The Battle Of Seattle

Monday, May. 21, 2001 By CHRIS TAYLOR/REDMOND

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There's something about the Nintendo campus that just heaves with secrecy. Its whitewashed buildings with black-tinted windows, closely shrouded by trees, seem more like Langley, Va., than suburban Seattle. Even if you sneak in, you won't find Nintendo's powerful new video-game console, the GameCube, in any of the display cases. Nor will you hear the staff speak the names of the games that will be released for it. "We've said the right amount on GameCube, which is nothing," chuckles the sagelike executive vice president Peter Main. "We've got our friends across the road saying, 'What are they doing?'"

If your friends across the road were Microsoft, you would try to fly under the radar too. A five-minute drive down Highway 520, Bill Gates' guys are beavering away on their own powerful new video-game console, the Xbox. Partly because Microsoft is the new kid on this particular block, its approach to publicity--it's dropping $500 million this year on Xbox advertising--is a little different. The staff here can't wait to thrust a green-and-black Xbox into your hands, show off dozens of cool games--and loudly taunt the game spooks up the road. "Let's face it, Nintendo's system is for kids," says Robbie Bach, Xbox's gruff-voiced team leader. "We're for sophisticated gamers. I don't know any 30-year-olds who want a GameCube."

Welcome to the new battle of Seattle. The $5 billion Mario Bros. gang and the $23 billion Windows heavyweights, neighbors who never before had occasion to compete, are set to clash over the hearts, minds and $15 billion annual global sales of the video-game industry. It's a pretty even contest: Nintendo may have more than a century of arcade experience, but Microsoft has its bruised post-antitrust trial pride at stake--and nobody ever went broke overestimating Gates' ability to break a new market.

The war officially commences this week at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, and there will be business casualties. Both systems are scheduled for fall release. The winner could easily oust Sony's PlayStation 2 from the top of the charts, while the loser could just as easily go the way of Sega's defunct Dreamcast, which sold only half its projected 6 million units before Sega pulled the plug.

So how do the two sides stack up? Last week TIME got an exclusive sneak peek at three closely guarded GameCube games and a whole passel of Xbox titles.

On the Nintendo side, Luigi's Mansion is one of several new works from Shigeru Miyamoto, the man behind Mario, Zelda and Donkey Kong and an inductee of the game designers' Hall of Fame. It features Mario's brother ridding his real estate of ghosts with the aid of a flashlight and vacuum cleaner; great game play aside, it's an excuse to show off the GameCube's spectacularly realistic lighting effects. Similarly, the hugely entertaining jet-ski game Wave Race has made an art form of virtual H2O; its foam and raindrops on the camera lens will have you reaching for a towel.