All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (41 page)

Initially, Microsoft tried frantically to downplay the number of consoles that were plagued by the Red Rings of Death, so named because when the front of the console displayed three flashing red lights, the machine was unusable, fried. As the machine gave up the ghost, you’d exclaim, “Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. What fresh hell is this? I call bullshit.” It was a horrible, sinking feeling of loss. Sometimes the hard drives, with all the saved games, were wiped of information as well. Microsoft claimed a failure rate of 3 percent, but technology journalists, like VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi, reported that the problem was far more widespread. Then, of five thousand
Game Informer
readers polled, more than half said their Xbox 360s had failed. Microsoft would spend well over a billion dollars on repairs alone. While hard-core gamers loved the 360 and would remain loyal, the Red Rings of Death were a disaster of monumental proportions for Microsoft. The Xbox 360 should have been the leader, far ahead of the pack in sales because of its year-long head start in stores around the world.

Both Sony and Microsoft had shot themselves in the foot. Nintendo would make no such missteps. It was primed and ready for world domination. A weary Shigeru Miyamoto was traveling the world to talk about the joys of the Wii. He had spent years overseeing the mechanics of the product, sending the Wii remote back to the design department in Kyoto time and time again to simplify the experience.

How hard should someone have to move the remote to get it to, say, roll a ball down a virtual bowling alley? If it was too hard, Miyamoto surmised, the Wii remote would go flying out of children’s hands from the force of movement. If it was too little, the experience wouldn’t feel real.

“Not ready yet. Try again,” he would say over and over again.

Then it
was
ready. On November 19, 2006, the Wii was premiered on store shelves worldwide. The bundled Wii Sports game was a winner even though it had rudimentary graphics that weren’t even as good as the best of the last generation GameCube games. But its variations on bowling, baseball, and boxing let families everywhere use the motions of real life sports: swinging the baseball bat, rolling the bowling ball, punching with their fists. Reggie went on TV and played, sometimes losing, but always breaking into a bit of a sweat. He extolled the importance of the Wii to exercise as if it were a kind of robotic Richard Simmons. No longer would kids or young adults be couch potatoes. The Wii could engender an aerobic workout. Like Guinness, where Reggie had been head of marketing, the Wii was good for you. At a Nintendo press event in San Francisco, a well-regarded blogger from
Wired
used the Wii exercise program to get in shape prior to the press conference. Nintendo garnered the seal of approval from one of the world’s finest tech culture magazines—without paying Condé Nast one penny in advertising money.

Again, Reggie was right. Playing Wii Sports was fun for the entire family, an experience that would quiet and entice the most inebriated of annoying uncles at a Thanksgiving repast. But there was
more to the Wii than Wii Sports. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, in addition to its traditional boy-saves-girl conceit, allowed you to attack enemies as if you were swinging a real life sword. Some preferred a more solitary experience of sitting by a lake and using the remote as a fishing rod. Amazingly, the fat fish would crowd around and bite a hook that had no bait on it whatsoever, just a lure. You would sit there, thinking: “Man, this is so boring. I could be fighting a boss. I could be saving a princess … Whoa. WHOA. That’s one mother of a fish. How cool is that?” If you stuck it out and were lucky, you could bring in a thirty-five-pound Hyrulean loach, a bottom dweller that was a true fighter.

There were videos on YouTube showing black eyes that people had received while playing virtual boxing. Frantic playing had led the overenthusiastic player to release the Wii remote—into his opponent’s face. There were photos of expensive flat-screen TV sets displaying a Wii remote stuck in irreparably broken glass. Perhaps, in their must-play-now ardor, kids and adults hadn’t tightened around their wrists the strap that came with the Wii remote, even though a message on your TV screen tersely reminded you to do so before every game. Somehow, all this damage only added to the wow factor.

From Thanksgiving to Christmas, lines of parents hoping to get a Wii at stores were the norm. Sales on eBay sometimes soared to three times the retail price. By the end of the holidays in 2006, Nintendo had sold 3.2 million of its $250 machines, and there still were shortages in every country. One executive for GameStop posited that the shortages were manufactured by Nintendo itself to keep the Wii frenzy going. Of course, no one but Nintendo knew if the shortages were real, and they weren’t telling. Whatever the case, it worked; though there was lack of supply for
years
, the demand didn’t let up until the spring of 2009. And then it didn’t let up much. Even better, unlike the other boxes, for which Sony and Microsoft saw losses, Nintendo was making a profit of $40 on each Wii sold, and its stock
skyrocketed from around $25 on release day to more than $78 a share at its peak less than a year later. Nintendo hadn’t been on the top of the console heap since it sold the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and it wasn’t about to let what it saw as a healthy trend become a mere fad. The Wii became part of cultural history. It was portrayed on TV shows that wanted to seem hip. Superstar pop singer Beyoncé claimed she used Wii Fit as part of her exercise regimen. Whether she was paid to say this or not was the subject of some speculation. Barack Obama’s kids played Wii Sports too. (Obama’s people knew the value of videogames during the presidential campaign; they even advertised in Burnout Paradise, the Electronic Arts racing game, with a virtual billboard that touted the website Vote for Change.) Just as Atari did in its early days, Nintendo released specious but well-received surveys showing that the use of the Wii games in its Brain Games line made you smarter.

In May 2006, Reggie was promoted to president of Nintendo of America, where he thrived just as the Wii juggernaut thrived. Shigeru Miyamoto requested release from his management position because he disliked the constant paperwork and employee evaluations that came with the job. His new role allowed him to go back to his roots of making and overseeing games. There was a new order of marketing people in the United States, for longtimers Perrin Kaplan and George Harrison decided not to move to help start a new office in the Silicon Valley under Reggie’s edict. They quietly left the company. It was a brand-new world for Nintendo, the age of the Wii.

Incoming was a parade of marketing people to take Kaplan’s and Harrison’s place, one with a résumé that included stints at Frito-Lay and Yahoo!, another from Reebok. Neither executive knew much at all about videogames. But just as Sony had with the PlayStation, Nintendo began to believe nothing anyone could do would defeat the Wii’s supremacy. Then the backlashes began. Industry analysts began to say on background to journalists that the Wii indeed was
a fad and that people were putting their Wiis in the closet because there wasn’t much to the games. Others, like the brother of Cliff Bleszinski, the maker of the renowned Gears of War shooter series, claimed that the Wii was ruining gaming by dumbing it down. He was correct on one count: Storytelling was radically absent in many Wii games. Instead, disks were filled with up to thirty short, disjointed games of skill, like those on a carnival midway. There were hundreds of such games, and most played like clones of the others. On YouTube, there emerged tightly edited parodies of Reggie’s hand and finger movements, which he still used during speeches. But through all this, the Wii retained its domination, even during the height of the recession.

While hard-core games never really took off on the machine, three Nintendo-made games sold massively: Wii Play, which included nine mini-games like billiards and came packed with a Wiimote; Wii Fit, a fitness routine, which included a wireless balance board full of sensors to track your exercises; and Mario Kart, a speedy arcade racing game that let you play online with people from other countries. These became three of the bestselling console games of all time. Wii Play alone sold more then 25 million copies all over the world. Even as all the consoles began to feel like old technology, Nintendo was still triumphantly leading the pack—much to the consternation and occasional anger of hard-core gamers. Microsoft and Sony, who had remained loyal to the hard-core gamers with their systems, would be playing catch-up by making casual games and motion-sensitive controllers through the life cycle of the Wii.

Nintendo had gambled hugely on introducing millions of new gamers to the videogame lifestyle. And they’d gotten filthy rich, pig-in-a-sty rich, in the process. But once again things were changing. If you didn’t like Nintendo, Fils-Aime, and the Wii, you could just look to the horizon, where there stood within sight a panoply of new inventions about which everyone could become nerdily rapturous.

In the lightning-charged world of technology, evolution is quick. Your eye blinks and there’s a new game with astonishing ways of playing, a new console that’s speedier and sleeker, a new platform that brings gamers together like never before. In the early 2010s, the target is still Nintendo; the Wii still reigns supreme. But that will change when some young engineering genius, maybe the next Will Wright, gives us our next innovation. The tens are poised to become the era of 3-D, and the first experiments were with clunky glasses, serviceable for games like Batman: Arkham Asylum and Resident Evil 5. But it’s annoyingly intrusive to don glasses, especially if you’re a nerd who already wears glasses. Microsoft’s next big thing, Kinect, uses cruise missile electro-optic technology originally developed by Israeli company 3DV Systems to allow you to interact with on-screen characters
without controllers. Peter Molyneaux touted its import with his signature British panache during demonstrations at various Microsoft press events. You could throw an off-screen ball to a hyper-realistic child named Milo on the screen. The boy would “see” how you tossed it and catch it accordingly. As you watched, you thought, “Man, which world is more real, that apple-faced kid’s or mine in which I live in my living room long into the night, playing games?”

Farther beyond 3-D, there is the possibility of more massive change. Not far from a boring shopping mall in San Bruno, California, IO2 Technology manufactures what it calls the Heliodisplay. In one demonstration, inventor Chad Dyson showed that the survival horror game Sin could be displayed holographically, although not in 360 degrees. Seeing it was like stepping through a portal into the future—even though all that was displayed was two characters blinking and turning around. While the cost of the device is prohibitive at $18,500, and the technology has yet to be perfected, Heliodisplay successfully uses lasers and the condensation in the air around it to create a nearly 3-D image. Currently, however, you’d need a supercomputer to deal holographically with all the frenzied character and vehicular movement present in today’s games. But it is completely conceivable that within two decades, the progeny of Madden and Halo will be played on TVs equipped with this technology. Crytek’s CEO Cevat Yerli, the maker of the shooter Crysis 2 in 3-D, believes that holographic TVs and games will be in stores “within ten years.” Imagine that the curtains are drawn, the TV is turned on, and the videogame characters appear like three dimensional apparitions before your eyes. But when you reach out and touch, your hand moves right through them as if they are ghosts from The 7th Guest. “It’s just
so
real,” you’ll say, “so lifelike. May I just hug Lara Croft, please? Just twice? OK, all right. Just once, one long hug?”

There is one trend that shows no sign of slowing down in the future: There are so many kinds of games for so many platforms for
so many tastes, that there’s a vast wealth of choice. If Gamer Culture is a city, it’s one with many neighborhoods spreading far and wide. Nintendo with the Wii and the 3DS gives you your Mario and Zelda fix. With the PlayStation 3, Sony gives you the eye-popping God of War, its online social network called Home, unusual downloadable games, and the über popular techie next door Veronica Belmont in a Web show to which you subscribe. The Xbox 360 brings you Kinect, Halo, and Netflix. Apple’s App Store features games for the iPad and iPhone that are often worth more than the small price of admission. And your PC is your ticket to the mother of them all, World of Warcraft. It’s such an embarrassment of riches, it’s difficult to decide which platform to buy.

In some instances, the future recalls gaming’s past. Beyond the gleaming multimillion-dollar advancements, enterprising companies or even individual nerds see fit to use the consoles to distribute downloadable games and game content. Sometimes these are intensely emotional stories for hits like the post-apocalyptic psychodrama Fallout 3 and the scheming underworld criminals of Grand Theft Auto IV. Sometimes they are little strategy games whose later levels are almost impossible to solve, like PixelJunk Monsters for the PlayStation Network. Sometimes, they are relaxing experiences, things to let you breathe in and notice beauty and feel peaceful after a long day, like the game in which you grow flora during sweet dreams, Flower.