In the vaults of the videogame industry lie many relics. Some are mere curiosities, obscure and grotesque contraptions that few have seen, and even fewer loved. Is there treasure amongst this labyrinth of cardboard boxes and ceiling-high metal shelves, this jungle of snarled AV cables and piles of AC adapter bricks? The dull fluorescent lights high above you flicker, and for a moment you fear getting lost in this dire place. What was it the old man said about grues?
But suddenly, out of the corner of your eye you see what you have not seen for many years. Those brown keys, that beige box, that bold red LED shining in the darkness! At last, you are reunited with a love you once forsook, but never forgot. Many gamers would argue that the Commodore 64 has not aged gracefully, but to someone who grew up playing and adoring classics like Forbidden Forest, Archon, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, or The Bard’s Tale, the Commodore 64 is still a great platform for gaming. But why did the Commodore 64 succeed and remain successful in the face of so much competition, which included heavy-hitters like the Atari 800 and the Apple II? Was it really just a question of value for money, or was there something intangible and unique about the machine, its games, or its fans?
In his foundational book Diffusion of Innovations, sociologist Everett M. Rogers wrote about how and why certain inventions—or “innovations,” as he called them—catch on while others are either forgotten or ignored altogether. Rogers argued that successful innovations are not necessarily superior to alternatives in any objective sense. Instead, what seems to matter most when deciding whether to adopt an innovation is the opinion of your peers, or at least the peers who are the most like yourself. Despite the huge expenditures lavished on marketing and advertising, it’s the ordinary people who enjoy and tell others about their products that determine their fate in the marketplace.
This book is essentially about the diffusion of a certain type of innovation that has become an integral part of our culture: the videogame platform.1 Over the course of the videogame industry’s history, we’ve seen countless consoles, computers, and programming languages come and go. Some, like the Atari 2600 and the Nintendo Entertainment System, diffused deeply and rapidly into our society, making indelible impressions on millions of gamers. Far more common in the history books than in the wild, however, are contraptions such as Nokia’s N-Gage, Smith Engineering’s Vectrex, or Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, all of which failed to move beyond a niche audience despite their promising innovations. It’s not easy to explain these failures, nor pinpoint precisely why other systems like the Sega Genesis or iPad are runaway successes. But it sure is fun to try!
Your humble authors, Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton, have always been fascinated by games and gaming machines, and now avidly collect hardware and software for every system we can get our hands on. We are lifelong gamers who began gaming shortly after leaving the womb (nice place, but the Wi-Fi is spotty at best). However, not content to simply play and enjoy games, we also write about them. In 2009, we wrote Vintage Games: An Insider Look at the History of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the Most Influential Games of All Time. We had a great time doing it, but all along we kept running into the “platform issue.” While our purpose in that book was to focus entirely on the games—that is, the software—it was difficult to avoid crossing over into hardware. That’s because the devices we use to play a game are a huge part of how we experience it.
For instance, if you’re playing Space Invaders at home on your Atari 2600 instead of an arcade machine—are you truly playing the same game? How about if you’re playing Breakout with a joystick or mouse instead of a spinner? A large part of the videogame experience is inseparable from the hardware—the peculiarities of the hardware for which it was originally designed and optimized, such as the amount of RAM, processor speed, graphics technology, default controllers, or storage media. In short, hardware is just as important as software when talking about videogames.
It’s quite fascinating to see how a single quirk in a system’s design can affect its destiny in ways the manufacturer could never imagine—an important process Rogers calls “re-invention.” For instance, in deference to controlling costs, the Atari 2600 shipped with only 128 bytes of memory—not enough memory, in fact, for a frame buffer, which would have stored all the information needed to display the screen. As Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost describe in their book Racing the Beam, this crippling limitation actually became an asset later, when clever programmers learned to use it to their advantage. While the Atari 2600 was designed to draw only two sprites on the screen, its lack of a frame buffer meant that it could be ingeniously hacked to draw entire rows of sprites, contributing greatly to its longevity and competiveness against rival machines like the Intellivision. It also meant that millions of Atari 2600 owners were spared the indignity of playing a game called Space Invader.
In short, a vintage game system is much more than the sum of its parts. There are deep and complex relationships between the aesthetics, capabilities, marketing, regulation, reception, and adoption of a platform that determine not only what type of games get made and sold, but also the type of gamer it attracts. When a system’s fan base reaches a critical mass then cliques, clubs, and entire subcultures develop with their own perspectives, tastes, and attitudes about gaming—all of which might clash with the company’s own efforts to create a brand image. Knowing something about these subcultures, or “fanboys” as they’re often derided, is fundamental to understanding the impact of any game system.
To sum up, your authors have a monumental task ahead of them. Our goal is to discuss each of our chosen platforms in depth, covering not just the machine itself, but also the assumptions behind its manufacture, the ways it was (mis)marketed, received, and developed, and the subcultures it fostered. We’ll take you inside the fan bases of each system, many of which are still thriving today in the form of “homebrew” scenes, expos, and online retrogaming communities. We want to situate these systems in their proper social context, and show you, for instance, what it was like as a gamer to own an Apple II in the early 1980s, and how your experience would have been much different with an Atari 800, Commodore 64, or ColecoVision.
Obviously, we cannot talk about every gaming system ever released. If we tried, this book would weigh more than a PS3!2 So, much as we did with Vintage Games, we’re taking a selection of the 20 systems that we feel are some combination of the most influential, innovative, important, and interesting to read and write about. We also want to feature the systems with the most active homebrew and emulation scenes. It really says something about a vintage system when people are still developing new software for it 30 years later!
Finally, in yet another parallel with Vintage Games, and further defining this book as the next entry in our Vintage series, we will again be presenting the North American, or, more specifically, the US perspective of our subject. That means that great game systems like the British ZX Spectrum or Japanese MSX platforms were not up for consideration when forming our list, although they may still get a passing mention. Similarly, that is why a platform like the Atari ST, which was a big success in Europe, can lose out in consideration to the relatively similar Commodore Amiga platform, which enjoyed a higher level of North American support. Perhaps future volumes of Vintage Game Consoles or entries in the Vintage series could rectify such an unintended slight for fans of a specific platform.
The chapters in this book are organized roughly chronologically and grouped into “generations,” an industry term that indicates a sort of collective step forward in technology. We’ll stop with the third generation, which extends to 2001 and the introduction of the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube. While each chapter is focused on a single system or platform, expect to find some overlap, especially in situations where two systems competed head-to-head, like the Sega Genesis and Nintendo Super NES. While you may be tempted to jump to your favorite platform, we recommend that you read the book cover-to-cover to get the full picture. Each of the systems we cover here has played an important historical role in the formation of the entire games industry, and you might get inspired to (finally) get around to playing games on computers and consoles you’ve never owned or even heard of before.
1 In this book, we use the term “console” to refer to a device intended purely for gaming, such as the Atari 2600 or Sega Genesis. “System” may refer to consoles as well as personal computers like the Commodore 64. “Platform” is a broader term that includes any combination of hardware and software that can run the same software. For example, the original Apple II, Apple IIGS, or a Windows PC running an Apple II emulator can all support the Apple II platform. Interestingly enough, “console” was the term used in the title of this book because that’s considered more recognizable than “platform” to the average consumer!
2 Sony’s original version of the PlayStation 3 weighed over 11 pounds.