The history of video games: Part 4

I think it's about time to go ahead and officially declare this video game week. Trying to get people excited for my book and keeping it focused on video games will be the goal this week. Sports, TV, movies, people I don't like, and relentless droning about the process of writing comedy will be back next week. But for now, it's time for the fourth section: the 32-bit era where companies got the idea that the video game market could sustain 7,854 different consoles. That will make this section quite long.

(Please note that I just recently received a rejection e-mail for a $9.60/hr. customer service job, which really just reaches all new levels of post-collegiate failure. I thought this was cosmic punishment because of my storied lifelong history of being a complete and total prick, but then I got on facebook and found that somebody I know, who's such a bigger asshole than me that his profile is nothing but bitching about poor people stealing his hard-earned money and his status even reads, "M***** K*** hopes you choke on your free lunch" was bragging about an awesome new opportunity he got at a recording studio. I know for a fact his parents had enough money that he went through college without ever needing a job, and nobody understands the situation with the poor better than well-off white people in their early 20's. If that monkey fucker is getting what he wants, at least I know god isn't punishing me for being a jerk. Anyways, I'll try to refrain from crying throughout this post.)

Panasonic 3DO


The 3DO, released in 1993, was one of the first CD-based gaming consoles. It featured various advanced features, had amazing looking games, and had heavy promotion as Time Magazine's Product of the Year in 1994. The only tiny problem was that it cost 700 FUCKING DOLLARS. And remember that we aren't talking about 700 today dollars, we're talking about 700 dollars circa 1993. Adjust for inflation and you get approximately $Whothehellwouldbuythis?.53. Despite the press and powerful features, not enough socialites who want you to choke on your free lunch sent their manservants to the store to buy enough units to make this one a hit.

Phillips CD-i

No, I didn't just take a picuture of an ancient DVD player. This is what that piece of shit actually looked like.

The CD-I, released in 1991, wasn't exactly a gaming console in the truest sense, as it played mostly audio CDs, educational titles, and other types of software. A serious attempt to succeed as a pure gaming console wasn't mounted until well after the Playstation and Nintendo 64 debuted, so its shot at success in the industry was over before it began. However, the CD-I did gain attention for having Zelda and Mario games despite it not being a Nintendo console. The games themselves were terrible, but they became legendary for their full motion video sequences. The scenes from the Mario game were legendary for their horrifying nature and capacity to give children nightmares, and the scenes from the Zelda games were legendary for their ass-throbbing gayness. The videos were so hilariously awful that there's an entire online community essentially built around editing clips from the games together in new and hilarious ways and posting them on Youtube. Despite endless critical praise and sparkling sales figures, Super Mario Galaxy sure as shit can't claim that.

I don't know what the fuck is going on, but I'm pretty sure it's funny

Sony Playstation

You might start to become tired and irritated by the fact that these blurbs are focused on savaging crappy consoles and singling out a single lowpoint of the good ones, and you might wonder why there's so much negativity. You want something positive? Here we go. Sony's first console, released in 1995, offered unmatched affordability in hardware and software, featured incredible sound and excellent graphics, a huge game library packed with excellent games in every imaginable genre, and a CD and memory card system that allowed developers to create games of limitless length and scope. The Playstation was a truly first-rate console that combined smart technology with excellent relations with third-party developers to give Sony extremely well-deserved dominance over the marketplace. There. See how fucking boring that was? Let me go back to being as irrationally mean as I want.

Atari Jaguar


Yet another gaming console released in the early 90's, this console was a part of an incredibly flooded market that also included the SNES, Genesis, Nintendo 64, 32X, Sega CD, Saturn, TurboGrafx-16, Playstation, 3D0, and CD-I. In a market that can support three consoles at the most, large amounts of humiliating failures were inevitable, and this is why this section contains so many tales of gaming train wrecks from this period. The Jaguar may be hands down the biggest. The console was best known for its ergonomically retarded controller shaped like a large square board with a fucking square grid of buttons, and the worst library of games in the history of the industry.

Sam Cassell has shit prettier things than this game

Comedian, writer, and just all-around amazing gaming personality Sean "Seanbaby" Reiley (who I steal 90% of my jokes and 100% of my irreverent 'tude from) once said that if a list of the twenty worst games of all time was to be accurate, it would be "19 Atari Jaguar games and the Atari 2600's god damn E.T." The whole sad saga wrapped up with a completely insane magazine interview with former Atari president Sam Tramiel who (very, very, very wrongly) insisted that the Jaguar was more powerful than the Saturn and close to par with the Playstation, and he went on to threaten to raise legal hell if Sony dared to *gasp* release the Playstation at an affordable price.

Sega Saturn

The 1995 launch of the Saturn served as more proof that sometime in the early 90's, every important executive at Sega died and was replaced with ten-year old children experimenting with huffing paint. The console was originally announced to launch on September 2nd. In response Sony announced the Playstation was to launch on September 9th. Sega then tried to pull a fast one and staged a surprise attack by suddenly releasing the console four months early in hopes of getting a head start on Sony. It's a good idea in theory, except they forgot to tell the media, third-party developers, or the public. No developers had games ready because they were still working toward a September 2nd deadline, and the public had no idea the Saturn was out. Sega learned the hard way that a surprise attack didn't work because they were trying to grab the attention of millions of consumers and sell them a product with lots of quality software ready to go, not commit rape.

Sega CD and 32X

The release of these expensive add-ons represented the point that many people started to wonder if all you needed to do to run a massive gaming company in Japan in the 90's was drink a bunch of 2-liter bottles of Pepsi and send in the caps. If that were true it would only be the 79,563rd strangest aspect of Japanese culture. In the early 90's Sega thought it would be a great idea to add two more consoles to a market that was already absurdly crowded, and fragment their user base in the process. In a development a retarded wombat could see coming, putting significant resources into the development of games for expensive consoles that only a small fraction of your user base has results in less money than making games fucking everyone can play. The debacle started Sega on a downward slide that knocked it out of the hardware business a few years later. The greatest travesty of the failure of these add-ons is that the amazing Sega CD game Snatcher was played by virtually no one. And no, Snatcher is not a Custer's Revenge-type sex game.

Nintendo 64

Most people believe that Nintendo fucked up when they pissed off every third-party developer on earth by making a console with cartridges that limit the length of a game, a crappy sound processor that limits the amount of recorded speech in a game, and a graphics processor that rendered a realistic-looking graphical style really motherfucking difficult and was much better suited to cartoonish graphics, all of which drove those developers to the Playstation. I offer a counter-theory: Nintendo is filled with friggin' geniuses. I believe to this day that Nintendo intentionally alienated all third-party developers. By making a console that no self-respecting developer wanted any part with, they insured that the only worthwhile games on the N64 would be made by Nintendo themselves.

When a Nintendo game is released on a Nintendo console, 100% of the profits go to Nintendo. That wasn't the case with the Playstation, where most of the hit games were made by third-party companies. Final Fantasy 7 sold millions of copies, but a lion's share of those profits went to Squaresoft. With no worthwhile Non-Nintendo games coming out for the N64, there was no competition. Super Mario 64, Super Smash Brothers, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time might not have sold near as many copies if they were up against the best that Konami, Capcom, Squaresoft, and Namco had to offer. Software sales mattered a lot more to Nintendo than hardware sales because cartridges were so fucking expensive that three cost more than a brand new N64 did at launch, so they had a lot of incentive to insure that their games and only their games were being sold. Most people say that the non-existent third-party support was by far the 64's biggest downfall when it was actually its greatest asset. It says something about Nintendo's greatness as a developer that they could be arrogant enough to think that their games are so good that enough people will buy a machine that only plays their games to turn a huge profit and be completely right.