Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)

From Geekcomix:

The Nintendo Entertainment System was released in America in 1985, after some limited success in Japan as the Famicom. Over the next few years, its user base would grow exponentially until the NES surpassed the Atari VCS/2600 peak set in 1982.6 As of 1990, there were over 19 million NES systems in the United States alone.5
In addition to the tremendous success of the system, its games had a great deal prosperity. For example, Super Mario Bros. 3 released in 1989 grossed over $500 million just in America. In the field of entertainment, only the movie E.T. has made more revenue.3 Super Mario Bros. 3 would sell more than 7 million copies in America and 4 million in Japan, which is more copies than any other game in history. Sheff wrote, "By record-industry standards, 'SMB3' went platinum eleven times. Michael Jackson is one of the few artists to have accomplished this feat."9
By 1990, the money earned from Nintendo's NES and its games allowed Nintendo to usurp Toyota as Japan's most successful company. In the entertainment business, Nintendo netted as much as all of the American movie studios combined, and more than the three television networks had in the previous two years. In the five short years since the system was released, the NES could be found in more than a third of the household in America and Japan. 9
This monopoly gave Nintendo significant control over the market during the Fourth Generation, which they utilized in various malicious schemes. Despite all of this, they are still one of the most popular and well-known companies in the world.
Nintendo's only competitor in the 8-bit market was Sega with their Sega Master System. While the Master System did have many more features than the NES (which is evident in a side-by-side comparison) it lacked the third party support that Nintendo had and was not much competition. The Master System sold a total of 2 million units and at times had a market share of 11%, these were the only reason the system survived as long as it did.

Ms. Pac-Man Trivia

A Ms. Pac-Man machine has a storyline based around it in the Friends episode The One Where Joey Dates Rachel. The plotline revolves around Chandler entering rude words onto the game's high-score screen and then attempting to beat his scores (thus removing them) before Ross's seven year old son arrives. In reality, Ms. Pac-Man doesn't have a high-score screen, displaying only the single best score, and the game doesn't allow players to enter their initials.
In one series of strips in Bill Amend's popular newspaper comic strip FoxTrot, Jason Fox, who is in fifth grade and still detests girls, has a nightmare in which he is romanced by Tomb Raider heroine Lara Croft. In one of these strips, Lara keeps trying to persuade Jason to play her game, and Jason declares that he'll never play a video game starring a girl. At this point, Lara says, "Permit me to reintroduce you to someone," and Ms. Pac-Man appears: "Hi, Jason. Remember me?"
A Ms. Pac-Man unit appears in the 1983 movie "WarGames", in the 1983 movie "Joysticks", in the 1984 movie "Tightrope" (the cabinet appears in the background of the bar scene), in the 1990 movie "The Grifters", in the 1999 movie "Man On The Moon" and in the 2002 movie "Van Wilder".
A Ms. Pac-man machine is seen in Scrubs in the episode My Own Private Practice Guy. Todd comments "Oh Ms. Pac-man I would sex that bow right off your head. Eat those dots you naughty, naughty girl."
The Ms. Pac-Man world record of 933,580 points was achieved by Abdner Ashman, of Queens, NY, on Thursday, April 6, 2006 at the Apollo Amusements showroom in Pompano Beach, FL, as verified by official referees from the Twin Galaxies Intergalactic Scoreboard, who were present to witness the accomplishment.
Some versions of the game had an "expert" level, where if you hold the joystick up while pressing the start button, the whole game speed doubled (including music and sound effects). Others have Ms. Pac-Man going twice her speed while the rest of the game went normal speed. The latter allowed for people to obtain much higher scores.
Many people have mistakenly called the game Mrs. Pac Man, which can upset many a video game purist.
In the 1980's cartoon version of Pac-Man, she was named Pepper (while the male Pac-Man was often called Packie) because she was never given a name.
In 1982, R. Cade and the Video Victims recorded a song titled "Ms. Pac-Man", using sound effects from the game, and released it on the album "Victim of the Video", a lesser-known video game song album.
While not inspired by the game, the song Game Over by rapper Lil Flip samples heavily from it.
In the movie Are We There Yet?, Lindsay tells Nick that Kevin had a bad dream playing Ms. Pac-Man at the mall but refers to her as Lady Pac-Man.
There is an obscure glitch in the original arcade game. If the player inserts a coin at the title screen, before Blinky appears, and begins, the walls of the first maze will be blue instead of pink.
At least one version of the game (found in a diner near the Kansas-Nebraska border) has the monsters turn into blue mice when Ms. Pac-Man eats the energizers.

Activision History

Prior to the formation of Activision, software for video game consoles was published exclusively by the makers of the systems for which the games were designed. For example, Atari was the only publisher of games for the Atari 2600. This was particularly galling to the developers of the games, as they received no financial rewards for games that did well, and didn't even receive credit in the manuals. After watching a number of games turn into multi-million-dollar best sellers, a number of programmers decided they had had enough and left. Activision became the first third-party game publisher for game consoles.[1]

The company was founded by former music industry executive Jim Levy and former Atari programmers David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead. Atari's company policy at the time was not to credit game creators for their individual contributions; Levy took the approach of crediting and promoting game creators along with the games themselves. This was an important draw that helped the newly formed company attract experienced talent. Crane, Kaplan, Levy, Miller, and Whitehead received the Game Developers Choice "First Penguin" award in 2003 in recognition of this step.

The departure of the four programmers, whose titles made up more than half of Atari's cartridge sales at the time, caused legal action between the two companies which was not ultimately settled until 1982. As the market for game consoles started to decline, Activision branched out, producing game titles for home computers as well, and acquiring smaller publishers.

In 1982, Activision released Pitfall!, which is considered by many to be the first platform game as well as the best selling title on the 2600. Although the team's technical prowess had already been proven, it was Pitfall! that turned them into a huge success. This not only resulted in a legion of clones, including stand-up arcade games, but can be said to have launched the entire platform genre which became a major part of video games through the 1980s.

In 1985, Activision merged with struggling text adventure pioneer Infocom. Jim Levy was a big fan of Infocom's titles and wanted Infocom to remain solvent. However, about six months after the "InfoWedding", Bruce Davis took over as CEO of Activision. Davis was against the merger from the start and was heavy-handed in management of them. He also forced marketing changes on Infocom which caused sales of their games to plummet. Eventually, in 1989, after several years of losses, Activision closed down the Infocom studios in Cambridge, Massachusetts extending to only 11 of the 26 employees an offer to relocate to Activision's headquarters in Silicon Valley; five did.

In 1988 Activision started to get involved in other types of software besides video games, such as business applications. As a result, Activision changed its corporate name to Mediagenic in order to have a name that would globally represent all its fields of activities.(Mediagenic is often mistaken to be a company that purchased Activision but in reality it was only Activision with a different name). Despite this change, Mediagenic continued to largely use the Activision brand on its video games of the various platforms it was publishing for, notably the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Sega Master System, the Atari 7800, Commodore 64 and Amiga. The decision of the company to get involved in various fields at the expense of video gaming proved to be a move so bad that in 1992 Mediagenic filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The new Activision
The failure of Mediagenic resulted in a reorganization and merger with The Disc Company with Mediagenic again being the acquirer. After emerging from bankruptcy, Mediagenic officially changed its entity name back to Activision in the state of Delaware on December 1992. At that point Activision moved its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Southern California. While emerging from bankruptcy, it continued to develop games for PCs and video game consoles and resumed making strategic acquisitions. Activision chose from then on to only concentrate itself in video gaming and nothing else.

In 1991 Activision packaged 20 of Infocom's past games into a CD-ROM collection called The Lost Treasures of Infocom sans most of the "feelies" Infocom was famous for. The success of this compilation led to the 1992 release of 11 more Infocom titles in The Lost Treasures of Infocom II.

In 2003, Activision, along with several other game software publishers, was investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for its accounting practices, namely the use of the "return reserve" to allegedly smooth quarterly results.

In 2004, the company marked its 25th anniversary, and stated that it had posted record earnings and the twelfth consecutive year of revenue growth.

In 2006, Activision secured the video game license to make games based on the world of James Bond from MGM Interactive. An exclusive agreement between the two begins in September 2007 with Activision's first game set to be released in May 2008.

Sega 32X - Quick History and Specs List

The 32x debuted in 1994. It was an add-on for the Genesis. It connects to the Genesis by plugging-in the unit into the Genesis's cartage port. It is said that the 32x increase the speed of the unit by 19x! This increase in performance is possible thanks to its 2 RISC based processors.
The 32X
The Sega 32X added better color (finally), faster performance, and 3D graphics to the Genesis and Sega CD. The whole idea is sort of strange considering that when you get the Genesis and attach a Sega CD and the 32X you now have a huge chunk of hardware worth well over $400 with massive parallel processing power that still pales in comparison to say a Saturn. Still, the whole thing wasn't too bad with some great translations like Virtua Racing Deluxe and Virtua Fighter. The system had a few notable titles released before it's quick demise at the release of the Saturn and Playstation.
The idea of emulating every aspect of the 32X is quite a challenge. You'd have to emulate both the Genesis and the Sega CD first, and then write up your SH-2 core and God knows how the 32X sound processor works. The 32X is another case of someone reverse-engineering the hardware to gain the knowledge to emulate the machine. Even though the 32X, (for the most part) takes over the Genesis unit, it still allows you to play Genesis games by passing through the data from the 32x to the Genesis unit.


Quick Specs List:

Released: 1994

Processor: Dual Hitachi SH2 RISC Processors (one master and one slave)
operating at 23Mhz each

Co-Processor: 68000, Z80, VDP (Genesis) 68000 (Sega CD)

Data Path width: 32-bits within 32X

Color Palette: 32,768

On screen: 32,768

3D Capabilities: 50,000 Texture Mapped Polygons per second

Sound: Stereo PCM plus an extra 2 channels to the Genesis and Sega CD

Ram: extra 512 Kilbytes for the Genesis and Sega CD

Cart Size: 16 - 32 Megabit

32X Games Reviews Part 1

AFTERBURNER (1 PLAYER) 60%

Afterburner is based on a late 80's arcade jet fighter game of the same name, you view the action from behind your plane, which is equipped with machine guns and lock-on missiles. Gameplay is strictly arcade and the graphics and sound are much better than the Megadrive version, (due to faster scaling and more colors) but gameplay is where it fails ... miserably, there is no skill or technique required for playing, the action is so fast and frantic that if you think\look at what your shooting, you'll be dead! and you wont know what hit you. The only way to make any progress in the game is to, turn the difficulty right down, put your guns on auto fire, and wobble the D-pad around like a nutter! WHERE'S THE FUN IN THAT! This coupled with an over responsive cross hair, and hit or miss controls, seals the games fate.


B

BC RACERS (2 PLAYERS) 40%

BC Racers is a Mario Kart style game set in the stone age, the characters are funny, colorful and well drawn, each have their own strengths and weaknesses. So the graphics are o.k, what about gameplay and sound? Well the sound is rubbish, and it's practically unplayable because it skips and stutters and jumps about so much, that you cant gage punches properly at other players or tell wether your turbo is on or not. This problem is greatly magnified in the split screen 2 player mode. In the end this is a poor port of an average game, and if you really have to own it, get the Mega CD or SNES versions instead.

BLACKTHORNE (1 PLAYER) 90%

Wow! a great 32X game! (rub your eyes) Blackthorne is a 2D platform adventure game in the same vein as Flashback and Abe's Odessy, only cooler. In the game you have to rescue slaves from an army of evil Ork type monsters by strategic gunning and puzzle solving. The graphics and sound are very good , with sharp digitized sprites, nicely drawn backdrops and silky smooth animation. Gameplay and control is intuitive and easy to use, your character can run, jump, roll, shoot, throw bombs and hide in the shadows to take cover from incoming fire. Enemy AI is spot on, and hapless slaves often get shot up in a gunfight. Blackthorne was released on other consoles too, (GBA being the most recent) but 32X owners will be happy to know that this is the best console version out there.

BRUTAL UNLEASHED (2 PLAYERS) 50%

Brutal is a 2D fighting game. You main characters are martial arts animals, dogs, rabbits and the like. There is nothing drastically wrong with the game except it's so stale and boring ... that and the fact that it doesn't offer anything new over the Megadrive, Mega CD and SNES versions. The graphics are nice, colorful and well animated, but gameplay is hampered by you having to choose a character and EARN your attack moves by competing in a series of one on one fights ... big mistake, fighters of this type should be fun and fast paced, (like Street Fighter) not drawn out and tedious like this one.

COSMIC CARNAGE (2 PLAYERS)45%

Cosmic Carnage is a 2D one on one fighter in which alien fighters battle choose different body armour before each round to increase their fighting potential, the characters are large and colorful and there is a lot of sprite scaling going on, as you punch, kick, grapple and rip limbs off each other ... and this is where it goes wrong. I'm pretty sure that this game was designed to show off what the 32X could do, because the extra color pallete and mode 7 style scaling is gratuitously over used, to the extent that the game looks silly, the colors are gaudy and the sprite scaling simply scales too much, bringing large, ugly pixels right up to the screen. To make matters worse the fighters are restricted to only a handful of stiff, awkward attacks, the gameplay has all but been forgotten, in a quest to showcase the 32X extra capabilities over the Megadrive ... could this have been done on the Megadive? ... No ... And who cares.

D

DARXIDE (1 PLAYER) 60%

Darxide is a 3D polygonal space shooter viewed from behind your ship. The ship is equipped with the usual lasers and rockets needed to blast all those alien ships and asteroids that cross your path. The graphics are some of the nicest you'll see on the 32X, it's done in proper 3D textured polygons and they all animate and scale very smoothly (probably achieved by not having to do much background ... space is black y'see) and the draw distance isn't an issue because objects fade nicely into view from the dark void, adding to the feeling of being in deep space. The sound is o.k, with minimal sound effects and a passable trippy-techno sound track playing in the background. But poor gameplay and bad controls spoil all of this. Targeting enemies is a tricky affair , due to an over responsive cross hair and a rubbish radar that is just a load of colored dots at the top of the screen do nothing to convey a sense of distance. Could have been a great game ... but is just mediocre.

DOOM (1 PLAYER) 88%

Needs no introduction really. Doom is THE original first person shooter, now other reviews have given the 32X version a hard time for not having full screen (there is a border around the edge of the screen) I on the other hand think this is a pretty good conversion for loads of reasons. The game features levels from both Doom 1 and 2, the graphics are sharp, smooth and colorful, the controls are tight and easy to use, and the sound is exactly the same as it was in the original PC Doom. Nothing has been lost from the gameplay, it's still fast, frantic, fraggin' fun, and you'll forget the smaller screen size after about 5 minutes play anyway.

K

KNUCKLES CHAOTIX (1 PLAYER) 79%

This is yet another 32X title to recieve unfair criticism by reviewers. I suppose that Sonic 1,2 & 3 fans might be a little dissapointed because Chaotix doesn't really play like a classic sonic title. You play as Knuckles over Sonic style stages, and you are always attached to various buddies by an invisible bungee type force who helps (hinders) your progress through the game, so team work is the order of the day here. The graphics are lush and colorful, with sprite scaling effects (albeit a bit blocky on the knuckles sprite) and a 3D polygon sub level where you must collect blue orbs (Tempest stylee). Not being a huge sonic fan I judged the game with an unbiased view, I'm not saying this is a great game, but the 32X is short on decent titles, and this is one of the better ones.

K

KOLIBRI (1 PLAYER) 20%

Strange game Kolibri, it's a shoot 'em up that see's you take control of a humming bird. So what's wrong with it then? Well first of all the gameplay, it's hard to know what you're supposed to do, and when you do complete a mission, you still don't know. The control of your humming bird while being quite authentic is annoying, like swimming against a strong tide, the graphics are pretty, but boring (flowers, plants, trees and the like) and it slows down qite a bit when there are too many sprites on screen, most noticeable when you are rescuing your humming bird brethren from the evil insects, in which case you cant tell which one is your bird because they look exactly like you do, and they follow you around the place, leading to you getting killed. Kolibri sucks ... nuff said!

History of the Philips CD-i

1984
Philips and Sony began independently to work on another derivative of CD which would combine audio, text and graphics.
1985
The two companies joined forces to develop a draft standard at the beginning of 1985, and later that year Matsushita joined in to work on the development of integrated circuits.
1986
The first public announcement of the new product - Compact Disc-Interactive - was made at the first industry conference convened in March 1986 to promote CD-ROM in the United States. A provisional standard (the ‘Green Book’) was issued in May.
1987
A full functional specification of the system was issued in March 1987.CD-i discs and prototypes were demonstrated to licensees in June 1987.
1988
The first working samples of players were distributed to developers in Autumn 1988.

1990
Philips introduced a range of hardware options and developers’ tools to encourage small software houses to enter the industry. A package was released, aimed at users who wanted to evaluate CD-i, both through playing back existing software, and/or use the supplied software to emulate a CD-i disc. The package, launched in February 1990 in the United States, and from mid-1990 in Europe, comprised the 180 player/controller/interfaces together with a monitor, a 100 Mbyte hard disc, and basic authoring software which allowed the user to put together graphics, text and audio using a sequence editor. The price also included limited studio services for processing images and audio, as well as one place on two training courses for designers and programmers. For users who were already experienced at software development on PC systems, one of the erstwhile ‘taboo’ products — the PC Bridge — enabled video, audio and text files to be created within the PC operating system MS-DOS, and then converted to CD-i format.
1991-1993
The 16-bit CD-ROM based system was not promoted as a gaming platform. In advertising, Phillips highlighted the multimedia applications that the CD-i would be able to perform. Dutch electronics giant Philips, begins to introduce its Compact Disc Interactive (CD-i) technology to industrial users before marketing it as an entertainment system for consumers. It is based on CD-ROM ('Read Only Memory') technology which stores and reads information in the same way as a compact disc. CD-i systems can play audio discs and films as well as numerous other publications from computer games to illustrated encyclopaedias.Philips sold various professional CD-i players next to the standard consumer models. Both types of players comply fully to the CD-i standard as defined in the Green Book and were based on the same CPU and audio and video ICs, but the professional players usually offered some extra features. There were professional players with an integrated floppy disk drive, parallel ports to connect a printer or ZIP-drive, SCSI-ports, Ethernet network connections or with up to 5 MB of extra RAM. Some players had a feature that enabled the users to customise the start-up screen of the player shell. Several professional players were especially made for CD-i development studios since they included input ports to connect an emulator to simulate the playback of a CD-i disc from an external hard disk for testing purposes.Although there were various models of CD-i players, every CD-i disc performed exactly the same in terms of system speed or audio and video quality on every CD-i system. The Green Book extensively specifies how and at what speed the audio and video data should be read from the disc and parsed trough the appropriate decoding ICs. Even if a faster CPU was used in a CD-i player (which is allowed by the Green Book, but never implemented in any CD-i player) system performance would only rise slightly because the real-time retrieval of audio and video from a disc is not influenced by the processor.
1994
By 1994, with low sales, Philips decided to alter its approach to advertising the CD-i. It was finally marketed as videogame platform. The console was redesigned to more resemble a standard gaming system. The price was lowered to $299 and a pack-in game named Burn:Cycle was included.
1995
Philips' decision had been made too late. By this time there was heavy anticipation centered on the upcoming release of the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation systems. Sales for the revamped CD-i were poor. In the summer of 1995, Philips began to release versions of CD-i software for play on the Sega Saturn and PC. Also in the summer of 1995, Philips announced plans to release a modem add-on for the CD-I, though there was no set date.
1996
In the summer of 1996, Philips announced that they would be discontinuing the CD-i system. Reportedly, Philips had lost close to one billion dollars on the console since its introduction to the US.In early fall 1996; Philips did eventually release an Internet terminal designed for use with television sets. It retailed for $329.