The Raging 1988-1989 Continuous Blowout of Tech & Videogames
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Welcome To The Next Level.
(
Sega Mars tagline in the United States.)
Sun Commodore Stays The Course
Sun Commodore opened the new year of 1988 with a pair of new computers, the Amiga 1500 and the Amiga 750 which were respectively the high and low end successors to the A1000 and A500. They also released the Atari 7800 Expansion Card which added a new high score saving system, additional RAM for the system, and a new sound chip. As part of this interim stop-gap solution until their Atari Panther console they also revised the main system to the Atari 7800/Enhanced which adds the Expansion Card capabilities to the motherboard.
Market share throughout the year remained in the 15-25% range in North America, however the NEC launch of the PC-Engine (the Atari 7800/Enhanced model) in Japan with a collection of translated Western games and several from Hudson Soft and the second tier of Japanese developers was a niche success. NEC's loose restrictions on content combined with the Western games meant that it saw fairly quick uptake among several different groups of Japanese gamers. The low price might also have helped. As a brand exercise it was quite successful, bringing NEC & Hudson Soft into the argument about consoles.
Development of the SparcLite CPU and the SunAmiga operating system continued apace with a 1991 launch planned for both and so Sun Commodore began to orient its product line towards that with new Amiga computers and the Atari Panther planned for that year. Meanwhile SPARC itself was powering the workstation side of the business into the global lead as performance was simply unmatched for the price.
Sales of the C64/74 remained fairly strong but signs of weakness were widespread. However the lowered price of the Amiga 500 (and also the reasonably low price of the Amiga 750) as well as full C64/74 support began to transition C64/74 customers to the Amiga as Sun Commodore's marketing explicitly pushed it as the obvious next computer to get. To help this transition they announced a trade-in program where an Amiga computer would be reduced in price if you brought in a C64 or C74. As part of a marketing campaign those computers were refurbished and sold very cheaply in third world countries.
Throughout 1989 Sun Commodore continued its string of reasonable performance as their workstations, computers, and console all did very well. In Japan the PC-Engine had built a surprisingly strong foothold in the market, at least partially on novelty, and a number of Japanese games began to make their way over to the Atari 7800 in the United States and Europe. Several of the more enterprising Japanese developers also made C64/74 ports of their titles introducing Japanese style console games to a Western computer audience for the first time. To help that out Sun Commodore released a cheap adaptor that let one use the 7800 controller on both the C64 and C74.
Fujitsu in Japan launched the FM Towns, an AmigaOS clone, touting their powerful graphics capability for a cheap price and NEC was forced into serious problems with no computer of theirs able to compete.
Sega Global
Having been mostly shut out of the North American market as regards the Sega Master System the new console would be launching there second, after Japan, however in an innovative plan Sega was working towards a global 1989 launch of their new console rolling out in Japan, North America, and then Europe/smaller markets. Indeed this 1989 launch would put them at least a year ahead of the Nintendo by all reports and fully two years ahead of the Atari Panther. The obvious trade-off was that the games would not potentially not look as good but Sega was confident that being first would help them build a strong position against the Nintendo juggernaut.
Having chosen not to go in-house Sega turned to Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd (Panasonic, outside Japan) for development of a Compact Disc Drive add-on for the console after seeing the fair amount of success that Nintendo had with the Famicom Disk System. This was scheduled for a 1991 launch opposite the Atari Panther and Sega was strongly considering making it also a powerful upgrade perhaps with extra RAM or even an extra processor.
Sega, in a major coup, also signed Electronic Arts to their new console having promised to match royalties with Atari and naturally being much more free than Nintendo with their restrictions. Perhaps most importantly the deal ensured that
John Madden Football would be a timed exclusive launch title.[1]
The Sega Mars launched in the spring of 1989 in Japan and fantastic graphics paved the way for a good start in that market, especially since top tier Japanese developers such as Capcom, Namco, and Konami all released titles for it. In 1989 those were mostly upgraded versions of NES games but nevertheless the show of support was important. A summer 1989 launch in North America went much more smoothly than the failed Sega Master System as Sega successfully advertised their graphics in commercials and suddenly the NES and Atari 7800 looked incredibly out of date. Finally the Western Europe/Brazil/Australia/New Zealand joint fall-winter launch brought the Sega Mars into its strongholds, where reception was fantastic. With only the Amiga computers able to compete on graphics (and those were rather more money) the Sega Mars was off to a roaring start. However the games in 1989, with the notable exception of
John Madden Football in the USA, were not particularly good and Sega turned its efforts towards having a new mascot….
Nintendo & Apple Sitting In A Tree, K I S S I N G
Nintendo had been looking for a potential partner that was strong in Western computer games to combat the Atari 7800's strong support there. For obvious reasons Sun Commodore, the strongest player in that market, was out but the Apple II had been a longtime player in that space. The Apple IIGS CPU was deliberately downclocked to not compete with the Macintosh and by adopting that CPU (although using different graphics chips) and speeding it up to 4 MHz from 2.8 MHz this would allow fairly easy porting of Apple IIGS videogames.[2]
Nintendo also began talks with various companies over the design of the freshly named Super NES and by a complicated process Sony would make the sound chip[3]. This also gave them a leg-up in bidding for the SNES CD drive but bids were solicited from several other companies including Phillips. In the end Nintendo simply postponed their decision, with internal developers not entirely happy about the CD's slow loading times and inability to save games on it.
The NES continued to be a very successful console in Japan and North America and began making headway in Europe. Although not a major contender they did do better in Europe (a market about half the size of North America at the time) than Sega was doing in North America and at the least if you wanted to buy a NES you could find one.
By 1989 Nintendo was once again in talks over a potential CD drive and this time Sony suggested their brand new MiniDisc platform. Rewritable and with faster load times than a CD (if less storage) were strongly appealing to Nintendo and both companies began to work on the SNES MiniDisc Drive for a launch sometime in 1993.[4]
Meanwhile Apple cut prices sharply on the Macintosh trading margins for sales as Motorola launched the Motorola Macintosh Mach I (the triple "m"), the first clone of the Apple Macintosh. This was followed in 1989 by the IBM Macintosh THINK Box. Meanwhile AMD had entered into negotiations to sell their Macintosh license to a third party.
The Apple Newton project, started in 1987, continued with a variety of conflicting goals. It's notable that Del Yocam, Apple's COO, let the project continue despite its expense given his usually tough stance on such things. Indeed Apple's R&D had been heavily cut down from its lavish ways in an effort to streamline the company.
The AMD-IBM-Motorola (AIM) Power project taped out in the spring of 1989 and by the fall IBM had several servers for sale using it. More importantly to the personal computing world was the continued development of PowerClear as Apple was hard at work adapting the Mac OS to run on it.
Sony's NeXTStep
Sony didn't have anything particularly interesting happen in 1988.
On the other hand 1989 was a huge year for Sony. The release of NeXTStep 1.0, the MiniDisc, and of course the brand new computers running it.
As Sony lacked any internal computer case design team they turned to the Audio group of the company. In response they came up with a computer that rather than being a beige box looked like a high-end piece of audio equipment. The higher-ups at Sony were quite impressed and also got them to make the MiniDisc drive.
The Sony CyberDeck[5] is launched with major fanfare in Japan. Besides running NeXTStep they are also gorgeous computers, equipped with an optional MiniDisc accessory and reasonably powerful as they used the MIPS processor from MIPS Computer Systems. Naturally they were also rather expensive and so much of their sales in Japan were as workstations, a market that had weak competitors at the time in Japan. However they were also used as a home computer by more upscale clients and indeed their very existence brought major pressure to bear on the state of personal computing in Japan.
The MiniDisc standard was released for license and Sony launched a variety of hardware:
- Walkman MD.
- Dual CD/MD Deck designed to transfer CD tracks to an MD, it can also connect to a computer so the computer can use both CDs and MDs (this causes headaches in CD rental stores in Japan until rental-specific CDs begin to be released).
- MiniDisc Deck for computers that already have a CD drive and don't need the dual CD/MD Deck.
They also sign up a number of companies to put out albums on the MiniDisc format for people that aren't buying the at-launch rather expensive Decks. Finally the two MD Decks came with drivers for all major operating systems as well as several Japanese-specific models on an included MiniDisc and Sony set to work to get everybody to include as part of a standard OS release.
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[1] IOTL Sega backed down on cartridge prices to get
John Madden Football. ITTL they drop that fee earlier and have done a good job courting developers so they'll actually make more money and earlier as the game will be released in 1989 instead of 1990.
[2] IOTL the SNES's Ricoh 5A22 was based on the same CPU. ITTL they just use the actual CPU, slightly faster than OTL, because of a deal with Apple to help them with cross-platform porting.
[3] Similar to how it worked IOTL, despite butterflies. Ken Kutaragi likely still would have bought his daughter a Famicom and it's quite reasonable to assume he did the same things after that.
[4] Feel free to get your pitchforks out, but I think you'd be wrong.
[5] The audio group at the company has parlayed their case design into calling them "decks", with the "cyber" part capitalizing on the global uprise in cyberpunk and "cyber" being seen as a cool and futuristic word.
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Note of course that pictures going forward are obviously going to be a little wrong sometimes. I hope you can overlook this because I enjoy having all the pictures in this timeline and I hope y'all do as well.
