Word: nintendos
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Three years ago, when Sega and Sony followed the lead of 3DO and began replacing the aging 16-bit game machines with 32-bit systems built around cd-rom drives, Nintendo charted its own course. Howard Lincoln, chairman of Nintendo of America, was convinced that his core audience--twitchy-fingered boys between eight years old and their first date--would be underwhelmed by the quality of games that can be delivered on cd-roms, silvery storage platters that have enormous capacity but are notoriously sluggish. Lincoln decided that his best chance to deliver game play so startling that his target...
...Netscape, Lincoln devised a plan to stuff the graphics-rendering power of a $90,000 SGI Reality Engine--the machine that created the T. rex in Jurassic Park--into a $250 box. The result was a calculated delay. After missing its self-imposed deadline last summer, Nintendo played the spoiler last Christmas, cutting into sales of Sony and Sega's $300 32-bit machines by dangling the promise of a cheaper and even more powerful player this spring. Sales of new video-game systems, which had dropped from 27 million machines in 1992 to 10.5 million in '94, rose only...
...Nintendo, meanwhile, pumped new life into the maturing 16-bit market by releasing Donkey Kong Country, a game originally designed for the new 64-bit system, in a version that played on the 16-bit Super NES. The game's eye-popping graphics were an instant sensation; DKC not only became the best-selling game of 1994 but also ratcheted up pressure on the teams designing games for the new machine. "When we released Donkey Kong Country, we raised the bar on ourselves," says Lincoln. "The launch games on Nintendo 64 had to be that much better...
...several other games for a test run. Playing Mario 64, he reports, is like jumping inside the movie Toy Story. The plot line, something about a princess and a bad guy named Bowser, is, as always, almost irrelevant. What matters is that the Silicon Graphics chip-fueled Nintendo 64 puts the fastest, smoothest game action yet attainable via joystick at the service of equally virtuoso motion. Mario runs, flies, swims, dodges and flips his way past a bewildering welter of walls, ramps, pools and abysses...
What's more, he goes wherever you point him. The Nintendo 64 shatters the convention of two-dimensional horizontal scrolling video games. No more bouncing off guardrails or dissolving in fuzzy pixels on the edge of the screen. Wherever you want to go--forward, backward, left, right or anywhere in between--the scene follows you in dazzling 3D. If you want to climb a wall or dive into the moat, you can. (The water is gorgeously rendered, and it's worth the plunge just to hear the dreamy New Age sound track that accompanies underwater excursion...