Video games only caught on in bars a decade before this, with the Atari 2600 blowing up halfway between, and by 1982 the whole market was bleeding money. Activision split off because five guys made the games that got 60% of Atari’s sales. They defended their right to sell good software on their own. This accidentally let everyone shovel garbage onto the one machine everybody liked. Those companies quickly went under, which made everything worse, because bins full of $3 cartridges meant kids could get a stack of games for Christmas. And then be bored of them by February.
The NES is such a weird relic (and achieved ninety percent market share) because it aggressively avoided Atari’s points of failure. Nintendo was already a century-old toy company. They were run by conservative old farts promoting rando engineers whose products succeeded. Yamauchi would read the market to name a price, and some clique lead by a guy who made grabby-hands out of popsicle sticks or whatever would bend over backwards to pitch a prototype the boss could play for five minutes and nod at. In Japan that meant a patent-dodging 6502 with barely enough RAM and hardwired controllers. In the US that meant being a “control deck” that took “game packs” and would only run software tested and approved by Nintendo. They basically pulled the “video games are for kids” thing out of their ass, and their absolute dominance for the next decade was nigh impossible to predict.
For god’s sake, Nintendo themselves didn’t think Donkey Kong was anything special. This arcade cabinet called Radar Scope bombed, and they wanted to make a Popeye game but fumbled the licenses, and future company director Shigeru Miyamoto slapped together an off-brand King Kong platformer to reuse the hardware. The owners of the warehouse where they shipped them to America went nuts for it and asked them to ramp up production. One of them was Mario yes-that’s-his-namesake Segale, and the other was future Nintendo of America president Albert Einstein Howard Phillips.
If the company had been as dysfunctional about promotion as Sega, or as arcade-focused as any other Japanese game company, Sharon might have been vindicated. At least for consoles. Home PCs were always gonna be a thing and PC games were always gonna be a thing. The UK was already buying ZX Spectrums by the truckload and teaching a generation of dorks how to make awful arcade knockoffs. Tetris hadn’t even happened yet. I doubt we’d get Commander Keen without Super Mario Bros, and then probably no Quake, no 3D cards, no GTA… but there’d still be Ultima, and Myst, and Bejeweled. Not to mention endless boring flight sims and visual novels so horny they’ll perforate your screen.
Hindsight is 20/20.
Video games only caught on in bars a decade before this, with the Atari 2600 blowing up halfway between, and by 1982 the whole market was bleeding money. Activision split off because five guys made the games that got 60% of Atari’s sales. They defended their right to sell good software on their own. This accidentally let everyone shovel garbage onto the one machine everybody liked. Those companies quickly went under, which made everything worse, because bins full of $3 cartridges meant kids could get a stack of games for Christmas. And then be bored of them by February.
The NES is such a weird relic (and achieved ninety percent market share) because it aggressively avoided Atari’s points of failure. Nintendo was already a century-old toy company. They were run by conservative old farts promoting rando engineers whose products succeeded. Yamauchi would read the market to name a price, and some clique lead by a guy who made grabby-hands out of popsicle sticks or whatever would bend over backwards to pitch a prototype the boss could play for five minutes and nod at. In Japan that meant a patent-dodging 6502 with barely enough RAM and hardwired controllers. In the US that meant being a “control deck” that took “game packs” and would only run software tested and approved by Nintendo. They basically pulled the “video games are for kids” thing out of their ass, and their absolute dominance for the next decade was nigh impossible to predict.
For god’s sake, Nintendo themselves didn’t think Donkey Kong was anything special. This arcade cabinet called Radar Scope bombed, and they wanted to make a Popeye game but fumbled the licenses, and future company director Shigeru Miyamoto slapped together an off-brand King Kong platformer to reuse the hardware. The owners of the warehouse where they shipped them to America went nuts for it and asked them to ramp up production. One of them was Mario yes-that’s-his-namesake Segale, and the other was future Nintendo of America president
Albert EinsteinHoward Phillips.If the company had been as dysfunctional about promotion as Sega, or as arcade-focused as any other Japanese game company, Sharon might have been vindicated. At least for consoles. Home PCs were always gonna be a thing and PC games were always gonna be a thing. The UK was already buying ZX Spectrums by the truckload and teaching a generation of dorks how to make awful arcade knockoffs. Tetris hadn’t even happened yet. I doubt we’d get Commander Keen without Super Mario Bros, and then probably no Quake, no 3D cards, no GTA… but there’d still be Ultima, and Myst, and Bejeweled. Not to mention endless boring flight sims and visual novels so horny they’ll perforate your screen.