U R Not E

Ah, eNOS, it only seems like yesterday. It seems hard to believe to me that it was 10 years ago I enrolled in business school, moved to run down City #17 (Pre-Combine), got an apartment with my girlfriend and proceeded to squander large sums of federal loan money on an education of moderate worth. While this was a very exciting and interesting time (the power grid in City 17 collapsed the day we arrived there, a learning experience that taught us that much was different in City 17 from Racoon City ). While this is an interesting time for myself, it was also the launch period for the Sony PlayStation.

I pretty much missed out the 2nd generation of video game consoles. I had an Oddessy 2 and an Intellivision when I was younger but I had switched to PC gaming by the time the NES/SNES/Genesis era (ah, GATO on an amber monocrome screen). I rented a NES a few times when I was college……checking out Mario Brothers and trying figure out how to play Metal Gear when I didn’t have the instructions (UMMM, Ok, I’m in a jungle and I have a pack of cigarettes, now what?…I think after an hour, I managed to sneak into a truck and completed about .0002% of the game). While I was big on PC gaming, I viewed the console market as mostly kids stuff (although I had been impressed by the hype surrounding the launch of Mortal Kombat on”Mortal Monday” for the Sega Genesis.

Then I saw the “neurotransmission” ads that PlayStation used to launch the product. These ads were exceptionally cryptic and used significant amounts of split second edits intermixed with varing images of words, gameplay screen shots, and noise. The ads begin with “begin neurotransmission NOW” as if the commercial was designed less to be viewed but to be downloaded to your brain. The ads ended with the phrase “U R Not e” and “eNOS”. In both cases, the e was colored red while the rest of the text was not. I later learned that the red e was to be read as “ready”, as in “you are not ready” and ready NOS (which stood for the Ninth of September)…I’ve also seen it suggested that it is “sony” spelt backwards with a “e” instead of y…but I think the red E sounds more plausible.

For me, these ads were stunningly effective from a marketing intrusion standpoint. If I was talking to my girlfriend when one of these ads came on, I would actually stop talking mid-sentence and remain quiet until it was over. If she said anything, I would just point to the TV. But I would pick up my sentence after the ad was over, as if I had downloaded the Sony message and could now proceed with other things. The ads were actually constructed with game cheat codes as embedded images that were just barely perceivable at normal speed. The marketing folks expected that the hardcore gamer audience (who would be technically leet enough to do so) would use VCRs to slow down the commercial to such a speed where the information was clearly visible.

However, during this period of time I was living on approximately $8K a year and a $300 game machine was a bit out of my reach and would remain that way for several years. At this time, the closest that got to a PlayStation was a demo unit at EB games in a nearby rundown mall where my girlfriend and I would play Tekken (although we were more Virtua Fighter fans).

Outside a couple PC games (I was a skilled and medaled Tie Fighter pilot for the Empire), I didn’t have the time or funds for any proper video games during this period of time. But as a treat to myself on getting hired to my first post grad school job was to buy a refurbished Sega Saturn (which was already in its death throws at that stage) for $80. The next year, I bought a Dreamcast (the only console I’ve ever bought for myself on launch day and I was extremely happy on that day…but that is story for another day)..

In retrospect, it amazing how primitive some of the Playstation games seem now…No analog control sticks in the controller, something like 300 polygons on screen…I fired up Demolition Derby recently and was trying to figure out why I was so blown away when I first saw this…although at the time, dynamic damage depiction was pretty “fresh” as the kids said back then. I also fired up WipEout, which has aged relatively well…although that title had enough style to burn thanks to The Designers Republic.

Well, I had a point when I started this post but it is lost to me now…but I was thinking about how the Playstation launch and start of one of my life’s chapters were at the same time and how much things have changed since then…both for myself and the for the Playstation.

A nice sum up of the PlayStation’s history can be found here at 1up