Thread by @gamespite, Instagram's Twitter integration has become terrible (no doubt by design), so I [...]

Instagram's Twitter integration has become terrible (no doubt by design), so I guess I need to handle crossposts for my little 2021 project manually.

But anyway: I’m going to try posting the classic game sets I've photographed for Video Works daily here throughout the year.

My project goes back to July 15, 1983 with the launch of Nintendo’s Famicom and Sega’s SG-1000 in Japan—the birth of the present-day games medium, for most intents and purposes. And what more appropriate lead off here than THE big game release that day: Nintendo’s Donkey Kong

The arcade game was two years old, but this was easily the most faithful home port that released to that point; the Famicom hardware was purpose-built to recreate this specific game. It wasn’t 100% accurate (it was missing an entire stage), but it still made a great impression.

Thanks to @stevenplin for lending me this game (and many to come) for photography

Nintendo’s second launch title for Famicom, Donkey Kong Jr., sees a villainous turn for Mario: Here he's successfully bested Donkey Kong atop the construction site and caged him to… sell him to the circus? Somehow going from an American city to the circus involves a jungle trek.

This is reputed to be a heel turn for Nintendo, too: They’re said to have built this game on the base of the original DK while cutting the contract engineers who designed DK's hardware out of the loop.

Compared to the first game, DK Jr. sees a real visual downgrade on Famicom.

Character sprites—especially Junior's—are quite small here. On the other hand, it does contain all four arcade stages.

The white Famicom packaging is sharp, a great contrast to its companion title’s red, though the stark scheme does make a pristine condition tough to find now.

Nintendo’s third Famicom launch title, Popeye hailed from the arcades, just like the Kong family. There's another connection between the games at play: Donkey Kong was initially conceived as a Popeye game, but ended up shipping as an original work due to licensing complications.

Just as well: DK was the better game and launched a powerfully influential creative dynasty. Imagine if Super Mario and all that came after had been derailed by licensing limitations! Of Famicom's three launch titles, Popeye suffered most in terms of visuals in coming to console.

The arcade game used an eye-catching dual-format approach: Backgrounds appeared as simple geometric shapes, while character sprites used a double-resolution mode that allowed them to look huge and detailed—like cartoon characters. The Famicom sprites were dinky and unimpressive.

The game still played almost exactly like the coin-op version, though. Naturally, it shipped in green packaging. Like spinach! This had the coincidental side effect of paying tribute to Mario’s heritage: Line up the green, white, and red launch carts and you get the Italian flag.

The same day Nintendo launched the Family Computer (which was a console, not a computer), Sega launched its own console (which actually WAS also a computer): The SG-1000 / SC-3000. Nearly identical to the ColecoVision hardware, it was less powerful than Famicom in most respects.

It would evolve rapidly! Sega conveniently numbered its SG-1000 releases, so their console history begins with Borderline, G-1001. Based on an arcade shooter, Borderline did not have the international clout of Donkey Kong, but in a way it was ambitious as Nintendo’s big game.

Each stage featured a different form of gameplay, from auto-scrolling to something like Dig Dug.

Many games for SG-1000 were released in multiple package variants; this is the second “small box” revision. The cartridges were always solid black, unlike Famicom’s plastic rainbow.

SG-1000 catalog no. G-1002, Safari Hunting is another arcade conversion. Not to be mistaken for the similarly named Sega Master System pack-in Safari Hunt, which was a light gun game played from a first-person perspective; make the "hunt" a gerund and you get a top-down game.

Here, players get a tranquilizer rifle, a Jeep with a VERY capacious trailer, and the task of stalking through a bush maze attempting to capture as many snakes, apes, lions, and elephants as possible. Hard to imagine a game like that being made today, but this was the ‘80s, baby.

The "western" quality of early SG-1000 boxes intrigues me. Nintendo’s illustrations fell somewhere between E.C. Seger and Osamu Tezuka, but Sega went with painterly styles that echoed the impressionistic realism of a ‘70s cigarette ad or looked like high-spec Mad Magazine art.

The art would drift more toward manga stylings as the tastes of Japan’s gaming audience solidified (and gaming became stigmatized as kids’ stuff rather than the adult pastime it was in its expensive early days). But this box could easily be for some forgotten Atari 2600 release.

The final Sega SG-1000 launch title, N-Sub, is—yes!—another military-themed shooting game. Even more than box art styles, the content of these games really points to the fundamental differences between Sega and Nintendo’s respective approaches to publishing.

Nintendo led with cartoon games and minimal opportunities for violence, while all three of Sega’s debut releases had more real-world vibes and revolved entirely around shooting. Of course, Nintendo made their share of shooting games as well, and Sega made plenty of non-shooters.

I mean, this game is a more elaborate Space Invaders derivative, and it's nearly identical to a Nintendo game called Heli-Fire! But Nintendo has never republished Heli-Fire, unlike Sega with N-Sub. It’s interesting to see the company's divergent approaches right from the start.

On to Famicom and SG-1000's post-launch releases. Sega has never published official ship dates for its early console titles, so I'm just going by catalog numbers for those. But we do know when Nintendo’s first follow-up titles arrived: Aug. 27, six weeks after the console itself.

These August releases were adaptations of traditional tabletop games, not arcade ports, including Gomoku Narabe Renju (based on Go). This one feels like a sop to company president Hiroshi Yamauchi; he famously never played video games during his lifetime, but he was a Go expert.

With AI powered by an 8-bit CPU clocked below 2MHz, I doubt this game challenged him. But it did help frame the Famicom as a Serious Computer Device For Adults.

A nice packaging touch: The black cartridge inside a white outer box echoed the tiles used in Go.

Along with their rendition of Go, Nintendo also treated Famicom owners to an adaptation of a second traditional tabletop game in August 1983: Mah-Jong. Nearly every console to come from Japan in the ‘80s received a Mahjong title near launch. It's simply a thing that was done.

This is definitely an “adaptation” as opposed to a faithful rendition. Mahjong is traditionally played by four people, each of whom sits in one of the cardinal directions of the compass, but this cart only allows two people (or rather, one person and the CPU) to square off.

As with other console interpretations of Mahjong from this era, Mah-Jong is based on Japan's “riichi” variant of the game rather than the original Chinese rules. (Someday, I'll actually learn how to play this game and will be able to explain what the differences actually are.)

Sega’s first post-launch title for SG-1000 was… also a Mahjong adaptation. As with Nintendo’s take, this cartridge works with riichi rules, and features a two-position face-off for a single player rather than proper four-position matches or multiplayer.

This version doesn’t look quite as nice as Nintendo’s, given the graphical differences between the two consoles, but they’re functionally almost identical. The box art is probably where the two games stand most apart.

Nintendo featured a clean, simple, and highly literal interpretation of the game, while Sega commissioned a colorful illustration of a salaryman calling “ron” (the winning declaration, e.g. “checkmate”) against a doofy-looking opponent as a border of dynamic tiles surrounds them.

Again, Sega’s love for lively-but-dated illustrations really does peg these packages to their era, but I love to see so many great examples of a bygone discipline in this lineup. A rack of SG-1000 boxes all hanging side-by-side must have been a sight to behold!

Sega's “Champion” sports series began with Champion Golf. As you'd expect, it’s a straightforward take on the sport—and primitive. Golf video games would be codified with the innovative swing meter in Nintendo’s Golf. There's a primal version of that here, but it's clumsy.

This is the first SG-1000 game to have a non-Sega credit on its title screen, to a dev called Logitec (not Logitech), for whom no other credits exist online. Mysterious! Less enigmatic is the cover art, which again appears to have been swiped from a Salem cigarette ad circa 1981.

Yesterday’s post was Champion Golf for SG-1000... and so is today’s. But this is catalog number C-05, while yesterday’s was G-1005. What’s the difference? So far as I can tell, nothing in terms of game content; the message here is the medium.

Sega updated its console hardware after a year or so on the market, adding support for their new media format: Credit card-sized "My Cards". These could hold just as much data as the original, chunky, black cartridges, but they took up much less space (especially on the shelf).

Several SG-1000 carts received reissues on My Cards once the redesigned SG-1000 Mark II console launched, presumably based on their popularity. From this we can determine that Sega fans, happily, enjoy golf more than they enjoy shooting wild animals.

Also, @gdri pointed me to the story behind Champion Golf dev Logitec: This cart/card was adapted from a game they created for the MSX PC. One of their designers would later establish Kid, the studio responsible for NES classics like Burai Fighter, G.I. Joe, and uhhh... Low-G Man?

Tsumeshogi, Sega’s sixth numbered SG-1000 title, adapts another classic Japanese tabletop game: Shougi. You invariably saw Go, Mahjong, or Shougi adaptations very early in the lifespan of classic consoles from Japan; Sega and Nintendo collectively covered the bases right away.

Shougi resembles Chess, with identical titles distinguished by the kanji character written on them. Tsumeshogi doesn't attempt to reproduce the full Shougi experience but rather gives players a series of self-contained play scenarios that need to be resolved, like little puzzles.

Given the complexity of Shougi and the meager processing power of the SG-1000, this was the wiser approach. (Even Sega’s artists couldn’t figure out how to spice up a game about chess puzzles, though. They settled for literal box art: A tile plunging bomb-like toward the board.)

Moving on to September 1983, we have the cartridge that, to my mind, marks the moment Nintendo declared it intended to be a home console maker first and foremost: Mario Bros.

At the time this cart shipped, Mario Bros. had only been in arcades for three months...

...yet here was Nintendo offering it up to everyone for home play, meaning you didn’t have to seek out the coin-op version.

Graphically, Mario Bros. on Famicom didn’t look as nice as the arcade game, but it played with few compromises—including simultaneous two-player action.

It was a pretty big win for the console.

Personally, though, my favorite thing about this release is the overall aesthetic. I love the early cartoon style of the artwork—Mario and Luigi look so lumpy and goofy!—as well as that gorgeous creamsicle-orange plastic.

In contrast to the timely Mario Bros. on Famicom, we have the horror of Congo Bongo on SG-1000. The arcade version was literally Sega’s answer to Donkey Kong—a game where you climbed a tricky structure in pursuit of a gorilla, programmed by the same company behind Donkey Kong!

This port badly misses the appeal of the coin-op: Its detailed, isometric graphical style. Congo Bongo in arcades looked great; Congo Bongo on SG-1000 does not. This version flattens out the perspective while trying to retain a semblance of depth in terms of the control scheme.

It’s a clumsy, ugly mess. Fittingly, the box art is bizarrely unpleasant, too. SG-1000 illustrations had an Atari 2600 box art vibe about them; this looks like a sketchy 2600 release from one of those fly-by-night publishers that helped spark the “Atari crash.” A real letdown.

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