Wednesdays with Andrew – NiGHTS into Dreams

(For context, see the introduction to this series here.)

We’ve all seen movies, read stories, and played games where if you die in the game you die in real life. But where are the games that if you die in real life you die in the game? Sure there are some games where if you stop playing an enemy may kill you or, if for some reason you play multiplayer games, another human. But it’s not really the same. I propose a game that detects a lack of player input and then sends pop up boxes in game every four minutes asking if you are still alive. If you take more than ten seconds to confirm your existence, you die in game. This ensures that dying in real life does in fact kill you in game. Maybe you think this is a harsh mechanic and you shouldn’t lose a video game just because you died, but I see it as respectful. Do you want your in progress game of Playboy: the Mansion to just forever sit there, waiting for your next photoshoot? Let’s show some respect to the models, please.

Speaking of dying in games, you can’t die in-game in NiGHTS into Dreams, the first Saturn game Andrew and I played in my one-running series Wednesdays with Andrew. Presumably this means I do not need to confirm if the game has a die in real life and you die in the game mechanic but I wouldn’t put anything past Yuji Naka, the programming savant and criminal mastermind who led Sonic Team during their development of NiGHTS. Instead of dying, the fail state of NiGHTS is waking up, which is also the fail state of life.

By now you may have noticed the spelling of NiGHTS is stupid, but there is an interesting story behind it. The title began development before Mario 64 was released and was led by the core team that developed the good Sonic games. Then they saw what Miyamoto and the people he yelled at were making. The realization that Nintendo was going to release a fully 3D game struck fear into Sega’s heart. In their defense, who could have seen video games moving to 3D because of huge hits like Virtua Fighter, Virtua Cop, and Virtua Racer? To combat Mario’s move to the third dimension, they considered adding hot woman-on-animal kissing but decided an idea that good should be saved for their key series, Sonic the Hedgehog. After testing a few other ideas, such as if you die in real life you die in the game, they landed on an innovative upper/lower case spelling of the name. NiGHTS sold very well considering nothing on the Saturn sold well, so perhaps their gambit worked.

There is a longstanding tale that the only video games that Shigeru Miyamoto ever liked were Plok and NiGHTS, though he only ever actually played Paper Boy 2. But then Miyamoto is a coward, and by that I mean to say his bosses have business acumen. Sega employed a lot of talented developers but in their most fertile era before constant iteration and acquisition, their strongest asset was gross managerial incompetence. While Miyamoto was falling in line before Yamauchi, a man known for refusing both to ever play video games and to never not be an asshole, Sonic Team did not decide to work on Sonic 4 (Sonic CD doesn’t count, shut up).

Some poor Americans were stuck trying to make a 3D Sonic game and were up against normal Sega mismanagement, the typical insane working hours of 90s game dev, and even Naka himself, who reportedly took his 3D engine, developed for NiGHTS, away from the American Sega team when he learned they were using it. When he wasn’t trying to ruin games made by the developer he worked for, the man was leading work on what was not only in hindsight but in foresight an obvious blunder, NiGHTS into Dreams. But again, this is why Sega made interesting and often good games. Had they focused on success they would be a boring developer, had they focused on just making very good games and a number genre defining ones, they’d be Nintendo and that’s probably hard to be. Also, Sega created the Fully Reactive Eyes Entertainment (FREE) genre so maybe don’t believe everything you just read on the internet. Or at least anticipate you’re probably being lied to in order to be setup and immediately dunked on, moron.

I first saw NiGHTS into Dreams at a kiosk in Toys R Us in 1995. By this point I must have already had a PS1, which I bought soon after devising and then scrapping my plan to get an SNES for Secret of Mana. I had successfully tricked my friend Danny into getting a Saturn before ditching Sega and going with Sony, but this demo of NiGHTS made me question my choices. Sure, Loaded was good and edgy humor is always funny and never something I’d be ashamed of and regret some 20 years later, but this game had a flying mime. It was with these young, jealous eyes I first saw Sonic Team’s big Saturn debut.

Andrew (who this series is supposedly about) and his son Morrie (Mory) first saw NiGHTS into Dreams a few weeks ago. Morrie was immediately dismissive as you’d expect of a 6 year old or 16 year old or however old he is, and it was difficult to blame him. NiGHTS is very unclear to the uninitiated, baffling even. I guided them through the game as best I could remember, but the game offered very little help. Arcade style score attack games are not really in vogue now, but they weren’t in 1996, either. Titles for the NES had already begun the evolution of bite-sized, quarter stealing action into longer, more involved console-style games. Haunted Castle, which is terrible but has that one song, became Castlevania, became Castlevania 2, the longer, lying game that also sort of maybe served as a prototype for Symphony of the NiGHT.

Explaining that NiGHTS was a racing game was met with incredulity from my audience. I retreated to the claim of, “well, you have to go fast,” which felt somewhat less potent. Andrew slowly opened up to the game as he got a feel for the movement, but the Sega 3D controller did not help the situation. It was met with mockery and comparisons to a waffle maker. Telling Andrew and his supposed son Morrie that Miyamoto likes the game didn’t impress them. A desperate attempt at explaining that Sega was good because they made weird stuff while Nintendo made safe sequels was met with accusations of propaganda. I quickly called 1-800-USA-SEGA to ask for advice on what to say next but was reminded that the number was disconnected around 2014.

I then put on Christmas NiGHTS in a futile attempt to wow the onlookers. It did nothing for them but I was happy to be reminded of how much seasonal stuff they crammed into the demo. There were no takers on my suggestion to increment the Saturn’s internal clock by 8 hours and reload the game until we covered the entire year, just to see if there would be any graphical changes due to holidays or seasons. It wouldn’t have even been 27,000 reboots but these guys don’t seem to like video games. The flying in the game is smooth and fun, as I remembered, but the music deserves a special mention. It fits squarely in that group of ‘so bad it’s good but I have liked it ironically for so long maybe it actually is just good’ soundtracks the Saturn is known for (by me), along with Sonic R and Burning Rangers.

Ultimately, I choose to believe that Andrew saw there was something to NiGHTS. Morrie, on the other hand, ended the session thinking the game was terrible. He told us that he felt bad for people our age because this is what we had to play growing up. At this point Andrew had to restrain me, or at least I backed into him while shouting, “Hold me back! Hold me back!” Morrie concluded his decidedly not 1990s inspired assessment – “A shit post if it were a game.”

With this first of this 97 entry long series coming to an end, we will now establish a tradition Andrew unexpectedly came up with when I asked him to send me over actually useful impressions of the game – the reviewing haiku. (I am the word writing guy, Andrew, not you. Do not come up with ideas for posts unless you want to sign documents indicating they were my ideas.)

NiGHTS into Dreams
Where am I going
Which way do I need to go
What am I doing