Computer games - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 181

that run, jump, and climb over obstacles through the different levels of the
game. Donkey Kong, Miyamoto's earlier game with Mario as a character, was the
first game that allowed players to jump over obstacles and cross gaps. Since his
appearance in 1985, the character Mario has appeared in more than one hundred
different games and is the anchor for what is now the best-selling video game
franchise of all time with more than two hundred million games sold.
Miyamoto followed up his success with another innovative game for the
NES console, The Legend of Zelda, released in 1986. In this game, Miyamoto
deliberately decided to focus more on puzzles and riddles than just adventure
and battle scenarios. Exploration was also a key feature of the game. He took
inspiration from his childhood in Kyoto, Japan:

When I was a child, I went hiking and found a lake. It was quite a surprise for
me to stumble upon it. When I traveled round the country without a map,
trying to find my way, stumbling on amazing things as I went, I realized how
it felt to go on an adventure like this. 5

B.9.8. Shigeru Miyamoto is the crea-
tor of the Donkey Kong, Super Mario
Bros., and The Legend of Zelda fran-
chises for Nintendo. He is one of the
most successful game designers and
is often referred to as “the father of
modern gaming.” B2

Miyamoto had heard of Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of the famous novelist F. Scott
Fitzgerald, and decided to name Princess Zelda after her because he thought
the name sounded “pleasant and significant.” The Legend of Zelda is the fourth
best-selling title for the NES console. It was the first console game that allowed
players to stop playing and save the state of the game for them to resume later.
In 1991, the Sega Corporation introduced Sonic the Hedgehog for their
Genesis console. This was a platform game like Mario, and the blue hedgehog
Sonic soon became the mascot of Sega's video game business. The Sonic the
Hedgehog franchise made Sega's console very competitive in the early 1990s - at
one point they had 65 percent of the market in North America. However, they
faced strong competition, first from Nintendo, and then from Sony, when the
PlayStation console was launched in 1994. The PlayStation or PS1 was the first
console to sell more than one hundred million units. Faced with such competi-
tion, and with the Microsoft Xbox launching in 2001, Sega dropped out of the con-
sole market in 2001. The company has since focused on producing video games,
including their Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, for other console manufacturers.
By the early 2000s, there were only three major game console sup-
pliers left in the market - Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Nintendo had
introduced new consoles at regular intervals after the NES with the Super
Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) in 1991, Nintendo 64 in 1996, and the
GameCube in 2001. Although the GameCube was profitable, its worldwide
sales of twenty-two million units placed it well below Sony in popularity.
Sony had introduced the PlayStation 2 (PS2) console in 2000, and within a few
years the console had sold more than 150 million units, making it the best-
selling console of all time. The video game series Grand Theft Auto, which put
players in the role of gangsters, had been a major success for Sony's PS1 con-
sole, and the company secured a brief exclusive on the PS2 for Grand Theft
Auto III, the groundbreaking three-dimensional version of the game.
Microsoft released its Xbox console with a game called Halo: Combat Evolved,
or simply Halo ( Fig. 9.7 ). Halo was a first-person shooter (FPS) game, in which the
player aims and shoots at targets seen from the viewpoint of the main charac-
ter. Halo was extremely successful in North America and Europe, and Microsoft