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TIME: Almanac 1993
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TIME Almanac 1993.iso
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061091
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0610140.000
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1992-08-28
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LIVING, Page 75Hold On to Your Joysticks
Nintendo's powerful new game system could get zapped
Sometime in the next few months, an argument is going to
break out in the 30 million families infected by the Nintendo
video-game craze. The kids, primed by saturation advertising,
are going to tell their parents they "gotta have" the awesome
new 16-bit Nintendo system for Christmas. The parents,
remembering the hundreds of dollars they have invested in the
old 8-bit Nintendo, are going to say, "No way."
Nintendo last week began taking bets on how many kids are
going to win that argument. At the Summer Consumer Electronics
Show in Chicago, the purveyor of the world's most successful
electronic-game system unveiled its long-awaited successor: a
gray plastic book-size box called the Super Nintendo
Entertainment System. When it becomes available in September,
Super NES will cost $199.95 (twice the price of the old NES) for
the basic game machine, two hand-held controllers, the latest
Super Mario Bros. adventure and a $50 coupon for another game.
The machine will also be backed by a $95 million nonstop
marketing blitz designed to convince every American
preadolescent that life without 16 bits wouldn't be worth
living.
It's not going to be an easy sell. In theory, the more
powerful computer chip at the heart of Super NES can generate
games with richer colors, clearer sound, faster action and more
sophisticated play. A 16-bit chip, for example, can create
32,768 colors, compared with 52 for an 8-bit chip. But it's
going to be hard to see those improvements on the fuzzy family
TVs most Nintendo sets are plugged into. And because the
original Nintendo -- and a portable successor called Game Boy
-- uses different chips, the old games won't work in the new
machine, rendering 200 million cartridges obsolete.
More worrisome for Nintendo are signs that the video-game
frenzy the Japanese-owned company stirred up over the past five
years may be starting to fizzle. Sales of the old Nintendo
system have fallen off sharply (down 46% in the first half of
1991), and discount tags have replaced SOLD OUT signs in toy
stores across the U.S. "I played all the games so much, I just
got bored with them," says Tomas Romano, 9, of Brooklyn, N.Y.
He and his friends now prefer Little League baseball.
Nintendo should be able to drum up enough excitement to
sell out this year's supply of 2 million Super NES sets. What's
less clear is how long that enthusiasm will last. At best, say
analysts, over the next five years Nintendo will sell about
two-thirds as many of the new systems as it sold of the old. At
worst, Nintendo could end up like Atari, which in the early
1980s tried to replace a wildly successful video-game player
with one that was more powerful but incompatible. Atari ended
up with a mountain of unsold game cartridges that got loaded
onto dump trucks and used as landfill.
By Philip Elmer-DeWitt