Console Wars does a great job capturing Sega’s willingness to try new ideas. And a lot of the ideas involve celebrities.
It was interesting to read about them planning the Sega Star Kids Challenge and bringing celebrities to the Sonic 2sday event:
A practice session may seem trivial, but it was important to Sega that these young celebrities give the impression that they really did love videogames and weren’t just heartthrobs for hire.
Wouldn’t ever want to make them look foolish.
Again, the best parts of Console Wars are the behind-the-scenes looks at Sega’s marketing strategies. The Super Nintendo had Mode 7, which made games like Star Fox and Mario Kart possible. Now that I’m doing some image searches, I’m learning it was also used in other games for certain sequences, like every overworld map.
I like imagining a .ppt from Nintendo with a slide titled “Guidelines: fitting races into stories” with 7 bullet points underneath.
Sega didn’t have an actual thing to strike back with, so they decided to strike back with not an actual thing:
While looking through the manual, Latham found something that kind of, sort of, maybe fit the bill: Burst Mode, which in theory allowed the Genesis to process code faster than Nintendo’s chip could. Although this sounded like exactly what the marketing team wanted, Latham explained that Burst Mode actually had very little to do with the graphics, velocity, and overall performance of Sega’s games. To say that Burst Mode was the reason that Sonic could move so fast would be like saying that cheetahs were faster than elephants were because of their spots.
Burst Mode turned into Blast Processing.
I remember always checking the “Graphics” rating first when reading EGM or GamePro. But I knew that high gameplay scores went further for how much I’d enjoy the game. (There’s something about UX in there.)
The book ends in the very early stages of the 32-bit era. When our family got a Playstation, one of the first giant-jeweled-case games we got was NBA Live 96.
I remember thinking my dad would think this purchase was totally worth it if he saw the graphics. So one day I told him close your eyes okay now open them.
“Can you tell it’s not live TV?”
Prior to reading Console Wars, I had some perspective on video games in Japan. Actually, it’s a little unusual. My dad was in the Navy and I grew up on military bases in Japan in the 90s. I played console demos in Japanese department stores and spent plenty of time in Japanese arcades basically run by Sega. But our family and all my friends had American consoles.
And we had english TV channels, but they had weird mixes of syndicated shows. The oddest part was that instead of commercials for products, there would be commercials about military life and American history. So most of the American marketing I experienced was through video game magazines.
They talk about the impact of a particular GamePro cover where Star Fox is on the front of it. From Console Wars:
“But why?” Arakawa asked Tilden, looking at the April 1993 issue of GamePro magazine. On the cover, right there in front of them, was artwork from Nintendo’s Star Fox. Not only had this artwork been intended for Nintendo Power, but White had specifically met with Arakawa, Tilden, and Harman to discuss sharing it with outside magazines and had explicitly been told not to do so.
As long as I remember, our parents let us subscribe to at least one video gamemagazine. And any time we went to the book store I’d first look at Goosebumps for the newest release then read the game magazines.
Game Players magazine had a newsletter that, looking back, seems like weird internet before the internet became what it is today.
Something I remember is one issue where a reader wrote inn asking how the magazine makes the stitched together maps. And they said it was software that costs hundred and hundreds of dollars.
I remember picturing some kind of mega-expensive super computer. Where like they’d make the brontosaurus in Jurassic Park and then in another window they’d have Link to the Past maps. Now I realize it was probably Photoshop.
Game Players turned to Ultra Game Players then disappeared altogether. Then we switched to an EGM subscription. GamePro (of PROTIP fame) skewed younger. We had some of those but they were usually one off purchases from the book store.
Nintendo’s side project was publishing a magazine with more than a million subscribers. As far as I remember, the book store didn’t have Nintendo Power. So the only kids that had copies had subscriptions.
I remember the Star Fox cover but really had no idea it was a big deal. I was probably in 2nd grade or 3rd grade so I didn’t understand that anything was a big deal. I really had no idea that Nintendo Power was a giant monthly advertisement.
(Then one day you find out Saturday-morning cartoons were toy advertisements and the world falls apart. That’s the adult version of finding out Santa Clause isn’t real. In between those discoveries is finding out wrestling isn’t real.)
Okay I exaggerated, Console Wars mentions RPGs exactly once:
Oshima partnered up with Yuji Naka, a brilliant hothead in the programming department who was responsible for one of Sega’s most popular series: Phantasy Star, a sci-fi role-playing game (RPG) about a resilient young female warrior bent on galactic revenge with the help of a muskrat named Myau and a wizard named Noah.
Side note: I thought Zelda was generally considered an RPG. According to my research (clicking a few links on a Google search), most people don’t consider it an RPG. And get pretty passionate about it not being an RPG. Anyway, I guess that further helps the case that Console Wars has one single mention of an RPG.
Searching the book for “Final Fantasy” returns nothing. In America, RPGs might not have had as much an impact on the 16-bit console war as, say, Mortal Kombat. But Final Fantasy III should get at least one mention. (The book ends before Chrono Trigger’s release, so there’s at least some explanation.)
RPGs make up 6 of the top 20 best selling SNES games.
Anyway, if RPGs were mentioned I would’ve had a better excuse for writing about a top–3 life achievement of mine…
I grew up in Japan on a U.S. Navy base. Which means it’s not really like growing up in Japan and not really like growing up in America, either. Families would go off-base at night or on weekends. And you’d also live off-base while you were on a waiting list for on-base housing.
On these weekend trips out, my and I would wander around the videogame section of a department store (Daikuma or Da’e) while our parents got groceries. On one of these trips, we noticed people gathered around a spinning wheel and walked over.
After watching a few times, it looked like you paid 2000 yen, spun the wheel, and got to pick from either 1, 2, or 3-game packages. Anyway, our mom let us spin and we got the 2-game choice. We picked the package with Super Smash TV and… some game with a bird on the cover. My brother had heard of the game but we were mostly in it for Smash TV.
The other game was Final Fantasy V. I was extremely bored any time I watched my brother play it. Then one day I tried it out and it didn’t make sense at all. Literally. It was in Japanese, after all.
I started out wandering aimlessly. Then I continued wandering around aimlessly. For dozens of hours. And just memorized the menu location for some useful potions (mostly just elixir and HP recoveries).
A main character blinks away, teleporting somewhere. Some girl joins the party for unknown reasons. Then I realize the guy teleported to heaven because guess what actually he died.
Dozens of hours turned to dozens and dozens of hours. Memorizing the +100HP potion became memorizing the +1000HP potion. Then I beat it.
I still have basically no idea what the story is about.
So, you know, don’t make your UX like that.
Trying to make it to shittyuiuxanalogies.tumblr.com. (For a better UX article based on Final Fantasy, check out Final Fantasy’s Guide to Onboarding.)
“Let me show you something.”
I stepped aside and an older kid—picture young John Connor—took the joystick. A few moments later Sub-Zero ripped someone’s head off with their spine attached. Awesome.
This was my first time seeing a fatality in Mortal Kombat. Apparently some parents didn’t think this was great, so the first Mortal Kombat had sweat instead of blood. Except for the kids with a Genesis.
“Some sort of blood code,” Garske explained to Kalinske. “So when you buy the game, it comes without any of that over-the-top gore and violence. But then all you have to do in order to get the game to look just like it does in the arcades is enter a code. A combination of buttons and then boom—blood everywhere.”
So on the SNES when I’d try to rip a spine out, instead I’d see this:
“As long as the shattered body parts aren’t red ice, we’re Gucci.”
I made the last quote up. My point was going to be that the SNES had watered down fatalities. But… this seems pretty brutal too. But these seemed much tamer as a kid.
I remember being really aware of how the first game had sweat. Nobody was buying the SNES version and most of my friends were Nintendo kids. And that it was a big deal that the sequel would have blood without a code.
I have cloudy memories of going to an AAFES store with my brother and our parents to get Mortal Kombat II. And it was behind this glass case with a rating on it. (Though it wasn’t one of the ESRB ratings that would eventually come out.)
Anyway we got it and then played it. A lot. I remember seeing MKII the first time at an arcade in an airport. And someone (again, an older kid) had what looked like a strategy guide but it was just a bunch of printouts.
And these printouts had all the moves and fatalities. That might have been my first exposure to anything related to the internet.
Console Wars talks about the different approaches toward violence that SEGA and Nintendo took.
Flash Boys also shows the perspective of programmers in finance. I’ve been a programmer at a fashion company where technology is a means to an end. The relationship in finance seems more nuanced. The programmers care about the trees, of course. Details are important. They also care about the forest, but they don’t get a view into that other forest. That one over there. Yeah the one with trees that have dollar bills for leaves.
Talking to a programmer type about the trading business was a bit like talking to the house plumber at work in the basement about the card game the Mafia don was running upstairs. “He knew so little about the business context,” one of the jurors said, after attending both dinners. “You’d have to try to know as little as he did.” Another said, “He knew as much as they wanted him to know about how they made money, which was virtually nothing.
What do programmers do, anyway?
[…] the entire platform had as many as 60 million lines of code in it and fifteen years of fixes to it had created the computer equivalent of a giant rubber-band ball. When one of the rubber bands popped, Serge was expected to find it and fix it.
Spot on. There’s the phrase “spaghetti code” for things that are getting out of hand. Rubber-band ball goes a step further. The older the root of the problem, the deeper you need to go to fix it. And you need to keep the other layers in order.
Something that might be hard to explain is lines of code. I don’t have a good idea of how many lines of code is equal to what. Staying abstract I don’t know how many lines would be in 1 KB, not to mention a MB. How many lines of code is jQuery?1
The size of code comes up in the chapters following Sergey Aleynikov (Serge). He sent Goldman Sachs code to himself before leaving his job. Most was mostly open source, but with modifications to work with their system. Why would he take it?
“In Serge’s case, think of being at a company for three years, and you carry a spiral notebook and write everything down. Everything about your meetings, your ideas, products, sales, client meetings—it’s all written down in that notebook. You leave for your new job and take the notebook with you […]”
You’re not going to read through a notebook word for word, but it’s good to have for reference. How much code was it all anyway?
Most were surprised by how little Serge had taken in relation to the whole: eight megabytes, in a platform that consisted of nearly fifteen hundred megabytes of code.
Not much at all. Or is it? Without looking it up I don’t have a good sense of what 8 MB is. I can try to break it down:
Which sounds like a lot, but I imagine it’s mostly libraries. But I also just have no idea. And I’ve been paid to program. Guess who was supposed to build up some sense of what this was then decide Sergey’s fate?
The jury in Sergey Aleynikov’s trial consisted mainly of high school graduates; all of the jurors lacked experience programming computers. “They would bring my computer into the courtroom,” recalled Serge incredulously. “They would pull out the hard drive and show it to the jury. As evidence!”
I’ve done jury duty and it reminded me that everyone goes. Your coworkers. Your barista. Their mom. Their doctor. I can convince my parents that technology can do anything or nothing. They’d almost certainly be swayed by someone waving around a hard drive.
Flash Boys has been on my to-read list for a while. I’d seen it referenced in passing as if everyone had read it. Michael Lewis writes about high frequency trading and the start of IEX.
I finally bought it after listening to the Joe Rogan podcast where he had on Andreas Antonopoulos who uses Bitcoin exclusively. Rogan mentioned the importance of physical location to fiber lines. That sounded like a reference to high frequency trading. In the same week, IEX was finishing up their transition to an exchange.
I knew little about finance prior to reading Flash Boys. Now I have a better idea of how little I know. A lot more happens than people might think when they submit a trade online.
The importance of milliseconds
How long is a millisecond? Michael Lewis explains a lot of technical things in simpler terms. There are a lot of metaphors.
Lewis describes Brad and Ronan on their campaign to bring awareness to high frequency trading:
They never created a PowerPoint; they never did anything more formal than sit down and tell people everything they knew in plain English.
Lewis may as well be describing himself. I have no financial background but now understand the basics of high frequency trading. Humans aren’t great at thinking of numbers at scale, but Lewis does a great job describing tiny numbers in sensible ways:
…from Chicago to New York and back in roughly 12 milliseconds, or roughly a tenth of the time it takes you to blink your eyes, if you blink as fast as you can.
I played Counter-Strike in high school. LAN parties and all. And one of the things that LAN parties took away was latency. When we were on the server my friends played on, ping varied around 70ms (DSL) to 250ms (usually on a 56K modem, virtual god help the virtual you). Everyone begged their parents for DSL lines. Milliseconds mattered.
Milliseconds, microseconds, either one may as well be instant. Even seconds seems fast enough for a lot of things. What difference does it make?
There were one million microseconds in a second. It was as if, back in the 1920s, the only stock market data available was a crude aggregation of all trades made during the decade.
I like this stretching out of time to describe resolution. It reminds me of zooming in on the timeline in a video editor from 1 minute to 1 second.
Never before in human history have people gone to so much trouble and spent so much money to gain so little speed. “People were measuring the length of their cables to the foot inside the exchanges. People were buying these servers and chucking them out six months later. For microseconds.”
Chuck Klosterman talks about consciousness and our place in the uni…multiverse. He explains the multiverse and has answers from Brian Greene, an expert in the topic. (Who has a TED talk about the multiverse.)
After a few more pages, another big idea doesn’t matter again. He describes traveling at the speed of light but manages to make it seem slow. It would take lifetimes to get to the edge of the galaxy. Forget about the edge of the universe. Even if we confirmed we were in a multiverse it wouldn’t matter.
Ok, another idea: what if we’re in a computer simulation? This was popularized by The New York Times in 2007 and it comes up once in a while when people like Elon Musk are asked about it. Musk talked about the advance from two rectangles and a dot to online multiplayer games in 40 years:
“If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, just indistinguishable.
“Either we’re going to create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality, or civilization will cease to exist. Those are the two options.”
So what if we’re right about this? You might be able to stop at “So what.” Multiverse or computer simulation, we still couldn’t interact outside of it. It doesn’t affect day to day life.
Such a realization wouldn’t be like Jim Carrey’s character’s recognition of his plight in The Truman Show, because there would be no physical boundary to hit; it would be more like playing Donkey Kong and suddenly seeing Mario turn toward the front of the monitor in order to say, “I know what’s going on here.”
He can’t step out. We can’t stick a crane game arm in there to pull Mario into reality. If we verified that we live in The Sims 28728, the person playing can’t pull us out and into base reality.
So it might not matter. And that’s okay because it’s still fun to think about. Klosterman establishes that and describes some approaches to life, including testing boundaries like it’s GTA.
Klosterman seems to be a magnitude smarter than me. And he interviewed people he’d describe as a magnitude smarter than himself. And he contests that even they probably don’t have it all sorted out.
And that’s fine and leaves some fun things to think through. But What if We’re Wrong has Klosterman guiding readers through these topics. Whether it’s all real or not, I enjoyed the journey.
In But What if We’re Wrong, Chuck Klosterman looks at the present as if it were the distant past.
In one chapter, he tries sorting out which modern writers will stand the test of time.
You need to write about important things without actually writing about them. I realize this sounds like advice from a fortune cookie.
He uses 9/11 as an example of an important thing. Down the line, though, whatever stands as representative of 9/11 probably won’t be something written directly about it.
One thing that’s stuck with me from listening to Serial is how poor memory is. Without looking it up, I couldn’t tell you details about 5 Thursdays ago. Klosterman brings up the inaccuracy of same-day eyewitness statements. Stretched over centuries, recorded history can’t be very accurate. It’s also missing a lot of pages altogether.
So maybe the past doesn’t matter, because we don’t really know what it was like. What about the future?
Well with computers we’re able to have accurate records of everything. True, but it really means everything. Who’s gonna go through that? It’s not like people hit up archive.org day to day. It’s usually a deep dive into one topic.
On a time scale of centuries, many things end up being winner-take-all. We can debate a Mount Rushmore of basketball players, but 500 years from now it’ll probably just be Michael Jordan in one full body mountain sculpture.
One takeaway from But What if We’re Wrong is that a lot of things won’t matter in the far future. Books take years to write. Most won’t be remembered a century from now, much less five centuries from now. Writers can only add a few pages to a book every day.
On an individual level, anything we do in a day or even in a year probably won’t matter in the (very) long run. It’s grim or freeing, or both.
Chances are, aiming to be remembered in the far future isn’t a great goal. Especially because the people who remember you don’t care in the first place:
To matter forever, you need to matter to those who don’t care. And if that strikes you as sad, be sad.
Basketball nerds can debate whoever else is in the top-4 with him, but Jordan will be in there. Of those 4, he’s the one with a global brand. There’s a culture with a foundation built around the popularity of his shoes.
A lot of the kids standing in those lines never watched a single game he was in live. They can’t care about Jordan as much as a Bulls fan in the 90s1. Their emotions aren’t tied to how well Jordan performs in a playoff game.
So the past doesn’t matter and now maybe the future doesn’t matter either. Bringing me to where we’ve always been and always are: the present.
For me, being present was the important thing this book was about that it wasn’t really about. I’m guessing it’s not even on the list of top 1,000 points Klosterman was aiming to make. I only made the connection because it’s top of mind for me right now. I started meditating recently, beginning my transition into the lifestream. Maybe it’s the way out of the simulation.
I may have just talked myself out of this. It might be LeBron. More people worldwide have probably followed his hero’s journey. In a 24-hour news cycle. So it’s gonna be Jordan, unless it’s LeBron. It just won’t be Kobe. You can’t go long thinking about Kobe and where he ranks without thinking about Jordan. ↩
I tinkered this week. That means there was a mix of design, development, and spinning my tires. I’m at a place where I’m not super embarrassed of the look/layout, just mostly embarrassed. It’s worth sharing and starting the search for my first ten. This week, I’ll get back to creating content.
Here are some updates from this week.
Standalone 100 Days, 100 Posts page: I want to set aside the 100 posts as I continue writing and posting beyond the first 100.
Redesigned the homepage
Here’s a timelapse of me struggling HTML/CSS, then struggling in Sketch, then struggling in HTML/CSS again. In potato
resolution:
Menu and Flickity
I bought a Flickity license, so I’ll be putting carousels everywhere. I started with the header menu, which remains in the previously mentioned super-embarrassed state. Iterations to come. On desktop, the carousel should be disabled and the cards should all just show.
I’ve been brainstorming card sets that might be interesting. One idea was stray book notes. One-off cards with a book highlight and some of my thoughts. For desktop, there should be an option to view the cards laid out next to each other.
Here’s a prototype. Three book notes from this week:
Simplifying
I changed my Twitter name @makeshowlearn to @_franciscortez. I still love the spirit behind “make things, show people, and learn more things”. For a little bit, I was wondering how this would be received by others. Then I remembered the immortal words of Don Draper: “I don’t think about you at all.” And I realized that nobody will care.
IRL
Running
I’m continuing with the Couch to 5K program. It ramped up pretty quick. I dropped the speed down because my heart rate was getting too high based on science and internet browsing. This seems sustainable. I also bought bands to help work on some knee pain.
Meditation
I need to get back on this. I still feel like I’m focusing better than before I started meditating. So Iit seems like a really important skill to work on. I’ll make time to do this. I really enjoyed Eric Barker’s post from this week: “Neuroscience Of Meditation: How To Make Your Mind Awesome”. Clear, informative, and fun to read.
Testing what a set of cards could look like in a post. I also tried a few in this week’s Sunday Journal.
This is me writing some stuff. In the other slides, I drew some things. I whipped out the Wacom and
proceeded with what I usually do with the Wacom. I created trash drawings. Actually I think the composition
notebook is okay.
Something very profound.
I can write stray book highlights like this.
