Tag: Nintendo

Play Ball: Nintendo and the Mariners, Midway’s Lost “MLB Jam,” and Don Daglow’s Baseball Sim

Sony’s MLB: The Show franchise offers an incredible facsimile of America’s Pastime, but with Opening Day upon us, I find myself instead gravitating towards my NES and Super NES shelves to replay old favorites like Jaleco’s Bases Loaded, Konami’s Base Wars, and Nintendo’s Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball.

Nintendo didn’t have to look very far to find a spokesman for the Super NES game… Griffey and the rest of the Mariners were actually already on the payroll. Even though he didn’t care for the sport, CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi purchased the baseball team in 1992 and owned it until his death in 2013.

But Yamauchi’s tenure at the head of the Mariners organization did more than help produce a handful of great Super NES and N64 games, it also upended one of Major League Baseball’s longstanding traditions.

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“Playing With Power: The Nintendo Story” Debuts on Crackle Today

Jeremy Snead, the director of 2014’s Video Games: The Movie and 2016’s Unlocked: The World of Games, Revealed, has returned with another behind-the-scenes look at one of the industry’s biggest players. Playing With Power: The Nintendo Story was released today on Crackle.

Featuring narration from Sean Astin, Playing With Power also includes commentary from Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aime, Microsoft’s’s Phil Spencer, Sega’s Tom Kalinske, and Atari’s Nolan Bushnell, as well as Wil Wheaton, Alison Haislip, Cliff Bleszinski, and more:

How did Nintendo go from niche playing card company to global juggernaut of gaming? This Crackle Original series brings together the creators of Video Games: The Movie and Executive Producer Sean Astin to pull back the curtain on the famously secretive company. The electrifying story is presented by an ensemble of Nintendo personnel, celebrity icons and industry veterans, including Wil Wheaton (Star Trek: The Next Generation), Alison Haislip (Robot Chicken), Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aime, and Xbox’s Phil Spencer.

All five episodes of Playing With Power: The Nintendo Story are now available to stream, and a trailer has been embedded above.

Bite-Sized Game History: The True Meaning of 1-Up, Wipeout’s Controversial Ad Campaign, and Luigi’s Debut

A good introduction can work wonders for getting an audience interested in your game. Just look at all the words written about the importance of World 1-1 in Super Mario Bros. (not to mention all the video essays and podcasts and infographics and interpretive dance performances).

Not every game can feature such a crackerjack introduction, and even if it did, most people will often first experience a game through some encouraging words from a friend or some kind of advertisement. This first impression is no less important, and we’ll look at three of them in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.

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Viz Media Will Publish “Ask Iwata: Words of Wisdom From Nintendo’s Legendary CEO” in Spring 2021

Even though it was founded in 1889, only five people have served as the President of Nintendo.

Satoru Iwata held that post from 2002 until his death in 2015, and in that time, the colorful executive guided the consolemaker through the boom years of the DS, Wii, and 3DS, and laid the groundwork for the launch of the Switch.

He also opened a window into Nintendo’s famously secretive culture, and spoke directly to fans as the face of the company’s Nintendo Direct video series and initiated a series of conversations with developers through his Iwata Asks column.

Shigesato Itoi’s printing company, Hobonichi, compiled some of these interviews (along with posts that Iwata made on the Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun website) into a collected edition in 2019 that was only available in Japan. But Itoi, who was also Iwata’s close friend and the creative force behind the EarthBound series, recently teamed up with Viz Media to announce that the collection will finally be released in English in Spring 2021 as Ask Iwata: Words of Wisdom From Nintendo’s Legendary CEO.

Viz Media shared an official description of Ask Iwata with The Verge:

In this motivational collection, Satoru Iwata addresses diverse subjects such as locating bottlenecks, how success breeds resistance to change, and why programmers should never say no. Drawn from the “Iwata Asks” series of interviews with key contributors to Nintendo games and hardware, and featuring conversations with renowned Mario franchise creator Shigeru Miyamoto and creator of Earthbound Shigesato Itoi, Ask Iwata offers game fans and business leaders an insight into the leadership, development and design philosophies of one of the most beloved figures in gaming history.

If you don’t want to wait until Spring 2021, the Iwata Asks archive is still available on Nintendo.com.

UPDATE (1/8/21): Ask Iwata: Words of Wisdom From Nintendo’s Legendary CEO will be published on April 13, 2021.

Bite-Sized Game History: The Smithsonian’s Animal Crossing Obsession, Game Characters Through the Years, and Ken Griffey Jr.

Welcome to another edition of Bite-Sized Game History!

This time around we’ll be looking at the Animal Crossing: New Horizons habits of a few librarians at the Smithsonian, an infographic that charts the evolution of more than a dozen game characters, and the time Ken Griffey Jr. and one lucky Nintendo Power reader got to play a game on the Kingdome’s big screen.

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Nintendo PlayStation Sells at Auction for $360,000

The Sony PlayStation launched with a $300 price tag in 1995, famously undercutting Sega’s planned $400 price point for the Saturn. So it’s only fitting that in 2020, the fabled Nintendo PlayStation prototype sold at auction this afternoon with a winning bid of $300,000.

The new owner of this rare artifact is currently a mystery, but the winning bid may have been placed by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, who wrote about his interest in the auction on Twitter back in February.

The Nintendo PlayStation was previously owned by Dan Diebold, who took it “around the world and back again” after his father discovered it among some “junk” that had once belonged to former Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Olaf Olafsson:

At one time, this particular unit was owned by the founder, first president, and first chief executive officer of Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. Olaf Olafsson. Olaf eventually left Sony to join Advanta Corporation, and became its president in 1998. A little over a year later, Olaf left Advanta to join Time Warner — but he left his Nintendo PlayStation prototype behind at Advanta. Roughly around this time, Advanta filed for bankruptcy and began gathering up everything in their corporate office to sell at auction. As the story goes, the Nintendo Play Station prototype was grouped together with some miscellaneous items that were boxed up with a group lot, the contents of which were veiled. A nice Easter egg for the winning bidder, indeed!

By far, this is arguably one of the most notorious, mysterious, and controversial artifacts of the video game industry. This prototype has been around the world and back again, admired and appreciated by video game enthusiasts from all over. Even though this is the closing of this portion of its narrative, it will continue to remain a pivotal piece of video game history no matter where it ends up.

According to the auctioneers at Heritage Auctions, the purchaser of the Nintendo PlayStation will also have to pay a $60,000 “Buyer’s Premium” on top of the winning bid, bringing the total to $360,000.

UPDATE (3/7/20): Forbes is reporting that Greg McLemore, the founder of Pets.com, is the mystery man behind the winning bid in yesterday’s Nintendo PlayStation auction. McLemore is an avid collector of arcade machines, game consoles, and original artwork, and he told the publication he plans to open a permanent museum to house his collection.

The Only Known Nintendo PlayStation Prototype is Being Sold at Auction

The failed collaboration between Nintendo and Sony to produce a CD-ROM add-on for the Super NES has become the stuff of legend. The details of the falling out have been documented pretty extensively over the years, and war stories from all the major players have appeared in both David Sheff’s Game Over and Blake Harris’s Console Wars.

While we all know the story, what became of the small batch of prototype consoles produced by the two companies has always been a mystery. More than 200 Nintendo PlayStations were reportedly produced, and it’s assumed that most were destroyed, but one managed to escape the trash heap by hiding out in “a box of junk” previously owned by former Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Olaf Olafsson.

After his stint at Sony, Olafsson would take a job with Advanta Corporation, and this “box of junk” went with him, but when the financial company went bankrupt in 2009, the Nintendo PlayStation was left behind. It was found by Terry Diebold, who worked in Advanta’s maintenance department, and eventually made its way into the hands of his son, Dan.

Now, after game historians have examined and repaired the one-of-a-kind artifact, it’s going up for auction. The Diebolds are selling the prototype through Heritage Auctions, and as of this writing, the current bid is sitting at $145,000. And it’s unlikely to stop there, as proxy bids will continue to be taken until the start of the live auction on March 6.

So what will you get for your money? According to Heritage, the console features a fully-functioning Super Famicom cartridge slot:

We at Heritage can attest the prototype is working, as we’ve played a couple of rounds of Mortal Kombat on it using a Super Famicom cartridge.

The CD drive is also functional, but as no software was produced for the Nintendo PlayStation, all it can do is play music CDs:

Though the CD-ROM drive was not currently working when it was found in 2009, it has since been repaired by Benjamin Heckendorn, a YouTube personality known for his console repair videos. It now has the ability to play music CDs like the commercially produced PlayStation, but there is no proprietary software that’s known to have been made during the prototype’s development.

Heritage refers to the Nintendo PlayStation as “one of the most notorious, mysterious, and controversial artifacts of the video game industry” and it’s hard to argue with that.

Bite-Sized Game History: Liberty City’s Early Days, an N64 Controller Prototype, and Jeopardy’s Tetris Blunder

Diving in to the sometimes subtle (and sometimes major) differences between a prototype and the final product is probably one of the most exciting parts of video game history. In many cases, you’ll be looking at the (literal) building blocks of what came before.

In this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, let’s look at one prototype that served as the foundation of something great and another that was ultimately sent to the scrapyard. And after all that, we’ll have a good laugh at a hoax that recently fooled the Jeopardy! writer’s room.

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Bite-Sized Game History: The History of Speed Boosts, Street Fighter ’89, and a Hyundai-Branded NES

Bite-Sized Game History has reached way back to talk about a lot of video game firsts, and I’ve got a few more today.

So let’s get right to it and dig into the history of speed boosts, the working title for Final Fight, and Nintendo’s initial collaboration with Hyundai.

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Bite-Sized Game History: Immortalizing Ralph Baer, Erasing Puck Man, and Capturing Neil Young’s Game Boy Camera

If you can believe it, Blizzard is just as well known for franchises like Diablo and Warcraft as it is for the monstrous statues that tower over the desks at its Irvine campus. It’s even become something of a tradition for newly-hired employees to pose in front of The Orc Statue on their first day.

But how do you immortalize an even more epic figure in video game history? How about with a nice park bench in the middle of New Hampshire…

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