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silveradept[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]
(And I just said that most of my journey didn't involve the Motorola 68000, didn't I?)
This was the console that sparked a lot of video game history, as well as what older me would look back upon and call "posturing fanboyism" with all the respect and dignity such a label deserves. The marketing campaign for the Genesis / Mega Drive in the United States positioned the system for people who cared about bigger numbers, including the "16-BIT" emblazoned on the console itself, so as to remind everyone that it was part of a new generation of consoles, as opposed to the charming and quaint NES. The mascot chosen, Sonic the Hedgehog, was supposed to be brash, in your face, and to have games that would zip about at speeds that Mario could only dream of. If you're looking for the first obvious signs of the gatekeeping attitude and division of people into "gamers" and "scrubs / n00bs," the marketing and posturing of this console against the Nintendo Family Computer (the NES) and then the Super Family Computer (the Super Nintendo Entertainment System) would be a solid base to build your thesis on.
The Genesis would also go on to develop a reputation for being willing to carry games that were bloodier and gorier than the ones that were available for the NES. Many arcade ports would find their way to the consoles of those generation, like the last one, and while Nintendo generally wanted games to be censored or altered in watch a way that would make them all-ages and okay for family gaming, Sega did not go in that direction. The console version of Mortal Kombat for the Genesis, if you played it as it had been constructed, would have been much the same as the one that would be released for the Super Nintendo, with the red blood turned digitally grey into splattering "sweat". Given that the government was rumbling quite a bit at this time about the increase of explicit content in video games, trying to figure out whether the fact that a child was pushing a button (or a few) to cause these violent acts meant they were of a different caliber than the violence in entertainment options available in movies and television, having it be "sweat" and locking some of the available finishers would make the game appear to be less of a Murder Simulator. Sega, however, included an unlock code for those who knew. On one of their demo screens, one that talked about the many definitions of the word code, it was possible to input the button sequence A-B-A-C-A-B-B and the limiters would come off. Red blood would spatter and the original arcade fatalities would be restored. (This could also be achieved by putting in DULLARD — ↓↑←←A→↓ — at the first available menu to activate the cheat menu and turning on the blood option in the cheat menu.} If what you wanted in your console port was the arcade-true experience of red blood and fatalities that ripped out spines and exploded heads, them you got the Genesis version of the game. That was the version of the games I played with an elementary school friend, along with an arcade port of Lethal Enforcers (a light gun cop game), an X-Men licensed game for Genesis, even though neither of us were good enough to get to the level where we would have to figure out that to reset the countdown clock and prolong the level, we would have to press the console's reset button, one of the Street Fighter releases for Genesis, Streets of Rage 2 or 3, Virtua Fighter (where I learned how to cheese and how to get cheesed), and an action-RPG called Cadash, which we could get pretty far in together, but still not actually to the end of the game. Eventually, I would beat the game in emulation myself, using a certain amount of save state assistance, because Cadash had no progression saving in it, and it got mean right about the time we made it to zombie town.
And, to date myself, the games were rented at a video store for the weekend when we were together. I also understood on an inner level, even if I wouldn't be able to articulate it aloud, that much of the media choices with this friend were the kind that my parents probably wouldn't approve of for my age, but the parenting decisions going on with this friend were more permissive about that kind of thing. We're lost contact out of elementary school, except for one call while in my university years where, despite not having heard from that person in nearly a decade and a half, I was able to correctly identify him at a guess. He had joined the military at that point, and I worry that he might have been one of the many casualties of the wars started in those years.
We also played a fair amount of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and our combined skill level was good enough for about five of the seven necessary bonus stages needed to get the good ending of the game, and we still failed out on the game even with cheats well before getting to the end boss. Now, the Genesis this friend owned had a single controller, sometimes two if we rented one additional controller with the game (or it came with one.) Most games of the era needed more than one button to play, and actually, some of them really needed more than the three buttons the Genesis controller had - it's a really awkward thing to have to switch between punches and kicks when playing a quick-paced fighting game that's based on a combo system because your controller only had three of the six buttons it really needed to have. Sonic, on the other hand, only needs one button too do all of its appropriate actions - jump, spin dash, all of it controlled with just one button. In Sonic 2, the regular game has Tails follow Sonic and mostly mirror his actions after a short delay. With a controller plugged into port two, the second player can take control of Tails and move him independently of Sonic. This has some great advantages, in that Tails can go collect rings and the like, so long as he stays in the screen with Sonic, and that Tails is invincible. What might be tricky navigation for Sonic and the chance of having all his rings popped out by making contact with something hostile kiss no trouble for Tails, who can take his and clear out enemies without worry that he will pop out any rings at all. So, obviously, the best way to play the game is with that second player independently helping out. But we usually only had one controller between us to share. One of those days, I was looking at the DE-9 connector for the Genesis and thought it looked fairly similar to the one the Atari 2600 had, so on a whim, I plugged the Atari joystick into the Genesis to see what would happen. (Child of an engineer. Every now and then, you go "Huh. I wonder…" and see what you can do to find an answer to it.) To my entire surprise, it worked perfectly. The single button mapped to A, it seemed, which meant the joystick was useless for many other games, since A, for example, for Streets of Rage, was the special attack button that could do massive damage, but also ate some amount of the life bar for each use. For Sonic, though, it was perfect, and it meant that I could control the invincible Tails using technology from a much earlier era, and that was pretty cool.
The Genesis also ended up being the first system I knew of where one large game had to be broken apart into two because of the limitations of the storage cartridges. The "lock-on" technology that came with Sonic and Knuckles was meant so that it could be linked in to Sonic 3, and then someone would be able to play the full game of Sonic 3 as intended. Of course, over of the things that people would them do is see if Sonic and Knuckles could be used with other games. I believe an April Fool's joke gave us doctored screenshots suggesting you could play as Sonic in Mortal Kombat (with the caveat that you really needed to make sure Sub-Zero never got a freeze attack off, or it would lock the software). The truth was, though, that the lock-on technology was meant for Sonic 3 alone, so that the two games could be played was one, but also contained a patch to play as Knuckles in Sonic 2, and would offer up a level of one of the bonus games if connected to another game and a specific button combination was pressed. Unless it was the original Sonic the Hedgehog, and then the full bonus game would unlock and someone could play the entire set of levels instead of just one. Loyalty to the series is what allowed someone to take advantage of the full offerings of the lock-on cartridge.
I never owned an actual Genesis in my life, even if I might own games from the Genesis era on later platforms. Since I tend to buy my technology used, since that's about the point I can afford it, I sometimes miss the window for it entirely. And, truthfully, the reputation that the Genesis got for being a system that had more violent software on it would have made it a hard sell for my household, even if I was playing a fair amount of Mortal Kombat with friends. (That I would also end up with Mortal Kombat II for the system I did end up buying, well, I was older then and attitudes had loosened some.) Beyond that, though, the Genesis also managed to have available for it a game called Night Trap. It's not a game I would have played, and it's still not really a game that I would play today, since it's about using surveillance footage and a house full of devious traps to protect a slumber party from vampires. There's actually minimal blood in the game, having watched a playthrough, even though there's a device meant to extract blood from humans that gets out to use if one of the factions of vampires is able to capture one of the partygoers. Most of the traps drop a target down a pit, or fling them away, or put them on the wrong side of a revolving object with ominous smoke. And actually playing the game means that you mostly miss out on the story, since you're too busy activating traps in the other parts of the house to pay attention to the slumber party, except when you need to intervene specifically to save one member of it. I guess the thought of vampires killing bedwear dressed girls was too much for the crusaders for them to bother actually playing the game instead of playing for the cameras, but then again, people got in trouble over Hot Coffee even though that part of the game was not actively pointed at in any way.
So we can thank Mortal Kombat, Night Trap, Doom, and plenty of others like it for bringing us the organization that we now know as the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, who function, essentially, in the same role that the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board does, as a voluntary ratings and suggestions board whose job it is to make sure there's enough information in there about any particular game so the purchaser knows what they're getting into and to enforce certain industry rules about minimum age requirements to purchase games at a particular rating. Because the alternative would have been for a government classification board, and Everyone Knew at that time that if the government actually went through with the threat, it would kill the industry or sanitize it severely, and there were enough examples of how industries before video games had gone through this cycle that the gaming industry wanted to make their time spent in the time-out zone to be as small as possible.
The Genesis would eventually get both the Sega CD external peripheral and the Sega 32X made for it, to try and keep the system alive for as long as possible. It managed a respectable run in its original console and with the expansions, and all of those systems live on really well in emulation scene and the speed runner scene. Turns out there are more than a few ways through a Sonic level, some much faster than others.
- CPU: Motorola 68000 at 7.61 MHz, Zilog Z80 @ 3.56 MHz (Compatibility and Sound Controller)
- Memory: 64 KB RAM, 1 MB of ROM, 64KB dedicated video RAM, 8 KB of dedicated sound RAM
- Graphics: Yamaha YM7101 Video Display Processor: 61 simultaneous colors of 512 color pallete @ 320 x 224. Sprites, tiles, the whole thing.
- Sound: A Texas Instruments 76489 chip for most sounds paired with a Yamaha YM 2612 for FM generation, 6-channel stereo.
- Inputs: Two DE-9 ports that accepted 3 or 6 button gamepads, light guns, and other compatible peripherals including the Atari 2600 joystick (although that's only useful in games that require only one button to play…)
(And I just said that most of my journey didn't involve the Motorola 68000, didn't I?)
This was the console that sparked a lot of video game history, as well as what older me would look back upon and call "posturing fanboyism" with all the respect and dignity such a label deserves. The marketing campaign for the Genesis / Mega Drive in the United States positioned the system for people who cared about bigger numbers, including the "16-BIT" emblazoned on the console itself, so as to remind everyone that it was part of a new generation of consoles, as opposed to the charming and quaint NES. The mascot chosen, Sonic the Hedgehog, was supposed to be brash, in your face, and to have games that would zip about at speeds that Mario could only dream of. If you're looking for the first obvious signs of the gatekeeping attitude and division of people into "gamers" and "scrubs / n00bs," the marketing and posturing of this console against the Nintendo Family Computer (the NES) and then the Super Family Computer (the Super Nintendo Entertainment System) would be a solid base to build your thesis on.
The Genesis would also go on to develop a reputation for being willing to carry games that were bloodier and gorier than the ones that were available for the NES. Many arcade ports would find their way to the consoles of those generation, like the last one, and while Nintendo generally wanted games to be censored or altered in watch a way that would make them all-ages and okay for family gaming, Sega did not go in that direction. The console version of Mortal Kombat for the Genesis, if you played it as it had been constructed, would have been much the same as the one that would be released for the Super Nintendo, with the red blood turned digitally grey into splattering "sweat". Given that the government was rumbling quite a bit at this time about the increase of explicit content in video games, trying to figure out whether the fact that a child was pushing a button (or a few) to cause these violent acts meant they were of a different caliber than the violence in entertainment options available in movies and television, having it be "sweat" and locking some of the available finishers would make the game appear to be less of a Murder Simulator. Sega, however, included an unlock code for those who knew. On one of their demo screens, one that talked about the many definitions of the word code, it was possible to input the button sequence A-B-A-C-A-B-B and the limiters would come off. Red blood would spatter and the original arcade fatalities would be restored. (This could also be achieved by putting in DULLARD — ↓↑←←A→↓ — at the first available menu to activate the cheat menu and turning on the blood option in the cheat menu.} If what you wanted in your console port was the arcade-true experience of red blood and fatalities that ripped out spines and exploded heads, them you got the Genesis version of the game. That was the version of the games I played with an elementary school friend, along with an arcade port of Lethal Enforcers (a light gun cop game), an X-Men licensed game for Genesis, even though neither of us were good enough to get to the level where we would have to figure out that to reset the countdown clock and prolong the level, we would have to press the console's reset button, one of the Street Fighter releases for Genesis, Streets of Rage 2 or 3, Virtua Fighter (where I learned how to cheese and how to get cheesed), and an action-RPG called Cadash, which we could get pretty far in together, but still not actually to the end of the game. Eventually, I would beat the game in emulation myself, using a certain amount of save state assistance, because Cadash had no progression saving in it, and it got mean right about the time we made it to zombie town.
And, to date myself, the games were rented at a video store for the weekend when we were together. I also understood on an inner level, even if I wouldn't be able to articulate it aloud, that much of the media choices with this friend were the kind that my parents probably wouldn't approve of for my age, but the parenting decisions going on with this friend were more permissive about that kind of thing. We're lost contact out of elementary school, except for one call while in my university years where, despite not having heard from that person in nearly a decade and a half, I was able to correctly identify him at a guess. He had joined the military at that point, and I worry that he might have been one of the many casualties of the wars started in those years.
We also played a fair amount of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and our combined skill level was good enough for about five of the seven necessary bonus stages needed to get the good ending of the game, and we still failed out on the game even with cheats well before getting to the end boss. Now, the Genesis this friend owned had a single controller, sometimes two if we rented one additional controller with the game (or it came with one.) Most games of the era needed more than one button to play, and actually, some of them really needed more than the three buttons the Genesis controller had - it's a really awkward thing to have to switch between punches and kicks when playing a quick-paced fighting game that's based on a combo system because your controller only had three of the six buttons it really needed to have. Sonic, on the other hand, only needs one button too do all of its appropriate actions - jump, spin dash, all of it controlled with just one button. In Sonic 2, the regular game has Tails follow Sonic and mostly mirror his actions after a short delay. With a controller plugged into port two, the second player can take control of Tails and move him independently of Sonic. This has some great advantages, in that Tails can go collect rings and the like, so long as he stays in the screen with Sonic, and that Tails is invincible. What might be tricky navigation for Sonic and the chance of having all his rings popped out by making contact with something hostile kiss no trouble for Tails, who can take his and clear out enemies without worry that he will pop out any rings at all. So, obviously, the best way to play the game is with that second player independently helping out. But we usually only had one controller between us to share. One of those days, I was looking at the DE-9 connector for the Genesis and thought it looked fairly similar to the one the Atari 2600 had, so on a whim, I plugged the Atari joystick into the Genesis to see what would happen. (Child of an engineer. Every now and then, you go "Huh. I wonder…" and see what you can do to find an answer to it.) To my entire surprise, it worked perfectly. The single button mapped to A, it seemed, which meant the joystick was useless for many other games, since A, for example, for Streets of Rage, was the special attack button that could do massive damage, but also ate some amount of the life bar for each use. For Sonic, though, it was perfect, and it meant that I could control the invincible Tails using technology from a much earlier era, and that was pretty cool.
The Genesis also ended up being the first system I knew of where one large game had to be broken apart into two because of the limitations of the storage cartridges. The "lock-on" technology that came with Sonic and Knuckles was meant so that it could be linked in to Sonic 3, and then someone would be able to play the full game of Sonic 3 as intended. Of course, over of the things that people would them do is see if Sonic and Knuckles could be used with other games. I believe an April Fool's joke gave us doctored screenshots suggesting you could play as Sonic in Mortal Kombat (with the caveat that you really needed to make sure Sub-Zero never got a freeze attack off, or it would lock the software). The truth was, though, that the lock-on technology was meant for Sonic 3 alone, so that the two games could be played was one, but also contained a patch to play as Knuckles in Sonic 2, and would offer up a level of one of the bonus games if connected to another game and a specific button combination was pressed. Unless it was the original Sonic the Hedgehog, and then the full bonus game would unlock and someone could play the entire set of levels instead of just one. Loyalty to the series is what allowed someone to take advantage of the full offerings of the lock-on cartridge.
I never owned an actual Genesis in my life, even if I might own games from the Genesis era on later platforms. Since I tend to buy my technology used, since that's about the point I can afford it, I sometimes miss the window for it entirely. And, truthfully, the reputation that the Genesis got for being a system that had more violent software on it would have made it a hard sell for my household, even if I was playing a fair amount of Mortal Kombat with friends. (That I would also end up with Mortal Kombat II for the system I did end up buying, well, I was older then and attitudes had loosened some.) Beyond that, though, the Genesis also managed to have available for it a game called Night Trap. It's not a game I would have played, and it's still not really a game that I would play today, since it's about using surveillance footage and a house full of devious traps to protect a slumber party from vampires. There's actually minimal blood in the game, having watched a playthrough, even though there's a device meant to extract blood from humans that gets out to use if one of the factions of vampires is able to capture one of the partygoers. Most of the traps drop a target down a pit, or fling them away, or put them on the wrong side of a revolving object with ominous smoke. And actually playing the game means that you mostly miss out on the story, since you're too busy activating traps in the other parts of the house to pay attention to the slumber party, except when you need to intervene specifically to save one member of it. I guess the thought of vampires killing bedwear dressed girls was too much for the crusaders for them to bother actually playing the game instead of playing for the cameras, but then again, people got in trouble over Hot Coffee even though that part of the game was not actively pointed at in any way.
So we can thank Mortal Kombat, Night Trap, Doom, and plenty of others like it for bringing us the organization that we now know as the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, who function, essentially, in the same role that the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board does, as a voluntary ratings and suggestions board whose job it is to make sure there's enough information in there about any particular game so the purchaser knows what they're getting into and to enforce certain industry rules about minimum age requirements to purchase games at a particular rating. Because the alternative would have been for a government classification board, and Everyone Knew at that time that if the government actually went through with the threat, it would kill the industry or sanitize it severely, and there were enough examples of how industries before video games had gone through this cycle that the gaming industry wanted to make their time spent in the time-out zone to be as small as possible.
The Genesis would eventually get both the Sega CD external peripheral and the Sega 32X made for it, to try and keep the system alive for as long as possible. It managed a respectable run in its original console and with the expansions, and all of those systems live on really well in emulation scene and the speed runner scene. Turns out there are more than a few ways through a Sonic level, some much faster than others.
