Abstract
This chapter discusses the social impact of Nintendo's Family Computer and the competition for the successor to the Family Computer. The Family Computer was the first home video game console to become the de facto standard in Japan, and its installed base attracted attention from many industries. A service that allowed users to trade stocks using the Family Computer as a communications terminal was also offered, but it was not a great success. As home video game consoles became a popular pastime, there was a flurry of activity aimed at replacing the Family Computer, but the competition was ultimately won by Nintendo's Super Famicom.
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Notes
- 1.
The service is a forerunner of today’s Internet, which allows users to connect their information terminals to an information center via analog telephone lines and access information stored in the center, such as newspapers, shopping, and game downloads. The service was terminated in 2002. It was a novel system, but it did not become popular.
- 2.
The disk system had an interface for connecting a communication terminal, but no peripheral device (communication adapter) was eventually released.
- 3.
Even so, the number of participants in the network experiment was outstanding for its time.
- 4.
After the spread of the Internet connection, the attempts were shifted to STB (Set Top Box), but all failed.
- 5.
Here, “until the end” means “until a player sees the ending or the final stage.” In addition, many action games from the dawn of time to the early days of the Famicom simply repeated a set stage, and even if a player cleared the final stage, he would only return to a specific stage and there would be no ending.
- 6.
The magazine was integrated into the magazine as Super Soft Corner from the January 1985 issue due to the number of cases where only Super Soft Magazine was taken out at bookstores.
- 7.
At the earliest stage, a strategy book for the arcade game Space Invaders has already been commercially published (Invader kouryakuhou korede anatamo 10000ten player(Invader Strategy—Now You’re a 10,000 Point Player), Herald Enterprises, 1979).
- 8.
‘86 nen shuppan gyoukai no omo na ugoki(Main Movements in the Publishing Industry in ‘86) in Shuppan shihyo nempo(Annual Report of Publishing Indicators) (1987), p. 43.
- 9.
“Dragon Quest II jiken karishobun kettei(Provisional Disposition Decision in the Dragon Quest II Case.)” http://www.isc.meiji.ac.jp/~sumwel_h/doc/juris/tdcd-s62-2-24.htm
- 10.
The release date of game software is often set on Thursday to Friday before a holiday so that the software can be played after purchase, and the shipment date is often 2 days before the release date (Tuesday to Wednesday) so that the software always arrives on the release date. For this reason, it was not uncommon for some retailers to have games lined up in their stores 1 or 2 days before the official release date listed in magazines, and for consumers to purchase them. In the case of Dragon Quest, the game was released on a holiday, which meant that it had to be shipped separately from the normal delivery schedule, placing a heavy burden on the distributors and retailers. Enix decided to do this as part of its social responsibility as the publisher of a “national game.” The company also strongly urged retailers not to sell the products to consumers without permission (not to let them pre-purchase) until the authorized time even if the products arrived before the release date.
- 11.
Nihon Keizai Shimbun, morning edition, July 30, 1986. It was an incident in which a sample sent to a sales company was copied.
- 12.
The author, who was in elementary school at the time, knew of the existence of machines that could copy ROMs as a matter of course. However, I had never heard of anyone around me who had bought such a machine and copied games with it. At that time, elementary school students were in the position of having their parents buy games for them, and it was hard to imagine that their parents would approve the purchase of this kind of illegal machine (to begin with, the machine itself cost the equivalent of two video games and was not something that could be easily purchased). In the absence of data, I can only speculate, but it is likely that the number of elementary school students using the machines was low.
- 13.
Nintendo has a factory in Uji, Kyoto Prefecture, but it is for card games such as Hanafuda, not for video games.
- 14.
If the popularity of a released game is very high, it is possible to reproduce additional game ROMs. However, even in this case, there is a time lag of several months between production and delivery. In an environment where new titles are released one after another every month, commercial opportunities are often already lost by the time additional production is finished. Commercial opportunities in the toy market in a broad sense, including games, are extremely short.
- 15.
The purchase price of a retail store is usually 70%–75% of the suggested retail price (so-called “list price”). The first few days after the release date of a new game are the biggest business opportunity, and competition among stores is fierce. As a result, retailers often sell at a discount of 10%–20% of the list price, resulting in a fairly low gross profit margin.
- 16.
The difference in the profit margin between individual stores and chain stores is the share of the chain headquarters. In the case of chain stores, the used games they buy are purchased by the chain headquarters. Conversely, stores that have difficulty purchasing used games can purchase them from the chain headquarters. Since there is a distribution margin for this, the profit margin is lower than that of individual stores.
- 17.
The HuC6280 has a 16-bit bus for exchanging data, but the CPU’s internal processing is 8-bit. Therefore, it is not strictly correct to call the PC Engine, Mega Drive, and Super Nintendo generation “the generation of 16-bit machines.”
- 18.
The My Card for the Sega SG-1000 was the first to offer games in a similar card format. The card-type game media was compact and convenient, but the capacity limit was severe. Sega eventually gave up on providing games via My Card and moved to ROM cartridges (called gold cartridges) that used high-capacity rom chip(1 mega-bit ROM). The PC Engine also shifted to CD-ROMs due to insufficient capacity, as described later.
- 19.
Perhaps to appeal to children, the game was released as Bikkuri-man World, with the characters from the Wonder Boy Monster Land game replaced by the popular Bikkuri-man characters of the time. Bikkuri-man is a sticker enclosed in Lotte’s chocolate confectionery, Bikkuri-man Chocolate. Each sticker depicted one character, with a brief explanation on the back. Reading through the different explanations for each character, you could learn the story of the battle between the devil and the angel.
- 20.
Since the capacity of the Hu-Card at the time the PC Engine was released did not allow for all the stages, the first 4 stages were released as R-TYPE I in March 1988, and the last 5–8 stages were released as R-TYPE II in June 1988. The PC Engine screen resolution was shorter than the actual arcade screen, but the game was ported with some scrolling up and down to shrink the graphics and not ruin the atmosphere.
- 21.
In addition to the PC Engine Duo described below, the PC-KD863G, a monitor with a built-in PC Engine, and the X1 Twin, a Sharp X1 PC with a built-in PC Engine (Each X1 and PC Engine has completely different circuitry in a casing), were also released.
- 22.
Since video playback was not possible with the performance of the PC Engine, animation scenes were created using sprites and background screen redrawing. Also, due to the limitations of the screen redrawing capability, games at that time did not draw pictures on the entire screen for animation scenes with a lot of movement but limited them to the center of the screen. It was not until the next generation of consoles that movie scenes could be played as video files.
- 23.
The number of registrations to the CD-ROM accompanying the 2011 edition of Daigirin.
- 24.
After the renewal of the contract with Nintendo, Namco aggressively sold games on the PC Engine. The number of titles released reached 25. However, all of the titles were offered on Hu-Card, and Namco withdrew from PC Engine game sales by 1992, when Super CD-ROM2 games became the mainstream.
- 25.
Unlike other countries, the Master System in Japan is equipped with the FM sound source unit, which was released as a peripheral device for the Mark III, as standard equipment, and has a completely new design.
- 26.
The arcade version of Space Harrier was designed to use two 68,000 CPUs, making it difficult to port to the Mega Drive. Therefore, it was not ported as-is, but released as a sequel.
- 27.
Sega of America offered game titles with a “cool” and “edgy” image to the older generation with the catchphrase “Genesis does what Nintendon’t.” Sonic the Hedgehog, released in 1991, became the killer application and drove hardware sales. Sonic the Hedgehog 2, released the following year, was a huge hit, selling over 6 million copies.
- 28.
The catchphrase “100 Mega Shock” is well known, but 100 mega refers not to the size of the game data, but to the bandwidth of the bus that exchanges the data.
- 29.
SNK also leases MVSs, and this framework allowed store owners in the city who were unable to maintain their enclosures to set up their own MVSs.
- 30.
It was expensive for a home game, but unbelievably cheap for an arcade game. This cheapness was one of the reasons why MVS became popular.
- 31.
At that time, ROM versions of games for home game consoles were at most 16 megabits, and regular games were 4–8 megabits, but NEO GEO games were over 40 megabits even in the first low capacity games, and later 100 megabits or more was the standard.
- 32.
In the case of the NEO GEO’s hit fighting games, a large amount of image data was required to represent the various movements of the large characters. As a result, some games took more than a minute to load each time you went from one stage to the next.
- 33.
Super Famicom is the official name, not an abbreviation or common name for Super Family Computer.
- 34.
This is evident from the fact that the Super Famicom uses the 65816 as its CPU, which is upwardly compatible with the 6502 used in the Famicom.
- 35.
Even after Nintendo gave up on supporting both systems with a single Super Famicom due to technical specifications and other problems, they were still considering selling Famicom compatible adapter that would allow screen input and output to be done on the Super Famicom side, and a prototype that was announced at a press conference was published in a magazine. In the end, the compatibility adapter was not released, and the configuration became simple.
- 36.
In the early days of the Famicom, most games were simple, and two buttons were sufficient, but in later, the start button and select button, which were not originally intended to be used during games, were increasingly used for operations such as calling up the menu screen and changing equipment during games. To prevent accidental pressing of the start and select buttons, they are smaller than the A and B buttons and are placed in a position where they are difficult to press. It was easy to make mistakes when trying to press them while playing. With Super Famicom, the controller was equipped with a large number of buttons, which made it possible to assign dedicated buttons to those operations, greatly improving the playability of the game. The L and R buttons were also used in combination with the screen rotation function.
References
Fukaya, M. and Fukaya, K. (1989). [Famicom syndrome] (Famicom Syndrome) Dohosha Printing.
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Koyama, Y. (2023). Console Games (1-2) Famicom and its Successors. In: History of the Japanese Video Game Industry. Translational Systems Sciences, vol 35. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1342-8_7
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