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Nintendo, meanwhile, pumped new life into the maturing 16-bit market by releasing Donkey Kong Country, a game originally designed for the new 64-bit system, in a version that played on the 16-bit Super NES. The game's eye-popping graphics were an instant sensation; DKC not only became the best-selling game of 1994 but also ratcheted up pressure on the teams designing games for the new machine. "When we released Donkey Kong Country, we raised the bar on ourselves," says Lincoln. "The launch games on Nintendo 64 had to be that much better."
They are. Hours after Super Mario 64 arrived in Seattle, TIME correspondent David S. Jackson took it and several other games for a test run. Playing Mario 64, he reports, is like jumping inside the movie Toy Story. The plot line, something about a princess and a bad guy named Bowser, is, as always, almost irrelevant. What matters is that the Silicon Graphics chip-fueled Nintendo 64 puts the fastest, smoothest game action yet attainable via joystick at the service of equally virtuoso motion. Mario runs, flies, swims, dodges and flips his way past a bewildering welter of walls, ramps, pools and abysses.
For once, the movement on the screen feels real. Nudge the stick forward, Mario walks: clump-clump-clump. Press it a bit more, he leans forward and trots: clop-clop-clop-clop. Push it all the way, he runs faster and faster, tiny legs pumping in unison with his body, his rising speeds a seamless gradation of motion.
What's more, he goes wherever you point him. The Nintendo 64 shatters the convention of two-dimensional horizontal scrolling video games. No more bouncing off guardrails or dissolving in fuzzy pixels on the edge of the screen. Wherever you want to go--forward, backward, left, right or anywhere in between--the scene follows you in dazzling 3D. If you want to climb a wall or dive into the moat, you can. (The water is gorgeously rendered, and it's worth the plunge just to hear the dreamy New Age sound track that accompanies underwater excursion.)
Nintendo's competitors, of course, are hardly disappearing. The Sony Playstation has acquired a fervent following, and in Los Angeles this week Sega will be trumpeting the arrival of a 32-bit version of Sonic the Hedgehog, a soaring game called Nights, and a Net Link telephone hookup that will allow Sega Saturn owners to use their systems as on ramps to the Information Highway.
That is something everybody is thinking about these days, from the PC makers to the folks championing the idea of a $500 "network computer." But when it comes to rapid deployment of high-powered computer technology, nobody has a better track record than the video-game companies. Nintendo won't say anything about its Internet plans right now except to wink and say, as Lincoln does, that it "will be making announcements in the near future." But it's not hard to imagine tens of millions of Americans a few years from now surfing the World Wide Web through their video-game players with Sonic and Mario at their side.
--Reported by David S. Jackson/Seattle