Good Night, Sweet Putz

 

image from Numista

 

Hey Joe Lieberman, here's something for the ferryman when you board the boat waiting on the shore of the river Styx. I hear he loves video games... I'm sure the two of you will have plenty to talk about on your way to Tartarus.

Titanic Panic

 

Buy up all the third party developers, then kill
your video game brand! Oh, the stupidity!

When you've been in the hobby for as long as I have, you start noticing industry behaviors with predictable outcomes. For instance, when a major game console takes a major price dive, chances are high that the company who made it is already planning to give it the old heave-ho. By way of example, there's the hundred dollar Dreamcast in 2001, the hundred dollar GameCube in 2004, and this, right now.

I bought the budget model of this system, which was already experiencing its own steep price drops. Given the currently dim fortunes of the Xbox brand (and grumbling from third parties who are openly wishing they'd just axe the damn thing and get it over with already), I'm glad I chose to pinch pennies. Who wants to pay five hundred dollars for a game system that's destined to surf on the lip of a two figure price tag a year later?

I'm less glad that I paid $120 for a memory card, when they'll probably tumble to a fraction of that price at Best Buy in three months. Don't think I don't remember what happened with the Playstation Vita's stupidly expensive proprietary storage!

By the way, I remember Chris Kohler, one of the major figures of the second wave of video game fanzines, sharing an anecdote about Trip Hawkins in a feature he wrote for Wired years later. (Yeah, some people actually get paid for doing this "video game journalism" shit. It's increasingly infrequent, and comes with the risk of literally being lynched by GamerGaters, but it happens.)

"I told him that a friend (editor's note: me) bought a 3DO a few years after it launched for $25, and his face just dropped. It was the same face I would have made if I had bought the latest Final Fantasy game and found a copy of Army Men in the box."

Thirty Six Years

 

You'll immediately act to protect
the rights to your games, but when it
comes to actually selling those games
to your customers, you never
seem to be in much of a rush.
Why is that, Nintendo?
(image from Electronic Fun)
(this was from 1982. Yes, Nintendo
has always been like this.)

 

The Switch emulator Yuzu was recently taken offline, after a legal battle with Nintendo that Yuzu's creators Tropic Haze realized they couldn't possibly win. I'm ambivalent about the news. Generally, I'm reluctant to emulate games for a system that's still actively supported... with digital game prices as low as they are, and with hardware demands as high as they are for emulating recent game systems, it's kind of pointless. 

However, the Switch isn't going to be supported by Nintendo forever. Then what? What happens to those games when the system gets orphaned?  What happens when the servers holding the games are shut down and you can no longer download them? What happens when the systems themselves begin to deteriorate and can no longer play games without extensive repair work... work that Nintendo itself won't do, and the average user cannot do?

Nintendo's solution for customers is to just wait for Nintendo to release the games again on a more modern system. And wait we do, for years or even decades, until those coveted titles are released at Nintendo's leisure, for its own hardware, on its own terms. If you're lucky, maybe you'll be able to buy the game you wanted twenty years after its debut. If you're less fortunate, maybe Nintendo will let you borrow the game from its online service, as long as you keep paying the subscription fee. If you're not lucky at all, you won't get it at all... as fans of the Mother/Earthbound series will attest.

The lion's share of Donkey Kong
ports back in the day sucked big
Donkey DONG. The Intellivision port
is an especially tragic example.
(image from My Brain on Games)

 

Everybody's been a victim of Nintendo's fickle and arrogant nature at some point. Personally, I had to wait thirty-six years for Nintendo to put its seal of approval on a worthwhile home version of the arcade game Donkey Kong. Yes, there were home versions including one for the NES, but thanks to the limitations of consumer technology in the early 1980s, none of these were arcade perfect... and very few came anywhere near that standard. Even the Donkey Kong port for Nintendo's own game system came up lacking. (That sure is a funny way to celebrate the game that built your brand, by pissing out a conversion with a quarter of the content removed.)

Eventually, after spin-offs on the Game Boy and shiny CGI platformers on the Super NES and god knows how many regurgitations of NES Donkey Kong on other systems, Nintendo finally got around to giving us the actual arcade version of Donkey Kong, with no compromises and no annoying strings attached.* This took them thirty-six years. I was a child when Donkey Kong debuted in arcades. I was a bitter forty-something by the time I could legally enjoy that experience at home. I went from freckles to liver spots in the time it took Nintendo to give us a Donkey Kong that actually was Donkey Kong.

For the sake of game preservation, some people just won't wait for Nintendo to part the clouds and shine its digital blessings down upon the world. Recently, there was a Virtual Boy emulator released for the Nintendo 3DS, the only system with a realistic chance of replicating the Virtual Boy's unique 3D display. For the record, Red Viper recreates the experience quite well... but the record must also state that for the nine years it was actively supported, the 3DS was never given an official Virtual Boy emulator. 

Nintendo had a golden opportunity to preserve that moment in gaming history for future generations. Because it wasn't an especially flattering moment for them, they simply ignored it... and we're supposed to do the same for the sake of respecting copyright law? If Nintendo won't give its customers fair and reasonable access to its past work, someone else must.

* There's a port of the arcade Donkey Kong in Donkey Kong 64, but the steps for unlocking it reads like the twelve labors of Hercules. Just... just give me the damn thing. What the hell, Rare?

** It was twenty! Twenty years since Ninja 5-0 was released! That comedian on YouTube was right; time sucks.