| AsiaPop: A look at cultures across the sea/ Ben Freund One-Up: Asian innovation gave video games an extra life |
| In the '90s, the personality recognized by American children more than any other wasn't Bugs Bunny, not Elmo, not even Mickey Mouse. It was Mario, the plumber who presides over the one arena in which Asian influences, both technologically and creatively, are not interesting footnotes in the development of American culture, but rather the defining standard. That arena is the virtual one, video games, where Japanese giants like Nintendo, Sega and Sony have deflected all western competition for two decades, earning the greatest share of the multi-billion dollar industry and a reputation for innovation in the young and controversial medium. Although Japan is the birthplace of the Sega Genesis, the true genesis of video games is American- the very first was the "Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device," created in 1947. The goal of the game was to navigate a dot representing a missile to a small circle representing a target. Technology marched forward, shrinking with each step and by the 70's, games had made the move from titanic computer mainframes in universities to phone-booth-sized, coin-operated 'arcade' machines, which became common fixtures in bars and shopping malls. In 1972, the Magnavox Odyssey became the first portable video game 'console' to display games on home televisions. The Odyssey spawned several competing platforms; the most successful was the Atari 2600 released in 1977. Atari's arcade and console games led the video game industry to immense success and popularity for six years- and then destroyed it completely. Consumers suffered from a lack of quality control; game cartridges were made by any company with a programmer and a desire for a quick buck. All of them were expensive and most of them were riddled with bugs, lacking in longevity or simply no fun. In 1983, the industry collapsed under the weight of a particularly abysmal game based on Steven Spielberg's blockbusting boy-meets-alien epic E.T. Anticipating sales that reflected the success of the film, Atari paid more than $20 million for licensing rights and produced 4 million cartridges. E.T. was to be the flagship title for the holiday season./ Unfortunately, nobody had bothered to play the game before launching the marketing hype, perhaps because the programmer was given only five weeks to make it. E.T. is today remembered as one of the worst video games of all time, a joyless exercise in slowly guiding a digital alien into and out of an endless succession of featureless pits. Sales of all consoles and cartridges plummeted, and eventually several semi-trailers full of unsold E.T. cartridges were shipped to a landfill in New Mexico and buried under a layer of concrete, never again to befoul the air of our nation with their digital effluence. But in a developing industrial nation across the sea, a fresh wind was blowing. A company established in 1889 as a producer and distributor of playing cards was seeking opportunities for expansion. That company, Nintendo, had recently tried and failed at running a taxi service, producing vacuum cleaners, and managing seedy 'love hotels,' and decided to develop more products that would make use of the extensive distribution channels to toy stores created by their century-old playing card business. Nintendo had already produced some simple electronic games, like a 'light gun' that activated targets from a distance to simulate target shooting, and had an arcade hit with a game called Donkey Kong. With the help of the star engineers that had created these novelties for them, Nintendo designed a console to fill the void left by the collapse of Atari and its kin; this time for the Japanese market which had not been tainted by the opportunistic cashing-in of incompetent and unethical game publishers. The Nintendo Famicom (or Family Computer) included a lockout chip to prevent unlicensed developers from producing games for the system and Nintendo underscored this exclusivity by placing a 'seal of quality' on all approved games. Nintendo rejected the single-programmer philosophy of the west by organizing three development teams, each headed by one of the company's best engineers and dedicated to producing a small number of high quality games rather than the glut of cheap, quickly-produced knockoffs that defined the American market. Approved third-party developers were encouraged to do the same by limiting them to five games a year. The Famicom's release in 1984 was such an incredible success that Nintendo decided to introduce it in America despite the widely held belief that console-based video games were dead and would live on only in personal computers. To whet the American appetite for the new console, the renamed Nintendo Entertainment System was originally sold in a packaged bundle with a robot-shaped accessory named R.O.B. who jerkily moved in response to action on the screen. R.O.B.'s antics were almost entirely superfluous to any of the system's games, but he allowed Nintendo to market their new console as a 'robot toy,' a far more attractive proposition to retailers than a 'video game' like the ones they had struggled to get off their shelves only two years before. The NES took off, and for the next 20 years, innovative, quality-oriented Japanese companies continued to outpace American upstarts at every turn. The 3DO retailed for a laughable $700 with games costing $200 in 1991, and Atari's resurrection in the form of the Jaguar performed the remarkable hat trick of having fewer games than the competition, of lower quality, running on buggy hardware. Finally, the most serious players in the American electronics business are catching on. In 2001, Microsoft released its Xbox to compete with the Nintendo GameCube and Sony PlayStation 2. The software behemoth has invested billions into research, development, production, and promotion of its system. The popularity of the new Xbox 360 places Microsoft in close competition with Nintendo as it closes in on reigning champion Sony, but even that impressive accomplishment doesn't represent financial success. To assure the technological superiority of their product without scaring off consumers with prohibitive expense, Microsoft actually loses more than $100 on every sale of the $400 console, and in the five years of Xbox history, the project has only had one profitable quarter. But Microsoft can afford to wait as long as it takes for their investment to pay off. American consoles and games may return to domination of the market- only two of the ten top-selling video games in 2005 came from Japanese developers, and every other game in the top ten was based on the American institutions of football, baseball, basketball and Star Wars. It's no surprise that as the medium evolves and reaches a larger audience, demand for games that speak to American backgrounds and tastes in ways that Japanese games can't will increase. But Japan retains its reputation as the source of the most bizarre and original examples of interactive entertainment, turning out quirky gems like the colorful exploration/garbage collection action in Katamari Damacy, the shifting landscapes which manipulate the stationary protagonist of Loco Roco, and the law simulation Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney which actually requires players to yell "I object!" at the screen. |