Day 10: Gun Control, Ultra 64, and Mullets
I miss video game magazines. Whenever my dad announced he was “heading to town” to pick up groceries and asked “you ‘anna go?”, all I could think about was killing time in the magazine aisle, flipping through the latest gaming periodicals to learn what my future wishlists would behold. I don’t ever remember actually reading anything in the magazines. I frantically thumbed through the pages looking for screenshots that sent my imagination into overdrive, a sensation that other types of magazines would replace a few short years later. I always asked if I could get one of the magazines but rarely came away with one. According to my dad they were “too expensive” or he’d claim that I didn’t “need that”. I bartered, I pled, I begged, but only sometimes got to take one home. 1996 would have been the year I clung to any and all news regarding the new, nearly mythical, Zelda game that would be coming to Nintendo’s new console at some point. Sadly, 25 years later, Ocarina of Time has never held my attention through to the end.
Last night I flipped through some old video game magazines courtesy of retromags.com to see if any of those old memories or sensations could be rekindled. I was immediately reminded of the 90’s bold, over-the-top advertising. Where Sega left off after their successful ad campaigns that carried them in their quest to overcome Nintendo earlier in the decade, companies like The 3DO Company (yes, that was their name) tried to capitalize on the market using similar, edgy tactics like this one.
“Baby if I could
Change the world
If I could be king
Even for a day”
I don’t need to remind anyone that 1996 was before the Columbine massacre and, later, 9-11; two events that altered history and had a lasting impact on our sensitivities. However, gun control debates have always been around and violence in video games has been a sore subject with many advocacy groups from the start. An ad like this would be less likely to fly today, especially considering the consequences social media outrage can bring about.
In fact, a relevant news story from outside the U.S. swept over the globe on March 13, 1996 from Dunblane, Scotland. A 43 year old man entered a primary school and shot and killed sixteen students, a teacher, and then himself. This sparked many gun control debates that eventually led to the ban of most privately owned handguns in the United Kingdom. For what it’s worth, in the U.S. that same year there was only one multiple-homicide that took place inside of a school, a significant break in the timeline of shootings that increased rapidly throughout the 90’s and up until COVID-19 halted in-person attendance. In that particular February 1996 incident two students and one teacher were slain. The ad shown above was found in a January 1996 edition of Electronic Gaming Monthly and so was not a response to either incident.
Then, perhaps just to stick it to Tipper Gore and Joe Lieberman, The 3D0 Company had to bring sex, drugs, violence, weapons, and a vague reference to gay men into an ad that shares real-estate with a screen shot of Captain Quazar or Star Fighter, two games that couldn’t move the needle on “edginess” if they wanted to. The 90’s tried awfully hard with their advertising strategies and it bafflingly worked.
1996 was an interesting year in gaming. As of January 1996, the console wars were set to reignite with new contestants and there were four players in the game: the Sony PlayStation, the Sega Saturn, the Panasonic M2, and the Nintendo Ultra 64. Three of those should be recognizable to you and the other, the Panasonic M2, was initially rumored to be a 3DO add-on but was later sold to a different company before being cancelled altogether in 1997. If you remember the ads from a couple paragraphs ago, maybe you are less surprised about The 3DO Company’s business acumen?
The Ultra 64 was all the rage in early 1996 magazines. Several interviews with Howard Philips would lead excited fans to believe that the console would release with several launch titles including Kirby Ball, later Kirby Bowl, later cancelled. Cruisin’ USA was originally tabbed as a launch title but was delayed. The console would eventually drop Ultra in their marketing before the middle of 1996, and simply refer to the console as the Nintendo 64. It came with two launch titles: Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64. Google Stadia released with more games than that. It truly is a wonder that a console with only two launch titles could sustain and perform as well as the N64 did but that is most likely a testament to the strength of those two launch titles and the other first party Nintendo titles that would come throughout the console’s life cycle, like Mario Party and Super Smash Brothers, among others.
If you were into PC games in 1996, you really had it made. Games were released at a nauseating clip and by standards of the time, most were pretty great. That is, if you enjoyed mainstay genres inherent to PC fans like point and click adventures, graphic novels, real time strategy games, and so on. I have already mentioned Diablo and Quake in this blog series, and those certainly turned the most mainstream heads.
And speaking of heads, are you ready to take on this fucking guy in EuroFighter 2000? Because I don’t think you are. He’s logged more hours in this game than real human pilots do in real metal planes all while scaping this beautifully maintained mullet, or in his case, a hanging skull garden. This guy was the most fierce PC playing machine known to the world in 1996 and had 6 underfed cats to prove it.
I’ll part today with this. I don’t think any one winner could win all of these prizes at once - but could you imagine? I might be more excited for this contest now than I would have been then. What about you?
