Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [43]
Then, like the dawning of a new day, came the Genesis. Called the Mega Drive in Japan when it was released in 1988, it was a 16-bit system, allowing for exponentially better graphics, sound, and—most crucially—speed. More than sixty possible colors, eighty movable sprites on screen at a time, and a resolution rate that was actually slowed so that the processor could have more juice for faster animation.
Any 1988 console would (and should) be leaps and bounds better than the NES, which was five years old. The paradox of launching a game system was how to attract third-party support when they would only make games for a system with a big install base . . . which of course would only happen with third-party support. Sega was having little luck attracting vendors to design for their great machine. Nintendo had inserted exclusivity clauses for all of its third-party designers, to starve any possible competitor. If they released a Genesis game, they’d be breaching their contract.
Furthermore, Nintendo wouldn’t let companies make their own products: everything was made by Nintendo, to further its control of distribution. This micromanagement came to a head during a chip shortage in Japan, where Nintendo both slashed orders down to a fraction of their size and forbade companies from finding their own U.S. or European chips. Those who complained could see their chip allotment cut further, and fewer mentions in Nintendo Power. Making your business partners codependently kiss your ring in exchange for such paltry treatment was a recipe for misery, and game makers no doubt hoped Sega would offer an escape hatch from the draconian Nintendo.
The Genesis sold for $189, nearly double the NES price. It was backwards compatible with the Master System, not much of a feature since few in America had one. In Japan, it wasn’t doing particularly well: it was third, behind the NES and then NEC’s Turbo-Grafx 16. The TG-16 was very popular in Japan—it had a 16-bit graphics chip before the Genesis did—but it cheated with an 8-bit microprocessor and wasn’t as robust a machine. Still, Nintendo’s and NEC’s market advantage of being there first and building a customer base shut Sega out. (The Genesis and the TG-16 launched in the United States around the same time: the Genesis’s superior games would essentially end NEC’s chance of American success. It ranked a distant fourth in the U.S. market.)
Sega made bold moves to win over American audiences, which in toto would achieve so much success that any claims of Nintendo’s coercive monopoly would crumble. It allied with Tonka to distribute its systems. It called out Nintendo by name in its ads, running sideby-side pictures that Sega’s Japanese exec thought were in bad taste. It made its own series of sports games, paying out millions to the biggest names in the field—Joe Montana, Tommy Lasorda, Arnold Palmer, Pat Riley, and (in a possible bid for industrial sabotage) hockey’s Super Mario Lemieux—for their names and likenesses. (Nintendo had stayed far away from athlete licensing ever since Mike Tyson was accused of spousal abuse.) It lured computer game giant Electronic Arts, which Nintendo had never hired, to make Genesis games. Sega even hired the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, for a beat-em-up called Moonwalker. It happily sold its games to Blockbuster.
And, in 1991, it unleashed its Sonic boom. Sonic the Hedgehog was a new genre of game, a mix of racing game and platformer. Sonic’s goal was ostensibly the same as Mario’s: trek from one end of the world to the other, while picking up all the goodies. But while Mario’s focus was on replaying each level until all the treasures were found, Sonic’s was on lightning-quick reflexes and the adrenaline rush of caroming up hills, through loop-de-loops, around lateral twists, and then banging into pinball bumpers to do it all again backward. Sonic used only one button, jump. This was done to simplify game play—Mario and his wardrobe of costumes seemed baroque by comparison. Even Sonic’s jump was literally sharp. He spun