Thread by @gamespite

Instagram's Twitter integration has become terrible (no doubt by design), so I guess I need to handle crossposts for my little 2021 project manually.

But anyway: I’m going to try posting the classic game sets I've photographed for Video Works daily here throughout the year.

My project goes back to July 15, 1983 with the launch of Nintendo’s Famicom and Sega’s SG-1000 in Japan—the birth of the present-day games medium, for most intents and purposes. And what more appropriate lead off here than THE big game release that day: Nintendo’s Donkey Kong

The arcade game was two years old, but this was easily the most faithful home port that released to that point; the Famicom hardware was purpose-built to recreate this specific game. It wasn’t 100% accurate (it was missing an entire stage), but it still made a great impression.

Thanks to @stevenplin for lending me this game (and many to come) for photography

Nintendo’s second launch title for Famicom, Donkey Kong Jr., sees a villainous turn for Mario: Here he's successfully bested Donkey Kong atop the construction site and caged him to… sell him to the circus? Somehow going from an American city to the circus involves a jungle trek.

This is reputed to be a heel turn for Nintendo, too: They’re said to have built this game on the base of the original DK while cutting the contract engineers who designed DK's hardware out of the loop.

Compared to the first game, DK Jr. sees a real visual downgrade on Famicom.

Character sprites—especially Junior's—are quite small here. On the other hand, it does contain all four arcade stages.

The white Famicom packaging is sharp, a great contrast to its companion title’s red, though the stark scheme does make a pristine condition tough to find now.

Nintendo’s third Famicom launch title, Popeye hailed from the arcades, just like the Kong family. There's another connection between the games at play: Donkey Kong was initially conceived as a Popeye game, but ended up shipping as an original work due to licensing complications.

Just as well: DK was the better game and launched a powerfully influential creative dynasty. Imagine if Super Mario and all that came after had been derailed by licensing limitations! Of Famicom's three launch titles, Popeye suffered most in terms of visuals in coming to console.

The arcade game used an eye-catching dual-format approach: Backgrounds appeared as simple geometric shapes, while character sprites used a double-resolution mode that allowed them to look huge and detailed—like cartoon characters. The Famicom sprites were dinky and unimpressive.

The game still played almost exactly like the coin-op version, though. Naturally, it shipped in green packaging. Like spinach! This had the coincidental side effect of paying tribute to Mario’s heritage: Line up the green, white, and red launch carts and you get the Italian flag.

The same day Nintendo launched the Family Computer (which was a console, not a computer), Sega launched its own console (which actually WAS also a computer): The SG-1000 / SC-3000. Nearly identical to the ColecoVision hardware, it was less powerful than Famicom in most respects.

It would evolve rapidly! Sega conveniently numbered its SG-1000 releases, so their console history begins with Borderline, G-1001. Based on an arcade shooter, Borderline did not have the international clout of Donkey Kong, but in a way it was ambitious as Nintendo’s big game.

Each stage featured a different form of gameplay, from auto-scrolling to something like Dig Dug.

Many games for SG-1000 were released in multiple package variants; this is the second “small box” revision. The cartridges were always solid black, unlike Famicom’s plastic rainbow.

SG-1000 catalog no. G-1002, Safari Hunting is another arcade conversion. Not to be mistaken for the similarly named Sega Master System pack-in Safari Hunt, which was a light gun game played from a first-person perspective; make the "hunt" a gerund and you get a top-down game.

Here, players get a tranquilizer rifle, a Jeep with a VERY capacious trailer, and the task of stalking through a bush maze attempting to capture as many snakes, apes, lions, and elephants as possible. Hard to imagine a game like that being made today, but this was the ‘80s, baby.

The "western" quality of early SG-1000 boxes intrigues me. Nintendo’s illustrations fell somewhere between E.C. Seger and Osamu Tezuka, but Sega went with painterly styles that echoed the impressionistic realism of a ‘70s cigarette ad or looked like high-spec Mad Magazine art.

The art would drift more toward manga stylings as the tastes of Japan’s gaming audience solidified (and gaming became stigmatized as kids’ stuff rather than the adult pastime it was in its expensive early days). But this box could easily be for some forgotten Atari 2600 release.

The final Sega SG-1000 launch title, N-Sub, is—yes!—another military-themed shooting game. Even more than box art styles, the content of these games really points to the fundamental differences between Sega and Nintendo’s respective approaches to publishing.

Nintendo led with cartoon games and minimal opportunities for violence, while all three of Sega’s debut releases had more real-world vibes and revolved entirely around shooting. Of course, Nintendo made their share of shooting games as well, and Sega made plenty of non-shooters.

I mean, this game is a more elaborate Space Invaders derivative, and it's nearly identical to a Nintendo game called Heli-Fire! But Nintendo has never republished Heli-Fire, unlike Sega with N-Sub. It’s interesting to see the company's divergent approaches right from the start.

On to Famicom and SG-1000's post-launch releases. Sega has never published official ship dates for its early console titles, so I'm just going by catalog numbers for those. But we do know when Nintendo’s first follow-up titles arrived: Aug. 27, six weeks after the console itself.

These August releases were adaptations of traditional tabletop games, not arcade ports, including Gomoku Narabe Renju (based on Go). This one feels like a sop to company president Hiroshi Yamauchi; he famously never played video games during his lifetime, but he was a Go expert.

With AI powered by an 8-bit CPU clocked below 2MHz, I doubt this game challenged him. But it did help frame the Famicom as a Serious Computer Device For Adults.

A nice packaging touch: The black cartridge inside a white outer box echoed the tiles used in Go.

Along with their rendition of Go, Nintendo also treated Famicom owners to an adaptation of a second traditional tabletop game in August 1983: Mah-Jong. Nearly every console to come from Japan in the ‘80s received a Mahjong title near launch. It's simply a thing that was done.

This is definitely an “adaptation” as opposed to a faithful rendition. Mahjong is traditionally played by four people, each of whom sits in one of the cardinal directions of the compass, but this cart only allows two people (or rather, one person and the CPU) to square off.

As with other console interpretations of Mahjong from this era, Mah-Jong is based on Japan's “riichi” variant of the game rather than the original Chinese rules. (Someday, I'll actually learn how to play this game and will be able to explain what the differences actually are.)

Sega’s first post-launch title for SG-1000 was… also a Mahjong adaptation. As with Nintendo’s take, this cartridge works with riichi rules, and features a two-position face-off for a single player rather than proper four-position matches or multiplayer.

This version doesn’t look quite as nice as Nintendo’s, given the graphical differences between the two consoles, but they’re functionally almost identical. The box art is probably where the two games stand most apart.

Nintendo featured a clean, simple, and highly literal interpretation of the game, while Sega commissioned a colorful illustration of a salaryman calling “ron” (the winning declaration, e.g. “checkmate”) against a doofy-looking opponent as a border of dynamic tiles surrounds them.

Again, Sega’s love for lively-but-dated illustrations really does peg these packages to their era, but I love to see so many great examples of a bygone discipline in this lineup. A rack of SG-1000 boxes all hanging side-by-side must have been a sight to behold!

Sega's “Champion” sports series began with Champion Golf. As you'd expect, it’s a straightforward take on the sport—and primitive. Golf video games would be codified with the innovative swing meter in Nintendo’s Golf. There's a primal version of that here, but it's clumsy.

This is the first SG-1000 game to have a non-Sega credit on its title screen, to a dev called Logitec (not Logitech), for whom no other credits exist online. Mysterious! Less enigmatic is the cover art, which again appears to have been swiped from a Salem cigarette ad circa 1981.

Yesterday’s post was Champion Golf for SG-1000... and so is today’s. But this is catalog number C-05, while yesterday’s was G-1005. What’s the difference? So far as I can tell, nothing in terms of game content; the message here is the medium.

Sega updated its console hardware after a year or so on the market, adding support for their new media format: Credit card-sized "My Cards". These could hold just as much data as the original, chunky, black cartridges, but they took up much less space (especially on the shelf).

Several SG-1000 carts received reissues on My Cards once the redesigned SG-1000 Mark II console launched, presumably based on their popularity. From this we can determine that Sega fans, happily, enjoy golf more than they enjoy shooting wild animals.

Also, @gdri pointed me to the story behind Champion Golf dev Logitec: This cart/card was adapted from a game they created for the MSX PC. One of their designers would later establish Kid, the studio responsible for NES classics like Burai Fighter, G.I. Joe, and uhhh... Low-G Man?

Tsumeshogi, Sega’s sixth numbered SG-1000 title, adapts another classic Japanese tabletop game: Shougi. You invariably saw Go, Mahjong, or Shougi adaptations very early in the lifespan of classic consoles from Japan; Sega and Nintendo collectively covered the bases right away.

Shougi resembles Chess, with identical titles distinguished by the kanji character written on them. Tsumeshogi doesn't attempt to reproduce the full Shougi experience but rather gives players a series of self-contained play scenarios that need to be resolved, like little puzzles.

Given the complexity of Shougi and the meager processing power of the SG-1000, this was the wiser approach. (Even Sega’s artists couldn’t figure out how to spice up a game about chess puzzles, though. They settled for literal box art: A tile plunging bomb-like toward the board.)

Moving on to September 1983, we have the cartridge that, to my mind, marks the moment Nintendo declared it intended to be a home console maker first and foremost: Mario Bros.

At the time this cart shipped, Mario Bros. had only been in arcades for three months...

...yet here was Nintendo offering it up to everyone for home play, meaning you didn’t have to seek out the coin-op version.

Graphically, Mario Bros. on Famicom didn’t look as nice as the arcade game, but it played with few compromises—including simultaneous two-player action.

It was a pretty big win for the console.

Personally, though, my favorite thing about this release is the overall aesthetic. I love the early cartoon style of the artwork—Mario and Luigi look so lumpy and goofy!—as well as that gorgeous creamsicle-orange plastic.

In contrast to the timely Mario Bros. on Famicom, we have the horror of Congo Bongo on SG-1000. The arcade version was literally Sega’s answer to Donkey Kong—a game where you climbed a tricky structure in pursuit of a gorilla, programmed by the same company behind Donkey Kong!

This port badly misses the appeal of the coin-op: Its detailed, isometric graphical style. Congo Bongo in arcades looked great; Congo Bongo on SG-1000 does not. This version flattens out the perspective while trying to retain a semblance of depth in terms of the control scheme.

It’s a clumsy, ugly mess. Fittingly, the box art is bizarrely unpleasant, too. SG-1000 illustrations had an Atari 2600 box art vibe about them; this looks like a sketchy 2600 release from one of those fly-by-night publishers that helped spark the “Atari crash.” A real letdown.

Another combat game on SG-1000? Yamato does at least stand apart by reflecting a more Japanese viewpoint than the generic shooters before it. It's based on a legendary WWII battleship that looms large in that country’s collective memory (despite not actually accomplishing much).

Gameplay-wise, it's redundant when N-Sub already exists. They don't play exactly the same, but both involve moving laterally on the ocean, firing at distant targets while avoiding incoming projectiles. Likewise, the box art seems pretty "been there, done that" for SG-1000.

An interesting thing about Nintendo is that they didn’t have a lot of game-making experience before launching the Famicom. Aside from Game & Watch, most of their game output had been produced by outside contractors. So their initial Famicom library was a bit thin.

So, they padded their schedule by repurposing Popeye’s graphics for Popeye No Eigo Asobi (Popeye’s English Tutor). Not the guy I’d have picked for my English tutor, but as Popeye might say: Beggers can’tsk be chooskers, yug gug gug.

(Weirdly, this one never made it to the U.S.)

The second of Nintendo’s quick reworkings of a Famicom launch title, Donkey Kong Jr. No Sansuu Asobi actually did reach the U.S.—no doubt to the chagrin of the many children who were hoping to unwrap an actual video game on their birthday or Christmas only to find a math quiz.

Nintendo originally advertised a third educational title based on the assets of a launch game: Donkey Kong No Ongaku Asobi, which would have taught music lessons (possibly with some application of the mic built into the Famicom’s second controller) using Donkey Kong graphics.

That one never came to pass, though. Maybe the devs couldn’t make a convincing music tutor within the limitations of a first-gen Famicom cartridge. Or it could be that by the time it would have shipped, the system’s library was strong enough that it was no longer necessary.

Baseball may be America’s favorite pastime, but Japan gives us a real run for our money. Naturally, Nintendo graced Famicom with a quick adaptation of the sport. Baseball stands out among 1983 releases for being a wholly original work rather than an arcade or tabletop adaptation.

It wasn’t the most sophisticated take on baseball seen to that point (that was Intellivision World Series Baseball), but it would be highly influential. Its simplicity and fun details, like the way the players twitch in anticipation of each pitch, give it a lot of personality.

Baseball would come to the U.S. as an NES launch title, but the energetic illustration here captures the look and spirit of the game far more convincingly than the fake pixel art of the American box.

(Like the other Famicom sets here, this comes from @stevenplin's collection.)

Over to hardware: Sega's SG-1000 (at least in its original incarnation) was a cute little machine, with a low profile and friendly, rounded contours. Sadly, as with Nintendo’s Famicom, its controller was simultaneously (1) not great and (2) hardwired into the machine. Tough luck!

Original SG-1000s have become fairly scarce and expensive on the aftermarket, while the Mark II revision is more widely available, less expensive, more stylish, and offers a superior play experience. Charming as this system is, better to skip it in favor of the makeover edition.

Sega’s SG-1000 was almost exactly the same machine, internally, as the ColecoVision. And like the ColecoVision’s ADAM, the SG-1000 had a variant model that functioned as a simple home computer: The SC-3000. Sega's was the superior product, in my opinion.

The ADAM took two years to hit the market after ColecoVision's launch; the SC-3000 showed up day and date with the SG-1000. Sega’s computer was also space-efficient, with its CPU housed in a single-unit keyboard barely larger than the console itself; ADAM, however, was massive.

I don't think the box/front bezel photos do this hardware justice, so here's a better shot of the SC-3000 (or at least, this particular model of SC-3000... there's a gorgeous red variant out there in the universe, too)

And the SG-1000, too, for good measure.

Look at this thing. It's like someone turned a Gundam's chest piece into a game console.

SG-1000? SC-3000? Sega didn’t make it an either/or proposition. Those who bought the console version and decided they wanted a computer after the fact had the SK-1000, a keyboard that plugged into the expansion port of the SG-1000 to effectively turn it into an SC-3000.

(No, I don’t know how 1000+1100=3000.) Math aside, it was a nice little add-on that neatly upgraded the console’s capabilities, and looked sleek doing it. And it was much smaller and much less expensive than the ColecoVision Expansion Module that turned that console into an ADAM!

Nintendo’s Family Computer (“Famicom” if you’re nasty) revolutionized the video games industry, but you wouldn’t think it to see this unassuming little system. Cast in a glossy, cream-white plastic with maroon accents, it’s an almost toy-like device: Compact and friendly-looking.

Its early games matched the almost childish look of the system, with simple gameplay and cartoonish sprites. In time, the system’s library would diversify immensely! I have a lot of fondness for this more lighthearted counterpart to the staid, grey, boxy American NES.

Real “early ‘80s computer magazine cover” vibes to the cover of SG-1000’s Champion Tennis, but it shows you an accurate representation of the game inside: You don’t see a cartoon lady when you play, but the figures in the background perfectly match the actual in-game sprites.

Champion Tennis will feel familiar to anyone who has played Tennis for NES. It’s the same setup, albeit more primitive, with some garish solid-color visuals and less responsive controls. And no Mario! A decent attempt for the era, but it doesn’t work as smoothly as you’d hope.

Star Jacker. I guess it’s like a carjacker? But you’re not car/starjacking anything in this game; you’re dragging around your extra lives as a grim burden that makes you more vulnerable to attack, watching your chances to continue play tick down as they fall afoul of enemy fire.

The cover illustration for this game has a great retro-‘70s sci-fi style about it (e.g. John Berkey), although the ship designs are bizarrely awful. The U.S.S. Italian Restaurant Tablecloth looks on as an off-brand space shuttle is annihilated over the Death Star... or something?

America’s favorite pastime is also Japan’s favorite pastime, so naturally the Sega SG-1000 got a baseball game right out of the gate. Champion Baseball was an adaptation of a fairly popular arcade game, but what flew in 1983 does not hold up so well in 2021.

This is a limited, simplistic game... though I will say that the automated fielding does a good job of keeping the score down to reasonable, realistic levels (as opposed to 8-bit games with more involved but sloppier fielding, where scores often run into ludicrous double digits).

I almost really like the cover art here—the old-school illustration of the batter in a split field of primary colors is a really strong image! But the awkward tangent they drew the pitcher at makes him look like a tiny man growing out of the batter’s face, which is weird

Sindbad Mystery is a neat little game I’d never heard of before staging these photos, but I’d describe it as a kind of mix of Crush Roller, Crystal Castles, and Heiankyo Alien. Obviously, that means it’s great.

The cover art style represents a pretty big departure from what we’ve been seeing on SG-1000 to this point. It’s cartoonish and bold, with a simple look to the manga-esque main character and a lively painterly environment. A strong package all around.

It’s SG-1000’s first media-licensed game, and this one is clearly intended for the kids! That’s right, it’s Golgo 13, Japan’s equivalent to James Bond... if James Bond were an amoral, emotionless, sex-powered murder machine.

This game is simpler than the NES game. Rather than taking the form of a rambling global adventure, it’s a simple shooter where you snipe the windows of a train so passengers can escape, while trying to avoid dying to your own reflected bullets. Weird use of the license, but OK.

The art is great, though: An ink-and-paint piece by Saito Pro that manages to work all the gameplay elements (train, chopper, car) into the layout. However, I just noticed that Golgo himself is holding a machine gun while pointing a pistol at the viewer... literally overkill.

While I’m posting these photos in the order of the games’ catalog numbers, in actual fact Golgo 13 showed up way out of numbered sequence—all indications are that this and the next title, Orguss, didn’t appear in stores until 1984. So much for punctuality, Duke Togo.

Next up for licensed SG-1000 games, we have Orguss, which is based on the TV anime series released between Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross (aka the shows that were smushed together to become the first two storylines of Robotech).

It involves... robots! That transform. But not Transformers... although it should be said that Orguss plays a LOT like the later Famicom games based on both Macross and Transformers. It’s a side-scrolling shooter in which you control a fighter plane that turns into a robot.

As in Macross and Transformers for Famicom, its designers didn’t have a sense of purpose for this concept, so it feels aimless.

The cover art style is great—the cel-style robot over the painted background looks gorgeous. If only the robot weren’t drawn in such an awkward pose.

We jump from SG-1000 catalog number G-1015 (Orguss) to G-1017 here, because... there was no G-1016. It’s one of Sega’s great (well, tiny) mysteries.

But then, Monaco GP was a big enough release to fill two slots—arguably the game that put Sega on the map as an arcade powerhouse.

It’s a high-speed racer with a revolutionary forward-facing camer viewpoint. The SG-1000 release goes with a less impressive top-down view (faux 3D is asking a LOT for SG-1000), but the essence comes through. It a varied, challenging game, and quite convincing in its own right.

You can tell Monaco GP was a big deal for Sega, because its SG-1000 conversion was one of the few releases for the system that received a reissue in the compact MyCard format. Same game, much smaller physical form factor. It also shipped with brand new cover art.

You could be forgiving for not spotting the difference at a glance, because the lead car is colored and positioned almost exactly as on the older box. But this is a more literal image with less abstract composition and rendering. Sega dropped the traditional look pretty quickly.

(Forgiven, not forgiving.) P.S. I misremembered the arcade game in my description yesterday—like this port, it was strictly top-down. I was thinking of its successor, Turbo, which had a revolutionary behind-the-car viewpoint and paved the way for Sega’s REALLY big racer, Out Run.

You may have noticed my SG-1000 pics come w/ two box sizes. Sega initially released games in oversized cardboard boxes, roughly the size of a plastic clamshell VHS case, but before long they slimmed things down to boxes barely large enough to contain just a cartridge and manual.

While the smaller boxes are more economical and demand less storage space, the bigger boxes were beautifully crafted. Here you can see how they worked: The front cover opened like a book to reveal a pocket for the game manual opposite a nook holding the cartridge firmly in place.

A pair of semi-circles were cut into the edges of the nook to give your fingers purchase on the cart, allowing it to be lifted out of the box without damaging the cardboard. The box front would remain secure when shut thanks to an integrated tab-and-slot design.

It’s a thoughtfully engineered package that, unlike most game boxes, makes it clear that you were meant to keep the box along with the cart. Admittedly, the cover tabs can be pretty fragile after nearly 40 years, but most boxes I’ve come across have been well-preserved.

This thread has become unwieldy, because Twitter's tech isn't great at this sort of thing, so I'll be starting a fresh thread each month. Here's February's:

https://twitter.com/gamespite/status/1356265639720136705

If you’d like to read these posts in a non-Twitter format, I’m compiling the images with revised text into monthly PDFs for my video patrons.

(I’d love to put it all into a coffee table book at the end of the year, but the economics of a 365+ page color book may not make sense)