Abstract Trouble in River City: The Social Life of video games by
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The Nintendo Era, 1985-1995Sluggish but steady arcade sales continued to prop the field up through the mid 1980s, but it wasn’t until Nintendo entered the console business that the industry truly resuscitated. That firm’s American chief, Minoru Arakawa, correctly interpreted the persistence of arcades to be a sign of continuing demand for games that could be filled by a home game maker (Sheff, 1999). Eventually, Nintendo’s resurgence lead to improved quality and marketing for the entire industry, and home video games became even more mainstream than they had been in the early 1980s. Nintendo’s Achilles heel would turn out to be a lesser version of the overconfidence that plagued Kassar’s Atari. The difference this time was that enough competition, quality and innovation persisted through the rough patches to keep the game industry moving ahead. Nintendo had been a conservative trading card company before passing into the hands of Hiroshi Yamauchi, the headstrong and bravura scion of a traditional family (Sheff, 1999). Yamauchi autocratically rehauled the company, transforming it into an industrious and inventive games shop. Before long, Nintendo had established itself as a powerhouse firm in Japan with the massively successful Famicom video game system, and looked across the Pacific at the bewildering and enticing American market. Yamauchi persuaded his son-in-law Minoru Arakawa to head up the new venture. Arakawa, diligent and MIT-educated, hired two entrepreneurial Seattle truckers to begin sales and distribution (they would eventually become vice presidents of Nintendo America). But it was the truckers’ lawyer, Howard Lincoln, who would turn out to be Arakawa’s greatest American asset. Lincoln and Arakawa navigated the volatile arcade business, including winning a contentious lawsuit with MCA, and created a foothold in the market with the breakout hit Donkey Kong (Sheff, 1999). But when the Atari collapse appeared to have entirely destroyed the video game business, Nintendo appeared to be sunk along with the rest of the industry. A Figure E. Mario Bros. invade the home.  rakawa, however, thought correctly that the home game crash was not the same thing as a total collapse of demand. Knowing that the very words “video games” had become anathema to retailers and distributors, Nintendo of America set out to sell a new console system that they dubbed the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES. In 1985, Arakawa paid a leading distributor, Worlds of Wonder (WOW), to force skeptical retailers to take the NES if they wanted to get WOW’s hot new toys, Teddy Ruxpin and Laser Tag. The NES eventually outsold both products, and by 1987 the home console industry was booming again. WOW folded, and Nintendo hired its entire sales staff. This management change was highly symbolic, and flew directly in the face of the press’ continued assertion that video games were dead and buried: Nintendo’s new sales staff were veterans of the first games boom—nearly all of them turned out to be earlier survivors from Atari (Kent, 2000).
By the early 1990s, with games re-established as a powerhouse medium, Nintendo began to make a series of costly mistakes that paved the way for a new, more competitive era for the industry. Taking advantage of its dominant position, Nintendo demanded difficult terms from its suppliers and retailers. Next, it alienated its consumer base by making its next console system incompatible with the NES, instantly making old software unusable o  n the newest system. These missteps allowed a console system from rival Sega to gain a foothold in the market by 1
Figure F. A hedgehog becomes a star. 992. Both firms released a series of new systems, games and accessories, with each desperate to drive the other out of business. Riding the strength of its “Sonic the Hedgehog” character, Sega briefly grabbed the sales lead from Nintendo in 1995 (Chronis, 1996). But neither firm anticipated that their toughest competition would come from a company that had never tried its hand in the video game market, the electronics giant Sony. Download 6.01 Mb. Share with your friends:
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