The cold war may be fading, but a new global battle is just over the horizon: the struggle for video-game dominance. Opening salvos were fired last week at an otherwise uneventful Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, the garish twice-annual tribal gathering of those who sell us our gadgets. Japanese giant Nintendo still owns the high ground–their exhibit was the largest ever in the history of CES, with more than 50,000 square feet of floor space, showing everything from dozens of new games to Nintendo-labeled breakfast cereal. But Nintendo is being challenged by two companies–Sega and NEC–offering superior technology and hoping to leapfrog straight into the hearts, minds and wallets of game buffs. And a new kind of game, the handheld portable (box), has opened up another field in which Nintendo now lags.
The biggest philosophical question among manufacturers at this year’s CES: is the video game a mere toy, or a new communications medium? Nintendo clearly plots a course beyond entertainment for its machines. The firm recently funded MIT professor Seymour Papert to the tune of $3 million to develop educational software for video games. By 1991, Nintendo machines in the United States will be equipped with modems for communicating over telephone lines, allowing consumers to order stocks and shop directly from home. Says Peter Main, vice president of marketing: “We want this to be an appliance that’s in every home, school and hotel room in the country.”
Hyperbole aside, CES displayed evidence that fresh and more substantial video-game uses might emerge. A new $299 Nintendo product from Los Angeles-based Software Toolworks is a good example. The package includes a keyboard, headphones and a Nintendo cartridge. Put these together with your television, and it gives piano lessons, prompting you through difficult passages and using an on-screen display to note your errors and make suggestions. Best of all: the system can reproduce the sound of an entire orchestra, with you as soloist, whether you’re plinking away at “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” or waxing romantic on “Rhapsody in Blue.”
Tacos and tapes: But don’t worry that video games are getting gray. Consider Electronic Arts, a California company known for its innovative and brainy computer software, published on floppy disks, which require a computer to run. The lure of the $5 billion videogame industry is so great that the firm has just introduced a brace of video-game-cartridge titles, including Skate or Die 2. A witty, tongue-in-cheek sendup of California skateboard culture. Skate opens as you skate over the mayor’s dog and your situation goes downhill, so to speak, from there. Nicest (and most cynical) detail: points are won and lost in terms of CDs, tacos, fries and tapes.
A new Michael Jackson game soon to come from Sega doesn’t rank much higher on the intellectual-content scale, but it is danceable. The new Sega technology permits five Jackson hits to provide a surprisingly high-fidelity background. In fact, at several points in the game, Michael’s animated cartoon figure actually dances his enemies into exhaustion. Jackson, a videogame buff, actively assisted in the design of the game. “The man,” says Sega vice president Al Nilsen, “truly understands video games”: the animation even includes Bubbles, his chimp.
The new game machines from Sega (Genesis) and NEC (TurboGrafx-16) offer so-called 16-bit processing. That essentially means they move more data more quickly, and it results in noticeably better graphics and sound. Both machines offer power comparable to $2,000 personal computers of the mid-’80s, but are far cheaper and easier to use. That particularly pays off in sports games-boxing, basketball, football-which also appeal to an older audience capable of paying the premium ($150 plus) prices of the new hardware. Even people who now own the old games can be expected to go after the new ones. “Traditionally,” says Sega’s Michael Katz, “when there are more powerful machines, there’s a 20 percent trade-up factor in the first two years.”
More Marios: Nintendo will announce an impressive 16-bit machine in Japan this month. But it may be another year before the Super Famicom officially arrives on U.S. shores. It will probably have a different name, and as bait for buyers it will play Mario Brothers 4, the next installment of the best-selling video-game series about the bizarrely adventurous plumbers. It’s a savvy marketing move–the brothers inspire virtual fanaticism among gamesters–but buyers beware: there’s still a question as to whether the old machines will be able to play the new game.
The next front in the videogame wars is the compact disc. The same disc now popular for music can also store high-quality animation and even film clips, which are played directly on the television screen. NEC has already introduced a $399 CD add-on for its video-game system; the accessory hardware is a best seller in Japan. In the new CD-based games, human actors can play parts. The first likely commercial title: a horror-action CD game from Cinemaware called It Came From the Desert, which will combine animation with film footage in which live performers actually scream on your television. CD will ultimately provide what Bing Gordon, vice president of Electronic Arts, calls “the gold standard of video games. We want it to look like live television.”
All manufacturers report an increasing number of adult and young female players, and all are following Nintendo’s lead in extending their offerings beyond the shoot’em-up fare that once dominated video games. So here’s a prediction: Nintendo’s new Super Famicom and the next Mario Brothers game will be on sale in Japan by fall. Chances are good a black market of unauthorized imports, at thoroughly inflated prices, will crop up in this country before long. Upstart competitors notwithstanding, a bootlegged Super Famicom could turn out to be the hippest Christmas present of 1990.
