Software superstars are the key to building brand awareness in the race for game console supremacy, Angus Kidman reports.

Published in The Bulletin, April 3 2002

If you were to judge by their promotions, the cut-throat battle between game console manu­facturers would seem to be all about raw power and technical specifications. Microsoft boasts of the eight gigabyte hard drive and Nvidia graphics card in its XBox console, describing it as the "most powerful console ever". Sony counters with details of the 75 million 3D transformations per second that its Emotion Engine processor can handle, while Nintendo's less powerful GameCube talks up its ease of connectivity with the handheld GameBoy Advance.

Yet the most important battle is not over higher frame rates or faster loading times. Even the range of games available, while an important factor for many consumers, is secondary to building brand awareness in a market where, research firm Gartner estimates, 75% of purchasers will already own a console. Technical details are relatively unimportant. Gartner analyst Andrew Johnson found that "consumers showed early preferences for the new Xbox and GameCube consoles well before the specifics of the products were released".

In building brand awareness, the console itself is secondary to the most powerful marketing tool of all: easily recognised characters associated with the platform. Recurring characters provide a means of ensuring users migrate from one platform to the next generation, and buy multiple titles for each platform. (Console developers make far more money from software sales than from hardware, which is generally sold as a loss leader.)

The acknowledged master at creating long-lasting characters is Nintendo, the Disney of the console world. Like Disney, Nintendo has concentrated on a family audience, and it has developed a small group of "stars" who are far more important than individual titles or consoles.

Characters who were introduced in handheld games more than two decades ago, including Mario the plumber and the gigantic enraged ape Donkey Kong, continue to appear in Nintendo's most recent offerings for the GameCube. During his career as combined company mascot and cash cow, Mario has been variously presented as hero and villain, plumber and doctor, street fighter and go-kart racer. He's endlessly adaptable but always easily recognised. Nintendo has been happy to license its characters to everyone from soap manufacturers to soft toy companies but has never allowed them to appear in games on non-Nintendo platforms.

Should Mario ever seem a bit long in the tooth, Nintendo has proved adept at adding to the family. Five years ago, its Pokémon characters proved a sensation in the under-10s market, spawning a TV series, two movies and a raft of merchandising, including a hugely successful series of trading cards.

More importantly, Pokémon invigorated sales of the company's N64 and Gameboy devices at a time when Sony was threatening to dominate the market. Nintendo's Super Smash Bros Melee, a key title for the GameCube, continues to milk the company's array of digital personalities, pitting the Mario family, various Pokémon characters and other favourites against each other.

Even when it moves away from the family market, Nintendo has stuck to the strong characters motif. Conker's Bad Fur Day, its first game aimed at over-18 players, starred Conker, a squirrel described by one reviewer for web site GameSpot as "a trash-mouthed rodent with a penchant for booze, wild women, and lewd conduct". Nonetheless, the review noted, Conker "looks just like any other character from previous Nintendo games".

The principle predates the console era. Early arcade machines such as Pong and Space Invaders attracted a strong following but it took the 1981 arrival of Pac-Man, with its pill-popping spherical hero, to push gaming into the mainstream. Personality has dominated ever since.

The same lesson has been learned by other console manufacturers, even if it hasn't been applied as religiously. The platform game Crash Bandicoot has been instrumental in the success of Sony's PlayStation range. Collectively, the Crash range of half-a-dozen titles has sold more copies in Australia than any other PlayStation games. While the games have pushed the limits of PlayStation's technical capacity, the recognition factor of familiar characters has been an important factor in their success. Crash and his cute marsupial cohorts have been merchandised as a range of toys, and have been used in platform, racing and puzzle games.

The obvious exception so far has been the XBox but, in software development terms, the console is still in its early days. If a breakout, XBox-only title emerges, its central character is likely to become just as important to Microsoft as Mario and his friends are to Nintendo.

The principle also applies to games developed for PCs, although it is somewhat rarer for characters developed for PC games to remain PC-exclusive. For instance, Lara Croft, the unfeasibly busty heroine of the Tomb Raider series of games, happily co-exists on both PC and console platforms. Nonetheless, it appears PC users are less driven by personality; surveys regularly reveal that the most popular PC games are Solitaire, FreeCell, Hearts and Minesweeper, the games supplied free with Windows.

The most successful game characters are rarely drawn from other media. Franchise rights to popular characters can sell for large sums -- Electronic Arts is rumoured to have paid several million dollars in 2000 for exclusive rights to develop Harry Potter games -- but the game characters with the greatest longevity usually originate in the console world. In a survey of British consumers last year to find the greatest video-game characters, Potter was the only import to make the list. The survey was dominated, unsurprisingly, by Nintendo properties, although Pac-Man (developed by arcade specialist Namco) took the top slot with 39% of the vote.

In some cases, hit characters can even take on a life of their own outside the video game arena, although the success of such transitions has been mixed. For every successful movie adaptation such as last year's Tomb Raider, there's a certified dud such as 1993's Super Mario Brothers. Other spin-offs such as toys and TV cartoons have proved more reliable but ultimately the fame of such characters derives far more from their presence within the game than any peripheral activities.

As strong characters have become a more essential element of the console marketing mix, games developers are becoming more alive to their potential. In some cases, they're seeking to increase profitability by moving the characters away from the origins and even making them available on the console platforms of their perceived rivals.

For instance, while Crash Bandicoot achieved his fame entirely via PlayStation, the rights to the character are owned not by Sony but by rival global multimedia giant Vivendi Universal. A canny licensing deal meant that when the first game was created, Universal retained the rights to the characters rather than Sony or original game developer Naughty Dog.

According to Pascal Brochier, managing director of Vivendi Universal's interactive publishing division in Australia, the company is now planning to make Crash titles available on other platforms, including the PC. "We see Crash as a very valuable franchise," he said.

A similar path is being pursued by Nintendo's Japanese rival Sega, which announced last year that it was quitting the console business to concentrate on games development. Sega's Dreamcast was praised for its technology, but failed to sell in sufficient quantities.

For the gaming press, the most significant consequence of Sega's move away from hardware was that it meant the company's flagship character Sonic the Hedgehog would at last be available on rival console platforms such as Nintendo or PlayStation. Sega has also licensed its game technology for use on mobile phones and handheld PCs.

Sega developers have been hard at work reinventing Sonic for non-Sega platforms, and the first Nintendo game featuring the spiky blue mammal is expected later this year. Whether his fame will prove so easy to translate remains to be seen.