Chapter 7

Japan, 2D Game Design and the Rebirth of Consoles (1983–1995)

Japanese Games and Game Companies in the Early 1980s

Japanese arcade and console manufacturers experienced tremendous growth throughout the 1980s relative to the contracting North American market. Arcade games continued to be in demand throughout the 1980s as Japan’s concentrated population was able to sustain dedicated game centers. The heavy reliance on train stations created spaces where large segments of the population spent time waiting, an ideal setup for arcade games. Japanese arcade manufacturers continued to push new game concepts and technologies, defining the post-Golden Age arcade, as well as shaping the console market. Japan’s home console market was relatively undeveloped until the simultaneous release of Nintendo and Sega’s first cartridge-based units in 1983. The aggressive expansion that followed reached a fevered pitch in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the war for dominance among Japanese console manufacturers took place on an international level, with the virtually vacant and highly profitable market of the United States serving as the main battlefield. This struggle helped fuel a continual need for high quality games, produced by a host of third-party developers in Japan and eventually, the United States; a situation that reignited the console industry in North America and established a pattern of Japanese dominance in home video games that largely persists today.

2D Game Design Trends after the Golden Age Arcade

Arcade games, by the mid-1980s, could no longer rely solely on their novelty for success. Second-generation home consoles and home computers brought many of the hits of the Golden Age, albeit in imperfect form, to the masses. Further, as more games were created for the home with longer play and more complex rules and interactions, arcade games needed new ways to stay enticing. Since arcade games relied on both sight and sound to attract customers to the cabinet, attention focused on aesthetic features.

The widespread adoption of 16-bit processors allowed attract modes to grow in complexity: short narrative segments of still or minimally animated images and text, flashed between the demonstration of gameplay, high score board, and large colorful title graphics. Game worlds transitioned from black backgrounds that represented the voids of outer space or other abstract locations, to more colorful and recognizable places, like cities, forests, and building interiors. In-game narrative segments introduced characters and provided context for actions between stages. Games featured a wider array of sounds including digitized voices, recognizable sound effects, and game music that recalled the synthesized 1980s musical genres of synthpop and techno. Even minor elements, such as the sound effect acknowledging coin deposit, were also enhanced with voices and musical jingles.

Pseudo-3D in Games

Arcade game designers who desired to simulate the feeling of movement through space at high speeds, increasingly relied on pseudo-3D visuals in the mid to late 1980s. Pseudo-3D games depended on the use of depth cues, such as imagery created in one-point perspective and changes in the scale of objects, to create the illusion of 3D space. This technique, seen as early as 1975 in Interceptor (Taito) by Tomohiro Nishikado and appearing in racing games Night Driver (1976, Atari) and Pole Position (1982, Namco), saw widespread use in the post-Golden Age arcade as 16-bit processors could smoothly manipulate the size of game sprites.

One of the industry’s most prolific game designers, Yu Suzuki of Sega, made the most significant advancements in pseudo-3D hardware and game design of the period. Suzuki’s first major project was Hang On (1985, Sega), a motorcycle racing game that featured detailed images and a fluid sense of motion. Hang On’s impressive performance was based on a development by Suzuki’s team known as the “Super Scaler.” The Super Scaler consisted of advanced hardware technologies that could quickly and smoothly change the size of thousands of 2D sprites per second, producing the sense of motion. This development became the heart of many of Sega’s most popular simulation-based games of the 1980s, all of which Suzuki had a hand in creating: Space Harrier (1985), Outrun (1986), and Afterburner (1987). The games themselves largely followed previously established conventions of game design. More importantly, however, they led Suzuki down a path to fully 3D game worlds explored in arcade games (see Chapter 8) and refined on home consoles in the 1990s (see Chapter 9).

Side-Scrolling Action and the Beat ’em Up

The appearance of a new type of game in the mid-1980s combined the character driven, sideways perspective of titles like Donkey Kong and Burger Time with concepts from scrolling shoot-’em-ups like Zaxxon (1982, Sega) and Defender. These side-scrolling action games such as The Legend of Kage (1984, Taito), Rolling Thunder (1986, Namco), and Shinobi (1987, Sega) featured large-sized sprites that represented human characters in colorful, scrolling environments. The core gameplay of these games consisted of fighting against large groups of weak enemies using punches, kicks, bullets, swords, and even occasional “ninja magic.” Like Golden Age shoot-’em-ups, the games employed the “one hit death” rule for both player and enemies, making gameplay continuously tense. The games also contained various enemy types, each with distinctive patterns of behavior, which allowed designers to adjust the difficulty by modifying the number, type, and combination of enemies encountered at one time. These elements, plus intuitive gameplay influenced by high-concept action films of the 1980s, made side-scrolling action games ideal for the coin-operated arcade.

A more defined type of action game, known as the “beat ’em up,” emerged from this loose pool of game concepts as well. The first fully-developed beat ’em up was Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun (1986, Technōs Japan). Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun, westernized as Renegade, was designed by Yoshihisa Kishimoto and centered on fighting multiple opponents with kicks and punches in a scrolling arena-like space. While scrolling had been employed in earlier action games, most notably Kung Fu Master (1984, Irem), Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun gave both the player and enemies a greater amount of health. The health system allowed Kishimoto to create gameplay centered on “knock-down-drag-out” fights, as seen in the 1973 Bruce Lee film, Enter the Dragon, as well as the altercations Kishimoto himself frequently experienced as a youth. Players needed to hit enemies multiple times, “beating them up,” in order to defeat them. The combat system of Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun was highly developed relative to other side-scrolling games as players could punch, kick, grab, charge, throw, and hit enemies fallen on the ground. This created the opportunity for multiple strategies of play. Once the area was mostly cleared of enemies, a tougher “boss” character joined the fight, requiring the player to adopt a new strategy in order to progress to the next level.

Kishimoto desired gameplay that could lead to situations in which enemies surrounded the player. Although earlier games like Robotron 2084 surrounded the player with hostile robots, it did so by an awkward mix of perspectives in which characters were represented in profile, but moved up and down the screen as if they were viewed from above. Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun instead featured an isometric game space populated with sprites rendered in a three-quarter perspective. The use of this perspective combined with separate buttons for punching and kicking, however, necessitated an extra button dedicated to “jump.” The result was a three-button control scheme that was quickly adopted by others beat-’em-up games of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Kishimoto’s follow-up game built on Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun’s combat systems and featured long, side-scrolling levels instead of short, bounded arenas. The most significant change, however, was the ability for two players to play simultaneously, a feature well suited to the public spaces of arcades. The game’s title, Double Dragon (1987, Technōs Japan), was derived from the two player simultaneous gameplay and its inspiration from the film, Enter the Dragon (Figure 7.1). While Kishimoto’s previous game was successful, Double Dragon and its sequels created a worldwide sensation that inspired other beat ’em ups such as Golden Axe (1989, Sega) and Final Fight (1989, Capcom).

Following the convention set by Double Dragon, beat ’em ups of the late 1980s and 1990s increased the number of simultaneous players by expanding the pool of playable characters and the number of joysticks. Japanese companies, Capcom and Konami, created beat ’em ups based on licensed animation and comic book characters, such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989, Konami), The Uncanny X-Men (1992, Konami), and Alien vs. Predator (1994, Capcom) (Figure 7.2). In the mid-1990s, Sega achieved a certain degree of success in translating the 2D beat-’em-up formula to full 3D with Die Hard Arcade (1996). The genre’s overall repetitive gameplay of punching and kicking, nonetheless, wore thin with players and the side-scrolling beat-’em-up disappeared from arcades by the end of the 1990s as home consoles provided more novel forms of games.

The Head-to-Head Fighting Game

The emergence of head-to-head fighting games in the 1980s represented the culmination of arcade competition and spectatorship begun in the late 1800s. In 1984, game designer Takashi Nishiyama of Irem created the side-scrolling action game Kung-Fu Master. In it, players punched and kicked their way through a series of long linear stages full of adversaries and bosses. The game was distinctive for using a bar to represent player health, as well as the health of the boss character, a feature that was appropriated in later beat-’em-up design. Nishiyama, despite the game’s success, left Irem and joined Capcom where he was tasked with creating a side-scrolling action game that could compete against his own Kung-Fu Master. Rather than a game based on attacking multiple opponents, Nishiyama’s Street Fighter (1987, Capcom), like the earlier Yie Ar Kung-Fu (1985, Konami), effectively consisted of a sequence of 10 increasingly difficult boss fights that took place in a much smaller game space. This form of gameplay allowed for dramatic ebb and flow of combat as multiple punches and kicks were exchanged between the fighters, each trying to deplete the other’s health bar. As a competitive arcade game, score played a key role in providing a measure of player performance. Each landed punch, kick, and other technique added to the player’s point total. Victorious players received points for the amount of match time and health remaining, encouraging quick but careful fights, while mini games based on board breaking and other demonstrations of skill awarded bonus points between sets of rounds.

Street Fighter distinguished itself in a number of ways that laid the foundation for subsequent head-to-head fighting games. The game’s sprites were large and multicolored thanks to the increased capabilities of post-Golden Age arcade hardware. Characters were furnished with more personality, providing background stories and other biographical details. The design itself was more complex: attacks were distinguished not only by punches and kicks (as in Yie Ar Kung-Fu) but also by relative strength, promoting a strategic form of play. Any attack could be more or less advantageous depending on the opponent and their actions, effectively making the game a more complex version of rock, paper, and scissors.

The game’s design concept was supported by a previously unheard of six-button layout that allowed players to precisely control their fighter’s actions.* In addition, players were able to execute physics-defying super moves that caused an overwhelming amount of damage and could quickly decimate an opponent. Although these moves were grossly unbalanced in a game that allowed competition against the machine and other players, this game mechanic could only be triggered by a secret combination of button and joystick movements; a privileged form of knowledge known only to the best “street fighters.”

Street Fighter was followed by other head-to-head fighting games like Violence Fight (1989, Taito) and Pit-Fighter (1990, Atari Games). These and other head-to-head fighting games of the late 1980s and early 1990s provided compelling gameplay, but few could match the popularity of Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (1991, Capcom) (Figure 7.3). Street Fighter II, more so than its predecessor, was designed for competitive head-to-head tournament play. This feature, like the beat-’em-up’s growing number of simultaneous players, took advantage of the arcade’s social aspects by providing a novel form of competitive play and spectatorship that home consoles were unable to completely replicate. Street Fighter II’s large cast of playable characters, each with meaningful differences in speed, strength, reach, and special abilities, created exciting and varied gameplay and led to intense debate among fans about which characters had the greatest overall advantages. The unbalanced amount of damage caused by special abilities in the first game was toned down relative to its predecessor, as super moves became an integral part of the regular gameplay. Skilled players became notable for their ability to string together combinations of attacks, which could quickly finish an unwary opponent. While this was originally a programming flaw that was assumed to be unexploitable by players, it nonetheless became a widely used approach that grew into a staple design feature in later games of the franchise.

Western Responses to the Head-to-Head Fighting Game

Many Japanese developers closely followed the design and pixel art aesthetic of Street Fighter II, as seen in the Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, and King of Fighters game series.* American developer Midway and British developer Rare, however, each sought to represent the genre in more visually distinctive ways. Mortal Kombat (1992, Midway), designed by Ed Boon and John Tobais, contained essential elements of the head-to-head fighting genre: distinctive characters, secret special moves, bonus stages, and a multiple button layout. The game’s most distinctive aspect, however, was its theme and visuals: a postmodern pastiche of criminal underworlds, Hollywood fame, magic spells, Japanese gods, and ninjas. These elements were met with a heavy emphasis on the graphic depiction of violence. Characters spurted blood when hit, and a unique game mechanic allowed the winner to kill the losing character in a particularly brutal manner. The character Sub Zero, for example, pulled the head with attached spine off opponents and held it up for display; an act made all the more intense by the game’s use of digitized images of real actors rather than pixel art.

The “fatality” game mechanic illustrated the ultimate form of social competition and game spectatorship and created an enduring mystique among players. It was immediately used in subsequent head-to-head fighting games such as Time Killers (1992, Incredible Technologies) and Eternal Champions (1993, Sega). Mortal Kombat, however, garnered a large following through its secret content, which included the special moves and fatalities as well as unique fights with hidden characters, all of which fueled wild but unfounded speculation about the extent of the game’s hidden content.

British game developer Rare, added to the fighting game boom with Killer Instinct (1994), which also inherited the genre’s rapidly evolving conventions, such as distinctive characters, multiple button layouts, blood, and finishing moves performed at the end of the match. Rather than using pixel art or digitized actors, the characters of Killer Instinct were created through a process called pre-rendering. Pre-rendering was a common way to balance the desire for high quality 3D imagery with the limitations of consumer computing power. In pre-rendering artists constructed highly detailed 3D models that were turned into a series of animated 2D sprites. This allowed the visuals to maintain the 3D look while requiring a fraction of the processing power to animate the individual frames. It was seen in Rare’s Super Nintendo platformer, Donkey Kong Country (1994, Rare), as well as numerous other games throughout the 1990s such as Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee (1997, Oddworld Inhabitants), and Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo (1996) and Starcraft (1998). For Killer Instinct, in particular, it allowed gameplay to respond quickly to user input, a must for competitive fighting games.

The distinctive element of Killer Instinct’s design, however, focused on combining individual special attacks to create chains of combinations. This design concept required a different approach to the control scheme as forcing the player to use a complex set of commands for each special attack was not viable—especially since combinations could build up in excess of 50 individual hits. Instead, Killer Instinct allowed the player to execute a simple combination of multiple techniques with a few button and joystick inputs; combinations that could then be extended with further input from the player. To create a sense of balance between players who had increasingly become dependent on trapping opponents in a seemingly never-ending sequence of combinations, Killer Instinct featured a “combo breaker.” This mechanic would interrupt an opponent’s chain of attacks if timed properly and could create an opportunity to counter with a supercharged combination of one’s own. Thus, the longer a player strung together combinations, the more chances they gave an opponent to counter and potentially turn the momentum of the match. The growing popularity of 3D fighting games (see Chapter 8) throughout the 1990s and the ability to play them on increasingly sophisticated home consoles (see Chapter 9), like the beat ’em up, led to the decline of 2D fighting games in North America and with it, the disappearance of dedicated arcades.

Japanese Companies Transition to the Home

Nintendo had produced home video games since the late 1970s with its various color TV game dedicated consoles (see Chapter 3), however, it wanted a more sophisticated unit that could play its hit arcade games. Starting in 1981, Nintendo engineer Masayuki Uemura, began experimenting with a cartridge-based console capable of reproducing Donkey Kong. Meanwhile Nintendo considered licensing and producing software for the ColecoVision in Japan. The fees proposed by Coleco, however, caused Nintendo to balk and fully support Uemura’s engineering efforts. Nintendo’s decision was fortunate as the 1983 crash hit North America and caused Coleco to abandon the market.

The console that emerged from Uemura was dubbed the Family Computer, or Famicom (Figure 7.4). Although the Famicom was designed for Donkey Kong, it exceeded the arcade game’s technical abilities by including the ability to smoothly scroll from one screen to the next. This uncommon but forward thinking technical feature for a home console would become one of the Famicom’s greatest assets.* Like consoles and several arcade games, the Famicom used tile-based graphics that filled the screen using blocks of 8 × 8 pixels. Early games for the Famicom saved memory resources by repeating tiles as often as possible and commonly led to brick and block patterns used to construct game worlds.

The importance of the Famicom was related, in part, to its well-designed controller. The iconic plus-shaped directional pad, or “D-pad,” was based on the controls of Nintendo’s Donkey Kong Game & Watch LCD handheld. Prior to the Donkey Kong Game & Watch, the handhelds used simple one or two-button inputs; however, since Donkey Kong was designed as a series of horizontal and vertical movements, these capabilities were translated into the efficient, plus-shaped control pad. It would appear in some form in nearly every console controller produced since. This control scheme was ideally suited for 2D game design as it allowed the player intuitive movement through space from either a top-down or sideways perspective. The “A” and “B” buttons, meanwhile, created a consistency with the majority of two-button arcade games.

There were also ergonomic benefits. The controller sat comfortably in the user’s hands as both index fingers supported it equally, while it was held in place by the thumbs. The controller’s design took advantage of the fine motor skills of the fingers, rather than the larger, less accurate motions of the wrist needed for the VCS joystick. The move away from the 12-button numerical keypad, as on the Intellivision, ColecoVision, and Atari 5200, made interaction with the game more intuitive and reduced the amount of time needed to find the correct button. Without the need for overlays to guide a player’s decisions concerning which button to press, players could concentrate almost exclusively on the screen. Aided by this unique combination of hardware and controller, the Famicom encouraged the production of fast, responsive 2D games that successfully captured the essence of arcade gameplay for the home.

Although, the initial batch of processors turned out to be faulty causing a recall of the units, the Famicom was met with tremendous success in Japan, selling three million units between its 1983 launch and 1984. Nintendo’s goal, however, was the United States. After a proposed deal with Atari to license the Famicom fell through (just prior to the beginning of Atari’s woes), Nintendo decided to market the system to the United States directly, a move which required a number of adjustments to the Famicom. It featured a new American-style form factor created by industrial designer, Lance Barr, which fit with contemporary home electronics trends. It was also rebranded as the NES, complete with light gun and toy robot. Nintendo’s main problem with breaking into the American market, however, was convincing retailers to stock another videogame console after the weight of nine major console releases between 1977 and 1983 helped flood the market. Nintendo was finally able to win over American retailers by guaranteeing that any unsold consoles would receive a complete refund. After a mediocre, but encouraging series of test market launches in 1985 and early 1986, the NES was launched nationwide in the fall of 1986.

Stabilizing and Controlling the Console Market

It was clear from the beginning that Nintendo intended to assert total control over the home console market through strict procedures in dealing with third-party developers. A company that produced games for Nintendo’s console was limited to a maximum number of five games per year. In addition, Nintendo insisted on exclusivity and extracted a high licensing fee. Its control also extended to the ability to override or censor anything it found objectionable in the game content, in the interest of protecting the company’s image, particularly its American branch, Nintendo of America. With three million consoles sold in the first year of the NES’s American launch and six million the year after in a market that was supposedly “dead,” developers were eager to create games for the system.

In order to eliminate the threat from counterfeit or unlicensed games, the American and European version of the NES was designed with a lockout chip, a safeguard that prevented the system from starting if an unlicensed cartridge failed an authentication by the system. Competitors eventually found a way to circumvent this early form of digital rights management (DRM), but, along with Nintendo’s licensing policy, it allowed the company to more easily manage its image and build a reputation on high quality games. These actions allowed Nintendo to achieve a near monopoly on the home console market by the late 1980s, with an estimated share of greater than 90% in both Japan and the United States.

Establishing Nintendo’s Franchises

The Famicom’s 1983 launch titles and early offerings were heavily tilted toward the arcade, with ports of Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Popeye closely followed by Mario Bros., Galaxian, Pac-Man, Xevious, Space Invaders, and many other Golden Age Japanese arcade games. In the mid-1980s, however, Nintendo and its designers began to transition away from an arcade-centric mindset to one focused on developing games better suited for extended play sessions in the home; much of which was achieved through finding and adopting a different approach to level design.

Leading Nintendo’s transition was the industrial designer turned game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto and newcomer Takashi Tezuka, also a traditionally educated designer. Miyamoto and Tezuka’s main achievements for the Famicom/NES centered on refining familiar coin-op game elements and creating novel level design that resulted in a depth of gameplay rarely seen on prior consoles. Their evolving design sensibilities and a range of technological enhancements to the Famicom, allowed the team to create some of Nintendo’s, and the game industry’s most lauded games.

Miyamoto and Tezuka’s first Famicom game was Devil World (1984, Nintendo), a dot-gobbling, fireball shooting, maze game featuring devils, crucifixes, and bibles that only saw release in Japan and Europe; Nintendo of America objected to the overt use of religious symbolism. Little separated Devil World from an arcade game, as the game endlessly repeated two mazes and a bonus stage until the player ran out of lives. Nonetheless, it took advantage of the Famicom’s ability to scroll in the game space. In the months following Devil World, Miyamoto designed the stunt motorcycle racing game, Excitebike (1984), which featured a game engine capable of more smoothly scrolling between the string of individual screens that made up the game levels. The illusion of movement from left to right at high speeds was crucial for the game’s racing theme. However, with the exception of a track editor that allowed players to create and play customized levels, Excitebike was still effectively an arcade racing game designed for short bursts of play.

Super Mario Bros.

The tipping point for Miyamoto and Tezuka’s design of console-based games was their next project, Super Mario Bros. (1985, Nintendo) (Figure 7.5), a game with an incalculable impact on the game industry that remains strongly influential today. Super Mario Bros. centered on Mario’s quest to free the kidnapped princess of the Mushroom Kingdom from the clutches of the Koopa Clan, a ruthless band of turtle-like creatures led by Bowser.

Although platforming elements of running and jumping had existed prior to Super Mario Bros., the game cemented a number of unique concepts that struck a balance between fast arcade-like action and longer durations of play suited for the home. It also helped rekindle the North American console market and served as one of the first gaming experiences of a new generation of players who would eventually become designers themselves.

The initial design idea for Super Mario Bros. involved controlling a large-scale character in space. Many arcade games, like Donkey Kong, contained all of the action in a single screen, requiring small characters in order to maximize the play space. An increase in a character’s scale (made possible by assembling multiple small tiles together), however, required a larger play space than could be displayed on the screen. This led to the game’s signature expansive world of colorful environments representing land, sea, and air. To make gameplay feel continuous through large spaces, Super Mario Bros. utilized the fast scrolling game engine developed for Excitebike. It allowed Mario to smoothly accelerate to a run rather than move at a constant speed, as in earlier games like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. The result was a 32 level experience that cohesively combined bonus challenges, multiple strategy boss fights, hidden objects, and secret areas. These elements encouraged the player to experiment, discover, and explore the bounds of play within the game space, a signature aspect of Miyamoto’s design philosophy.

Adding to its sheer scale, Super Mario Bros. featured well-designed interactions between its individual mechanics, enemy behaviors, and level design that created intuitive and compelling gameplay. Power-up mechanics, central to the game, increased the player’s abilities in the game world. Although many games of the time included power-ups (Pac-Man, Galaga, and Devil World), Super Mario Bros. gave the player a wider range with the ability to break blocks, throw fireballs, or temporarily become invulnerable. These skills, gained and lost during gameplay, created a dynamic ebb and flow that required the player to continually adjust and change strategies. Principally important among the game mechanics was the jump, which deviated significantly from the straight vertical or preset arcs of Pitfall!, Pac-Land, and even Miyamoto’s earlier arcade games. Players could adjust their position slightly left or right in midair, allowing for subtle and precise redirection. Further, the player could control the height of the jump based on an intuitive notion that the longer the player pressed the jump button, the higher Mario would jump. While a previous game, Ice Climber (1985, Nintendo), for the Famicom/NES allowed a slight left or right alteration of the player’s jump mid-air, it was not nearly as developed as that of Super Mario Bros.

With such an uncommonly high degree of control over Mario’s movement, the game needed to teach the player the subtlety of the mechanic before increasing the challenge. Early in the first level, for example, the player encountered a set of three green pipes, each progressively higher, and containing zero, one, and two Goomba enemies. This set of obstacles required mastery of the jump mechanic before the player could progress. A small jump, created by a quick tap of the button, sufficed for the first pipe but not for the second or third, which required a longer press. The Goombas between the pipes were moving targets that required the player to adjust the trajectory of the jump in order to land on or avoid them. A player who failed at either action would die, but since this occurred at the game’s beginning, the player could quickly try again without losing ground. A later level, World 6-1, featured stair-like structures arranged in different configurations that led to bottomless pits. Although these structures required careful timing and accuracy of jumps to ascend, the player would have become skilled enough to pass them easily. A cloud-riding enemy called Lakitu, however, complicated this task by repeatedly dropping the un-stompable, spike-shelled, “Spiny” character into the game space, reducing player maneuverability.

The Legend of Zelda

At the same time that Miyamoto and Tezuka designed Super Mario Bros., the team was also creating The Legend of Zelda, which released the following year in 1986 (Figure 7.6). The Legend of Zelda used a similar narrative form to Super Mario Bros.: it centered on a lone hero, Link, who attempted to rescue the Princess Zelda from the evil Ganon, while uniting the disparate pieces of the magical Triforce of Wisdom. While Miyamoto and Tezuka drew elements from the Japanese localizations of CRPGs Ultima II and The Black Onyx, The Legend of Zelda featured none of the RPG genre’s signature experience points or character stats. Players instead explored the unfamiliar landscape in search of items that would grant them access to closed areas and eventually complete the game’s goal. A raft, for example, allowed the player access to islands while a power bracelet granted the ability to move large rocks and access new spaces. This experience of unpacking elements of the game space was also found in the side-scrolling shooting platformer, Metroid (1986, Nintendo), which used new weapon powers to open previously encountered doors.

Rather than a gentle introduction to gameplay as seen in Super Mario Bros., players of The Legend of Zelda were placed in a 128-screen overworld without the means to attack. Those who ventured into one of the three available starting pathways confronted enemies they could not fight, leading to a quick and helpless death. Further, while players were aware that they needed to find pieces of the Triforce, they were given no indication of where to begin, as the massive open world game space did not suggest any particular path. While these were common elements among computer-based adventure and role-playing games, they were unconventional for console games. This prompted Nintendo to include directions in the game’s manual for obtaining the sword and reaching the first two dungeons.

Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda were followed by sequels that deviated significantly from their predecessors. Super Mario Bros. 2 (1986, Nintendo), utilized game mechanics and level design that often intentionally misled the player, deviating from Miyamoto’s encouragement-based approach to platformers. For instance, early in the beginning level, the player encountered a poison mushroom that closely resembled the power-up mushroom but would instantly kill the player when touched. Although the game was intended to create a greater challenge for those who had completed Super Mario Bros., Nintendo considered the game too difficult for international release. Instead, the North American version of Super Mario Bros. 2 (1988) used the setting and mechanics of the Arabian Nights-themed Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic (1987, Nintendo) and replaced the character sprites with those inspired by Super Mario Bros.* Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1987, Nintendo), was a similar departure, as the top-down perspective was replaced with a side-scrolling action game that utilized experience points, random encounters, and an overworld map similar to Dragon Quest and other Japanese RPGs (see below).

Although both sequels were commercially successful, Nintendo embraced a more conservative approach to subsequent games in these key franchises. Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988, Nintendo) sported more than 90 levels and spaces with a game world alive with interaction; it featured new power-ups, an inventory system, several mini games, and wandering mini bosses brought together by an overworld map laid out like a board game. It allowed players the choice to experience everything offered by the game world or to take the shortest route to a final showdown with one of seven “Koopaling” bosses. Despite its unparalleled grand experience, the game returned to the accessible essence and feel of the original. It made the learning curve more forgiving through level design that helped the player learn the game’s new mechanics and included a more frequent placement of extra lives near the game’s beginning. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991, Nintendo) for Nintendo’s “next-gen” Super Famicom/SNES (discussed below) similarly returned to its inaugural roots. In all, this experience helped to solidify the design philosophy at Nintendo for the remainder of the 2D era and provide a starting point for its first 3D games in the mid-1990s (see Chapter 9).

Computer Games and the JRPG on the Famicom/NES

As discussed in Chapter 6, the home computer industry saw rapid expansion throughout the 1980s and gave rise to a number of distinct forms of gameplay and game interfaces. Many computer game developers, aware of the mass appeal of the Famicom/NES, also created games for the console. This allowed Nintendo’s players access to a wider variety of game types than what had typically been developed for consoles. Although the Famicom/NES was not as technologically robust as home computers like the Amiga, it nonetheless, featured ports of point-and-click adventure games (Maniac Mansion and King’s Quest), vehicle simulators (Silent Service and F-15 Strike Eagle by MicroProse), and RPGs (Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord and The Black Onyx), ports which often saw release on the Famicom years before the NES. In addition to adapting specific computer titles, general design concepts also flowed from computer games to Nintendo’s console with games like The Goonies II (1987, Konami) and Friday the 13th (1989, Pack in Video) which combined the action of platforming gameplay with adventure-based, first-person exploration. Both, like The Legend of Zelda and computer adventure games relied on the player’s willingness to explore the bounds of the game world and its various interactions to make progress.

Important in the exchange between computers and the Famicom/NES, were the concepts that led to Dragon Quest (1986, Churnsoft), the game that created the framework for subsequent JRPGs. Japan had few computer RPGs until the mid-1980s with The Black Onyx and localizations of the Ultima franchise, and even then, they were appreciated by only a small subsection of Japan’s gaming population. Yuji Hori, a developer associated with software publisher Enix, was an avid fan of Western RPGs, however, he felt the genre’s unfamiliar game mechanics and number management created a significant barrier for new Japanese players. Thus, Hori along with programmer Koichi Nakamura, looked to create a form of RPG more simplified in its systems, eventually resulting in the Famicom game, Dragon Quest.

In Dragon Quest (titled Dragon Warrior in the United States), the player wandered through a map-like overworld of natural landscapes with icons representing towns, caves, and dungeons. Like the Ultima games, once the player moved over one of the map icons, the perspective abruptly changed to a full-scale representation of the space, complete with non-player characters (NPCs), stores, and treasure chests where appropriate. In the overworld map, the player fought enemies in turn-based random encounters, gathered gold and gained experience points—all staple elements of early CRPGs. Hori’s design for Dragon Quest, however, simplified the standard RPG formula: it reduced the character’s attributes to two (strength and agility), compressed the myriad classes/professions into a single character, awarded the majority of experience points in simple low numbers, and replaced spell levels with a pool of magic points that were spent on spell cast. Leveling increased all character stats and attributes and provided a clear indication of character progression rather than changes in hit points and number modifiers common in Western RPGs.

One of the game’s most distinctive elements was its manner of interaction. Dragon Quest adopted the interface from the Hori’s earlier Famicom port of the graphic adventure, The Portopia Serial Murder Case (1985, Churnsoft), which consisted of selecting predetermined commands from a series of menus using the Famicom’s d-pad. These changes to the formula for RPGs, aided by a series of articles in manga magazines explaining the concepts of the gameplay, as well as character artwork by famed manga artist Akira Toriyama, helped propel Dragon Quest to success among Japan’s Famicom player base.

Dragon Quest’s popularity led other Japanese developers to create RPGs as well. Final Fantasy (1987, Square) used the same basic systems, overworld map, and Famicom friendly interface of Dragon Quest, but added a more tactical element to combat: players used a party of characters, composed of multiple classes and abilities, to fight mixed parties of enemies. Player choice in managing the fight, in addition to the exploration and fulfillment of the main quest, thus became a central element of the game. The JRPGs by Enix and Square resulted in a long line of sequels that inspired other developers and franchises. The North American localization of these initial JRPGs and others created a small, but devoted fan base that grew stronger after the 1997 North American release of Final Fantasy VII (Square) and the 1998 Game Boy release of Pokémon (1996, Game Freak).

Sega Joins the Console Market

Nintendo supercharged the home console market in Japan and reawakened the desire of North American retailers, however, the Famicom/NES was not the only 8-bit Japanese console of the period. The SG-1000 by Sega, launched the same day as the Famicom but paled in comparison as seen in the choppy scrolling and undesirable flickering sprites of games such as the shoot-’em-up Orguss (1984, Sega) and port of arcade platformer, Wonder Boy (1986, Sega). An updated version of the console, the SG-1000 Mark II was released shortly thereafter, in 1984.

While commercially unsuccessful in the Japanese market, Sega was undeterred and decided to compete with Nintendo head-on, by designing a system to exceed the Famicom’s capabilities. The SG-1000 Mark III, internationally known as the “Master System,” was designed, like most previous consoles, to replicate the performance of arcade machines at home. The unit’s ability to smoothly scroll the screen and scale the size of sprites allowed Sega to port its pseudo-3D and action platformer arcade games in an attempt to help drive console sales. With Yu Suzuki’s Hang-On as a pack-in launch title, followed by ports of other Sega games, such as Afterburner, Altered Beast, Outrun, and Space Harrier, the SG-1000 Mark III/Master System performed better than its predecessors but was inconsistent in different regions, leading to tepid third-party support. The console was virtually locked out in Japan and North America by Nintendo’s monopoly created by its exclusive licensing agreements and several years’ headstart. Despite this, Sega was able to produce a few successful original titles for its console such as JRPG Phantasy Star (1987, Sega). In Europe the Master System was more popular, as Nintendo had been unable to control the market as in Japan and the United States. The Master System encountered virtually no competition in Brazil, allowing it and the later Mega Drive/Genesis to capture the market and continue to produce demand for games through the 1990s.

16-Bit Consoles, Marketing, and Game Design

Nintendo’s dominance of 8-bit consoles made all previous attempts to compete virtually impossible. The success of the Famicom/NES, however, made Nintendo slow to accept change in an industry becoming more dependent on rapid advancements in technology. Falling prices of 16-bit processors in the late 1980s made their inclusion in a new generation of consoles cost effective and allowed Nintendo’s competitors to leapfrog and outperform the 8-bit Famicom/NES. This inaugurated new set of “console wars,” this time between Japanese companies, as Sega, Nintendo, and newcomer NEC, aggressively vied for market share.

The framework of intense competition drove many underlying game design decisions as a “next-gen” version of a game within a popular genre could either retain customer loyalty or lure them from a competitor. This was particularly true of Nintendo’s Super Famicom/SNES as its exclusive relationship with developers allowed for “super” versions of titles in various franchises, such as Adventure Island, Bomberman, Castlevania, Double Dragon, Mega Man, Metroid, and Punch-Out!!, many of which were highly lauded by game critics for their refinements. In these and other cases, game graphics received a vast amount of attention, as marketing relied on a player’s ability to instantly judge a game, fairly or unfairly, based on its visual detail. Vivid colors brought characters and objects to life, while environments composed of multilayered, parallaxing backgrounds contributed to the period’s distinctive and much-loved visuals leading to a Golden Age for pixel art.

New Contenders

In 1987 computer manufacturer NEC and software developer Hudson Soft released the PC Engine in Japan, inaugurating the fourth generation of home consoles. Although the unit used an 8-bit processor at its core, it was capable of 16-bit visuals, which brought high-fidelity ports of arcade games to the home. These advanced visual capabilities were the central feature of the console’s advertising efforts as the console was renamed the Turbo Grafix-16 for its 1989 North American launch. The PC Engine was able to temporarily overturn Nintendo’s dominance in Japan before settling for a second place position, however, its performance in the United States was abysmal, as Sega’s new 16-bit console quickly captured a sizeable portion of the next-gen market.

The form factor of Sega’s 16-bit Mega Drive/Genesis console stood in stark contrast to the toy-like aesthetic of the Famicom. It projected an overall impression of maturity and high-tech futurism as its asymmetric layout of vents, buttons, and switches bore a resemblance to high-end audio mixing equipment, while the characters “16-BIT” were conspicuously embossed in gold on the console’s top (Figure 7.7). Sega, continuing the quest to capitalize on its arcade catalog, based the Mega Drive/Genesis console on its System16 arcade board, used for Shinobi, Altered Beast, and Golden Axe among others. With this, the gap between post-Golden Age arcade games and console games significantly narrowed, allowing the console to faithfully reproduce popular arcade games more accurately than the PC Engine/Turbo Grafix-16. The design of the controller for the Mega Drive/Genesis was also heavily influenced by Sega’s arcade games: its 8-directional game pad followed the standard 8-directional arcade joystick while its three buttons allowed the console to reproduce the typical “attack/jump/special weapon” control scheme of Sega arcade games like Altered Beast, ESWAT Cyber Police, Shinobi, and Golden Axe. In addition, the rounded edges and small projections at the ends of the controller provided a greater degree of ergonomic comfort relative to the rectangular game pad by Nintendo.

New Platformers for New Consoles and Intensified Competition

Replicating the performance of arcade machines was a compelling feature of the new consoles, but ports of arcade games alone did not suffice in a game market rapidly transitioning away from arcades and into new territory. In particular, Sega’s initial lineup of unmodified arcade ports was criticized as being light on content. Both NEC and Sega included arcade-like action platformers with shooting or other combat-focused mechanics, but neither system initially had a viable Mario-style platformer with compelling game design and a mascot capable of siphoning Nintendo’s fans away.

The first direct challenge to Mario was the PC Engine/Turbo Grafix-16 platformer, Bonk’s Adventure (1989, Red Company/Atlus). Bonk’s Adventure was a brightly colored, light-hearted, prehistoric-themed game, starring “Bonk” a child-like caveman with a colossal head that “bonked” enemies. The game used many design elements from Super Mario Bros.—a smooth scrolling game space, an ebb and flow of power-ups, hidden rooms, boss fights, and a highly controllable jump mechanic. The game spanned different environments and created the feeling of embarking on a journey. Although it was released on multiple game platforms (including the Famicom/NES) and led to a number of sequels, it was unable to significantly impact the game market, as Nintendo had already produced more elaborate and refined platformers like Super Mario Bros. 3.

Sega was more successful with its platformer, Sonic the Hedgehog (1991, Sonic Team). Both the game and the character, Sonic, were intended to promote the technical power of Sega’s Mega Drive/Genesis console by focusing on speed (Figure 7.8). The game’s concept was based on a particular design problem with the platformer genre: players needed to traverse a linear sequence of levels in order to make progress. This structure, inherited from arcade games, gradually grew in difficulty with each level (as discussed above in relation to Super Mario Bros.). Skilled players, however, were still required to play through the beginning levels in order to get to the later, more difficult content.

Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto addressed this problem by creating level-skipping warp zones in the Super Mario Bros. games. Sega programmer, Yuji Naka, however, wanted to make his love of fast moving objects into a fun experience by creating a game that allowed skilled players to complete early stages in extremely fast time before getting to the game’s later content. This concept was reinforced by Naoto Oshima’s design of a feisty, anthropomorphic, blue hedgehog that sported a spiky hairstyle and wore bright red running shoes. In the final game, Sonic ran through roller coaster loops, rolled into a ball, and shot through serpentine tubes at almost dizzying high speeds. The game’s brightly colored zones featured highly animated objects and parallaxed backgrounds that made Sonic’s world one of constant motion. Although still a linear experience of running from left to right, the level design of Sonic the Hedgehog was more open, with each stage often featuring multiple pathways to the end goal. Since the game’s timer counted up and not down, players were free to either cruise through the level as fast as possible, like a race, or meticulously explore the entirety of the game space, looking for the collectable golden rings or power-ups.

Sonic the Hedgehog propelled Sega to its first major home console success and provided the first real threat to Nintendo in the North American market, especially after the game was bundled with new systems. Sega also went on the offensive against the monopoly of Nintendo with a confrontational North American marketing campaign, unified by the catchphrase “Genesis does what Nintendon’t.” The Genesis’ offerings included games that not only pushed the boundaries of represented violence, such as an uncensored version of Mortal Kombat and the fighting game Eternal Champions (1993, Sega), but also games with celebrity sports personalities of the early 1990s such as Joe Montana, Arnold Palmer, and Pat Reilly in addition to “King of Pop,” Michael Jackson.

Nintendo, meanwhile, launched its 16-bit Super Famicom/SNES in Japan in 1990 along with its new platformer, Super Mario World (1990, Nintendo), produced by Shigeru Miyamoto and directed by Takashi Tezuka. Super Mario World, like its predecessor Super Mario Bros. 3, was essentially a retelling of the original Super Mario Bros. with a number of added mechanics in the form of power-ups, enemies, and environmental objects. Like Super Mario Bros., it was designed to subtly teach the game’s basic behaviors before testing players with challenging content. As a backup, it also included optional text boxes explaining the game mechanics; a feature found in many of Nintendo’s subsequent Mario games. A notable feature was its break from the sense of linearity as the activation of a switch or object in one level often required the player to revisit already completed levels in order to progress to new or secret areas. This Zelda-like design feature encouraged players to investigate game spaces in total and provided a new objective in an otherwise familiar level, thereby efficiently increasing the game’s content; a concept that was central to the later fully 3D Super Mario 64 (1996, Nintendo).

Nintendo’s reputation as a provider of quality platformer game design was further enhanced with two titles, created later in the Super Famicom/SNES’s life cycle, Donkey Kong Country (1994, Rare) and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island (1995, Nintendo). Each game closely followed the form of the earlier Super Mario World, but signaled a maturing of design for 2D platformers at a time when 3D-based gameplay was becoming increasingly common. Each game also provided a significant visual departure from the 16-bit era’s pixel art graphics as Donkey Kong Country utilized pre-rendered visuals while Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island featured graphics resembling a series of hand-drawn 2D layers—a deliberate pushback by Miyamoto against the encroaching visual realism in games (see Chapter 8).

While 2D platformers were synonymous with Nintendo, the Super Famicom/SNES was designed with capabilities that foreshadowed the coming wave of 3D-based gameplay. Key was the mode 7 background layer graphics setting, which could rotate and scale a background layer, producing the effect of smoothly moving through space in a pseudo-3D perspective. This effect was used to create racing and flying gameplay as in F-Zero (1990, Nintendo), Pilotwings (1990, Nintendo), Super Mario Kart (1992, Nintendo) (Figure 7.9), Top Gear (1992, Gremlin Graphics), and Super Star Wars (1992, Sculptured Software/LucasArts).

The competition between Nintendo, Sega, and NEC occurred in a complex time of change for digital games and digital culture. Compact disc-based games and hypermedia applications that combined image, sound, text, and video with nonlinear access exploded into the marketplace and brought with it a new experience of media for consumers. 3D graphics appeared in more sophisticated forms than simple wireframes on home computers. Finally, virtual reality made its first commercial debut, sparking the imagination of the public and raising expectations for the future. All of these developments in the late 1980s and early 1990s made an impression on the highly competitive home console market, as Nintendo, Sega, and NEC looked to enhance the capabilities of their products in a rapidly changing environment. This set of topics and their impact on games across the industry will be more fully explored in Chapter 8, as a new visual and spatial realism came to dominate the design of digital games in the early to mid-1990s.