Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [3]
And the biggest game maker by far was Atari, the company that put out the first rock-star megahit game, Pong, in 1972. Atari followed Pong with hit after hit—Asteroids, Tank, Lunar Lander. In 1980, it introduced two big crazes: Battlezone, a wireframe game of tank combat, and Missile Command, a Cold War nightmare where players had to see how long they could keep civilization alive while shooting down nukes raining in from the USSR. Everyone else merely treaded in Atari’s wake. It brought in untold millions every year, it was run by a hippie, and it flat-out didn’t exist ten years ago. Everyone wanted a piece of Atari’s success: it spurred the game industry for a 5 percent monthly expansion rate.
No one dreamed of beating Atari.
A six-person start-up called Nintendo of America was ahead of the pack of wannabes in one crucial way: it was already a success. Too bad that was only in Japan. A Kyoto-based playing card manufacturer since 1894, Nintendo had craftily shifted over to the toy market to capitalize on its existing distribution route for cards. Lots of other Japanese firms were selling arcade games: Pac-Man’s Namco, Frogger’s Konami, Bomberman’s Hudson Soft, and Space Invaders’s Taito. Japan’s specialty, as journalist Chris Kohler has pointed out, was personality: its good guys and bad guys were characters, of a very crude sort, instead of abstract art come to life, like Atari’s Breakout or Tempest. If everyone else could make games, so could Nintendo.
Nintendo’s most skilled inventor was Gunpei Yokoi, who had started his lifelong career with Nintendo repairing its playing-card machinery. He made a telescoping fake hand as a gag, and company president Hiroshi Yamauchi decided to market it as a toy. The “Ultra Hand” sold over 1.2 million copies in 1970, and was soon followed by novelties such as the “Ten Billion Barrel” maze, the “Love Tester” device, and a Roomba-like remote-control vacuum.
Yokoi’s most recent success was in portable electronic games. After watching a salaryman playing with an electronic calculator on a train one day, Yokoi had the idea of making small games that could run off of watch batteries. (As with the Ultra Hand, Yokoi only told the imperious Yamauchi about his game idea because he was desperate for conversation. In this case he was stuck as the boss’s chauffeur for the day.) The inventor taught himself about segment display, which let the pieces of an LCD “8,” when lit up separately, represent all ten digits. By designing a man with many hands, and only lighting up two at a time, segment display could animate a cartoon character for a game. And thanks to the pocket calculator boom, LCD was cheap to acquire. Games people were paying a hundred yen each to play on machines weighing five hundred pounds could be engineered to fit into a shirt pocket. The resulting device was called Game & Watch.
The first Game & Watch game, 1980’s Ball, was a juggling game. Players watched a ball tick back and forth from one hand to another, and pressed either the left or right button to keep it airborne. Game A was two balls, Game B three. There were five games like this for the “Silver” collection, named after the shiny color of the case. Five more “Gold” games followed in 1981. All flew off the shelves, and lots more were in the works.
This was on top of Nintendo’s other game successes. It had joined the home-Pong clones, releasing its undistinguished but popular Color TV Game 6, with a fifteen-game follow-up the following year. It had found success with 1974’s EM game Wild Gunman, tanked with the malfunctioning horseracing title EVR Race, and rebounded with its first true video arcade game, Computer Othello. Now it had a team of designers (including Yokoi) cranking out new titles every few months, cresting the faddish wave of whatever was currently gobbling up hundred-yen pieces in smoky arcades. How hard could it be to duplicate Japan’s success overseas?
Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo’s president,