Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System

Platform Studies

Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, editors

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, 2009

Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform, Steven E. Jones and George K. Thiruvathukal, 2012

The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga, Jimmy Maher, 2012

Flash: Building the Interactive Web, Anastasia Salter and John Murray, 2014

I AM ERROR: The Nintendo Family Computer / Entertainment System Platform, Nathan Altice, 2015

Peripheral Vision: Bell Labs, the S-C 4020, and the Origins of Computer Art, Zabet Patterson, 2015

Now the Chips Are Down: The BBC Micro, Alison Gazzard, 2016

Minitel: Welcome to the Internet, Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, 2017

Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Dominic Arsenault, 2017

Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System

Dominic Arsenault

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Filosofia OT by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Arsenault, Dominic, author.

Title: Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware : the Super Nintendo Entertainment System / Dominic Arsenault.

Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2017. | Series: Platform studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016055172 | ISBN 9780262036566 (hardcover : alk. paper)

eISBN 9780262341486

Subjects: LCSH: Nintendo video games--History. | Nintendō Kabushiki Kaisha. | Nintendo of America Inc. | Video games industry--History.

Classification: LCC GV1469.32 .A76 2017 | DDC 794.809--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016055172

ePub Version 1.0

d_r0

Table of Contents

Series page

Title page

Copyright page

Series Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Welcome to the Dark Side

1 Establishing the Nintendo Economic System (NES)

2 Minutes to Midnight: Devising and Launching a Platform

3 Now You’re Playing With Power … Super Power!

4 Beyond Bits and Pixels: Inside the Technology

5 The Race to 3-D

6 The American Video Game ReNESsance

7 The CD-ROM That Would Not Be

Conclusion: Silver Linings and Golden Dawns

References

Index

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Typology of the paratext derived from Lane’s figures (1991, 94–96).

Table 3.2 Comparison of console specs, reproduced from Electronic Gaming Monthly #2 (July/August 1989, 39).

Table 3.3 Dominant discursive stances on technology found in the press covering video games and their corresponding paratextual status.

Table 7.1 Cost and price breakdown for producing a game on Super Famicom and Sony PlayStation, derived from Asakura 2012, chapter 4.

List of Illustrations

Figure 0.1 Lifetime worldwide Nintendo home console sales, in million units, compared with competitors from 1983 to 2012.

Figure 0.2 Nintendo’s market share derived from lifetime worldwide console sales.

Figure 1.1 The walled garden model, regulated by the three-degrees structure.

Figure 3.1 Display of 16-BIT technology on the North American Sega Genesis model 1 (left) and the Japanese Mega Drive (detail, right). In addition to the central 16-BIT, the Japanese has two mentions on the sides: AV intelligent terminal and High grade multipurpose use. Source: Evan Amos, Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 4.1 Left: the Japanese Super Famicom; right: the Super NES. Source: Evan Amos, Wikimedia Commons

Figure 4.2 Left: Super Famicom (top) and Super NES (bottom) controllers. (The L and R shoulder buttons are hidden by the photo’s angle.) Right: Famicom (top) and Genesis (bottom) controllers. Source: Evan Amos, Wikimedia Commons

Figure 4.3 The Super Star Wars cantina stage (left) and the mountain cave in Soul Blazer (right) both resort to foreground elements to induce a sense of spatial depth, whether in side view with nearer patrons or in top-down view with hanging icicles. Emulated on Higan v0.95.

Figure 5.1 Axonometric (isometric) graphics in the SNES titles Shadowrun and Equinox. Emulated on Higan v0.95.

Figure 5.2 Linear perspective in the SNES port of Eye of the Beholder and F-Zero. Emulated on Higan v0.95.

Figure 5.3 Illustration of a line-by-line transformation to simulate perspective in Mode 7, exported from F-Zero. Left: top-down view of the ground map. Right: progressive angling to reach the perspective shearing. Emulated on Higan v0.95.

Figure 5.4 F-Zero’s playfield without the background skyline (left), and without the playfield (right). Emulated on Snes9X v1.53 for Windows.

Figure 5.5 Racing against the Blue Falcon in F-Zero means seeing the car at various predrawn sizes and angles as the player overtakes it. There are more angles of view when the car is up close (in the top three rows) and a lot less as it is farther away. Spritesheet built by Solink, with contributions from Davias, downloaded from Spriters Resource (http://www.spriters-resource.com/).

Figure 5.6 Flatness of mountains revealed when flying low in Final Fantasy III. Emulated on Higan v0.95.

Figure 5.7 The 7th Saga’s transition from top-down overworld traveling (left) and perspectival fight scene (right) reveals the artificial construction of height as the mountains are reduced to a flat picture on the ground. Emulated on Higan v0.95.

Figure 5.8 Inspired alternating between perspective and top-down views in Secret of Mana means the flatness of mountains is deemphasized by the top-down view. Emulated on Higan v0.95.

Figure 5.9 NHL Stanley Cup and NCAA Basketball. Emulated on Higan v0.95.

Figure 6.1 The American Video Game ReNESsance and its four phases: Appearance (1985), Rise and Apex (1985–1989), Decline (1989–1993), and Resistance (1993–1996).

Figure 7.1 Publisher shares of total sales of million-sellers for the Famicom/NES. (Total: 233.68 million copies)

Figure 7.4 Publisher shares of total sales of million-sellers for the PlayStation. (Threshold: 5 million copies; total: 426.65 million copies)

Figure 7.2 Publisher shares of total sales of million-sellers for the Super Famicom/Super NES. (Total: 143.6 million copies)

Figure 7.3 Publisher shares of total sales of million-sellers for the Nintendo 64. (Total: 142.75 million copies)

Series Foreword

How can someone create a breakthrough game for a mobile phone or compelling work of art for an immersive 3D environment without understanding that the mobile phone and the 3D environment are different sorts of computing platforms? The best artists, writers, programmers, and designers are well aware of how certain platforms facilitate certain types of computational expression and innovation. Likewise, computer science and engineering have long considered how underlying computing systems can be analyzed and improved. As important as scientific and engineering approaches are, and as significant as work by creative artists has been, there is also much to be learned from the sustained, intensive, humanistic study of digital media. We believe it is time for humanists to seriously consider the lowest level of computing systems and their relationship to culture and creativity.

The Platform Studies series has been established to promote the investigation of underlying computing systems and of how they enable, constrain, shape, and support the creative work that is done on them. The series investigates the foundations of digital media—the computing systems, both hardware and software, that developers and users depend upon for artistic, literary, and gaming development. Books in the series will certainly vary in their approaches, but they will all share certain features:

a focus on a single platform or a closely related family of platforms

technical rigor and in-depth investigation of how computing technologies work

an awareness of and a discussion of how computing platforms exist in a context of culture and society, being developed on the basis of cultural concepts and then contributing to culture in a variety of ways—for instance, by affecting how people perceive computing.

Acknowledgments

Writing this book has taken a number of years, and although I’ve been alone in penning the words, the long journey of ideas, from vague intuitions to rough shaping to constant chiseling and their final stonecast presence, could never have happened without the excellent people who have surrounded me through these years. I want to thank everyone who has engaged with my hypotheses, listened to my ramblings, and offered support in every way possible. In particular, and although mortally afraid to forget someone, I’d like to thank first Andréanne and Nathan, for being there for me and putting up with me while I rattled away at my keyboard for impossible hours; my close friends and colleagues in the Montreal game studies community, whom I always look forward to seeing, even if that doesn’t happen enough: Bernard Perron, for his friendship, support, encouragements and wise advice; Maude Bonenfant, for the inspiring discussions and rich exchanges we keep having; Carl Therrien, Guillaume Roux-Girard, and Simon Dor, for their sustained, positive presence through the years; Martin Picard, for sending me charts and news and sharing ideas during writing (and beyond); Gabrielle Trépanier-Jobin, Louis-Martin Guay, and Danny Godin, for the all-too-rare occasions to meet and their ongoing friendship; Andréane Morin-Simard and Marc Joly-Corcoran, for their almost daily presence in the office and pleasant exchanges, as well as our academic collaborations; my LUDOV colleagues and friends Hugo Montembeault, Pascale Thériault, Mikaël Julien, and Francis Lavigne; my research assistants of Team INTEGRAE Audrey Larochelle, Pierre-Marc Côté, and Sacha Lebel, who were tremendously helpful, dedicated, and perspicacious and who gave an additional dimension to my initially modest research project; MITP acquisitions editor Douglas Sery for his initial support and ongoing understanding and patience in making this project a reality; series editors Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost for their openness, support, and insightful comments on my initial pitch and first draft (I’d say your comments were pure silver!); the two anonymous peer reviewers, whose excellent and generous work has been incredibly helpful in powering up this book from the initial draft; MITP manuscript workflow assistant Elizabeth Agresta for her keen eyes that saved the figures in chapter 7; Devin Monnens and John Szczepaniak for offering connections and encouragements; Akinori Nakamura and Koichi Hosoi for their kind and positive responses to my probably impolite emails; Dana Plank and Julianne Grasso for revising some of the music-oriented statements in the book (and for headbanging with me to the Final Fantasy Mystic Quest soundtrack); David Viens and Hubert Lamontagne of Plogue Art et technologie for revisions on audio technology; the Fonds de Recherche du Québec—Société et Culture (FRQSC) for funding my research project on innovation and graphical technologies in the video game industry; and finally the hordes of anonymous individuals and communities all over the Internet who have provided me innumerable references, trails to follow, and points to argue. I can’t retrace all my digital footsteps, but I want to underline in particular the following portals: Wikipedia, the VGSales Wikia, VGchartz, N-Sider, SNES Central, Chris Covell, gamepilgrimage, MobyGames, 1up.com, Kotaku, the Super Nintendo Development Wiki, and the NESDev Forums.

Introduction: Welcome to the Dark Side

This book is about the Super NES—more precisely, it is a book about a certain framing of the Super NES as the technological enforcer of economic and cultural corporate wars in the video game industry. This book is about Nintendo, how it lived the 16-bit console wars of 1989–1995, and why it went from great to good to bad to worse in the span of 20 years. Ultimately, it is a critical history of Nintendo’s fall from grace, from the height of the Golden Age brought by its 8-bit NES console (1985–1990) through a waning Silver Age with its 16-bit Super NES (1990–1996) that ultimately led to a prolonged Dark Age with the Nintendo 64 and GameCube consoles (1996–2006). The bulk of the Super NES’s lifespan is thus intricately tied to Nintendo’s Silver Age, when things began to go wrong for the firm. Figures 0.1 and 0.2 contain some console sales and market share data that easily drive that point home; as can be seen, were it not for the sudden and unexpected Wiivival of 2006, Nintendo’s long slide downward would have brought them ever farther away from the spotlight and into the darkened margins of home video game consoles.¹

Figure 0.1 Lifetime worldwide Nintendo home console sales, in million units, compared with competitors from 1983 to 2012.

Figure 0.2 Nintendo’s market share derived from lifetime worldwide console sales.

But, the gamer who grew up with the console objects when reading this, the Super NES is routinely hailed as one of the best consoles of all time! It had an incredible library of games! And this is true. Osamu Inoue’s Nintendo Magic presents the typically held (if overly positive) view when discussing the belated arrival of the SNES against its rivals: In the end, the delays in the SNES’s development only stoked the fires of fan enthusiasm, and the 16-bit wars ended with the leading brand Nintendo’s overwhelming victory (Inoue 2010, 135). Witness Retro Gamer’s hardware profile of the console and its section, Why the Super Nintendo was great: Nintendo’s 16 bit powerhouse represents the true ‘Golden Age’ of videogaming as the likes of Konami, Squaresoft, and even Nintendo itself have arguably never been on better form than when designing games for this machine (Retro Gamer 2013, Super Nintendo entry). Or Don Reisinger from CNet’s article, conveniently titled The SNES Is the Greatest Console of All Time:

In essence, the NES was the building block of American gaming in the ‘80s and the SNES was first console to be drastically different (and better) than its predecessor. […] Instead of releasing a veiled copy of the NES to get in on the fight with Sega earlier, Nintendo created a follow-up that was worthy of the Super moniker and gave developers the license they needed to create the legendary titles that we still play today. (Reisinger 2008)

Throughout this book, I will argue the opposite of these accounts on every point mentioned. The Super NES was not a powerhouse, and it does not represent a Golden Age but rather a Silver Age (more on this later). The Super NES was neither drastically different nor better than its predecessor. It was a veiled copy of the NES released too late to play catch-up with Sega. The Super moniker was just markethin: thin marketing. Nintendo didn’t give anything to developers; it was forced to concede some control because they fought for it and went to look elsewhere. The only point I won’t dispute is whether game developers have arguably never been on better form than at that time.

The Platform With a Thousand Faces

Now, even in the face of the arguments I will develop here, the Super NES still continues to be regarded as a highly successful platform. Why is that? Answering this question requires us to change the way we think about platforms and eschew the traditional question What is a platform? for another one: "What is a platform to whom?" The Super NES was an incredibly strong platform filled with high-quality games for gamers; it was a one-tracked and short-sighted vision by Nintendo to keep its stranglehold on the market, a strict and intransigent tool of control against independent game developers, a giant leap forward in controller ergonomics, a conservative cement that resisted game genre experimentation, the site of schizophrenic promotional practices, a refuge for concerned parents, flash over substance, and the list could go on. The Super NES asks us to recognize the paradoxical situation where a game console can be recognized as a great platform sporting an extensive library of high-quality titles by gamers, rake in good profits for its owner, and yet simultaneously weaken its overall positioning and long-term success. In short, it asks us to consider for a moment how we evaluate a game platform’s success.

Conventional wisdom declares the SNES successful because it sold more units than the Genesis, with reported lifetime worldwide sales of 49.1 million SNESes (Nintendo Co. 2016a) against an often-cited 29 million Geneses.² If we take a step back and look at the broader history, however, the SNES period is when Nintendo lost close to half its market share while Sega’s tripled. We could thus declare the SNES a failure due to its inability to maintain the status quo. Perhaps we should count the number of games produced for a platform because, after all, gamers buy consoles to play games. Or maybe we should count the total number of software sales because games that don’t sell are only unwanted clutter and expenses for their publisher. However, platform owners may not care that third-party developers’ games do not sell if their own games are selling and the profit margins are high; maybe the only metric we should measure is the platform owner’s hardware and software revenue. But do immediate profits qualify as winning when market share has shrunk? After all, conventional economics and business studies describe market share as a valuable long-term strategic advantage. And on and on it goes.

In this light, the Super NES stands as Nintendo’s Pyrrhic victory, a symbol of its stubborn and uncompromising conservative nature. This much can be gathered from its name. The Super NES is exactly that: it’s the NES, only Super, whatever that means. The name betrays the console’s rushed development, Nintendo’s will to capitalize on the NES’s success, and the relative emptiness of its proposal to consumers. It almost feels like a newer, improved version of its NES rather than a unique new console. Incidentally, that’s exactly what many people gathered back then: the Economist claimed Nintendo was set to launch a professional version of its best-selling ‘Famicon’ (The Economist, August 18, 1990, 60). Even in contemporary writings, people make that mistake: When Daniel Sloan reviews the Famicom’s success in Japan, he sandwiches a sentence in the middle of the discussion to the effect that an upgrade came in 1990 with the 16-bit Super Famicom (Sloan 2010, 70). In other words, the SNES, as a souped-up Famicom 2.0, is not terribly interesting technologically, encouraging game developers to keep doing what they were doing, only slapping a Super on it.

Beyond Technology: The Commercial Platform

To put it as bluntly as I can, the SNES makes a boring case for a platform study, in the usual sense of the term defined by series editors Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort: Platform studies is about the connection between technical specifics and culture. In one direction, it allows investigation of how particular aspects of a platform’s design influenced the work done on that platform (Bogost and Montfort 2009a). Fortunately, another direction is available: In the other direction, it looks at how social, economic, cultural, and other factors led platform designers to put together systems in particular ways (Bogost and Montfort 2009a). Montfort and Consalvo’s (2012) piece on the Sega Dreamcast provides an example of the latter by focusing on Sega’s development policies with the console. Thomas Apperley and Darshana Jayemanne (2012, 12) situated this approach within the material turn of game studies: the materiality of platforms can be turned […also] outwards to focus on the organizational structure that allows the platform to be produced.

I want to push this direction further and consider platforms not only as technological objects but also as the embodiments of marketing forces that shape the creative works performed on that platform. This conception of the platform is perfectly suited for Nintendo’s stringent controlled environments. The first criterion from which game developers and publishers select a platform is often the business realities of the platform. No one delves into the arcane programming and technical constraints of SNES game development without making sure they will be able to actually release and market their game.

Robert Pelloni found that out when he spent reportedly five years and 15,000 hours making Bob’s game, a one-man project for the Nintendo DS. Nintendo would not send Pelloni a software development kit (SDK) needed to actually produce the game for the platform because Pelloni had no secure office space, staff, or other indicators of him acting as a business rather than an individual. This situation shows how the business practices of platform owners can shape the creative expression of game developers just as much as technological constraints. Platforms are not technology constructs that exist by themselves, with cultural or marketing considerations gravitating somewhere around them; a platform is a technology and a culture and a marketing construct, and these elements are indissociable. Thus, I have consciously named the various economic models described in the book with the same initials as their host platform or corporation, as appropriate; the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Nintendo Economic System, for instance, are flipsides to the same coin.

Thus, although the Super NES may be rather straightforward as a technological platform, it brings a unique opportunity to expand and even redefine how we view game platforms, by putting (perhaps counterintuitively) business and marketing first, culture second, and technology last. In these terms, a platform is a device meant to regulate and protect a firm’s market, and platform studies can benefit from a corpus of academic work that has seldom been integrated in game studies: business studies and its neighboring fields of innovation studies, economics, and management studies, which can be seen as forming a second kind of platform studies. Accordingly, one of the central contributions of this book is to articulate the dual nature of platforms as participating in both business-to-consumer (B2C) commerce and business-to-business (B2B) interactions. In Nintendo’s case, the discrepancies between the two are so important that the most apt description of the firm becomes an iron hand in a velvet glove. I will term the need to achieve balance between the fun-loving toy company image and the gravely serious tech firm at heart (Harris 2014, 133–134) the surface-and-core duality, and I will return to it throughout the rest of this book.

Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter’s framework of Digital Play (2003) conceptualizes the games industry as an Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing, with three interlocking circuits that influence each other and collectively define the three main facets of digital play, along with their actors. The cultural circuit involves cultural texts and meanings, the practices or activities associated with both designing and playing games, and designers, games, and players. The technology circuit involves digital artifacts, hardware and software infrastructures, and programmers and users. The marketing circuit deals with research, advertising, and branding practices, commodities, and marketers and consumers (Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter 2003, 50–53). Adopting this model, the book presents the interactions of these three circuits to understand the Super NES, which explains the oddities of its title.

Marketing: Nintendo’s Super Power

By studying the circuit of marketing, I am pursuing a direction identified by both Consalvo (2006, 134: Researchers of new media must continue to examine not only cultural products, but also the business practices that lead to the production and circulation of these products) and O’Donnell (2011, 85: We have not spent enough time looking at the folks who make games or at the broader system that they are a part of), among others. Too often the various organizations involved in the games business (individual game developers, development studios, publishers, distributors, and retailers) are more or less lumped together in the catch-all category of the video game industry, whereas in truth their motivations, goals, desires, and responsibilities are often divergent. To say that the industry wants to sell games and make money is no more helpful than to declare that gamers play games to have fun. Just as the important work of game studies scholars has allowed us to go beyond the simple gamer term and identify different types of game players, with varying interests and value systems for approaching games, we need to unpack the industry and recognize its various actors for what they are: different elements playing unique roles in a larger system.

Considering platforms as part of a business ecosystem allows us to position them as sites of struggle between conflicted and conflicting parties. It provides a unique key to understanding not only some of the technical choices behind the hardware of the system but also some of the aesthetic or design choices that can be found in some of the software on offer on that platform.

A survey of literature from business studies, economics, and management will allow us to further clarify the relationships among gamers, consoles, and games in the game industry, and to highlight the contributions and specificities of Nintendo and other hardware firms. What’s a platform to its owner? How can the two traditions of platform studies, from game studies and business studies, respectively, benefit each other and allow us to better understand the complex corporate context in which the Super NES inscribes itself and the restrictions it imposes on game developers and their creative output?

Technology: The Super NES as Silverware

Computers are hardware machines meant to run software programs, and the relationship between the hardware’s configuration and the software as expressive practice forms the backbone of platform studies. The hardware category, of course, predates computers, and in its original sense, it designates the miscellaneous assemblage of durable goods and tools used in the household to perform various actions, whether by humans or machines—anything from hammers and screws to door handles and window sills, including wires, plumbing, and utensils. It makes sense to think of computer hardware as such, insofar as computers are tools for software developers to make things with.

Sometimes, however, things are not so simple. Think of utensils. Many homes typically use functional flatware (knives, spoons, forks, etc.) in their everyday lives, saving a set of silverware (known as a silver service in Britain or argenterie in French) for special occasions. Language comes into play here, as Carolin C. Young writes: Americans often use the term ‘silverware’ with casual, democratic optimism to refer to dining utensils of any material. Properly, the word defines any object fashioned from silver, Sheffield plate, or silver electroplate (Young 2014, 256). Before the 20th century, America put its vast amounts