by Jeff Ryan
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
PART 1 - ARCADE FIRE
1 – BABY MARIO - THE BIRTH OF NINTENDO OF AMERICA
2 – MARIO’S ARTIST - SHIGERU MIYAMOTO AND THE CREATION OF DONKEY KONG
3 – MARIO’S BRAWL - THE MCA UNIVERSAL LAWSUIT
4 – MARIO’S EARLY YEARS - THE VIDEO GAME CRASH OF 1983
PART 2 - SUPER 8
5 – MARIO’S ISLAND - JAPAN AND THE FAMICON
6 – MARIO’S SUNSHINE - SUPER MARIO BROS. AND THE NINTENDO ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEM
7 – MARIO’S BOMB - THE LOST LEVELS
8 – MARIO’S SMASH - SUPER MARIO BROS. 3
9 – MARIO’S BROTHERS - THE NES AND THE GAME BOY
10 – MARIO’S DRIFT - SEGA, THE GENESIS, AND A VERY FAST HEDGEHOG
PART 3 - SWEET 16
11 – MARIO’S CLASH - THE SONIC-MARIO SHOWDOWN
12 – MARIO’S GALAXY - SPINOFFS GALORE
13 – MARIO THE JUGGLER - MARIO PAINT
14 – MARIO’S ADVANCE - NINTENDO’S DISCS
15 – MARIO’S KART(RIDGE) - VIRTUAL BOY AND OTHER THREE-DIMENSIONAL FUN
PART 4 - THIRD PRIZE IS YOU’RE FIRED
16 – MARIO’S WORLD - THE N64
17 – MARIO’S COMMUNICATION KIT - THE NINTENDO 64DD
18 – MARIO’S MELEE - THE GAMECUBE
19 – MARIO’S TIME MACHINE - THE GAME BOY ADVANCE
20 – MARIO’S SAGA - SUNSHINE AND DARKNESS
PART 5 - WII ARE THE CHAMPIONS
21 – MARIO’S REVOLUTION - THE DS
22 – MARIO’S PRINCESS - THE WII
23 – MARIO’S PARTY - THREE DAYS IN THE LIFE OF NINTENDO
24 – MARIO’S LEGEND - THE FUTURE OF NINTENDO
THANKS, MARIO, BUT OUR NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ARE IN ANOTHER CASTLE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2011 by Portfolio / Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Jeff Ryan, 2011
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Ryan, Jeff, 1976 –
Super Mario : how Nintendo conquered America / Jeff Ryan. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN : 978-1-101-51763-5
1. Nintendo Kabushiki Kaisha. 2. Video games industry—United States. 3. Nintendo video
games. I. Title.
HD9993.E454N5767 2011
338.7’6179480973—dc22 2011004054
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TO BILL RUDOWSKI
I’MMA GONNA WIN!
THANKS, MARIO, BUT OUR NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ARE IN ANOTHER CASTLE 277
BIBLIOGRAPHY 281
INDEX 285
INTRODUCTION
MARIO’S INSIDE STORY
While Super Mario is a plumber by profession, exploration is at the heart of his stories. As with other distinguished explorers of Italian descent, such as Christopher Columbus, the place he discovered was already inhabited. It was the world of play, a world to which all of us are born holding passports. (As one Royal Geographical Society wag presciently put it more than a hundred years ago, “Explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and a need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men.” He could have been yelling it down the stairs into a modern rec room.) Most of us let that passport expire, but Mario gives us a way to renew it, and revisit our homeland.
There are 240 million Super Mario games out there. Just one game, the original Super Mario Bros., has more than forty million copies in print, not counting releases on other platforms or the uncountable emulators that let you play samizdat versions on your computer. Broken down by hour, it’s an extremely economical buy: few will spend twenty-five hours watching a single twenty-five-dollar DVD, but most everyone who purchases a fifty-dollar Mario game can put in fifty hours or more to explore its nooks and crannies.
Let’s talk about economy some more. Do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: the number of Mario games sold times fifty bucks each, the average price of a game. This number is going to be off, since it doesn’t account for games being bundled with consoles, which are discounted. But it also doesn’t account for merchandise and tie-in games like Dr. Mario, or for anything else Nintendo sells: Mario games are only one or two of its hundreds of titles a year, and that’s all just the software. Hopefully you used a commercial-size envelope: the ballpark figure of Nintendo’s Mario’s sales is $12 billion. If each one of Mario’s gold coins was worth a million dollars, to collect that much moola he would have to knock his head on a coin block for almost three and a half hours.
Mario is unique in that he seems to offer so little appeal. What person who had been living in a cave the last few decades would have picked Super Mario as the dominant game franchise, over the Halo (30 million sold), Tomb Raider (35 million), Guitar Hero (40 million), Resident Evil (43 million), and Madden (85 million) game franchises combined? And that doesn’t even count Mario’s other appearances, such as Mario Kart (12 million) and Mario Party (5 million). The other top franchises let you experience the adrenaline and horrors of war, or deep fantasy worlds, or pro sports. A Mario game lets you pretend to be a middle-aged chubster hopping onto a turtle shell. Huh? No superheroes? No soldiers? No wizards? What sort of cut-rate wish fulfillment is this?
There’s something to Mario more than just looks. Games are different from all other entertainment due to their interactivity: they light up totally different parts of the brain than watching a movie or reading a book does. And Mario’s bland persona is part of his appeal: he’s a one-size-fits-all hero. For twenty years everyone tried to create distinct memorable avatars for us to control: Sonic, Lara Croft, Mega Man. That trend has reversed, and popular games now feature silent, unknown characters such as Halo’s Master Chief and the faceless grunts from Call of Duty and SOCOM. Yet they’re still copying Mario, who is both wackily specific (an overalled plumber) and
vague as fog (anyone ever see him unclog a drain?).
My own Mario memories probably aren’t too different from anyone else’s. My first experience was with the cardboard box the NES came in, rather than any game. A schoolmate brought it on the bus every day to show off, and we crowded around to look at the screen shots on its obverse side. A few months later our parents bought us a NES, and my brothers and I put it through usage that would put a Miami air conditioner to shame. We traded games with neighbors, kids older and younger than us, even traded out of the middle-school caste system with the cool kids. We started a neighborhood fan club: to get in, you had to beat a game and find a secret. Most everyone’s secrets were from Super Mario Bros., which had them in spades.
Then high school and college and life happened, and I stopped gaming, save for a PC shooter once a year or so. I never chose to quit gaming—it just fell off my priorities list. Then about ten years ago, I landed a copyediting job at a dot-com. No one had any copy for me to proof before noon, yet I was coming in at 8:30 A.M. I asked my managing editor if there was anything I could write, to help out.
There was. She gave me a press release about a Pokémon tournament. The company had been using a freelancer for its irregular reporting of video game news and reviews. Having me write for this section of the site would bolster that coverage—and for free, since I was salaried. I typed up the piece, handed it in, and a few minutes later heard my editor on the phone firing the freelancer. She said they had just hired a new video game expert. Gulp.
In the months that followed I studied video games in a way very few others have. I wasn’t actually playing them, since I was at work. I wasn’t designing them, either, so I didn’t need to know alias coding or texture mapping. I needed to know why they were popular, what made one title better or “cooler” than the next. I made myself an expert in all things Sega, Sony, and Nintendo.
And just about all things Nintendo, I found out, were connected to Mario. He was everywhere: in sports games, fighting games, role-playing games, puzzle games, racing games, and every bit of branding imaginable. He had become a one-word shortcut for Nintendo, for gaming itself, and (I’m sure Nintendo hoped) for the concept of fun. Streets were named after him. There was even an unofficial holiday for him, on March 10 (MAR 10, get it?).
“Super Mario” has become the default nickname for any Mario. Formula One champion Mario Andretti (born in 1940) sometimes gets asked if he’s named after Super Mario. (He says he is, to the delight of the seven-year-olds who ask.) Chef Mario Batali is called Super Mario as well. If you’re good at a professional sport, and your name is Mario, you know what your nickname will be. Just ask hockey’s Mario Lemieux, football’s Mario Williams, ultimate fighting’s Mario Miranda, cycling’s Mario Cipollini, and soccer’s Mario Basler, Mario Gomez, and Mario Balotelli. They are, respectively, Canadian, American, Brazilian, Italian, German, Spanish, and Ghanaese. The nickname cannot be avoided wherever on the globe you are a Mario.
At some point I realized that the “life story” of Super Mario is the history of gaming itself. Yes, it’s a history of Nintendo and its creators: designer Shigeru Miyamoto, billionaire Hiroshi Yamauchi, and his underestimated son-in-law Minoru Arakawa. But at its core, it’s the biography of a man who’s not real, but has a Q rating up there with Mickey Mouse. A figure whose specific tale of the tape—pudgy Italian plumber from Brooklyn—merely serves to make him as perpetual an underdog as that undertall Italian boxer from Philadelphia, Rocky Balboa. A world-beloved character with roots across three continents: Asian invention, American setting, European name. A character almost totally blank, yet beloved. A hero who is at once us, more than us, and so much less than us. A guy with a brother named Luigi, and a princess to save.
Super Mario.
PART 1
ARCADE FIRE
1 – BABY MARIO
THE BIRTH OF NINTENDO OF AMERICA
In 1980, starting an arcade game took a quarter. Starting an arcade-game company took a lot more. But the rewards were more than getting your initials up on the high score. Companies in the arcade-game business tapped into a gold mine by updating their old electromechanical games, which had been collecting first pennies and nickels and now dimes and quarters for nearly a hundred years. One by one they were replacing the solenoids and miniature puppet shows and blinking lights with fancy new “TV thrillers” and “video skill games.” These games, shown on sideways television screens, used solid-state electronics to lure players into a web of lighting-fast reflexes, sweaty palms, and cramped fingers, all in an attempt to defeat computer opponents. They were bits of science fiction dropped out of the twenty-third century into the polyester-plaid laps of the 1970s.
And the biggest game maker by far was Atari, the company that put out the first rock-star megahit game, Pong, in 1972. Atari followed Pong with hit after hit—Asteroids, Tank, Lunar Lander. In 1980, it introduced two big crazes: Battlezone, a wireframe game of tank combat, and Missile Command, a Cold War nightmare where players had to see how long they could keep civilization alive while shooting down nukes raining in from the USSR. Everyone else merely treaded in Atari’s wake. It brought in untold millions every year, it was run by a hippie, and it flat-out didn’t exist ten years ago. Everyone wanted a piece of Atari’s success: it spurred the game industry for a 5 percent monthly expansion rate.
No one dreamed of beating Atari.
A six-person start-up called Nintendo of America was ahead of the pack of wannabes in one crucial way: it was already a success. Too bad that was only in Japan. A Kyoto-based playing card manufacturer since 1894, Nintendo had craftily shifted over to the toy market to capitalize on its existing distribution route for cards. Lots of other Japanese firms were selling arcade games: Pac-Man’s Namco, Frogger’s Konami, Bomberman’s Hudson Soft, and Space Invaders’s Taito. Japan’s specialty, as journalist Chris Kohler has pointed out, was personality: its good guys and bad guys were characters, of a very crude sort, instead of abstract art come to life, like Atari’s Breakout or Tempest. If everyone else could make games, so could Nintendo.
Nintendo’s most skilled inventor was Gunpei Yokoi, who had started his lifelong career with Nintendo repairing its playing-card machinery. He made a telescoping fake hand as a gag, and company president Hiroshi Yamauchi decided to market it as a toy. The “Ultra Hand” sold over 1.2 million copies in 1970, and was soon followed by novelties such as the “Ten Billion Barrel” maze, the “Love Tester” device, and a Roomba-like remote-control vacuum.
Yokoi’s most recent success was in portable electronic games. After watching a salaryman playing with an electronic calculator on a train one day, Yokoi had the idea of making small games that could run off of watch batteries. (As with the Ultra Hand, Yokoi only told the imperious Yamauchi about his game idea because he was desperate for conversation. In this case he was stuck as the boss’s chauffeur for the day.) The inventor taught himself about segment display, which let the pieces of an LCD “8,” when lit up separately, represent all ten digits. By designing a man with many hands, and only lighting up two at a time, segment display could animate a cartoon character for a game. And thanks to the pocket calculator boom, LCD was cheap to acquire. Games people were paying a hundred yen each to play on machines weighing five hundred pounds could be engineered to fit into a shirt pocket. The resulting device was called Game & Watch.
The first Game & Watch game, 1980’s Ball, was a juggling game. Players watched a ball tick back and forth from one hand to another, and pressed either the left or right button to keep it airborne. Game A was two balls, Game B three. There were five games like this for the “Silver” collection, named after the shiny color of the case. Five more “Gold” games followed in 1981. All flew off the shelves, and lots more were in the works.
This was on top of Nintendo’s other game successes. It had joined the home-Pong clones, releasing its undistinguished but popular Color TV Game 6, with a fifteen-game follow-up the following year. It had found success with 1
974’s EM game Wild Gunman, tanked with the malfunctioning horseracing title EVR Race, and rebounded with its first true video arcade game, Computer Othello. Now it had a team of designers (including Yokoi) cranking out new titles every few months, cresting the faddish wave of whatever was currently gobbling up hundred-yen pieces in smoky arcades. How hard could it be to duplicate Japan’s success overseas?
Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo’s president, ached to be a major player not just in Japan but in the world. He had his eyes opened during a mid-fifties trip to America, where he had met with Walt Disney executives about licensing its characters on cards. The experience had walloped him with the scope of the global market for entertainment, showing him just how rinky-dink his Japanese-only, family owned playing card business truly was. A small, intense man with prematurely silver hair, he had worked hard to keep it going in the postwar years and beyond. But true success in the era of global zaibatsus and international corporations meant making money all around the world.
Hiroshi’s great-grandfather Fusajiro Yamauchi opened a Kyoto card shop in 1894 manufacturing colorful flower cards called hanafuda , and named the shop Nintendo Koppai. (The word “Nintendo” means “leave luck to heaven” or “We do what we can,” which suggests the chance inherent in card games.) He sold to gamblers, who used a new deck every hand. The company hung on through thick and thin over the years, following Japan’s economic roller-coaster as it crashed after World War II, rebounded, then crashed again after the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.
Hiroshi Yamauchi, who at age twenty-one took over from his grandfather in 1949 after the older man suffered a stroke, was at the forefront of Nintendo’s changes. Yamauchi tried out various new business models—rice, taxicabs, “love hotels” rentable by the hour. None clicked, until he decided to utilize his network of card and toy shops. His single-minded dedication to running his company his way made him few friends. Even his family was distant: his children were virtual strangers who feared him the rare times he was home. Like so many family businesses, the business became more important than the family it was supposed to enrich.
