The parking lot is full—unusual for the small strip mall where I sell video games. It takes me a while to park my car, and when I make it into the store, chaos greets me: a line at the counter, the cardboard remnants of a FedEx drop shipment scattered everywhere, my harried-looking manager matching names from a printout to real customers standing in line, then doling out colorful boxes to the mob as quickly as she can. An unattended toddler knocks over an endcap display and starts crying.
I hurry to the back of the store to grab my name tag. When I return, a customer at the front of the line exclaims, "Bullshit, lady! I got the preorder slip right here. I want the damn jet ski game, not just the Mario one." The other customers in line begin to stir angrily. My manager looks over at me as though I might be able to sort out the mess.
It is September 1996, I am 18 years old, and I am the "keyholder" at Babbage's store no. 9 in Houston. This is the North American launch day for the Nintendo 64, which makes it the third major 1990s console launch I am lucky (or "lucky") enough to work. As the yelling escalates, I wonder if I'm going to make it through my shift without getting punched in the face.
But let's start at the beginning.
Sega Saturn
In August 1994, I began working at Babbage's as a minimum wage sales associate earning $4.25 per hour—which, having just turned 16, I was thrilled to have. By the time the whole operation came to a crashing close three and a half years later, I was an older but wiser man who had worked through not one, but three separate console launches that would together bring "modern" consoles to the world. For younger or newer gamers, those who have seen console launches only in the last few years, those mid-1990s launches may sound like they took place in a different country. And in many ways, they did. The retail landscape around video games felt little like it does today, and the launches themselves were not quite the truly mainstream events they have become in the years since—but for store employees, they were just as crazy.
It was a heady time to be a gamer. No "Nintendo 64" existed at that point, though gaming magazines were abuzz with news that the console developer was working on something called "Project Reality." If EGM and GamePro were to be believed, this new platform would deliver some kind of virtual reality gaming experience that would be like a mash-up of The Lawnmower Man and TRON and uploaded directly into our brains, where it would redefine the future of video gaming while melting our faces right off.
But first, before the face-melting could begin, came the Sony Playstation. And before that came the Sega Saturn. And before all three came the oldest gaming activity of them all: arguing that the system you had purchased had been the best possible choice.
Babbage's had two other part-time sales associates when I arrived, and both of them seemed 12 feet tall in my young eyes. Todd, the most senior, had won a 3DO in a magazine contest; the other, Jeff, owned an Atari Jaguar. These two systems defined state of the art in the middle of 1994. The 3DO was a god-like machine of mythical capabilities with a price to match. Retailing at $699 at launch, it played hardware-accelerated, smooth-as-butter video from CD-ROMs, and its games looked amazing. Todd waxed rhapsodic when he described FIFA Soccer or Road Rash or, most incredibly to me, Crystal Dynamics' port of Star Control II, which featured full-motion video and speech.
But my coworker Jeff at every opportunity talked up the superiority of his Atari Jaguar. In addition to being more affordable to mere mortals, the Jaguar touted itself as the first "64-bit" gaming console. This was mostly a marketing-based claim, as the technical details behind it were a bit hazy, but it didn't stop either Atari or Jeff from shouting about it from the rooftops.
Unfortunately, Jeff's Jaguar suffered from a sad dearth of titles. The system itself had a neat visualization mode where it would display trippy graphics with a music CD inserted, and the copy of Cybermorph it came with was weirdly fun, but it never had a huge number of games.
However, the Jaguar did have one thing that no other system did: Aliens vs. Predator. In 1994, years before the stunning awfulness of Alien Resurrection, this was the freshest Alien franchise item you could get your hands on (well, it was either this or a Laserdisc player with a copy of the Criterion Collection Aliens special edition, but normal people didn't own stuff like that). Aliens vs. Predator was mind-blowing: you could play as an alien or as a Marine or as a Predator! I devoured the AvP box's pictures and copy, and I listened rapturously to Jeff's telling and retelling of his gameplay experiences. Many times over my first year at Babbage's, I almost sunk three or four entire paychecks into that console and a copy of AvP—but I could never quite commit.
Increasingly, however, it became clear that both systems belonged to the past. The 3DO vs. Jaguar in-store holy wars continued, but 1994 closed with us all eagerly anticipating the launch of the Sega Saturn, which went on sale in Japan around Thanksgiving 1994 and was slated to come to the US for at the end of the third quarter of 1995. My buddy Jason, an anime connoisseur and ardent lover of all things Japanese, predicted that the Saturn would lead to a renaissance in video gaming; Sega's laughable Genesis add-on, the 32X, was sitting on our store's shelves like a thing already dead, unselling and unsellable. Never mind Sega's misstep with the 32X, though; the Saturn, Jason predicted, would make up for all past sins and destroy the 3DO and Jaguar both.
The Sega Saturn certainly looked like it would be impressive. From a technological point of view, it had a CD-ROM drive and more than a half-dozen processors scattered around inside of it. More importantly, though, was its pedigree. In the beginning of 1995, console gaming was something of a two-party system: you had Nintendo with the SNES on one hand, and Sega with the Genesis on the other. Sure, there were other options—the 3DO and the Jaguar were two, of course, along with more fringe consoles like the TurboGrafx 16, or the even more rare Neo Geo and its $200 cartridges—but most folks were either (R) Nintendo or (D) Sega.
Nintendo still cultivated a family image, where Sega went edgier, both in games and in advertising, and so the Saturn seemed to appeal to a hardcore gaming audience. Its launch price of $399 was a little nutty compared to how much a Genesis or SNES cost (though not as stratospherically absurd as the 3DO's $699), but when we began taking preorders in anticipation of the September 1995 US release, sign-ups were brisk.
Sony was busy playing up its own entry into the home console market, too. The implosion of a partnership with Nintendo to produce a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES led directly to the development of Sony's Playstation console, which launched in Japan less than a month after the Sega Saturn and which was targeted to follow the Saturn to market in North America, and at only $299, undercutting Sega's console by a hundred dollars.
In many ways, the Playstation was less technically impressive than the Saturn. Rather than a tour de force of two CPUs and an array of co-processors, the Playstation had a far less complex traditional architecture, with a single CPU and a single GPU. Judging by the quality and type of titles, the Saturn was especially good at moving around sprites and art; the Playstation looked better at pushing polygons. Fighting game purists put their money on the Saturn, since the most popular 2D sprite-based titles would look and play best there.
Sneaky Sega
Today, with the remnants of Babbage's, Software Etc., and Electronics Boutique all gobbled up by the slavering used-game-powered beast that is GameStop, it's hard to remember just how different things used to be. Babbage's, for example, had an actual return policy. When I started, you could return anything—console game, PC game, productivity application—within 30 days of purchase for a full refund or exchange, so long as you had saved your receipt.
People rarely abused the privilege. We tracked returns and exchanges, and if someone was going crazy, we might stop letting them do returns, but we had few issues. If anything, the policy boosted sales because it let folks take chances on titles. After all, if it sucked, you could always take it back!
We sometimes wore ties then, we sales associates, and we knew what we were talking about. Uncommissioned, carrying no quota, and encouraged to be honest, we were trusted friendly faces. If you wanted cheap video games, you went to Walmart, but if you wanted actual expert advice on what to buy and a gold-plated return policy, you went to Babbage's.
It was a great job—the best a young geek could ask for. In order to ensure that we stayed current on our knowledge, we were encouraged to check out games, keeping them for a day or two in order build familiarity. We received regular visits from game company reps, who would appear in the store and dole out demo copies of hot titles so we'd be able to sell their wares more effectively.
The atmosphere was collegiate, joyous, ridiculous. Our manager, Anna, was in her late 20s and as goofy as the rest of us. Pranks abounded. A running informal contest challenged employees to package the largest and most complex items possible using the shrink-wrap machine in the back. One evening, I shrink-wrapped my manager's office chair (this is a lot harder than it sounds). We would have shrink-wrapped each other's cars if we could have gotten them into the back room.
But things got serious around launch day, especially with the Saturn, because Sega pulled a fast one in May. It struck a blow against Sony by unexpectedly releasing the Saturn months ahead of schedule in the US. We got a drop-shipment of Saturns and games the morning of the announcement, and we busily started selling the things. Although, after the pre-order folks had picked their units up, we found ourselves with a back room full of Saturns and not many interested buyers.
Some of the launch title choices were odd for a North American audience. Virtua Fighter sold best, followed closely by Daytona USA, but the other two titles were more difficult. Clockwork Knight was a platformer with pretty graphics but child-like box art that no one purchased; Panzer Dragoon appeared to be about riding on a dragon and blowing things up, but it resonated even less with customers than did Clockwork Knight.
The Saturn's price was its biggest stumbling point, though. A September launch date might have encouraged folks to splurge on the expensive system for the holidays; it also would have given Sega some more time to cook up some additional launch titles. At the start of summer, though, without a holiday in sight, no one was going to drop $400 on a console and $50 each on top of that for some weird-looking games. The Saturn rotted on our shelves.
Sony played its cards well, holding fast to its own late 1995 release date and lower $299 price. We took far more Playstation preorders than we did for the Saturn, and the year crawled toward September with a growing realization that the Saturn was dead in the water—that was what it looked like to us retail pukes on the ground, anyway, with sales circling the drain even within a few months of launch.
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