Console Wars

by Blake J. Harris

  “Can we at least discuss the magazine?” White asked, hoping to leave the room with some sort of concession, even something small. He had unsuccessfully broached this topic before, but figured that with the research results now would be a good time to try again. “Nintendo Power is great, and I know Gail has done a great job; we can all see that it’s, you know, great. But we have to recognize that by hoarding all of the secrets to our games, it’s really pissing off the other magazines and, with that, lots of people in the industry. And let’s face it—that’s one of the areas where Sega really torched us.”

  Although Arakawa often took long moments to juggle pros and cons (or at least to make it appear that way), he did not like to be challenged in this manner and his answer to White was brisk. “No.” He shook his head. “There is nothing of this matter to discuss.”

  In lieu of a conversation, a stiff tension permeated the room. White wanted to shout something back, at least to spur a discussion, but he knew there was nothing he could possibly say that would open up Arakawa’s mind, and that only made him want to shout even more. But it was pointless, and everyone there could feel the staggering lack of efficacy.

  As if to break up the subtly uncomfortable mood, the representative from MDC offered some optimism. “It’s not all bad news. We did find some signs of progress,” he said, quickly glancing at the papers in his hand. “More girls between the ages of six and fourteen are becoming primary players. And of all the people we surveyed, 96 percent knew who Mario was, and 83 percent of people said that they liked him.”

  It wasn’t enough to put minds at ease, but it was enough to unknot everyone’s stomachs. And it served as a reminder that beneath the numbers, Nintendo always had the advantage of Mario and everything he represented: Miyamoto’s genius, and the no-nonsense perseverance that had enabled NOA to resurrect an industry from the ashes. Defeating Sega would require a recommitment to many of the same values: focus, belief, and the confidence to follow a vision in the face of adversity.

  This was what made Nintendo so wonderfully successful in the past, from playing cards to videogames, and this strategy to double down on substance over style likely would have worked, if not what for Sega did next.

  43.

  MAGIC CARPET RIDE

  Being a grown-up was not supposed to be this much fun.

  Being a kid? Probably. Being a college student? Definitely. But being a grown-up? No way, that was supposed to be nothing more than pushing papers, rolling eyes, and constantly struggling against a slew of unwanted responsibilities. Being a grown-up, especially one with a corporate job, was supposed to be the beginning of the end. But for Diane Adair, who was flying to the Mojave Desert in order to film Sega’s newest commercial, being a grown-up felt like nothing less than the beginning of a wonderful new beginning.

  Personally and professionally, there were changes everywhere, but none more emblematic than that of her name. It had all started about a year ago, just prior to Christmas 1991, with an occasion that included a teddy bear, a persistent doorbell, and, with a strange symbolic appropriateness, a fat lady singing. It was Saturday, December 14, and Diane Adair was into the final hours of planning a surprise party for her boyfriend, Don. The plan was that while he was at Candlestick Park, watching Steve Young dismantle Kansas City, she would decorate the house, welcome guests, and entertain family and friends until the fateful shout of “Surprise!” It was perfect, or would have been if Don hadn’t gone ahead and ruined her plans for his birthday party.

  “You’re going to be late,” she said, trying to hustle him out the door.

  “I know, I know,” he said, resisting the light pushes on his elbow. “But first I need you to go to the Christmas tree. Bow is over there, and it looks like he’s got something for you. You know how impatient he can be.”

  Bow was a fluffy, tan-colored teddy bear that Don had given to Diane at a Christmas party two years earlier. It was the first formal event they’d attended together, and in a strange way, the tan stuffed bear came to represent the formalization of their affections. Bow held a special place in their hearts, an inanimate pet that only the two of them could fully appreciate. On Don’s instructions, Diane walked toward the Christmas tree and saw that there was a small jewelry box resting right below the bear’s spiffy black bow tie. An early Christmas gift? How thoughtful! But couldn’t he have just waited eleven more days? Well, the quicker she opened this, the quicker he would leave and she could get on with planning his party. But all thoughts about the surprise party were trumped by the surprise she felt when she opened the box, saw the ring, and then looked up to see Don getting down on one knee and asking her if she would marry him. “So,” he concluded, “what do you say?”

  Tears welled up in her eyes, but before Diane could answer the question, the doorbell rang. It was Don’s best friend, ready to take him to the game, so eager to get going that he quickly rang the doorbell twice more before poking his head in the doorway. “Don, are you ready?” he asked, before he noticed Diane crying and apologized profusely. “Sorry, I didn’t realize you were fighting, I’ll just come back in a little while.”

  “No,” Diane said, trying to explain the situation, but before she could do that Don pressed her for an answer (especially since the only thing she had said since he had asked was no). “Yes, of course,” she said, smiling and laughing, but before she could embrace her husband-to-be, the doorbell once again rang. This time Don answered it, intending to clarify the situation for his friend, but when he opened the door he found instead an obese woman dressed in a Viking costume. “Um . . .” he said, because there’s really nothing else appropriate to say under these circumstances. Diane had hired this woman to sing at the party this evening, but apparently she had arrived early and knew how to embrace the moment. And as the two-hundred-plus-pound Viking woman launched into an over-the-top operatic version of “Happy Birthday,” there was really nothing appropriate for Diane to say under these circumstances except for “Surprise.”

  They got married nine months later, on September 12, 1992, a wonderful day that began with Diane Adair and ended with Diane Fornasier. She had gladly taken his name (and then taken a honeymoon in France), which seemed to metaphorically represent her transition from giver to taker. All her life, Diane Adair had been a giver, the kind of person who instinctively shares credit, who sincerely believes in the Golden Rule, and who would actually give someone in need the shirt off her back (if such a thing were socially acceptable for girls). Some might argue that her altruism was inspiring, while others might argue that it was naive, but Diane didn’t care all that much because she didn’t want to argue at all. Conflict was okay, if it came to that, but shouting, shoving, and winning first place in the blame game didn’t get her juices going. Besides, needless conflict got in the way of giving 100 percent toward the task at hand. But over the past couple of years, a change had taken place within her. It began with her taking the job at Sega, grew when she took on Nintendo (Game Gear vs. Game Boy), and was finalized by taking Don’s name. This evolution of confidence and self-esteem was then confirmed once again when Diane Fornasier took over Al Nilsen’s responsibilities and was put in charge of marketing the Genesis.

  Although Sega’s marketing department had already developed a scintillating reputation for shock and awe, Fornasier’s tenure on the Genesis would begin with a shot-heard-round-the-world type of bang. Following the launch of the “Welcome to the Next Level” campaign, the team at SOA could not have been any happier with how they had successfully redefined the Sega brand and, simultaneously, positioned Nintendo. Amazingly, Nintendo had not yet fought back, which only further enabled Sega to paint them into a kiddie-sized corner. As a result, Sega felt like they were dominating Nintendo on every front in the advertising war except for one: technology. They didn’t think they were losing this battle (Sega CD promised the future, and Sonic’s speed exemplified the present), but Sega’s Next Level thinking wasn’t content with just winning; it was about winning bi
g. And the only thing standing in the way of total domination was Mode 7.

  Ever since the release of Super Mario Kart, Nintendo had made a noticeable effort to tout their 16-bit system’s Mode 7 technology, which enabled the console to display some rudimentary 3-D graphics. Although technological jargon often has a way of eluding mainstream consumers, Nintendo’s Mode 7 resonated with a wide enough audience to cause SOA’s marketing department to ask: “Do we have that?” When the answer came back no, the marketing department scrambled to look for something, preferably something with an ad-friendly name, that the Genesis had and the SNES did not. To find a cool-sounding needle somewhere in Sega’s haystack, France Tantiado, a member of Fornasier’s group, met with a seasoned producer named Michael Latham. Although nothing immediately came to mind, Latham grabbed a hardware manual and began paging through it. Surely there must be something, Tantiado suggested, or how else could Sonic be so much faster than Mario? While looking through the manual, Latham found something that kind of, sort of, maybe fit the bill: Burst Mode, which in theory allowed the Genesis to process code faster than Nintendo’s chip could. Although this sounded like exactly what the marketing team wanted, Latham explained that Burst Mode actually had very little to do with the graphics, velocity, and overall performance of Sega’s games. To say that Burst Mode was the reason that Sonic could move so fast would be like saying that cheetahs were faster than elephants were because of their spots. But still, it was something that Sega had and Nintendo did not, which was exactly what the marketing team had wanted. Tantiado loved the concept but hated the name, which prompted Latham to brainstorm possible nicknames and eventually settle on Blast Processing.

  Although Blast Processing was really Burst Mode, which was really nothing more than the spots on a cheetah, this phrase went up the flagpole and caught fire internally, especially after Hiroshi Yamauchi announced that Nintendo had been developing something called the Super FX chip. From Jeff Goodby to Tom Kalinske, it seemed nearly everyone loved the idea of thumbing their nose at Nintendo by flaunting this magical Blast Processing. The lone voice of dissent came from Al Nilsen, who felt this crossed a line; there were so many positive things to say about Sega and the company’s rags-to-riches story, why resort to fiction? His concerns were noted and debated, but ultimately he was outvoted and Sega chose to start deploying the phrase on Sonic 2sday (by having Dustin Diamond gush about “Sega’s Blast Processing capabilities”). Following a positive response from the buzzword-loving mainstream press, this new term would come to embody the difference between Sega and Nintendo and serve as the focal point of a series of commercials to kick off 1993, which is precisely why Diane Fornasier was headed out to the Mojave Desert.

  The spot called for a “long open road,” which is exactly what Fornasier found when she arrived on the set. The highway where they would be filming looked almost exactly like it had in the storyboards, except that in real life the road was surrounded by miles and miles of frosted desert terrain. Not ideal weather for those on set, but perfect for the ad they were shooting. Titled “Top Fuel,” it would begin with a Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo sitting in the middle of the road. The camera would then pan back and forth between the two as a narrator explains that “the Sega Genesis has Blast Processing, the Super Nintendo doesn’t” and then asks the question that was on everyone’s mind (because Sega had just put it there): so what does Blast Processing do? Answering that was the fun part, and it’s why they had to shoot this in the middle of nowhere.

  “How fast will it go?” Fornasier asked, looking at the Formula One race car.

  “About 150 miles per hour,” one of the ad guys said, “160 if we’re lucky.”

  Fornasier was feeling lucky, but she knew that advertisers and clients always have a slightly different definition of this concept. Although both sides wanted the same thing—critical, commercial, and watercooler success—the agency guys would have been perfectly happy to accomplish that by not showing a single second of game footage. That’s where Fornasier came in. Typically, someone in her position would farm out production work (and avoid the desert’s thirty-degree winter temperature), but she wanted to be on set to ensure there was a semblance of substance to the agency’s style.

  “Just 160?” another ad guy asked. “Nah, I heard that bad boy can sling it up to 170. Might not work in this weather, but it’s definitely a possibility.”

  “I think 150 will be more than fine,” Fornasier said. The centerpiece of the commercial, and the part that vaguely answered the question about the meaning of Blast Processing, was a television playing Sonic 2 attached to the back of the race car. And although it’s fair to assume that the coolness of this aesthetic would increase with each additional mile per hour, Fornasier also knew that there would be an inverse relationship between the race car’s velocity and a viewer’s ability to figure out what the heck was playing on the TV. “On second thought, there are no shots of the speedometer, so 140 might even be okay too.”

  “Oh, come on!” the agency guys playfully exclaimed.

  “Hey,” Fornasier said, proudly taking charge, “back when I worked at Del Monte, my boss used to take out a stopwatch and count how many seconds it took for the logo to appear on-screen. It’s up to you guys how to film this, but if you want to try to break a speed record, then I’m bringing a stopwatch to the next shoot.”

  The guys from Goodby made it work, as they always managed to do, and they made sure everyone had fun in the process. For the next several hours they filmed the television-clad race car, and then they moved on to shoot the part that would piss off Nintendo. Not only had Sega chosen to fabricate something called Blast Processing, but they decided to end the commercial with one final insult. After the race car speeds offscreen, the narrator returns with another question: “And what if you don’t have Blast Processing?” As he speaks, the camera pans to a wimpy, blah-blah-white milk truck on the side of the road. The clunky thing can hardly get started—it’s a piece of junk from bumper to bumper—but when it finally manages to lumber down the road, a television is revealed on this vehicle as well. And it’s playing Super Mario Kart, the poor little racing game that now seems so slow by comparison. Just another victim blasted by Sega’s marketing process.

  What Kalinske loved so much about Blast Processing was how perfectly it unified Sega’s defenses for the coming year. Not only did it provide cover in the battle against Nintendo, but it also armed Sega with additional ammo to take down the slew of 32-bit consoles on the horizon (like Atari’s Jaguar and Trip Hawkins’s 3DO machine). Additionally, Kalinske was always hyperconscious about the “story” that Sega was trying to sell to the world, and now that his company’s underdog tale was reaching its climax, it was time to shift the narrative from the little engine that could to the engine that powered the videogame industry. Blast Processing fed right into the new storyline, and the best part was that if anyone tried to dismiss it, they’d be the ones cast as villains. If Nintendo (or Atari, or Trip Hawkins) called out Sega and accused them of doing exactly what they had done, then they’d look like the jealous killjoy. Besides, they wouldn’t be able to prove anything anyhow, because technically it was true: Genesis did have Blast Processing, which would go on to do so much for Sega, even though it actually did almost nothing at all.

  From a tactical standpoint, Sega appeared to be invincible in the short run. That mentality, however, began to change when Kalinske received a call from a psychologist named Arthur Pober.

  “Wait, wait,” Kalinske said, speaking into his office phone. “Why don’t you slow down and start over again?”

  “Sorry, Tom,” Pober apologized. “But it doesn’t matter how slow I say it, because the fact remains the same: the United States government is looking to crack down on the videogame industry.”

  The words made Kalinske momentarily numb. “Please tell me this is a prank.”

  “Unfortunately not,” Pober said. “I have this on good authority, and I suspected that you would appreciate
this as a courtesy call from me to you.”

  Arthur Pober was a proudly blunt Brooklynite who was currently serving as director of the Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU). Founded in 1974, CARU was a self-regulatory group that had been created to promote responsible children’s advertising across various mediums; from commercials during Saturday-morning cartoons to advertisements in the Sunday circular. In effect, CARU was the advertising police, at least when it came to protecting children. But because this was a self-regulatory agency, its officers were typically members of the toy industry, which is why Tom Kalinske had been a member since Mattel asked him to join in 1978.

  “Have you spoken to Howard?” Kalinske asked. Sega’s leader wasn’t the only member of CARU; so was Howard Lincoln, who had been a member of the group since Nintendo’s heyday.

  “Not yet,” Pober said, “but he’s my next call.”

  “Good,” Kalinske said, hoping that Lincoln would be just as rattled as he was. “In your expert opinion, what are we looking at here? How bad could this be?”

  “Best-case scenario,” Pober mused, “the government gets bored and stops nosing around. Worst-case scenario? They hold congressional hearings and wind up regulating the gaming industry.”

  “That would effectively kill the entire business.”

  “Hey, you wanted to know how bad it could be.”

  Kalinske couldn’t believe what he was hearing, but at the same time it felt like the other shoe had finally dropped. Ever since his conversation with Emil Heidkamp at CES about the dangers posed by the increasing realism of videogames, Kalinske had been feeling that this was only a matter of time. “Do you know what prompted all of this?”