Long-Awaited 64-Bit Nintendo Game Machine Goes On Sale

After several years of being perceived as the laggard of the video game industry, there may be brighter days ahead for Nintendo.

This week, the Japanese company’s long-awaited new game machine, the Nintendo 64, is starting to make its way to retailers and will officially go on sale in the United States todaycq.

The success or failure of that new machine, a feat of engineering that packs some of the visual punch of a Silicon Graphics computer workstation into a $199 toy, may well decide whether Nintendo leads the video game industry or leaves it. Moreover, consumer reception of the Nintendo 64 could revitalize the sluggish $12 billion worldwide market for video games, which declined 25 percent last year.

With personal computer games, the Internet, and other forms of entertainment vying for consumers’ leisure time, “it’s not like if this launch is unsuccessful, we can say ‘well, OK, we can go back and sell (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) machines,”’ said George Harrison, vice president of marketing and corporate communications for Nintendo of America, the Redmond, Wash., subsidiary of Kyoto-based Nintendo Co. Ltd.

“For us as a company, and for any company in this industry, there is no turning back.”

Nintendo hasn’t refreshed its flagship hardware platform since it brought out the SNES in 1991. The company that once held a near monopoly on the market has seen its share drop to about 40 percent.

Rivals Sega and newcomer Sony both brought out nextgeneration hardware more than a year ago. Sega’s Saturn and Sony’s PlayStation video game machines already have sold 8.4 million combined worldwide.

The Nintendo 64, plagued by shortages of special processing chips and new games based on the machine, was delayed for more than a year, costing Nintendo potential sales during the 1995 holiday season and giving rivals a shot at making further inroads with buyers.

Nintendo could have had a next-generation machine on the market by now. But three years ago, it opted out of a partnership with Sony to build a new system, one that ultimately became the Sony Playstation, a CD-ROM-based game machine.

The company instead courted and won a partnership with Silicon Graphics, the California company famous for its graphics workstations and computer-generated contributions to Hollywood movies such as “Jurassic Park.”

It was a costly arrangement - Nintendo had to agree to share royalties with Silicon Graphics, a first for the conservative Japanese company. But executives didn’t feel the hardware being developed by Sony would allow for a large enough improvement over the existing platforms, according to Harrison.

Now, it looks like Nintendo’s gamble may pay off in the long run. Introduced in Japan last July, the machine and the headliner game that runs on it - Super Mario 64 - have been hailed by the industry press as a major advance in gaming technology.

The Nintendo 64 “has a lot of potential given the technology they put in there,” said Bruce Ryon, principal multimedia analyst for the Dataquest market research firm. “They definitely have a fairly advanced system.”

The new machine gives game engineers the silicon horsepower to realistically depict much of the contour, texture and depth of the real world. In Wave Race 64, a wet bike game due out before the end of the year, the water glints and ripples and piles up in wakes that play off each other according to real-world physics.

Users also get a lot more options in terms of what their on screen haracters can do. In the Mario game, players can control “camera angle” which essentially allows characters to look completely around the environment. The monotonous “side-scrolling” action of older games is gone, as characters walk, run, jump, turn somersaults and crawl in just about any direction.

The Nintendo 64 is named for its central processing chip - a silicon wafer, about one inch square, that processes information in 64-bit chunks, compared to the 32-bit processors of the Sony and Sega machines and the 16-bit SNES.

The MIPS chip, made by a Silicon Graphics subsidiary, handles the game logic and split-second mathematical computation that imparts some of the realism.

However, according to Jim Merrick, software engineering manager for Nintendo, 90 percent of the work of the machine is done by another chip specifically designed by Silicon Graphics for the Nintendo 64. Called the “reality co-processor,” it is responsible for audio as well as the texture and scale calculations that bring 3-D to life.