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 <copyright>Copyright 2007-2008 ON Networks, Inc.</copyright>
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 <itunes:summary>Did you know that Nintendo started out as a playing card company? Did you know that Steve Jobs worked for Atari before a spiritual retreat to India?  The history of video games is a strange and exciting saga that needs to be told. In Play Value, game industry heavy-hitters and hardcore gamers retell the stories that have led up to a multi-billion dollar industry.

See more of this great show and others at www.onnetworks.com.

All of ON Networks&#039; shows are available in both Apple TV HD and a smaller version that plays on both iPods and iPhones.  To download a different version of this show, click on the &quot;See All Podcasts&quot; link and select the version you&#039;d like to download!?</itunes:summary>
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 <media:text type="html"><![CDATA[Play Value
Episode “Colecovision”

Dan: Now a lot of kids growing up had an Atari 2600, they had a Nintendo maybe even had a Sega Genesis, but not everybody had a Colecovision.  If you did I salute you, you are a true video game fan.
TJ: You did not see too many Colecovision’s, you had one friend who had one, but still everyone knows what a Coleco is.
Jeff: Like all the important video game consoles the Colecovision started in Hartford Connecticut with a leather company.
TJ: Coleco stands for Connecticut leather company, Co le co that is where the name came from.
Jeff: They started out in the leather industry, and in the fifties they started making above ground pools, in the sixties that kind of turns into a business where they’re making foosball tables and tabletop hockey games.  Then in the seventies finally they started developing video games.
Dan: Beck in 1976 they started the Telstar line, and this is a line of basic boxes that you would hook up to your TV and they each played one game.  They had a shooting game and they had a pong knock off but then Atari came out with a system where you could use interchangeable cartridges a brilliant idea.  You could play different games on the same box, and that was how the Telstar was buried.
Jeff: After Atari comes in and captures the entire home market Coleco said is what is left?  They start developing some of the world’s first a handheld video games.  The most famous of which was electronic quarterback.
Josh: They also maybe solid state little mini arcade games that people loved.
TJ: They had Pac Man, Donkey Kong, and Space Invaders.
Jeff: Which are great for taking home, and they are full size arcade machines if you have any tiny people around.
Josh: But Coleco was waiting trying to make its next move to get back into the home market in a big way.
Jeff: What nobody realized it is about Atari’s Technology is that there’s so much competition in the video game place that it was getting a little old.  And Coleco comes in with this brand new system.  It is five years later technology wise which is enormous amount of time; it is an entire generation of video game consoles.  This is the difference between a Super Nintendo and a PlayStation.
TJ: Even though the Atari 2600 is five years old at the time it does not matter because Atari has so many games and so much money.
Dan: Atari is the 800 pound gorilla of the video game industry and any good arcade game that comes along Atari locks up the rights and home version, so where is Coleco going to find an in?
TJ: They scour the arcades and find the cult classics that Atari missed, these great games that Atari just never picked up like Zaxxon, Mr. Do.
Josh: The other thing they did it, which is crazy is they created an adapter that you can actually play Atari games on the Coleco vision.
Dan: It had never been done before and it had never been done since.  If you had tried to pitch an idea like this today your lawyers head would just explode.
Josh: The last piece of their planned to launch this in a big way, they needed to have a secret weapon and Coleco’s secret weapon was Donkey Kong.
TJ: In 1981 Donkey Kong is the second big as arcade game in the world.  Pac Man is number one, and Donkey Kong is made by this real small Japanese company no one had heard of it at the time called Nintendo.
Dan: Nintendo wanted to get a home version of donkey Kong into living rooms across America and they said that we are a small guy, lets partner with another small guy like Coleco and maybe we can help each other out and take a little bit of the wind out of Atari sails.
Jeff: The two small companies at the dance, they see each other from across the room, they lock eyes and the rest is history.
Libe: So in July of 82 Colecovision comes out with Donkey Kong and it happens to be a really great translation of the arcade game.
Dan: Now keep in mind that this is only after two months that Pac Man came out for the Atari 2600 and that was a complete debacle, completely terrible.  So in one step they are already making the head guy look bad.
Jeff: Donkey Kong for all intensive purposes was the Mario of Colecovision, the only problem is that it was about to throw a barrel at them and they did not know it, and they were nowhere near the hammer.
Josh: Very close to when their about to launch they got a very not so nice call slash letter from Universal Studios and it was the equivalent of a cease and desist.
Jeff: We are on the eve of the launch of the Colecovision, it is about to come out and Sid Sheinberg, the head of Universal here is about it and says hey,  Donkey Kong, King Kong, guerrilla, that is kind of similar, I could probably make money on this. 
TJ: He goes after both Nintendo and Coleco and he says look you have 48 hours to provide me with all of the receipts from all of your sales of Donkey Kong related material and you have to destroy all of your inventories and any kind of Donkey Kong related merchandising that you have.  If you don’t, we’re going to sue you.
Josh: Coleco, they were a company that had been around for a long time but they were not a huge company.  They immediately buckled.
Jeff: Nintendo, Donkey Kong is this huge hit for them, this huge hit and they’re not willing to settle as easily.
Josh: Through a little digging Howard Lincoln of Nintendo of America found that only a few years earlier Universal had brought a lawsuit that actually disproved their claim to the copyright.
TJ: In 1975, which is just seven years earlier, Universal Studios does a remake of King Kong, starring Jeff Bridges of the movie Tron fame and Jessica Lang. 
Josh: To bring that film to market they actually had to prove that the rights to King Kong have lapsed and it had become public domain.
TJ: So basically Universal Studio seven years ago is in court proving that King Kong is public domain, and nobody owns the rights to it, now they’re doing a complete 180.
Jeff: Universal kind of gets caught in there own lie and they’re forced to pay Nintendo 1.8 million dollars for a frivolous lawsuits, just for wasting that the American legal systems time, Nintendo’s time, your time, you’ve had to hear about the story now.
TJ: And all Universal Studios was trying to do was scare these two little companies into giving them free money and it backfired.
Jeff: Universal flat out abused the legal system; they flat abused it much like Donkey Kong would abuse Mario.
TJ: So thanks to Nintendo, Coleco comes out with a DK cartridge, it ships with the Colecovision and now the Colecovision is on its way.  And Donkey Kong was not the only great game that was going to come out on Coleco; there was Montezuma’s Revenge, Miner 2049’er.
Jeff: Games like a Gateway to Apshai, the first home RPG.
TJ: Rocky, Popeye, Pit Stop, I mean the list goes on and on.
Dan: But unfortunately they got into the business at exactly the wrong time.  1982 was cool, 1983 that was when the whole home gaming business fell apart.
TJ: And the big video game crash happened and swept Coleco, Atari, and everyone else off of the map.
Jeff: It looked like Coleco was going to be the next big thing, just kind of bad timing.
TJ: So after the big video game crash of 1983 the public has moved on to personal computers, they do not want anything to do if your games anymore so Coleco responds with two products, one is a huge success and the other is a huge failure.
Josh: Trying to compete with the influx of personal computers and this interest with that they came out with the Adam.
Jeff: Unfortunately they were really rushing to get it out the door, and about half of the units did not work.
TJ: If you have half of your product return as defective then your name is soiled, you’re never going to recover from that, so that is what happened.
Jeff: The other product was a huge success, something a little low tec but the Cabbage Patch doll. 
TJ:  The fact that they come up with Cabbage Patch Kids is great, it is a huge success for them.  But the problem with having a huge success with a toy is that it is only for one year after that Christmas season people move on.
Jeff: You know the next year is replaced by Teddy Ruxpin, in 1986 Teddy Ruxpin is replaced by laser tag, the year after that laser tag is replaced by Nintendo. 
TJ: So we have come full circle video games at the top, the huge crash, to being on top again, but this time Coleco is nowhere to be found.
Jeff: By 1988 Coleco had filed for bankruptcy and so ends the legacy of their great Connecticut leather company.
Dan: It was fun while it lasted, sorry you had to go.
]]></media:text>
 <itunes:duration>8:00</itunes:duration>
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 <itunes:keywords>classic gaming play game ps2 nintendo wii atari emulation rom smc image </itunes:keywords>
 <itunes:subtitle>The story of an upstart leather company that took on a corporate titan.</itunes:subtitle>
 <itunes:author>ON Networks</itunes:author>
</item>
 <item> <title>Controversy!</title>
 <link>http://www.onnetworks.com/videos/play-value/controversy</link>
 <description>Sex and violence in video games is a potent issue and has been for quite some time&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onnetworks.com/videos/play-value/controversy&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://images.onnetworks.com/images/playvalue_controversy_425x239.jpg&quot; title=&quot;Controversy!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;</description>
 <pubDate>Thu, 15 Nov 2007 17:22:00 -0600</pubDate>
 <dc:creator>ON Networks</dc:creator>
 <guid isPermaLink="false">3799 at http://www.onnetworks.com</guid>
 <category domain="http://www.onnetworks.com/videos/play-value">Play Value</category>
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 <media:text type="html"><![CDATA[Play Value
Episode “Controversy”

Josh: Any time any kind of new artistic medium emerges there is always controversy, people thought that radios were rotting kid's minds, then it was comic books, then it was TV, then movies.  There are people that thought the jitterbug was going to be the downfall of society. Everything brings controversy with it and videogames are certainly no exception.
TJ: There has always been controversy in games and it all starts in the 30s and 40s with pinball.  The way that you play pinball was there were no pads like you play now, you put a ball in and shook it around until it went in the right pocket and it paid out.  So pinball was essentially a game of chance, gambling.
Libi: So in order to other words take a hit at the Mafia, pinball became illegal.  And then the New York mayor at the time LaGuardia went so far as to take pinball machines down to the river, slash them within ax and then shove them into the water.
Jeff: In 1976 New York decriminalized pinball and almost immediately after, literally months later the first controversial video game comes out.
Dan: No sooner was pinball legalized then video games took their place, the torch was passed and they aware now public enemy number one.  Parents up in arms, legislators angry as hell, why is that?  It is a game called Death Race.
TJ: And the object of Death Race was you are driving around and running over Gremlins, well running over Gremlins kind of looks like running over people in the 70s because graphics were really bad.
Josh: All you can see is a pixelated head, a pixelated body, pixelated legs, and pixelated arms, which do anyone looks like a person.  So parents started to object.
Libi: The woman who is at the forefront of emerging protest was Ronnie Lamb, a housewife, PTA member, and she led protest marches, went on Phil Donahue, was really active in getting arcades banned from malls.
Dan: It wasn't really the videogames themselves that where the problem most of the time.  No parents thought that Frogger was going to corrupt their kids it was the environment they were playing these games in. It was dark sweaty rooms full of machines, and kids standing in front of them.  The creepy old guy with the crotch mounted coin changer and the leer in his eye that was the real problem.
Josh: Kids would skip school to hang out at arcades; parents just viewed the institution of an arcade as a public menace.  Get rid of them.
Jeff: What is interesting here is that Nolan Bushnell, who started Atari, sees this and that is what inspires him to open Chuck E. Cheese, a place with safe games where people can bring their kids and they will have a good time.  
Dan: They are well lit, they are well supervised, you can bring the kids there and the parents can be there.  In fact Nolan Bushnell made more money with Chuck E. cheese than he ever did from Atari.
Jeff:  And if death race is the first videogame controversy than the first controversy at home on the consoles is Custer's Revenge.  Where General Custer dodge's arrows to go rape an Indian woman, but apparently some people thought that that was not OK.
Josh: This game was retarded, and it was a slap in the face against everybody pretty much, from the people to take it in the game, to women, to people playing a game.  You now, it was not even classy porn, they deserved a protest and a protest is what they got.
Dan: Now after the big videogame crash of 1983 the issue kind of went away, because they were not a lot video games around.  Occasionally one would pop up, like there was Commando Libya, where at the end of the level all the bad guys that you beat you lined them up and shot them against the wall.
Josh: And then there was NARC which came out in the late eighties, which you were NARCS killing drug dealers, and you're blowing them up and body parts are being strewn all over the screen.  Needles are being injected and thrown into your leg, and other words it was awesome.  The way that Midway got around the ultra violence in it was positioning it as an anti-drug game.
Jeff: And it's really, really very funny to me that they were preaching an anti-drug message with extreme, extreme amounts of violence.
Dan: But for the most part things were nice and calm.  Nintendo prided itself on being very family friendly and the industry largely policed itself.
TJ: Sega then decides to give consumers the things that Nintendo does not, you know a violent, dirty, gritty type games.  Then Mortal Kombat comes out.
Dan: Incredibly gory, incredibly violent, and of course incredibly successful, now both Sega and Nintendo wanted to take the game and put it on home systems.
Josh: Mortal Kombat looked better on the Super Nintendo I would argue, but it did not have blood.  It did not have the decapitating moves.  The Genesis had the full thing.
Jeff: It is all about the blood, that is the trademark and the fact that everyone knows that it is in the Genesis version makes the Genesis version outsell the super Nintendo one 4 to 1. 
Dan: So it may seem like a win for Sega, but of course it came back and get them on the ass, because whenever you do something that Mom does not like you end up in front of a congressional committee and that is where the videogame industry ended up, and front out of Joe Lieberman and all these other congressmen.
Jeff: Society at this point is still kind of wrapping their head and around the idea that it is not just children playing video games.  Today it was pretty accepted that games come out that are clearly for 18 and over but it was not always that way.
Libi: Congress called Sega to task for their ultra violence version of Mortal Kombat and another game called Night Trap which is almost really a B-movie it has got vampires chasing co-eds in pyjamas around at a slumber party.
Jeff: And it is really no worse than you would see on USA up all night, but just the fact that it was on a Genesis and not a VCR made all the difference.
Sen. Byron Dorgan: About two months ago I saw the video game Night Trap for the first time; it is a sick disgusting video game in my judgment.
Dan: And the ultimate outcome of all of this is that they created the ESRB a ratings board for video games.  Kind of like the MPAA for movies, it is voluntary but all of the games have these ratings.
Jeff: One of the genres that probably attracted the most controversy was the first person shooter, a lot of people look at them as almost murder simulators and of course it does not help when Columbine happens and it comes out that the kids were playing Doom and into Doom.
TJ: And so now there is a link being developed between these school shootings, which now to start to happen more regularly.  It seems like more and more school shootings are happening.
Jeff: And then of course Doom is followed by games like Duke Nukem, and Quake and all of these games have to try the top each other in violence. 
TJ: And that is kind of brings us up to today, they has never really been a resolution.  Every few years a study is done that say a games causes kids to kill, games do not cause kids to kill.  So I think that that is an ongoing battle that will continue for the history of gaming.
Jeff: After Columbine the controversies there, but nothing really comes of it ages kind of spirals around.  Until, one of the Grand Theft Auto spin-offs, San Andreas, when it turned out that somewhere deep, deep in a game there was a sex scene that was never completed but left on the final disk.
Dan: Some hidden footage somewhere in the game with some fully clothed 3-D characters hopping up against each other in a bed.  It was not anything worse than you would see on Adult Swim but parents and congressmen and politicians were outraged.
Jeff: Hillary Clinton makes a huge deal out of this, she is threatening to shut the game companies down, she is threatening to do things that she does not even have the right to do but she is making a big stink.
Dan: How did the videogame industry solve this problem?  Well they held a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton's re-election campaign and mysteriously no further hearings were ever held. Hmm.
TJ: And the one constant and all of this is that controversy in games means sales.
Jeff: It is the same with films, and books and with music.  It is just the best free publicity you can get.
Libi: You know all the concerned parents and the governing boards might want to raise a fuss a little less often if they do not want their kids rushing to stores to buy these games.
Jeff: The bottom line is that they can regulate and they can market these things all they want, but it is up to the parents to keep track of what their kids are playing.  If parents did their job the government would not always have to step in.
]]></media:text>
 <itunes:duration>8:00</itunes:duration>
 <itunes:explicit>no</itunes:explicit>
 <itunes:keywords>nintendo ps2 ps3 sega atari classic video games play grand theft auto</itunes:keywords>
 <itunes:subtitle>Sex and violence in video games is a potent issue and has been for quite some time</itunes:subtitle>
 <itunes:author>ON Networks</itunes:author>
</item>
 <item> <title>Sega Vs. Nintendo</title>
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 <pubDate>Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:42:00 -0500</pubDate>
 <dc:creator>ON Networks</dc:creator>
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 <onnetworks:product_id>playvalue_segavnes</onnetworks:product_id>
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 <media:text type="html"><![CDATA[Play Value
Episode “Sega vs. Nintendo”

Jeff: In 1989 Nintendo owns the videogame market.  They're operating for all intensive purposes as a monopoly.  Atari tried to take them down but was completely unsuccessful.  Not even close.  Really the first bump in the road for them is Sega and the Genesis.
Josh: Up through the 80’s really Nintendo was dominating the videogame market, killing Sega’s Master system, basically installing themselves in almost every kid's home in America.  Sega needed to combat that.
Dan: What does Sega do?  They put all their money into R&D; they develop the Genesis, a fantastic new console. They put the Genesis out there and then just like a political campaign step one, flood the market with negative advertisements, try to knock Nintendo down a notch or two in the public eye.
Josh: They came out with this crazy marketing campaign, Sega does what Nintendon't. I mean Sega was so aggressive when the Genesis came out.
Dan: Step two, grow the market.  If Nintendo has a lock on the 10 year olds well then go after the older brothers, go after the high school seniors and then if they like Sega and think that it is cool, their younger brothers will eventually come along and go, oh I want to play the  cool system too just like my big brother.
TJ: You know, in Sega's advertising there like, well you know what Nintendo is for little kids.  We are for you, we are for the teenagers, we are a little bit more edgy, and we are cool.  That is baby stuff.
Dan: Now how is Sega going to get their hands on these older kids?  Well they released a lot of sports games that is always popular with high school and college kids.  And then they signed up a lot of celebrities.  They had Arnold Palmer golf.  They had Pat Riley's basketball.  They had Michael Jackson's Moon Walker.
Jeff: Sega went out there and got a lot of endorsements, a lot of celebrities. And that is something that Nintendo had really avoided.  Nintendo made a celebrity.  They had Mario they had Zelda, those were their celebrities.  Sega did not have anything like that so they had to go out and get people like Madden, Buster Douglas boxing, Joe Montana Sports Talk Football.
TJ: Granted their games may or may not have been great, but they used names that this older group of people would recognize.
Dan: And they also brought back all the arcade classics, like Golden Ax and Shinobi. A 10-year-old is not going to let these are, but if you are in high school or college you are going to remember these and maybe you want them for your home system.
Josh: Basically Sega had a history of making really good arcade games.  For the first time you could play arcade like version of Strider, Altered Beast, Space Harrier.
TJ: Sega also produced games that were more intellectually stimulating you should say.  Like games that are geared towards older kids.  Sword of Vermilion is a good example, these are complex role-playing games.
Jeff: More complex adult games like Fantasy Star, or Populous, which to this day I cannot figure out.
Dan: And then Sega also had wackier more indie fair, they had a Ren and Stimpy game, they had Toe Jam and Earl, to kind of appeal to that artsy cool crowd.
Jeff: Same with Echo the Dolphin.  It was a very original game that is not like anything out there, and there may be reason for that but you have to hand it to them it is unique.
Dan: Now everything is going well for Sega but they are missing one thing.  Nintendo, while they have got mascots.  They have Mario, they have got Zelda, they have got Donkey Kong, and they have got all these great characters.
TJ: Nintendo has this cast of characters, that have worked their way into people's hearts.  And whenever you think of Nintendo I instantly think of Mario.  Now the Sega does not have this yet.
Dan: So they have a big board meeting and they go what can we do, what kind of character can we come up with?  And amazingly, they actually come up with something cool; they come up with Sonic the Hedgehog.  It was fast, it was furious, it was kind of out there, it was a little edgy, he had spiky hair, he had attitude.  It was everything that was Sega.
Jeff: And it was huge, it was a reason to buy the system.  And a reason to buy a new system before the super Nintendo came out.  It is one of the great games.  Its cannon, Sonic is part of a cannon.
TJ: Sonic came on the scene, kicked ass, and then their problems began again because Nintendo releases the Super Nintendo.  And now the battle has to start all over again.
Jeff: Super Nintendo comes out, so now technology wise they are even and now it comes down to the games, and now it is a real slugfest just going back and forth.
Dan: Nintendo has ads like Nintendo is what Genesisn't. And Genesis fights back by starting a price war.  And everyone starts cutting the cost of their consoles and making them cheaper for gamers.  
Jeff: Nintendo landed Final Fight, which was one of the biggest arcade hits.  And Sega could not get that so they made Streets of Rage, which is a pretty good competitor, in a lot of ways superior.  Sega does not have Final Fantasy so they made Fantasy Star.
Dan: Now you can go back and forth on which system was actually better or more powerful, but the fact is that the Genesis actually had more fun games come out more often.
Jeff: Nintendo has a lot of big franchises, and they drop one maybe two a year.  These are classic games like Super Metroid, or Mario World 2. And of course, I haven't even thought about it yet but Mario Kart.
TJ: And Nintendo’s strategy is we are going to sit around and wait for the next Mario title or the next Zelda to come around and then we will release it.  Sega develops a think tank for games basically, the Game Institute.  
Dan: And they came up with all kinds of new games and new ip’s and they just kept throwing them out there and they were all really good.  So if you wanted to play more good games, well then you had to get yourself a Genesis.
Jeff: Sega was basically hammering you with B’s, while Nintendo was waiting and once a year they would drop an A+.
Dan: It just keeps going on and on and by the time the smoke clears Sega actually has the edge on the marketplace, owning about 65% of the console market.
Jeff: Sega got a toehold in the market with technology, and that is what they figured is going to win this game, and this is just the classic mistake you see hardware manufacturers making over and over again, worrying about the console, and not about the games.
TJ: They had the lead, and all they had to do was nothing to maintain it.  But instead they did everything, and destroy themselves.
Jeff: They released the Sega CD and there is nothing even resembling a reason to buy the Sega CD, every game on it is terrible.  And then there's the 32x, which no one can name a 32X game.  You know, I don't even know anybody that has seen a 32X.  I am skeptical they exist.
TJ: One system is CDs this is the future.  The next system, oh we are back to cartridges.  The next system, oh we are back to CDs again.  Sega looked like a company who had no idea where they were going, no idea how they got there, and no idea what to do right now.
Dan: What is Nintendo doing in the meantime?  Nothing, selling games, selling consoles, counting money, waiting for Sega to burn itself out.
Jeff: Nintendo just sat on the Super Nintendo and said this is it, and focused on making great games for that for five years.  They did not even release a 32-bit system they went from 16 to 64 bit.
Libi: So Sega is telling everyone that their systems have the latest technology and that it is so important to have the latest technology.  And then Nintendo comes out with Donkey Kong Country.  A16-bit game which looks and plays so much better than anything that Sega has put out.
Jeff: It made Sega look silly.  Why spend all this money on add-ons when the greatest most advanced games are on the old system?
Josh: Sega died as a hardware company.  The Dreamcast was its last gasp, with all that Sega pulled back, got out of the hardware business.  They just started making software.
TJ: And the first time that you booted up your Nintendo and saw Sonics face you knew it was over.  When Sonics face appeared on a Nintendo machine, game over man.  Game over.
Josh: And it's like I never think we would see this.  But later in 2007 we are getting a Sonic, Mario joint title.
Libi: Which is a Mario and Sonic Olympics game, it is always been Sega versus Nintendo, Nintendo versus Sega.  And now kind of that competition is fully realized in this game where it is sonic versus Mario.  Who is the better Olympian?  We shall see.
Jeff: It is hard to imagine that with all this bad blood between Nintendo and Sega they were able to sit down in a room together and hammer out this deal.  I mean it was 10 years ago which is not that long but in software that is an eternity and it is just ancient history now.



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 <itunes:duration>8:00</itunes:duration>
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 <itunes:subtitle>Remember when Sonic and Mario went head to head?</itunes:subtitle>
 <itunes:author>ON Networks</itunes:author>
</item>
 <item> <title>Failed Consoles - Part Two</title>
 <link>http://www.onnetworks.com/videos/play-value/failed-consoles---part-two</link>
 <description>More video game consoles that failed to attract fans&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onnetworks.com/videos/play-value/failed-consoles---part-two&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://images.onnetworks.com/images/playvalue_failed2_425x239.jpg&quot; title=&quot;Failed Consoles - Part Two&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;</description>
 <pubDate>Fri, 28 Sep 2007 07:38:00 -0500</pubDate>
 <dc:creator>ON Networks</dc:creator>
 <guid isPermaLink="false">3432 at http://www.onnetworks.com</guid>
 <category domain="http://www.onnetworks.com/videos/play-value">Play Value</category>
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 <media:description type="html">More video game consoles that failed to attract fans</media:description>
 <onnetworks:product_id>playvalue_failed2</onnetworks:product_id>
 <media:copyright>Copyright 2007-2008 ON Networks, Inc.</media:copyright>
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 <media:text type="html"><![CDATA[Play Value
Episode “Failed consoles part 2”

Dan: Now you may think that video games are all about technology. The guy with the biggest most powerful hardware is going to win. That is not always the case. In fact it is very rarely the case, in pretty much every generation of video game consoles. The console with the most powerful video game hardware has not been the winner. 
TJ: Turbo Grafix 16 comes out in 1989. It is the first 16 bit console system to hit the market. 
Jeff: The Turbo Grafix 16 stands out because it was one of the first failed consoles that actually had some great classic games on it. The Castlevania that came out for Turbo Grafix 16 is among the best Castlevania's, which makes it among the best games. The problem is that all of these titles require the CD add on which was very difficult to find in America. 
TJ: And even if you could find the adapter. It was $400. So they are asking you to buy A $400 adapter to play there killer applications.  You know that is kind of, that is asking a little too much you know. Ultimately it ends up just failing. 
Libi: Since 1992 Sega comes out with this brilliant idea. Hey lets come out with the CD-rom add-on for the Sega genesis. Now the problem with that was it was just basically a CD player. 
Jeff: The Sega CD doesn’t make the Sega genesis any more powerful. It jut gives it more storage. And the genesis itself wasn’t really ready to take advantage of that storage in any meaningful way. So they are like alright what are we going to do with this. 
Libi: Well they decided that they were going to create games with lots of video in them. You know a kind of game that consists of a bunch of video and audio clips and you press the different buttons to play the different parts. And games are by definition interactive. And video is by definition not, so the games are more chose your own adventure than games. Where you are just picking one path and just watching what happens. 
It spawned some of the worst games of all time, including Night trap, sewer shark, and the make my video series; starring such fine artist as Marky Mark, and C&C music factory. So with such fantastic games as these, the Sega CD did not go anywhere. 
Dan: Back in 1993 we had one of the most famous video game console flame outs of all time. This was going to be the next big thing. It was called the 3DO. 
Josh: To be fair though the 3DO was a pretty powerful piece of machinery. It rivaled the Playstation 1 before that was even out. 
A guy named Trip Hawkins, he developed this new video game technology, but he licensed it to other guy to actually make the hardware.  He said you guys make the hardware, and I am going to make the games, and he said you sell the hardware and make whatever money you can off that. And I am just going to make money on the games. The problem is the razor and blade model. You are not supposed to sell the razor for a lot of money, you sell the blades and that’s what you make your money off of. So the guys who made the console, they couldn’t make any money, so they had to charge $700 for these things, literally $700. In 1993 that is a lot of scratch. 
Jeff: When I was a kid I never understood. It cost like 5 times as much as the other systems, but it is really not that much better than super Nintendo. It certainly doesn’t look 5 times better than super Nintendo. 
Josh: If you don’t have hardware that people can afford, they are not going to buy it. If people don’t buy it people aren’t going to make games for it. So you’re basically screwed anyway. 
Dan:  So you basically got hundreds of plastic that is completely useless, my $700 door stop. 
TJ: In 1993 Atari released the Jaguar. You know some of the pitfalls of the Jaguar? Is that ridiculous 12 button grid like controller.
Jeff: Even the worst controller the buttons go where your fingers go. But this is really just something unnatural. It is really incredible that it exist at all. 
TJ: If you want to look at some of the titles of Jaguar games. Just do a search online for worst games ever. And you will see basically a list of all of these games. 
Jeff: At least we know today what the Jaguar controller looks like. Nobody left living knows what a 3DO controller looks like. 
Libi: 2 years after the Sega CD tanked, they came out with another brilliant add on to the Sega genesis system, the 32x. 
Jeff: There is not really an example in the history of games, of a add on to a system being successful. Like games coming out that require just this whole new component to your system, working.
Libi: So in another brilliant business move. A couple of months after the 32x hits the market, Sega announces that the Saturn is coming out. And it’s like ten times more powerful than this machine. Why the heck am I going to go buy a 32x?
Jeff: Yea, you can’t put something out and then say this is it for now but pretty soon there is going to be something better. When you put something out that has got to be your product for the next few years. 
Libi: So when the Saturn launched it didn’t really do as well as Sega hoped at first. So Sega jumped the gun again and immediately started talking about the Sega Dreamcast. And it totally pissed off designers because they were like hey, if you are not going to support the Saturn, we are not going to do it either. So the stopped making games for it. 
Jeff: Consoles have to be made to last. It is not just a one time launch and then you are done with it like a movie. There are a lot of things that go into it and it has to stay afloat for five or six years. When you buy a console you want to just buy one, and then worry about buying the games for it. Not just buying new consoles. 
Dan: You may say to yourself what is the biggest bonehead move in the history of the video game console? Well you wouldn’t have to think too long because it is nearly unanimous. It is Nintendo’s Virtual Boy. 
Jeff: Realistically Nintendo was questioning if it even was going to launch the Virtual Boy or not. But when the N64 got delayed for the ump teenth time, they just had to put some thing on the market. And there went the virtual boy. 
Dan: Now this console was supposed to be a 3d experience just like you see in movies about the future where you have flying cars and picture phones and virtual world that you can walk around in. You had this whole big stand that you had to put it on. And stick your head inside it, like you were in traction in the hospital with a big neck brace on. Don’t turn your head; you were in a car crash. 
Jeff: It was like 4 boom boxes except mounted on your face, and then of course plying it for too long hurts your eyes, which is always good. 

Dan: And of course the biggest problem, they couldn’t get it to run any real games, so they just decided to make them red. That is the only color in the games, red and black. You get your games any color you want, just as long as it’s red. 
Jeff: There were only fourteen games made for the Virtual Boy, one less than the Jaguar CD, setting an all time record for the least successful console of all time. I did like the controller though; it had a nice comfortable controller actually. 
Libi: So throughout all of video game history the one thing worth noting is that basically the top console was never the most powerful. 
Dan: Take a look at all the different generations of video game consoles. The original Atari 2600 was not as good as the Intellivision. And the Coleco Vision outsold it by about a zillion units. The Sega Master System well that was better that the original NES, but it didn’t sell nearly as well, Atari’s Jaguar and 3DO, well they kicked the super Nintendo’s ass again. All complete failures. The original Playstation not really as good as the N64, the Playstation 2 not really as good as the Xbox, still the number one console of that generation. Why is that, because it is all about the games not the hardware. 
Josh: Companies do not learn. Look at the Playstation 3 for example. This is a case where they are selling an extremely powerful bit of hardware, but right now there really aren’t games to justify this purchase. 
TJ: These companies come out with a new console and still think they are gong to change the industry, change the way people purchase. No, consumers want have fun, they don’t care about the hardware. 
Libi: It is always software over hardware. 
Jeff: It has always been about the games. 
Josh: It is funny that right now anyway, the Wii being one of the best selling systems happens to be the one with the least horsepower. That is something we have seen historically and I just don’t know what it is about these video game executives that doesn’t get just that. 
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 <itunes:subtitle>More video game consoles that failed to attract fans</itunes:subtitle>
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 <item> <title>Failed Consoles - Part One</title>
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 <pubDate>Thu, 13 Sep 2007 22:49:00 -0500</pubDate>
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 <media:text type="html"><![CDATA[Play value
Episode “Failed Consoles part 1”

Jeff: 500 years of books and we still get books on paper. 100 years of film, still pretty much the same medium. Video games change every 5 or so years, the whole market changes. Here is a shake up every five years. And it doesn’t matter what you did. It’s all about the next system.
TJ: In thirty five years of video games. You have all these consoles, the big ones. Xbox, Nintendo, even the Genesis, everybody knew what it was. But for every one of those, there are five of them that didn’t make it.
Dan:  1978, what’s big in 1978? The Atari 2600, so of course everyone else has to come out with their own consoles to compete with that. One of the ones you don’t really remember anymore was the Magnavox Odyssey 2. 
Josh: Great system really had some nice horsepower in it. But Atari bought out rights to third party games like Space Invaders and Pacman, so by the time the Atari 2 came out; they really just didn’t have the content to compete, except for KC Munchkin. I don’t even have to describe it in much detail, all you need to know about it is the, it’s a rebuffed Pacman. 
Dan: There were a couple of differences, there weren’t as many dots, and mazes were different. But it was just close enough to be legally actionable. And if it Atari thinks something is legally actionable, they are going to action it. So why did the Odyssey 2 fail? Well KC Munchkin was there mascot and if he is tied up in court, then you got nothing left. 
Josh: At the end of the day Atari controlled the content. Which as you will see through history is what dictates which consoles live and which consoles die. 
Dan: Now the biggest threat to the Atari 2600 came from the Intellivision. This was a cool little system that was actually a 16 bit system, 16 years before the Sega genesis. 
Josh: This is interesting because Intellivision wasn’t a complete failure. Here you had a company who had a pretty powerful machine, with some interesting innovations. They had directional pad instead of a joystick. 
Dan: And just like the Genesis and later the Xbox they kind of positioned themselves as kind of the more adult console for the sports crowd, the mature crowd, and the kind of hip young adult kind of people.
Josh: They actually really focused on sports games; they had a baseball game that sold more than a million copies. They had George Plimpton the sports caster, Shill as Mr. Intellivision in some ads. And they actually did well because of it. And decided to parley that strength into what I would call video game mistake number one. 
Dan: What do they do? Well they just completely spazz out. They start releasing all these peripherals. Hey had a keyboard add on, they had the intellivision 2, 3, 4. They had kind of a computer add on, that turned it into kind of a vey primitive computer. Thy had a whole separate computer they built that was a stand alone PC. It was just too much hardware, not enough software. 
Josh: They cluttered the market and forgot the fundamental rule, if you don’t have good games; no one is going to care. 
TJ: Atari releases the 5200 console system in 1982. There were a number of problems that plagued that system that really didn’t make it as successful as it could have. Number one, the controllers. These controllers were cool to look at. But what was the problem with the controllers was no centering of the joysticks. 
Josh: It was a strange thing because I would just flop to one side like you couldn’t get it back in the middle, and it was really. Well this looks really strange right here, but it was really. Yeah the thing was terrible. 
TJ: Number two was that the 5200 for all its glory wasn’t able to play 2600 games. Your just telling your consumer, hey thanks for spending all your money, and now here is the new stuff that you can’t use any of your new stuff with. 
Josh: Basically it was the firs instance of this whole backwards compatibility thing. That still plagues systems. The Xbox 360 is still having trouble playing many of the best original Xbox games. 
TJ: In the long list of things that game companies refused to learn. Backward compatibility. 
Josh: Let’s talk about another failure. Actually I wouldn’t necessarily call it a complete failure, but the Sega master system was one that just couldn’t quite do it. 
Jeff: Nintendo made some of the best first party games of all time. Like Mario and Zelda, but beyond that they had some of the best third party support from companies like capcom and konami. They were just giving them gifts in the form of games like castlevania, metal gear, and bionic commando. The list just goes on and on. 
Josh: Nintendo had pretty much made exclusive deals with its third party companies. Like Konami, like Capcom. Basically saying to them, if you make games for us. We don’t really want you making games for other companies. And basically they effectively black balled Sega from being able to work with some of the best gaming companies that were out there. 
Jeff: It was up to Sega to make there own games, and they were ok at it. But thy were no Nintendo. It would have been impossible for them to match the creative force of Nintendo, capcom, Konami, just all the companies combined. 
Dan: there was one flaming car wreck on the side of the video game highway that some people remember kind of fondly and that was the Vectrex. 
Josh:  It was a home based system that played 3d vector graphics. It didn’t actually plug into your TV. It came with its own little nine inch monitor. Now there graphics were interesting because they were actually being used back in the day as a way to create 3d graphics in games. And like one of the best examples is probably one of my favorite games too of all time. It’s the starwars arcade game. It’s that vectrex tried to bring that excitement home.
Dan: It failed because you couldn’t hook it up to your TV, there are only so many games you can make out of these white lines coming at you, and today it is kind of a, it’s a curio, it’s a oddity. But it still has its fans. 
Josh: Let’s add another log to the fire and talk bout the Atari 7800. If the Atari 7800 had came out any earlier it would have been a nice system. Problem was, this is about 2 years too late. 
Jeff: There big titles are pole position 2 and Miss Pacman. Neither of which are big improvements over the originals, which are great games. Bu they are ancient, they are literally ancient. I mean you have things like Zelda going on. Like really revolutionary stuff. And they are still making maze games. And Pacman is a classic, but there is new classics being made like Mario and Zelda. 
Josh: Launching with Ms. Pacman in 1986 is like coming out with a DVD player and packing in birth of a nation. 
Jeff: Every successful console has on game that sells the system. A Mario, a sonic. Just something that moves it, that makes people say that’s the one I need. I need to play this game. 
TJ: In the industry there is a term that everyone uses called killer app. Now killer app stands for killer application. And a killer application is a application that is a application, a game, a killer title that helped drive the sales of the console. If the console does not have a killer app, or a group of titles that people really want to buy, the system will fail. 
Josh: Atari knew it, that’s why they locked down the licenses for Space invaders an pole position, for Pacman, these huge games that are sort of driving the success of the systems. 
TJ: Looking back at 35 years of gaming. The top console had a killer application. Something that is unique to that device. 
Jeff: Nintendo has Mario an Zelda. Genesis has sonic. 
TJ: You have the game boy. Game boy had Tetris. The most simplistic designed game, and greatest selling game of all time. 
Dan: the original playstation they got tomb Raider, they had resident evil. These are games you jus had o play. On the playstation 2 they had grand theft auto. Changed the face of gaming for ever. 
TJ: Xbox one comes out, the killer app on Xbox, Halo. 
Jeff: They never would have gotten anywhere without Halo, they really wouldn’t have.
Dan: And today on the current generation, the Xbox 360, well gear of war, that’s the killer app for that. For the playstation 3 the jury’s still out, we don’t really have a killer app yet and maybe that’s why it is not selling so well. 
Josh: These consoles all succeeded because they had games that people were just dying to play. The ones that couldn’t get those games, for whatever reason, were the ones that lost it. 
  



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 <itunes:duration>8:09</itunes:duration>
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 <itunes:subtitle>The trashcans of the past are stuffed with consoles that didn&#039;t catch on</itunes:subtitle>
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 <pubDate>Thu, 30 Aug 2007 15:40:00 -0500</pubDate>
 <dc:creator>ON Networks</dc:creator>
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 <media:text type="html"><![CDATA[Play Value
Episode “Atari vs. Nintendo” 

Dan: Nintendo and Atari, you would think these two video game pioneers would be the best of friends. But you really should not invite them to the same dinner party. 
Jeff: Atari was synonymous with video games for a long time, the way that Nintendo is now, and uh they fell off there throne. They made some miscalculations, they made some bad decisions and they weren’t the number one guy anymore
Josh: But Nintendo took on Atari’s role and Nintendo’s success just like fueled the fires again, and gave Atari this last glimmer of hope that they could be back on top of the industry.
Libi: Atari released the 7800, in an attempt to compete with Nintendo. And when that didn’t work out, Atari decided to drop the whole console thing, and said hey; alright we are just going to make games for Nintendo instead. 
Jeff: One of the reasons Atari fell from grace in the first place is just so many games were coming out it was impossible to keep track of what were the good ones and what were the ad ones. And the bad ones were so overwhelming that people just started to think that’s what videogames are, they are garbage.
Libi: Nintendo wanted to reassure its customers that they were going to get good games from them. So what they did was decided to put the Nintendo seal of quality on their games. And then limited other companies and told them hey you can only make five games a year for our console. 

TJ: So you have to pick the five best games, because we are not going to flood our console with crappy games. We saw what it did to Atari, we have seen the past and we don’t want that. We want to have some kind of quality control. 
Jeff: So Nintendo says no more than five games a year, and in order to ensure that happens they put a security system in Nintendo called the 10 NES code. And what it is, is kind of a lock and key system. Where there is a special chip in the Nintendo games that matches a special chip inside the Nintendo. And if both aren’t present a game doesn’t start.
Josh: When a cartridge was put into the console they communicated, and it was like this is a real game, this isn’t a real game. If it was a real game you could play it, if it wasn’t a real game, meaning authored by Nintendo, it wouldn’t play.
Libi: So by limiting companies to only creating five games a year for their system, they really did ensure that they got the best games from those companies. 
Jeff: The companies didn’t like being limited to five games a year. But because they were, you see some of the games that come out here are some of the best games ever. Capcom is releasing Mega Man, Bionic Commando, Ghost and Goblins. Konami is putting out stuff like Contra, stuff like Castlevania, Metal Gear, and Gradius. There are just so many great games that even today they still make sequels to. Because they were so good that even twenty years later people still want Castlevania's because of those first few. 
TJ: Ok when Atari gets this news that Nintendo’s only going to allow them five games Atari is like wow, wow, wait a minute. We invented video games, w invented the home console. You’re not going to limit us to five.
Dan: Nintendo says listen, you guys were first, we respect that but you got to play by the same rules as everybody else. Atari was not happy with this at all. 
TJ: It’s all on ego. Atari couldn’t stop third party providers from making crapware for their system. So when Nintendo tries to do it they are like wow, we couldn’t do it, what makes you think you can do it. Oh you guys add a secret code, damnit why didn’t we come up with secret code?
Jeff: Atari wants special rules they want to put out more games, Nintendo says no. This goes back and forth for months, finally Atari says fine. So Atari through there subdivision Tengen, puts out three games, RBI baseball, Gauntlet, and Pac Man. And that is going to be the end of it. We will just keep moving and see how it goes. Maybe we will put out more games, maybe we won’t, you know? No big deal.
TJ: Now this is were the story gets good. Because secretly Atari as a plan. All the Atari execs sit around and say ok, we are going to play by the rules. We are going to give them their five games, but we are going to break this code, we are going to find out what this secret Nintendo code is. 
Josh: Atari at first tried to hack the system. Bought a bunch of NES’s cracked them open gave hem to their best programmers. Monitored how the software interacted with the software in hopes of finding that unique little trigger that they could then bypass when they made their own game. 
Jeff: You know they tried to look at it and see what information was being sent back and forth. They were like we will steal this the correct way. But when that failed they were like alright, ok we will just take it from the copy right office. 
TJ: Atari goes to the copyright office and they submit a request to see the Nintendo code. Well the copy right office, fine why do you need to see the code? Atari said we are sued by Nintendo and in order for our legal team to create a proper defense we have to see what this code is, so that we can then fight this legal battle. Copyright office doesn’t know, so what do they do, they release the code to them. 
Jeff: This isn’t like one rogue Atari employee who is trying to rung Nintendo. This is an entire corporation, committing a major crime, really a very elaborate scheme to try and break the rules and then try to change them retroactively. 
TJ: So now Atari is sitting on the secret Nintendo code, and then in turn they sue them for 100 million dollars. They sue them for 100 million dollars because they have been monopolizing the industry.
Dan: Nintendo they weren’t going to take this lying down, they said we are going to take this to the street. This is a street fight. So they went to all the toy retailers and they said listen. We got this tiff going on with Atari we will tell you what’s going to happen. If you carry any of their stuff, then you’re not going to get anymore Nintendo stuff, so no matter who wins these lawsuits. Nintendo still wins, Nintendo for the win. 
The fact is that Nintendo just owned the market, they dominated toy stores, and they are accounting for half of a store like Toys R Us’s profits. The court case took awhile to drag on but the results are just meaningless. Because Nintendo just bullied Atari out of stores. They had that much clout. They kind of were operating like a monopoly. There are warehouses full of games that people would have bought, but no ones going to sell them because they didn’t want to upset Nintendo. 
Josh: I mean basically Atari now needed to win this lawsuit against Nintendo. Everything rode on this, because they weren’t making any money in the market place with these games. 
Jeff: What happens next, because they so clearly stole it in a, a sneaky and underhanded way. I mean kind of like a Boris and Natasha style plot. Because of the way they got this they don’t do very well in court. 
Josh: Atari brought a fair and valid antitrust argument to bear. But completely ruined there credibility by engaging in theft, in copyright theft. 
TJ: But it never even got to that. Case was dropped, they settled out of court. Atari ultimately paid Nintendo something for stealing from them, and then Atari disappears. 
Jeff: Eventually the code was cracked as all codes are, and one person was making games, Wisdom Tree who put out some classics like Sunday Fun Day.
Libi: And basically they hacked a secret code and they made Bible games. And so Nintendo heard about it and they were like man, do we really want to sue these guys. You  know we are trying to tell parents that games aren’t the devil, but then we are trying to sue a church, un uh, I don’t think so, 
Tj: Nintendo in the true fashion of the Bible decided that they were just going to turn the cheek on this one and let Wisdom Tree do there thing. 
Jeff: This whole story is the beginning of a lot of bad blood between Nintendo and Atari, and it would continue for many years. But it was never really a big deal, just because Atari was never any competition. Atari always wanted to be, what Sega would eventually become, which is a real second company, with a real strong chance at dethroning the king. 
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 <pubDate>Thu, 23 Aug 2007 15:08:00 -0500</pubDate>
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Episode “Tetris: Splitting the iron curtain”

Dan: It is the summer of 1985 which in Moscow is still actually kind of cold, Alexey Pajitnov, a low level programmer is sitting around, and he puts together Tetris. The most simple puzzle game you can think of, stacking blocks, but there is something magical about it. 
Libe: So you know you can’t sell the game. This is communist Russia after all. So instead he gives it away to his friends. And then you know it spread all through Moscow. 
Jeff: You copied it from your friend. You copied it for his friend. You copied it for his friend, and soon it had spread al the way to the outer states. That’s what communism is, it means free Tetris. 
Dan: Now the game finally ends up in Hungary, in Budapest, in Croatia. Some Hungarian guys have made an Apple version of it. And this guy Robert Stein comes in and he is almost like an opportunist who travels around trying to by up stuff cheap and sell it more expensively some where else. And he see’s the game. And he says this game is great. I am not even going to buy this game. I am just going to steal it. 
Jeff: In Steins defense. What do you do? How do you break down that red curtain? You don’t get the rights to this game. Russia is a society, and they don’t even have private property, much less an abstract concept like intellectual property. How do you deal with that, you know? And it was probably easier to just steal it. 
Dan: So this guy takes the game back to the west and starts selling the rights to all these other companies, because they don’t know any better. They think that he has actually, legitimately gotten the rights from the guy who created the game back in Russia. Now people don’t really remember Robert Maxell these days, but back in the eighties he was a huge media mogul. He was like Rupert Murdoch. So then Stein sells it to Robert Maxwell’s video game company called Mirrorsoft. 
Josh: They are basically just creating fake contracts, fake deals with all sorts of companies from Mirrorsoft to Atari in the states, to Spectrum Holobyte. Basically he just went around selling it, trying to make as much cash as he could. Before the Soviets figured out he was selling their property. 
Jeff: It was just this whole mess, because Robert Stein is selling rights. The people he is selling rights to are selling there rights. And they are not real, but there is just this whole web of deceit and just laziness that no ones checking up on it. And it is all just going to come crashing down on it. 
Josh: Before anyone figured out who owned the rights. Tetris had already become the best selling PC game in the UK and America. 
Jeff: Robert Stein never thought it was going to be a big deal, you know? He just thought he would sell a few hundred thousand copies at best, make a quick buck. No one in communist Russia is going to find out about this. But the thing is Tetris is really good. It is really good, and it just becomes almost this world wide phenomenon. 
TJ: So the game gets so big that the Russian government takes notice. Now mind you, Russia at this time is Communist, so there is no owner in particular, other than mother Russia. 
Jeff: The Russians are Communist, but there not stupid. They see what’s going on. And they create Elorg, this company to manage the rights for Tetris. Before there was never anybody to officially organize the rights. Now that this organization exists there is just rampant land grab. 
Dan: You have got Maxwell, you have got Stein, and you have got Nintendo who are about to launch there Game Boy, all coming into Moscow at the same time, trying to snap up as many of the rights as they can for different platforms for this game.
Jeff: And there are a lot of sticky issues here. This is just a society that works in a completely different way so it wasn’t exactly clear how it was going to shake out. 
Dan:  Now Nintendo, they took the red eye and they got there first. When they got there they met with Russian officials, ad they say hey, we would love to get the rights for this kind of hand held version we are going to do. And we will show you how good job we did; we made a Nintendo cartridge, here check it out. 
Josh:  They pull out a cartridge and the Russians freaked. We haven’t been paid for this; we didn’t even know this existed. 
Dan: And the Russians go, where did that come from, we didn’t give you the rights to that? Oh we bought the rights. No you didn’t. So the Nintendo guy says, I will tell you what, I will just right you a check for these rights too. We sold a bunch of these cartridges, just take this.    
Josh: The Russians, who hadn’t been paid at all for any of the versions that were best seller in the west, took that check and said, finally someone is actually taking care of us, and immediately granted the rights to Nintendo. 
Dan: Now the Stein guy, he has been selling this game left and right, it is the number one best selling computer game out there, and of course he has not paid the Russians a cent. So the Russia government is furious. But instead of giving Stein the old poison tipped umbrella in the middle of Trafalgar square, they say hey lets at least get some of this money. So they sign a contract with him to sell the computer version of the game. 
Jeff: Now Stein thinks he is buying the rights for computers, and he is thinking bout the broad definition of computers. He thinks he is going to sell it on calculators, on Game Boy, on watches, on Nintendo’s, I mean things will come in the future, everything. 
Shandi: So he figures nobody can say what is and what isn’t a computer. So I pretty much have everything I need to make money off of this. And the Russians realize this, so in the 11th hour they snuck something in to the contract, where they defined a computer as something with a keyboard and a monitor. 
TJ: That one little sentence basically blocked Stein from making money on any other distribution of Tetris. Which means he collets nothing from the Game Boy, he collects nothing from any arcade rights. He collects nothing from any home console rights. He got the rights to anything has a monitor, which is basically at this point a PC, and you know what Tetris was already a he success on the PC, so its over. So now Stein is stuck with nothing. 
Dan: Now Maxwell shows up later in the day, by the time he gets there all the good stuff is already gone, its like he was on the Russian bread line, you get to the front, and there is no bread left. 
TJ: And so we all know what happens, Russia sells the rights to handhelds and consoles to none other than Nintendo, and we know how that story ends. 
Dan: After all the dust settles, Nintendo releases the Game Boy with Tetris. And Tetris helps the Game Boy to go on to become a best seller. And the game boy helps Tetris to become the best selling game of all time. I think like 30 million Game Boy versions of that alone out on the marketplace.
Josh: If someone got screwed and maybe didn’t deserve it. Under there other banner Tengen, I think Atari got unfairly screwed in the whole Tetris debacle. Atari had bought the imaginary rights to the game and they thought they were buying something real, but they weren’t. And they produced and advertised there version of Tetris. Which a lot of people think is superior. 
Dan: I mean Atari had actually made so many of these cartridges they couldn’t just throw them away. They actually had to put them out in the marketplace first, just to try and roll the dice. And then when they lost the case they had to recall them all. And that ended up costing them even more in the long run. 
Jeff: And at this point there is a lot of bad blood between Atari and Nintendo. So Nintendo is only two happy to stop Atari from selling what they thought was going to be a hit game.
Dan: And of course back in Russia the Russian government made millions off of this, but Alexey Pajitnov, the programmer didn’t make any money at all, because of course the communist party system, you can’t make a lot of money.
Shandi: If Pajitnov would have been born in a different country the whole twisted crazy stories about all these companies fighting for all the rights. Yeah, it wouldn’t even exist. 
Josh: It is kind of interesting actually; Tetris has probably appeared on more operating systems, consoles, handheld videogames, graphing calculators than probably any other game in history. The reason why Tetris is the number one selling game of all time is because it is not technology dependent. 
TJ: You could put that game anywhere and it plays just as good as anywhere else. You can put that game on a cell phone and it is going to play just as good as it is going to play on the Xbox 360. Basically it is the solitaire of the next millennium. 
Shandi: That is why it got so popular. And why Tetris spread so fast. Wherever you play it it’s the same feeling. 
TJ: And a hundred years from now, Tetris will still be here. Just like solitaire just like chess, and all these new games they will be no where to be found. 
Shandi: Yeah, Tetris is going to be around forever. It is going to outlive us all. 



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 <media:text type="html"><![CDATA[Play Value
Episode “The Fall of Atari”

Jeff: So Atari was one of the fastest growing companies ever in America, no one had ever seen anything like it. And it was just this new exciting business. And people for the first time realized that video games were going to be a big thing. But the implosion was so massive and so quick that it almost brought down video games entirely.  
Josh: Atari was sort of like the dark side of hippy culture, a bunch of dudes working out of a warehouse, a bunch of stoners, some really talented programmers. Come 1976, they were ready in production on the VCS, which would later be the Atari 2600
Jeff: So Atari has this idea for a console with interchangeable cartridges. And they want to get it out on the market, but Fairchild semiconductors, this other million dollar company which was into semiconductors obviously, put one out. And Atari sees it and they say we got to get out there now before this hits it big, this is our idea. 
Dan: So what they did was they went to Warner and they said, hey come in with us buy out our company and put some money in and we can put out this thing and we will make a lot of money together. So Warner put in like 30 million dollars to buy this company, then they put in like another hundred million to get this thing out on the market in time for the big holiday season. 
TJ: So ultimately Atari selling themselves to Warner worked, because we have never heard of Channel F. But that sale and that success came at a price. 
Josh: Realistically the hippy culture that permeated Atari wasn’t conducive to making profits. And they needed to go through some changes. 
Dan: So Nolan Bushnell, he is the founder, he also started Chucky Cheese. He gets forced out. They beam in Ray Kassar from corporate headquarters. And he is a button down suit and tie guy and he is going to turn everything around and make this a traditional by the numbers company. No more coming in at noon, no more smoking the reefer in the office. 
Jeff: It was a culture clash and in a lot of ways it destroyed what made Atari so great I the first place. So from these starting limitations, like having to water socks to the office, other problems grew out of that. The guys who were making the games, they were getting paid maybe thirty grand a year. And they would say, hey I made this game; you just made ten million dollars off of it. Can I get a little bonus, can I get something extra? No, nothing.
Libe: Kassar wouldn’t let the people who made the games take any credit for their work. Like their names weren’t mentioned on the game anywhere, they were just basically programming monkeys. The credit went to Atari.
Jeff: Game design at this point is maybe not appreciated as the art it is today. Even today I think people still look at it as just programming. It is not, there are a lot of choices to be made on a creative level. And they didn’t really understand that at the time. So the designers weren’t particularly well paid, and they weren’t well respected. 
Libe: Atari’s top game makers went to the brass, and tried to get some more money, some royalties from the games they made. And it never worked out, so a bunch of the top designers left Atari and went to make their own company. 
Dan: And they actually do it, they leave and they make Activision. And Activision starts making games for the Atari 2600.
TJ: Which nobody saw coming. Atari certainly didn’t see it coming. Now this has never happened before, mind you this is a big thing. 
Shandi: Atari never thought that, that could have happened, that there designers would leave. That if they left they would be like ok well you still have a job. I don’t think they thought they were smart enough to be like well, I don’t think it’s illegal for us to create our own games. 
Dan: It’s not just that some guys were leaving Atari; it’s that the best guys were leaving Atari. And they were making great games, like River Raid, like Pitfall. They were making better Atari games than Atari was making. 
Josh: And there actually were royalties on the sales of there games, so people were more invested in the work they were producing. It almost seems like a no brainer. 
Jeff: David Crane, who created Pitfall. Pitfall always said, David Crane’s pitfall. Like Francis Ford Coppola's the Godfather, you know. He put his name on it, it was his work. 
Josh: The crazy thing is within two years after Kassar started showing up, Atari became the fastest growing company in the history of the United States. 
TJ: And in 1982 Activision replaced Atari as the fastest growing company in the history of the United States. 
Dan: Well that just opened the flood gates, and then everybody and there cousin started a game company and started making cartridges for the Atari 2600. 
Jeff: One Activision is out there and people start to realize hey, I can get rich making games for the Atari, then they still needed to learn the same lesson Ray Kassar did, video games are art form. You can’t just make one with no thought. You need the right people to do it. And there is just a flood of terrible, terrible games for the Atari. To the point were it becomes impossible to separate the weak from the strong. You don’t know which ones are the good ones, and which ones are the bad ones. People start to think that Atari is garbage, because that’s what most of the things that were on it, were garbage. 
Dan: Now with all these really bad games flooding the market Atari says we need to do something to cut through the clutter. We are going to pull out the big guns and do some really big a list titles. The first one is Pac Man.
Josh: People were psyched; retailers were clearing shelves for this game. They produced 12 million copies when only 10 million systems were in existence, thinking that Pac man was actually going to sell more systems. It was going to be that big. 
Jeff: Unfortunately they thought it was just the name Pac Man was enough. That was enough; the product itself was not that good. It flickered, it had slowdown, and it didn’t even look like the arcade version. The sound effects wee awful. Everything they could have failed on this home Pac Man, they did. 
Dan: So that was the first ace up the sleeve that went boom, nowhere. The second ace, turned out to be the second nail in there coffin. That was E.T. the video game. 
Josh: When they decided to make the E.T. game, around June July of 82, when they wanted the game to come out, Christmas of 82. 
Dan: Now this is a classic example of the artist vs. the corporate guys. The corporate guys say hey, we just signed a deal with Spielberg; we got to get an E.T game out there. And the artist say ok, we will make a game, it will take us six months, and the studio guys go, six months f.a. you got six weeks, we got to get this thing on the trucks and on the shelves so we don’t miss a day of the holiday shopping season. 
Jeff: It would be insane if a movie producer bought the movie rights to a book, and was like we have to make a movie out of this, we have eight hours. You know, and that’s basically what they did with E.T. 
Dan: So six weeks go by, and they end up with something. I don’t know if you could really call it a game, but it was on a cartridge and you had something that looked a little like E.T. and you walked around and fell in some holes. But really it was one of the worst games of all time. 
Jeff: The roots of all these problems are just the lack of respect for the design of the games. And they look at them and they are like, moving blocks are moving blacks, what’s the difference. They thought everyone has to have this game, but when the games garbage, no one needs to have it. They are basically selling a box with E.T on it. 
Josh: Atari was left with over 2 million unsold cartridges that were returned from retailers. They just dumped the in a land fill somewhere in New Mexico. 
Dan: So just like that the golden age of Atari was over they had lost the hearts and minds of the people. 
Josh: By the end of 1983, Atari had just completely tanked. Eventually they posted a $350 million dollar loss. By the end of that year, grew to over $530 million. 
Dan: So Warner says we got to get out of this business, this is killing us. So they break up the company, they sell the different divisions off. And the Atari name bounces around for years, being bought and sold. Eventually it’s bought by a French company. That is where it is today. And people don’t realize that the Atari name they see today has nothing to do with the original Atari Company. Somebody just bought the intellectual property rights to the name. 
Jeff: I guess the lesson of the whole story is just that, just to look at video game design as an art form. It’s not something you just put out in a factory. You need smart creative people to do it. It is its own medium. 
Shandi: That is the main rule of thumb when you have a company, do not crap on your employees. Because you make them unhappy they are going to leave. And they are going to come up with other ways to make money doing what they do. 
TJ: The lesson to be learned is, treat your employees well, or you risk dying.



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 <item> <title>The Death of Arcades</title>
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Episode “The Death of Arcades”

Libi: When we talk about arcade games you have such awesome memories of like either going with your friends or just like that’s what kept your attention for hours and hours and hours when you were a kid. 
Jeff: Arcades were great because when you were a kid they were a fad for awhile, but looking back now it’s almost, what it’s almost like looking at a mulch shop in the fifties. It’s just not a thing we have anymore. 
Dan: You know in the early seventies Pong actually was a hit in bars right, but it wasn’t until the end of the seventies that games like Space Invaders came out, these huge money makers actually established a reason to have dedicated arcades. 
TJ: And here you have dedicated gaming centers for people to say lets put a center for kids to play games, and the games will come. And sure enough hot on the heels. Pac Man was on the hype. 
Josh: So Pac Man is in a lot of ways the first video game character. Before that there are a lot of spaceships, a lot of boxes ad triangle bleeping and blooping. But Pac Man is kind of like a person and you know you can put him on a Saturday morning cartoon. You can put him on the cover of Time, you can put him on kid’s lunch boxes, and he has a wife!
Dan: That time period between 1978, and maybe 82, 83 was sort of the golden age of arcades. Every year you had new games that were pushing technology, making a heck of a lot more money. 
Josh: You got Donkey Kong, you got your Pole Position, and you got your Frogger. 
Dan: You know you had the Star Wars arcade game which was huge, centipede. They all used different control mechanism some were joysticks some were paddles. Others used the trackball. 
Josh: Video games eventually became so mainstream that there was a movie based on video games, Tron. And then in turn of course there is a video game Tron, of course based on the movie. 
TJ: So by the early eighties you have one and a half million arcade machines in the country together. People are playing about 2 million hours on these machines. That is a lot of time for them to stand going, up pa pup, pup, pup, like that. 
Josh: And we all just pulled together. Someone had to stop the centipede invasion, had to be us. 
Dan: The video game industry in that period from the late seventies to the eighties it was out of control. It was pulling in twenty billion dollars a year which was more than major league baseball basketball and football were pulling in combined. This is ridiculous. Christ I think that’s why Americans are pretty fat. 
TJ: Now this was a peak, but we new it couldn’t last forever. 
Dan: Every year the video game industry was just growing and it was growing in terms of the money it was bringing in. In terms of the people who were actually visiting the arcades. People who were involved in the industry didn’t really think there as any way for it to go but up. And it actually ended up peaking and not growing any further because the investment started to exceed how much you are actually going to play the games. 
Josh: When arcades started to fall the first places to feel it where places that should never had games in the first place. Places like grocery markets, restaurants, senior citizen homes, synagogues. Those all disappeared. After that the huge theme parks that were built around the idea that video games were just a never ending gross business. Those started to fall. By the end the only places that are left are in the middle. The medium sized arcades, little, dark, not as glamorous, but just reasonable enough to turn a profit. 
TJ: And then right around 86, 87 Nintendo. The Nintendo came out and became really popular and that revitalized the entire game industry but it moved the focus back into the living room.
Josh: Arcade games because it was such a business made up of a hundred companies. They wouldn’t advertize on TV, where as Nintendo they are like, mom buy your son this! And then for the son they are like tell mom to buy me this. Birthdays, Christmas you can’t give an arcade game realistically, but you can give a Nintendo.
Shandra: So actually the Nintendo systems and arcades could kind of peacefully coexist. The nail in the coffin for Nintendo games is when the Sega Genesis came out, in like 89, 90. Because it was arcade games that you could play at home. It was direct competition. 
TJ: Now Sega was making arcade games, but they decided to make the same version of games for their new console. Now why did they do that? It is not because they didn’t want to make money in arcades anymore, but they said we can do better if we start to sell these games directly to the consumer. You don’t have to go to Joe bob pizza shack anymore. We can just say hey, Mr. Consumer, watch this commercial on TV and go out and buy this game yourself. So Sega was cannibalizing their own arcade audience but they had seen the writing on the wall. They knew that home gaming was the way of the future. 
Dan: They were able to replicate the arcade experience pretty well. First and foremost, the fact that you could get Strider, Altered Beast, and Afterburner on your home systems when you bought your Genesis eliminated the need to go to the arcade. But then the other thing that started happening was playing these games at home people started to ask for longer more involved video game experiences than they had previously had. 
Josh: Arcade games are designed to kill you. They are designed to be frustrating; if you just sit there and play it for ever it would not be a profitable business. Where as home games work with you a little more, they are a little more fun, you can do things like explore, you can tell a story. 
Libi: Like the levels unto which you were stimulated were just completely changed and they were like more involved, you know like you were actually becoming the character. And you had to like think of where to go and what to collect and what to do. And like where to find things. 
Josh: The real case in point is the Neo Geo. This is a system that was designed to be as good at home as it was on the arcade. The games were the same in both. And even though the price for one was abnormally high, the games were very boring. They weren’t the kind of games people wanted. 
TJ: Why do I want to spend, in this case $54 for a game that gives me three minute burst of fun. Nobody wants that, they want something deeper. 
Girl2: Gamers grew up and they wanted more variety, and the home console offered that. They wanted board games, adventure games, role playing games, sports games. I mean how do you play a sports game in the arcade, it’s like impossible.
Josh: So when you go home you have this rich tapestry of genres you can play with, and that’s why arcades died. They have a very narrow set of fleeting experiences. And we just outgrew them. 
Dan: What was interesting is when you were in the arcade, your basically putting in quarters and trying to last as long as you can with a limited amount of money. And there is a real financial incentive, when you get Final Fight at home and you can just continue and you can play till you beat it. It totally sucks all the fun and you realize right away that those game suck. 
Josh: The dead, dead cat bounce of arcades, right when they bounce, and right before the final death cry is Street Fighter 2, and Mortal Kombat. 
TJ: These games are going to test your skill against complete strangers, people you don’t know. And you know complete bragging rights; people are always stepping up to the challenge trying to challenge them.
Josh: That is something that is very important to the development of video games, it never went away. It is just now we do it online. And there is elaborate ranking systems so you know exactly how good the person you are playing is versus how good you are. 
TJ: So the last thing that the arcades had to hold onto was that social interaction and that competitiveness against strangers. Well you know what that even fizzled as soon as the internet came along. 
Shandra: I think there will always be arcade games around though just for like nostalgic purposes. Just like I don’t want to get rid of that Frogger game that’s been sitting in the back of the store because it has been part of history. You know it’s like its sad but it happened. 
TJ: So we grew up and the games grew up but the arcades they couldn’t grow up and change for us, so they died. But they died so we could have Oblivion and World of War Craft and really complex artistic games like that. 
Josh: Arcades had to die for the art to evolve. You know you can’t make an omelet without destroying a few businesses, that’s the bottom line. 

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 <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:03:00 -0500</pubDate>
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 <media:text type="html"><![CDATA[Play Value
Episode “The Rise of Nintendo”

Jeff: The year is 1985 and video games kind of look like they were a fad. It looks like it was just a thing it came and went and now we are all ready to move onto our lives. Kind of like disco, it was there it was big, now it’s gone. 
Josh: Recently Atari basically single handedly created the home video market and destroyed it. There really was no appetite on both the part of people actually buying video games or retail stores to even carry video games. 
Shandi: Because Atari you know, they made tons and tons of money and then they were just gone. 
TJ: Its all about the home computer now, people are looking to the commodore, the Amiga, IBM, Apple, they are looking to buy these computers that offer more than just gaming. 
Libe: The funny part if you think about that it’s just really only in America. And so while American companies didn’t want, you know to touch video games with a ten foot pole. Video games were still going strong in Japan and Europe.
Dan: So from the land of the rising sun Nintendo looks over and sees 250 million Americans with nothing to waste their homework time on. And they say we can conquer America and bring video games back.
Jeff: So over in Japan, Nintendo has this thing called the Famicom, the family computer. And its got very advanced graphics, and even more than that it’s got a controller that is a little more complex than what we are used to. Nintendo looks at America and they are trying to figure a way in. and they think lets partner with Atari.
TJ: Now Atari, yes Atari is dead in terms of consoles, but it has a name. Atari is a household name in America at this point, Nintendo isn’t.
Libe: Atari asked Nintendo; well you know what do you got for us. And they say well we have Donkey Kong, you can have Donkey Kong. Which is a huge arcade hit; it would definitely be a win for Atari. And so there like, ok cool.
TJ: We could have very easily been playing the Atari entertainment system instead of the Nintendo entertainment system, if it wasn’t for one mistake.
Josh: What had happened is Coleco, who had this home computer called the Adam, published their own version of Donkey Kong, even without Nintendo’s knowledge of that. Atari found out about this in the middle of their distribution talks and just got so pissed off. 
Libe: Nintendo was like, no, no, no not us, its Coleco’s fault, they don’t have rights to that game they just made the game! You know innocently or