adult-oriented games. In later years, Nintendo tried to attract older consumers to Game Boy and Super NES by releasing Metroid versions for those systems.

  The Library of Licensees

  Nintendo’s third-party licensees also provided impressive games in 1987. Konami, a company that would distinguish itself as one of Nintendo’s four most influential licensees, made good use of its five-game allotment in 1987. A successful arcade company with such past hits as Frogger and Time Pilot, Konami’s first offerings included Gradius, a side-scrolling space shooter; Track & Field and Rush ’N Attack, two decent translations of arcade games; Castlevania, a side-scrolling adventure in which players controlled a whip-toting vampire hunter; and Double Dribble, a basketball simulation.

  Konami sold more than 1 million copies of Gradius, its first NES title, in Japan before shipping it to the United States. The game contained a secret code that would enable players to equip their spaceship with an array of weapons. To get the weapons, players had to hit the directional pad on their controllers up twice, down twice, left, right, left, right, “B,” “A,” and then “Start” buttons. Konami used the same secret code in many of its later games.

  Data East, another licensee with a strong arcade pedigree, used its game allotment to convert popular arcade games into home cartridges. Data East’s first offerings included Tag Team Wrestling, Karate Champ (the first side-view martial-arts tournament game), Burgertime (which had been released for ColecoVision, Intellivision, and several Atari systems in the early 1980s), and Karnov.

  Taito, which along with Konami was one of the original four licensees, released home versions of three arcade games in 1987—Elevator Action, Legend of Kage, and Arkanoid. In later years, Arkanoid became somewhat of a collectors’ item because it had an adapter featuring a knob that enabled NES controllers to move paddles across the bottom of the screen. Arkanoid was basically an updated version of the Atari game Breakout.

  Some companies rushed to publish NES translations of arcade games that they licensed from other companies. SNK Corporation licensed the NES rights to the arcade hits Ikari Warriors and Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road from a company called Irem. Sun Soft Corporation licensed a 1983 driving simulation called Spy Hunter from Bally/Midway.

  Of all of Nintendo’s early licensees, however, the one with the most staying power in the industry was Capcom. With an unmistakably strong arcade presence and a particularly aggressive marketer at the helm of its U.S. affiliate, Capcom released a mixture of arcade translations and original games that attracted a strong following.

  Capcom is another coin-op company, a very good coin-op company. They were especially good at creating the games and doing the smart marketing. Sometime, from inventory-risk point of view, they made mistakes by being too aggressive, and they ended up in trouble back in those days.

  —Minoru Arakawa

  Fighting for Survival

  Nintendo and Sega were neighbors during the 1987 Winter Consumer Electronics Show. Sega’s big product at the show was a pair of 3D glasses f
or the Master System. The glasses were designed by Mark Cerny, the young game designer who created Marble Madness for Atari Coin-op. Now working for Sega, Cerny moved to Japan shortly after leaving Atari.

  Sega’s 3D glasses reflected their creator’s gift for sensible design. They were molded out of durable plastic, lightweight, and large enough to fit over prescription eyewear. The glasses were not meant to replace the television but rather to enhance it. Players watched the game through the glasses, and transparent liquid crystal displays within the eyepieces focused the picture on the screen and added 3D effects.* Cerny’s glasses were one of the big hits of the trade show.

  We were showing off what we felt was the next step in this technology, these 3D glasses that used a shuttering effect. Next to us … right next to us because we were side by side, Nintendo was showing their knitting machine. They actually had a big to-do for knitting potholders and stuff like that.

  I remember seeing Howard Lincoln and Arakawa in the hallway between our booths, and I started laughing and said that I felt that I was taking two steps forward in technology and I didn’t know where they were going with the pot holders.

  —Bruce Lowry, former president, Sega Consumer Products

  Sega had a number of small victories during this period. Macy’s and FAO Schwartz carried the Master System right alongside the NES, and Target stores promoted the console quite heavily. Film critics Siskel and Ebert compared the NES and Master System on a special holiday program, concluding that they preferred Sega’s hardware. Ebert, who wore corrective eyeglasses, even commented that he could wear his glasses under the 3D Glasses.

  These were fleeting victories at best, however. Nintendo controlled somewhere between 86 to 93 percent of the market by the end of 1987. By the time Sega had sold 100,000 Master Systems, Nintendo had already sold more than 2 million NES units and the gap was widening. Nintendo had better market awareness and more money for advertising. Sensing that an established marketing partner with inroads into the American toy industry might have more luck competing with Nintendo, Sega Enterprises CEO Hayao Nakayama pulled the plug on the in-house consumer division in the beginning of 1988 and signed a two-year licensing agreement with Tonka Toys. Neither Bruce Lowry nor Bob Harris, who was vice president of sales and marketing, wanted to move to Tonka’s Minnesota headquarters; and both ended up leaving Sega.

  While we had gotten into all the retailers they [Nintendo] did, we simply did not have the resources to compete against Nintendo’s huge marketing budget, and the decision was made to look for a partner. We hooked up with Tonka, and they took over the distribution and put a tremendous amount of money into marketing dollars. They put over $30 million into marketing.

  —Bruce Lowry

  Another Big Year

  Toy sales generally drop sharply after the holidays, but Nintendo sales remained strong in January and February of 1988. With more than seven million users, the demand for new games remained steady all year long. So did the requests for game hints and information about upcoming titles. Nintendo tried to satisfy consumer curiosity with a free quarterly newsletter called Nintendo Fun Club News, but the newsletter wasn’t enough. It began as a 12-page, two-color publication in the spring of 1987, but by winter it had expanded to 32 full-color pages. After releasing the spring 1988, issue of Nintendo Fun Club News, Arakawa decided it was time for Nintendo to publish a full magazine. The magazine was named Nintendo Power.

  There were quite a few publishers making video game magazines in Japan, and no one was doing one in the United States, so we decided to do it ourselves. I felt Gail Tilden was the perfect person to do the editing on the magazine. She had just had a baby and wasn’t in the office, so I called her up and asked her to start our publishing department. She accepted, and she came with the baby in her arms two weeks after she got out of the hospital.

  —Minoru Arakawa

  Nintendo Power, which was released bi-monthly, was larger and far more sophisticated than Nintendo Fun Club News. Each issue was approximately 100 pages long and featured game maps, tips from game counselors, and descriptions of upcoming games. Nintendo Power ran no advertisements, though it glibly plugged products made by Nintendo. By 1989, more than one million people subscribed to Nintendo Power.

  One of Nintendo Power’s most popular features was “NES Achievers,” a two-page spread that listed the names of people who either completed or got exceptionally high scores on popular NES and Game Boy games. The competition to get on this list was fierce and not always restricted to kids.

  I had my name in Nintendo Power Magazine several times for top score on Game Boy Tetris. It got to the point that they wouldn’t print my name again, so I had to use a fake name…. my first name backwards and my last name backwards. Evets Kainzow.

  I saw the fake name in there one day, and I thought it was somebody else and said, “Oh, my God, his score is better than mine!” I was trying to figure it out, then I noticed that Evets Kainzow lived in Saratoga, and I remembered sending it in.

  —Steven Wozniak, cofounder, Apple Computers

  Inventing the Ultimate Video Game

  As Nintendo’s popularity grew, so did complaints about video games interfering with school studies. Rather than taking a defensive approach, the public relations team from Hill and Knowlton recommended that Nintendo take a proactive stance and proposed an event that would cast the company in a pro-education light.

  There was a fair amount of backlash starting to develop about this time, and people felt that video games were an insidious stealer of children’s energies and creativity. There were a lot of things we did to try to put a more human face on Nintendo, including sponsoring a contest that promoted the process of inventing and creativity among kids.

  —Richard Brudvik-Lindner

  The contest was called the “Invent the Ultimate Video Game” competition. Kids of all ages were invited to submit original ideas for video games to be judged by Nintendo. They did not have to make an actual game; they simply needed to send documentation explaining their ideas. Of the more than 10,000 entries received, 10 finalists were selected and flown to Washington, D.C., in February 1989, to exhibit their ideas at an event that would be held in the rotunda of the Senate office building. Many of the games that were selected had a decidedly educational theme. A female finalist, for instance, came up with a game that simulated a presidential election. The winner of the competition was fifteen-year-old Jeffrey Scott Campbell of Aurora, Colorado, who received the grand prize: a $3,000 scholarship.

  I presented the trophies at the competition and talked with a lot of reporters. This one TV reporter came up to me, and we spoke for quite a while. We had a friendly conversation, then he said, “Are you ready to do the interview?”

  I said yes, and he put his microphone in my face and said, “Why is it that video games are so bad for kids?”

  I thought for a few seconds, then I said, “They’re not.”

  He said, “Let’s try this again,” and asked the same question. Then I thought for a few seconds and said, “They’re not.” He wanted to get me arguing, and I thought this was the best way to make sure that he did not get any useable tape from me.

  —Howard Phillips

  Not a Political Statement

  In 1988, Konami released an NES side-scrolling shooter game called Contra. The game started out like a fairly typical war game with soldiers running through a jungle, shooting at enemies. Before long, however, the action moved out of the jungle and into a futuristic-looking fortress filled with alien creatures and lasers. (Despite the picture of an alien standing between two soldiers on the box, some people saw the title and thought the game referred to the guerrillas Ronald Reagan had sent aid to in Nicaragua.) Toys “R” Us refused to carry the game, stating that it was too violent. When Minoru Arakawa called Toys “R” Us headquarters and told the buyers that the violence in the game was within acceptable limits, the retailers picked up the game. It sold exceptionally well.

  Nintendo’s p
roduct analysts scrutinized and screened games before approving them for publication on the NES, but some things slipped through. When Jaleco, a company best-known for the million copy–selling baseball simulation Bases Loaded, submitted Maniac Mansion as a possible NES title, Nintendo made the company change some of the background art. Originally created by LucasArts for the Commodore Amiga, Maniac Mansion featured naked Greek statues. Once the statues and a few mildly suggestive lines of dialog were changed, the game was approved. Unfortunately, Nintendo’s screeners had not discovered an Easter egg that was well hidden deep within the game.

  You had to sneak into a character named Weird Ed’s room and steal his hamster. You would then run down to the kitchen undetected and put the hamster in the microwave oven, at which point the hamster would explode into a little charred mess complete with sound effects. Then you could hand the charred hamster back to Weird Ed.