Replay: The History of Video Games (57 page)

Hey You, Pikachu!: A Nintendo fan comes face to face with the Pokémon star. Courtesy of Nintendo of America

26. All-Access Gaming

When Japan’s
newspaper readers opened their morning papers on the 21st May 1998 they were confronted with a full-page picture of a battlefield littered with slaughtered samurai. The advert posed a bold question: “Has Sega been defeated for good?”

It certainly wasn’t unthinkable. The Sony PlayStation and Nintendo 64 had crushed Sega’s Saturn console, leaving the company’s consumer division nursing losses of $242 million for the year to March 1998. But Sega already had the answer to its own question. The next day the newspapers once again showed the battlefield picture, but this time the samurai were rising to their feet to fight again. That November Sega returned to the fray with a brand new console: the Dreamcast. It would represent both a creative zenith and commercial nadir for the firm.

Sega’s internal developmenstudios pulled out all the stops for the Dreamcast. They created innovative music-games from the intergalactic dance-off
Space Channel 5
to the Latin-flavoured maraca shaking of
Samba de Amigo
. They pioneered the use of cel-shaded graphics in the Japanese urban cool of
Jet Set Radio
.
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Game designer Reiko Kodama delivered one of the best Japanese role-playing games of the early 2000s with her Jules Verne-influenced
Skies of Arcadia
. And Sega’s AM-2 team created
Outtrigger
, a rare example of a Japanese-made first-person shooter, which used the Dreamcast’s in-built modem to allow online play.

Sega also used the Dreamcast’s dial-up modem to bring the online role-playing game onto the home console with
Phantasy Star Online
. “The president of Sega at the time, Isao Okawa, was very vocal about the future of games being online,” said Yuji Naka, the head of Sega’s Sonic Team studio, which created
Phantasy Star Online
. “We chose to make an online
Phantasy Star
game because we thought the series was most suited to the online environment. Since it was my first attempt at such a big online game it was trial and error, we tested and re-tested and discarded a lot of things before coming up with the final product. It was a very different experience of game design and development.”

Set on the brightly coloured planet of Ragor,
Phantasy Star Online
was a far cry from the gloomy and dark fantasy worlds of
Ultima Online
and
EverQuest
both in terms of its visuals and in how it played. Instead of encouraging competition between players, Naka’s game encouraged players to battle Ragor’s alien monsters as a team. “I thought that in an online environment people would enjoy co-operating rather than competing and that a different approach would get players interested in the online version,” said Naka.

To help players from across the world play together, Naka developed a system that let players who spoke different languages communicate with each other using pre-defined lists of words or symbols that the game could translate instantly. As a result of Naka’s communications aids and co-operation focus,
Phantasy Star Online
boasted a sense of community between players that other more competitive online games from the time lacked.

Most ambitious of all, however, was Yu Suzuki’s 1999 game
Shenmue
. At the time of its release,
Shenmue
was the most expensive game ever made. Suzuki spent five years and at least $20 million realising his vision with the aid of an army of artists, programmers and musicians.
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Set in the Japanese city of Yokosuka in the mid-1980s, Shenmue cast players as Ryo Hazuki, a young man out to avenge the murder of his father. Its ambitious story hinged on not only on Hazuki’s sense of loss and anger, but also on Suzuki’s detailed recreation of 1980s Yokosuka, which provided a snapshot of a society at a cultural crossroads as the traditions of the past gave way to a new, modern vision of Japan.
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Suzuki gave players the freedom to explore his virtual Yokosuka, taking in the sights and sounds of ’80s Japan by taking on part-time jobs, talking with residents, eating at restaurants and visiting game centres to play Suzuki’s arcade games from era.

But for all this ambition and creativity, Sega’s efforts to convince the world to buy its console failed. When Sony released its PlayStation 2 console in March 2000 sales of the Dreamcast dried up entirely. In January 2001, a defeated Sega stopped production of the Dreamcast and reinvented itself as a publisher of games for the consoles made by its former rivals.

Two months after pulling out of the console business, Sega quietly released the Japan-only Dreamcast game
Segagaga
, a bitter epitaph to its own fall from grace.
Segagaga
challenged players to do what Sega failed to do and make the Dreamcast a success. Its designer, Tetsu Okano, used the game to lampoon both the video game industry and his employer. At every step in their battle against the faceless Dogma Corporation,
Segagaga
lectured players on the reality of the video game industry. Game developers, the player is told, are “subhuman” but an unavoidable necessity. Elsewhere business advisors urge the player to sacrifice creativity, copy their rivals and remember, at all times, that video games are just product. It was a playable polemic from a designer who worried that the creativity of the video game industry was being sidelined by the pursuit of profit and that Japan was losing its position as the world’s foremost producer of video games.

On the surface Okano’s fears about the future of the Japanese game industry seemed misplaced. Japan was still the world’s biggest consumer of video games, Japanese consoles still dominated the international gaming landscape and, starting with
Final Fantasy VII
, the Japanese role-playing game – the most popular game genre in Japan – had become internationally successful. And then there was
Pokémon
.

Pokémon
was an unstoppable video game phenomenon that had fanned out across the world like a tsunami following its Japanese debut in 1996. Images of Pikachu, the bright yellow tubby mouse-like creature with rosy-red cheeks that fronted the game, appeared everywhere converting children to its charms by the million. Although it started out as a video game,
Pokémon
had become a multimedia brand by the time it reached North America in September 1998. It was a game, an anime TV series, a trading card game and a manga comic. And, thanks to widespread merchandising, Pikachu could be found on everything from bed sheets and takeaway hot dog trays to airplanes and toy shop shelves.

Within a month of arriving in the US,
Pokémon
’s anime show had become the country’s most-watched children’s show. Within seven months more than 2.5 million
Pokémon
video game cartridges and 850,000 sets of
Pokémon
trading cards had been sold. On top
of that the hype was already building up for
Pokémon: The First Movie
, an animated feature that premiered in November 1999. It would earn more than $160 million at the box office and spawn numerous sequels. By the dawn of the year 2000, the custard-coloured Pikachu was everywhere, earning adoration from kids and befuddled glances from parents.
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Pokémon
’s journey to global domination began 10 years earlier, when Japanese game designer Satoshi Tajiri became interested in making a game based on linking together Nintendo’s handheld Game Boy consoles. “Everyone was using the link feature to compete,” he told
Time Asia
. “The idea I had was for information to go back and forth.” Tajiri’s information-sharing idea dovetailed nicely with his own interest in entomology. As a child, he had been fascinated with collecting creepy crawlies, so much so that he earned himself the nickname ‘Dr Bug’ for his obsession with beetles and other invertebrates. He envisaged
Pokémon
, a game where players set out to collect ‘pocket monsters’ that they could share with each other or use to battle creatures in other players’ collections via the Game Boy’s link cable.

Pokémon
was also Tajiri’s response to the changing attitudes to childhood in Japan. He worried that the pressure on Japanese children to study was isolating them from each other and that increased urbanisation was separating them from the natural world. He hoped
Pokémon
would help reconnect children with one another and offer them the chance to experience the joy he used to get from fishing creatures out of streams and searching for unusual beetles hiding under rocks. It took Tajiri six years to complete
Pokémon
. The result was nothing if not Japanese. Its childish ‘kawaii’ visuals owed a clear debt to Hello Kitty cuteness and manga comics, and the game itself fitted comfortably into the Japanese role-playing game mould. But with the original Game Boy in its twilight years, Tajiri’s publisher Nintendo expected
Pokémon
would fare poorly at retail. Indeed, Tajiri was surprised that Nintendo even bothered to release his game.

The simultaneous 1996 release of the first two
Pokémon
games,
Pokémon Red
and
Pokémon Green
, however, struck a chord in Japan. Within three months, more than three million
Pokémon
game cartridges had been sold and its popularity only grew from there.
Pokémon
’s international success became a tipping point for the spread of Japanese pop culture, paving the way for the rapid spread of anime and manga into North America and Europe.
Pokémon
’s global appeal became a source of national pride in Japan, a confirmation that the country was a cultural, as well as economic, power capable of influencing culture on a global scale.

Given the huge success of
Pokémon
and Japan’s continued dominance of the home console market, Okano’s view that the golden years of the Japanese gaming were over seemed out of step. But it turned out that Okano was right. Although the Japanese economy had sunk into a long drawn-out recession back at the start of the 1990s, the country’s video game industry initially seemed immune. But after peaking in 1997, video game sales in Japan began to drop. In 2002 North America overtook Japan as the world’s biggest consumers of video games, the following year European game sales edged above those in Japan.

And while sales in North America and Europe continued to grow, sales in Japan flatlined. By 2009 the UK had displaced Japan as the world’s second biggest consumer of games, after the US. Few had more to fear from this fall than Nintendo, the former king of the video game industry. While it was still enjoying spectacular profits from
Pokémon
and its Game Boy handhelds, Nintendo’s share of the home console market was melting away. The PlayStation 2 had not only wiped out Sega, but also utterly eclipsed Nintendo’s rival Gamecube console. To add to the pressure, Microsoft had just stormed into the console business with its Xbox.

Until the Xbox, Microsoft had sat on the fringes of the video game business. It had a few popular PC games to its name, most notably the
Microsoft Flight Simulator
series and the historical strategy game
Age of Empires
, but it had never really challenged the likes of Electronic Arts. It was a situation the Xbox set out to change for
good. Backed by Microsoft’s deep pockets and its flagship first-person shooter
Halo: Combat Evolved
, an elegant and dynamic burst of sci-fi action that liberated players from the confined corridors of most games of the genre, the Xbox became the first American-made games console to gain a significant share of the market since the Atari VCS 2600 in early 1980s. Microsoft managed to sell 24 million Xboxes, almost entirely in North America and Europe, just ahead of the 22 million Gamecubes sold by Nintendo.
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