Electronic Gaming Monthly, Oct 1993 (Part Three)

Word from the road was that Nintendo’s train trip was a power fest of gaming eds that lost their bunks along the way to L.A. Whose idea was that anyway?…

That might not be entirely the case, but since Q is being a bit vague here, this might take some explanation.

In 1993, Nintendo sponsored a cross-country train ride that lasted three days. It was called the Zelda Whistle Stop Tour, and those who were chosen to ride the train had three days to complete The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening; this was meant to promote not only the new Zelda game, but also the Game Boy’s superior battery life. While most internet references to the Whistle Stop Tour just copy-paste the Wikipedia article on it, some digging eventually revealed an archived Chicago Tribune article from that year that arguably comes off a bit disparaging at times, but is probably the only solid account of what really happened on that train ride.

But let’s hold off on the Quartermann critique for a second, because through reading said Chicago Tribune article, I caught a couple of paragraphs worth digging into.

– Nintendo also recently announced the Gateway System, an interactive multimedia system for travelers. The system will be installed in airplanes, cruise ships and hotel rooms and will let users play Super NES video games, watch movies, play CDs and make phone calls. One Northwest Airlines jetliner already has the system, and installation is scheduled for 20 more planes by the end of the year.

Not a rumor, really, but here’s one for the Strange But True file! I find that gaming history tends to forget about “emplaced gaming” systems (a term I’ve just made up). A lot of companies had a lot of different systems in place, from Sega’s Mega Jet to Nintendo’s own FAMICOMBOX. Somewhat different from arcade machines, these devices tended to be installed in – as the above quote says – airplanes, cruise ships, and hotel rooms (some are even still in place today, if Game Center CX‘s Famicom Box segments are any indication), occasionally available to use for free, but sometimes requiring a token payment or an extra charge to one’s room bill. The Nintendo Gateway System was another such system, offering 60 minutes of play time for only $5.95. There’s a lot more about it to read at SNES Central.

– Nintendo also unveiled plans for a new 3-D multimedia system to make its debut at Christmas 1995. That gives competitor 3-DO (whose system is due this fall) a two-year jump on the company. Thus, Nintendo is taking a big gamble, especially when you consider the problems it has had overcoming Sega’s early lead in the 16-bit market.

Heh, sounds like EGM wasn’t the only publication that was skeptical about the Nintendo 64! Of course, we probably know by now how well the 3DO ultimately wound up doing…

Eh, enough of that, though. Next Q rumor!

Look for a new video game developer, Buzzcut Software, to get into the game with a number of high profile licenses from the movie and comics industries…

Who the hell were Buzzcut Software? Not even the Internet knows; even the most exhaustively-detailed websites I can think of have no record of this company at all. A quick Google search for the name reveals only an archived 4chan thread where this exact rumor was transcribed with no further comment. All I can figure is that they had to quietly disappear when their high-profile licenses proved too difficult to work with.

This does remind me of another, similar company from recent years, by the name of BRASH Entertainment. They formed with a similar purpose, to create games based on prolific licenses. They ultimately released all of six games (and two of those were Space Chimps) between 2007 and 2008 before disappearing into the aether.

Look for Virgin to capture the rights to the upcoming sci-fi flick, Demolition Man, due out October 8. The game won’t hit for some time, but the movie, which Q-Mann previewed recently, looks like a complete trip…

Virgin were pretty productive with the rights to Demolition Man, and while neither movie nor games earned any major awards, the 3DO game is notable for being one of a few FMV tie-ins to Hollywood films to actually sport new footage with original actors and props from its respective movie. There were also versions for the Genesis, SNES, and Sega CD, all published by Virgin Interactive, but again, nothing that would have won any awards.

Atari is said to have scored a retailing hit with rumors surrounding the capture of shelf space at Toys ‘R Us! If it turns out to be true, it represents one of the best steps forward for the upcoming Jaguar hardware…

Ah, the Jaguar, the machine everybody hoped would be the return of the classic American console juggernaut. Atari sure did market their “triumphal return” as hard as they could, but when your exclusives range from a new Bubsy game to Trevor McFur, I’m not sure if there would ever be an alternate universe where Atari actually won that battle. Not to mention their ill-advised “Do the Math!” advertising campaign, which claimed the Jaguar to be 64-bit (which, while it handled some 64-bit operations, was actually powered by a pair of custom 32-bit CPUs…and apparently 32 plus 32 equals 64 bits?…I’m not an electronics engineer, but that sounds off, somehow), and the fact that the Jaguar ultimately didn’t look that much better than the SNES and Genesis that it competed with. I guess it had really good ports of Wolfenstein 3D and Pinball Fantasies, though.

Say it ain’t so! Uncle Al has bailed from Sega for the richer pastures of MTV-Land! Actually, he’s heading up Viacom’s new gaming division after that company gobbled up ICOM Simulations…

Apparently Defunct Games had the same thought I did (in several ways beating me to this very concept!), by asking “Who the hell is Uncle Al?” The most they were able to dig up was a rumor from a 1991 issue of EGM talking about a Sega CD game called “Uncle Al’s Bigtop Fun” which I’m unable to find any trace of elsewhere on the internet. Even frisking MobyGames’ “all game by Viacom New Media” page revealed no games from the era with anybody named Al on staff. I did find that they were responsible for publishing ICOM Simulations’ Windows 3.1 remakes of Shadowgate and Deja Vu, as well as a compilation of their Sherlock Holmes games, so at least that part was educational…but seriously, who the hell is Uncle Al?

Electronic Gaming Monthly, Oct 1993 (Part Two)

Part Two covering Part Two?! Who’d have thought?

More problems in Sega Land: Part Two – The Q-Mann has uncovered a legal loophole that many independent Genesis cart publishers are utilizing to get around the approval process — and to get their games onto store shelves without the fascist ratings emblazoned on the box! Accolade, EA, and other licensees are also circumventing Sega’s approval process! Yes, that is sweat you see rolling down the Sega white shirts’ brow…

Wow, yikes! Is this what we thought about video game ratings before the Senate hearings? Of course, Mortal Kombat was already out by now (see the previous post for a rumor directly relating to that), so everybody in 1993 had already seen Sega’s voluntary Videogame Ratings Council badges (the ones that tended to say “GA”, “MA-13”, and “MA-17” in Kombat‘s case). But to call them “fascist”? Yeesh, Quartermann, what were you thinking? At least nowadays we have the ESRB and its ultra-clear descriptors, meaning that (almost) nothing gets outright rejected from being sold…that said, other nations have also tried to follow the ESRB’s suit, with some tending to miss the point; Australia still has games occasionally be refused classification due to extreme violence or sexual content, and Germany still has its “index” for games that are deemed harmful to minors.

But no, that’s not what I was supposed to look for. In an incident that is oddly parallel to Nintendo of America v. Tengen, Sega and Accolade entered into legal battle over the manufacture of unlicensed game cartridges that bypassed the Genesis’ TradeMark Security System. The reason why this is such a sore spot for console makers is exactly what I talked about in my critique about the Nintendo 64’s price point: console makers sell the console at a loss, to make the money back on game sales. Well, if the console maker doesn’t have any involvement in the creation of the games, they don’t get anything from game sales, which means they’re out money. What’s interesting, though, is that the lawsuit between Sega and Accolade had been going on since late 1991 (source), and had only been apparently resolved two years later – after which Sega does not seem to have continued to enforce their injunction, as Electronic Arts, Codemasters, and Absolute Entertainment (correction: Absolute didn’t make their own cartridges, just wrote their own TMSS handlers, according to commenter Lance Boyle) all appear to have manufactured Genesis cartridges that bypass or otherwise skip portions of the TMSS protection.

Ken Lobb, the wizard of game design who managed to steer Namco toward some of their best titles is on his way to Nintendo to head up project development for the big ‘N! Way to go big K., save me a coffee in Seattle…

Ken Lobb is certainly a name with a storied history! While gamers of my generation probably know him best as the namesake of Goldeneye‘s “Klobb” sub-machine gun, his actual work dates back to 1989/early 1990, as a project manager at Taxan USA Corp. We might not have even known about those credits if it weren’t for the fact that he embedded secret messages in a few titles that he worked on; as ReyVGM points out in a post at FamicomWorld, Ken hid secret messages and more-difficult “second quests” in Burai Fighter, Low G Man, GI Joe, and Kick Master, all encouraging the player to play even harder. His Wikipedia rap sheet shows that his time at Namco was just as fruitful, with him getting special thanks on titles such as Splatterhouse 2 and 3, before he wound up at Rareware to work on the Killer Instinct games (including the 2013 XBOX One reboot!), and of course, Goldeneye, where his legacy as history’s least-favorite video game firearm continues to live on.

Back to Super Street Fighter 2 for a quick second. The Q-Mann has just learned that a development team has been put on, yep, you called it, the Super NES edition of the follow-up of the year…

Capcom’s own internal development team would manage to push the SNES port of Super Street Fighter II by 1994.

The bow tie boy gets the can from TH*Q! Howard Phillips, fresh from TH*Q and LucasArts and Nintendo (where he was the ultimate vid geek), has joined the Absolute team. No, he’s not slamming back the booze, he’s at Absolute Entertainment making new tank simulators or plane simulators or whatever it is they do there…

Howard Phillips – probably best known as being the headliner of Nintendo Power‘s famous “Howard and Nester” comics – certainly did jump companies a lot. I’m unable to find any proof as to whether he was fired from THQ or left of his own volition, but Absolute Entertainment – a company whose name was chosen specifically so it’d appear before Activision’s in the directory – was probably a less than stellar job compared to Nintendo, considering very few of their games had an especially high reception in the 1990s. The simulators Q mentions are most likely to be Garry Kitchen’s Super Battletank: War in the Gulf and Turn and Burn: The F-14 Dogfight Simulator, a series of SNES/Genesis war-sim games that happen to be the only Absolute games I can find that have even vaguely-positive reviews to them. Their respective sequels, Super Battletank 2 and Turn and Burn: No-Fly Zone, would both hit in 1994, alongside a handful of badly-received licensed titles like Home Improvement, the awful SNES adaptation of the Laserdisc game Space Ace, and yet another game adaptation of Jeopardy!.

While we’re on the subject, could it be that things have soured between TH*Q and Malibu Graphics, the powerhouse behind this summer’s blockbuster line of “Ultraverse” comics?…

I’m not really very knowledgeable on comics, especially not early-1990s stuff like the Malibu Ultraverse stuff, which I didn’t even know existed until I looked it up on Wikipedia just now. (Yes, I probably lean too much on Wikipedia on this…) I was able to find out that Malibu at some point formed their own interactive entertainment division, Malibu Interactive, who decidedly had nothing to do with THQ, and their final release was only ever available as a compilation disc for Sega CD: Ultraverse Prime, formerly an SNES project that wound up being canceled in that form and eventually bundled on the same CD as Psygnosis’ Microcosm. Beyond that, I don’t feel I know nearly enough to be considered an authority on the subject. (I just happen to be alright at internet searches, or something.)

[edit] Commenter Lance Boyle pointed me in another direction by pointing out that Q might possibly have been talking about not Malibu Graphics, but Malibu Games, a subsidiary of THQ from 1993 to 1995. Yet if Time Trax is any indication, this might not be too far removed from Malibu Interactive mentioned above. Yet things are only getting more confusing as I continue my research…

The Q-Mann hears that the hottest new video game company on the upscale scene is definitely Crystal Dynamics. They’ve stolen away a top movie boss, put together a high-priced team of producers, and pointed their big guns almost exclusively at Trip Hawkins’ 3DO system. The result? Crystal Dynamics is the darling software pumper of Wall Street…

I can’t find enough information to talk about the Wall Street remark, but the rest is true: Crystal Dynamics were the first fully-licensed exclusive developer on the 3DO platform. I’m also unable to figure out which “top movie boss” came to work for them (edit: his name is Strauss Zelnick, who is nowadays part of Take Two, and there’s even a New York Times article about his departure from Twentieth Century Fox), but their initial output on the 3DO did include a handful of games with full-motion video prominently featured, including Off-World Interceptor, which had acting that was so awful that they gave it their own Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment in-house. Crystal Dynamics would eventually create the GEX series of gecko-oriented movie-spoof platform games (not to toot my own horn, but you can read all about those at Hardcore Gaming 101), and nowadays they are a subsidiary of Square Enix USA, where they are wholly responsible for the Tomb Raider series, having taken over for CORE Design.

Contrary to what the Brits have to say, Sega’s upcoming Saturn system WILL be downwardly compatible with the Genesis and clock in at around 400 bucks and feature some cool enhancements ranging from on-screen color calibration to a “code card,” which will be used as part of Sega’s expanding plans to conquer cable TV…

And we were doing so well.

400 bucks wasn’t too far-fetched for such a new (arguably rushed) console; the closest figure I can find is a scan of Electronics Boutique’s 1995 Christmas catalogue that lists the Saturn at $349.99. Keep in mind, too, that unlike the Nintendo 64, the Saturn actually had a custom sound chip in it, along with two main CPUs. Sega were not screwing around with this thing. And while it did feature on-screen color calibration, it most certainly did not play Genesis games, despite what that cartridge slot might indicate. No, that was pretty much only for memory cartridges, such as extra RAM (useful for those Capcom and SNK fighting games) or save-game space (because Shining Force III would demand nothing less). And those plans to conquer cable TV, well, those weren’t for the Saturn; Q probably had his rumors mixed at this point, as that’s probably what ultimately came to be known as the Sega Channel, the game world’s latest attempt at a digital distribution service. (“It wasn’t the first?” you might ask. You might want to go read up on The Incredible History of Downloadable Console Games, as it’s really quite fascinating.)

With another paragraph down, next Monday’s article might be a short one! Or it might not be. We’ll have to see, won’t we?