References & Bibliography

References

All Business, (2000), Nintendo's Pokémon Video Game Sales Leap 220Percent as Franchise Remains Number one Among Kids, [online], Available from  http://www.allbusiness.com/company-activities-management/product-management/6465373-1.html , Accessed on 7.2.2011

Allen, M, (2006), Popular culture, globalization and Japan, Edinburgh, Taylor & Francis

AtariAge, (2001), Atari Lynx History, [online] Available from http://www.atariage.com/Lynx/history.html , Accessed on 29.01.2011

Laing, G, (2004), Digital retro, Michigan, Sybet

Loguidence, B and Barton, M, (2009), Vintage Games: an insider look at the history of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the most influential games of all time, Focal Press

Sheff, D, (1993), Game over: how Nintendo zapped an American industry, captured your dollars, and enslaved your children, United States of America, Random House

Simenov, G, (2001), Gameboy Colour: A history in the making and already made, [online], Available from  http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/gameboy_color/59576 , Accessed on 9.02.2011

Slade, G, (2006), Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, Harvard, University Of Harvard Press.

Wesley, D and Barczak, G, (2010), Innovation and Marketing in the Video game Industry, Boston, Gower

Wolf, M, (2008), The Video Game Explosion, Wisconsin, ABC –CLIO

Wolf, M, (2001), The Medium Of the Video Game, Texas, University of Texas Press

Bibliography

Berger, A, (2002), Video games: a popular culture phenomenon, Liverpool, Transaction Publishers

Compton, S, (2004), Gamers: writers, artists & programmers on the pleasures of pixels, Canada, Soft Skull Press

Edery, D, (2009), Changing the game: how video games are transforming the future of business, London, FT Press

Herman, L, (1997), Phoenix: The Fall & Rise of Videogames, USA, Rolenta Press

Kent, S, (2001), The ultimate history of video games: from Pong to Pokémon and beyond: the story behind the craze that touched our lives and changed the world, Cambridge, Prima

Kline, S, (2003), Digital play: the interaction of technology, culture, and marketing, Toronto, McGill-Queen's Press

Ogden, S, (2005), Game design: theory & practice, Cambridge, Jones & Bartlett Learning

Slaven, A, (2002), Video Game Bible, 1985-2002, Liverpool, Trafford Publishing

Tobin, J, (2004), Pikachu's global adventure: the rise and fall of Pokémon, London, Duke University Press

Ziesak, J, (2009), Wii Innovate - How Nintendo Created a New Market Through the Strategic Innovation Wii, Norway, GRIN Verlag

Economic Issues

Although Tetris and Pokemon were massive sellers for the Game Boy and Tetris was the game that put the Game Boy on the map, plus the ownership of the massively successful Pokemon franchise made the Game Boy a hopusehold name but and even then neither of those games was it’s all biggest seller. By far the biggest-selling Gameboy game of all time was the original Super Mario Land, which sold an incredible 17 million copies. In comparison Pokemon Red and Blue sold about 14 million copies combined (Simenov 2001 - http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/gameboy_color/59576)

Technological Issues

The first Game Boy to be released had extremely limited technical capabilities, the original had a  2” screen which used only four shades of grey and was not backlit. Considering the Atari which at the same time released the ‘Lynx’, which had a much more ergonomic design, a colour LD screen and was able to connect up to 17 other players via it’s ‘ComLynx’ networking system ; a system which right up until just before the initial release date would have used infra-red signals, as opposed to it’s lower-fi cabling method but was changed at last minute. The Game Boy only had connectivity for more than one player on a single game called “Faceball 2000”. So Game Boy was by no means the technical superior, in fact it was panned by many critics and reviewers as an out-of-date poorly conceived device.

It held the number one spot for so long for a single reason, a puzzle game called ‘Tetris’. Tetris game bundled with the core package and was synonymous with the Game Boy. It was invented by a Soviet mathematician by the name of Alexey Pajitnov. A simple puzzle game which gave Nintendo’s Game Boy the almost sole monopoly of the hand-held gaming market. Scheff (2006) agrees with Tetris being a large part of the Game Boy’s success and states “There is no way to measure accurately how much ‘Tetris’ contributed to the success of the Game Boy… Once a customer bought one, Nintendo could sell more games, an average of three a year at $35 a pop. Not counting Game Boy, ‘Tetris brought Nintendo at least $80 million. Counting Game Boy, the figure is in the billions of dollars” (2006:223)

All in all the Game Boy has had 7 incarnations, since it’s original was released…

·         Game Boy (1989)

·         Game Boy Pocket (1998)

·         Game Boy Color  (1998)

·         Game Boy Light (1998) – only released in Japan

·         Game Boy Advance (1998)

·         Game Boy Advance SP (2001)

·         Game Boy Micro (2005)

It is unusual to see that it took Nintendo nine years to make a real advancement to their hand-held device, it is possible that Nintendo, having no real competitors simply felt no need to improve.

Perhaps another of the reasons that Nintendo held the hand-held gaming top-spot over the far technically superior was GameGear and Lynx was its battery-life. Both the Lynx and the Gamegear, being larger devices and with their color screens held six AA batteries, giving them about 4.5 hours of battery life, while the Game Boy worked on just 4 AA batteries which gave it over 8 hours more gaming time.

It could be argued that it was not the Game boy itself that made the console such a phenomenon and dominated the market as the number one hand-held console for so long is not the console but its games. Were it not for Nintendo owning the rights to the Pokemon franchise and Super Mario then perhaps the Game Boy would have been a flash in the pan and could not have ridden on the tails of Tetris alone.

Ethical Issues

The Game Boy’s Flagship game Tetris was at the centre of a number of court cases, as previously mentioned the game was invented in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov who was working for the Computer Sciences Department at the Soviet Academy of Sciences which in 1986 they then loaded into the IBM PC first in in Hungary. The rights to the game were swiftly obtained by a company called Spectrum Holobyte who just beat a British company called Andromeda to the post. After failing to obtain the rights from Pajitnov, Andromeda gained them from the Hungarian IBM company. From this point it seemed that two spate companied owned the rights to the game, Andromeda apparently owned the rights to the home PC version and Spectrum Holobyte. The issues to the rights and who were the true owners got even more complicated by the time Nintendo came along and wanted to use it in their Game Boy and in 1989 more than a dozen different companies laid claim to the legal rights to the game.

Even after Tetris became as popular as it did and became a household name and gamers of all ages were engrossed by the game, Pajitnov saw very little in the way of royalties for his creation. In fact the Game Boy version sold over 33 million copies and Pajitnov did not receive a peny for them.

It was only in 1996 when the rights for the game reverted back to Pajitnov himself and he created the Tetris Company that he began to have some true financial income from the game.

Cultural Issues

The Game Boy wasn’t the first hand-held, In 1979 Milton Bradley, the company who created the popular ‘Simon’ game, created the first truly programmable hand-held games console ‘Microvison’. Despite the fact that the console was technologically quite advanced for the time as it was fully upgradeable due to the CPU’s being housed in the games cartridges rather than the console itself,  the sales for the Microvision swiftly fell and by 1981 was nowhere available. Wolf (2008) explains that perhaps the world’s culture was simple not ready for handheld gaming (2008:144). Another of the reasons the Microvison failed as a venture was that it was given very little support by independent games companies; it’s CPU’s being housed in the game cartidges themselves, the same thing that made it quite an advanced console meant that few games companies wanted to create games for the console if they had to produce the CPU’s as well.

The Game boy revolutionised not only hand-held gaming but gaming culture as a whole as it did what only now the Wii was doing again, it brought adults into gaming. People of all ages were beginning to be seen everywhere with the Game Boys in hand. According to Wesley and Barczak (2010) “Game boys became frequent attachments to business executives who spend hours in first class compartments dropping Tetris blocks” (2010:83)

Although it was the Tetris game that made the Game Boy the market leader in the beginning, it was Nintendo’s use of another cultural phenomenon that helped them to hold on to the title. In 1996 Nintendo released the game ‘Pokemon Red’ to their Game Boy system in Japan and seeing it was it released into America in 1998. The game was a simple Role Playing Game created by Satoshi Tajiri who wanted to emulate insect collecting for children at home. The game was an instant success. This success was not a fluke the marketing was carefully planned, at the time of release of the game, the comic book was released as well and a cartoon series hit Japanese screens very shortly thereafter. It hit multiple media’s within in very short time and this helped to build the games cross-media franchise as gamers would seek-out the comic-book , watch the cartoon and so on. Each would interlink, the cartoon would make the gamer seek out more comics and this cross-pollination was what defined Pokemon as a brand,. at more or less the same time and it’s transmedia technique helped propel the game to massive sales. In fact thanks to Nintendo’s marketing skills and the success of the Game Boy as a console put the sales of Pokemon into the Guiness World Record book, which was just one of its entries among several other entries in 2009’s Guinness World Records Gamer edition, it sold 14.77 million units as of March 2008.

Game Boy’s success was not welcomed by all, in 1992 Bredon Hill Middle School in Evesham, UK followed a trend among many others at the time and banned Game Boy’s from being in the school. Any pupils seen with one in school had their console’s immediately confiscated. This happened in several schools across the UK as well at the US at the time.

Game Boy Research

Here are some facts I found on Game Boy on my initial research...

·         The Game Boy was first released in America in 1989 and then into Europe in 1990

·         Upon its release, in less than a month more than a million were sold and did not even half meet the demand for more.

·         Along with its successor, the game boy colour sold over 118.7 million worldwide.

·         Created the hand-held gaming sub-culture

·         Created by Gunpei Yokoi and Nintendo’s R&D1 team.

VR & Amiga Vs Game Boy

For the industry case study, I have two options on my subject that i think would make interesting reports.


My first option is the Amiga 1000 CS and it's VR gaming platform. Its a very interesting topic as it was the only publicly available VR arcade system and had a great boom and crash at a time when Virtual Reality was seen to be the future of gaming and everyone from Joe Public to the military were heavily investing in it's future. However the information available on the Amiga 1000CS itself is scarce and there are very few books on it's history, in fact there are no books specifically on the Amiga at all. Online resources are few and far between as well, being mainly a few forums and wikipedia. I've contacted a few people in the industry to see if I could gain an interview on the subject but as of yet have had no replies. 


My alternate subject for the industry case study is to research the Game Boy. This is another interesting topic as it kicked off mobile gaming and created it's own sub-culture. The research for Game Boy information is much easier to come by with several books and a wealth of online resources on the subject. Again I have tried to contact a few people in the industry and am awaiting a reply. With the Game Boy subject I can also conduct a questionnaire into it's popularity.