Replay: The History of Video Games (28 page)

Nintendo’s attention to detail became clear when Beam submitted
Aussie Rules Footy
, a NES game aimed at the Australian market, for the Japanese giant’s approval. “One of the quirks about Australian Rules Football is that in the real game you can keep the ball in play if the ball is inside the line, even if the player holding the ball is over the line,” said Milgrom. “Nintendo actually picked up a situation where the player went over the line but wasn’t called out. So we said ‘well, here’s the rule’, but you wouldn’t expect this to come up as a bug. It was just so meticulous.”

Nintendo’s hawk-like examination of its licensees’ games didn’t stop there. Keen to avoid controversy or another
Custer’s Revenge
, Nintendo produced an extensive list detailing what game publishers could not put in a NES games. The rules echoed both the Hays Code, which policed the films of Hollywood from 1934 to 1968, and the 1954 Comics Code. The Hays Code emerged in response to a spate of scandals in the 1920s that earned Hollywood the nickname ‘Sin City’. Enacted by Will Hays, the head of the movie business trade association and a campaign manager for US President Warren Harding, the code was actually written by the Catholic Father Daniel Lord. The Hays Code banned sex, drug use, nudity, swearing, positive portrayals of criminals and the ridicule of religion. Its rules encouraged Hollywood to spend three decades creating innocent fantasies or moralistic parables where the bad guys were always punished for their crimes.

The Comics Code was born out of a political row about adverts for porn, drug paraphernalia and weapons in comics that coincided with increasing public disquiet about gore, violence and sexual content of comic bo
oks. The Comics Code took its cues from The Hays Code. It banned cannibalism, zombies, torture, sex and werewolves. It required that “in every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal be punished for his misdeeds” and demanded that judges, government, police and other respected institutions were not treated in a negative way. Many of Nintendo’s restrictions could have been lifted directly from the Hays Code. Nintendo prohibited graphic depictions of death, the Hays Code barred studios from showing brutal killings in detail. Both barred sex, nudity, random or gratuitous violence, criticism of religion and illegal drug use. Nintendo also banned games from featuring tobacco and alcohol, and prohibited sexist and racist content. The NES remake of the ultra-violent, anti-drugs
Narc
played down the drug references and removed the blood from the original coin-op game. “The game was watered down to almost unrecognisable levels,” said the arcade version’s creator Eugene Jarvis. Jaleco was forced to remove nude Greek statues from its NES version of Lucasfilm Games’
Rocky Horror Show
-inspired adventure game
Maniac Mansion
.
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Even Miyamoto couldn’t escape the censors. His 1984
Pac-Man
clone
Devil World
was refused a US release because it featured demons, Bibles and crucifixes – a breach of the rules of the treatment of religious imagery.

But Nintendo’s code differed from the Hays Code and Comics Code in its motivations if not content. Nintendo’s rules did not emerge in response to public or political pressure but more from an expectation of controversy at a later stage. It was also a unilateral censorship code rather than one agreed to the video game industry as a whole – as was the case with the movie and comic industries with the Hays Code and Comics Code.

Few game publishers minded. Most were happy to trade creative and business freedom for the huge profits to be made from NES games. As in Japan, much of the US video game industry was now subject to the will of one company alone. Nintendo’s competitors Atari Corporation and Sega watched their 7800 ProSystem and Master System consoles get savaged in the retail market and starved of games as Nintendo licensees decided it was safer not to jeopardise their relationship with the increasingly monolithic Nintendo by flirting with the opposition. “I couldn’t get any arcade exclusives on the 7800 because Nintendo had exclusive agreements – formalised or not,” said Katz. “We couldn’t get the hot arcade games for the 7800. So I thought I should try and get the hottest titles from the old computer game companies. It was the only strategy we could employ.”

By 1989 Nintendo products accounted for 23 per cent of all toys sold in the US. Macy’s and Toys R Us devoted whole sections of their store to Nintendo, shrines to the new messiah of video gaming.
Nintendo Power
, Nintendo’s promotional magazine, became the US’s biggest-selling children’s magazine with a monthly circulation in the region of five million copies. Nintendo’s premium rate helpline for players wanting tips on how to beat games was taking more than 50,000 calls a week. And there was enough Nintendo merchandising for fans to literally eat, sleep, drink, dress and study shrouded in Nintendo branding. There were Mario cereals, Zelda trunks, Nintendo notebooks, wallpaper, bed sheets, rulers, tennis shoes, birthday cake pans, portable radios and soft toys.

Nintendo’s success did, however, make it a target for Americans upset about the growing influence of Japan on the US – a concern that peaked at the end of the 1980s when the NES was at its zenith. After defeating it in the Second World War, the US set about turning Japan into a democratic free market outpost in As. The US bankrolled improved infrastructure, helped Japan gain membership of international trade associations and encouraged US companies to share technology with the Japanese. It also sought to make it easier for Japanese companies to sell their products in the US by reducing trade barriers and agreeing a fixed exchange rate between the yen and the dollar. Japan, meanwhile, introduced protectionist laws that kept foreign firms out of Japan and helped kill off Atari Japan.

By the end of the 1970s Japan was being described as an “economic miracle” and, aided by low wages, Japanese corporations were making massive in-roads into the US market at the expense of American manufacturer
s. Many Americans hated this. They saw Japan’s protectionism and the US’s openness as an unequal arrangement that was destroying American companies and jobs.
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But despite the domestic pressure, the strategic importance of Japan as a Cold War ally often caused attempts to address the issue to be sidelined. Measures such as US President Richard Nixon’s decision to restrict Japanese TV imports only made matters worse by encouraging Japanese companies to open US factories or buy out US businesses. Nowhere was the row about Japanese influence more fraught than in the debate about the car industry. The US car industry was more than a collection of business to Americans; it was a symbol of national economic virility. So as Japanese companies made in-roads at the expense of iconic companies such as General Motors and Ford, the anger boiled over. There were incidents of people smashing up Toyotas, while others made patriotic appeals for people to buy American motors.
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Wild-eyed commentators compared Japan’s economic success in the US to a “second Pearl Harbour”.

To some, Nintendo’s success was just another example how American business was being crushed by Japan’s economic steamroller. For Nintendo, however, the anti-Japanese feeling only came to a head when Washington State senator Salde Gorton asked if the company would buy the Seattle Mariners baseball team to prevent it moving out to Florida. Yamauchi, hoping to give something back to the country that had made Nintendo so huge, used $60 million of his own money to buy a majority stake in the club. Yamauchi didn’t even like baseball. “Baseball has never really interested me,” he told reporters at the time.

He explained it as returning a favour to the US that helped make Nintendo one of the world’s most profitable companies. Furious baseball fans did not see it that way, however. They saw it as another example of t
he Japanese buying America.
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Nintendo found itself the latest focus of anti-Japanese sentiment. A poll conducted at the time found 61 per cent of Americans wanted the Japanese out of Major League Baseball. When news of the row reached Japan, Yamauchi found himself being criticised by the Japanese for inflaming American ill feeling. Japan was well aware of anti-Japanese sentiment in America at the time. One Japanese company, SystemSoft, even responded with a video game called
Japan Bashing
, where, as the Americans, the player’s goal is to change Japan by trying to make the Japanese eat wheat or to stop hunting whales. The computer-controlled Japan, meanwhile, fights back by trying to turn hamburgers on the US coast into sushi.

Nintendo faced other sources of criticism as well. Its huge success prompted accusations that the company was engaging in monopolistic practices that stifled competition. However, the attempts to challenge Nintendo on these grounds in the courts came to nothing. Health campaigners, meanwhile, blamed Nintendo for making American kids fat. The National Coalition on Television Violence released figures in November 1988 suggesting 83 per cent of NES games were violent in nature.

More troubling for Nintendo was the work of Eugene Provenzo Jr., the professor of education at the University of Miami. Provenzo had become fascinated by Nintendo’s huge success and noticed there was very little research into video games from a cultural perspective. He decided to conduct one of the earliest studies of video games examining the portrayal of gender and violence within the 47 highest-selling NES games.

“My colleagues thought I was a lunatic and crazy to be working in this area,” he said. “I got kind of stubborn and really got fascinated with it and thought this was a very important emerging phenomenon. They sort of humoured me.” Provenzo started looking for funding. The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, which funds studies into new media and violence, was his first port of call. “They kinda laughed me out of the place. I went to the Spencer Foundation, the US Department of Education. They all basically said ‘charming, but who would possibly care about this?’. Bear in mind at that, at the time, the notion of looking at film sources, new media and popular culture as an area of serious research wasn’t there yet, least of all looking at it in terms of kids’ culture.”

Provenzo finished his book
Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo
off his own back and sent it to Harvard University Press. “I sent it in on a Thursday and I got a telephone call, which was very unusual, on Monday morning,” he said. “The editor basically said this is a breakthrough book.” In his book Provenzo accused many of the NES games he examined of promoting aggression and containing racist and sexist stereotypes. His work marked the start of academic study of video games, but it was not the kind of conclusion the game industry, and Nintendo especially, wanted to hear. “The game industry was extremely hostile afterwards,” he said. “Nintendo of America’s publicity office and legal office were intimidating enough that the original title of the book was going to be
The World According to Nintendo
, which is the Nintendo motto, but the publisher decided they didn’t want to take the risk.”

The criticism, however, did little to detract from Nintendo’s success and, with North America and Japan wrapped up, Nintendo turned its attentions to Europe. The NES started to arrive in Europe in 1986, but Nint
endo’s lack of a European office and patchy distribution, meant the console only really started to appear in most countries during 1987. By then, however, European game players were aspiring to own one of the new home computers such as the Commodore Amiga or Atari ST – machines that offered visuals no NES game could match. The four-year-old NES just looked old hat compared to the work of game developers such as the UK’s Bitmap Brothers.
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The NES and its games were also expensive for a continent weaned on that budget games costing as little as £1.99 and dirt-cheap home computers. “When Nintendo originally exhibited the NES nobody was very impressed with it compared to Amiga and stuff like that,” said David Darling, co-founder of British budget game publisher Codemasters. “It looked really quite old technology, the cartridges were expensive and no-one in the industry could foresee it as being a success.”

The terms of Nintendo’s NES licences also shocked the freewheeling European game industry. “It was restriction of trade. I still find it totally amazing,” said Geoff Brown, the founder of US Gold – one of Europe’s largest publishers at the time. “It not only told you how many products you could put on that format, it also says Nintendo has to see it in advance. They approved the release of them when they are your biggest competitor. It was incredibly expensive to manufacture and you couldn’t manufacturer it yourself. It was a total lock down of the format. I just thought it was outrageous. If I want to make a game for a console and it’s terrible and I want to spend the money it’s my problem, not theirs. I wasn’t alone in this, there was a negativity amongst publishers – they didn’t want to support it.”

Others saw it as a creative affront. “It would have been impossible for us to develop a creation such as
Captain Blood
on a console because we would never have obtained the concept approval,” said Philippe Ulrich, the founder of French game publisher Ere Informatique. Not that Nintendo cared. It already had the cream of Japanese and American games for its console and saw little need to pander to the game publishers of Europe. “They couldn’t care less,” said Brown. “They didn’t really need regular UK publishers. They had brilliant games of their own. We didn’t go to them and they didn’t come to us.”