Video Game History with Steven L Kent (Part Two)

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Here's a sample of the full show notes - make sure to click through and check them out.

Show Notes

This is part two - of four - of a conversation with author and video game historian Steven L Kent, and is a collaboration between ourselves and Zoom Platform. Whilst this is an audio episode, it was originally recorded as a pair of video interviews. What we've done is cut the two video interviews into four parts and will be releasing them as audio episodes. But if you'd rather watch the first two parts as a video you'll find it here.

Part Two of Four

As a reminder, Steven describes his books as

My books are called "The Ultimate History of Video Games".
Volume 1 starts out with Abraham Lincoln and Bagatelle, and goes all the way to 2000 and sort of the collapse of the Dreamcast - or it's about to collapse, you can tell that it's faltering - PlayStation 2 has been announced and is just coming out, and Xbox has been announced.
Book two has some overlap, because there will be some people who read volume 2 without reading volume 1, so it's got a bunch of overlap. But what's interesting is that I thought I'd be able to go from 2000 to the present, but I only got to 2012. So volume three should come out around 2026.
- Steven L Kent

299

No discussion on video game history would be complete without a discussion on "the price heard" around the world. Which you can find here.

And for those who don't know, there is a very long story behind the crowd reaction here. Essentially, the story is that Sega had just announced their Saturn (only a few hours earlier), which was a surprise to most of the retailers who were in attendance (because Sega hadn't told them that it was being announced). Sega also announced it with a $399 price tag.

As such, Sony's entire announcement of the PlayStation was simply

299
- Steve Race, CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment

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Gunpei Yokoi

Gunpei Yokoi really was an amazing engineer. He started Nintendo's "responsible engineering" philosophy - the idea that they will use technology that is widely available now in order to innovate in non-traditional ways. And this is something that Nintendo has continued to do to this day. He was the designer of the Game&Watch, GameBoy, the "cross pad" controller, and the Metroid series.

Steven shared a wonderful story about Gunpei in this episode:

So I was at a CES - I was fairly new in the industry - and Virtual Boy had not come out yet. I was covering [Virtual Boy] for Electronic Games.
I went to Nintendo and I said, "I wanna meet all these people," in truth I clipped their names out of "Game Over" by David Sheff. I didn't know this people. Nobody did, really. If it weren't for Sheff, we might still not know them... [Nintendo] gave me some Miyamoto time.
But Gunpei Yokoi gave me an hour, two days in a row. And after that, if we were ever at a show and we would see each other, we'd go have a drink together. We couldn't talk very much, because my Japanese is non-existant, and I'm not sure where his English was, but it wasn't strong. But there was a bond, there was a real friendship.
I remember the last time I got to see him was at the unveiling of the N64 at Space World... and everyone ran to this one corner and looked at the N64, and near the exit as you left, there was a little ring of Virtual Boys and Gunpei was there with his translator. And as I was leaving to write my article about the N64, there's Gunpei and he's like, "Can you come take a look at things?" And he was my friend, so I went and looked at things, and it wasn't wonderful. And nobody else was there, so we sat and talked, and his translator translated for me.
And that was the last time that I got to see him. And he was a wonderful gentleman: he was nice, he was smart, and he had a self-deprecating sense of humour. I think he already knew that he was leaving Nintendo at that point.
- Steven L Kent

Full Show Notes

Make sure to check out the full show notes for more discussion on the points we raise, some extra meta-analysis, and some links to related things.

What have you been playing recently? Do you agree with the anonymous review that Chief read during this episode? What would you take with you to the Thunder Plains?

Let us know on Twitter, Facebook, leave a comment on the show notes or try our brand new contact page.

Links

Here are some links to some of the things we discussed in th...