Reviewed by: Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System by Dominic Arsenault Dal Yong Jin (bio) Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System. By Dominic Arsenault. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Pp. 240. Hardcover $29.95. Once upon a time, Nintendo reigned supreme in the global video game markets. With the newly launched Nintendo Switch in 2017, Nintendo dreams of the golden age it enjoyed between 1985 and 1990. Dominic Arsenault's Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System was published right before the introduction of Nintendo Switch and provides rich data and discussions on the rise and fall of Nintendo in the global console market. This book has several strengths, and three clever ideas (presaged in the title) make the book valuable. Unlike several other books that have focused on the celebratory and upbeat tones of successful game companies and video games, Arsenault emphasizes the failures of Nintendo in his analysis of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). Based on his exhaustive research, which draws on trade journals, manuals, and advertisements from the 1980s and the 1990s, he clearly identifies key technological discourses and business models that formed what he calls Nintendo's Super Power—one that all too quickly encountered market kryptonite, though for a time enabled the company's short-term dominance over the console game sector. While they helped produce a period of ascendance, Arsenault argues that these same business models were the major reasons why Nintendo eventually lost its market share to other Japanese console companies, namely Sega and Sony. Arsenault examines the historical evolution of the SNES from diverse, but connected perspectives. After discussing the different meanings of a video game platform, from an early emphasis only on hardware architecture to the marketing forces and cultural spheres that later developed, he discusses the ways in which Nintendo has faced its dark age. Arsenault identifies a few key technological shifts that happened during the SNES's lifetime, and he contends that Nintendo refused to admit that such technological [End Page 652] shifts had implications for the future of certain traditionally strong game genres. He also argues that the company pursued inflexible business models and maps out the cultural changes in the game world that wore away users' fondness for the SNES. What Arsenault discusses are some of the most significant reasons for the fall of Nintendo, even if that fall is not permanent, and his arguments provide a good lesson not only to game companies but also to other digital media and platform corporations that emphasize innovation as one of the most significant virtues. Throughout, Arsenault uses the three key concepts alluded to in the tantalizing title. "Super Power," as noted above, encompasses marketing and strategy in a broad sense; in Nintendo's case, this meant conceiving, developing, and marketing the Super Nintendo as the super version of the original Nintendo, not as something markedly new. "Silverware" refers to a particular approach to technology via the analogy of using shinier utensils to make a meal fancier without improving the quality of the food. Finally, "Spoony Bards," refers to a particular culture, specifically that of people who would sing the praises of the Super Nintendo without acknowledging its deficiencies and downfalls. Arsenault dexterously structures his argument by combining the extended notions of platform and three metaphors from the title in detailing the reasons why Nintendo has lost its supreme power in the console market. Chapters two and three explore the video game market, explain the context in which the Super NES was conceived and marketed, and articulate the critical steps in the process of launching a video game console. Chapters four and five discuss the technology of the Super NES, describing its limited processing and memory units, audio system, controller, and hardware design while exploring the larger technological revolution that video games went through during the SNES's lifespan. Chapters six and seven address the cultural images and identity of Nintendo as a corporation and the trials and tribulations it faced during the SNES's life. Arsenault eventually chronicles the fall of the SNES by emphasizing its failure to adopt a CD-ROM player...

This essay makes the argument that the numerous ‘‘networks’’ or ‘‘inter/intranetworks’’ that structure the video game industry have lived local effects for those involved in the production of video games. In particular, this is most visible in the realm of console video game development but is visible in many other contexts as well. It uses the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) as an index into this complex and highly structured world that frequently disappears from developers perception. The essay uses largely historical data drawn from patent filings, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, and court cases to analyze these networks. The essay argues that these inter/intranetworks, as constructed, have been instrumental in the way that the game industry now finds itself structured and that as the industry has ‘‘matured,’’ the networks have become less accessible and less interoperable.

In the 1987 Nintendo Entertainment System videogame Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, a character famously declared: I AM ERROR. Puzzled players assumed that this cryptic mesage was a programming flaw, but it was actually a clumsy Japanese-English of My Name is Error, a benign programmer's joke. In I AM ERROR Nathan Altice explores the complex material histories of the Nintendo Entertainment System (and its Japanese predecessor, the Family Computer), offering a detailed analysis of its programming and engineering, its expressive affordances, and its cultural significance. Nintendo games were rife with mistranslated texts, but, as Altice explains, Nintendo's challenges were not just linguistic but also material, with consequences beyond simple misinterpretation. Emphasizing the technical and material evolution of Nintendo's first cartridge-based platform, Altice describes the development of the Family Computer (or Famicom) and its computational architecture; the translation problems faced while adapting the Famicom for the U.S. videogame market as the redesigned Entertainment System; Nintendo's breakthrough console title Super Mario Bros. and its remarkable software innovations; the introduction of Nintendo's short-lived proprietary disk format and the design repercussions on The Legend of Zelda; Nintendo's efforts to extend their console's lifespan through cartridge augmentations; the Famicom's Audio Processing Unit (APU) and its importance for the chiptunes genre; and the emergence of software emulators and the new kinds of play they enabled.

Describes Nintendo's rise to dominance in the home video game industry in the late 1980s. Then presents the challenges Nintendo faced in 1990 as 16-bit processors entered the market against the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System.

The North American video game crash of 1983 made it difficult for Nintendo to break into the American market with its new console, the Nintendo Entertainment System. When it finally did gain a toehold in 1986, it was the Nintendo ‘Seal of Quality’, a graphical rosette that was emblazoned on every official Nintendo release, that encouraged consumers to buy video game cartridges once more. This chapter explores how the difficulties in getting the Nintendo Entertainment System to market, coupled with a strong sense of house style, played an important part in creating a consistency in the 8-bit sound, in terms of both quality and style. The chapter focuses on Super Mario Bros., the game that defined the Nintendo Entertainment System. Its catchy soundtrack captured the qualities of the gameplay. It discusses how the game’s composer, Koji Kondo, defined the formal grammar and style of a new form of media music, the interactive game underscore, and worked with the hardware to create a light, jazz-inspired sound.

This chapter deals with the various hacks for Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The chapter begins with an introduction to Nintendo NES and its brief history. The first four hacks in the chapter involve modifying the NES console and the last three hacks in the chapter involve modifying NES game cartridges. Opening the NES console, replacing the 72-Pin cartridge connector, blue power LED modification, disabling the NES “Lockout Chip”, replacing the battery in certain game cartridges and creating an EPROM cartridge for homebrew game development are the hacks for NES that the chapter demonstrates. In the concluding part, the chapter also outlines some links that will serve as a good starting point for adventures into NES homebrew programming.

The complex material histories of the Nintendo Entertainment System platform, from code to silicon, focusing on its technical constraints and its expressive affordances. In the 1987 Nintendo Entertainment System videogame Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, a character famously declared: I AM ERROR. Puzzled players assumed that this cryptic mesage was a programming flaw, but it was actually a clumsy Japanese-English translation of “My Name is Error,” a benign programmer's joke. In I AM ERROR Nathan Altice explores the complex material histories of the Nintendo Entertainment System (and its Japanese predecessor, the Family Computer), offering a detailed analysis of its programming and engineering, its expressive affordances, and its cultural significance. Nintendo games were rife with mistranslated texts, but, as Altice explains, Nintendo's translation challenges were not just linguistic but also material, with consequences beyond simple misinterpretation. Emphasizing the technical and material evolution of Nintendo's first cartridge-based platform, Altice describes the development of the Family Computer (or Famicom) and its computational architecture; the “translation” problems faced while adapting the Famicom for the U.S. videogame market as the redesigned Entertainment System; Nintendo's breakthrough console title Super Mario Bros. and its remarkable software innovations; the introduction of Nintendo's short-lived proprietary disk format and the design repercussions on The Legend of Zelda; Nintendo's efforts to extend their console's lifespan through cartridge augmentations; the Famicom's Audio Processing Unit (APU) and its importance for the chiptunes genre; and the emergence of software emulators and the new kinds of play they enabled.

Much of what modern digital rights management (DRM) systems attempt to accomplish was actually forcefully implemented on videogame consoles beginning with the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and SEGA Genesis system in the early 1980s. Examining the links between modern DRM mechanisms and these early production and copy protection systems can help contextualize the future of media production and access.

Bithoven is a prolific composer of approximately 1.079363 * 10^239 different compositions based on four-part harmony and basic chord progressions. It is combined with a purely functional audio synthe- sis engine based on the Ricoh RP2A03, found in the 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The synthesis engine is parameter- ized over a band of instruments and styles of play, so each com- position can be played in one of approximately 4.22234 * 10^41 different arrangements or NEStrations.

How the Super Nintendo Entertainment System embodied Nintendo's resistance to innovation and took the company from industry leadership to the margins of videogaming. This is a book about the Super Nintendo Entertainment System that is not celebratory or self-congratulatory. Most other accounts declare the Super NES the undisputed victor of the “16-bit console wars” of 1989–1995. In this book, Dominic Arsenault reminds us that although the SNES was a strong platform filled with high-quality games, it was also the product of a short-sighted corporate vision focused on maintaining Nintendo's market share and business model. This led the firm to fall from a dominant position during its golden age (dubbed by Arsenault the “ReNESsance”) with the NES to the margins of the industry with the Nintendo 64 and GameCube consoles. Arsenault argues that Nintendo's conservative business strategies and resistance to innovation during the SNES years explain its market defeat by Sony's PlayStation. Extending the notion of “platform” to include the marketing forces that shape and constrain creative work, Arsenault draws not only on game studies and histories but on game magazines, boxes, manuals, and advertisements to identify the technological discourses and business models that formed Nintendo's Super Power. He also describes the cultural changes in video games during the 1990s that slowly eroded the love of gamer enthusiasts for the SNES as the Nintendo generation matured. Finally, he chronicles the many technological changes that occurred through the SNES's lifetime, including full-motion video, CD-ROM storage, and the shift to 3D graphics. Because of the SNES platform's architecture, Arsenault explains, Nintendo resisted these changes and continued to focus on traditional gameplay genres.