NextGen gets a bit of a format and layout change this issue.

Cover: EA’s Knockout Kings is on the cover, with a CG Muhammad Ali.

Industry Interview: We get to meet a young up-and-comer named Mark Cerney, who has gone from designing Marble Madness, to running Universal Interactive Studios for Vivendi (and will later go on to develop the PS4 & 5). Cerney talks about his philosophy about game design & running a studio. This includes discussion about using analytics in game design – which is also why games now feed data back to developers for fine-tuning patches after launch.

News: VM Labs has confirmed their Project X consoles will run on DVD. As a considerably bigger story – right before press time, Sega unveiled the Dreamcast, complete with pictures of the console, controller, and VMU. Presumably, we will get a deeper dive into the hardware in the next issue. Nintendo has also revealed the specs for the Game Boy Color, which is also a big deal (but not as big a deal). Interestingly the Color doesn’t support the baked-in Super Game Boy color palettes.

There’s also a discussion of the legal controversy around emulation – there’s a limited legal precedent for emulation at this time, as the emulator software itself is supposed to be legal, but distributing the roms isn’t, and ways to extract your own roms are hard to come by (and console manufacturers would really like to make sure you can’t dump your own roms). On the other hand, there’s some real discussion to be had on how much actual harm Rom distribution causes – nobody is (or will be) going to be selling Tengen Tetris in a legally distributed compilation in the late ’90s – and nobody’s doing that now in the 2020s either. Arguably, Emulation helps to show that there is an interest in those older games. Indeed, NextGen’s official stance is that they hope emulation helps to show a market for older games, and rather than strictly cracking down on older titles, they take steps to make their back catalogs available as a legal alternative to bootlegging.

Meanwhile, Nintendo, due to their falling out with SGI, is running into problems finding a hardware partner for their next console. This is aggravated by the fact that SGI is basically going on a patent-and-copyright-infringement suit spree at everyone else who makes video cards, including Nvidia.

This month in history – Jack Tramiel takes over Atari, Tom Kalinski leaves Sega, Commodore unveils the Amiga, and Bill Gates buys what would become MS-DOS from Seattle Computer.

In Japan, Final Fantasy VIII is on the way, Kenji Eno is still working on D2, and Sakura Wars has gotten a stage show, paving the way for the kind of “2.5D Plays” that we see done to promote various anime and manga franchises (an example of which shows up in the current season of Oshi No Ko). We also get a post-mortem for Gran Turismo.

Licensing: Our big feature article is on Licensing – it’s a big deal in games now and has become a fact of life. Not only in the sense of licensed games based on movies or TV shows, but also licenses within games for car manufacturers, car parts like tires, race tracks, and likeness rights for actors in films.

Alphas (Previews): We start with EA’s Knockout Kings, with the rights for numerous legends and current contenders, including doing exhaustive research to replicate their styles. We also get an interview with Sugar Ray Leonard, who teases possibly coming out of retirement for a bout against Oscar De La Hoya (which never actually happened).

We also get a look at the sequel to Daytona. We have Battletanx and Crash 3. An interesting note about Crash – Naughty Dog developed their own programming language for the PS1 – GOOL (Gaming Oriented Object Lisp) which translates Lisp to PS Assembly – it would be interesting to know if they licensed out the language to other developers. There’s also a look at Return Fire II – I played a bunch of Return Fire (or at least the demo) back in the day in High School, but never played the sequel. We have a preview for Jackie Chan: Stuntmaster – which features Jackie doing a bunch of motion capture (which is interesting, considering Jet Li turned down a role in the Matrix Sequels because he was operating under the perspective that doing motion capture would entail signing away ownership of his moves for perpetuity).

Finals (Reviews): Change in layout this issue and also in organization – titles are no longer grouped by console. Reviewers still aren’t credited though.

Starcraft, Bushido Blade 2, and Tenchu: Stealth Assassins get very strong reviews (also I played a ton of Tenchu back in high school). So does Banjo-Kazooie – with NextGen not having the same problems I had with the Bear and the Bird – look forward to my thoughts in an upcoming Nintendo Power Retrospectives. We also have Douglas Adams’ last hurrah before his passing with Starship Titanic. Need for Speed III also gets very strong reviews.

Letters: We get a bunch of letters this issue about attempts to regulate content in video games.

Retroview: This time we get remembrances from Al Alcorn about trying to sell Home Pong.

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