Retronauts - 503: The Years in Review Revue - 1983 & ’93

Episode Date: December 26, 2022

Jeremy Parish, Jared Petty, Benj Edwards, and Kevin Bunch continue their conversation from four episodes ago, wrapping up the highlights of 1983 before diving into the best and most earthshaking games and events of 1993. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week of Retronauts, it's threes again, so I guess the sixes. this up on the schedule right now. I'm Jeremy Parrish, and this is episode 503. And this is a continuation of a previous episode, which was episode 499. So quick turnaround time on this. You have to respect the efficiency. But yes, this is a continuation of our conversation, Retronauts East, a few weeks back, about the games of, I said 10, 20, 30, but really it was 40 and 50 years ago. week, we're continuing our conversation about the games of 40 years ago, and then moving on to 30 years ago, and then we're all taking a nice, well-deserved nap, because we're old and tired, and it's scary out there. Anyway, with me this episode, once again, we have,

um, wow, let's go alphabetical by first name. Okay, I guess that's me. That's you. Hi, I'm Ben Edwards. Mr. Deepfake himself. Mr. Deepfake himself. And who else do we have? I'm Jared Petty. Happy to be on this latest voyage of the Retronautilus. Hmm. Are we going to spear a narwhal?

I mean, I hope so. And then finally we have dialing in from glorious East Coast, D.C. This is Kevin Bunch. All right. And you have all listened to our episode from a few weeks ago because you're cool. and therefore you don't need any further introduction about what this episode is and what we are doing here. So without further ado, we're just going to continue with the year 1983 talking about the biggest events and the coolest events and the things that we connect with the most. We talked about the arcade games and the computer games of 1983, but we did not make it to the console games.

And that was kind of a big deal because 1983, you know, in America, things were crashing. in the console space. In the UK, no one cared about consoles. But in Japan, oh my gosh, so many consoles. And I'm going to talk about that. But first, let's just kind of give a rundown of some things that were happening in 1983. We could all maybe say like a sentence about each of these if they strike your interest. And then we'll move on to our meteor topics. Everyone has a few points of interest they want to discuss. So, uh, let's see. The first Mahjong games were released for home consoles. This does not matter to you because you are listening to this podcast as an English language speaker and therefore probably don't care about Mahjong games. But nevertheless,

these were a huge part of the kind of Japanese games launch era. Finally, you had the ability to play Mahjong by yourself instead of having to socialize. That's really cool. That's the great thing about video games is you don't have to play with other people. You can just do them by yourself. people are weird and bad. I like to think that you just enrage the mahjong community worldwide. I wouldn't say worldwide. I mean, there are definitely some American mahjong fans and European mahjong fans, but they are a small, small community. They've been kind enough to teach me how to play mahjong. And I'm not any good at it, but at least I do understand it now. However, for the vast majority of Americans, it's just, you know, like eventually mahjong gave us Shanghai, and that's when

Americans started to like Mahjong. That and crazy rich Asians. I used to hang out in a late-night bar that was one of the only restaurants open in my small town of Japan that late. And the food was pretty good and the coffee was really good. And if I couldn't sleep, I'd take a walk over there and sit. But the small town yakuza guys would come in and play Mahjong all night there. That was a, there could, there were soaps next door that they managed and they'd come in.

sunglasses at night, track suits and all, and just hang out and play non-majong until morning eating noodles. Yeah, I used to hang out with the international students at my college, and some of them, you know, would get together, and they had friends or family who owned some of the local Chinese restaurants. And one time some of my friends took me to a, like, after hours to a Chinese place, and I just watched for the first time of my life, people playing Mahjong, and it was scary. They were so fast and so intense and the clacking of the tiles. It was pretty hardcore. The funny thing is, I hadn't talked to the friend who took me there in like 25 years. And then I recently got a friend invite from her on Facebook because she

saw a tweet of mine that went viral. And she's living in Singapore now. And she was like, hey, you're famous. Let's connect again. So Twitter was good for something after all. That was a good tweet. Oh, thanks. I didn't think of it. My nephew did. It's great. He's, yeah, someone else's glory is the best I've ever done on social media. Anyway, let's see. Some other things that are worth highlighting but not talking about in depth. Let's see, Mario Cement Factory. That was a game and watch system, right? Yeah, don't you have one of those on your desk? Yes, I do. Well, not at my desk at work, but yeah, I do have one of those. That someone was kind enough to donate to me

in the event that I ever managed to pull together the funds to create game and watch works, which, you know, maybe someday. That's a fun game and watch tabletop. That's actually a really sweet little game to play. I like Mario Cement Factory a lot. It's on one of the Game Boy collections, isn't it? Yeah. I believe so, yeah, yeah.

And it's definitely not in Donkey Kong for NES. They took out the cement factory level. So they had to create a standalone device just for it. Let's see. there's also Astro Command. Kevin, you wanted to talk about this, but I don't know if you can because your cassette vision crapped out. It did. Have you played it before? I've not been able to actually run the game. Oh, I just put together a video about it, and spoilers for a patron exclusive video available at patreon.com slash games bite. Astro Command is actually really super

impressive. It's a, it's scramble, basically, on hardware that was designed to play Pong. And it It should not work, and somehow it does. The system doesn't even have controls to let you move up and down, but they use the left-right lever for space invaders for up and down. You press left to go up and right to go down, and it actually works. And it has scrolling objects, like everything's scrolling. It has, you know, the fuel tank destruction mechanic. It even has a boss at the end of the stage cycle. It's kind of like a grottious boss. I'm actually, I was very impressed by it. It's not like an all-time classic, and it sure doesn't compare to, you know, playing Scramble on real hardware. But, like, they should not have been able to create anything even close to Scramble on that hardware. And it's kind of amazing. I'm starting to believe that Scramble is sort of the will it run Doom before Doom? If you think about old computers and handheld, it seems like there's a version of Scramble for all of them.

Yeah. Or Super Cobra. Yep. I mean, that's the same game. But, yeah. Yeah, I, you know, on my videos, I talk a lot about Zevius and Hayankyo Alien, Space Invaders, and the Tower of Duraga. But Scramble is definitely one of those just, it's a primal game, and it influenced so much else in, especially in the Japanese arcade and, you know, console game space. It's a, it's a big deal.

So, yes, you can, if you own a cassette vision, you can play something approximating Scramble. All 10 of us. Yes, exactly. another game from 83, James Bond 007 from Milton Bradley, I want to say, or Parker Brothers maybe. A Parker Brothers. Yes. And

even made its way to the Othello Multivision over in Japan, which was an SG-1000 clone. I'm not any good at this game, but it's kind of impressive. It's kind of like a Moon Patrol knockoff and a little bit like Scramble, actually. I think the most interesting thing about James Bond, 007 is that it was one of those games. that went through development and then stopped and then they restarted from scratch

and that's the game we got. Like the original one I think was based specifically on a recent James Bond movie. I'm blanking on which one. Moon Raker, maybe? Maybe. And then they just dropped that and started over with this sort of moon patrol, multi-screen adventure

that we got and it's pretty okay. You do have an Astro Martin or Aston. Asson. Hashtro command on the brain. Yes. You have one of those British cars that turns into a submarine. That's kind of cool.

Actually, come to think of it, like scrolling and, you know, this kind of Moon Patrol-ish thing was sort of big at the time because 83 also gave us for Kalikovision B.C.'s quest for tires, which it's been a long time since I've played it. But I feel like that's also kind of in the Moon Patrol auto-scrolling platform jump action kind of space, right? Totally is. Yeah. Yep, same kind of game. Let's see what else 83 Pepsi invaders. Someone talk about this because I only know the generalities. So this was a modified version of space invaders for the Atari 2,600, that was handed out to sales executives at a Coca-Cola conference.

In 83, they made, I think, 125 copies of them, and a decent number of them are still floating around. They show up every so often for sale or for trade. It's very interesting. You've got the aliens replaced with the words Pepsi. And you got a little Pepsi logo as the UFO. And after, I think, three minutes, the game ends and a flashing Coke wins appears on screen. And it's impossible to lose. The Pepsi invaders never come down to the ground.

You have infinite lives. So it's a very strange little piece of marketing. Yeah, the deck is stacked against Pepsi. There's no way. I didn't know that you couldn't lose. Coke would not do well in the Kobayashi-Maru. They don't believe in the no-win scenario. They hacked the game.

That's exactly right, just like Captain Kirk. Let's see. Also, in 83 Sword Quest, the first three games of that series came out eventually. And the fourth, I think, am I correct in saying that it just, like they put together a fourth game that's not totally accurate to the creators' original intentions for the Atari 50th anniversary collection? Yeah, they put together an Atari 50, a sort of a pseudo-what-might-a-been version of how SwordQuest might have ended. And this, of course, was the contest series that you had to have an inscrutable comic book

and knowledge of zodiacs and various and sundry astrological signs to solve. And then you found clues in the game and you shipped it off to Atari. hoped you won a really cool goblet or sword with like jewels and the hilt. And it was a neat thing. And no one did. Yeah, some people won parts of it, but never won the final prize. Some of the prizes were given out and are accounted for. But they couldn't give out the final prize because they never made the final game.

Yep, exactly. And there are all kinds of dark rumors of where the sword might have ended up. Maybe in Jack Triminal's office, which is almost certainly of aquifle, maybe never even made. who knows. Don't miss the classic Retronauts episode with Chris Sims talking about sword quests from five years ago. I don't know. That was good. Good one. Yeah, it was. He put together, he wrote a comic book about it. Well, actually, a comic book adaptation based on the series. So, but it was really more about like the story of the series as opposed to the series itself. Anyway, go back and listen to the episode. It's great. Another 83 event, MCA Universal filed a lawsuit against Nintendo. that they ultimately lost because they said Donkey Kong, that sounds and looks a lot like King Kong, and we own that. And then Nintendo went to court and said, actually, that is the public domain. And Nintendo was so grateful to its lawyer whose last name was Kirby that they named a character

after him who regularly destroys everything in sight and battles gods. Also on the Nintendo front, Nintendo created research and development for the future EAD, electronic or entertainment analysis division, headed up by Shigero Miyamoto, the fourth and final, I guess, kind of core division of creativity within the company. Essentially, Shigeru Miyamoto created Donkey Kong, which was, you know, legally defensible. And they said, you're awesome. You should make, like, be the head of this division to make games for us. And he did.

So that's great. Anyway, those, that's kind of the high view. Let's talk about some of the particulars. Let's start with Jared, who put his name next to something called Beam Rider. Yeah, just a standout little game. This was a – I love the Atari 2,600, and 83 is a halcyon year for the 2600. Even though the business end of things was going terribly, this is a year that some of the very best Atari games come out or games for the 2600. Beam Rider is an Activision game that asks, what if you were trying to port Tempest to a system without a spinner, and you wanted to do it well?

Beam Rider is the answer to how you do that. I'm of the opinion that there are about 30, 2,600 games that really hold up, and BeamRiders, among the best of those. It would be absolutely in its element in the old days of, like, Xbox Live Arcade as a leaderboard chasing games. game that a community got around. It's a simple, simple game. Just a series of flat lanes that you're moving a ship between to dodge projectiles and fire straight up, a lot like tempests, kind of rigid positioning. And then it just gets faster and faster and meaner and meaner and introduces new

enemies. They fly at you in blinding speed, and yet it never, ever feels unfair. Beam Rider is a treasure, and I think this is one of those like, hey, if you're like, I don't know, everything on the Atari is kind of primitive and terrible. This is one of those challenge that assertion games. Activision had some real killers this year. This was the E.C Quest and Robot Tank, too, their best games, but Beam Rider is something else. It holds up better than almost any 2,600 game. I'm a big fan of that game, too.

great game. If you've ever tried the Intellivision version, that one I think is even better because that was the original target platform and they just ported it to everything. And, you know, they'd nail just the speed and the sound effects in a way that most

in television games really don't. And I think part of it is because it was written and developed by the guy who built the systems bios originally after he left APH and went to Activision. And, yeah, it just shows.

It's one of the best shooters of that, of that time frame, period. Yeah, there's a general consensus around the time that Intellivision wasn't the best at fast action games. And you get games like Astrosmash and Beam Rider that just go really, seriously. Are you kidding? And I love the Intellivision. I agree with you. The Intellivision version of Beam Rider is incredible. All right.

So, Beam Rider, I'm not familiar with that one, but it sounds like I should look it up. Is that on Atari 50, or is it not because it's Activision? No, it's not because it's Activision. It's on the old anthology collection. Where would I find that for play on a modern system? Beam Rider is as out there. I know it's in a couple of the compilations. I've got it somewhere.

I'll try to dig it up for you, Jeremy. I'm trying to remember what it's on. Ah, I mean, it's fine. I've got the ability to play 2,600 games otherwise, so it's all good. Great. Kevin, let's talk about the Atari suit against Coligo, since we're in the Atari mode. Sure.

So this was a lawsuit Atari brought against Calico because Calico had started selling the Gemini system, and they had also announced plans for this Calico Vision expansion module one. And the key thing here is that both of these would run Atari 2,600 games. The Gemini is just a 2,600 clone, and expansion module one is essentially just 26 Hardware. that you plug into your Kaliko vision and use the systems a pass-through. Atari didn't like this since, you know, that was an infringement on their technology.

They settled out of court around March. The terms of it basically came down to Kaliko agreeing to become a licensee for Atari. So, you know, they would have to pay them royalties and that sort of thing. But they got to sell their Gemini. They got to sell their expansion module. and it sort of kicked off this weird period of companies making materials for each other's systems. You had Battelle games on Atari. I guess that started in 82, but they were reporting Intellivision stuff to the 2600.

Klico was making games for the 2,600 and the Intellivision. Atari was making games for the Intellivision and the Klico and, you know, Atari stuff soft on computers. Phillips, they made The Odyssey 2. They even put out a game on the Kleecovision. It was a strange period. I think the closest you could look at it now is when Sony put M.LB. The show on Switch. Yeah.

Like the nearest thing I could think of to compare. You've got a bunch of Xbox games, Microsoft Studios games, like Ori and the Blind Forest on Switch. So, yeah, we're back at that age again. Some of those M-network games, the ports through the 2,600, are great, Armory Ambush and Frogs and Flies. And there's a lot of really good M-network games that came over to the Atari. I'm kind of grateful I got those. I love Frogs and Flies.

I was going to say, I'll take on all comers and frogs and flies. Yeah, frogs and flies, it's the best. I love it. Speaking of ports for 2,600, Jared, you have a note here about the best 2,600 arcade ports happening in 1983. A lot of them. Yeah, this was a great year. Again, the narrative is that by now, you know, Atari is falling apart. And yes, on a business end, a lot of that is happening.

Meanwhile, we're getting really, really neat imagining as a great Atari games. I think people think of when they look back at the 2600, they think of these early 80s arcade games like 80, 81, as being on the 2600 at the same time. But most of them didn't come along until around 83. So we get Battlezone, Centipede, Digda, Galaxian, J. Jouse, Jungle Hut, Moon Patrol, Miss Pac-Man, Phoenix, pole position, and vanguard this year. And I just picked the good ports. I mean, Centipede's borderline, but a lot of people like it. The Dig-Dud port is stellar.

Galaxian, which is a really old game by this point. The 4600 version of Galaxian is better than an arcade game. Plays faster. I really enjoy it. Joust is not particularly colorful, but plays spectacularly. Jungle Hunt's amazing. Miss Pac-Man is what Pac-Man should have been. Phoenix, again, another one that's really in a lot of ways.

is better than the arcade version. Certainly plays smoother. Vanguard, which shouldn't work on the 2600, kind of works great. And so this year, and as Kevin points out in the notes here, a lot of these by our good friends at the General Competing Corporation. Kevin, you want to jump in on that? Yeah, some years ago, I interviewed someone who worked at GCC on some of these 2,600 games, and he described that, at least for Ms. Pac-Man, they had access to all of their original

development materials for Miss Pac-Man Arcade and, you know, the staff. So they just pulled them in and helped them help them out and making this 2600 port as good as they could. But at this point, Atari was sort of just outsourcing stuff to GCC to make for the 2600, just because their internal development teams had been so depleted from people abandoning ship and starting their own companies. There's actually a bit of animosity between, uh, Atari's developers at that point because, you know, they were just throwing all these projects to GCC and the thing, you know, maybe they wanted to do them.

But, you know, either way, GCC was just hitting it out of the park. I think I think Centipede might be the only one of these that they didn't do. And that's probably the worst. I'm not even positive on that. Yeah, it's, and a lot of these on this list, one of the things I really think stand out is that this is where they've got their heads around the hardware and after years and years of working on this thing. but they've also learned to adapt. They're like, we're never going to make a vector battle zone. So let's just make a really good, you know, rasterized battle zone.

We're going to make the best moon patrol we can make on this hardware and then rebalance it to fit what the $2,600 could do, and it works perfectly. Vanguard, we don't have twin sticks. So we're going to just introduce an auto fire to a shooter. And, hey, who knew? It actually works great. You don't need a fire button to have a good shooter. And there's, and Dick Doug, there's like, you know, just scale it.

down a little rebalance it for that and it's these are really really great versions of these games and uh unfortunately came along late and so a lot of people you know these were bargain bin games later on i guess so you know maybe bad for business but good for kids right Yeah, so let's talk about that. We need to move on from 83 pretty quickly. So I'm going to ask both of you, Jared and Kevin, to combine your talking points here with the crash of the market, the console market and the computer crash. the price wars, all that stuff, go for it. Okay, well, I guess I'll start off because the console crash hit first.

So this was sort of kicked off at the very end of 82, and it really spied out of control in 83, basically, you know, through a combination of poorly tracking orders, stores ordering too many games, and then all of that stuff coming in and there was just too much product on the store shelves, supply, way overshot demand. And basically all of these companies were stuck because these stores had to discount all of these games that they'd ordered, so they weren't really ordering a whole lot of new games.

The publishers and developers, they were losing money. A lot of them were starting to go under. US games went out of business. this year. Ashtarcade filed for bankruptcy. Apollo as well after an ad agency seized their assets because they failed to pay their bill in 82. Fox video games, Starpath, they had to go merge with epics to survive. Data Age went under. Just a massive shakeout. Mattel almost went out of business. They lost so much money on their electronics business that they almost went under and they had to shut that down early 84. Atari kept losing gobs of money

and that led to mourners splitting the company in 84. And, you know, this was all, this was mostly Atari's doing because Atari accounted for so much of the market. But, you know, the CEO at the start of the year, Ray Kassar, he did not want to change course, according to one of the former vice presidents of marketing who worked there. And I interviewed a while ago. All this excess stock did not get cleared out until around late 84, early 85. And, you know, even though games were still selling, no one was really making any money off of them.

So eventually everyone just sort of threw in the towel until Atari and Kleeko were the only ones left. Rough. And things weren't any better on the computer side of things. Yeah. Although in perhaps in the most consumer-friendly way possible, they weren't better. That's the way that, in my opinion, 1983 is the most important year in the history of personal computing in America. And that's because this is the year that computers become

accessible to ordinary human beings in a real way. The great computer price war comes up long and the short of it. There are so many companies trying to enter computers or maintain a space of computers at the same time. There's just not space for everyone. And Commodore has come along with a brilliant plan of owning their own chip manufacturers, which enables them to produce computers more cheaply than anybody else in their bracket and undercut the market. Other people cut prices to try to keep up and they lose money. And finally, there's just a complete meltdown of what's thought of as the home computer market there.

Texas Instruments, Timex in the United States, Atari, which up to that point had a really good computer business. Colico with their Adam, which was a pretty big player for a little while, all wash out of the market this year. IBM, which is looming over the home computer market with this theoretical PC junior that's going to come out someday and revolutionize home computing, the way the IBM PC is revolutionized business computing. That's the expectation.

Project Peanut misses Christmas. It alters the entire trajectory of what's going to happen with that system. Commodore gets out ahead, manages to meet demand. At the beginning of this year, computers cost two to three times what they do by the end of this year. And a lot of companies shake out. Apple survives by creating finally the Apple IIE, improving their seven-year-old or six-year-old technology. And because they have such a great education connection, they're actually able to charge more for the computers and do really well with them. The T2E's an incredible PC builds more life into their ecosystem.

system early the next year. IBM's PC Jr. keyboard is a farce and it's enough to ruin the entire thing. Tandy comes along, takes the PC Jr. says, what if it weren't deliberately handicapped by its developers? Anyway, this is the year we go. And finally, perhaps most important of all, this is the year we get the first legitimate legal PC clone like POMPAC, who reverse engineers the bias of the IBM PC. All this combined creates a situation where at the beginning of your computers are very expensive and at the end of your computers are very cheap. And they stay cheap compared to where they've been. They never go back up.

And second, we go from like 10 companies to to PC clones, which end up solidifying the market to this day. That's defined in 1983. Apple, which remains around. And then Commodore, which hangs around with the C-64 and the Amiga for more than a decade after this. All right, that was a long spiel, but it is a heck of a year. Yeah, so, I mean, basically as the American console industry was collapsing in on itself, like a bad souffle, the computer market was also shaking out, but in a way that gave it an advantage and kind of kept video games alive for Americans at home during the lacuna of the console market, because there was a spell where basically no console games came out. And there were months where nothing was released new for a console in America anywhere. So people turned to computers.

That made a big difference. And then, of course, at the end of 1985, everything changed because Japanese companies started to sweep into the market with their consoles, filling in the vacuum that had been left behind. And those consoles hail from 1983 also. They kind of basically, while the American market was collapsing, the Japanese market was just beginning to stir. There hadn't been many real proper consoles released in Japan. Epoch tried to localize the Atari 2,600, and I believe Bandai localized the Intellivision, but tariffs and the fixed exchange rate of the yen made those things impossibly expensive. And a few things happened in the early to mid-'80s, such as the yen being decoupled

from the dollar and allowing to inflate relative to the dollar, bringing import prices way down. But also, Japanese companies just kind of said, hey, let's make our own consoles. We kind of get the idea. We kind of see where, you know, things have gone poorly overseas. And so 1983 is where the first proper consoles hit Japan and, you know, proper homegrown consoles, I would say. And there had been consoles developed by Japanese companies before that, such as the Epic Cassette Vision, Bondi with its Supervision 8,000, a few others, but really 83 is where things start. And, you know, if you look at official histories, you're just going to see, hey, that was the launch of Nintendo's family computer, which became the NES. It's the only

thing that matters. It's the beginning of Japanese video games. But no, 1983 was a boom year for Japanese game consoles. So in addition to the Famicom, of course, you also had Sega's first console, the SG-1000, and its clone console by Skuda Original, the odors of the Othello board game brand with the Othello Multivision clone. At the same time, Epok converted its cassette vision into the Cassette Vision Jr., which was budget priced to be more competitive with the Famicom, although it didn't have anything on the technology. And also, it removed some of the basic functions. All the controls were built into the original cassette vision. And it lost not only the light gun jack, but also all the rotary dials for playing

Pong style games and baseball and Space Invaders. And yeah, it's just like a weird choice. It's a new console cheaper, but can only play like two-thirds of the library. Casio released the PV-1000 console alongside the very similar PV-2000 computer. Gaken released a very strange little game console called the TV Boy that looks like a kind of weird, funky desk phone, but it's actually a console with a handle that doesn't do anything and a controller built into it. Strange little device. I can't wait to tackle that for video. And then Tommy turned its tutor home computer into the Tomi Puta Jr. console, which was basically

essentially a Ti-994A clone hardware that was designed. specifically in this case as a console. So a lot of interesting things happening. There was a huge shakeout, of course. Most of these consoles did not do well. Famicom ended up having like 95% of the market with a tiny little sliver going to Sega and then almost nothing happening for these other consoles. But, you know, the fact is, it was kind of like what was happening in a very condensed timeline in the U.S. and in Europe with home computers. where lots of companies were entering the market, and the company with the best technology and the best lineup of games ultimately succeeded. But, you know, for a while, it was anyone's

guess. And that, like I said, a few years later, those consoles, the survivors started to make their way west and kind of changed the way people looked at video games and kind of broke the hegemony of American-made consoles. And we're still playing Japanese consoles to this day. And, you know, it's a kind of just an important and, I think, a positive development for, for video gaming as a whole. Hazzaw. If you say run, I'll run with you. If you say hi, we'll hide. Take my heart into

If you should fall into my arms Trimble like a flow Anyway, that's 1983. We need to move on to 1993. You guys probably remember 93, right? You're old enough and young enough that you remember these things, just like they were yesterday. But they weren't.

They were 30 years ago. Oh, well. So 1993, we're going to start with the arcade again. And, you know, if there's one thing that really stands out to me in arcades in 1993, it's the fact that, hey, Street Fighter 2 happened two years ago, and now everyone was catching up. Because most of what happened of interest in 93 in arcades was fighting games. You had Super Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat 2, Fighter's History, World Heroes 2, Fatal Fury Special, Samurai Showdown, Virtual Fighter, Saturday Night's Slam Masters, and Sega Sonic the Hedgehog. Anyway, do we count that? I don't know. Anyway, a lot of fighting games happening. The one, surprisingly, the one that anyone made notes next to is Samurai Showdown. So Kevin, take it away. What's up with this one? Why is this the fighting game to talk about and not say Virtua Fighter? Well, well, I guess the first step is that I played a lot more Samarish Shodon than I have Virtual Fighter. But also, this was a really big hit for S&K and the NeoGeo platform. If you go through the coin-op trades for the time, this was a very successful game for them and for operators.

It sparked a franchise that's still going to this day. I mean, they had a new game, what, two, three years ago now. Yeah. And if you look at S&K's post Street Fighter 2 output, you know, you had Fatal Fury to Diamond Fight just wrote that column for the Retronauts Patreon about how that was sort of their one that they looked at Street Fighter 2 and said, okay, we can try that kind of game too. This one, I feel, is the one that establishes S&K as a developer of fighting games, their identity. It's got this very distinctive theme, you know, the 1780s, Japan. The cast is very iconic at this point. You know, you had a few characters that were based on real-world figures.

Halmaru, Ukio, Jubei, they were all based on real people. Same with Hanso, Hatori. You had Nakaruru, who was an indigenous character, who has ended up being one of S&K's most popular figures even now. Like, she's sort of one of their company mascots. They used actual voice actors. They didn't just get people who worked at the company to come in and read lines. It's separate from other fighting games at the time because every character is using a weapon.

It's a weapon-based game. So attacks accordingly do a lot of damage. They also have this comeback mechanic of the rage bar as you take damage that fills up. And once it's full, your characters will do even more damage with their attacks. This is a much more sensible approach to a comeback mechanic than how Fatal Fury 2 did it with a, there's just a flashing life bar when you get low health that lets you do infinite supers if you can pull them off. The game, like revisiting it, it's a little janky, but it holds up reasonably well, and it's pretty iconic.

This was one of the big fighting games and arcade games in the arcades around me when I was a kid. Yeah, I played it a lot in the arcade. I think it was at like an adventure landing type like mini golf place we had. And it just blew my mind the graphics. And I love the theme and the setting. It seemed like enough of a difference between this and this. Street Fighter 2 that it really stood out instead of just like a Street Fighter 2 clone

and the swords and the weaponry and stuff are a neat, neat type of addition. Yeah, this was the first fighting game after Street Fighter 2 to hook me. I tried several of the others, but this one really just pulled me in. Some of that was the weapon element. Some of it was

the just gorgeous character art and character design. And I like to, I like the fact that you did have pretty high damage per hit with the weapons. So it felt lethal. It felt like a different kind of duel than you got with a street fighter, which I really liked. You were mentioning Nakuru. Is Nakuru an Ainu person? Yes, she is. Okay. I didn't realize that. Cool.

All right. So that was the best fighting game of 1993, maybe. Definitely the most inventive. And, you know, it's not like people weren't trying and throwing a lot of things at the wall. But yeah, Summary Showdown, definitely. definitely had its own personality. And it does, it does kind of embody that NeoGeo fighting game style, that whole vibe, where it just feels larger than life and a little, a little different than everything else. But, you know, you also had lots of other inventive arcade games in 1993. You had NBA Jam. I mentioned Virtual Fighter, you know, an attempt to take the fighting genre into the third dimension with lateral movement and ringouts and things like that. that, very blocky polygon graphics, but despite their, their kind of blockiness, that's sort of their retro charm now. I love when Sega makes, you know, action figures that are accurate to the polygon models in Virtua Fighter. It's great. It was also a year for people really, you know, as much as the industry was starting to move toward 3D graphics, like, you know, polygons and things like that. It was also a year where, you know, next to games like Ridge Racer, which were proper 3D, you had some of the most beautiful 2D games ever made.

You had Outrunners from Sega, which was basically kind of the ultimate expression of the super scaler style. Like if you, you know, it's clearly hand-drawn, but it, when you watch it in motion, it feels almost like it is a 3D world. It's just really stunning because it's, you know, on, I think, Model 32 hardware or whatever or System 32. So it just can do so much. You had In the Hunt from NASCA, the company that would eventually give us the Metal Slug series.

And, you know, it's a submarine underwater shoot-em-up side-scrolling action, very slow-paced, but there's just so much detail in the visuals. You know, if you happen to be one of the people who bought that for sake of Saturn or PlayStation, it was just amazing to see all that visual depth in there. Capcom, you know, kept doing the brawling thing. They had Dungeons and Dragons Tower of Doom, which, you know, just, it's just a great game that looks awesome and it has kind of an RPG element to it. Just, you know, a lot of stuff happen.

Yeah, that's the one that walks so the shadow of Mysteria could fly. Like, Tower of Doom is really good, but it's sort of an essay that lays out the stuff that'll create the, it's the caterpillar that's about to become the beautiful butterfly that is shadow over a mystery. Can you give us one more, one more metaphor for this one? Sure. It'll probably be, how about this? I'll go back to End the Hunt and call it a feast for the eyes. I can just, I can just grab some tropes here. I don't really have a personality. I'm just an AI trope machine. So you're also a deep fake. I see. There's going to be some shocking revelations about all of us by the end of this episode. Exactly. I have created my replacements. They are Jared and Kevin. That's why I'm not talking.

What do you have to say about arcade games in 1993 Venge? Just what I already said about Sam Rye Showdown. That's all I remember. You didn't play anything else? I don't think so. It wasn't a big arcade year for me. I don't know. I may have been one of the years when I went to Gatlinburg and played the classics.

There you go. I was 12, so we went there every spring. And there were two or three really great arcades there that were big and each had over 100 classic arcade games. It's just incredible. I wish that still existed. Alas. All right. So one more arcade game of note for

1993, and that's also from Sega, and that is Star Wars Arcade, which Kevin has once again flagged for moderation or something. Yeah. So, you know, the last episode, Jared talked quite eloquently about Star Wars

Arcade, the Atari one. This was I don't know that I would call it a remake per se, but it's in the same vein. This was based on the Sega Model 1 hardware, which Virtual Fighter used. This is, so it's all modern-ish 3D polygonal technology. There's a bunch of different kinds of stages, like you're attacking the Death Star, a superstar destroyer, and then you're going after the second Death Star. There's a two-player mode where you fly a Y-wing and someone takes the,

secondary gunner position. The game plays a lot like the original one, the original vector game. You can fly around an arena area, but it's a little tricky to actually get moving. You have lock-on proton torpedoes that regenerate over time. It's just, it's very interesting to me, because this came out right on that cusp of Star Wars being interesting again that it's never quite gotten out of. So I'm kind of surprised that they even made it in 93 in the first place. Yeah, it was, well, you know, this was when Star Wars was starting, like LucasArts, Lucas

film was starting to kind of rally around Star Wars and saying, yeah, you know, we should bring that back. So we'll talk about that with the PC side of things too. But you started getting like the Timothy Zon novels and the Dark Horse comics, you know, Dark Empire, or heir to the empire, you know, both of those, actually. So I feel like this was part of that same thing. You know, they said, hey, let's go to a company that's big in the arcades and license Star Wars is a property to them and just, you know, do the full, you know, multi-prong attack.

And six years from now, we're going to come up with the amazing prequel movies and everyone's going to love them and they're going to revolutionize cinema. So this was, this was the well, you know, the good intent. the well-intended effort for a disaster. Yeah. If you ever get the chance to play an actual cabinet of it, there is a 32-ex port that's really good, but there's nothing quite like the original machine.

I know they have one at the Galloping Ghost in Chicago. It's a lot easier to find the 1998 Star Wars trilogy arcade machine, Sega did. But I prefer this one. I think it's a more fun game. Oh, you nailed it, Kevin. Yeah, this is of the two, this is the better game. game. I love this game. And it's Sega doing Sega. You know, Sega made this huge investment into 3D. We talk about Virtual Fighter. We're going to get virtual racing and four long virtual tennis. And now you hear they're like, you know what? What if we use our new like Polygon powers on Star Wars? That sounds fun. And it really works. And because it's so stylized and in a way kind of like Star Fox, it still looks good. Because it looks so abstract and impressionist that it, really, really continues to have a neat visual fidelity.

If you can play this in an arcade, absolutely great. This is a really neat video game. Beautiful. And I forgot that Virtual Fighter was 93, too. It just reminds me that I'm sure I've talked about Virtual Fighter before on this podcast. But, yeah, that game just blew me away. Sorry, I was, like, I wasn't paying attention when you guys were rattling off the names and things. Cool.

But I remember seeing it in Gatlinburg, so that jibes with what I was saying earlier. Like I went to an arcade and I saw Virtua Fighter there. I'm like, oh, man, crazy. Anyway, so that's 93 in the arcades. Pretty good year. A lot of refinement, some technological innovations happening. But really, the magic was happening on home computers. Here are some games that I'm going to mention in passing before we jump into a couple of really big titles.

You've got the seventh guest, Day of the Tenticle, the sequel to Maniac Mansion. Master of Orion Alone in the Dark two Star Trek Judgment Rights Sam and Max hit the road that's two

not one but two really great all time classic Lucas Arts scum games with just super fantastic animation

great style great humor just kind of hitting on all cylinders syndicate the far opposite extreme from Sam and Max

SimCity 2000 Space Quest 5, Prince of Persia 2, the flame in the shadow or whatever, the shadow in the flame. And also, over in Japan, Princess Maker 2, kind of an early, like, virtual life sim slash dating sim? I don't know. It's a weird one. It's got some problematic content. But it's interesting in innovation. Also, it was how Gynax helped fund Avangelion.

So there's something to be said for that. I did not know that. I remember Princess Maker 1, your daughter could end up choosing to marry you, her father. I think that's Princess Maker 2 also. Is that 2 also? Okay. There we go. Yeah, that's fun.

Yeah. I mean, you weren't like her literal dad. And also, you're basically Satan, I think. No, no. She can marry Satan. That's right. And become the mistress of like hell. It's a wild game.

Anyway. Good for her. Yeah, right? I mean, it's really. all about, you know, bringing up children to the best of your ability and then letting them be their own person. Congratulations. Whatever choices they make.

Anyway, yes, exactly. Everyone give the round of applause. Omedito. So, okay, those are the highlights and weird lights. Now let's talk about the really important stuff. And I don't think we can talk about 1993 in computer games without

fast forwarding all the way to the end of December and talking about doom in all caps. Yeah, a obscure little gem that no one's ever really played. It's a lost classic. I suggest if you can dig it up and get it running in DOS box.

You know what the problem is? You know, in a pregnancy test. Well, the problem is they never ported this game to any other system. It just was stuck on DOS forever. Yeah, I mean, it is you know, it is our job to talk about what's important in gaming, Doom is one of the most important things to ever happen in gaming.

It's genre-defining. It changed the way we thought about what computers were capable of. It really did. We were looking earlier, talking about Day of the Tenticle and Sam and Max, and we thought about the DOS platform, at least, as a place where those kind of games excelled, but where bleeding edge action was just not going to happen. And then Doom, In software, it did things that people didn't really think were possible and shifted our perspective. Doom is a concise, perfect, twitchy, exploratory, atmospheric, horrific, scary, fun, wonderful single-player experience that can also be experienced co-op. They could also be experienced with terrific multiplayer, so much so that people hacked in Duangos as they could play it online. the community was actively encouraged to create new content for it and given tools by the developer to do that, creating the entire Wadden community around that that continues to this day.

So we get wonderful things like Mega Man Death Match that we can play now. Doom is, I think Jeremy said in an old episode of Retronauts that Doom's, you know, one of the three games your grandma's heard of. And I think that's, that's very, very true. It's funny that you say that, have I told you the Doom story about my grandma seeing Doom? No, not that I've heard. Jeremy may have heard it before, but my grandma is from a small town in Texas. She's passed away now. But in like the 90s, I guess when the PlayStation Port of Doom came out, I think we took it to Texas to see my grandparents.

And my brother had it hooked up to the TV set in the main living room. And my grandma, who was like, I don't know, 70 something at the time came in and saw I'm playing it. And she said, oh, boy, shoot them demons. So she liked it, which is funny. So, yeah, that's the only video game my grandmother ever saw. So ironically, you're right. In 93, I was already a PC gamer. Doom shifted the way I played PC games.

I was already deeply into it. But I was playing stuff like Civ. And you talked about syndicate. And we're going to talk about X-Wing in a minute. But with Doom, I was just like, oh, and entirely, this is the best place to play video games now. I love Mario World and I love Star Fox, but my Super Nintendo can't do this. What I liked about Doom is that it, yeah, it changed like the greatest place to play games as action games was the consoles at home. And then suddenly it's the PC out of nowhere when it was never really the PC.

It was always RTS and strategy and whatever things that were going, you know, slow turn-based role-playing games and stuff. and Doom still does all of that action stuff so well that it's still incredibly playable and fun and it does it better than most games made today. So it's just one of the classics. I was playing Doom yesterday. Yeah. Yeah, there you go.

It's just so good. I go back to it again and again. It doesn't get boring. It's too well-tuned for that. And we're going to get down to it here in a little bit, but this is half of the equation. Doom is one half of an equation that's going to change all of video games, pretty much forever, that happens in 1993.

We get the other half of it a little later on down these notes, but super duper important. So, yeah, I don't know. We ran about Doom forever. We could talk about three hours. Oh, yeah. That would be of an entire episode about Doom, which would be a great idea, but that's not this episode. Yeah.

So I'm going to jump in and talk about another PC game that is kind of the opposite of Doom. It is not fast-paced. It is not finally tuned, though it was a graphical showcase for. its time, and that's missed. And, you know, missed, we've talked about this before. It gets a lot of hate that I think is extremely unfair. People talking about how it ruined adventure games and dumbed down the genre. No, adventure games ruined adventure games by, you know, imposing really arcane and ridiculous restrictions on people by playing gotcha, by, you know, just basically being unfair and unfriendly, and missed kind of threw that aside by stripping everything down

to a very, very minimalistic, simplistic style. I mean, it literally is a hypercard application. It's a slideshow. It's you going through computer rendered visuals, like postcards of someone's trip to an island that's really weird and nothing quite makes sense. But it's, you know, the, the, the visuals, the pre-rendered graphics were very cutting edge for the time. And they really, between that and the very sort of minimalist sound design, it's a great masterpiece in a sense of doing a lot with a little. It does not give you a totally immersive world in the sense of doom where you're moving around and everything's flying around you. It's immersive in the sense that you're there and you're invited to look at all the details and soak in the atmosphere. And then you encounter puzzles and you have to solve things to get through the island and make your way to the end of the story. But everything that you need to solve a puzzle is always right there. There's no like, you know, carry around an inventory and use object on item and vice versa over and over again until something clicks. There's no concern that, oh, wait, you forgot to

pet the rabbit in the first screen. And you never see that rabbit. again. And because you didn't pet the rabbit, it's going to actually turn into a monster that hate you and it's going to kill you in the last five minutes of the game. And you can't win because of that bad choice you made in the first screen of the game. It's none of that. It's very, very straightforward. And once you kind of understand what the game expects of you, which is look around this space and figure out how the logic behind these puzzles, these objects, these musical instruments, whatever you have, you know, what's the point there? And yeah, it's an island full of goofy mysteries and, you know, ridiculous gadgets that don't make any logical sense

in the context of like, why would people actually do this? It's kind of like, you know, going into Resident Evil's police station and you have to like place a red gym to access the police vault or whatever. Like, it's stupid. Hey, that was clearly an art museum beforehand for me. That's been explained. So, so it's, it's kind of nonsensical, but it's a video game. And it's really just about, you know, kind of figuring out what's the mystery behind this island? What's with all these other places I can go to? What's with these guys who are shouting me from the pages of books to help them out? Who should I trust? What should I do? And, you know, it's, it's not a game that has a lot of replay value. But, you know, just in the sense of, hey, here is a visual showcase for your

computer to really take advantage of the CD-ROM format. And it's got great audio design. It's got really cool, you know, impressive visuals. It's like straight out of the mind's eye. And you have to figure out all the mysteries here. And every island has its own style of mystery and every puzzle is going to be a little different. It's great. I really, I have a lot of respect for this game. And, you know, I don't want every game to play like Mist, but I think Mist was important for kind of pushing back against some of the worst design rubric of a genre. And also, you know, I think it deserves respect for just helping to propagate the CD-ROM format and encourage people, encouraging people to buy multimedia setups for their games, for their computers. I mean, if Doom didn't pull you in,

then Mist did. It was one of these two games. that basically made you say, or both, I need, or both, yeah. But, you know, one, the other, or both. This was the one-to punch of the PC industry at the time. And this was the game that made people say, you know, I need some good speakers and I need to buy a CD-ROM because this looks so cool at Comp USA or at Walden Software or whatever. And I played for like five minutes. And I feel like I was making, you know, I feel like I almost figured something out. but I want to keep playing and do more of that. And also, some of the puzzles were arcane enough that they made some good money off strategy guides. So there's something to be said for that, too.

Anyway, so that's my spiel for miss. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Yeah. In some ways, it was the birth of casual games because you don't die, and you can kind of go at your own pace. And the funny thing about it is we considered the graphics photorealistic at the time, or at least I did. I couldn't believe, like, those renderings. I thought they were so mind-blowing. And I wrote a really neat article, or at least I think it's neat because I wrote it.

I interviewed John Romero and Tim Schaefer about it, and we talked about the interplay between Doom and Mist, and it's neat. It's a great game. My kids liked it. I brought it out on a rainy day during a hurricane in 2019 and on the Jaguar CD system of all things, which is how I actually first played it. That's when I first got around to it. Thoughts and prayers, wow. Like in 2000 or something. But it was actually great.

It was a good experience. And I love that game. And it's completely underrated. I'm just kidding. Yeah, I was just replay an inscription and it made me want to get missed back out. I was like, oh, yeah. Huh. This is kind of missed, this kind of the original escape room.

Who knew? It's really neat. And it was even more neat when you were there. And I think that what Jeremy said about adventure games kind of destroying themselves there for a while and getting up their own butts. Yeah, Mist reminds me in some ways of the original Smash Brothers. It's taking a genre that's gotten so far up its own butt

that's inaccessible and turning it into something vastly different that more people could enjoy. It was zany and rule-breaking and I understand that you can finish the game at five minutes if you know what you're doing, but I don't care because no mere mortal could do

that with Mist until they'd memorized it. And so if that first wonderful experience. And I got very frustrated and I'm bad at puzzles, but I still, I can't help but think it's a great video game and really, really shook things up. And yeah, gosh, it was pretty. It's hard to think of how pretty it was and looking at it now and how primitive it is. But it just looked great.

I still want one of those lampshades that has like a rib cage, you know? Do you remember that in one of those boards? I mean, I have a lampshade that's a rib cage, but it's, you know, just real human. Okay, good. Yeah. Sometimes you just got to make it yourself. Trustpassers perish that enter my doing. So I talked about MIST, but there was another, there were other adventure games of that time that were notable.

And, you know, MIST did some pretty clever things incorporating full motion video, but a few other games went really all in on that. And one of those is returned to Zork, which Benj is going to talk about. Oh, yeah. I loved Return to Zork, even though it's difficult and frustrating. This game, I guess, chronologically speaking, I guess I played this before I ever played Miss, because we had a PC and when it came out, I think we'd just gotten a CD-ROM drive that year, and the graphics were just mind-blowing because they were full-color, full-motion video scenes with real actors talking, and this game, I think, does that the full motion stuff fairly well.

It doesn't feel as, I never liked any of the other full motion video games, I think, that ever came out. This, you know, this does have static adventure scenes where you're pointing and clicking. It feels kind of like missed, but I'm pretty sure it was developed, you know, simultaneously, something like that. and it's got a lot of stuff that I refer to a lot like the Booz Allen sequence

where you have to get a guy drunk to get his keys or something I can't remember and he goes Wants him right? Of course you do over and over again and so it gets stuck in your head forever

and he says like who's like us damn few you know and all that stuff like it's just so classic and the guy at the beginning says I need a new battery a new battery

all those things those lines are still etched in my brain. So I think that the performances of the actors, even though some people considered them cheesy, were very memorable. And there are some dead ends in this game, just like it has those bad habits of earlier adventure games. It wasn't missed influenced yet. So there are places where you can die all the time. You do the wrong things. Or you can get somewhere where you can't beat the game and you have to start over from a save. And I hate all that. You know, I hate it really bad, but the game itself is, I feel like it was an important step towards, I don't know,

just, I guess the games didn't really go in the full motion direction as the mainstream, but it was, it felt like a really big breakthrough, and the craziest thing to me about it is that when I played it again for the first time, maybe 15 years afterward, I could not believe how small and low resolution the video is. It's like, you know, 320 by 200 or something. It looks horrible, grainy, super compressed and dithered and everything. But at the time, when we saw that on a BGA monitor, it was like, oh, my God, this is like a movie, you know? So, anyway, it's a cool game.

I think, I don't know if any contemporary players would enjoy playing it as far as fun is concerned, but I believe it's historically important, and I think it should be experienced if you're looking to, you know, go back through. sort of important and interesting games of the time. All right. And also on the PC front, Jared, wrap it up for us talking about X-Wing, which has nothing whatsoever to do with these other games we've talked about. Yeah. Let's talk flight sims. Once upon a time, they were a really big deal.

And somebody said, what if, you know, flight sims but Star Wars end in space? X-Wing is the first foray into that space where you had a real sim, element, where with one hand, you're flying your X-wing across 360 degrees of beautiful, wonderfully rendered, excitingly designed missions, except for that one horrible thing with the Corvette. And on the other, with your left hand, you're constantly balancing your engine, shields, and weapons energy for maximum deployment. So you're playing a very fast strategy rhythm game with your left hand, and you're at a dog

fight with your right. That's what makes X-Wing work. It nails the feeling of being in a Rebel Alliance Starfighter. You just, you're just like, oh, my gosh, this is exactly what I imagined it would be like. You're doing cool Star Warsy things. You've got digitized John Williams music running in the back. All midying it up there. The enemy AI is just good enough to make things feel right.

The design engine was actually extremely limited, but they were really. really, really smart with how they used it. And the vast majority of the missions feel really good and are different enough from one another that it doesn't get stale. There are a couple of places where it's blatantly unfair, which later gets, you know, smoothed out and Tie Fighter, which is really kind of X-Wing 2. I also love that some of your, you know, homing targets are anagrams for rival companies of LucasArts. The names of the ships are things like Microprose rearranged into something else, which is very cute. and then you blow it up. A lot of love.

X-Wing remains among the great Star Wars video game titles for its ambition, which was largely realized on very limited hardware. I mean, this is a game designed for pre-Penny MPCs with a 3D engine in it for fast-based combat, and it totally works. It really kind of became the standard for what light sim-type space combat would be. moving forward. And once again, it kind of walked and walked fast so that Ty Fighter could fly. And Tyfighter's storytelling is superior to X-Wings. But X-Wing's still just a lovely video game. And it's on Gog, and I really enjoy playing it to this day.

It's a great year to be flying an X-Wing. Really was. Yeah, in arcades and on computers. And on home consoles, you had kind of an Ersatz approach. with Star Fox. But we're not going to talk about that yet. You also had Trevor McAfur in the Crescent Galaxy, which, you know, the real classic. But we are going to move on to consoles at this point. point, 1993, I would say an okay year for consoles. I think the medium was kind of trying to

find its way at this point. You had the 16-bit transition, sure, but, you know, optical formats were making their appearance. You started getting home consoles that were capable of proper 3D. A lot of people were entering the business and competing, and it was all very confused. So, There was innovation happening, but also some stagnation. So we're going to kick things off by talking about, you know, some iterations on some classics, namely the Zelda series. So, Kevin, why don't you take it for us? Tell us about some amazing Zelda games that came out for consoles in 1993. At long last, my time has come.

So we have Zelda, the Wand of Gamelon and Link the Faces of Evil on here. both came out in 93 for the CDI. Both have a reputation, you could say, but that's sort of based solely off of the incredibly janky cutscene animation that these games have. I would go ahead and say terrible. It's not great. It was done out of an Iron Curtain studio that clearly did not have a lot of money or a good director. but the games themselves are pretty interesting.

They were in development back at the time when all they had to go with were the first two games for the NES and the 1989 cartoon. And what they pulled from those were two sort of companion proto-Metroidsvania kind of games. So you control each of your characters, you know, Zelda or Link, depending on which of these games you're playing. You have an island, and the island has a different layout for each game, different stages. Each one, the stages, you can sort of jump in and out, additional ones unlock as you go through the game. But, you know, you have probably like five or so to start with. And these all have, you know, people, they have items, they have enemies. And as you find progression items, you can return to these other areas.

areas and continue moving along. This very generous continue system, you know, if you lose all of your lives, you just get knocked back into the world map and you can try again. You get to keep all your money and your resources.

The music's very, very good, shockingly, and the visuals, too. Like, this has very painterly quality to it. Yeah, I really like these games. I'm shocking to say, that, but... That is shocking.

You know, because I owned them and they were terrible. The hitboxes are the worst part. And once you progress enough that you, you know, get a ranged weapon, that's no longer really a big issue.

The boss fights are interesting, you know, all the bosses, well, most of the bosses have a weakness to a particular item that if you figure out what that is and pick it up,

you can one-shot them. It's a little, they're a little grindy, because sometimes you have to go buy more bombs or ropes or what have you. But, you know, I think they're worth checking out. There's fan remakes on the PC in recent years. They will even fix the hitboxes, so they're not so CDI. So I think that's a good approachable way to try them out.

It needed, I mean, there's a lot of quality of life stuff. It feels like it's a couple of drafts away from being solid. But, you know, no game has ever needed four face buttons more than this one that uses two. There's so many things that happen when you're trying to toggle between your very limited interface options, which is especially maddening because you've got three buttons that are front of you and they'll use two of them. Well, the third button was just one and two together. Yeah, they need unlimited ropes and bombs. You know, the way you go in and out of doors is maddening.

the way you pick up items is maddening. The hitboxes are maddening. But you're right. It's beautiful. And the music is really good. And it's darn interesting. It doesn't feel finished. That's always been my trouble with it.

It's just like it feels like it's a couple of passes away from where it really needed to be. Just not enough QA. The thrilling thing about them is that they are sort of like the lost Zelda games in a way. A lot of people haven't played them. So if there's a way that people have improved. them, like you're mentioning, Kevin, that sounds like fun, you know. Yeah, these were really let down by the CDI hardware and not being very well designed to run games.

But I think they did the best they could with the hardware they had, and it turned out all right. They're darn interesting. I agree with you there. Okay. So anyway, that was kind of a joke. There were other Zelda game. Well, there was another Zelda game released in 1993, one that people actually like.

No, one that people love. And that's The Legend of Zelda, Link's Awakening for Game Boy. And it looks like Jared has highlighted this one to talk about. So, Jared, why would you rather play Link's Awakening than the Wand of Gamalon? Well, Wanda of Gamelon has 0% chain chomps, and Link's Awakening has 100% chain choms. So I think that right there that decides a lot of it. There are more interesting owls than Link's Awakening. There are very few.

Links Awakening is all the good episodes of Twin Peaks and Wanted Gammon on us all the bad ones. Links Awakening is a Zelda game with no Zelda, no Hyrule. It's playful and fanciful and plays fast and loose with the Nintendo universe. It has cute little side-scrolling sections with Gumbas, has delightful puzzle design. And it's occasionally obdurate and frustrating when you don't know where to go next and definitely benefits from a guide. It's unfathomably beautiful for the Game Boy, somehow translating the general vibe of Link to the Past straight into that very primitive four-color hardware. And it's a game that instills extraordinary melancholy. Has very well-designed dungeons that are all thematic and fun and neat overworld full of interesting characters.

where you're doing funny things, people that don't overstay their welcome, but that you come to like. And then the gravity of discovering that, you know, in kind of a proto-colonois-ish thing, by the way, you just have to kill everyone and everything. And there's nothing you can do about it. The world is esoteric. And death comes for all of us. And you are the agent of destruction for everyone you've come to love. And not what you were expecting on the Game Boy. Or, frankly, out of Zelda.

We played the same game, and that was the message. I never picked up on that part. I love this game. I think it's beautiful. It is one of the first video games, and this is so lame, but I'm a big sap and sucker, but it's one of the very first video games that got me teary. I actually cried at the end of Link's Awakening, which is very silly, I know. But it hit me.

I was just like, oh, this is the way things are in the real world, too, isn't it? Oh, dear. That game took me an entire summer to finish, and I enjoyed every minute of it. It's just a top-touch. This is one of those games that I got when it was new, and I really enjoyed, you know, on the Game Boy, I didn't play very many games on the original Game Boy model, because the screen was so blurry I didn't enjoy it other than Tetris and some Super Mario Land, but it was difficult to enjoy it.

But there's something about this game that was just perfect, and it felt like it felt so advanced for the Game Boy. It felt like it could be a Super Nintendo game. And I just played it again. I played through about 95% of it. I haven't finished the whole thing, but when that little handheld game and watch style Zelda thing came out last year, I don't remember when it was.

But it has, you know, the monochrome version of Link's Awakening on it. And it's just amazing. I just picked it up and started playing it, and it hooked me. And I just kept playing it and playing it for days. And that's how good it is. So, yeah, I love it. All right, so we've talked a lot about Nintendo stuff, even when it was skewed horribly and showed up on a Phillips system. Let's talk about some Sega stuff.

Kevin, take us through the world of Gunstar Heroes. Oh, man. So this was a game that apparently did not do that well in the States when it came out. But my aunt had a copy, so I played the crap out of it. I think it might be one of the best action games of its day. So this is a game made by former Konami devs. They went out and formed their own development studio, Cal Treasure. This was one of their early works, and I think one of their best ones.

Sort of a contra-style game, Metal Slug, if you will. You're scrolling along the ground on foot, and you're fighting various enemies. This sort of sets itself apart because you have all of these different weapon types and you can sort of mix and match the abilities you get. You can have two at a time and either combine them or just use one or the other. There's a lot of moving sprites. Like, this game would chug if it was on the Super Nintendo, but on the Genesis, it runs really smoothly.

A lot of gigantic bosses. And this game's also got like a sense of humor to it. There's a lot of like really weird, goofy anime-style jokiness to it. So it doesn't take itself very seriously. Great music. I just really love this game. Also, for some reason, it came with a fruit roll-up, which I also enjoyed. Yeah, this was one of those games that took existing ideas and really built on them.

So it's very contra-ish. And it comes from people who used to work at Konami. So that's probably not a coincidence. But they threw a lot in there. You mentioned the mix-and-match weapon system, but also it had two-player cooperative play, but each character controlled a little differently. One of them had sort of a free running system where he could run and shoot as he went. The other could plant his feet and aim all around.

Or am I getting Gunstar superheroes mixed in there? Could you select the playstyle? Red and blue were different, right? You could select the play style. I don't remember if they were like character-specific, but I know you could. Okay. So anyway, the point is you had options. It gave you lots of options. And you mentioned the jokiness, but, you know, that comes through even in the play mechanics where, like, concepts for levels are almost like parity to a certain degree. You know, there's one stage very famous where you're basically playing like a roulette or a board game to go through the stage. And, you know, depending on how you roll the die, that determines. determines what you have to face as you're playing through to the end of the stage. So it just, yeah, it's just full of inventive ideas.

Very, very cool, very technically impressive. You know, it did all these things that people said the Genesis hardware couldn't do. But yet, here it is. Here's, it's doing these things. Also, seven force. Exactly. Seven force was a very annoying boss when I was a kid. Just would never die.

No, you just had to kill it seven times. That's the same. So, yeah, very, very impressive. On the other hand, over on Super NES, you know, Super NES couldn't do exactly this kind of game, but you did have Capcom giving us Mega Man X, which really took the Mega Man series in a new direction. Besides introducing a new protagonist, the eponymous X, it just threw in a lot of new elements to add greater depth and discovery to the Mega Man concept. the concept of, you know,

you've got eight robot bosses to be before you fight the final boss, but, and you know, you can choose the order in which you take them on, but I kind of broke those up into two sections. There's four bosses, and then there's another four bosses. And there's interplay between some of the stages.

And Mega Man or, sorry, X, has the ability to permanently upgrade himself beyond just capturing robot boss weapons to use as like, a secondary attack, he could also find energy tanks and boost his health permanently and gain the ability to do dashes and gain better armor to increase his durability. So, you know, it really rewarded exploration within the stages in a way that the original Mega Man games didn't. And it just feels like a real refined approach to the concept of Mega Man. And while it's not as

technically as impressive as Gunstar Heroes. It just plays so well. The controls are so good. You know, there's there's something fun and surprising in every stage, like the ability to jump into robot armor that, you know, one of the villains uses to pummel the crap out of you in the opening introductory stage. Like later, you can hop into one of those armor things and use it to pummel the crap out of bad guys. And every stage, or not every stage, but a lot of stages have multiple paths. So you can choose, hey, do I want to just keep pummeling things in this robot armor? Or do I want to hop out and, you know, go see what I can do outside of the armor and maybe find some power-ups. Just a lot going for it. And the funny thing is it actually shipped right around

the same time as Mega Man 6 for the original NES, which I think people thought was super stale and dated and pointless at that period. You know, like, oh, we've seen this, we've done this. We don't really care anymore. We've got Mega Man X. But actually, Mega Man 6 is really good. It's kind of, you know, it has some downsides to it, sure. But I feel like it's a highly underrated take on the Mega Man series that doesn't get enough respect. And also has one of the best soundtracks in the series, which says a lot. So, you know, if you liked Mega Man, there was a lot of Mega Manning to do. Haza. Yeah, I'll back that up. Mega Man 6 was great, and Mega Man X was also pretty good. Mega Man X excited me because you could get

a secret Hadoken ability, I think. It's true. Shoot the fireball from Street Fighter, too. And I love that. I thought that was cool. Yeah, Mega Man, and Mega Man 6 was great because it showed, hey, the NES isn't dead yet. There's still some cool stuff to buy.

You know, if you kept hold of this system. Taito released a bunch of games that year that are now incredibly expensive because they didn't make very many of them and most of them are really good. So if you would like to go spend $10,000 on half a dozen games, Taito is their 1993 selection is just waiting there for you.

But perhaps the most technically impressive game ever published on the NES is readily available. It was published in plentiful qualities. And although a lot of people didn't discover it until a few years later, you know, with emulation or with reissues, it's nevertheless a game that I think, you know, fared well enough for the time that the series has continued to thrive. And that is Kirby's Adventure. Benj, tell us about it. Oh, yeah. I love Kirby's Adventure. First, the first thing I ever tell anyone about Kirby's Adventure is that my proudest gaming acquisition came via this game, which is I went to a Toys R Us.

of it, maybe it was 94, 95, and they had a copy of Kirby's Adventure on clearance for $10. That was the best, single best gaming deal I've ever gotten in my entire life. And I still have that copy. And it's just, I think I took it home and played it all the way through without stopping because it was so much fun. And as you know, Kirby's Dreamland came out on the Game Boy first. And in that game, you could not swallow, I mean, you could, I think you could swallow them, spit them out. Is that right? But you couldn't

copy their abilities. Yeah, he had the suction power, but not the ability to gain powers from enemies. So, NES, this Kirby's Adventure game had the first appearance of the copy ability, and he was also

I guess probably pink for the first time because it was the first game in color. And I think it has maybe six worlds. And it's just, I might be wrong about that, but it feels like there was a lot of content. And the fact you could apply the abilities in sort of novel ways to each board.

Like, you could hold on to one that you didn't have access to and then sort of defeat the board in a different way. But the designers anticipated all of that. So it was every stage was ready for you with the different abilities. It was just so well thought out. The graphics are beautiful. The music is beautiful. The gameplay controls are great.

It's just an all-time classic for the NES, one of the best NES games, I think. Did you guys play it? Later. I had it when it came out and, yeah, sunk a lot of time into that game. I think I ended up 100%ing it just because kept going back to it. Oh, what I was going to mention is the bonus stages were cool. Do you remember those, Kevin, like the crane game where you could... Yeah.

I remember the crane game. I especially remember the, like, wild... the gunman one, where you had to, like, wait for them to tell you to shoot and then beat the computer with your reactions. Yeah. The fast draw game, yeah, I love that. This was a, I missed it when it was new, but it was lucky to catch it only a couple years later.

And I'd already fallen in love with Kirby on Game Boy, but this was just next level. I was like, oh, okay, well, I went from thinking Kirby's really neat to being a lifelong Kirby lover. This is when I started, you know, buying Kirby merch and wearing Kirby clothes. thing and being Kirby for Halloween. That all started with Kirby's adventure. Wow, that's cool. I still think it's kind of the best Kirby game in a way,

like the most pure distilled version of it. Because it got the basic formula down that was basically copied from then on. Even Kirby's Dreamland, too, then I think, had, for the Game Boy, had the copy ability where you could swallow a guy and take his stuff. So, yeah, it's great. I love it. All right. Let's see. Boy, I hate to just keep banging on with the Nintendo stuff, but that's what you guys want to talk about. So, Jared, tell us about how Nintendo embraced the future with its own take on Star Wars.

Well, yeah, let's listen. Once upon a time, Argonaut software made X for the Game Boy, which was impossible. And it was. They created this amazing, amazing video game on Gameboy using a Z80 and no particular graphic processor help. They made a real software rendered 3D game on this underpowered handheld. And Nintendo's like, well, that's cool. Why should come over here with Miyamoto and make some cool video games? And so they did. And Star Fox was the result using that fabled Super FX chip, which expanded the capabilities of the S&S just enough to get away with some blocky old polygons. But Star Fox, for all its distinctive look, is, I think the look and the really great soundtrack belies what really makes it work, was that it was just a pure, beautiful arcade shooter in kind of the Star Wars. you mentioned Star Wars. It's a lot like Star Wars Arcade, 83, or 83 and 93. It is a superbly balanced and designed rail shooter. It's a series of carefully orchestrated encounters that are laid out in such a way with power-ups and health refills that you're trying, without knowing it, to get from waypoint to waypoint, you know, from refill to refill and you're learning your way through it, but it doesn't have the memorization

requirements that something like Gradius has. You feel a little more in control. You don't feel completely doomed if you screw up. You've got a life bar. You've got lives. You've got smart bombs to get you out of terrible situations. You've got a barrel roll. You've got a barrel roll.

You've got neat teammates that make funny sounds and don't talk too much, that you have to rescue every now and then. And you've, and you also have a game that could be completed in, you know, 90 minutes on your S&ES, and then you can replay it, take a different route, do something different, try out different things, try different orders to the stages, full of the difficulty, find hidden routes that are there on the map. It is, it is a game that is characterized by its refinement and restraint. It is tuned. It is fine tuned. We did, is razor-sharp tuned, which I think we miss because it looks and feels framey and janky in terms of, you know, because it's pushing the S&ES beyond its limits. But the level design is among the best to ever come out of Nintendo.

I believe that Star Fox is the best Star Fox game. 64, Star Fox 2, Star Fox Command all have their merits. But the purity of Star Fox makes it, I think, Nintendo's best arcade games since Donkey Call, just in terms of a game that feels like it belongs in an arcade. Even more so than Punch Out? You know, I think so, because I think Punch Out is a home game. You could make an arcade version of Punch Out and go back and get better at it. What? Have you played Punch Out in the arcade?

It's amazing. Oh, it's incredible. Oh, we're talking about Arcade Punch Out. Okay, I'm sorry. I thought you. Oh, it's beautiful. We talked about this, actually, I think, on the last episode about how we all love it. Like, I believe that was an 83 game.

Punchout's incredible and beautiful and a technical marvel. But Star Fox is more fine-tuned. I think Star Fox is a game that's the difficulty curve is the carrot and stick element of Star Fox, the difficulty spikes on every level and just where the flow of the game, I think, is more pure than, And so when I say arcade game, again, Star Fox was never in the arcade, but I'd rather rather play Star Fox than Punch Out, even though Punch Out is a freaking technical Marvel. It is beautiful. Okay.

Comment Withdrawn. All right. So Star Fox, kind of awesome. You know, the funny thing is the Super NES could have been capable of producing games that looked like this on a basic level. If you go back and listen to our interview from several years ago with Dylan Cuthbert, it turns out the Mario chip, eventually the Super FX chip that they built for this game was something they proposed putting into the Super NES hardware, but the system was just too far along

by that point. So they didn't, and it ended up being a cartridge add-on. But that would have changed video game history. Maybe not for the better, but definitely it would have been an interesting alternate timeline if that had happened. So we need to kind of wrap this up, and we still have a few other sort of broad topics to talk about for 1993. So I'm going to give a quick rundown. I'm going to forego talking about the things I wanted to talk about. But I'm just noble like that. Some other notable console games in 1993, Sonic CD.

So see, there's a Sega game for you. Here's Sega and Nintendo. Disney's Aladdin versus Disney's Aladdin. I don't even want to get into which one you guys think is better. That is a religious debate. probably more heated than Super Mario 3 versus Super Mario World not even worth it

the action RPG kind of made some actually the console RPG in general made some significant strides in 1993. You had Secret of Manna from Squaresoft kind of the legend of Zelda plus leveling up

pretty fun multiplayer three person, that's crazy how do you get three people on a super NES? You cheat. Oger Battle battle, the opposite extreme from Secret of Mano, where it's a strategy game and everything you do is judged morally. And that determines the ending of the game. You are judged constantly by this game. Breath of Fire, not a great RPG, but apparently Squarespace said, this is more

accessible to Americans than Final Fantasy 5. So that's what we got. Let's see. Act Razor 2, which was not an RPG in any sense, even though the original had like RPG and sim elements because Enix said, hey, we need to make this accessible for Americans. Let's take out all the good stuff and just make it a really hard action game. But thankfully, Nintendo stepped in and said, we will publish

your sequel to Soulblazer, Illusion of Gaia in America for you and you won't have to compromise it and it can still be good. So thank goodness for Nintendo doing that. And then finally, one of the big ones for 1993 didn't actually come to America.

We've never actually gotten a localization of this game. Torneko no daiboken, fushigi no dungeon, which you might recognize as the first mystery dungeon game. It was a spinoff of Dragon Quest 4 and introduced the rogue concept properly to consoles. There had been console roguelikes one or two before this, but this was the first really good one and gave us Sharon the Wanderer and all those Pokemon mystery dungeon games. It's all the same DNA right here with this game that only came out for Super Famicom. One of the cool things about this cartridge is that because it has a lithium battery backup, every action you take is immediately saved to the cartridge and there is no saves coming. Everything you do is recorded. So it really, really takes that rogue style, you know, permadeth seriously. Although, you know, Tornaco doesn't actually die permanently. He just gets kicked out of the dungeon by the slimes. Other games in 1993, Tinkle Pit, I don't know if that is, but I put it on here because it's called Tinkle Pit.

That's also known as the Ball Pit at McDonald's. Shinobi 3 from Sega, also Rocket Night Adventure from Konami. Yay. Oh, there's a lot of Disney stuff happening this year. Duck Tales 2 and Rescue Rangers 2, both for NES, both very expensive now because no one bought NES games in 93, except Kirby. and Goof Troop, which apparently is the basis for Resident Evil. That's an exaggeration, but anyway. Also, kind of on the goof troop vein, you had Zombies Ate My Neighbors.

I love that. And nothing whatsoever liked those games. You had two attempts by Hudson to finally do something with this Bomberman concept in like a decade after the series debuted with Super Bomberman for Super NES and High Ten Bomberman, which was maybe the first HD console game. It was designed for a special system that Hudson designed that output to a high-resolution, high-definition CRT. And apparently this thing cost tens of thousands of dollars,

so it never really went to anywhere, but this was kind of their technical showcase to say, to say, hey, see what you can do. And I feel like the spirit of high tin bomber man, which I believe, don't quote me on this, but if I'm remembering right, it could support 10 players, if that's correct and I'm not just making things up, which is very possible in my, you know, aging Dementia, that spirit lived on through Saturn Bomber Man, which allowed you to play 12 people together for just pure chaos.

Was Saturn Bomberman 12? I didn't realize. I didn't realize it wasn't that high. No kidding. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's 12. That sounds right. to me. It's a lot of people. I just don't have enough friends. I think I maxed out at like 10. Let's see. 893 was also a dark time for mascot games. I mentioned Trevor McFer in the Crescent Gallery, Galaxy. You also had cool spot an attempt to turn Seven Ups mascot into an Othello game.

Or I guess, what is it called, a taxis or something like that? Attacks, that's it. Basically the same concept as Reversey. headbucky. There's a good cool spot platformer on the Super Nintendo and Genesis at least. It's okay. Spot the video game. It's okay. Oh, no, that is a cool spot. Spot the video game is the Othello clone. My mistake. That's all right. You've got your seven up oriented. Next thing you know, you're going to be screwing up your Pepsi Man, dude. I mean, probably all of those games of which there were one. Oh, we got the Fighting Vipers cameo now. That's, that's true. And let's see.

Then you had cooperative action with the Lost Vikings, a great puzzle platformer from, wasn't that from Cineps and Silicon that would later become Blizzard? I believe it was. Sounds right. So anyway, 93, cool stuff happening. Oh, I forgot there were three Castlevania games and only one of them came to the U.S.

And the one that came to the U.S. was actually a Mega Man game. Kid Dracula. But also in Japan, there was Akamajo Dracula for the X-68,000 computer. amazing remake of the original Castlevania, balls hard, but very, very cool. And, of course, the king of classicvania's Dracula X, Rondo of Blood, or Sino Rondo, if you prefer. That's the game that begat Symphony of the Night, but the thing is, they're both equally brilliant in different ways. And I'm glad that this game is now accessible to Americans in many ways, because it deserves

to be played weekly, really. Daily. It's pretty good. Daily, yes. Okay, there you go. Hourly. Yeah. All right, so to wrap up 1993 and this little mini-series so that Bob can tackle 2003,

I did want to talk very briefly about some other things that happened in 1993. First of all, the Congress began to hold hearings on the existence of sexy murder games. Senators acted really upset, which probably means they were extremely into them. That's usually how it works with politicians. David Schiff published one of the first video game history books with Game Over, the history of Nintendo. And apparently, this book is why Nintendo internally no longer cooperates with authors writing books about Nintendo because they weren't happy with it. Good job, David. Way to go, David.

Anyway, Nintendo launched Project Reality, which would eventually become Ultra 64, which would eventually become Nintendo 64, and let's see, other hardware, actual hardware debuts that year, we had the Sega Model 2 board, which powered some of those arcade games, the 3DO, which was an open standard for console gaming, the Pioneer Laser Active, which was a laser disk system plus a Sega Mega Drive, aka Genesis, the NES top loader, and finally, Benj Edwards' favorite system, the Atari Jaguar. Do you have more to say about it, Benj? I know that. that's how you experience Mist, and you hold it in a dear place to your heart because you actually bought the CD add-on, of which like 10,000 units were made.

Yeah, I love the Jaguar. I was a big Atari fanboy at the time. That was when I was, you know, I started collecting retro consoles, and we had been, you know, I'd grown up with the Atari 800 and all that stuff. And I had just gotten on CompuServe, probably in 1992, and I joined the Go Atari Forum. and I remember hearing all the rumors about this new console was going to come out. First, it was going to be the Panther, and then it became the Jaguar. And, boy, was I excited that Atari was going to be back, and they were going to defeat Nintendo

because they were their true kings of video games, you know, from this 12-year-old point of view back then. And so I actually got my Jaguar on, it was released on November 23rd, 1993 in America. I got mine for my birthday in 94, around April 94, and the games were lacking. You know, I enjoyed cybermorph. I played it a lot because it was probably my first 3D polygonal, you know, console game. I don't know if I had played Star Fox a little bit or not. I don't remember. I'd probably rented it once.

But then there were some great games, too, that came that year. There's an incredible port of doom. There's a great port of Wolfenstein 3D. This is a 94, so I'm completely breaking the format of the episode. God. Yeah. What are you doing, Bench? Oh, Lord Alien versus Predator.

And so there's like five or six, like Tempest 2000. There's five or six really, really, really good games for the Jaguar. And the rest of them are pretty terrible. But it has that redeeming quality of at least it has some interesting, unique titles. And it's a cool. It's still a cool system. I still get mine out every once in a while just to play the Atari version of Doom because that was, you know, my PC at the time, we had a 486 that had exactly 16 megabytes of RAM or something that you needed to run Doom. I can't remember what it was.

But you had to put in a boot disk to like strip out all the extra DOS stuff just to try to run Doom slowly on this 32 megahertz 486. But on the Jaguar, I could play it smoothly on the TV screen with a controller, and, man, that was awesome. So, Doom was first experienced by me on the Jaguar, and hell, hell, I played, missed on the Jaguar, too, which is weird. It was eight megabytes binge, because I feel your pain. I was doing the same thing. I had that, you had to do the boot disc. Oh, maybe it was four. It requires exactly four, and we had exactly four megabytes.

It requires four. That's it. Yeah. That's, yes, you can get away. with it with four, and then eight's where you can get rid of the darn boot disc. Yeah, you couldn't just play Doom on 32X like I did as a kid. Ooh. Yeah, I'm glad I didn't go that route.

But, yeah, so it was weird. I was in the Jaguar scene on CompuServe. I was talking to the people making these games, and one of them named Ted Takichi, I think it pronouncing his name properly. Now I'm a friend with him on Twitter, and he did, you know, some music for Tempest 2000 and some production for some of those Jaguar games, and I think that's cool. So, yeah, Jaguar.

Great. Go buy one. All right. And speaking of Atari Jaguar, Kevin has a topic called The Crash That Almost Was. Kevin, why don't you, I think, wrap this episode up for us talking about The Crash That Almost Was. Yeah, so this was an event that happened to cross the video game

industry writ large. It wasn't just localized to North America, although that's where it was probably worst. So basically, from around mid-93, up until around the PlayStation taking off in 96, the

video game market was kind of in a downturn. You had the strong yance. There was a trade imbalance or revenue imbalance with Japanese companies trying to sell their goods in the U.S. Plus, This was after the bubble economy had burst, so the Japanese market was now in a recession.

You had a lot of different companies trying to sell their wares at the same time. You mentioned the Jaguar and the 3DO, and you still had the NES and the Genesis and the turbo duo were still floating around in the corner. And then just so many third-party publishers putting their stuff out. The arcade industry had been in a downturn for a little bit at this point. You had just a shift in technology away from what the 16-bit platforms are really excelling at and capable of. So there was more focus on multimedia that you saw with CD-ROM stuff like MIST or 3D technology like you saw on PC games or on arcade machines. Which, you know, these consoles can't do that well. Like you had Star Fox, but Star Fox also chugged along at like 15 frames per second.

So you had this. You also had the rising production costs for cartridges. This was the era of, you know, $70-80 cartridges or more. And the end result of this is a lot of prominent companies that had to close their U.S. operations because they just weren't making enough money. These were places like Enix or Sunsoft, Hudson, Hal. Companies like Sega and Declaim, Data East, Capcom, they just got walloped hard.

by this downturn. Just a lot of material that they were trying to sell that wasn't moving. Data East closed. A claim in Capcom both came pretty close. Sega, you know, they were always barely turning a profit in the U.S. on their consoles, and this was really hitting them hard. And it wasn't until the PlayStation came along with, you know, relatively low production costs.

It was a more capable piece of hardware that could do 3D pretty well and bolt-a-media stuff. A bigger focus on third-parties, so it wasn't like having a lot of third-party publishers was eating into their profit margins much. And that sort of helped stabilize everything, but it was a rough time behind the scenes. Not so much anything that we saw on the consumer side, because, you know, for me, it was just, oh, there's a bunch of games. But, you know, apparently stuff that was on the market after, you know,

so many months, it just wasn't moving, which is probably why a lot of these late era games for the NES or even items from 94, 95, like Final Fight 3 or Fantasy Star 4 and whatnot. They just weren't produced in high quantities and are really expensive now. Just a messy time and a weird, weird synergy or symmetry, rather, with the 83 crash. Yeah, so this episode ends up being fairly circular, going from crash to crash. But each one had different outcomes. The first crash basically gave Nintendo an opportunity to step in. And the second crash basically accounts for why you didn't see that many third parties on N64. And they really lost ground to Sony in the late 90s. So, you know, it's all cyclical or something like that. Anyway, we'll continue the cycle of. this years in review review next year. But for now, this is the Finn of Arsicle. This is, yeah, the end of our episode. Bob will be tackling the year 2003 fairly soon, and none of us are just quite ready to talk about 2013 yet, because it wasn't that long ago. So, gentlemen,

I would like to thank you for taking the time to talk about old video games with me. Thank you. Let's see. This is a public-facing episode. So let me say that if you would like to hear the prelude to this episode, the Years in Review Review, Review Part 1, I believe that was a patron exclusive episode. So that means you should go to patreon.com slash returnauts and subscribe to the show for five bucks a month or more. An increasingly good deal in this fraught economy. That will give you access to all of our patron exclusive episodes, which, which we've been doing now for like three years. So they happen every other week. That is, if you do the math, like 75 episodes-ish, plus weekly mini episodes by Diamond Fight for about two years. So we're talking a lot of time that you could just cram into your podcast listening device for five bucks a month.

Not a bad deal. And it will give you more context for this episode, which is always a great idea. So anyway, that is our spiel. Now, let's listen to everyone else's spiel. Let's see. Kevin, you're calling from the furthest distance, so you go first. All right. So you can find me on Twitter as it exists at Ubersaurus.

I run a video series on YouTube called Atari Archive, where I'm going through the Atari VCS library chronologically sort of contextualizing each of these games in their development. and place on the market. If you liked what Atari 50 did, it's kind of the same basic concept, just in video format. I have a Patreon to support that under Atari Archive,

and I have a book coming out early next year, covering 77 and 78 of Atari games. And a fine book it is. And in fact, why don't we go to the person who helped edit that book, Jared? I did help edit that book, and it's a fine book. As a matter of fact, I really, really dig it.

That's my favorite book I've ever read about Atari. So I really like your book, Kevin. Yeah, I'm Jared from Press Run. Jeremy's Minion at Limited Run Games. Press Run is our book publishing label where you can find all kinds of nifty books by some of your favorite authors. And folks you may not have heard of yet, but you will soon. If you want to know more about that, you can go to Limited Run games to see it. You can follow Press Run on Ealt Twitter at Press Run Books.

Or you can just reach out to me if you want. too, and learn more about it. I also make a little fun podcast every now and then called the Top 100 Games podcast that I use for fun with my friends. We just published the real game awards. So if you want to know the actual winners of important awards like Best Dog of 2022 or Best Video Game Monster, go over there and here are goofy takes on fun, silly categories and know what the real winners for true gamers are because I'm the truest

game where you'll ever encounter. I agree. Interesting. Bench, how would you classify yourself? I am a complete fake and fraud and pretender. That's right. You are a deep fake. I forgot. I had heard about that. Everything that I say on this podcast is being whispered into my ear from a tiny earpiece by a guy on the other room. That's why. It's like Serenot de Bergerac of podcasting? I was thinking of the quiz show scandal. There we go. Exactly. Yeah. So this whole thing.

thing is a farce. I'm sorry. I apologize. But yeah, I'm Benj Edwards. You can find me at Ars Technica most of the time writing about AI stuff and some history things too. I just celebrated the 30th anniversary of my BBS last month, starting at when I was 11, and I wrote a big article about that, which is cool. And I'm mostly on Mastodon now. Benj Edwards at Mastodon. so give it a try and kick that Twitter habit if it's possible man you're lucky when I was a kid I didn't have a BBS I just had VBS see you at church kids I'm Jeremy Parrish you can find me on social media as game spite on Twitter and man I don't even know about that one anymore I had my moment of fame so I think I might be done with that um where else can you find me oh yeah

limit to run games helping to make books I'm facilitating them and also making them you can find me on YouTube doing a video series, kind of like Kevin's, but focused more on Nintendo stuff. And also my current obsession, which is that sort of pre-NES Japanese console boom. Currently, I'm working on Epoch Cassette Vision. I'm having a Gockin TV boy modded, and I've tracked down all six games for that thing. Finded the Tommy Puta Jr., the Casio PV-1000. It's just a terrible idea, and I'm really fascinated by it. So you can check out those videos at YouTube and also by going to my Patreon, the pre-famacom or pre-NES boom stuff is a patron-exclusive at patreon.com slash gamespite. But, you know, it'll be public in like a year.

So if you don't want to give me money, I understand. It's fine. You're already giving money to Retronauts. I don't want to be a hard sell here. Anyway, thanks everyone for listening. Thanks everyone for continuing to age with us. And if you continue to age with us for another year, you get to hear about the four. is in about 12 months. And the exciting thing about that is that in Japan,

four is the number of death. Please look forward to it. Thank you.