Replay: The History of Video Games (35 page)

Sonic boom: Sega’s blue hedgehog captivated millions. Pitchal Frederic / Corbis Sygma

17. Sega Does What Nintendon’t

Sega’s prospects looked bleak. The arcade game giant’s attempts to challenge Nintendo with its Master System console had ended in disaster. And now its latest home console, the Megadrive, had bombed in Japan.

When it launched in October 1988, Sega was hopeful that the Megadrive, which was based on the technology used in the company’s coin-op games, would make serious inroads into Nintendo’s dominance of the Japanese market. Despite boasting conversions of popular Sega arcade titles
such as the fighting game
Golden Axe
and the second instalment of Yuji Naka’s role-playing game series
Phantasy Star
, the Japanese had snubbed the Megadrive. Embarrassingly even NEC’s PC Engine, a NES rival launched in 1987, was outselling Sega’s flashy new system.
[1]

Confident that its superior hardware would win out in the end, Sega shrugged off Japan’s apathy towards its new console and pressed ahead with the 1989 launch of the Megadrive in North America, where the system would be called the Genesis. Few analysts believed Sega could succeed
in North America. NEC, despite mild success in Japan, had come unstuck in the US when it attempted to challenge Nintendo’s NES with the TurboGrafx-16 console, the North American version of the PC Engine. The TurboGrafx-16 sold so little in the US that NEC abandoned its plans to bring the console to Europe. NEC’s low sales were compounded by the lack of game development support for the TurboGrafx-16 outside Japan. As a result, many of the games on NEC’s console were titles designed for a Japanese audience and were ill-suited to the American market, such as
Kato-chan and Ken-chan
, a
Super Mario Bros
-esque romp starring a popular Japanese comedy duo who farted, defecated and urinated their way through the game.
[2]

Sega, at least, had its popular coin-op games to fall back on, but getting other companies to go against Nintendo and back the Genesis was an uphill struggle. Even a licensee deal offering more favourable terms failed to persuade big-name publshers to support the Genesis. Michael Katz, the head of Sega of America whose primary goal was to make the Genesis popular in the US, had faced similar problems before.

Prior to joining Sega, Katz had been in charge of marketing Atari Corporation’s 7800 ProSystem, its unsuccessful attempt to challenge the NES. “Atari couldn’t get the hot arcade titles,” said Katz. To try and plug the gap, Katz arranged for the hottest home computer game titles to be converted to the 7800 ProSystem. The approach failed. Katz decided to try a different approach for the Genesis. “I thought we should go after personality licences, especially in sports,” said Katz. “It was very hard to get support from third-party publishers for the Genesis. That’s one of the reasons we needed strong personality licences, because then we could woo guys into doing a football or baseball or basketball game because they knew we had a good personality licence attached that would give it good volume and they would know we were going to put good amounts of TV behind it.”

First on Katz’s shopping list was Joe Montana, the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers and one of the most valuable American football players at the time. Sega paid $1.7 million for the rights to create American football video games bearing the sports star’s name for the next five years and hired Mediagenic, the company formerly known as Activision, to create its
Joe Montana Football
game. It was to be Sega’s flagship Christmas game for the Genesis. “Sega needed a football game and fast. We saw the beginning of what looked like one at Mediagenic so I asked if they could do it for us and we paid them a lot of money,” said Katz.

With
Joe Montana Football
under way, Katz formulated a marketing plan designed to take Nintendo head on. He decided to position the Genesis as a console for teenage boys, figuring that the children who grew up playing cheery and cute Nintendo games would want something more edgy now they were entering puberty. The Genesis would, he decided, be pitched as the console Nintendo owners “graduated” to, an argument Sega’s line-up of arcade hits and sports games was well placed to reinforce. Katz then decided to ram the message home with an advertising campaign that attacked Nintendo directly. “The Japanese would never do competitive commercials,” said Katz. “They thought they were in bad taste in terms of business ethics, but we convinced them that was what we needed since we were against Nintendo. So it became ‘Sega does what Nintendon’t’.”

But within a month of the Genesis’ August 1989 launch, Sega discovered its crucial Christmas game was in trouble. “Each month we were checking on the game, but we weren’t doing a very good job of checking it and/or we were being deceived,” said Katz. “Mediagenic weren’t nearly as far ahead on the game as we thought they were. We found out in September that the game wasn’t going to be finished. I was in a bind. I owed Joe Montana $1.7 million and we were counting on a game for Christmas.”

With time running out, Katz turned to Electronic Arts for help. Since its formation back in 1982, Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins had aspired to make the company a leading producer of sports games. “My personal desire to make authentic sports simulations was the primary reaso
n that I founded Electronic Arts in the first place,” said Hawkins, whose interest in sports games stemmed from his love of Strat-O-Matic’s dice-based sports games.
[3]
“I would watch games on TV and then want to go outside and run around and pretend to be my sports heroes. Then I wanted to be them in Strat-O-Matic, but I couldn’t get that many of my friends excited about it because it was too complicated. When I saw my first computer I realised I could put all the computation and administrative stuff in the computer and just put nice graphics on a TV screen. I figured the more we made it look like TV the more people would be able to relate to it.”

Sports games had come a long way since the early 1970s, when text-only statistical sims and
Pong
clones disguised as sports titles ruled. By the early 1980s, advances in graphics technology had encouraged game designers to explore new ways of representing sport in video games. Some experimented with views from the stands, such as Texas Instruments’
Indoor Soccer
, or bird’s eye views of the pitch as in
Atari Football
, but more game designers took their inspiration from TV sports coverage.

Don Daglow and Eddie Dombrower were among the first to follow the example of TV with their 1983 Intellivision game
World Series Baseball
, which fused the statistical backbone of Daglow’s text-only
Baseball
with action viewed from TV-inspired angles. “Sports simulations started with no graphics, so we started to get the maths and the simulation part right first because that was all we had,” said Daglow. “Then game designers started integrating graphics and had to explore the trade-off between mathematical accuracy and graphical display. On
World Series Baseball
we started imitating TV coverage. That game came out of wanting to mimic the way television covered baseball and watching a baseball game one day and realising I knew how to make the Intellivision do that.”

The viewpoints used in TV coverage had significant advantages, said Daglow: “TV coverage has always experimented with trying to find the best camera angle that gives you the best close up, but still lets you follow the action, because the players are recognisable rather than specks in the field. It’s the best trade off between showing the action and portraying human beings.”

As the 1980s progressed, game designers continued to explore the fusion of mathematical simulation and TV presentation pioneered by Daglow and Dombrower. And, as game makers sought to increase the realism of their sports games, they began to include real-life sports stars, starting wit
h Electronic Arts’ 1983 basketball game
Julius Erving and Larry Bird Go One-on-One
, and more managerial elements such as training your virtual sportspeople.
[4]
These ideas and more came together in Daglow and Dombrower’s
Earl Weaver Baseball
. As well as bearing the name of and design input from the former Baltimore Orioles manager, the 1987 Amiga game simulated baseball in incredible statistical detail while also pushing the TV-style coverage to new heights with slow-motion instant replays and computerised commentary. “
Earl Weaver
was a case where machines had become more powerful,” said Daglow. “It was originally conceived for the Amiga and we now had the power to do split screen so we could show the batter and the pitcher on one side of the screen and the field on the other, so you could actually see the players in detail.”

The leap in visual capabilities also meant Daglow and Dombrower had to pay attention to the skin colour of the baseball players. “When you had four colours to choose from everybody is going to look the same and no-one’s going to think anything about it,” said Daglow. “But when you get to the point when you’ve got that many colours and that big a human figure, you can’t have an African-American pitcher and a white pitcher look the same. At the time I was concerned because I felt anything else was going to be disrespectful and that there could be negative feedback. Ironically, we ended up getting tremendous support from the community precisely for having acknowledged race in a game. At the time I felt we were taking chances, but I ended up feeling very proud of the responses we got.”

The following year Cinemaware took the union of TV coverage with sports games to its logical conclusion with
TV Sports Football
, a title that offered all the razzmatazz associated with broadcasts of American football matches. “I saw that people related to sports through television and that the way to do it was to emulate the TV broadcasts,” said Cinemaware founder Bob Jacob. “We had scores, the half-time show, we had marching bands, adverts. We had everything.”

In the same year that
TV Sports Football
came out, Hawkins tried once again to realise his dream of making the best sports video games with
John Madden Football
, a American football title endorsed by the former Oakland Raiders coach turned sports commentator. Electronic Arts’ first effort, created on the Apple II, was a dud. Compared to the showbiz trappings of
TV Sports Football
and the depth of
Earl Weaver Baseball
it was an underwhelming effort that only offered full-size teams because Madden himself intervened when he discovered that the developers planned to make it a six- or seven-a-side game. “The first version was exceptionally crude,” admitted Roger Hector, the Electronic Arts producer who oversaw the game once Hawkins decided to concentrate on other projects. Scott Orr, the founder of GameStar, felt it was dull. “It emphasised strategy over action,” he said. “Unfortunately, the graphics – even by Apple II standards – were unimpressive and the game play was boring. Not surprisingly sales were disappointing too.”

“Madden became known around Electronic Arts as ‘Trip’s folly’,” said Hawkins. “Everyone other than me thought the project should be killed. The accountants insisted that all the money, including Madden’s advance, be written off as unrecoupable. But I am a determined fellow and eventually got it right.”

At Hawkins’ insistence Electronic Arts tried again with
John Madden Football
. To help reboot the series it handed control of the project over to Rich Hilleman, who had just finished producing the company’s 3D racing simulation
Indianapolis 500: The Simulation
. Hilleman immediately brought in veteran sports game designer Orr, who had sold GameStar to Activision in 1988, as the lead designer. While Hilleman and Orr set about rebooting the game, Sega’s Katz called Hawkins pleading for help. “I called him up and asked him did he have any back up Madden football games we could use under the Montana name,” said Katz.

Up to that point Electronic Arts had focused on home computers. It distrusted Nintendo’s dominance of the console market and had made minimal effort to expand into the NES game business. “Part of Trip Hawkins’ original founding vision was that the future of gaming would be on PCs, not consoles,” said Hector. “At the time I joined Electronic Arts, they were committed to this strategy and to speak otherwise was heresy.”