Released by Japan's Famicom
The 1983 Summer Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was held from June 5 to June 8, 1983 at the Chicago Convention Center and two hotels in Chicago, Illinois. Spanning 735,000 square feet, 1,200 exhibits were exhibited and 80,000 people attended.
In 1980, the personal computer began a price war and attempted to enter the hottest field of games at that time. The 1983 CES was a PC vs. console, Atari introduced the 600XL and other models, and Mattel showcased the newly released Aquarius. The night before CES, Coleco announced their new Adam computer to steal the limelight. Commodore showcased their Magic Voice speech synthesis box and Execute-64.
Nintendo originally planned to enter the North American market through Atari, and the two sides agreed to release The Family under the name of Atari at this summer CES. Unexpectedly, at CES in 1982, Atari discovered that Nintendo had licensed the game Donkey Kong to its main rival, Coleco. The incident violated the exclusive licensing treaty agreed upon by both parties, leading to Nintendo's plans to release The Family at CES in 1983.
A month after summer CES, in July 1983, Atari CEO Ray Casa was fired. The deal was even more elusive, and Nintendo decided to market The Family itself.
Famicom was released on July 15, 1983, named: family with カセット式ビデオゲーム ファミリーコンピュータ,家用卡式游戏 PC。 Priced at 14,800 yen, it comes with three Nintendo games: Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong JR, and Popeye. Famicom was released after Japan and sold well in the first few months. However, many of Famicom's graphics chips have problems, which will cause the game process to suddenly get stuck. After finding a circuit fault, Nintendo recalled all of the Famicom. Nintendo's decision to stop selling until the problem was resolved cost Nintendo millions of dollars, followed by the launch of the new motherboard and the gradual surge in Famicom's popularity.
Also released on the same day as Nintendo Famicom was the Sega SG-1000. The Sega SG-1000 was modified by Sega Japan CEO Hayato Nakayama on the SEGA PC SC-1000 to snipe Nintendo's Famicom console. In the early stage, the Nintendo Famecom chip failed, and the SG-1000 took advantage of the void. By the time Nintendo solves the hardware problem, the SG-1000 will not be enough to see.
The Sega SG-1000 supported 21 games when it was released, while the Nintendo Famecom only had 9. The SG-1000 costs 15,000 yen and the Nintendo Famem costs 14,800 yen. In 1983, 450,000 units were sold with The Family and 160,000 units sold on the SG-1000.
The picture shows the SG-1000 gaming PC.
Famicom peripherals
Unlike Atari's lawsuit against Activision, Yamauchi had long planned to open up game production to third-party game production companies. Famicom's costs are not low, and hardware margins are meager. Faced with this situation, Yamauchi began to consider sales strategies that made a profit from sales on peripherals and game cards.
In 1984, a light gun supporting the Nintendo Family was released, along with keyboards and robots.
The picture shows the Zapper light gun.
The picture shows the Famicom keyboard, in 1987, Zhongshan Xiaobawang Company was established.
Pictured is the Famicom robot.
Eat crabs for Hudson and Namco
On May 18, 1973, two brothers, Hiroshi Kudo and Yuji Kudo, founded Hudson Soft Ltd. Hudson Software in toyohei, Sapporo, Japan. The two brothers grew up loving trains, so they used their favorite Hudson 4-6-4 steam engine train model as the company name.
The brothers initially wanted to open a coffee shop, but found that there was already a coffee shop in the place where they were going to open the shop. Without long thought, the two decided to change the coffee shop into a radio shop, selling radio communications equipment and taking art photos. Although they have a college degree, they have no business experience and lose money every month when they open the store.
Beginning in September 1975, Hudson began selling personal computers, and in March 1979, it began developing and selling game cards. Atari has no quantitative restrictions on third-party game companies, and the Kudo brothers adopt a "quantity over quality" business method. At one point, the company released more than 30 games a month, all of which failed, none of which succeeded.
In 1983, they considered adjusting their strategy to prioritize the quality of the game, otherwise the company would be out of the question.
In this way, Hudson became Nintendo's first third-party game developer to develop games for Nintendo.
Pictured here is Hudson's company logo, a bee named Yasuke.
The founders of Hudson are very funny, but their production level is even higher than their funny level. After all, the companies that can make Takahashi Celebrity Adventure Island and Bomberman are indeed eligible to eat crabs.
On March 1, 2012, Hudson Corporation merged with KONAMI Konami, a well-known third-party game company at Famicom.
Hudson was followed by Namco, where the two companies agreed to make third-party games at 30 percent of the licensing fee and production cost, 10 percent as a publishing license fee, and 20 percent as the cost of making a game card. The 30% share is used by Jobs to launch the AppStore on ISO. Born in Atari, Jobs was well aware of the benefits of this model, and it had a special name: the royalty model.
In 1985, companies such as Capcom, Enix, and Konami all began working with Nintendo to produce third-party games for Famecom.
Not long after, Hudson's "Road Runner" and Namco's "Xevious" became a hit on The Farmcom, which made the Farmcom feel like a flower touching hot oil and adding fire to the fire. In 1984, The Famec sold more than 1 million units, and that number soon refreshed to 2.5 million units in early 1985.
After Sega completed the MBO, Sega Japan released an upgraded version of the SG-1000, the SG-1000 II, on July 31, 1984. Despite their efforts, Sega's consoles still couldn't compete with Nintendo. The reason is that as a former arcade king, Sega does not want to cooperate with competitors in the arcade industry to develop third-party games, they insist on making their own games. In 1985, Sega Mark III was released. As of 1988, the SG-1000 series (including the Mark III) sold 1.4 million units in Japan, and the original SG-1000 model sold 400,000 units in Japan.
The SG-1000 is sega's official entry into the family game console, although the results are not very good, but it has left Sega with many thoughts.
The success of Super Mario Bros
In 1985, Haruki Murakami published The End of the World and Cold Wonderland, a fantastic work in the history of human literature. In 1987, Norwegian Woods was published. The two books sold millions of copies, making Haruki Murakami famous and becoming the most popular author who dominated Japan's best-seller list from 1985 to 1987.
Haruki Murakami's beautiful results were no better than the Super Mario Bros. game jointly launched by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takushi Tezuka in that year. In the words of Masayuki Uemura, the combination of Famicom and Super Mario Bros. is like "adding fuel to the fire of fashion." With government decrees banning children and teenagers from entering the arcade that year, Super Mario Bros. became a fashion in Japan.
Super Mario Bros. is the ancestor of the horizontal level game and the greatest work in the history of video game art. In September 1985, 120 copies were sold in the month of release. Four months later, 3 million copies of Super Mario Bros. were sold in Japan. By 1986, the Super Malayo Brothers had sold more than 5 million copies. After being released overseas, Super Mario Bros. soared, and in 1994, Super Mario Bros. Famicom's version of the game card had sold 40 million copies. It won the Guinness Book of Records for best-selling video games and is a landmark in the history of video game art.
The picture below is a super Mario Bros. game screen, and China has a unique name: mushroom picking.
Super Mario Bros. and Mario Bros
How was Super Mario Bros. born?
In 1983, Nintendo released the arcade game Mario Bros.
In the arcade version of Mario Bros., there are two plumbers: one named Mario and the other named Luigi. Luigi, Japanese pronunciation: ruiji. In Japanese, it means "similar", so Luigi was designed as Mario's brother and companion. The arcade version of Mario Bros. is Luigi's first appearance, and the dual character design is designed to achieve dual controllers and family gathering games. To better identify the twin brothers, Mario wears a red hat and Luigi wears a green hat.
In the arcade version of Mario Bros., Mario and Luigi need to investigate the sewers of New York, while the two brothers can only run and jump. Each game level is platform, and the jumping Mario Bros. can top the monster and then pass a level.
Pictured is the mario bros. game screen.
In 1984, Shigeru Miyamoto's 7th year at Nintendo, the 32-year-old was at the height of his creativity. In April 1984, Nintendo welcomed a new employee: Takashi Tezuka. Takashi Tezuka, a graduate of the Design Department at Osaka University of the Arts, is a big fan of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and the executive producer of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, released in 2017.
However, at this time, Takashi Tezuka was still a newcomer.
Super Mario Bros. was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka and programmed by SRD company Toshihiko Nakago.
SRD was founded in 1979 and began working with Nintendo on The Family in 1982. Since then, they have assisted in programming games on almost all Nintendo consoles. It's unclear how many games they've been involved in, except that they've been involved in the development of almost all of Zelda's Legends video games. The company has no capital relationship with Nintendo, although their Kyoto office is located within the Nintendo Development Center, with Toshihiko Nakago as president. On February 24, 2022, Nintendo announced the acquisition of SRD Studios.
Takashi Tezuka said: "When designing the game, I never consciously separated casual users from hardcore gamers. For the past 20 years, I've been working hard to make games that anyone – as many people as possible – can enjoy them... I have to say that I love making games from the bottom of my heart. ”
The addition of Takashi Tezuka made Shigeru Miyamoto want to make a more colorful game with scrolling screens to progress faster. Before designing this game, Shigeru Miyamoto thought a lot. Nintendo was about to release the disk version of Famicom in 1986, and Shigeru Miyamoto said: In the era of Famicom game cards, the hardware restrictions were very strict, and there was nothing we could do. We want to bypass these restrictions and achieve something new, something the public has never seen before. So we wanted to impress them with something new they'd never seen in other games and make them think, "How did they do it?" ”
At this time, Shigeru Miyamoto is no longer a fledgling young man, but a senior game designer who knows the best-selling games and technical elements on the market.
The next chapter will provide an in-depth look at one of the best games in the history of video game art: Super Mario Bros.