62 MCV 06/08/10
WWW.MCVUK.COM
20FIVE 165,000
Nintendo’s top-sellers of Q1 2010: Super Mario Galaxy 2 (4.09m), Will Sports Resort (3.02m), Will Sports (2.73m).
BILLION
The number of Tweets sent since Twitter launched in March 2006.
SECOND FACTS
Read and remember these so you can sound clever at the next Monday morning meeting...
SEGA’s Q1 territory sales split: US (1.68m units), Europe (1.33m), Japan (0.27m).
Number of game copiers seized from Playables by Nintendo in landmark High Court ruling.
25.2 billion yen (£184.8 million): Nintendo’s Q1 loss on sales of 188.6 billion Yen (£1.38 billion).
40 million unique browsers: MailOnline’s recent official ABCe audit puts it at the top of the pack in the UK.
20 FEET
The size of the stone arches that customers will enter
through in Apple’s new flagship store in Covent Garden.
The brands, people and technology that have dominated decades. This week, packaging... EIGHTIES, NINETIES, NOUGHTIES
Down 90.4 per cent: Capcom’s Q1 profit drops year-on- year, to 2.2 billion
yen (£16.1m).
$28 MILLION
Amount awarded to Richard Garriott in a legal dispute with his former employers NCsoft.
CARDBOARD
No-one would honestly claim to know what the hell they were doing in the endearingly clueless 1980s. Informed by the do-it-yourself ethic of the punk era, the idealism of the hippies and, presumably, freeform jazz, software companies seemed to believe that packaging was as much of a statement of their brand as the game itself. After a brief period of cute plastic cassette box dominance, publishers like Ultimate, Melbourne House and Beyond went their own way with bespoke shelf- hogging cardboard designs – but it didn’t end there. By the time 16-bit formats were gaining traction towards the end of the decade, it was out of control. Ridiculous cardboard behemoths meant the average software emporium could only stock 27 games at any one time.
CD-ROM
With a determination bordering on psychotic, gaming publishers continued to try and outdo one another in the packaging stakes. Despite the rise of the CD-ROM format, most simply saw this as a chance to create unnecessarily bloated designs, culminating with Virgin’s 1993 humungous PC release The 7th Guest. Sony had other ideas, though, and two years later stuck two fingers up at accepted wisdom with its svelte CD-sized PlayStation design. But despite the obvious practicality of this new space-saving design, every rival format – apart from the Dreamcast – figured that it was entirely necessary to differentiate itself, with massive PC boxes duking it out next to fat N64 cardboard, dorky Saturn and ultra-destructible Game Boy packaging.
DVD
Bowing to pressure from pissy (and increasingly powerful) retailers, Sony ushered in a new decade of sanitised conformity with the release of the new DVD-sized PS2 boxes – a standard that both Microsoft and Nintendo quickly adopted with the Xbox and GameCube, respectively. It took a tad longer for PC publishers to be neutered and fall in line, but it ensured that future generations of gamers would now have about 500 per cent more storage space. But what did we do with our newly uniform media collection? We made endless trips to Ikea and wallowed in the misery of self-assembly. Thank goodness the proliferation of Limited Edition box sets restores chaotic balance to the situation.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64