It's No Longer the 1990s. Stop Playing Klax.

I was just thinking back to my childhood, as aging men are wont to do, and remembered that the 1990s was a time of pushing the envelope... of human limitations, and of good taste. Extreme sports were the prevailing fad of the time, and professional wrestling made a comeback after experiencing the late 1980s doldrums of constant pay-per-views and NBC's jobber-riffic Saturday Night's Main Event. Cartoons went from half hour toy commercials to smarter, louder, riskier fare, like The Simpsons and Ren and Stimpy. The reliable, safe pop of Michael Jackson and Paula Abdul took a back seat to the angsty war cries of grunge rock and heavy metal.

There was an arms race in pop culture to become the rudest, hippest kid on the block (often to embarrassing effect), and the world of video games was no exception. Take for example, this early release for the Sega Genesis.

 

 

This is Kid Chameleon, designed by Sega's American division (and principally by industry legend Mark Cerny, who bears an unfortunate resemblance to Gollum in AI depictions). It's the Sega Genesis answer to Super Mario Bros. 3, but instead of a friendly plumber who probably would feel like a plush toy if you hugged him, you get K.C., a leather-clad arcade master who gets a little more than he bargained for when he steps into the cutting edge world of VIRTUAL REALITY. (For you millies and zoomers, "virtual reality" was the exciting new frontier in technology in the 1990s, like artificial intelligence is now. You know, the AI that makes Mark Cerny look like Peter Lorre with jaundice.)

 

Like Mario, K.C. gets all his power ups from boxes hovering in mid-air, but instead of wimpy costumes like raccoons and frogs your dumb six year old sister might like, they're COOL power ups, for COOL kids like you! You can become a knife-wielding villain from a horror flick, or a German skeleton driving a tank, or a samurai, just in time to capture the imaginations of the first wave of anime fans! Awesome! Except they're not nearly as useful as the Weenie Hut Jr. abilities in Super Mario Bros. 3. Say what you will about a raccoon tail, but at least it gets me to the end of the stage.

 

Designs like this which favor form and fashion above function plague Kid Chameleon from start to finish, whether it's the edgy but unremarkable enemies (dragons, tanks made from piles of rock, and scorpions) or the title character who croaks "BUMMER" whenever he's hit. Hip for the time? Maybe. But even back in 1992 and even to a teenager, it still smacked of insincerity, like Steve Buschemi posing with a backward hat and a skateboard tucked under his arm.

 

It didn't take long before the extreme sensibilities of the 1990s crept into the fighting game genre. Originally deeply rooted in the 1980s and bearing a stunning resemblance to its grimy older brother Final Fight, Street Fighter got a sleek anime makeover in the Alpha and Marvel vs. games, then upped the ante by embracing hardcore rap with Street Fighter 3, and ESPN2 culture with Street Fighter Alpha 3. What had been a timelessly traditional Street Fighter experience up to that point had been modernized, to the consternation of picky players like myself. The difference between the introductions of Street Fighter Alpha 2 and its sequel, sponsored by Doritos and Mountain Dew, says it all.

 

 

This is a classic example of the simple but effective CPS2 cinematic style, not much more than a slideshow but with dramatic introductions of beautifully drawn martial artists. It tells you exactly what you need to know about these combatants, although in Dan's case it might give you entirely the wrong impression about his abilities. (Maybe that was a plank of Styrofoam he was kicking, rather than concrete.)

 

This, by contrast, is what you get with Street Fighter Alpha 3.

 

 

It certainly makes a statement. An obnoxiously hyperactive and overstated statement, that sounds a lot to these jaded ears like "I'm so trendy, pleeeease love me!" It doesn't help matters when the voice of a snarky MTV veejay pops in and shouts, "STA-REET FIGHTER ALLLPHA THREE!" Let me guess, you're going to jump in from time to time to remind me to "beat 'em up, guy!" and that I have "fists of God." All righty then. When they had to take his voice out of the Game Boy Advance version of Street Fighter Alpha 3 to conserve cartridge space, it felt like less of a compromise and more of a quality of life improvement.

 

The extreme sports motif of Street Fighter Alpha 3 works in hindsight. That really was an accurate reflection of the trends of 1998, for better or worse, but good grief did it grate on me in 1998.

 

Perhaps the greatest offender of pop culture pandering in the video game world is when the mediums of video games and television meet. (With all the gristly violence of the two semi trailers sandwiched in the middle of a twelve car pile-up.) The game show Nick Arcade, hosted by the perpetually energetic Phil Moore, was as hapless and harmless as your boomer dad trying to bond with you over a game of Super Mario World, but the same can't be said of Video Power and its spin-offs.

 

If you think that chair looks
uncomfortable, try watching Johnny
for more than five minutes.
(image from YouTube, and also
my nightmares)

 

Video Power was hosted by Stivi Paskoski, adopting the handle "Johnny Arcade." Imagine a tryst between a smug game show host, Vanilla Ice, and the aforementioned Kid Chameleon, and Johnny Arcade would be the product of this unholy love affair. He is hip. He is with it. He is a merciless test of your patience to watch, whether he's bouncing through vapid product reviews like a glittery rubber ball from a vending machine, or being the master of ceremonies in a video game contest that looks like it was held in a neon-soaked junkyard. There was also a cartoon; a Great Value version of Captain N with Acclaim characters replacing the likes of "is that Mega Man?," "why is Simon Belmont a pilot?," and "Okay, I could see that kid as Pit." Let's not talk about the cartoon.

 

The 1990s and its propensity for taking things to the edge and beyond are over. As crappy as things are now, maybe that's for the best.

Here a Coleco, There a Coleco, Everywhere a Coleco

 

I just came to the disturbing conclusion that the ColecoVision built the foundation, or at least the first floor, of the video game industry as it stands today. Even though the ColecoVision itself didn't last long past the video game crash of 1983 (which the Japanese amusingly refer to as "Atari shock"), it begat enough children to fill a few long, especially boring chapters of the Old Testament. 

You know how in the show Xena: Warrior Princess, every fifth woman just happens to look exactly like Lucy Lawless, because the God of War (no, not the bald one. Kevin Smith. No, the other Kevin Smith) had Mortal Fever and couldn't keep it in his codpiece? That's the sum total of the second generation of game consoles*. There's so much ColecoVision DNA in game consoles and computers of the 1980s that it's nuts. 

Everybody likes to say that the ColecoVision was made from off-the-shelf parts, but it seemed like everybody was raiding the same shelf. Sega's little seen SG-1000? Nearly identical to the ColecoVision, with Sega ripping off the specs and changing only a couple of minor details. The Master System builds on the hardware of the SG-1000, while patching over many of the system's faults. The richer color palette, smoother scrolling, and an extra helping of RAM effectively make the Master System a Super ColecoVision. 

The MSX computer standard, adopted by dozens of corporations and sold throughout the world? That's a ColecoVision with a keyboard, albeit with more memory and an alternate sound chip. You get them both in the Super Game Module, a peripheral that makes the ColecoVision an MSX without a keyboard.

Even the Sega Genesis and Game Gear find themselves stuck in the tangled web that is the ColecoVision family lineage. The Game Gear is a handheld Master System, with very little to distinguish itself from its progenitor. You get some extra colors and a little less screen real estate, but beyond that it's the same hardware, in a (somewhat) convenient travel size. The Sega Genesis uses the Master System processor as a sound chip and is natively compatible with the bulk of its games, which means that it's a Super Master System... and logically, a Super Duper ColecoVision.

You have to wonder if the ColecoVision really was a failure after all. Sure, it couldn't save the company that made it, but its progeny continued to influence the industry deep into the 1990s, until the next wave of cutting edge RISC, MIPS, and ARM processors marked the end of the trusty, but increasingly crusty hardware. Even long-suffering Game Boy players were eager to leave the Z80A in the past by the turn of the century... I know I was unreasonably excited by the launch of the Game Boy Advance, and considering its popularity and healthy sales, I couldn't have been the only one.

* The line between second and third gen consoles seems drawn to coincide perfectly with the American video game crash, and it feels... inaccurate. Disingenuous. Dismissive of other territories, where video games were still popular. Somehow, ALL consoles released after Pong units but before NES are magically regarded as "second generation," when the NES (as the Famicom) was released just one year after the ColecoVision and the same day as the nearly identical SG-1000. Why is the NES regarded as a third generation console, but the Atari 5200, the successor to the Atari 2600, is considered a second generation console? The boundaries just don't make sense.