The Battle of Seattle

There's something about the Nintendo campus that just heaves with secrecy. Its whitewashed buildings with black-tinted windows, closely shrouded by trees, seem more like Langley, Va., than suburban Seattle. Even if you sneak in, you won't find Nintendo's powerful new video-game console, the GameCube, in any of the display cases. Nor will you hear the staff speak the names of the games that will be released for it. "We've said the right amount on GameCube, which is nothing," chuckles the sagelike executive vice president Peter Main. "We've got our friends across the road saying, 'What are they doing?'"

If your friends across the road were Microsoft, you would try to fly under the radar too. A five-minute drive down Highway 520, Bill Gates' guys are beavering away on their own powerful new video-game console, the Xbox. Partly because Microsoft is the new kid on this particular block, its approach to publicity--it's dropping $500 million this year on Xbox advertising--is a little different. The staff here can't wait to thrust a green-and-black Xbox into your hands, show off dozens of cool games--and loudly taunt the game spooks up the road. "Let's face it, Nintendo's system is for kids," says Robbie Bach, Xbox's gruff-voiced team leader. "We're for sophisticated gamers. I don't know any 30-year-olds who want a GameCube."

Welcome to the new battle of Seattle. The $5 billion Mario Bros. gang and the $23 billion Windows heavyweights, neighbors who never before had occasion to compete, are set to clash over the hearts, minds and $15 billion annual global sales of the video-game industry. It's a pretty even contest: Nintendo may have more than a century of arcade experience, but Microsoft has its bruised post-antitrust trial pride at stake--and nobody ever went broke overestimating Gates' ability to break a new market.

The war officially commences this week at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, and there will be business casualties. Both systems are scheduled for fall release. The winner could easily oust Sony's PlayStation 2 from the top of the charts, while the loser could just as easily go the way of Sega's defunct Dreamcast, which sold only half its projected 6 million units before Sega pulled the plug.

So how do the two sides stack up? Last week TIME got an exclusive sneak peek at three closely guarded GameCube games and a whole passel of Xbox titles.

On the Nintendo side, Luigi's Mansion is one of several new works from Shigeru Miyamoto, the man behind Mario, Zelda and Donkey Kong and an inductee of the game designers' Hall of Fame. It features Mario's brother ridding his real estate of ghosts with the aid of a flashlight and vacuum cleaner; great game play aside, it's an excuse to show off the GameCube's spectacularly realistic lighting effects. Similarly, the hugely entertaining jet-ski game Wave Race has made an art form of virtual H2O; its foam and raindrops on the camera lens will have you reaching for a towel.

Probably the most potent example of GameCube's capabilities is LucasArts' Rogue Squadron II. Replicating the climactic canyon-run sequence in Star Wars, designers created a Death Star that looked embarrassingly more realistic than the 1977 movie model. "I thought, 'My God, I hope Lucasfilm doesn't get mad at us,'" says director Brett Tosti. To save George Lucas' blushes, the virtual version has been fixed to look as plastic as the original.

Can Xbox match GameCube for visuals? You bet. If anything, it's even more cinematically realistic and detail obsessed. Just take a walk through the space station in Halo, an action game based on Larry Niven's classic sci-fi novel Ringworld, and you'll notice fingerprint marks on triple-glazed windows. Or check out Oddworld, one of the laugh-out-loud funniest video games in a long time. The scaly textured reflective skin on the alien heroes, Abe and Munch, is easily up to Jurassic Park standards.

Long before the current battle took shape, the two companies fought to win over independent game developers, who are critical to any platform's success. The key promise for any nascent game console is to make your machine easier to program than the other guy's--so developers can practically forget programming altogether and let their imagination run riot.

In both of these cases, however, the claim has turned out to be true. Developers say the standards and software in both GameCube and Xbox have chopped in half the time it takes to program a game--at least compared with the PlayStation 2, whose "emotion engine" system is so arcane that it has left a lot of developers badly burned. "PlayStation 2 is like a Maserati: looks great, but every time you take it in for an oil change, they have to take out the radiator," says Lorne Lanning, CEO of Oddworld Inhabitants, who led his Oddworld game from PlayStation to Xbox in mid-development. "The Xbox is more like a BMW."

Microsoft has the allegiance of more game-development companies--no surprise considering the software giant has been aggressively courting them for 18 months, even buying a couple along the way. That means Xbox will be launching with between 15 and 25 games. Nintendo, true to its code of silence, won't say how many outside developers are working on GameCube, but that it has any is significant. Previously, the company subsisted almost entirely on its own games. Now popular sports games like Electronic Arts' Madden NFL will be on the roster.