- Pronouns
- He/Him
So... I said something that touched a nerve in another thread that I was requested to follow up on. I wish I hadn't, this went into WAY more detail than I intended. But it's a thing now, so... here we go.
Howard Lincoln, former Senior VP (1983-1994) and Chairman of Nintendo of America (1994-2000), is idolized by a great many Nintendo fans as the man at the helm of Nintendo's North American operations during its golden beginnings and considered responsible for the company's many achievements in this era, most notably the partnership with Rare.
He was also a gigantic insufferable arrogant prick who all but made sure everything he built would collapse without him.
This may come as a shocking stance for some of you, but it shouldn't. And this is not meant to diminish how great it was for gamers during these years. But behind the scenes, there was a lot going on and so little of it ended up good. Between excerpts of Game Over, various journalistic pieces and general public knowledge, one gets a picture of a Nintendo of America that was built entirely around one man, a man whose record for leaving things he manages worse in the end is 2-0. Just ask the Seattle Mariners.
So much of the negativity for what happened at NoA is heaped on the beginning of Satoru Iwata's years on the job at Nintendo as head of corporate planning and president, but further assessment shows that much of that blame was unwarranted.
So let's dig in and start with the facts, shall we?
Howard Lincoln was considered untouchable
From the beginning, Lincoln was thought to be a godsend. After winning the court case for Nintendo against Universal Studios over Donkey Kong and preserving Nintendo's future arcade prospects, along with Hiroshi Yamauchi finding common ground with him in terms of business mindsets, Yamauchi trusted Lincoln with North American operations completely. Lincoln's only oversight during his time at NoA was Minoru Arakawa, the man who founded NoA (against his wife's wishes, I might add) due to being a member of the Yamauchi family by marriage who was already settled in on the continent. But Arakawa wasn't running the show and everyone with sense knew it; he was the rubber stamp and a way to keep the business in the family across an ocean. Yamauchi liked Lincoln and, by the 90s, he had been given carte blanche with no one to question him, since he had Yamauchi's ear, and... well, one did not cross Hiroshi Yamauchi.
Some of you might ask "well, how is that a bad thing? Clearly things worked out well." Yeah, well, entrusting things to a single person in the gaming industry rarely works out well.... hell, management having no real oversight in ANY industry tends to be a disaster long-term. Sony fans understand this better than most, with the grossly over-designed, over-hyped and under-performing PS3 (and let's not forget the Banana Shock 3) under Ken Kutaragi, the man that Sony thought could do no wrong. Giving someone carte blanche works.... until it abruptly doesn't.
Howard Lincoln seemingly delighted in making enemies in business
Game Over is such a foundational work of journalism regarding Nintendo's early years. But while it paints everything with a slant towards mentioning Lincoln's activities as positives (as did Emily Rogers' article about Howard Lincoln's time at NoA), I'm here to tell you it's never a good thing to ignore consequences of actions.
Almost from the outset of their success with the NES launch, Nintendo of America loved to strong-arm retailers as much as possible, pumped up royalty fees for 3rd-parties into the stratosphere and undercut their rivals in the most brutal fashion imaginable. The Tengen and Tetris story is an unflinching display of that, with Lincoln openly calling actions Nintendo made against Tengen as "revenge". You couldn't get away with that today.
It is here that Lincoln and Yamauchi had something in common, an unapologetic cutthroat style of business that served them well. But cutthroat business strategies only serve you well when you're riding high; it displays a feeling of infallibility and utter hubris, and Lincoln delighted in it, going as far as to taunt his rival, Sega's Tom Kalinske, openly in the news after the infamous 1993 congressional hearing (which I'll come back to in the next section, don't you worry).
And what's that modern phrase again? .... OH YEAH, "talk shit, get hit". The moment that retailers, 3rd-parties and competitors saw weakness in Nintendo, they punished them for it as hard as they could, unabashedly so. It's taken decades to mend some of those open wounds, when the simpler (and in hindsight, infinitely better) solution would have been not being out for blood in the first place. So if you ever wanted to really know why 3rd-parties and retailers had so much acrimony with Nintendo for so long? Look no further than Lincoln in the West and Yamauchi in Japan (who also engaged in similar tactics, much to their detriment in Japan when 1996 rolled around... make no mistake, I have little love for Yamauchi, either, albeit for differing reasons). The games industry might have been growing, but the world of middle and upper management in the industry was quite small, and no one truly forgets a slight.
Howard Lincoln is entirely responsible for the much-maligned "kiddie" discourse
I know that some of you saw this one coming, but it bears repeating and digging in deep on it.
You might think that soft and cute mascot characters coming out of NCL were responsible for this. They weren't... or at least not really. It was Howard Lincoln, the man responsible for Nintendo's austere, sententious and downright bizarre censorship requirements during the NES and early SNES years, which was sadly carried over to Europe, as it was unfortunately subservient to NoA during much of the early 90s after it was founded. NCL (quite obviously) had no interest in such heavy levels of censorship and made no directive to Lincoln to establish it, but with North America as a growth market, it meant that certain titles were destined for other platforms like the Mega Drive/Genesis, PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 or both, but not the SNES.
Despite him being a massive prick, Lincoln loved to portray Nintendo as a saintly purveyor of wholesome entertainment, to the point of being downright self-righteous about it. Which leads us back to 1993, where the problem came to a head thanks to Mortal Kombat.
In front of Joseph Lieberman and a congressional committee convened on violence in video games (primarily MK, Night Trap and Lethal Enforcers), Lincoln etched something in stone when he threw Sega under the bus as solely responsible for the issue du jour in the industry at the time, by painting Nintendo as family-friendly entertainers who were above such filth. There were even rumours that Lincoln himself instigated the hearings by showing a pre-release version of the gore-code-enabled Genesis port of MK to members of Congress and reporters. Here is a terrible quote from his testimony:
But in these moments, he created enough retailer animosity to have them chomping at the bit to push Nintendo out of its dominant retail space at the first opportunity and (more importantly) gave Sega, Sony and Microsoft enough marketing material for the next decade or so to come (which came with a slight air of legitimacy as a result of Lincoln's testimony and censorious behaviour). When you pair his words with the games Nintendo developed in Japan, it was a mindset that stuck with many gamers, one that stuck so much that it inevitably filtered across the ocean to 3rd-parties in Japan who wanted to sell their games in the US to a consumer base that was aging into wanting more "mature" content. The "purple lunchbox" just sealed the deal. Nintendo consumers were deemed "family-friendly" consumers more often than not and content was sorted by platform accordingly. And it all traces back to a man who clearly does not understand long-term consequences of his words and actions.
But funny enough, even in the short term, this plan of Lincoln's backfired spectacularly. Here is Lincoln's own words in Game Over talking about the fallout shortly after his congressional testimony:
From this point on, with the indisputable facts established, much of what comes next is founded in facts but contains what I see as logical conjecture from those facts when keeping in mind his well-publicized history as a short-sighted, braggadocious and cutthroat bastard who, thanks to having Yamauchi's ear, quite literally couldn't be stopped and, thanks to it being boom times for Nintendo, no one would dare try to. Now then, let's continue on...
Howard Lincoln is partly (if not mostly) to blame for losing Rare
Yeah, it's time that we discuss Nintendo's history of 2nd-party developers. And we will start with Rare, since so much has been written about it. I won't cover ALL of it in this paragraph, but some key info.
With the faint beginnings of an already-established but minimal relationship with Nintendo during the NES years, Lincoln visits Rare and sees they had used the money it earned in that era to invest in Silicon Graphics workstations, to create 3D models as 2D sprites. So impressed was he that he showed demos of their technology to NCL to get approval to proceed with a development partnership and ended up getting the approval to pick an IP from Nintendo's catalog to put the impressive technology into practice at retail. They picked Donkey Kong (which allegedly annoyed Miyamoto in the beginning until he saw the game in action), and the rest was history, beginning a "2nd-party" developer arrangement, starting with a 25% stake in Rare that increased to 49% over a very short time.
I will not be re-litigating the perceived lost value (or lack thereof) in the sale of Rare to Microsoft here, as that is not important, but the sale did endlessly beg the question among gamers: why did Nintendo not propose a majority acquisition before it was sold to Microsoft? In truth, however, it was always a possibility considered from the outset. The moment that the 49% minority stake was purchased in Rare, according to Ed Fries at Microsoft who brokered their Rare acquisition in 2002, the minority stake included a contract option where Nintendo was given the option for a full buyout by a specified date or to allow Rare to look for buyers of Nintendo's stake after the date, which tells me that the Stampers were willing to sell Rare to Nintendo as far back as 1995, during Lincoln's tenure. That option deadline had ended with no purchase, which had been temporarily extended by one year when the Stampers started fielding offers. At any time between the mid-90s to 2001, considering Rare moved over 20 million software units (an average of 5 million per game) on the SNES alone, Nintendo could have made the purchase and the fact is that Lincoln had wasted time not pushing to buy them up during their hot streak. Coincidentally, the timing of when the original unextended purchase option ended and when Lincoln retired is amazingly tight, and I'll be revisiting that later in another part of this.
There are a lot of reasons discussed for why Nintendo didn't buy Rare in the end, but there are 2 strong theories for why.
First was the fact that the Stampers' management style wasn't to all their employees' tastes, with 6 employees walking out in April 1997 to form the Sony-funded studio Eighth Wonder (which never produced anything of note and folded in 1999 due to "internal problems"). You also started seeing more defections and more new studios (like Zoonami and Free Radical). One could reasonably expect that Nintendo had concerns over this employee churn, especially in the design departments. This would partly explain why Yamauchi gave them a lowball offer some time between 1999 and 2001, along with him thinking they'd be nothing without them (which is a half-truth at best, since much of the blame for their lacklustre output since has been on Microsoft themselves).
But second, and one of the most likely reasons, especially when the Stampers were pretty keen to sell and (in hindsight to us, anyways) walk away, is that a studio wholly owned by Nintendo becomes wholly controlled by NCL, which cuts Lincoln mostly out of the picture. And as I'll now explain...
Howard Lincoln was a control freak
With Donkey Kong Country becoming one of the Top 3 best-sellers on SNES seemingly overnight, Lincoln was given more freedom to expand Nintendo's reach in the West. But Lincoln dragging his feet securing Rare is one instance of what looks like a pattern of behaviour, because securing studios for NoA is not the same thing as securing studios for the head office in Kyoto. You put down a minority stake (mostly with North American revenue so as not to repatriate that income to Japan), get a little bit of say in output and control seemingly remained primarily at NoA, under Lincoln's purview, who was there to act as a go-between and advocate to NCL.
The difference when he was involved was so stark when you compare positive relationships like Rare against what happened with DMA Design and Angel Studios (now both part of Rockstar, funny how things work out), both of which were 3rd-parties that had a relationship Lincoln seemed mostly uninvolved in beyond perhaps some introductions, and struggled to overcome both differences in design principles and communication breakdowns with NCL without Lincoln or his team present to act as a go-between that eventually caused both relationships to sever very prematurely (I think it was challenges like this that Iwata tried to get the company to overcome during his time as president). So, in a brief moment of praise, I have to give credit to Lincoln where it's due, he seemed to understand the Nintendo of the 80s and 90s wasn't ready to directly interact with North American and European developers in a wide or full capacity without similar complications arising. I'm happy to see Nintendo moving past all that.
But at the same time, this just allowed Lincoln to make him and his team indispensable, which means NCL was utterly reliant on them. This is unfortunately a common tactic among upper middle management types (lawyers like Lincoln know this tactic better than others, slavishly guarding their client lists to keep them at their firms), to make themselves so entrenched as to be impossible to remove, rather than ensuring all parts of the organization they work for are capable of functioning in an ideal capacity in their absence. The only reason much of Nintendo's Western development partnerships never went beyond "2nd-party" and why no attempt was being made to improve direct developer relationships with NCL that makes any sense is this: Howard Lincoln liked being in control.
So with some extra slack on his already-limp leash, and by virtue of his long industry presence, he leveraged his (probably few) industry friendships and threw a bit of Nintendo's money around, making "2nd-party" studios the way a dog marks his territory: wherever he could. In the mid-90s, he secured a console exclusive action-adventure title with LucasArts in Shadows of the Empire and helped assemble the cruel joke that was the "Dream Team", which... yeah, was mostly a mess that disintegrated almost instantaneously outside of star player Rare and a substantial relationship with Midway and Acclaim (and I'm gonna circle back to that really soon).
The tail end of the 90s in particular was a prodigious couple of years for Lincoln, getting a 5-year deal with LucasArts, establishing minority stakes in Left Field Productions, founding NST as a direct partnership with DigiPen via his friend Claude Comair, and likely around the time that Nintendo's relationship with Silicon Knights first began (whether the 2nd-party relationship was in motion before Lincoln left NoA is impossible to say, but it was close timing). But there's one stand-out, because it's threaded through all of this and it highlights how...
Howard Lincoln traded industry favours and played favourites (or, how Retro Studios was born)
That's right, I'm coming for everything considered a success under Lincoln, and it's Retro's turn.
One partnership that went really well from the "Dream Team" was that with Acclaim, particularly with Iguana Entertainment and its founder Jeff Spangenburg, who created Turok: Dinosaur Hunter for the N64. NoA was making a lot of hay about this game, likely because it wanted to prime the pump right from launch with information on an M-rated title (Lincoln trying desperately to undo the own-goal he did on Nintendo) and create interest from FPS fans in the N64 for the Goldeneye to come. Lincoln gave Acclaim and Spangenburg all the help NoA could give them (and no small amount of pressure) to get the game out the door, but its purpose was fulfilled and console-only gamers were suddenly knee-deep in a genre they knew little about but wanted to play (being one of a tiny handful of games from the genre released for consoles). It and its sequels were all that kept Acclaim afloat until 2004.
So when Spangenburg was let go from Acclaim in 1998 and suing them for breach of contract, he needed a job. So he founded a game studio out of his home, and then out came the Rolodex to get Howard Lincoln on the phone; he was seemingly Spangenburg's first call. Lincoln considered Spangenburg to do good work and helped to initially fund the studio, creating another "2nd-party" to add to his collection. But one honestly gets an impression that Spangenburg was calling in a favour.
This is entirely conjecture, but one gets the impression that much of what Lincoln was able to achieve was on the back of his success with finding talent with Rare and a network of people he collected and owed favours to, which when combined with Lincoln's checkered history of making industry friends, explains a lot of what would be considered odd partnerships due to nothing visible precipitating them. But when you consider everything about Retro's history from that point on, and some of the deals he was able to achieve in spite of an industry trying to push Nintendo out of it from every angle (like getting EA Sports on N64, of all things), nothing else really makes sense except exchanging favours. This is not an unknown phenomenon in the industry; Iwata's NCL basically made sure Nd Cube was emptied out and bought out its other partner there so former Hudson Soft employees (including a former Hudson president) had a job in Hokkaido to fall back on when Konami started gutting them like a fish (though who owed who the favour in that scenario? I couldn't say).
Spangenburg and Lincoln were kindred spirits, in that they both delighted in petty revenge:
Howard Lincoln built a house of cards and was out the door before it fell
This is admittedly a long read, so let's recap Lincoln's "accomplishments", shall we?
So in February of 2000, Lincoln stepped down as NoA Chairman, going on to dedicate his time to Yamauchi's pet project that was the Seattle Mariners, which he was already a part of as of 1999.
What motivated his departure is something that can only be speculated at. He could have been pushed out for his cumulative mis-steps and long-term damage to the Nintendo brand in North America and Europe, but that seems unlikely, since the worst was yet to come. He could have decided he didn't have the same kind of fight in him to keep going at the job and bowed out for that reason.
But the most likely reason, given everything I've typed thus far, is that he had an inside track into Yamauchi's retirement plans and that he was about to groom a successor, and since everything he had done up to that point was catching up with him, his crown jewel in Rare was about to disappear and he knew he was about to face scrutiny he'd never had to contend with in his career thus far, he decided to cut and run.
Almost immediately after he did, the house of cards he built fell down.
The Aftermath of Howard Lincoln (Conclusion)
Oh thank goodness, I'm almost done.
With Lincoln gone, all that was left was his team: the likes of Peter Main, Ken Lobb, etc. and Arakawa, his rubber stamp. It was quite obvious, at this point, that they weren't capable of holding things together.
Shortly after Lincoln's departure, the rocks got turned over. NCL went to inspect what was happening at Retro and were completely appalled by most of it. It's not that they didn't have talent (I think they would have instead cut their losses and abandoned Retro if they didn't), it's that so much of it was mismanaged and no one at NoA decided to tell them how badly that was the case, which confirms that NoA was steering the ship with their "2nd-party" teams completely, just how Lincoln liked it:
So Rare was asking for an obscene amount of money with a lot of company turnover and Retro Studios had to be cobbled back together from the flaming wreckage it was under Lincoln. As head of corporate planning, Iwata was likely disgusted with what he saw at NoA when he got to step in to survey the situation and how no one who remained could hold any of it together. By the time Iwata was president, there was little sign of Lincoln's legacy left.
Silicon Knights (and Denis Dyack in particular) ended up being more trouble than they were worth and got cut loose shortly after Twin Snakes. That was for the best, given Dyack's prima donna tantrums, SK's lawsuit or the head writer's child pornography arrest (yeah, things got WEIRD there). Between Spangenburg and Dyack, ol' Howard sure knew how to pick 'em, huh?
The 5-year contract with LucasArts was not extended primarily due to a change in management at LucasArts that practically threw Factor 5 away (which Nintendo let happen, for what are now obvious reasons), who then went on to sink their company with Sony exclusive Lair.
NST made a few games but investment in them was seemingly scaled back, with some employees transferred to Retro.
Left Field wanted out, with rumours stirring that they were unhappy since Lincoln's retirement, and they got what they wanted.
Peter Main left NoA in 2001 and Arakawa left in 2002, getting what I'm sure was a nice golden parachute, to prevent a firing for being the last one standing who could be blamed for the state of things. By 2003, Nintendo of America was a clean slate and only had Retro to show for it all.
Iwata was left to pick up the pieces, to rebuild retailer relationships and build new software partnerships. But there was one clearly specific goal: no one at NoA was going to operate without oversight ever again. He made sure of that by naming himself CEO of NoA and hired people who would defer to NCL. And it was a very rough process, but look at where they are now.
Much speculation was made and a lot of blame was dropped on Iwata that Nintendo wanted to allegedly refocus on internal development and their 3rd-party relationships and new developer partnerships withered as a result. The fact is that they were building relationships, but they wanted those relationships to be sturdy for a change, which took time. It started in Japan (of which there was a lot of Yamauchi's mess to clean up there, but that's a story for another day) and slowly radiated out. Next Level is the most recent success story originating from this time. The MercurySteam partnership is a continuation of that, which early accounts suggest is working out well for them. Nintendo honestly seems stronger than ever in every region, and while there's still work to be done, there's no denying that NCL put in the work themselves instead of trusting some lawyer who won them a court case to do it for them sight unseen.
I'm sure there's plenty of grammar mistakes and typos to be had, but this took 3 days to write, sorry in advance. But I hope that you can look at all this and appreciate that, even if the games were good, it's important to consider the legacy of the corporate side of NoA for indications of why things have been such an uphill climb for Nintendo for so long on multiple fronts.
Plus, I needed something myself and others could point to in case someone foolishly romanticizes the Lincoln era of NoA ever again, so now at least I'll never have to type any of this ever again. Hope you found this enlightening.
EDIT: cleaned up some salty language
Howard Lincoln, former Senior VP (1983-1994) and Chairman of Nintendo of America (1994-2000), is idolized by a great many Nintendo fans as the man at the helm of Nintendo's North American operations during its golden beginnings and considered responsible for the company's many achievements in this era, most notably the partnership with Rare.
He was also a gigantic insufferable arrogant prick who all but made sure everything he built would collapse without him.
This may come as a shocking stance for some of you, but it shouldn't. And this is not meant to diminish how great it was for gamers during these years. But behind the scenes, there was a lot going on and so little of it ended up good. Between excerpts of Game Over, various journalistic pieces and general public knowledge, one gets a picture of a Nintendo of America that was built entirely around one man, a man whose record for leaving things he manages worse in the end is 2-0. Just ask the Seattle Mariners.
So much of the negativity for what happened at NoA is heaped on the beginning of Satoru Iwata's years on the job at Nintendo as head of corporate planning and president, but further assessment shows that much of that blame was unwarranted.
So let's dig in and start with the facts, shall we?
Howard Lincoln was considered untouchable
From the beginning, Lincoln was thought to be a godsend. After winning the court case for Nintendo against Universal Studios over Donkey Kong and preserving Nintendo's future arcade prospects, along with Hiroshi Yamauchi finding common ground with him in terms of business mindsets, Yamauchi trusted Lincoln with North American operations completely. Lincoln's only oversight during his time at NoA was Minoru Arakawa, the man who founded NoA (against his wife's wishes, I might add) due to being a member of the Yamauchi family by marriage who was already settled in on the continent. But Arakawa wasn't running the show and everyone with sense knew it; he was the rubber stamp and a way to keep the business in the family across an ocean. Yamauchi liked Lincoln and, by the 90s, he had been given carte blanche with no one to question him, since he had Yamauchi's ear, and... well, one did not cross Hiroshi Yamauchi.
Some of you might ask "well, how is that a bad thing? Clearly things worked out well." Yeah, well, entrusting things to a single person in the gaming industry rarely works out well.... hell, management having no real oversight in ANY industry tends to be a disaster long-term. Sony fans understand this better than most, with the grossly over-designed, over-hyped and under-performing PS3 (and let's not forget the Banana Shock 3) under Ken Kutaragi, the man that Sony thought could do no wrong. Giving someone carte blanche works.... until it abruptly doesn't.
Howard Lincoln seemingly delighted in making enemies in business
Game Over is such a foundational work of journalism regarding Nintendo's early years. But while it paints everything with a slant towards mentioning Lincoln's activities as positives (as did Emily Rogers' article about Howard Lincoln's time at NoA), I'm here to tell you it's never a good thing to ignore consequences of actions.
Almost from the outset of their success with the NES launch, Nintendo of America loved to strong-arm retailers as much as possible, pumped up royalty fees for 3rd-parties into the stratosphere and undercut their rivals in the most brutal fashion imaginable. The Tengen and Tetris story is an unflinching display of that, with Lincoln openly calling actions Nintendo made against Tengen as "revenge". You couldn't get away with that today.
It is here that Lincoln and Yamauchi had something in common, an unapologetic cutthroat style of business that served them well. But cutthroat business strategies only serve you well when you're riding high; it displays a feeling of infallibility and utter hubris, and Lincoln delighted in it, going as far as to taunt his rival, Sega's Tom Kalinske, openly in the news after the infamous 1993 congressional hearing (which I'll come back to in the next section, don't you worry).
And what's that modern phrase again? .... OH YEAH, "talk shit, get hit". The moment that retailers, 3rd-parties and competitors saw weakness in Nintendo, they punished them for it as hard as they could, unabashedly so. It's taken decades to mend some of those open wounds, when the simpler (and in hindsight, infinitely better) solution would have been not being out for blood in the first place. So if you ever wanted to really know why 3rd-parties and retailers had so much acrimony with Nintendo for so long? Look no further than Lincoln in the West and Yamauchi in Japan (who also engaged in similar tactics, much to their detriment in Japan when 1996 rolled around... make no mistake, I have little love for Yamauchi, either, albeit for differing reasons). The games industry might have been growing, but the world of middle and upper management in the industry was quite small, and no one truly forgets a slight.
Howard Lincoln is entirely responsible for the much-maligned "kiddie" discourse
I know that some of you saw this one coming, but it bears repeating and digging in deep on it.
You might think that soft and cute mascot characters coming out of NCL were responsible for this. They weren't... or at least not really. It was Howard Lincoln, the man responsible for Nintendo's austere, sententious and downright bizarre censorship requirements during the NES and early SNES years, which was sadly carried over to Europe, as it was unfortunately subservient to NoA during much of the early 90s after it was founded. NCL (quite obviously) had no interest in such heavy levels of censorship and made no directive to Lincoln to establish it, but with North America as a growth market, it meant that certain titles were destined for other platforms like the Mega Drive/Genesis, PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 or both, but not the SNES.
You want to know why we never got Fire Emblem or the Wars series until the 2000s? Lincoln and his team thought the genre too difficult for American players and (for FE specifically) would involve FAR too much re-writing of the massive amounts of text to fit NoA's content guidelines (which Masahiro Higuchi diplomatically refers to as wrangling with the series' "complexity of setting"). It's not an accident that these franchises came over to North America only (and almost immediately) after he stepped down, when the Treehouse staff basically begged Intelligent Systems to help plan a release of AW first and FE to follow.
In front of Joseph Lieberman and a congressional committee convened on violence in video games (primarily MK, Night Trap and Lethal Enforcers), Lincoln etched something in stone when he threw Sega under the bus as solely responsible for the issue du jour in the industry at the time, by painting Nintendo as family-friendly entertainers who were above such filth. There were even rumours that Lincoln himself instigated the hearings by showing a pre-release version of the gore-code-enabled Genesis port of MK to members of Congress and reporters. Here is a terrible quote from his testimony:
So not just Sega, he threw his retail partners under the bus, as well, which loops right back to the previous point I made. (He also infamously said that Night Trap would never appear on Nintendo hardware. OOPS.) The hearing's attendees ultimately came down HARD on Sega, releasing in a statement that "Sega’s games were unfit for American youth."
But in these moments, he created enough retailer animosity to have them chomping at the bit to push Nintendo out of its dominant retail space at the first opportunity and (more importantly) gave Sega, Sony and Microsoft enough marketing material for the next decade or so to come (which came with a slight air of legitimacy as a result of Lincoln's testimony and censorious behaviour). When you pair his words with the games Nintendo developed in Japan, it was a mindset that stuck with many gamers, one that stuck so much that it inevitably filtered across the ocean to 3rd-parties in Japan who wanted to sell their games in the US to a consumer base that was aging into wanting more "mature" content. The "purple lunchbox" just sealed the deal. Nintendo consumers were deemed "family-friendly" consumers more often than not and content was sorted by platform accordingly. And it all traces back to a man who clearly does not understand long-term consequences of his words and actions.
But funny enough, even in the short term, this plan of Lincoln's backfired spectacularly. Here is Lincoln's own words in Game Over talking about the fallout shortly after his congressional testimony:
Mortal Kombat II released on SNES in 1994 with a pre-ESRB rating label affixed to it to keep the gore intact and Lincoln hid behind the ESRB for the remainder of his time at NoA while he tried to bolster mature content on Nintendo platforms, but the damage was already irreversibly done to Nintendo's brand image among far too many gamers. The "kiddie" image was seemingly what he wanted, and wowzers, did he deliver. Let's all give the man a one-finger salute, shall we?
From an LGBTQ perspective at the very least, allowing things to come to the creation of the downright puritanical and arbitrary ESRB, which is known to pump up age ratings for games with LGBTQ characters and themes, is a legacy not worth having. We could have had the Videogame Rating Council instead, which was a panel of psychologists/sociologists instead of average consumers who would, at least in the modern era, be far more relaxed about LGBTQ content, but Nintendo and Sega both screwed that up in their own way, and now we have something worse in its place. Lincoln's part to play in that is not something I am willing to forgive.
From this point on, with the indisputable facts established, much of what comes next is founded in facts but contains what I see as logical conjecture from those facts when keeping in mind his well-publicized history as a short-sighted, braggadocious and cutthroat bastard who, thanks to having Yamauchi's ear, quite literally couldn't be stopped and, thanks to it being boom times for Nintendo, no one would dare try to. Now then, let's continue on...
Howard Lincoln is partly (if not mostly) to blame for losing Rare
Yeah, it's time that we discuss Nintendo's history of 2nd-party developers. And we will start with Rare, since so much has been written about it. I won't cover ALL of it in this paragraph, but some key info.
With the faint beginnings of an already-established but minimal relationship with Nintendo during the NES years, Lincoln visits Rare and sees they had used the money it earned in that era to invest in Silicon Graphics workstations, to create 3D models as 2D sprites. So impressed was he that he showed demos of their technology to NCL to get approval to proceed with a development partnership and ended up getting the approval to pick an IP from Nintendo's catalog to put the impressive technology into practice at retail. They picked Donkey Kong (which allegedly annoyed Miyamoto in the beginning until he saw the game in action), and the rest was history, beginning a "2nd-party" developer arrangement, starting with a 25% stake in Rare that increased to 49% over a very short time.
I will not be re-litigating the perceived lost value (or lack thereof) in the sale of Rare to Microsoft here, as that is not important, but the sale did endlessly beg the question among gamers: why did Nintendo not propose a majority acquisition before it was sold to Microsoft? In truth, however, it was always a possibility considered from the outset. The moment that the 49% minority stake was purchased in Rare, according to Ed Fries at Microsoft who brokered their Rare acquisition in 2002, the minority stake included a contract option where Nintendo was given the option for a full buyout by a specified date or to allow Rare to look for buyers of Nintendo's stake after the date, which tells me that the Stampers were willing to sell Rare to Nintendo as far back as 1995, during Lincoln's tenure. That option deadline had ended with no purchase, which had been temporarily extended by one year when the Stampers started fielding offers. At any time between the mid-90s to 2001, considering Rare moved over 20 million software units (an average of 5 million per game) on the SNES alone, Nintendo could have made the purchase and the fact is that Lincoln had wasted time not pushing to buy them up during their hot streak. Coincidentally, the timing of when the original unextended purchase option ended and when Lincoln retired is amazingly tight, and I'll be revisiting that later in another part of this.
There are a lot of reasons discussed for why Nintendo didn't buy Rare in the end, but there are 2 strong theories for why.
First was the fact that the Stampers' management style wasn't to all their employees' tastes, with 6 employees walking out in April 1997 to form the Sony-funded studio Eighth Wonder (which never produced anything of note and folded in 1999 due to "internal problems"). You also started seeing more defections and more new studios (like Zoonami and Free Radical). One could reasonably expect that Nintendo had concerns over this employee churn, especially in the design departments. This would partly explain why Yamauchi gave them a lowball offer some time between 1999 and 2001, along with him thinking they'd be nothing without them (which is a half-truth at best, since much of the blame for their lacklustre output since has been on Microsoft themselves).
But second, and one of the most likely reasons, especially when the Stampers were pretty keen to sell and (in hindsight to us, anyways) walk away, is that a studio wholly owned by Nintendo becomes wholly controlled by NCL, which cuts Lincoln mostly out of the picture. And as I'll now explain...
Howard Lincoln was a control freak
With Donkey Kong Country becoming one of the Top 3 best-sellers on SNES seemingly overnight, Lincoln was given more freedom to expand Nintendo's reach in the West. But Lincoln dragging his feet securing Rare is one instance of what looks like a pattern of behaviour, because securing studios for NoA is not the same thing as securing studios for the head office in Kyoto. You put down a minority stake (mostly with North American revenue so as not to repatriate that income to Japan), get a little bit of say in output and control seemingly remained primarily at NoA, under Lincoln's purview, who was there to act as a go-between and advocate to NCL.
The difference when he was involved was so stark when you compare positive relationships like Rare against what happened with DMA Design and Angel Studios (now both part of Rockstar, funny how things work out), both of which were 3rd-parties that had a relationship Lincoln seemed mostly uninvolved in beyond perhaps some introductions, and struggled to overcome both differences in design principles and communication breakdowns with NCL without Lincoln or his team present to act as a go-between that eventually caused both relationships to sever very prematurely (I think it was challenges like this that Iwata tried to get the company to overcome during his time as president). So, in a brief moment of praise, I have to give credit to Lincoln where it's due, he seemed to understand the Nintendo of the 80s and 90s wasn't ready to directly interact with North American and European developers in a wide or full capacity without similar complications arising. I'm happy to see Nintendo moving past all that.
But at the same time, this just allowed Lincoln to make him and his team indispensable, which means NCL was utterly reliant on them. This is unfortunately a common tactic among upper middle management types (lawyers like Lincoln know this tactic better than others, slavishly guarding their client lists to keep them at their firms), to make themselves so entrenched as to be impossible to remove, rather than ensuring all parts of the organization they work for are capable of functioning in an ideal capacity in their absence. The only reason much of Nintendo's Western development partnerships never went beyond "2nd-party" and why no attempt was being made to improve direct developer relationships with NCL that makes any sense is this: Howard Lincoln liked being in control.
So with some extra slack on his already-limp leash, and by virtue of his long industry presence, he leveraged his (probably few) industry friendships and threw a bit of Nintendo's money around, making "2nd-party" studios the way a dog marks his territory: wherever he could. In the mid-90s, he secured a console exclusive action-adventure title with LucasArts in Shadows of the Empire and helped assemble the cruel joke that was the "Dream Team", which... yeah, was mostly a mess that disintegrated almost instantaneously outside of star player Rare and a substantial relationship with Midway and Acclaim (and I'm gonna circle back to that really soon).
The tail end of the 90s in particular was a prodigious couple of years for Lincoln, getting a 5-year deal with LucasArts, establishing minority stakes in Left Field Productions, founding NST as a direct partnership with DigiPen via his friend Claude Comair, and likely around the time that Nintendo's relationship with Silicon Knights first began (whether the 2nd-party relationship was in motion before Lincoln left NoA is impossible to say, but it was close timing). But there's one stand-out, because it's threaded through all of this and it highlights how...
Howard Lincoln traded industry favours and played favourites (or, how Retro Studios was born)
That's right, I'm coming for everything considered a success under Lincoln, and it's Retro's turn.
One partnership that went really well from the "Dream Team" was that with Acclaim, particularly with Iguana Entertainment and its founder Jeff Spangenburg, who created Turok: Dinosaur Hunter for the N64. NoA was making a lot of hay about this game, likely because it wanted to prime the pump right from launch with information on an M-rated title (Lincoln trying desperately to undo the own-goal he did on Nintendo) and create interest from FPS fans in the N64 for the Goldeneye to come. Lincoln gave Acclaim and Spangenburg all the help NoA could give them (and no small amount of pressure) to get the game out the door, but its purpose was fulfilled and console-only gamers were suddenly knee-deep in a genre they knew little about but wanted to play (being one of a tiny handful of games from the genre released for consoles). It and its sequels were all that kept Acclaim afloat until 2004.
So when Spangenburg was let go from Acclaim in 1998 and suing them for breach of contract, he needed a job. So he founded a game studio out of his home, and then out came the Rolodex to get Howard Lincoln on the phone; he was seemingly Spangenburg's first call. Lincoln considered Spangenburg to do good work and helped to initially fund the studio, creating another "2nd-party" to add to his collection. But one honestly gets an impression that Spangenburg was calling in a favour.
This is entirely conjecture, but one gets the impression that much of what Lincoln was able to achieve was on the back of his success with finding talent with Rare and a network of people he collected and owed favours to, which when combined with Lincoln's checkered history of making industry friends, explains a lot of what would be considered odd partnerships due to nothing visible precipitating them. But when you consider everything about Retro's history from that point on, and some of the deals he was able to achieve in spite of an industry trying to push Nintendo out of it from every angle (like getting EA Sports on N64, of all things), nothing else really makes sense except exchanging favours. This is not an unknown phenomenon in the industry; Iwata's NCL basically made sure Nd Cube was emptied out and bought out its other partner there so former Hudson Soft employees (including a former Hudson president) had a job in Hokkaido to fall back on when Konami started gutting them like a fish (though who owed who the favour in that scenario? I couldn't say).
Spangenburg and Lincoln were kindred spirits, in that they both delighted in petty revenge:
But in 1999, trouble was setting in. Nintendo had nearly a 25% stake in Retro by this time, producing 4 game projects and literally nothing to show for it. They were thinking it was time to go kick over some rocks to see what was going on at NoA. And this comes to nearly the conclusion of this long historical re-telling...
Howard Lincoln built a house of cards and was out the door before it fell
This is admittedly a long read, so let's recap Lincoln's "accomplishments", shall we?
- Rare could have been bought at any time during its life as a 2nd-party according to their contract, but Lincoln wanted to maintain control, so either he:
- never pushed for a purchase so control would stay primarily with him instead of NCL, never expecting discontent at Rare, or
- waited until the last minute when they were already losing design staff and the Stampers had over-valued their company beyond what Nintendo would pay
- The rest of the "Dream Team" turned to ashes with less and less to replace it
- The North American video game industry had expanded and before the 6th generation had even began:
- Lincoln's burned bridges with publishers meant little to no Western game production, as developers were getting wooed by a hardware maker that wasn't based in Japan (for once)
- Lincoln's burned bridges with retailers, combined with Sony's now dominant position, meant Nintendo was getting edged out of retail space
- Retro was causing media buzz but had no product almost 2 years in
- Silicon Knights was struggling to meet milestones on its first project, Eternal Darkness
- Factor 5 was making middleware tools for GameCube and on target to continue producing Star Wars content with LucasArts
- NST still hadn't produced a single game
So in February of 2000, Lincoln stepped down as NoA Chairman, going on to dedicate his time to Yamauchi's pet project that was the Seattle Mariners, which he was already a part of as of 1999.
What motivated his departure is something that can only be speculated at. He could have been pushed out for his cumulative mis-steps and long-term damage to the Nintendo brand in North America and Europe, but that seems unlikely, since the worst was yet to come. He could have decided he didn't have the same kind of fight in him to keep going at the job and bowed out for that reason.
But the most likely reason, given everything I've typed thus far, is that he had an inside track into Yamauchi's retirement plans and that he was about to groom a successor, and since everything he had done up to that point was catching up with him, his crown jewel in Rare was about to disappear and he knew he was about to face scrutiny he'd never had to contend with in his career thus far, he decided to cut and run.
Almost immediately after he did, the house of cards he built fell down.
The Aftermath of Howard Lincoln (Conclusion)
Oh thank goodness, I'm almost done.
With Lincoln gone, all that was left was his team: the likes of Peter Main, Ken Lobb, etc. and Arakawa, his rubber stamp. It was quite obvious, at this point, that they weren't capable of holding things together.
Shortly after Lincoln's departure, the rocks got turned over. NCL went to inspect what was happening at Retro and were completely appalled by most of it. It's not that they didn't have talent (I think they would have instead cut their losses and abandoned Retro if they didn't), it's that so much of it was mismanaged and no one at NoA decided to tell them how badly that was the case, which confirms that NoA was steering the ship with their "2nd-party" teams completely, just how Lincoln liked it:
And it seemed that either Lincoln had totally lost control of Spangenburg or Spangenburg was sweating the impending scrutiny from NCL without Lincoln being present:
Eventually, with Spangenburg barely there to lead the teams while enjoying a lifestyle of partying with strippers (and hosting a website full of pictures of these parties at Retro's IP address) and unsubstantiated rumours that unnamed employees had embezzled from Retro to the tune of hundreds of thousands and fled the country, Nintendo came to the realization that Spangenburg himself was ultimately the problem at Retro and cut him loose 2 years later in 2002 just before the release of Metroid Prime, buying the remaining 75% of the studio for the meagre price of $1 million. Spangenburg's replacement didn't fare much better, being a crunch-demanding tyrant, finally righting the ship with the appointment of Michael Kelbaugh in 2003, who has been the head of Retro ever since.
So Rare was asking for an obscene amount of money with a lot of company turnover and Retro Studios had to be cobbled back together from the flaming wreckage it was under Lincoln. As head of corporate planning, Iwata was likely disgusted with what he saw at NoA when he got to step in to survey the situation and how no one who remained could hold any of it together. By the time Iwata was president, there was little sign of Lincoln's legacy left.
Silicon Knights (and Denis Dyack in particular) ended up being more trouble than they were worth and got cut loose shortly after Twin Snakes. That was for the best, given Dyack's prima donna tantrums, SK's lawsuit or the head writer's child pornography arrest (yeah, things got WEIRD there). Between Spangenburg and Dyack, ol' Howard sure knew how to pick 'em, huh?
The 5-year contract with LucasArts was not extended primarily due to a change in management at LucasArts that practically threw Factor 5 away (which Nintendo let happen, for what are now obvious reasons), who then went on to sink their company with Sony exclusive Lair.
NST made a few games but investment in them was seemingly scaled back, with some employees transferred to Retro.
Left Field wanted out, with rumours stirring that they were unhappy since Lincoln's retirement, and they got what they wanted.
Peter Main left NoA in 2001 and Arakawa left in 2002, getting what I'm sure was a nice golden parachute, to prevent a firing for being the last one standing who could be blamed for the state of things. By 2003, Nintendo of America was a clean slate and only had Retro to show for it all.
Iwata was left to pick up the pieces, to rebuild retailer relationships and build new software partnerships. But there was one clearly specific goal: no one at NoA was going to operate without oversight ever again. He made sure of that by naming himself CEO of NoA and hired people who would defer to NCL. And it was a very rough process, but look at where they are now.
Much speculation was made and a lot of blame was dropped on Iwata that Nintendo wanted to allegedly refocus on internal development and their 3rd-party relationships and new developer partnerships withered as a result. The fact is that they were building relationships, but they wanted those relationships to be sturdy for a change, which took time. It started in Japan (of which there was a lot of Yamauchi's mess to clean up there, but that's a story for another day) and slowly radiated out. Next Level is the most recent success story originating from this time. The MercurySteam partnership is a continuation of that, which early accounts suggest is working out well for them. Nintendo honestly seems stronger than ever in every region, and while there's still work to be done, there's no denying that NCL put in the work themselves instead of trusting some lawyer who won them a court case to do it for them sight unseen.
I'm sure there's plenty of grammar mistakes and typos to be had, but this took 3 days to write, sorry in advance. But I hope that you can look at all this and appreciate that, even if the games were good, it's important to consider the legacy of the corporate side of NoA for indications of why things have been such an uphill climb for Nintendo for so long on multiple fronts.
Plus, I needed something myself and others could point to in case someone foolishly romanticizes the Lincoln era of NoA ever again, so now at least I'll never have to type any of this ever again. Hope you found this enlightening.
EDIT: cleaned up some salty language
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