The war is about to begin! After successfully invading Japan, we are about to witness the first wave of next generation gaming on these shores. […] The lines have been drawn and the heavy artillery is about to be revealed to the game playing public. Three gaming superpowers—NEC, Sega, and Nintendo—are flexing their muscles with a variety of products that have to be seen to be believed! (Steve Harris in EGM #2, May 1989, 32)
We have seen how the Super Famicom spontaneously emerged as a project to counter the aspirants to the throne of home video games and how its Japanese launch hinged on a strong ludic promise. Here, we get to detail the North American emergence of the Super NES. To push the typical religious metaphor that most historians use when discussing the NES, the idea that it “resurrected” the video game market, we can describe the intense competition between Nintendo and Sega in North America from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s as the holy wars or the Crusades.
In this chapter, I will introduce the Super NES as the general public got to discover it: through the press coverage and announcements from Nintendo and from the video game press prior to the launch. Then I will go over the platform’s life cycle and show how the promotional discourses evolved through magazines, with a particular focus on how they addressed technology and shaped the platform’s identity for gamers. If the market is the battlefield of Kingdom Videoludica, then the various advertisements and magazines are the war room, where orders are given, plans are established, and strategies are exposed and discussed. Nintendo’s discourses on technology and innovation when marketing the Super NES during the early 1990s exemplifies its characteristic surface-and-core duality and was used to marshal its troops in defending the Super NES against the “infidels” that had sworn fealty and loyalty to Sega. As Douglas Crockford (1993) mentioned in closing his account of dealing with Nintendo’s content restrictions for porting Maniac Mansion to the NES, “Nintendo is a jealous god.”
Super Power, Nintendo Power
Nintendo’s presence in North America came with the establishment of a whole new “World of Nintendo,” in the words of Provenzo (1990). One of the strongest ambassadors in pushing this world to the millions of children of the Nintendo Generation was Nintendo Power magazine, whose inspiration came from Japan’s “Famicom culture,” “built gradually with the emergence of numerous video game magazines,” including Beep, Family Computer Magazine (then Famimaga) and Family Tsuushin (then Famitsu) (Picard 2013). These magazines provided a blueprint for Nintendo of America to create Nintendo Power, which played a key role in establishing a Nintendo gamer culture.
Nintendo Power was dressed up (some would say “masquerading”) as a magazine but was actually less of a video game magazine in the now-traditional sense of the term and more of a house organ for the firm (a company catalog or newsletter sent out to employees, when internal, or to customers, when external). Half of Nintendo Power stemmed from the Nintendo Fun Club newsletter, an informational brochure discussing (or rather promoting) upcoming games, which evolved into the paid-subscription magazine after seven issues (Wong 2013). Nintendo Power was entirely funded by Nintendo of America as a fusion and extension of the Fun Club newsletter and the Powerline (which we’ll see next), a customer service expense made necessary by the firm’s business model, which stemmed from the hardware limitations of the NES. Framed according to the three circuits of interactivity (Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter 2003), technology shaped marketing, which then shaped culture.
Games of Progression and the Longevity Imperative
With Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, games were transitioning into a new type of relationship with their players, according to John Harris (2007): “The older school of thought, which dates back and beyond the days of Space Invaders to the era of pinball, is that a game should measure the player's skill. […] The newer concept is that a game should provide an experience to the player.” In the words of Jesper Juul, games were moving from open structures of emergence (“simple rules combining, leading to variation”) to closed structures of progression (“serially introduced challenges”) (Juul 2002). However, as Harris explains, the transition was gradual, and many games exhibited both a steep difficulty curve and scoring mechanisms to evaluate player skill, as well as a narrative or other rewards to be discovered by progressing through the game.
Because progression relies on serially introduced challenges, development costs and memory constraints for games also increased serially. Various game environments had to be constructed, graphics stored, and levels planned to procure interesting challenges and renew the desire for gamers to keep trying to reach the game’s end. This led home video games to new and higher equilibrium points between cost to user and expected value; games of progression cost more money to produce, and consumers expected them to last longer and provide an experience of discovery that was different from that of arcade games. This is precisely the reason that Sega of America’s Tom Kalinske wanted Altered Beast out of the Genesis bundle: It was a great arcade game but not a good home video game (Harris 2014, 98). Because games were sold at relatively high prices to consumers, they had to offer a relatively lengthy life. They couldn’t be sold for less, or at least not through the Nintendo Economic System.
This longevity imperative influenced how games were marketed. Arguments that justified video games’ resistance to the economic recession of the 1980s centered on the “value” of video games, measured as dollars spent for hours of entertainment received (Terdiman 2009). Deep, rich, and complex games like role-playing games (RPGs) or action-adventures promised—and listed as a selling point—50 or 100 hours of gameplay. This marketing imperative stood for all home video games and would only get questioned with the rise of indie games, sold cheaply via digital distribution, around the second decade of the 21st century. Up until then, the longer the better, and reviews often mentioned the length of a game and its replay value as an important criterion for aesthetic (or budgetary) appreciation.
Manufacturing Difficulty
Marketing constraints informed game design, in a push for longevity and lasting value. Because the limited storage space afforded by ROM cartridge technology restricted the amount of content that game developers could put in their games, other methods of ensuring longevity were needed. A high difficulty level, combined with the need for the player to often restart from the beginning, offered one natural solution. Hard games lasted longer and hence delivered good value to consumers. But hard games could be frustrating, especially for kids. The idea was not to mock or shame them, but to present them with challenges—and ideally provide a customer experience where they would be empowered to acquire skill and eventually triumph (Therrien 2014). From now on, they would be playing with power! (But not too much power; triumph had to come eventually, not right away, for the game to provide lasting value.)
In this business context, Nintendo sued Galoob in 1990. Galoob had released the Game Genie accessory, a pass-through device that latched on any cartridge and could temporarily modify the game’s code to allow players to cheat and produce various alterations, glitches, and alternative modes of play. Nintendo (unsuccessfully) claimed the cheating device produced derivative works without their approval, an argument that had no real basis because the modification had no physical support and permanency—it evaporated once power was turned off, leaving the game unaltered—and because, it was ruled, consumers may freely alter a game they purchased for their own enjoyment.1 Yet this wasn’t about creative ownership and copyright. A Game Genie owner could cheat and power through games. In an industry where longevity was a value metric, this significantly lowered a game’s value and could result in the owner selling secondhand games back to someone without the incentive to replay at harder levels or top a score. If that player simply rented games—another problem entirely, which led to Nintendo suing the Blockbuster video stores as well (Forman 1989) —they could complete them in a day without a problem and never have to buy any game again.
The Game Genie cut through the first-party lines of support and assistance that Nintendo was offering to gamers and that allowed Nintendo to control gamers’ experiences and their relationship with difficulty, just like it controlled the games’ contents and the market within which they appeared. With the US release of The Legend of Zelda in 1987, Nintendo had launched the Powerline, a phone hotline for players to call when they needed gameplay tips. This ensured that gamers would not get hopelessly lost or confused when playing the game so they could be kept satisfied. The Powerline lasted through five generations of Nintendo home video game consoles and was eventually discontinued on June 1, 2010. Nintendo Power thus merged Nintendo’s two needs: to promote upcoming games as in the Fun Club Newsletter, and to assist gamers in persevering through games as with the Powerline.
The Self-Party Magazine
Nintendo Power provided access to cheat codes, advice in dealing with hard specific problems in some games, maps and hints of featured games, and previews of upcoming games. A number of other relatively secondary features, such as storyline comics, additional game advice disguised as comics, reader letters, and so on, constituted the building blocks of the magazine. Fake reader letters were also used by the staff to get some messages across, as Nintendo Power editor Gail Tilden explains:
Another thing we used the magazine for was in the letters section with customer service. If they had an issue that they wanted covered in the magazine, we didn’t want to be writing preachy customer service articles. One solution for that was to present the customer service problem as a letter, and then respond with the answer. That way, it would have been published. That was the way we at Nintendo Power could get around writing consumer service articles. (Tilden in Cifaldi 2012, 3)
Nintendo Power had privileged and systematic access to the games thanks to a clause in Nintendo’s license agreement for third-party developers and publishers. When they signed Nintendo’s forceful terms, they agreed to send them the game for review and to make any changes that Nintendo deemed necessary. After Nintendo Power was launched, however, they also had to agree to let the magazine’s staff access their submission for coverage (Cifaldi 2012, 4). In practice, that was not a hard sell; according to Howard Philips of Nintendo of America, third-party partners were eager to have their games featured in Nintendo Power because it meant great exposition directly to the target consumer.
This was especially valuable given Nintendo Power’s popularity, which quickly soared to record highs. The first issue was shipped for free to the 3.4 million members of the Nintendo Fun Club, 1 million of which took the paid subscription right away (Harris 2014, 57). Wesley and Barczak comment on a figure of 1.5 million subscribers, making Nintendo Power “the most popular youth magazine in America” (Wesley and Barczak 2010, 20). Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter mention that Nintendo Power “by 1990 had become the biggest-selling magazine for children, with a paid circulation of two million in the US” (Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter 2003, 120). Of course, a magazine is not only read by subscribers: Sheff’s numbers for 1991 are “about 1.2 million subscribers and 4 million readers” (Sheff 1993, 234). A brief from a 1994 Billboard issue mentions that Nintendo has sent 1 million copies of the Donkey Kong Country promotional videotape to “a million subscribers of Nintendo Power magazine” (Billboard, November 12, 1994, 90).
The magazine’s sharp success, like that of the NES, was a result of tackling a market without competitors. As the NES gained in popularity through 1986 and 1987, eventually becoming a full-blown success story in 1988, almost no other American video game magazines were in circulation. Electronic Games (whose last four issues were rebranded as Computer Entertainment), the first video game magazine published in the United States in 1981, ended in August 1985; Videogaming Illustrated was briefly published in 1982 and 1983; Atari Age and Electronic Fun with Computers & Games were both launched in 1982 and terminated in 1984. When Nintendo Power’s first issue hit in July 1988, the only other magazine in existence was Computer Gaming World (which was dedicated to PC games). The only thing covering game consoles—and Nintendo had the only significantly selling console—was the Nintendo Fun Club Newsletter, given out to consumers who registered their address when they bought a Nintendo game.
Following Nintendo Power’s success, GamePro appeared in April 1989 and Electronic Gaming Monthly in May 1989 (after an initial Buyer’s Guide in March). No other magazine appeared in 1990. This shows how little competition Nintendo Power faced. Not only was the quantity of opponents limited, but their coverage of Nintendo games was severely limited as well, given Nintendo’s contractually negotiated right to coverage for all games that were made for the one platform that controlled more than 80% of the video game market (Provenzo 1991, 13). As the house organ to the biggest house on the block, Nintendo Power made the rules and, in large part, contributed to the commercial success of the games it treated. In this sense, the magazine must be seen as an integral part of the Nintendo Economic System that acts as a promotional vehicle for Nintendo and its games, even as it is an important vector in shaping the culture of video games at large.
American Surveillance
It would make sense to turn to Nintendo Power, an insider source, to search for the first mention of the Super Famicom and Super NES among American magazines. The first time NP acknowledged the Japanese system was in a single-page feature titled “Super FamiCom announced in Japan” (Nintendo Power #16, September/October 1990, 86). We know that Nintendo was in no hurry to promote the system because the NES was selling so well in North America, but if we didn’t, we could have inferred so from the backbench position the magazine attributed to the system. There’s no mention of anything related to that article on the magazine’s cover, which instead promotes Maniac Mansion, previews of some NES games, and a special “Giant Game Boy Feature.” The article isn’t even referenced in the table of contents but is simply tucked away in the “NES Journal” subsection of the “Player’s forum.”
In comparison, Electronic Gaming Monthly had put the Super Famicom, identified as the “16-Bit Super Nintendo,” along with the Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, and Game Boy, on the “Big Bang” cover of its second issue in August 1989—a full year before Nintendo Power. The Super Famicom is also the first system mentioned in the “cover story” paragraph in that issue’s table of contents. It wasn’t even the first time Nintendo’s next console was mentioned in the magazine, as the Super Famicom had appeared in a column in the preceding issue of May 1989. Granted, there wasn’t much in there other than data on how it was planned for release in the summer in Japan, expected for release in the United States in 1990, and that it was a 16-bit system that had reportedly “been hailed as ‘the most incredible game system ever seen’ by those who have been privy to the limited exposure that Nintendo Japan has given it” (EGM #1, May 1989, 63). EGM had, however, caught on Nintendo’s savvy marketing delay tactic at the time:
Continued strong sales for the 8-Bit Nintendo Entertainment System may hamper a stateside release until sometime in 1990. Nintendo simply doesn’t need to release their 16-Bit on these shores…they would be doing nothing but cutting in to the sales of existing NES consoles and carts. (EGM #1, May 1989, 63)
Nintendo Power’s first-ever mention of the Super Famicom described the technical specifications and explained how the “Super FamiCom’s new features really wowed those who attended the Nintendo press conference roll-out,” before succinctly going over the usual technical specifications: 512 x 448 resolution, 32,768 colors, and “the abilities to twist, rotate, stretch, zoom in on and miniaturize game images.” So far it’s all standard fare. However, to avoid cannibalizing NES sales, the article ends thus:
There’s still no word on when a Nintendo system like the Super FamiCom will come out in the United States, but you can be sure that you’ll read about any plans first in Nintendo Power! […] Look to future issues of Nintendo Power to get hard facts and not wimpy rumors on this hot new development in Nintendo technology! (Nintendo Power #16, September/October 1990, 86)
So if we get this right, Electronic Gaming Monthly’s coverage of the Super Famicom a full year earlier than Nintendo Power should be chalked up as “wimpy rumors.” This is somewhat curious considering that EGM had simply acted as an echo chamber to Nintendo of Japan’s own claims from its 1988 press conference. The staff was visibly piqued by the remark, as a month later in their October 1990 issue, they promised readers an upcoming “complete report with all the hard facts and no wimpy rumors directly from Japan” (EGM #15, October 1990, 10).
This certainly highlights the key role that Nintendo Power was playing as a formidable promotional engine in the Nintendo Economic System: Readers had to be assured that the magazine was the only trustworthy source of information so that Nintendo could control the flow of information without interference from independent sources in journalism or criticism (however little of those actually transpired). This control over information is an issue that revolves around the concept of paratextuality and merits further discussion.
The Fine Line between Text and Paratext
Video game magazines can be treated as a giant stand-alone text making up a “paratextual industry,” which historians can use as documents to understand “what the ‘ideal’ gamer should know and expect from games” at the time (Consalvo 2007, 20). Consalvo framed them following Lunenfeld (1998) and has provided a certain usage of the term “paratext,” which many new media and game studies scholars have used since. As a consequence, “paratext has increasingly become associated as the external elements that shape the experience and reception of video games” (Dunne 2016, 279), including anything from advertisements and reviews to message board discussions and fan fictions. Everything that references a text and influences how it can be received and understood falls under this definition of paratext, which means we are constantly surrounded by paratexts that point toward texts. Indeed, we actually consume more paratexts than texts in our saturated media landscape (Gray 2010).
For Dunne (2016) and Rockenberger (2014), these approaches are too broad because they run the risk of treating everything as a paratext. How can we account for the differences among a promotional trailer, a game review, and a message board discussion for a game if they can all be considered as making up a giant auxiliary text to the main text, a video game? What should constitute a paratext and what should simply be a text that’s about another text (in technical terms, partaking in intertextuality)? The debate on paratext may look like academic squabbling over semantics (something like “what is the threshold at which point something is in the threshold?”), but in reality the question is far from trivial. We deal with the nature and status of paratexts whenever we read a product review that turns out to be an advertisement imitating a product review, or when we read articles published on unfamiliar websites that we later find out to be run by corporations providing the goods that are covered in these articles. This proves absolutely crucial when dealing with uncomfortable entities like Nintendo Power magazine. Applying the “paratext” label across the board might make us lose sight of the specific practices and relationships behind (para)texts, especially regarding questions of power, control, and agendas.
Genette and the Origins of the Paratext
The notion of paratext was introduced by Gérard Genette in Palimpsestes (1982) and subsequently developed in Seuils (1987).2 Originally, it referred to the supplemental text that lies at the periphery of the main text, surrounding and extending it to present it, in the usual sense of the word, and to make it present, in the form of a book. Some typical paratextual elements consist of the title, author’s name, collection, publisher, epigraph, preface, front and back cover, and packaging. More than a limit or frontier, the paratext is a threshold or an airlock, a zone of transition and transaction where strategies and actions can be deployed by the author or their allies to ensure a better reception and reading of the text (“better” as defined by them, usually meaning to provide the intended experience).
Genette puts forth a key distinction between the peritext and the epitext: The peritext surrounds the text itself and is not separate from it (it lies at its periphery), whereas the epitext is kept at the surface of the book and circulates independently from it. He also brought a second distinction between authorial paratext, which is produced under the responsibility of the text’s author (and on which he focused), and editorial paratext, whose responsibility lies with the publisher. The latter question is, however, pretty straightforward, as the video game industry, for game consoles and AAA productions at least, admits no such thing as an “author” (with a few notable exceptions, such as Shigeru Miyamoto, Hideo Kojima, David Cage, Peter Molyneux, and a select few other); consoles and games are the firm’s creation, and the text accompanying it is wholly produced by the “editorial” instance rather than being a polyphonic mixture of the author’s and publisher’s voices. The more serious problem that paratext theory faces is that Genette originally developed it with written books in mind. This requires adaptation for video games, for both the peritext and epitext.
Accounting for the peritext is easier than the epitext, although more in-depth work on the peritext remains to be done.3 The Super NES’s peritextual documentation, written by Nintendo of America, was adamant about the machine’s performance. The Super NES Instruction manual states, “Thank you for purchasing the Super NES™, Nintendo’s most advanced video entertainment system, featuring full digital stereo sound and breathtaking graphics!” The back of the system’s box was particularly verbose and grandiloquent. This is both unsurprising and surprising: On the one hand, the back of the box exists to convince the consumer looking at it in a store to buy it; on the other hand, Nintendo putting technology at the forefront goes against the whole Gunpei Yokoi philosophy of seasoned technology:
You’re about to experience a whole new dimension in home video entertainment—The Super Nintendo Entertainment System®! […] The Super Nintendo Entertainment System will astound you with the most colors, the biggest characters, and the smoothest, most detailed animation imaginable. Cascading sounds echo crisply in super digital stereo. Crystal clear 3-D graphics shrink, expand and spin with amazing speed. Multiple backgrounds allow for complex scrolling, shadowing, and depth like you’ve never seen in a video game! […] The new Super NES Control Deck features Nintendo’s most advanced game technology, with thousands of magnificent colors, huge on-screen characters, stunning 3-D graphics, and digital stereo sound!
Lane and the Criterion of Authorization
When we get into epitext, the limits of Genette’s approach are immediately felt because he focused his efforts on the authorial paratext. The authorial epitext, then, is constituted by the author’s private correspondence, diary, or preliminary drafts of the final literary work, interviews, conferences, and the like. This is all well and good for the (culturally entrenched) Grand, Profound, and Revered Author but much more marginal for video games. I will rather follow the work of Philippe Lane, who worked on the editorial paratext to supplement Genette’s focus on the authorial. Table 3.1, which joins two tables from Lane (1991, 94–96), summarizes some common occurrences of peritext and epitext, both authorial and editorial.
Table 3.1 Typology of the paratext derived from Lane’s figures (1991, 94–96).
In the Lanean logic of paratextuality, advertisements are considered part of the editorial epitext of games. Contrary to the overinclusive approaches to paratext we have seen earlier, not everything that points toward a text can be considered part of its paratext. Siding with Lane and Genette means that game reviews, previews, feature articles on game consoles, trade show reports, and other such features found in game magazines are excluded from the realm of paratextuality because that conception of the paratext upholds the criterion of authorization (Rockenberger 2014): A paratext has to be produced or authorized by the author and his allies. This definition makes the paratext a question of “Who writes under whose conditions?” rather than “What other text is being written about?”
Hence, although Consalvo (2007) may include game magazines as forming a “paratextual industry” because they affect gamers and help shape their encounters with games, I contend there are many types of texts in magazines that do not qualify for being paratexts that surround and present specific game-texts, such as reviews and articles. Certainly game reviews constitute an important, if not central, mode of engagement with games, and they play a pivotal role in framing games and consoles for gamers. However, we can’t simply add two more columns to table 3.1 and attempt to account for “critical paratexts” and “journalistic paratexts.” The notions of criticism and journalism imply at least a modicum of distance from the creators or producers of the text, whereas authorial and editorial instances collaborate more or less closely together to provide the paratext. In fact, journalism and criticism, if they are to be credible, most definitely have to not be produced or authorized by the author and their allies. Adopting the criterion of authorization to determine the paratextual status of game publications requires us to clarify the sources of writing and the magazine’s status of proximity with the article’s subject: Whose facts, views, and arguments are being printed out? Whose interests are served by the publication? Quite simply, whose money is being spent in doing so?
Lane’s contribution proves invaluable to the study of the paratext in the video game industry, where notions of authorship and editorship are made more tentacular by the specificities of platform technology and economics. In the video game industry, the platform owner has a vested interest in the success of games made for its platform because the more (quality) games there are available for it, the more desirable the platform becomes for consumers. Hence, whereas the Nintendo of America staff working on Nintendo Power content may cover games for Nintendo consoles that have not been developed or published by Nintendo, they are never disinterested observers or completely impartial reviewers because promoting these games in the magazine or other product catalogs and television advertisements also promotes the platform.
Because of the market’s hardware-software integration and noninteroperability, video game reviews and previews must be understood in completely different fashion depending on where they are published. There are two categories of publications: independent game magazines such as EDGE or Electronic Gaming Monthly, which have no affiliation with a particular platform owner; and first-party magazines of platform owners, exemplified by Nintendo Power, preceded by Atari Age, and followed by Xbox Magazine, Official PlayStation Magazine, and so on.
The Nintendo Power Case
This uneasy proximity and relationship of collaboration between Nintendo and third-party developers and publishers makes Nintendo Power a problematic publication in terms of paratext theory: The magazine is offered like a journalistic or critical text but in truth functions as a quasi-editorial epitext, conveying Nintendo’s editorial messages and, quite literally at first, spending out its money as a customer service expense (Tilden in Cifaldi 2012). According to Lane, the editorial paratext obeys a specific logic of discourse:
The linguistic and communicational specificity of the editorial paratext resides in the interlinking of two modes of writing: description and argumentation. Description is the dominant textual mode in this discursive genre; this description however is never neutral, always oriented so as to gain the reader’s support; the selected elements are organized, hierarchized according to the editorial goal of producing the most pertinent paratext, accounting for the specific product and the audience. (Lane 1991, 92–93)
Hence, when discussing Nintendo Power, “the linguistic and communicational specificity of the editorial paratext” will not only appear in official advertisements for Nintendo products but permeate through what may on the surface appear to be part of video game criticism. That the deeply argumentative nature of the texts was hidden under a veneer of descriptive objectivity (sometimes very thin indeed) explains how the magazine insidiously persuaded children and young teenagers—the magazine’s target audience—that they were being given “information” when, in actuality, the magazine was pushing sales arguments and product catalogs, conforming to the surface-and-core duality of Nintendo.
Nintendo Power’s coverage of the Super NES perfectly exhibited this dual-level discourse. A four-page feature in 1991 had parts on the SNES’s technology that appeared as objective (or at least factual) descriptions but were orchestrated to present the SNES as the logically reasonable option among 16-bit consoles:
SUPER GRAPHICS. Although graphics aren’t the only consideration when comparing games or game systems, they are the most glamorous aspect of video games. Graphics fire the imagination and allow you to roam alternate universes. The first and most obvious aspect of graphics is resolution. Resolution is determined by the number of pixels that can appear on the screen at one time. A greater number of pixels translates into higher resolution pictures. In the case of the Super NES, the resolution is a very impressive 512 x 448. That’s almost twice the resolution of most other 16 bit systems. (Nintendo Power #25, June 1991, 46)
Independents’ Dependencies
Further complicating the question of authorization is the independent magazines’ theoretical independence being compromised by the restricted flow of information from platform owners. This leads to magazines such as Electronic Gaming Monthly becoming an uncritical relay of Nintendo’s discourse when it is describing Nintendo’s consoles, which is deeply problematic given that the editorial epitext is predominantly descriptive but “never neutral, always oriented so as to gain the reader’s support” (Lane 1991, 92–93). EGM’s discussions of Nintendo hardware thus become even more insidious than the editorial content found in Nintendo Power, a source that may be more readily pointed out as biased. The gamepilgrimage website has extensive studies of the coverage of 16-bit consoles in EGM and GamePro and highlights how EGM had a bias for the SNES from the start. Site owner “sheath” sees in EGM’s treatment of the SNES a wider shift from the earlier “wait and see” approach that was in place in video game journalism so far to the “enthusiastic prospective prophecy” (sheath 2010).
In a sense, it would have been hard for independent magazine editors to do anything more than relay, almost verbatim, the inflected descriptions they received from hardware manufacturers for two reasons. First, they often received information on consoles, add-ons, or games that were still in development (and hence impossible to verify) or on technical details and methods that would have required expertise in games programming and design to verify, or been protected as trade secrets by licensing agreements or contractual employment obligations. Second, most game magazines were started by game fans and people working in communications on different subjects. The first American video game magazine, Electronic Games, was started in 1981 by Bill Kunkel, Joyce Worley, and Arnie Katz. The trio had met through science-fiction fandom, with Joyce Worley having founded and worked on multiple science-fiction fanzines. Kunkel and Katz had covered pro wrestling in a radio show and then a magazine. Later, they transitioned into a column on video games titled “Arcade Alley” in Video Magazine. Electronic Games was born out of that endeavor (Fulton 2009).
Had the roots of video game journalism been laid out by ex-industry programmers or other technology-oriented journalists, rather than the Kunkel/Katz/Worley trio’s foundations in fandom and general entertainment coverage, the video game magazines might have taken a different (and critical) stance toward the technological promotion discourses of video game console manufacturers. Instead, a magazine such as Electronic Gaming Monthly is criticized for basically reading a bunch of Japanese game magazines and translating what they read in there months later for publishing in the United States (Roberts 2009). Tracing the exact provenance of the discourses thus may prove difficult and would require more research to restore the complete chain from Nintendo of Japan’s press release to Japanese magazines, which may have been interpreted and translated by American editors and mixed in with other sources as well.
These rhetorical contraptions constituted the first point of contact between the general public and the Super NES. The Super NES’s promotion and coverage in game magazines, from its reveal and introduction right up to its displacement by the Nintendo 64, are exemplary of Nintendo’s uneasy relationship with technology and of the particular context of the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Technology was a discursive Trojan Horse that all video game hardware firms more or less used to push their promotional discourses to the specialized press. The strategy required a careful management of information and a certain cultural context around video game magazines; when successful, it meant writers, reviewers, journalists, and editors of independent magazines could only discuss the game platforms under the platform owner’s terms. In effect, technology allowed them to extend their editorial epitext to other, external sources of discourse and information on video games, heightening the simulacrum of information and objective description to reinforce the persuasive technological promotion discourse.
The Turbo-Mega-Super Generation: Between Technobabble and Technoliteracy
Magazines of the Turbo(Grafx)-Mega(Drive)-Super(NES) time routinely discussed which of the consoles was the most powerful or could offer the best games, in a “battle of the bits” or “bit wars” (cf. Therrien and Picard 2015). They featured elaborate comparisons of megahertz, RAM and ROM, number of on-screen colors, number of sprites or background layers, and so on between Nintendo’s Super NES and Sega’s Genesis consoles. Whole articles were dedicated to the benefits of CD-ROM technology, Full-Motion Video, prerendered 3-D graphics, or some special software technique or hardware configuration that allowed spectacular visual effects. NEC’s TurboGrafx-16 was touted as a “16-bit console” in its marketing, although it was knocked off as being “not a true 16-Bit” (EGM #2, May 1989, 32) by competitors and the press. Sega’s own Genesis had a “16-BIT” mention centrally embossed in shiny silver letters on the hardware, as can be seen in figure 3.1.
Figure 3.1 Display of “16-BIT” technology on the North American Sega Genesis model 1 (left) and the Japanese Mega Drive (detail, right). In addition to the central “16-BIT,” the Japanese has two mentions on the sides: “AV intelligent terminal” and “High grade multipurpose use.”
Source: Evan Amos, Wikimedia Commons.
Throughout the mid-1990s, an advertisement by Atari for its Jaguar system encapsulated the technomarketing mindset through a simple equation: more bits = more power = better games. It was a simple matter of counting, as the tagline went:
What makes Jaguar games so awesome? The raw power of 64-bit technology that adds CD-quality stereo sound, 16 million colors, and incredible 3D animation. […] This is just a preview of what’s to come. The Atari Jaguar. 64 bits. Do the Math. (EGM #63, October 1994, 40–41)
Technology, it seemed, was everywhere. Or was it? In stark contrast to this assessment, in 2002, Mark Finn wrote:
The marketing of the consoles of this period also seems to confirm the desire to de-emphasise the actual technology underlying the systems. Although some advertisements mentioned the relative performance of each system (a tactic often employed in relation to Sega’s Genesis), by far the most prevalent form of advertising avoided emphasizing the technology at all, preferring to focus on brand-recognition through characters. (Finn 2002, 48)
My own research on game magazines from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, as part of a project on graphical technologies and innovation in the games industry between 1985 and 1995, led me to the exact opposite viewpoint: Technological discourses are omnipresent in the promotion of video games during that period. Part of the conflict between interpretations can be resolved by remembering that advertisements are only a certain type of promotion, and promotion is only a subset of marketing. Yet the matter is not so simple either and will require us to identify the different discursive stances and practices toward technology that have been deployed throughout the press in discussing the Super NES. These can be summarily distributed across three general categories: technobabble, buzzwords, and technoliteracy. As I will show, the promotional discourses and their stance toward technology have transformed quite rapidly from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s due to a cultural change as the promotion of games followed the maturing generation that had been hooked on the NES (detailed later in chapter 6).
In its initial years, the video game press largely relayed the technological details that console manufacturers were supplying them in press releases. These technological arguments were seldom explained in depth, analyzed, or critically weighed by magazine editors; by and large, they simply stated the factual data (in the form of hard numbers) they received from the firms. Table 3.2, which compares systems in Electronic Gaming Monthly #2 (July/August 1989, 39) represents this idea.
Table 3.2 Comparison of console specs, reproduced from Electronic Gaming Monthly #2 (July/August 1989, 39).
In most cases, the articles went beyond the simple list and contextualized some of the data by providing a few examples of these technologies’ applications for games. These examples were mostly provided by the platform owner, and magazine editors and writers then speculated more largely on what this could mean for the future of games, as when Nintendo Power enthusiastically described the upcoming revolution to be brought by the Super NES’s sound system:
[the Super NES] can reproduce the same digital stereo signals used in CDs with all the tonality and richness that you would expect from a recording of your favorite musical group. This also means that actual voices can be reproduced. Real voices! Imagine a Batman game in which cinema scenes don’t have subtitles but the actual voices of Jack Nicholson and Michael Keaton! With the Super NES that sort of realism is possible. (Nintendo Power #25, June 1991, 47)
Futurology isn’t always right, even when the futurologist is prophesying from their parent corporation’s technology. But futurology doesn’t have to be right; it has to sell systems.
Technobabble
For a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when new consoles and technologies were on the far-off horizon or just around the corner, the technological discourse found in the specialized gaming press functioned more like a dizzying, superficial flash of lights than an inquisitive, thorough searchlight delving into the hardware to illuminate its shadowy secrets. I call such brandishing of factual information and data without context technobabble. The word is used in discussions of science fiction literature as a way to describe any pseudoscientific/technological-sounding explanation that is actually a cover-up to dazzle the reader and maintain suspension of disbelief. I find it poetically fitting to see “next-generation” video game consoles described according to the same rhetorical discursive strategies of technology in science fiction.
Two examples from Electronic Gaming Monthly will illustrate technobabble. The first citation describes the upcoming Super Famicom console:
The system uses a 16-Bit CPU (Central Process Unit—the brains of a game system) that is equipped with a CPU utilizing an 8-Bit Data Bus and a 24-Bit Address Bus. […] The Super Famicom has a built-in math function that uses 8bit x 8bit multiplication and 16bit / 8bit division math that allows the unit to obtain high speed calculations in hardware as opposed to software. (EGM #2, July/August 1989, 76)
What are the advantages of calculating in hardware as opposed to software? Savvy readers will know that the hardware can take care of these operations, hence leaving more processing power and time to manage other specific game-related operations in software. Yet what is the advantage conferred by “8-bit x 8-bit multiplication and 16-bit/8-bit division math” in achieving these calculations in hardware? How does it compare with previous technology and rival systems? Is it standard to have built-in math functions or is this an innovation? What exactly is an Address Bus, and how does it relate to the Data Bus? Readers might guess that someone, somewhere, at least, will know. Aside from that, it seems clear that the function served by these sentences in the text is not really to inform the readers but to have them feel that this system is advanced and powerful.
Sometimes trying to go beyond the surface and into more in-depth explanations only manages to show that the surface-level discussion is actually founded on surface-level comprehension. An interesting example of this can be found in the reader letters of the July 1994 issue of EGM2. Reader Jason Sootkoos asks, “How can Super Metroid for the Super NES be a 24-Megabit game when the Super NES is only a 16-Megabit system? Is it possible to play a 24-Bit game on a 16-Bit system, and if so, why aren’t all games like this?” The question shows gamers’ earnest interest in understanding the technicalities of game technologies, and EGM2’s choice to feature the letter likewise shows its valuing of this kind of curiosity. The editor’s response is just as interesting, as the answer probably caused even more confusion:
The fact that the Super Nintendo is a 16-Bit system doesn't limit the cartridges to 16-Meg. What it does mean is the Super NES can only read 16-Megabits of information at one time. This is also true with the Genesis. Even though Super Street Fighter II will be 40-Meg, the Genesis can only read 16-Meg of the cartridge at one time. (EGM2 #1, July 1994, 14)
The answer lumps together computational complexity and data storage, as if contemporary discussions attempted to explain modern computers’ 64-bit processors by how much of a double layer Blu-Ray Disc’s 50 gigabytes of storage space can be processed “at one time.” Apparently, the SNES being a 16-bit system allows it to “read 16-megabits of information at one time,” hence processing around 66% of Super Metroid’s 24-megabit size at any given time. The (more complex) reality is that the 16-bit processor of the SNES can process 16-bit instructions (data points with 216, or 65,536, possible values), which are stored in the 24-megabit (24,000,000 bits) storage space of these game cartridges. The reply even features a photo of Super Metroid whose legend states, “Although the Super NES is 16-Bit, games like Super Metroid are 24-Bit. Confused?” Well, anyone would be too if that kind of technobabble was their only contact with technology.
Buzzwords
Beyond the specialized gaming press, various publications also covered video game consoles in one of two ways. Typically, the general press did not address technological performance at all or did so in superficial terms. A good example can be found in Newsweek:
The new game machines from Sega (Genesis) and NEC (TurboGrafx-16) offer so-called 16-bit processing. That essentially means they move more data more quickly, and it results in noticeably better graphics and sound. Both machines offer power comparable to $2,000 personal computers of the mid-'80s, but are far cheaper and easier to use. (Newsweek, June 17, 1990)
In a sense, these kinds of publications are the least problematic because they have (theoretically at least) no link of dependency with game publishers or platform owners, and because they minimize discussion of technology instead of trying to discuss it in more depth than they (or their readers) can understand. However, they can still contribute to technopromotional discourses by relaying made-up words as buzzwords. This shows up in the previous examples as “so-called 16-bit processing,” which does not attempt to explain what it is at all. In this way, terms can be brandied about without anyone having any idea whatsoever as to what they actually mean. Although this is far from contributing to technical literacy, it is arguably less of a problem than technobabble because the people employing buzzwords to discuss video game technologies at least know that they don’t know the technical details behind the word’s buzz, placing them in the realm of Socratic ignorance. Technobabble, by contrast, insidiously instills the impression of knowledge in people, hence bringing them into double ignorance—not knowing that they don’t know.
Technoliteracy
A more involved discussion of technology could be found in general tech publications, which placed a heavy focus on properly explaining the consoles’ specifications. I will give one such example from Popular Mechanics, a magazine that has been running since 1902 and that covered the SNES’s launch in the context of the console wars:
First, it’s necessary to understand that beneath the plastic exterior and emphasis on entertainment, videogame machines are at heart small, relatively powerful computers. In the same manner that text and graphics are controlled in the PCs we use in our homes or at the office, the on-screen action in videogames is controlled by two tiny but powerful microchips—the Picture Processing Unit (PPU) and Central Processing Unit (CPU). The CPU acts as the brains of the system, interpreting and directing the steady stream of data it receives from the game cartridges. The PPU, in turn, receives information from the CPU and game cartridges, and transforms it into the graphics and video information you see displayed on-screen. (Willcox 1991, 74–75)
In carefully detailing the underpinnings of game technology in an informative rather than a promotional manner, the magazine shows a glimpse of what the specialized gaming press could have been. This way of discussing technology seeks to build technoliteracy for readers, that is, to give them access and proficiency in understanding the complexities of technology rather than using technobabble to smash them with complexity and leave them dazzled or beaten senseless. Ultimately, the article from Popular Mechanics also shows the limits of discussing proprietary technologies, as even with its informative goal, it couldn’t have a discussion of the SNES’s sound chip with any more details than “a custom Sony sound chip, complete with its own 8-bit CPU and digital signal processing, provides for impressive digital audio capabilities” (Willcox 1991, 75).
Nintendo Power produced a Q&A about the Super NES in issue #29 (October 1991), with a question and answer that could well be a case of technoliteracy except the explanation conveniently stops at the part that states how much better the SNES is compared with the NES in order to sell it. The general tone and style of writing in the first part are emblematic of technoliteracy, but the description arriving in the second part is ultimately subservient to the overarching goal of persuading the reader to buy it, thus illustrating why these kinds of texts are best understood as editorial paratexts:
What is a 16 bit machine?
The term “16 bit” refers to the Central Processing Unit of the Super NES, which is the brain of the system. It means that the Super NES can process 16 bits of information at the same time. That makes the Super NES twice as powerful as the 8 bit NES. The increase in processing speed means that the Super NES can produce spectacular effects such as color layering that allows you to see through objects or to rotate and scale backgrounds. (Nintendo Power #29, October 1991, 70)
Another, more insidious case of technobabble advertising from Nintendo disguised as an independent technoliteracy discussion can be found in the “SMASHING the Myth of Speed & Power” campaign. In 1994, Nintendo produced a two-page feature that mimicked the form of regular magazine articles and purported to compare the performance of SNES and Genesis consoles. The description claimed to debunk the “myth about Blast Processing” and present “the cold, hard facts.” The article conforms to the strategies of the editorial epitext laid out by Lane: It features description as its main textual mode (for example, “Processing speed can be measured in several ways including CPU clock speed and memory cycle time”), but this description is oriented to garner support (“Mode 7 is a built-in function of the Super NES PPU that has revolutionized home video games”).4
Table 3.3 summarizes the dominant discursive stances found in various publication types when discussing video game technology.
Table 3.3 Dominant discursive stances on technology found in the press covering video games and their corresponding paratextual status.
The end result of these multiple factors and discursive strategies interacting was a certain conception of what the Super Famicom and Super NES was going to be, a conception that influenced how the platform was framed. It was to be a technological—and more specifically graphical—powerhouse, as the examination of the console’s peritext (instruction manual and packaging) earlier has shown. The epitext and other external commentary on the console also underlined graphics as an important part of its identity: “Super Nintendo’s main attributes are its brilliant custom chips. … These are used to create some stunning graphical effects” (Computer and Video Games #123, February 1992); “The Super NES feature that has attracted the most attention among game players is a graphics mode the company calls ‘Mode 7’” (Willcox 1991). In July 1991, just a month before the North American release, a Nintendo Power feature titled “In the Works for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System” (#26, July 1991, 50) provided a general five-sentence blurb to the effect that 29 games were under development or already published in Japan and might be released for the SNES. The rest of the page was filled with screenshots from each of the 29 games, understanding the need for consumers to visually see the difference and pushing the strengths of the console.
“Do the Math”: Technological Promotion in Advertising
The discursive stances on technology that I exposed so far have applied to the journalistic and critical contents that appear in game magazines. But game magazines feature another quantitatively important type of communications: advertisements. Advertising discourses differ from journalism and criticism because they can be blatantly honest about their business. Aside from their positioning and motivation, the discursive contents of many ads of the period also revolve around certain framings of technology that are fully compatible, if not without localized differences, with the prior discussion.
A particular two-page MegaRace advertisement is something of a piece of anthology. It perfectly embodies the edgy, provocative line of advertisement that characterizes the 1990s in video game promotion, with the entire left page taken up by the mug of a Mad Max-esque, pierced, scarred, and tattooed skinhead wearing a chain around his neck and gritting his teeth (the latter adorned with MEGA RACE letterings) under the words “NO COPS. NO LAWS. NO WIMPS.” It perfectly exemplifies the competitive mode of address (Therrien 2014) by taunting the player from the typical heavily gendered macho masculinity perspective, the right page titling in all capitals, “ARE YOU A GIRLIE-MAN OR A MEGARACER?”
More to the point of the discussion at hand here, however, the advertisement’s text seems to hit up all the right notes, throwing in every buzzword of the time. Two of the three captions that accompany the game’s screenshots are particularly strong embodiments of the buzzword mode of technological discourse:
Spectacular fully rendered animation, amazing 3-D graphics and pulse pounding sound effects make MEGARACE a rowdy, super-charged, one-of-a-kind virtual driving experience. / Over 25 minutes of full-motion digitized video commentary by MEGARACE host Lance Boyle, 15 full rendered tracks, hot rock music track and the virtual ride of your life (or death). (EGM #59, June 1994, 26–27)
Rendered 3-D graphics, edgy vocabulary, virtual reality, full-motion live-action video, great sound effects, and CD music: It’s all in there (including lame parenthesis jokes).
Tempest 2000’s Jaguar port’s game box provides a similarly hilarious concentrate of neologisms and buzzwords for the technophiliac:
Turn out the lights, turn up the volume and prepare for a mind-blowing assault on the senses. Once your neurotransmitters get a taste of the hypnotic rhythms of 100% pure techno-rave, you’ll be hooked. … Unable to escape the rush of blasting Flippers and Demon Heads as enhanced 3D polygons, screaming particle displays and hyperdelic Melt-O-Vision™ graphics warp you into the ultraviolent 64th dimension. … (Atari Corp. 1994)
Why settle for “virtual reality” and its promises of the 3rd dimension and realism when you can have your neurotransmitters directly hooked up to the 64th dimension and experience hyperpsychedelic graphics that melt your vision? Just Do the Math.
Alongside these over-the-top, orthodox advertisements, in 1994, we find a wholly different stance toward technology present as well. An ad that may appear refreshingly honest is the two-page splash from STD Entertainment, a manufacturer of programmable game controllers for multiple platforms. The opening is strikingly in tune with this discussion:
Are you into sports games, OR WHAT?! Then you’re gonna love this STUFF! We won’t bore you with the Techno-Babble, just use our Advanced Controllers […]. CUSTOM PROGRAMMABLE MICRO-CHIPS! Now you can handle those Complex Jams and other tough moves! HIGH PERFORMANCE CIRCUITRY! Our super-smart engineers have done it again! You’ll have the edge in Accuracy, Speed, and Responsiveness! (EGM #57, April 1994, 8–9)
They won’t bore us with technobabble, but they’ll use a lighter version of the strategy by throwing the buzzwords around and not even trying to connect them with explanations. This conscious play on the tensions between technobabble and technoliteracy marks a shift in address and target audience, from the technically savvy and rebellious teenagers dedicated to gaming as their hobby and as a way of expressing their cast-out nature toward a mainstream audience who isn’t “into” technology. Technoliteracy is dead, long live the buzzword! Sega’s own promotion for the Virtua Racing Genesis port presented its chip technology (an attempt to compete with Nintendo’s 1993 Super FX chip and its polygons) but didn’t discuss it:
[…] you’ve been waiting for Virtua Racing on the Genesis. Well, it’s here. With all the speed, realism and 3-D graphics of the arcade game. All it took was a quantum leap in processing speed—that’s where our SVP chip comes in. Luckily, you don’t have to understand the technology to appreciate Virtua Racing. Just drive. (EGM #59, June 1994, 54–55)
Nintendo, in its newfound attempt at being cool and hip n’stuff, of course followed suit when promoting Donkey Kong Country. Instead of explaining that the game developers modeled and animated polygonal 3-D characters on computers and exported stills and animation frames into the game, the firm created the buzzword “A.C.M.” for “Advanced Computer Modeling,” which it threw around every possible promotional material. It sounds technological, and it’s “Advanced,” to boot! A poster from Nintendo of America, dated from 1994 and titled “Want game frenzy? We’ve got it!!” presents a selection of SNES games and an arrow pointed at a Donkey Kong Country screenshot with the words “A.C.M. Advanced Computer Modeling (obviously cool stuff).”
Trademarking technology—or rather, technological-sounding buzzwords—was the way to go if all went well, as Sega’s “Blast Processing” campaign had shown. Trying to claim technological superiority over Nintendo, Sega of America promoted the Genesis’s “Blast Processing” capabilities, eluding technoliterate explanation until widespread consumer suspicion turned it into ridicule. Unfazed by Sega’s humiliation, Atari employed the same tactic to promote Tempest 2000 for the Jaguar, promising the player will “experience outrageous Melt-O-Vision™ graphics and powerful 3D polygons” (Video Games: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine #66, July 1994, 48–49). What’s Melt-O-Vision? It may turn out to be nothing more than a trademark (one that was filed in June 1994 and abandoned in May 1996 to be precise),5 but that’s sufficient for the goal of the ad: to instill a sense that there’s something graphically unique, “powerful,” and advanced in this game, and that makes it worth playing to see what it’s all about.
The three discursive strategies of technoliteracy, technobabble, and buzzwords play a vital role in shaping gamers’ expectations when new technologies are introduced into the market. They may do so as part of a game or game console’s epitext when they appear in ads or as independent journalism and criticism. Regardless of their provenance, they created high expectations toward the Super NES before it even hit the store shelves.
