Rebuilding on Scorched Earth - Volume 1. Edition 2.
Jul 28, 2020 8:46 pm
Rebuilding on Scorched Earth
"Shovelware."
It started in the early 1980s when Atari sensed an opportunity to extract more money from an already ridiculous $3 billion video game industry (that's a little over $8 billion today adjusted for inflation).
They wasted no time in flooding the market with poor game system iterations and a glut of rushed, buggy software. Like all aggressive capitalist bubbles, the Video Game Bubble of 1982 burst and it took out an entire industry overnight in the infamous Video Game Crash of 1983.
The American public soured on home video games. Staggering numbers of development companies folded.
Following the calamity, Atari was rumored to have dumped thousands of unsold surplus game cartridges into a pit in the middle of the New Mexican desert.
Literally shoveling software into a landfill.
That would prove a source of colorful mythology for three generations of gamers.
It should have been the last stop on the timeline of the whole medium.
Should have been.
Imagine what kind of crazy discussions were flying around the Nintendo Co. Ltd. boardroom in 1983 having just launched a famously successful video game console in Japan: the Famicom.
No sane person would suggest, "We should launch this in America next year." That would be a guaranteed failure. The Americans were anti-video game!
But, Nintendo was (and still is) full of plucky world builders from the top down. With the direction of then-president Hiroshi Yamauchi and a cadre of hungry creatives like a young Shigeru Miyamoto and hardware engineer Masayuki Uemura, they decided to take on the flattened American video game market.
Their strategy wasn't just to rebrand a system, but to reconfigure the whole world of home video games and entertainment marketing.
- They would not sell a "toy" or a "game", but an "Entertainment System"
- It would be designed to look like a trusty VCR, not a flimsy children's plaything
- It would feature quality software: Nintendo would control the publishing pipeline and approve it with a visible "Seal of Quality" and an original hardware chip that detected unauthorized cartridges
- It would ship at a very reasonable price point: $99 with two robust first-party games included
Nintendo, with their brazen holistic approach, brought a dead medium back to life. Retailers and developers climbed over one another to get a slice of the boom. The victory would set Nintendo on a course to become leaders in the home entertainment space for decades.
Where most saw a graveyard of discarded plastic and scorched earth, Nintendo envisioned a shining world of joy and opportunity.
Then they built it.
Dico.
To future worlds,
Matt Ventre
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