Old Times
What came before us, and workedThe Konami Code exists because a programmer could not finish his own game
Kazuhisa Hashimoto was porting Gradius to the Famicom in 1986, kept failing his own test runs, and wrote himself a ten-button shortcut. He forgot to take it out before release.
Ted Woolsey translated Final Fantasy VI to a budget measured in bytes
From 1991 to 1996 one man handled the English versions of Square's SNES output. What constrained him was less the deadline than the size of the cartridge and Nintendo of America's list of prohibitions.
Final Fantasy VII went to Sony because of storage arithmetic
In January 1996 Square announced it was working with PlayStation. It was not a grudge against Nintendo: the game's video would not fit on a Nintendo 64 cartridge, and if it had, the retail price would have passed ten thousand yen.
Four Atari programmers demanded their names on the box and invented the publishing industry
On 1 October 1979 David Crane, Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead and Larry Kaplan founded Activision with Jim Levy. It began with a demand that now looks obvious: a royalty on sales and a credit for the author.
Nintendo and Sony were building a console together. The divorce took one day
On 1 June 1991 at CES in Chicago, Sony unveiled the Play Station, a CD unit for the Super Famicom. The next day Nintendo announced from the stage that its disc drive would be built with Philips. Sony found out from the audience.
Gunpei Yokoi built the Game Boy out of technology everyone else had written off
Lateral thinking with withered technology was not an aphorism but an engineering policy. The monochrome Game Boy of 1989 outlived its colour rivals precisely because it was made of cheap, thoroughly understood parts.
Sega shipped the Saturn four months early and lost in a day
On 11 May 1995, at the first ever E3, Tom Kalinske announced the console was already in stores at 399 dollars. Minutes later Steve Race stepped onto Sony's stage and said two words: two ninety-nine.
The console war was an American story. Japan barely noticed it
The Genesis does what Nintendon't campaign was run by Sega of America under Tom Kalinske. In Japan the Mega Drive lost not only to Nintendo but to NEC's PC Engine, and not by a little.
Pinball was illegal in New York for thirty-four years
On 21 January 1942 Mayor Fiorello La Guardia signed the order that sent police out with sledgehammers. The ban fell in 1976, when Roger Sharpe announced at a hearing where the ball would go — and put it there.
The console that revived the industry was sold as a VCR
After the 1983 crash, American retail refused shelf space to anything labelled a video game. Nintendo solved the problem with a costume — and the connector invented for that disguise went on to poison a generation.