Rivers of ink have been spilled in our corner of the counterculture scene about Cultural Ground Zero. For the uninitiated, that’s a shorthand description of the abrupt decline that struck Western entertainment right around 1997. The movie moguls, rock gods, and video game wizards who’d spent the 80s and 90s making one summer blockbuster, S-rank album, and instant classic game after another suddenly stopped.
The magic was gone. It took two bland, repetitive decades for us to realize it, but now there’s no denying that every legacy pop culture institution is in steep decline.
Since volumes have been written about how to contend with and even reverse the trend, today we’ll indulge in some fanciful speculation. It’s a gentle summer day–the perfect time to idly contemplate ‘what if’s.
Specifically, what if Ground Zero had never happened?
That’s a massive question encompassing any number of butterfly effect chains, so we’ll restrict this thought experiment to a trenchant representative example.
Alternate Timeline: Sega Stays in the Game
In the early 90s, upstart game company Sega enjoyed a meteoric rise that saw them go head-to-head with big dog Nintendo for console market dominance. With consummate businessman Tom Kalinske at the helm, Sega of America actually took the top spot from the Big N at one point.
The honeymoon wasn’t to last. Constant undermining from Sega of Japan, especially multiple ill-advised hardware blunders and a catastrophically botched console launch, lost the 32-bit generation for Sega and set them on their way out of the console market. Their player-centric, arcade-at-home ethos has been sorely missed ever since.
How they could have defused the bomb
- Kalinske puts his foot down, possibly even suing his parent company under the terms of the deal SOJ approached him with to lead SOA in the first place.
- Legendary albatrosses like the 32X and Sega CD don’t get a stateside release. SOA’s install base isn’t wearied and bilked with gimmick hardware.
- More time and resources are put into the Saturn. Absent Japan’s interference, Kalinske seals his deal with Silicon Graphics, whose next-generation RISC chip goes into the Saturn instead of Nintendo’s Project Reality.
- The N64 never exists. Nintendo realizes its best bet is to continue its partnership with Sony, resulting in the CD-based Nintendo PlayStation.
- Sega releases a more powerful, more reasonably priced and easier to program for Saturn for Christmas, not summer, 95.
- The console market remains a head-to-head battle between Sega and Nintendo. The SG-powered Saturn boasts better 3D graphics than the PlayStation, while Sega’s stable of veteran arcade programmers take 2D games to the next level. Nintendo is forced to keep its focus on making player-centric experiences rather than dev wank-offs.
- Square releases Final Fantasy VII for both CD-based consoles. They’re compelled to turn in a more refined–and actually finished–version of the game to accommodate the 64-bit Saturn, whose version of FFVII is hailed as the superior, definitive incarnation.
Which might have been something like this:
But the sweetest plum to come out of the 64-bit Saturn pudding would have been the continued flowering of 2D gaming. The few morsels that console gen did give us only ever hinted at what 32-bit 2D games could have accomplished. Trying to imagine player-centric, high production value 2D with no console Ground Zero boggles the mind.
It’s probably just as well, since we’ll never know what might have happened.
Yet every evil is allowed only that greater good may come of it. To see the restoration of mecha mil-SF, read my hit military thriller Combat Frame XSeed: S!
Reading this made me sad. I was always Nintendo > Sega, but Sega is clearly missed in the console market. Nintendo PlayStation also has a nice ring to it. Sony’s weird decisions they make now would have been kept in check by the big N. In this timeline do you think Atari could have salvaged anything? Does Microsoft still make the jump in another generation?
For Atari to survive, someone who understood it was a technology company would have to be in charge. To this day, the folks who ran it into the ground see the video game crash as just “bad luck.”
I’ll defer to Chris on the Atari question.
As for Microsoft, I asked a company insider the same question prior to writing this post. He maintains that they still would have jumped into the console market since they had entirely different motives than Sega or Nintendo, and this scenario wouldn’t have changed their calculus.
To forestall the direction of the video game industry, you would also need to ditch the 20th century Progress myth that new thing = improvement. It’s only been within the last decade that the industry itself will admit the 32-bit generation was an objective step down from the 16-bit one, and that is because they were too blinded by hubris to admit it.
Unfortunately, I don’t see a scenario where the industry would have gone a different way because its rise and fall is very typical of the century that spawned it.
JD
How was 32 bit gaming a letdown? Too enamoured with movie making tropes? Trying to be too realistic? Lazy programming because 32 bits are more forgiving?
xavier
It’s aged exceedingly poorly. Unless you were around during that generation, most of the games that aren’t 2D are incredibly hard to play today.
Thing is, they weren’t that great to play back in the day. We put up with it because it was shiny and new. But an objective review would lead anyone to admit it was a step down. We went from responsible 60fps gameplay, bright and sharp 2D graphics, and unique artstyles, into sub-30fps, blurry, warped, and foggy 3D graphics, and everything being the same uniform artstyle. This also doesn’t factor in the resulting slower controls, bad cameras, and abandonment of many classic IPs that came from all of this.
The next generation after it fixed the majority of the technical flaws, but not so many of the game design or aesthetic ones, leading it further down the forked path. Then we got to the natural conclusion: the first HD generation where all the problems hit full flowering and the industry hit the wall.
Aside from Nintendo, everyone else ditched 2D and arcade design, leading to the interactive d-grade movies the industry subsists on today.
It all started with the 32-bit generation.
JD
I wasn’t much of a gamer. I did play pong with a Commodore 64 at friend’s house. I played tank and Pac-Man in the arcade and some Star fox at a dept store.
So I didn’t pay any attention to the 32 bit transition because I had other interest as a teen. But looking at screenshots of 32 bit games reminds of the Money for nothing video by Dire Straits.
Do you think a return to 16 bit would rejuvenate video games or nah game over at this point?
xavier
Xavier
In a lot of ways, we already had a return to 16 bit / 2d gaming in a big way within the indie game scene. And it did provide a rejuvenation of sorts. The fruits of that are games like Sword and Sworcery, Cuphead, Braid, Hades, Among Us, Salt and Sanctuary, Hollow Knight, Shovel Knight, Castle Crashers, etc. More recently there have been a ton of FPS games built on the old build engine — the one that was used for Blood and Duke Nukem 3d — and the fruits of that are games like Ion Fury and Dusk.
I think a return to arcade design would help more. There are plenty of people making 2D games that still have a mentality of standardizing everything into formulaic modern goo. Someone emulating what worked in a game like Jet Set Radio would help more than creating another Fez, at this point.
But 2D arcade gameplay eventually becoming the standard again would definitely do a lot of good.
It’s hard to look at a Wii game like Wario Land: Shake It! and not think it is a shame that this isn’t the standard anymore. There is so much more you can do with this template that we just don’t see.
The 32 bit era was obsessed with implementing 3D technology which was barely functional and which lacked a good control scheme until the next generation. Now it was necessary that some games pioneer new techniques, and inevitably some of them would be failures to pave the way for successes. However, nearly EVERY game was trying to get it on the fad, which only ended up stifling innovation because there was no need to break from the pack.
And the thing is, this is where the PC finally beat the consoles into the ground (outside of spreadsheet like rpgs, strategy games or economic simulators.) DOOM had shown how to make a (limited) 3D game that ran well, had a style that looked great and held up over the years, and had the controls to go with it. But note that even the ports developed with the cooperation of id software were noticeably inferior to the PC version. Most new 3D games on the playstation and the like performed and looked worse even than the DOOM ports.
Things were even worse on the Saturn due to it being optimized for drawing rectangles over triangles: great for moving 2D sprites or doing SNES style mode 7 shenanigans, bad for making polygonal models.
If you look at the rare 2D games of the era, such as Symphony of the Night, Darkstalkers, Rayman or Princess Crown look noticeably better than the 16 bit generation, generally control well and hold up today (with the main problem being loading times.)
There was also some crossover with the end of the FMV fad (which almost entirely defined the Sega CD’s library) where companies would just stuff as many videos as possible onto a CD without worrying about game design. There are maybe 10 good FMV games on PC, I don’t know if there are any on consoles.
Some of them are admitting it?
Company-wise, Nintendo’s online subscription service heavily relies on the free NES and SNES games included in the packaging. The virtual console in the Wii U already slowed down on the N64 games that were on the Wii and there is still no sign that N64 games will ever be on the Switch service. And no one except the youngest Gen Y kids particularly care. Because even Nintendo knows that outside of that small packet of people, N64 games are impossible to play today unless they get ground up remakes. Why bother with Quest 64 when you could get Lufia 2 instead?
Sony ditched backwards compatibility for the PS4, even though they had a whole store of PS1 games they could cash in on that were available on previous systems, plus easy access to PS1 discs. The PS1 Classic console was a total flop, bad emulation aside, and never went anywhere. There wasn’t much demand for it.
Nintendo has also shown zero interest in creating an N64 Classic console. And let’s be honest, we know why. Outside of nostalgia, it wouldn’t be very good and would tarnish their brand. They have nothing to gain by putting one out.
Sega would even consider putting out a Dreamcast classic before a Saturn one, and have even referenced the DC a ton in recent years. Despite the JP success, the Saturn is still relatively ignored these days.
Game journos already hate retro games, and always have outside of lol so random irony, but even they don’t ignore the glaring faults when talking about 32-bit games. Anyone with working eyes can see them.
Outside of certain members of Gen Y, this console generation is destined to be looked back on as a mistake.
I’m saying this as someone who still thinks the PS1 is Sony’s best system, and that’s only because the 2D games remain great and the 3D games have a weird charm that got polished out of the next generation in the move to make them more like movies.
The 32 bit generation was a mistake.
While I agree the Ps2 generation was better and fix many of the problems. The n64 min would still be fun for multiplayer. To this day people buy the N64 (2nd hand) for it. Single player not really worth it other than the 2 Zelda games (but unfortunately with 64 bad controller). PlayStation only having 2 controller support doesn’t get the same attention and only really for the RPGs, or to laugh at the bad games. I do like the card games on it (since very little is made outside mobile market)
Grinding up N64 games sounds like a great idea.
Here’s some anecdotal points of data:
I know a few families with young children that have the mini/classic systems of NES, SNES and PSX (in one case due to nostalgia of the parents, in the others due to it being a cheap way to get a lot of games.) But the kids have absolutely no experience with any of these games. Which system do the kids end up preferring every time? Super Nintendo.