Documentaries · Hardware and games, 1982–1999
The Beige Years
Researched histories of the machines, companies and games of the beige-box era, argued from the documents. Each video has a page here with its chapters, its full source list and every image credit.
The library
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17No.
The Cyrix 6x86 · 1995
Cyrix 6x86: The Chip That Quake Exposed
Cyrix warned of a quarterly loss the day before Quake came out, yet the game still gets the blame for its fall.
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16No.
The Creative Sound Blaster · 1989
Sound Blaster compatible: How a Copy Became the Standard
The Sound Blaster had the AdLib's own Yamaha chip, yet it cost more in the shops, and it still won.
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15No.
The Roland MT-32 · 1987
Roland MT-32: Why Its Music Sounds Wrong on a Sound Canvas
Roland MT-32: Sierra's games wrote their own instruments into a box that forgot them when it was switched off.
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14No.
The Nintendo 64 · 1996
Nintendo 64: Square Announced N64 Games, Then Chose Sony
Nintendo 64: in September 1995 Square announced a company to make N64 games; in February 1996 it signed with Sony.
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13No.
The Nintendo Virtual Boy · 1995
Virtual Boy: Nintendo's Red Machine and the Man Who Left
Virtual Boy: the manual does warn of headaches, but it ties them to misadjusting it; Yokoi blamed a liability law.
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12No.
Doom · 1993
Doom: id's Boast About Lost Work Hours Came True
Doom 1993: id promised "the number one cause of decreased productivity" before its network game existed.
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11No.
FidoNet · 1984
FidoNet: The Wrong Number That Rang Every Night
FidoNet's boards called each other for one hour a night, and a wrong number in its list rang a stranger every night.
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10No.
Iomega and the Zip drive · 1980
The Iomega Zip Drive and the Click of Death
The Zip drive's legend says the click of death killed it, but Iomega's own filings point to something cheaper.
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09No.
Street Fighter II · 1991
Street Fighter 2: What Capcom Didn't Plan
Street Fighter 2 was the sequel its players forced on Capcom, and by one Capcom man's account, pirates set its speed.
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08No.
Palm Computing and the PalmPilot · 1992
Palm Pilot: Its Company Was Sold in 1995, Before It Shipped
To ship the PalmPilot, its inventors sold Palm Computing in 1995 for about $44 million, then watched it slip away.
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07No.
NBA Jam · 1993
NBA Jam: The Night a Chicago Arcade Knew It Had a Hit
NBA Jam's on-court bodies were Chicago amateurs, not NBA stars; one of them was a club bouncer.
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06No.
Atari's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial · 1982
E.T. Atari: What Was Really Buried in the Landfill
Atari E.T. really was buried, yet its programmer Howard Scott Warshaw answered "I say false".
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05No.
The Tetris licensing war · 1984
Tetris and the Game Boy: The Check Written in Moscow
Tetris was licensed to Mirrorsoft in 1987, while there was still no contract with the Soviets.
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04No.
3dfx Interactive · 1994
3dfx: From GLQuake to Nvidia, in Its Own Filings
3dfx's own merger filing said it would likely lose customers who competed with STB, yet the board signed anyway.
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03No.
US Robotics · 1976
US Robotics: How the Courier Won the Bulletin Boards
Buying US Robotics, 3Com recorded merger charges of $426 million in the first quarter of fiscal 1998.
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02No.
Mortal Kombat · 1992
Mortal Kombat: The Fatality Began as an Office Gag
Mortal Kombat was filler to Midway: four people, a hole in the schedule, and a budget around $1 million.
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01No.
Commodore 64 · 1982
Commodore 64: Discontinued in 1994 While Still Selling
The Commodore 64 sold about 12.5 million by its own sales records, not the 17 million the company put in print.
Method
- Sources
Every claim traces to a source.
Each video's page lists what it was built from: period magazines, court records, company documents, interviews and reference works, with links and the date each was read.
- Disagreement
Where the record disagrees, the video says so.
When two sources give different figures or dates, both are named and the video explains which one it follows and why.
- Voice
The narration is a synthetic voice. The research isn't.
The voice is generated from a written script. The script, the sources behind it and the argument are the work, and each video's page lists them in full.
Spotted a wrong date, a misread spec or a bad attribution? Send the video, the timestamp and your source. Corrections are logged on the video's page.
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