There were many great things about growing up in the nineties.
I got to witness a complete music revolution, the offspring of a new generation of post-dictatorship artists and their mentors, people who had had to disguise their lyrics in order to deliver powerful, hidden messages to a population starved of magic and joy, broken by war and distraught by their own powerlessness in the face of great evil. These musicians were finally able to declare their love of life instead of their hatred of death, and that hit a note with everyone who was still around to truly appreciate the shifting tone of the message, almost as if seeing a rainbow after a devastating storm. I also got to see technology advance with such terrifying speed as to make the past and the future into completely interchangeable things, with highly-anticipated developments being forgotten almost immediately, their time under the limelight cut short by the next best thing, which promptly suffered the same fate, leaving us all dizzy and adrift in a sea of dark plastic, bright leds and empty dreams.
And, of course, this was the perfect time to watch Nintendo's dominance over the gaming market.
It may be hard to imagine for anyone born after the fact, but videogame magazines and TV shows raved over the "Big N", this Japanese juggernaut that was somehow praised by its colorful presentation whilst also mass-producing gray boxes of circuitry. It didn't matter that the SNES was so utterly expensive as to make it prohibitive for most of the population around my neck of the woods. The fact that games were carried only by a few, selected retailers was also of little relevance at the time. Even the cold, hard truth that there was always an SNES taunting kids walking by the local Todo Por 2 Pesos, bathed on blue light from a whimsical lightbulb casting its glow right beside it, on a high shelf as if claiming the top spot for itself, couldn't dent the endless torrent of flattery lobbed its way.
Nintendo's was a way of life, and you were absolutely missing out by not embracing it.
Perhaps because of how much credit the company was given (and also because its biggest competitor was too busy tripping over its own shoelaces to put up much of a fight), the suits at the service of Mario felt like they could play by their own rules, and that antagonizing developers was something that they could afford to do... after all, publishing games on a Nintendo console was a privilege, not a right.
The infamously censored version of Maniac Mansion on NES...
One of the most amusing side-effects of this "righteous" onslaught was the fact that most developers knew better than to push back against this force, and so they bent their necks and let them set the tone for whatever happened to their games -- the NES version of Maniac Mansion (an otherwise excellent port) was butchered so hard by Nintendo's censorship that even promotional screenshots published on Nintendo Power didn't make it in by the time the game was finally greenlit to start production. Worst still, the SNES port of Wolfenstein 3D, while a technical marvel, was changed so drastically as to make the higher-ups at id Software decide right then and there that they'd never work with Nintendo again, outsourcing their IPs and games to third-party developers to make, despite being so interested in the process of getting their titles on the hands of console gamers as to even have John Carmack himself program a new engine for this ill-fated port, guaranteeing that the game would run as well as possible on a machine boasting only 3,5 MHz of power (even adding new features to the game in the process!).
Nintendo was not shy when it came to policing and enforcing their so-called "content rules" on games published on their systems... and I'm not talking about the kind of gratuitous violence already plaguing those titles (like the exploding hamster on Maniac Mansion), but pretty much everything that could result even slightly offensive to the public. An arcade cabinet with the word "Kill" in it? Gone. A statue that's *gasps* NAKED?! Gone. Even a stupid, outdated sign designed to twist the knife for old timers playing the game for the first time was promptly removed from LucasFilm's classic... after all, "Disco Sucks" could be seen as divisive, offensive message! These examples of "Flanderization" (and many more which followed and that would take an hour just to cover) actually resulted on a rumor that I haven't been able to confirm (but that I have no problem believing) in which LucasArts cancelled a proposed port of Monkey Island for SNES (which was to compete directly with the SEGA CD version already in the works) because they didn't think much of it would survive under Nintendo's scrutiny and that their creative vision would be compromised by being released on that system.
Wolfenstein 3D was treated even worse, and I honestly have to question the logic applied to it... because Nintendo obviously knew what the original was all about (and they also knew what the people buying it would and could expect from it), yet they decided that an FPS set in World War 2 may be "too violent" and "too bloody" for their customers. They also hated the idea of bringing up such a troublesome topic as Nazi Germany into the mix. They absolutely nuked the game's spirit, getting a ton of changes made for the sake of making it "more presentable", which resulted on a port that was unfairly panned by critics and players alike, despite performing the miracle of running greatly on a console which could be bested by every computer of its time and on a cartridge that didn't really have the space for it to work as intended, leaving it mauled.
... And its fan-made, uncensored counterpart!
Funny how at one point the N64 was considered a "PC killer".
Whilst the console's release kept being pushed back further with each new update, the extremely hot Sony PlayStation was already posed to overtaking it before it could even properly launch, like a giant ship, the pride and joy of a navy, being torpedoed as soon as it hit the water. No-one was admitting this at the time, of course, but it was painfully obvious that there was a serious challenge for videogame crown being issued and that the company that had pretty much ruled the 8 and 16-bit era of gaming was going to lose, getting overshadowed even in its own home market.
My first clue that this was going to happen came with the numbers: the PS1 was just being sold like hot bread, whilst I didn't know anyone who owned the N64 by the time it hit the Argentinean market in 1997. Plus, magazine articles were suddenly a lot less enthusiastic about it, rehashing the same old, tired points about the system that had once looked so promising... trust me, you can only hear about its built-in four-player multiplayer mode so many times before it starts sounding like nails on a chalkboard. Still, there was hope because there were still many good games being released for the system, including the whimsical, kinda weird but still awesome Pokemon Snap, the incredibly sweet-sounding Pokemon Stadium, Banjo-Tooie/Kazooie (and their genius ads) and many other titles that made the investment a lot more attractive, despite a rather scary-looking price tag attached to the machine itself.
In the words of one of the developers: "Wolfenstein 3D on SNES was the game where they made absolutely sure you couldn't harm innocent dogs... whilst killing dozens of rats and people at the same time".
By the time I met my first Nintendo 64 owner (a foreign exchange student hailing from Italy), the Wii was already on its way, so I really couldn't tell whether the hype (or lack thereof) was justified or not, only that I couldn't decide for myself because the console never dropped in price, not even two generations later -- it was bad signs all-around with this thing, but that made me obsess over it even further... so much so that I actually went on a mission to blow up my phone bill by connecting to the internet for the first time and try to get my hands on some N64 Roms to try out (which was never going to happen -- for a myriad of reasons, ranging from my Pentium II being utterly unable to run a proper emulator to my 56K connection dying a screeching death half-way through the process of taking the phone line hostage to download "gargantuan" 13 MB files). I ultimately decided to look up info on those games, the battle cry of someone who lost (which is how I ended up stumbling upon the aforementioned horror tales of weird censorship). It truly looked as if the hype train that had carried me all through the nineties had derailed at some point, taking a corner too fast and crashing somewhere, leaving only jagged questions and the broken remnants of what used to be certainties on its wake.
However, the thing that blew my mind like no other happened before any of those things became clear to me, before the age of the internet and of the end of the last iteration of the endless console war between Sony's CD-based underdog and Nintendo's cartridge-based juggernaut... it actually happened at its peak, right as they both climbed to the top of their competition and were exchanging blows left and right before entering into a barely-controlled dive that was meant to signal their final curtain. Yeah, while magazine nerds were goshing over the lastest developments and debating which console's version of Resident Evil 2 rocked the hardest (and I'm going with Nintendo 64 here because they even kept the cutscenes on a measly cartridge!), a single ad caught my eye, a tiny rectangle at the edge of one of the last pages of my zine of choice: "COMING SOON: SOUTH PARK ON NINTENDO 64!".
It actually looks pretty good for what it is.
South Park... on Nintendo 64.
South Park was a show I actually got grounded for watching once, not in the least because I also made the cardinal mistake of quoting it... in class. It was such a weird, irreverent show that TV networks didn't dare putting it on until very late at night (some even after midnight!) just to be safe. And that thing was coming over to a Nintendo console? This show were a character (a kid, no less!) was getting brutally murdered every single episode was being made into a videogame to be published for a company that considered blood too taboo... in a game about World War 2? That was actually the moment that made me question everything and also to renew my interest on this weird system, this relic from a bygone era of gaming that seemed to exist both ahead and behind the times. If they were willing to do something like that then maybe the schoolyard rumors were true, and they were actually losing to a console half its power and made by a company that was taking its very first steps into the videogame market. It was David vs Goliath on the nerdiest of scales, and we were all for it.
At the time I was unaware that that game was also coming out on PC and PS1, and I thought that this was Nintendo's wildest bet yet -- a desperate measure to stem the bleeding before being completely overtaken by this unexpected rival.
Perhaps the biggest irony of this whole thing is that the N64 version of South Park was the only one that wasn't critically panned (despite scoring very low anyway) because... well, people just assumed that it was gonna suck, and then they were pleasantly surprised that it only kinda did. That hyper-hyped built-in four-player mode the console was known for and which was repeated to the point of rivaling SEGA's bygone "Blast Processing" mantra? Turns out that it was about the perfect pitch for selling a game based on such a recognizable quartet of colorful characters to play as! Who knew?
Oh, the game still sucked pretty hard, with critics agreeing that its novelty wore off after about an hour of gaming (not nearly enough to complete it), specially quoting the one-liners and the monotonous gameplay layering on top of each other until it all become a sensory assault that made you shut off the damn thing before your brain did. I personally didn't think it was that bad, but game journalists like their flair... and I admit that I'd have been pretty pissed, too, if I had paid full price for an N64 title of such mediocre quality when the PlayStation was still riding on much more successful franchises born on the system (like Spyro the Dragon and Gran Turismo). But it's interesting that the suits decided to double down on this sort of thing later on, allowing Conker's Bad Fur Day to be released even later, just about clashing with the advent of Nintendo's next console: the equally fun, interesting and whimsical (but ultimately tragic) GameCube.
To think that this caused an outage at some point...
Regardless, I find it very interesting that the rare gift of self-awareness was what caused this dominant force to be stopped right in its tracks. They were aware of what the public (and many developers) thought about their overzealous censorship, and they seemed to take careful note of what had happened to SEGA as they tried to keep the Genesis alive through whatever means necessary to keep the heat on on this two-horse race, only to make many of the same mistakes they had been extremely critical of (and profited from) themselves, from releasing weird add-ons with little use and nearly zero support (like the N64HDD), to keeping cartridges around when every other major player in the industry had already moved towards the largest, cheapest CD-Roms to power their own bets.
Keeping your own identity in the face of overwhelming change is a noble pursuit, and I'm aware that many parents were thankful that their children weren't seeing explicit things when dropping $50 a piece for games to play on their expensive toasters at a time when the videogame "scare" was its hardest and when these pieces of electronic escapism were being blamed for every evil under the sun, but that's what makes this whole thing so fascinating for me... at some point "change" meant their core values and not the outdated technologies they were being enforced on, and whilst they still pulled off some very impressive things with the software and hardware available at the time, they were swallowed whole by the ceaseless advance of technology and the expectations of the people using it. People who had been spoiled rotten by every new bell and whistle that came out of the assembly line and who were more than ready to let go of the family-friend ethos that had worked as a shield against the relentless assault on videogames that was still very much a thing around the time Doom and Mortal Kombat had made their mark and opened the floodgates for their countless clones to capitalize on the rivers of blood that had originally made people turn towards Nintendo for keeping it safe in the first place.
The lessons from that era still shape today's gaming world, and so they are very much worth remembering... messy as they were.
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