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

  Now, I’m going to be very direct with you. The very best games out there right now are N64 games. On the other hand, when it comes to Cruis ’n USA, I wouldn’t be honest if I said that Cruis ’n USA was much of a game; but that product is selling. I think it would be fair to say that we know that some of the N64 software is not better than [the software you find] on other platforms. The challenge for us is to continue to try to keep that quality on the way up. Hopefully, we’re going to succeed most of the time, but occasionally we’re not. It’s like saying to MGM, “You made Gone with the Wind. How come all the rest of your movies are not Gone with the Wind?” It just doesn’t work that way.

  —Howard Lincoln

  There were other disappointments, too. Mortal Kombat Trilogy, a game that many people thought would only come out on N64, was released on other systems. The PlayStation version was superior.

  When played side-by-side, the PlayStation version makes the N64 version look like it’s on a SNES [Super NES]. Then there’s the sound: The digitized sound effects are utterly atrocious. In fact, it’s so muffled that players may as well put their speakers on the other side of a cement wall before starting the game. The music is typical of a non-CD game—that is to say, worthless. It’s tinny and very electronic sounding.

  Mortal Kombat Trilogy proves that the Nintendo 64 is merely mortal. While it surpasses the PlayStation version in regard to load time, it still suffers a three or four second delay when loading a new character in multiplayer fighting. Ultimately, only Mortal Kombat addicts, who don’t already own a PlayStation, will find this game worth picking up.4

  When asked about these titles, Nintendo executives often defended them by pointing out that consumers had voted with their wallets—nearly every title released for Nintendo 64 was a million-seller. Nintendo’s statistics were accurate: the company quoted TRST data with nearly religious reverence. The numbers, however, did not reflect the entire story. Millions of people purchased N64 hardware in the first year, then had only a few games to choose from. Every game for Nintendo 64 had reached bestseller status, but the sales were only being spread across a handful of games, whereas Saturn and PlayStation software sales were spread across five times as many games.

  Nintendo did publish some brilliant games in the early days of Nintendo 64. During the first year after releasing the console, Nintendo released a few games that appealed to mainstream audiences, including WaveRace 64, Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye 007, and Star Fox 64. But the Nintendo 64 library was limited and expensive. By the end of 1997, PlayStation and Saturn had hundreds of games, most of which sold for under $50. By comparison, there were merely dozens of games for N64, some of which sold for nearly $80, and rumors were that future third-party cartridges might cost as much as $100. People outside Nintendo speculated that the console manufacturer had to sell its games at a loss and subsidize costs for other companies to keep prices down. Nintendo of America adamantly denied these stories, and the price of cartridges never reached $100. By 1998, the cost of cartridge manufacturing came down, and Nintendo 64 cartridges generally retailed for $10 more than PlayStation games.

  Nintendo Loses Square

  During this crucial time, Nintendo lost an important third-party partner called Square Soft. Square Soft specialized in publishing role-playing games (RPGs), adventure games in which players traversed elaborate worlds, gaining experience and learning fighting techniques while completing a quest. Although Square Soft published many highly respected games, its crown jewel was a series of games called Final Fantasy, created by Hironobu Sakaguchi, one of the world’s most respected game designers.

  Sakaguchi did not start out making RPGs. After joining Square Soft, he made three computer games, then switched platforms to Famicom and made Highway Star (released in the United States as Rad Racer), King’s Knight, and World Runner. Sakaguchi was not excited by any of these games. His bosses assigned him to make 3D games because the programmer working with him, a notable Apple II game designer named Nasir Gebelli, was good at coming up with 3D code. Square sold approximately 500,000 copies of Highway Star and World Runner, pleasing Sakaguchi’s employers. But Sakaguchi had become bored with game design.

  In an effort to get more excited about his work, Sakaguchi decided to switch genres and work on a game that would be more interesting to write. He decided to create an RPG and brought the idea to his boss.

  The only person you had to go to at that time was the president [of the company], and he didn’t really understand games that well. Selling him on the concept of an RPG wasn’t that hard. I just went up and said, “I want to do an RPG.”

  He said, “Is that good, is that interesting?” and I said, “Yeah, it’s fun.” So he said, “Okay.”

  —Hironobu Sakaguchi, president, Square USA

  Since he planned to quit making games after this first RPG, Sakaguchi named his game Final Fantasy.

  The basic concept was really a mythical concept of the whole earth, with fire and water representing everything on earth. I took that concept and represented those elements into a crystal, and that essentially became sort of the core theme for Final Fantasy.

  I took a preexisting idea—the four or five basic elements of the world; sort of an orthodox and mythical concept—then molded it into an original fantasy story.

  —Hironobu Sakaguchi

  Creating Final Fantasy was a much larger and more involved task than making World Runner. Though he was able to create his earlier games with a three-person team, he needed a fifteen-person team for his RPG.

  I started with the story and the overall worldview of the game. I had the graphics designer do the drawings.

  Initially, the process was different from what we do now. Currently, we write the story completely and work from the storyline.

  When we first started Final Fantasy I, we were really limited, technologically. So what I had to do first was make a basic rough idea for the game [then we would test it]. We had to deal with the hardware first. By doing so, we would come up with the graphics on the screen and figure out, based on the limitations and the capabilities of the hardware, how big the world was going to be and how many locations I could have.

  After that, I would incorporate my rough ideas and build up a story based on what I had to work with. It was kind of working backwards.

  —Hironobu Sakaguchi

  A huge bestseller, Final Fantasy was not the swan song Sakaguchi intended it to be. It resonated so well with Japanese audiences that Nintendo published it in the United States under its own label, and an unshakable relationship was forged between Square Soft and Nintendo.* In the early 1990s, as other companies flocked to Sega, Square Soft remained exclusive to Nintendo, publishing games like Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana and always having its biggest sales with Sakaguchi’s Final Fantasy games. Square Soft became one of Nintendo’s most influential partners, a partnership that was covered by such publications as Businessweek.

  The American audience was never as interested in RPGs as the Japanese. Though Square Soft’s RPGs had a loyal U.S. following, sales were not as high as company officials hoped, and the company did not release Final Fantasy V in the United States. Then in 1994, as the market entered its major slump, Square released Final Fantasy VI for Super NES. (As there had been no American versions of the previous three games, it published game six as Final Fantasy III.) Final Fantasy III was one of the top-selling games of 1994, but Square Soft employees were not satisfied.

  When you look at that game and the numbers in Japan … It sold 3 million copies in Japan. Judging by the [U.S.] population alone, we predicted millions. So, it didn’t do that well.

  —Hironobu Sakaguchi

  Square Soft’s final title for Super NES was Super Mario RPG, a game that took Square Soft’s signature in-depth stories and turn-based combat and applied them to the Mario universe. With the game’s great graphics and a slowly growing base of RPG players, Super Mario RPG sales exceeded Nintendo’s rather conservative expectations. Then, as Ni
ntendo prepared to unveil Nintendo 64, Square Soft announced that it was switching allegiances. Like Namco before it, Square Soft was going to make console games exclusively for PlayStation. The split was bitter. So bitter, in fact, that even after Nintendo reestablished relations with Namco in 1999, Yamauchi still refused to work with Square Soft. When asked if Nintendo would allow Square Soft to publish games for a new console called “Dolphin” that would not be released until the year 2001, Minoru Arakawa quietly replied, “I do not think it is yet time for Square Soft.”

  Square Soft’s decision to switch to Sony was largely due to aesthetic considerations. In a 1997 interview, Hironobu Sakaguchi explained that Sony’s CD-ROM format allowed for more artistic freedom. His next game, released as Final Fantasy VII in both Japan and the United States, would be the biggest game of 1997 and one of the first RPGs to crack the U.S. market.

  With PlayStation’s 32-bit processing power and the seemingly unlimited storage of CD-ROM, Sakaguchi was able to increase the artistic qualities of his games. Sakaguchi had always had an eye for cinematics, art, and intricate storytelling, but working with CD-ROM gave him the opportunity to enhance these features exponentially. Final Fantasy VII had epic dramatic cut scenes with symphonic music. Sold under the Square Soft label in Japan, it was marketed by Sony with a huge budget in the United States. Nintendo had always published the bestselling game of the year in the United States, but with Sakaguchi’s amazing animations and Sony’s big-budget marketing, Final Fantasy VII became the biggest-selling game of 1997 worldwide. Once, when asked if the time and money spent on the game paid off, Sakaguchi happily replied, “Big time. It sold better in the United States than in Japan, and six million worldwide.”

  Violence Becomes the Issue

  In August 1997, Nintendo released GoldenEye 007, a game that Rare, Ltd., developed, based on the James Bond movie Goldeneye. Few people paid close attention when Nintendo first announced plans to make a game based on James Bond, and interest waned even more when it was announced that the game would be a first-person shooter. When the game was released, it became a sleeper hit. PCs would remain the best platform for first-person shooters, but GoldenEye 007 set the standard by which console versions of this genre would be judged.

  The Rare team members who designed GoldenEye 007 had been meticulous. They requested blueprints of set locations to be sure that their virtual locations matched those in the movie. They filled their game with Bond music and created a storyline that was reasonably true to the film.

  As the game progressed, one designer asked Ken Lobb, the Nintendo of America executive in charge of second-party games, if he would like to appear in it. Tickled at the idea of becoming a virtual target, Lobb agreed. Curious to see what he would look like, Lobb looked for his image in each unfinished version of the game as Rare submitted them for review. When his likeness did not show up after several versions, he thought that Rare had decided against using it. Then, when a nearly completed version of GoldenEye 007 came in for review, Lobb’s team found a bug in the game and called him for help.

  They said they taped it and showed me the tape. It was me. They had made a tape of each of them shooting me, again and again.

  —Ken Lobb, head of Tree House, Nintendo of America

  GoldenEye 007 was quietly released in August, a month not often associated with blockbuster game releases. But the game’s popularity grew steadily. By the end of 1997, Nintendo had sold nearly 1.1 million copies. By 1999, that number would swell to more than 5 million copies worldwide.

  This was a watershed game in the history of Nintendo. Rated “T” (or appropriate for players ages thirteen and up), GoldenEye 007 was, like any other first-person shooter, about traveling through 3D environments and killing enemies. Nintendo, the last holdout of the video game industry, had shed its Disney image.

  The Tragic Storm

  On October 1, 1997, 16-year-old Luke Woodham of Pearl, Mississippi, used a baseball bat and a butcher knife to murder his mother. He then hid a rifle under his trench coat and took it to school. By the end of the day, he had killed three students and wounded several more before being stopped by Pearl High School assistant principal Joel Myrick, who grabbed a pistol from his car and brought Woodham down at gunpoint. “Mr. Myrick, the world has wronged me,” Woodham told the stunned school official.

  On the morning of December 1, exactly two months after the shooting in Pearl, 14-year-old Michael Carneal of Paducah, Kentucky, brought a 22-caliber pistol that he had stolen from his next-door neighbor to Heath High School and entered the lobby where 35 students had gathered together for a prayer meeting. Without warning, Carneal fired shots into the crowd, stopped to reload, and was wrestled down by Ben Strong, the boy leading the prayer. He wounded 8 students, 3 of whom died.

  On March 24, 1998, 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson and 11-year-old Andrew Golden of Jonesboro, Arkansas, set off the fire alarm at Westside Middle School, then opened fire on students and teachers from nearby woods.

  Two months later, on May 20, after being expelled from Thurston High School, 15-year-old Kip Kinkel of Springfield, Oregon, shot his parents and planted booby-traps around their bodies. He returned to school the next day with a 22-caliber semiautomatic rifle and shot 24 students, killing 2. When several boys tackled him to the ground, Kinkel shouted, “Shoot me!”

  These events left the entire nation unhinged. Tragically, the violence did not stop there. On April 20, 1999, 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold of Littleton, Colorado, smuggled four high-powered guns and a stash of homemade explosives into Columbine High School and carried out a massacre that left 12 students and 1 teacher dead, and 23 students injured, before killing themselves. National outrage turned to horror and grief as the media showed the nation images of the wounded and the dead. As people tried to make sense of what happened, stories about school violence became a common theme in the media.

  Video games were not immediately rooted out as a cause of the Pearl, Mississippi, shooting, and the Paducah shooting was said to have been inspired by the movie Basketball Diaries. Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden, on the other hand, were said to have spent a lot of time playing shooting games, including GoldenEye 007, before their 1998 Jonesboro assault. Most incriminating of all, however, was the shooting in Littleton. “The two became ‘obsessed’ with the violent videogame Doom—an interactive game in which the players try to rack up the most kills—and played it every afternoon,” reported Newsweek.5 Harris was said to have created a special version of Doom based on his high school.

  Months later, the media reported that Klebold and Harris had made videotapes of themselves shortly before going on their killing spree. In the tapes, Klebold and Harris talked about their plans and related it to Doom.

  Dylan Klebold sits in the tan La-Z-Boy, chewing on a toothpick. Eric Harris adjusts his video camera a few feet away, then settles into his chair with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a sawed-off shotgun in his lap. He calls it Arlene, after a favorite character in the gory Doom video games and books that he likes so much.6

  “I hope we kill 250 of you,” Klebold says. He thinks it will be the most “nerve-racking 15 minutes of my life, after the bombs are set and we’re waiting to charge through the school. Seconds will be like hours. I can’t wait. I’ll be shaking like a leaf.”

  “It’s going to be like fucking Doom,” Harris says. “Tick, tick, tick, tick … Haa! That fucking shotgun is straight from Doom.”7

  State legislators from Oregon, Arkansas, Florida, and other states proposed legislation to outlaw certain arcade games, and activist groups rose up, decrying violence in the media. In Washington, D.C., Senator Sam Brownback (Republican of Kansas) had long tried to hold hearings that investigated the marketing of violence to children. The events in Columbine gave his hearings a new urgency, and they began on May 4, 1999, just two weeks later.

  The hearings had been rescheduled at least twice. We had it previously scheduled, and then an expert witness fell out or we had som
e objection, so this was like the third time it had been scheduled.

  —Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, United States Senate

  In light of recent events, it was only natural that this round of Senate hearings took on a more serious and heated tone than the earlier hearings. While only a few senators appeared at Joseph Lieberman’s 1993 hearings, fourteen made an appearance at the latter ones. John McCain and Orrin Hatch, both of whom would run in the 2000 presidential primaries, delivered statements at the hearings.* Reverend Charles J. Chaput, archbishop of Denver, Colorado, addressed the hearing, as did Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti and Doug Lowenstein of the Interactive Digital Software Association.

  The hearings, which focused as much if not more on movies than on video and computer games, began with statements from each senator. Senator Brownback started his statement discussing the connection between the Paducah shooting and the movie Basketball Diaries, then turned his attention to video games.

  The violence in video games is, in some ways, even more disturbing. A game player does not merely witness violence, he takes an active part. Indeed, the point of such games as Postal, Kingpin, Duke Nuke ’Em, Guilty Gear, and others, is to kill as many characters as possible. The higher your body count, the higher your score.8**

  —Senator Sam Brownback