Console Wars (2015)

PART FIVE

THE TORTOISE
AND THE HARE

59.

BLAST FROM THE PAST

“Now tell me,” Olafsson said from his office in New York, as he interviewed candidates for the president’s job at Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA), “what have you been up to since departing Sega?”

The candidate chuckled. “How much time do you have?”

Olafsson liked this guy already, and his answers further convinced Olafsson that he was the right man to run SCEA, which had been formed in May 1994 as the formal division within Sony to launch its new videogame console, PS-X. Much like he did with Sony Imagesoft and Psygnosis, Olafsson would oversee this new division, but whoever became president would be given the space to operate as he or she saw fit. Although the Sony name carried a lot of weight, there was skepticism about this venture from retailers, from distributors, and most of all from consumers. Whoever became responsible for launching the PS-X would need to be an intuitive thinker, an inspiring leader, and a smooth talker—and, as crass as it may sound, would need to have balls of steel. “But on a serious note,” Olafsson continued, “where has the world taken you?”

The candidate, Steve Race, smirked. He loved to tell a good story. “Let’s see . . . After Sega I did a few turnaround assignments for some venture capital firms that I’ve kept in touch with over the years. Nothing wild, nothing lasting more than a couple of months, until I got a call from Philips. They wanted me to come in and evaluate this product called DBI. Have you ever seen this thing? I’d sprinkle in a few details about the piece of shit, but it’s a waste of goddamn brain space if you ask me. Anyway, I came to the conclusion very quickly that this was a noncompetitive product and they ought to shut it down. They became we, ultimately me, and I was given the exciting task of dismantling this needlessly elaborate house of cards.”

“Is that something you take pleasure in?”

Race shrugged. “I’m good at it, I guess. I seem to do well with putting things together, or with taking things apart.”

“Beginnings and endings,” Olafsson said. “Well, that pretty much runs the spectrum, then. Do you not possess any areas of weakness?”

“Oh, I’ve got plenty of those,” Race said with a grin.

“Would you like to share?”

“Nah,” Race replied. “If you bring me in, you’ll find out soon enough.”

The interview progressed very nicely from there. Olafsson appreciated Race’s run-through-a-wall mentality and his ability to convince others to follow him through. This would be particularly valuable given that Sony would be selling a product nobody had ever seen, heard of, or thought about before. Race too was taken with Olafsson, whom he quickly nicknamed the “Nordic Knucklehead.”

As Race heard more about the budgets that would be involved, and Sony’s commitment to aggressive marketing, he began to covet the chance to once again shake up the videogame industry with his heat-seeking competitive strategies and snarky brand of shenanigans. But, as at Sega, there was a lingering concern.

“To be perfectly honest,” Race explained, “I’m very reluctant to go and work for a Japanese company. That kind of conservative micromanaging is not really for me. So can you tell me a little about what that dynamic would look like?”

“This is an excellent question,” Olafsson replied, “and I believe you will be pleased with the answer. Essentially, Sony corporate does not fully believe in what we are doing. They have agreed to a pay a few bills and open a couple of connections, but it seems to me like they might be very happy if we just went ahead and failed spectacularly. This sounds like embellishment, perhaps, but there is a hard edge of truth to it. For example, they would prefer we don’t use the Sony name on the product, and they have already prohibited its usage on the packing.”

“Sounds like a serious bummer.”

“It is,” Olafsson agreed. “But with this imposed distance comes a certain level of freedom. One which I believe would suit you quite well.”

This was mostly truth, but it was also what Olafsson knew Race needed to hear. He also knew that given Race’s reputation for either flaming out or getting bored easily, he likely wouldn’t be at the company long enough for this to become a major issue. At this specific time, Race was the right man for the job, and so Olafsson offered to protect him from the Japanese if this man, who had had a finger in Atari, Nintendo, and Sega, was willing to slap on an eye patch and come sail Sony’s pirate ship into the unknown.

“One more question,” Olafsson said, “which I had failed to ask earlier. Sega: do you have any ill will toward them?”

“No,” Race replied. “The opposite, actually. I think rather highly of Kalinske and what he’s got going on over there.”

“And it will be no problem for you to compete with former colleagues?”

“Not at all,” Race said, shaking his head in a way that made it appear weightless. “As the saying goes, the devil you know is more fun to do battle with than the devil you don’t.”

Olafsson wasn’t quite sure the saying went this way, but he couldn’t argue with the logic of SCEA’s soon-to-be president, and he wouldn’t dare do anything to dampen that wonderful fighting spirit.

While Olafsson was at work reeling in a blast from the past, Kalinske took the opportunity to welcome one of his own: Mike Fischer, the American at SOJ who had been such a great subtle peacemaker over the years.

Fischer had been on the fence about leaving Sega of Japan, but after his father’s recent heart attack and the quintuple bypass that followed, it felt like the right time to move back to the United States. And so, in the spring of 1994, Fischer had left SOJ to join SOA and help Kalinske oversee SOE. With Sega’s rapid ascension in Europe, Fischer’s move appeared to have come at the perfect time, but as excited as Kalinske was to have a trusted colleague building European relations, he worried about what this meant for his Japanese relations. Fischer had always alerted him to things on SOJ’s radar, but now he would be flying blind.

“Let me ask you a question,” Kalinske began, giving Fischer a tour of Sega’s headquarters at Redwood Shores, “are you at all opposed to my cloning you? That way you can work both here and in Japan?”

“Not at all,” Fischer said with a smile, “as long as I or, rather, my clone and I, are getting paid double.”

“Sure,” Kalinske replied, “I’ll just have to check with HR about that.”

Although Fischer was being treated to the same wit as usual, he sensed something askew in Kalinske’s tone. “Tom, is everything okay?”

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred Kalinske answered that question with an optimistic nonresponse, but there was something about Fischer that always relaxed his demeanor. “I don’t know,” Kalinske said, pausing to let a group of smiling employees from product developed pass by. “These are just weird times, I suppose.”

“What kind of weird?”

Kalinske didn’t quite know how to put it into words, but it was a very specific feeling. “It’s hard to say,” he described, scouring his mind for the best example of this wordless thing. “But it’s happening more and more lately. Okay, I realize that sounds ominous, so let me just give you an example. Earlier today I was looking at the most recent software numbers.”

“Were they good?”

“No,” Kalinske replied. “They were fantastic.”

Fantastic was an understatement. Of the top ten videogames sold in March 1994, eight of them were for the Genesis (and four of them were published directly by Sega):

1. NBA Jam (Genesis)

2. NBA Jam (SNES)

3. Sonic 3 (Genesis)

4. Mortal Kombat (Genesis)

5. Aladdin (Genesis)

6. Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball (SNES)

7. NHL ’94 (Genesis)

8. NBA Showdown ’94 (Genesis)

9. World Series Baseball (Genesis)

10. Sonic Spinball (Genesis)

“That’s terrific, Tom,” Fischer declared. “You should be proud!”

“We should be proud,” Kalinske corrected, “but that’s the point I’m trying to make. When I look at those figures I should be overjoyed. And part of me is, believe me, but another part can’t help but fast-forward to a couple of years from now and wonder if Sega will even have one game in the top ten. Have you seen the Saturn?”

“I’m sure the developers are still getting used to the environment,” Fischer explained. “Besides, concerns like that are normal. We all occasionally suffer from fear of success. It’s human.”

“That’s what I thought at first,” Kalinske replied. “But what if it’s not actually fear of success, and actually fear of something lurking beneath that success? Almost like it’s a perfect day at the beach, the sun is shining and the water is warm, but right there beneath the surface there’s a very hungry shark.”

“Interesting,” Fischer said, bobbing his head side to side. “Well, if that were the case, and I don’t think it is, then you have two choices: enjoy it while it lasts, or learn how to outswim the shark.”

What if it’s already too late, Kalinske wanted to ask. He looked around the office, taking great pride in having built such a powerful team. Eight out of ten titles in the top ten. Outstanding, but what if it really was already too late? Instead of asking this, however, Kalinske showed Fischer to his new office and officially welcomed him to Sega of America.

“Huh?” Minoru Arakawa quietly murmured when his key card did not work. He tried it once more, but again was denied, and it slowly dawned on Arakawa that he had not been granted access to the third-floor office space that Tony Harman had taken to calling the treehouse. “Tony!” Arakawa playfully shouted, while gently knocking on the door and laughing to himself. “Tony!”

Finally, Harman poked his head out the door. “Mr. A.? What are you doing here?”

“I heard you have something special to show me,” Arakawa replied. “But first I must ask why my keycard does not work.”

“Oh, that,” Harman said with a sheepish grin. “I never thought you’d want to come in. But since you’re here, let me show you around.”

Physically, Nintendo’s “treehouse” did not quite live up to its name. It was a nearly 2,000-square-foot area with a few four-foot-high cubicles, a small conference room, and an L-shaped bench in the back of the office. But a closer look revealed that, philosophically, it was everything an adult treehouse should be. Beside those cubicles there were some old arcade cabinets, hanging in the conference room were storyboards of games-to-be, and piled on that bench in the back was a pyramid of hardware systems. It was a fun place to work no doubt, but there was lots of work to be done. This new space was where NOA now localized NCL’s Japanese games, reviewed third-party titles, and, for Tony Harman (as well as his external producers Ken Lobb and Brian Ullrich), it was a place to develop games without constantly being asked “Whatcha working on?”

After a quick tour of the treehouse, Harman showed Arakawa what he had come to see: the game that Rare had been working on. It was still about ten to twelve months from completion and didn’t even have a name (its codename was “Country,” because Rare’s studio was located on the English countryside) but the Stamper brothers had been doing such an incredible job with the game that Harman wanted his boss to have a look. When Arakawa finally sat down and watched a demo of the game, he looked like he had seen a ghost. And in many ways he had. Because what Arakawa saw was the hulking body of an old friend, one who had been defeated by Mario so many years earlier. Thirteen years ago, this character had rescued Nintendo of America from obscurity, and now he was back again to haunt the competition. After all these years the wonderful beast had returned: Donkey Kong.

“This is incredible!” Arakawa declared. “The 64-bit games will look this good?”

“What do you mean?” Harman asked.

“Do you expect many of the games will appear in this quality on Ultra 64?”

“Oh!” Harman said, pleasantly taken aback. “No, Mr. A. This game is for the Super Nintendo.”

The look on Arakawa’s face was equal to incredible multiplied by impossible. This game, which would later be called Donkey Kong Country, was only 16-bits? Summer CES 1994 was only six weeks away, but Arakawa was convinced that it was worth undoing everything to feature this and only this. Don James, who designed Nintendo’s fantastical display, would later be asked to make this change and somehow, in only a matter of weeks, create a 30,000-square-foot booth with a volcanic island flaming in the middle. Thousands would come to marvel at this amazing game, the one that would extend the lifespan of the SNES and prove that Nintendo could rise back to the top without needing to rely on violence, name-calling, or flashy marketing. Make no mistake, there would be tons of marketing for the game: Peter Main, George Harrison, and Perrin Kaplan would be allowed to go to town. The difference was just that unlike their competitor, there would be substance behind the style.

Normally, Arakawa’s initial order for a game that Nintendo deemed to be an A+ title was one million units, but for Donkey Kong Country he ordered four million right off the bat. This is what Nintendo had been waiting for after all, and it was finally time for the tortoise to open the war chest and strap on a jetpack. Did it take longer than Arakawa expected for Nintendo to make their big move? Maybe, but he was not at all surprised that the time had finally arrived. The only thing that surprised him in the end was that inside of the tortoiseshell there was a gorilla hidden inside.

“Tony?”

“Yes?”

“You did good,”

“Thank you, Mr. A. Any time.”