Hold On to Your Joysticks

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Sometime in the next few months, an argument is going to break out in the 30 million families infected by the Nintendo video-game craze. The kids, primed by saturation advertising, are going to tell their parents they "gotta have" the awesome new 16-bit Nintendo system for Christmas. The parents, remembering the hundreds of dollars they have invested in the old 8-bit Nintendo, are going to say, "No way."

Nintendo last week began taking bets on how many kids are going to win that argument. At the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, the purveyor of the world's most successful electronic-game system unveiled its long-awaited successor: a gray plastic book-size box called the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. When it becomes available in September, Super NES will cost $199.95 (twice the price of the old NES) for the basic game machine, two hand-held controllers, the latest Super Mario Bros. adventure and a $50 coupon for another game. The machine will also be backed by a $95 million nonstop marketing blitz designed to convince every American preadolescent that life without 16 bits wouldn't be worth living.

It's not going to be an easy sell. In theory, the more powerful computer chip at the heart of Super NES can generate games with richer colors, clearer sound, faster action and more sophisticated play. A 16-bit chip, for example, can create 32,768 colors, compared with 52 for an 8-bit chip. But it's going to be hard to see those improvements on the fuzzy family TVs most Nintendo sets are plugged into. And because the original Nintendo -- and a portable successor called Game Boy -- uses different chips, the old games won't work in the new machine, rendering 200 million cartridges obsolete.

More worrisome for Nintendo are signs that the video-game frenzy the Japanese-owned company stirred up over the past five years may be starting to fizzle. Sales of the old Nintendo system have fallen off sharply (down 46% in the first half of 1991), and discount tags have replaced SOLD OUT signs in toy stores across the U.S. "I played all the games so much, I just got bored with them," says Tomas Romano, 9, of Brooklyn, N.Y. He and his friends now prefer Little League baseball.

Nintendo should be able to drum up enough excitement to sell out this year's supply of 2 million Super NES sets. What's less clear is how long that enthusiasm will last. At best, say analysts, over the next five years Nintendo will sell about two-thirds as many of the new systems as it sold of the old. At worst, Nintendo could end up like Atari, which in the early 1980s tried to replace a wildly successful video-game player with one that was more powerful but incompatible. Atari ended up with a mountain of unsold game cartridges that got loaded onto dump trucks and used as landfill.