Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
advantage of the fact that they only needed to produce a few commercials
each year, investing their money into making a handful of highly produced,
relatively expensive ads. As a result, their higher production values stood
out from the clutter of other advertising, aiding in their attempt to draw
attention to the NES.
The authenticity of their games was shown less through the graphics and
in-game presentation than in the development of the ads themselves. The
ad for
Ice Hockey
promoted the game by blending shots of people playing
actual ice hockey with in-game images of the NES version. The game is “as
slick as ice, as fast as fury” because with Nintendo “now you're playing
with power.” The end of the commercial shows a shot going into the net in
the NES version that is continued with a puck coming out of a television
and fl ying by the player who ostensibly scored the goal in the game. The
advertising for
Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!
was built on a similar theme by
intercutting game images with depictions of Tyson hitting a heavy bag. The
ad reached a crescendo by promising players the opportunity to fi ght Tyson
should they make it through the gauntlet of other fi ghters, while the images
switched from game action to a mocking Tyson laughing at the viewer fool-
ish enough to believe they could take on Iron Mike. The Nintendo ads were
based on eradicating the perceived boundary between life and game. Adver-
tising was used to depict the NES as the device that gave players power, a
power anchored in the realm of the real. Nintendo was where players could
take on the heavyweight boxing champion and dig their skates into the
ice. Nintendo enabled players to do more than they could do outside the
game, as suddenly they could become a top-notch boxer or hockey player.
Attempts to defi ne representation in play did not stop here though, as Sony
reached beyond sports to give gamers another ideal to seek.
In making the PlayStation, Sony turned away from the cartridge based
game systems that had become the norm in the wake of the VCS. Tak-
ing advantage of their status as a major electronics company, Sony opted
to use a CD-ROM drive that was capable of
3D
graphics and was easier
and cheaper to develop games for than the proprietary cartridges used by
other consoles at the time. The use of CDs also of ered game companies the
ability to break their games into parts by using multiple CDs for a single
game, therefore including far more data to distinguish their representation
of play.
One of the banner games for the system was
Final Fantasy VII
. By the
time the PlayStation was released, the
Final Fantasy
series was already well
established and had been exclusively released on the Nintendo family of
consoles. However, for
Final Fantasy VII
the developer of the game, Square,
sought to use a large amount of motion data for the battle sequences and
a signifi cant number of cut scenes to facilitate the storytelling. As such,
Square wanted to release the game on CD-ROMs, rather than a cartridge,
leading to a decision to make the game for the PlayStation. As part of a
massive marketing campaign, the game was promoted in a number of
