Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [79]
The new company in gaming was Nintendo’s neighbor from Redmond, Washington: Microsoft. Microsoft, the only American company of the four, launched its Xbox three days before the Gamecube. It had bought up a cadre of fine developers for first-party games, most notably Bungie, who delivered the outstanding shooter Halo: Combat Evolved. It convinced many of the big developers (EA, Konami, Midway, Tecmo) to sign up for third-party launches. Nintendo and Sony helped sign them up, too, in a way: Nintendo was late in sending out Gamecube software development kits and Sony had a shortage of PS2s. Both setbacks made the Xbox a more viable option. The Xbox launched in the United States first, a canny move, since American tech never did as well in the land of the rising sun.
Microsoft was so committed to its new console, according to Dean Takahasi’s book Opening the Xbox, it even inquired about buying Nintendo outright as a developer. Arakawa brought the idea to Yamauchi, who quashed it. Microsoft also weighed buying Sega and Square, but decided in the end to buy smaller developers for its first-party content instead of an industry big boy. It wasn’t ever a money issue; internal estimates said Microsoft was willing to sink $5 billion or $6 billion into the endeavor before expecting a profit.
This was the PlayStation all over again: a new rich kid in town with the best toys becomes the most popular. And what toys: the Xbox had a 733 MHz Intel processor, a DVD drive, and enough standard parts from PCs that it looked like a tower inside its large black case. (The black came with hints of green: green is the color of renewal.) It had an 8 GB hard drive, which cost a pretty penny, and a meaty controller that had breakaway cords for safety. Biggest of all was the Xbox Live service, letting players throw on a headset and chat with friends or strangers as they joined multiplayer games. (Coming full circle, one of Xbox Live’s data centers is in Tukwila, Washington, Nintendo’s one-time home.)
For all the innovations Nintendo has pushed for its modems over the years, online game playing was not one of them. Its games focused on single-player campaigns (see: Mario), with a multiplayer option (see: Luigi). But Microsoft came from the computer world, of Counter-Strike LAN parties and Quake and Unreal death matches. Multiplayer came first for them, so every Xbox had a free Ethernet card installed. Later games would be required to have an online component for Microsoft to release them. Xbox Live was a one-stop shop for a football match, a game of capture the flag, some boxing, racing, whatever you and your friends list wanted.
This was just Nintendo’s luck: it spends decades flailing at one idea over and over like a jar that won’t open, and tosses it aside just in time for Microsoft to claim hero status for opening it. Hey, Nintendo loosened the lid! The PS2 launched a modem as well, but it was a separate (and sometimes damnably difficult) process to connect for each new game. The Dreamcast’s modem was a big hit, but only until the PS2 and Xbox showed up. As millions more got online every year, the time was finally right for online play.
Nintendo did try to get some skin in the online game. But it cost money and took disc space to develop online content, and on a mere 1.5 GB disc (compared to 8.5 GB discs for the PS2 and Xbox) there wasn’t much room for it. Third parties weren’t stepping up to the plate either. The same vicious circle that felled Sega started to churn around Nintendo: companies leave because third-party games didn’t sell, which meant fewer third-party games, which lowered overall sales. If you wanted online play, you went to Xbox. If you wanted a variety of games, you went PS2. Only if you wanted Nintendo games did you go Gamecube.
Most gamers chose either Xbox (24 million sold), or PS2 (a staggering 141 million, still the all-time record). Gamecube (approaching 22 million) was third overall. Nintendo’s games remained solid, but if an outside company had a new game to break