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

  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 War

  I 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

  Acclaim Breaks Ranks

  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

  Rare Becomes Scarce

  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.

  A Street Fighter from Japan

  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.

  Okamoto’s next few games did not do well. As Okamoto struggled to come up with new ideas, Fujiwara created such Capcom classics as Commando and Ghosts ’N Goblins. Okamoto became worried about his job. He created a “soft porn” version of Mahjongg, a tile game that is popular in Asia, but in the meantime, he needed a special project—something big. The answer came from another Osaka-based game company—Taito. While looking at competitors’ games, Okamoto ran across Double Dragon II: The Revenge and realized that with some of Capcom’s newer technology, he would be able to improve upon this style of the game.

  Double Dragon II was a two-dimensional side-scrolling gang-fighting game in which players walked along streets, fighting off muggers of all types. It featured simplistic three-button combat controls, with one button for attacking enemies to the left, one for attacking to the right, and one for jumping. One problem with the game was its antiquated graphics. The combatants looked short and childishly scrawled. Capcom’s research and development engineers had recently come up with new and more powerful hardware that could make much more realistic-looking characters and backgrounds. The end product was a game called Final Fight.*

  With its simpler controls and much more sophisticated graphics, Final Fight improved upon the Double Dragon formula. Instead of having three buttons and a joystick, Okamoto’s game had only “attack” and “jump” buttons. Players could execute several moves as they fought off attackers, but they did not have to master these moves to have fun with the game. The art was the biggest improvement. The characters in Final Fight looked cartoonish and moved stiffly, but they had human proportions and detailed faces. One of the enemies was a giant who looked and fought like Andre the Giant, a real-life professional wrestler. Released in 1989, Final Fight was one of Capcom’s most successful games to date, but it was Okamoto’s next game that made him famous.

  Okamoto’s next project was a sequel to a 1987 game called Street Fighter. The original Street Fighter was a one-on-one martial-arts fighting game. As Okamoto’s team members created their version of what a Street Fighter game should be, they decided to include three elements from that game: secret moves that allowed players to throw fireballs, a character named Ken, and a character name Ryu.

  The sales division said that we needed to make another Street Fighter; they had been asking for it for a long time. At one of the trade shows, Final Fight was shown with the title of Street Fighter II, but all the operators said, “Hey, that’s not Street Fighter.”

  Originally, I wanted to change all the characters, but some of the players still liked Ryu and Ken.

  —Yoshiki Okamoto

  It took ten months to complete Street Fighter II: The World Warrior. The game was a major undertaking and several artists worked on each of the fighters. The team created multiple hidden moves for each of the eight main characters in the game. Okamoto personally believed that this game would be just as successful as Final Fight, but once the concepts and art were complete and the fate of the game was in the hands of the programmers, he became nervous. Restless by nature, he found it impossible to sit around the office waiting to see the final results, so he often went off to play baseball to distract himself. These were nervous times for Okamoto. He had committed a great deal of time and resources to Street Fighter II.

  Like Final Fight before it, Street Fighter II brought marked improvement to an already existing genre. Not only did it have the same kind of clean, ornately detailed, yet somewhat cartoony look that distinguished Final Fight, it also had a colorful cast of international brawlers. Along with returning martial artists Ryu and Ken, it featured ten other fighters, including a fire-spitting Hindu mystic, a lumbering Sumo wrestler, and a one-eyed kick boxer. Each character had unique abilities and special moves. Okamoto was well aware of the arcade prestige given to players who master hidden moves and difficult games, and he wanted to use that prestige to his game’s advantage.

  The game was a major international success. Its combination of brutal action, hidden moves, humorous characters, and bright graphics appealed to players all over the world. Released in 1991, Street Fighter II brought much-needed business to the dwindling American arcade industry. This was the first game since the mid-1980s that actually attracted players to arcades. More im
portant, arcade owners bought multiple Street Fighter II machines and set them up in rows, the way they used to set up Pac-Man machines a decade earlier. Capcom will not release the final numbers, but some outsiders have estimated that more than 60,000 Street Fighter II arcade machines were sold worldwide. According to a former Capcom spokesperson, the arcade version of Street Fighter II earned more money than the movie Jurassic Park made in box office receipts.

  Street Fighter II was even more successful as a game cartridge for Super NES. Capcom released it exclusively for the 16-bit Nintendo console and went on to sell more than 2 million copies of the game, making it the first third-party hit for the Super NES. In 1992, as Genesis started to pull away in sales, having the only home version of Street Fighter II gave Nintendo a needed edge.

  Battle of the 16-Bitters

  Was Genesis ever as advanced a machine as Super NES? Technically, no. I thought we were able to do better software then they were. They both are good machines, but I think the big advantage we had was we initially were able to do better software and it took them a long time to get up to speed on doing as good a [job on their] software.

  —Tom Kalinske, former president and CEO, Sega of America

  Nintendo sold 3.4 million Super NES consoles in 1991, a long-lasting record for first-year sales of new game hardware. This gave Nintendo a good share of the market. But with a one-year lead and more sales overall in 1991, Genesis continued to have the larger 16-bit install-base in the United States.*