Mon, Sep 06, 1999 page18

• Video-game makers engaged in epic battle to entertain users

  Sega is launching `Dreamcast,' a new video-game console, in an effort to challenge its arch-rivals Sony and Nintendo, who are also planning new consoles

  • by oliver burkeman / THE GUARDIAN
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  If Shoichiro Irimajiri is getting any sleep at the moment -- and, under the circumstances, it doesn't seem likely -- a small grey plastic box will be figuring large in his dreams. Irimajiri is gambling his professional survival, and that of his multi-billion-dollar company, on the box.

  The price of failure will be financial ruin, but the possibility of success more than compensates for the risk. The unassuming box represents the intoxicating opportunity to revolutionize the way we spend our leisure time -- and even, just maybe, to supplant Bill Gates and the moguls of Hollywood from their seemingly unshakeable positions of dominance over the entertainment world.

  It must be a strange situation for a man, and a company, whose most notable achievement to date is Sonic the Hedgehog. Irimajiri is the president of Sega, and the box on his mind is the Dreamcast.

  Launched in the US on Thursday and in Britain next month, it is a video games console. Or at least, it's what used to be called a video games console: the term is fast becoming obsolete. The Dreamcast is the opening salvo in a battle for control over the next generation of entertainment technology.

  Anyone who doubts the importance of the battle need only cast an eye over the guest list for Sunday's UK launch party at the Commonwealth Institute on Kensington High Street in London. It is an unusual product launch indeed that can bring together the likes of actress Helen Mirren and footballers Ian Wright and Dwight Yorke with EastEnders star Ian Beale. The confrontation, it is quickly becoming clear, will be a fight to the death. Irimajiri's problem, though, is that the death in question -- despite the scale of his company's US$100 million European marketing campaign -- could well be Sega's.

  The company's mightier arch-rivals, Sony and Nintendo, are both planning new consoles that could well leave Sonic looking like a bloody and bedraggled piece of roadkill.

  Few details of either machine -- a successor to Sony's PlayStation, working title PlayStation 2, to be revealed for the first time the week after next at the Tokyo Games Fair, and a new Nintendo console to replace the N64, currently codenamed "Dolphin," have been made public yet. And in an industry noted for its obsessive deployment of bluff, counter-bluff and spoiling tactics, the battle lines are unlikely to be clear for some time yet.

  THE NEW REALISM

  But whatever the outcome, popular culture is unlikely to ever be quite the same again. The new breed of small plastic boxes promise a level of realism and interactivity that look set to permanently erase the conventional boundaries between cinema, television, computer gaming, hi-fi, and the internet.

  The rhetoric alone -- towering edifices of euphoric marketing-speak -- is a marvel to behold. Irimajiri says Sega is "taking the amusement industry in a new direction;" Nintendo promises "a console more powerful than any current or planned home video game system." And Sony Computer Entertainment communications director Kenichi Fukunaga insists that, with the PlayStation 2, "the current meaning of the word game needs to be redefined. We want to narrow the gap between games and television to create a new form of entertainment."

  It is a prospect that has Hollywood studio executives chomping on their cigars with alarm. Last year the gaming industry chalked up revenues of US$6.3 billion worldwide, a whisker short of Hollywood's total box office takings, US$6.9 billion. Next year the combined forces of Sony, Sega and Nintendo and associated software developers are confidently expected to outstrip the US movie industry -- a crucial milestone. One fifth of British and one third of American households already own a games console.

  In Japan, Sonic's spiritual homeland, the figure is closer to 50 percent. The current market leader, Sony, riding high on the success of the first-generation PlayStation and the improbably pneumatic heroine of the Tomb Raider game series, Lara Croft, has sold 50 million consoles worldwide, and is close to breaking the 20 million barrier in Europe.

  It's all a mind-numbingly long way from the early 1980s, when Atari first capitalized on the earliest signs of interest in now comically low-resolution bat-and-ball simulations to develop the first commercially credible range of home video games. That its three-pronged logo now emblazons T-shirts as a nostalgic symbol of retro culture is a telling reminder to the likes of Irimajiri of the unforgiving speed with which the sector has evolved. The losers have been left scattered by the roadside like, well, like squashed hedgehogs.

  "These battles are crucial," says Tony Mott, editor of the gaming magazine Edge. "Gamers want to see blood spilled: many hardcore Nintendo fans would kill to see Sega fall on its face with Dreamcast.

  One brand will dominate for the next 10 years, until eventually it becomes a standard, like VHS videos. Games developers have always dreamt of a one-format market, and when that eventually arrives the ramifications will be enormous."

  SPEED

  Of course, it's what's inside the little grey box that really matters. The Dreamcast is the first 128-bit console -- making it twice as fast as the current Nintendo N64 and four times as fast as the 32-bit PlayStation, and the first to come with a modem as standard.

  This enables gamers to engage in multi-player combat across the internet. It is capable of performing 1.4 billion floating point operations per second, or "flops" -- the minute operations required to manipulate a character or object in three dimensions.

  Sonic Adventure, a much-expanded version of the hedgehog epic released with preview versions of the Dreamcast, makes some tentative steps towards exploiting these new capabilities: already, the potential for the consoles to emulate convincingly the semantics of Hollywood cinema is becoming clear. Reflections in water and the ripples of trees in the breeze resemble more and more their real-life counterparts; even the faults of traditional film-making -- such as the lens flare of cameras directed into sunlight -- have been added, providing an authentic filmic experience when Sonic squints at the sun. Though none of this, yet, it has to be said, quite manages to distract from the fact that the game still concerns the exploits of a massively annoying blue hedgehog.

  It's thought that the PlayStation 2 will add to this armory the capacity to play digital versatile disks or DVD, a new CD-sized format capable of storing movies, audio and computer games. And industry rumors, tellingly reported as fact in Newsweek this week, even suggest that Nintendo may leapfrog the 128-bit revolution with a 256-bit console.

  It is a staggeringly vast market, with correspondingly staggering profits to be made for the victors: last year Sony's computer entertainment division posted profits of 338 billion yen (about US$3 billion). With stakes so high, there is little to which the manufacturers will not resort to blast their competitors to pieces.

  "Dirty tricks are the cornerstones of hardware companies' campaigns," says Mott. "Prior to the PlayStation's launch, Sony hired a venue in London where it showed dummy console cases against a background of bogus game footage -- footage which made it into the abysmal sci-fi film Hackers but not, as it turned out, to the console itself.

  In the same vein, Sega has been dogged by unprecedented cuts in the price of rival consoles in Japan, where the Dreamcast has been available since late 1998, and the US, where the PlayStation and N64 can now be had for US$99 apiece. The Dreamcast will retail at US$199 in the US.

  For Sega -- to use the language of its games -- it is a case of kill or be killed. The dismal failure of its 32-bit Saturn machine -- plagued by bugs which made it complicated for games developers to design for -- set the firm on a spiral of decline that has resulted, last month, in the resignation of its US President Bernie Stobar.

  Early this year it axed 1,000 jobs worldwide, and closed its Segaworld amusement venue in the Trocadero at London's Piccadilly.

  Its pre-tax losses this year increased from 17.1 billion yen to 32.6 billion yen. It now clings desperately to an estimated 1% of the market. And the delay of the European launch from September 23 to October 14 -- caused by bottlenecks in the pan-European network BT is constructing to allow players to link up across the continent -- hardly bodes well.

  THE LATEST BUZZWORD

  "Convergence" is the home entertainment industry's buzzword, and its received wisdom within the industry that we will, before long, be relying on an ever-smaller number of appliances to watch films, access the Web, send e-mail, watch television and listen to music, providing previously undreamed-of opportunities for crossfertilization between these cultural forms. But with a variety of devices -- games consoles, PCs, digital set-top TV decoders -- vying for mastery, it is far from clear exactly what kind of box will end up ruling our leisure time. Bill Gates wants it to be the so-called "Wintel standard" -- PCs with Intel chips running Windows. Hollywood would like it to be equipment primarily focused on movie viewing. They will have a fight on their hands.

  "Everyone who's anyone in the industry knows that in the long term, you're not going to have a PC, a TV and a wide array of hardware each with one specific function," says Frederic Diot, a games industry analyst at Datamonitor. "You'll have one central piece of hardware that will be multifunctional. What will have that role is hard to predict, but if Sony offers DVD and net access, if you can also listen to CDs and play games, then you're starting to envision what could be the future of home entertainment."

  The short-term key to Sony's success -- if that is what happens, as industry insiders predict -- will be the prized asset of "backwards compatibility": the ability of games enthusiasts, cash-strapped after such speedy evolution in the market, to play their existing games on the new machines. But it is something very old-tech indeed that will decide the fight in the end: the ability to move the audience.

  As Diot says: "Sony is staking their Emotion Engine chip [the centerpiece of the forthcoming PlayStation 2] on the hope that a game will come to be judged not on how great it looks but on how compelling its storyline is. If a developer can create a game that really moves you, in the same way that a film does -- then we will have reached the full capacity of games."

  And this, ironically, is the key: the success of an industry rooted in the thrills of destroying enemy spacecraft, hacking the heads off zombies and exploring alien worlds will ultimately rest on the capacity of video games to emulate the truly human -- to approximate the emotional highs and lows of the very cultural forms they presume to supercede.

  Until the hedgehog begins to learn the finer points of the thespian's trade, the battle for control of our leisure time will remain unwon. Shoichiro Irimajiri has more sleepless nights ahead.
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