Advanced Game to Be Designed by Nintendo, Silicon Graphics : Technology: A new generation of speedy chips will offer more lifelike play and could reinvigorate the market.
Nintendo and Silicon Graphics Inc. on Monday unveiled plans for an advanced new video game that is part of what promises to be a boom in that enormously profitable arena, a boom driven by advances in computer technology.
“They’re leapfrogging the point the rest of the industry is trying to get to,” crowed Dave Corbin, director of marketing for MIPS Technologies, a Silicon Graphics subsidiary that is developing the new generation of speedy, powerful chips on which the new game system will run.
“Project Reality,” as the two companies are calling it, is nowhere near being real enough to touch, but it is scheduled to hit arcades late next year and homes in 1995. Expected to be priced at $250 for the home market, Nintendo’s 64-bit video game system will feature leading-edge graphics, sound and speed that, its makers contend, will leave the current 16-bit systems in its silicon dust.
The machine is expected to compete most directly with a product from 3DO Co. of Redwood City, Calif., due in stores in October. At $700, that system, capable of linking players to databases and competing players, could come in for some heavy discounting, industry analysts and software developers say.
Sega of America, Nintendo’s chief rival, and Atari are also targeting the upstart. Sega is expected to move soon into three-dimensional games, and Atari has announced a $200 system due out in January.
With all these incompatible potential choices, a quandary looms for parents, who might fear being saddled with the video game equivalent of BetaMax.
Although consumers have yet to see any of these splashy new devices, the lucrative industry is at least showing the kind of innovation that powered it, in its early days, to $3 billion in sales by 1982, when it was only 6 years old. Lately, video game sales have been running at an annual pace of $6 billion to $8 billion.
Plagued at times by slow advancement, the industry has spent the last decade on a roller-coaster ride offering more nail-biting thrills than most of its games. About 38% of U.S. homes have video game systems, but that number has shown little growth recently.
Nintendo will build its new machine and pay royalties to Silicon Graphics for that company’s fast-paced, three-dimensional imaging software. Silicon Graphics, based in Mountain View, Calif., created the lifelike computerized dinosaurs in the film “Jurassic Park” and the body-melting-and-mutating “morphing” effects in “Terminator 2.”
Nintendo of America, based in Redmond, Wash., is a subsidiary of Nintendo Co. Ltd. of Kyoto, Japan.
Nintendo and Silicon Graphics officials had no Project Reality prototype to show off, but they provided a glimpse of its potential by demonstrating software on Silicon Graphics workstations. In one example, the user was invited to swoop onto the back of a pterodactyl through a prehistoric world, with realistic colors and sounds.
The product would offer sophisticated three-dimensional graphics that the user could adjust and shift according to whim in real time. A golf pro could offer tips on using drivers and putters. The younger set could tag along with Nintendo’s ubiquitous Mario brothers.
The machine would play compact discs or cartridges containing music, photos and movies.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
