GameSpotting

Brad Shoemaker
Associate Editor

Now Playing: Dark Cloud 2 (PS2), Battlefield 1942: The Road to Rome (PC), The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (GBA)
Can't Wait For: Doom III, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

Value Subtracted

When I think back on the days of my youth, so many of them misspent in front of a game console, my mind always drifts with wistful remembrance to the things that made the early days of gaming great. When I say "early," I'm talking about the NES and Sega Master System--I mean, I'm not that old. Anyway, I think about walking home from grade school around the first of the month and checking the mailbox hopefully for the new issue of Nintendo Power. I think about getting up at 6 am to get in an hour of Super Mario Bros. 3 before I had to go to school. I think about really wanting to play Contra because, gee, that picture on the front of the box sure looks cool. And I think about how back then, when you got a new game system, you were good to go, right out of the box, for a long time. And then I lament the death of the pack-in.

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Look at all this...this stuff. We need more stuff with our systems.
In the days of yore, the value that came with a new system was staggering by today's standards. Remember all that junk you got when you bought an NES? Two games (these two), two controllers, and a light gun. If you paid a little bit more, you got another game (Gyromite) and the Robotic Operating Buddy, which...well, ROB was pretty lame, but you get the idea. The Master System had a comparable two-games-two-controllers-and-a-gun bundle, if I recall. The point is, if you bugged your parents into getting you a game system, you had access to as much gaming as your prepubescent attention span could handle. Of course, other games came later, but for a while, you were set.

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This thing spelled the end for the pack-in.
Then along came the Genesis, and everything started to fall apart. Oh sure, it came with Altered Beast, and that was all well and good, but what? Only one controller? Twenty freaking dollars more just to play two-player on this vaunted next-gen system? Foul, the gaming populace cried. Thankfully, Nintendo kept up old traditions when it put out the Super NES a couple of years later, throwing in Super Mario World, which is one of the greatest platformers ever (fact!), and two of what I think is nearly the best controller ever made. But despite the SNES's quite respectable bundle, I think this period marked the beginning of the end for pack-ins.

Of course, once the Saturn came out, it was all over. For $400, you got the system, one controller, and one very lackluster port of Virtua Fighter. To be fair, it had a CD-ROM drive, and I'm sure it cost a pile of cash to manufacture, but the sales figures make it pretty obvious that Sega seriously limited its audience with that move. Maybe we should have seen the writing on the wall when the SegaCD shipped for $300, packaged only with the awful Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective and some shovelware Genesis games. But at least that was something to play; the Saturn had almost nothing (sorry--buggy Virtua Fighter doesn't count). And of course, when Sony made its big entry into the games business, it pulled pretty much the same stunt, minus a game (although for $100 less). But in addition to needing an extra controller and a game, you had to buy a memory card just to save your games. Ditto for Nintendo that generation with the N64--even the stalwart "Big N" was shunning tradition to cut a few costs. 'Twas a dark time indeed for the gamer on a budget.

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Seems like things are looking up for the cash-strapped gamer. This package will set you back only 200 bones.
So that brings us to now. The cost of buying a game console has increased since the old days, and you're getting a lot less for the price. But now that the games business is generating an untold amount of revenue and competition is red hot, could it be that things are changing? I'm not necessarily suggesting that we'll experience a pack-in renaissance in the next generation, but at least two of the major players have recently changed their tune. Microsoft was offering Sega GT 2002 and Jet Set Radio Future to all new Xbox owners last fall in the rush up to Christmas, and recently Nintendo started offering one of four games--Metroid Prime, Star Fox Adventures, Mario Party 4, or Resident Evil 0--along with the GameCube, which is already a pretty darn good deal at $149.95. Of course, Sony's made no such moves, but then again they're selling PlayStation 2s as fast as they can make them, so they really don't have to undercut their competitors in any way.

With Microsoft and Nintendo both making suggestions that they want to get out of the gate with their next systems before or at the same time as Sony releases the PlayStation 3, maybe the next generation really will be competitive enough that all three companies will start throwing some value back into the basic system package. At the very least, we'll probably be spared the extra cost and inconvenience of the memory card, since it's conceivable that all the systems will have some kind of writable internal storage. Of course, network adapters and extra interfaces, like USB and FireWire ports, are also becoming the norm. But will we be lucky enough to see a second controller or, dare I say it, even pack-in games again in a couple of years? I'm not holding my breath, and I don't think you should either, but here's hoping.

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