Super Mario

by Jeff Ryan

  A family member would be needed to run the new American branch of Nintendo, Yamauchi knew. But who? Yamauchi’s son, Katsuhito, was too young to take over an American division, despite being older than Hiroshi was when he assumed control of the whole company. His other two kids were girls, Yoko and Fujiko. But the Yamauchis had a history of bringing sons-in-law into the family business. So his eldest daughter Yoko’s husband would run the U.S. branch.

  If only the son-in-law wanted the job. Minoru “Mino” Arakawa, Yoko’s husband, was the second son of a wealthy Kyoto textile family. Mino had Western experience—he and Yoko were living in Canada for his real estate development job with the zaibatsu Marubeni. He spoke English, had a graduate degree from MIT, and had driven across the United States in a VW bus. He was a far cry from Yamauchi, a man so callous he took his daughter to one of his favorite geisha clubs for her twentieth birthday—and stayed there after she went home.

  Arakawa turned down Nintendo jobs before, but Yamauchi was bred by his grandparents to be persistent. (Hiroshi’s father had abandoned his family, and a probable Nintendo presidency, for another woman.) In the end, Arakawa accepted the role as president of a new subsidiary, Nintendo of America. Taking the job meant going against his wife’s wishes—Yoko had a distant relationship with both her father and his company—but Yamauchi was just that convincing about the expansion opportunities. At least Arakawa didn’t have to change his last name to Yamauchi, like the two previous sons-in-law.

  Nevertheless, Yoko’s bad premonitions were seemingly confirmed the day they left on a road trip from Vancouver to New York. They had set up a Seattle-based “distribution channel”—really just two truckers named Ron Judy and Al Stone, who had been importing used Nintendo arcade cabinets from Hawaii, and reselling them locally. Before heading out to the East Coast, Arakawa hired them, on commission, to set up distribution channels for the North American market. Then it was time to drive cross country to set up the New York headquarters of Nintendo of America. What was the bad omen? The day the couple crossed over from Canada into Washington State, May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted.

  HAVING SURVIVED THE VOLCANO, THE ARAKAWAS SET UP shop an ash-free three thousand miles away in New York City, with a rented warehouse across the Hudson River in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The Arakawas were in the Big Apple because it was, and still is, the toy capital of the world. Visiting three buyers in a day took a dollar’s worth of subway tokens, not a week of airports and hotel lounges.

  But it wasn’t a good fit. Kyoto was fourteen hours ahead of Manhattan, and any conversation with the home office required one party to stay up very late or wake up very early. Yoko didn’t know as much English as her husband, and New York’s cesspool vibe—this was the year of the transit strike, Studio 54 being shuttered, and John Lennon’s murder—was hardly the Asian-friendly Pacific Northwest of Vancouver. They were unhappy in the city, yet supposed to figure out what sort of games these American foreigners wanted to play. In the vigilante atmosphere of the Guardian Angels, they decided on a game about shooting.

  The success of Space Invaders had started a worldwide rage for shooters. (Since its release in June 1978, Space Invaders was also responsible for a shortage of hundred-yen coins in Japan, and for giving the Japanese something to be as proud of as Brazil was of Pelé.) Namco released a color sequel, Space Invaders, Part II, in 1980: it was a worldwide hit as well. Taito responded with Galaxian in 1979, which was basically Space Invaders with some swooping attacks: it was a hit too. Its sequel, Galaga, came out in 1981, with minor upgrades: yet another global hit.

  In Japan, Nintendo tried its hand at its own space shooter game in 1980, Radar Scope. Radar Scope’s twist was that the enemies flew down, but then retreated back to the safety at the top of the screen. There were no shields for players to hide behind, and the more blasts a player let fly, the slower the “rapid-fire laser blaster” would become. Finally, some wireframe buildings in the background made for the illusion you were standing among skyscrapers, looking up at the alien horde.

  Radar Scope was Nintendo’s biggest game of the year. Its catalog also boasted Space Firebird, a top-down dogfight game. There was also Space Fever, a straight-up replica of Space Invaders, from a year or two back. Space Launcher (sensing a theme to the names?) was a Frogger-style obstacle course game. Monkey Magic was a Breakout rip-off. Head-on-N was a maze game with race cars, except nowhere near as good as Pac-Man. Finally there was Sheriff, a Western-themed shooting game, which would seem perfect for America. But it had odd and frustrating controls, with two joysticks instead of one.

  So, a few out-of-date knockoffs, a game that had players fuming over the lousy control scheme, and one proven hit. Yamauchi went all in on Radar Scope, telling Arakawa it had the best chance for American success. Nintendo started manufacturing three thousand cabinets, shipping them from Kyoto to the New Jersey warehouse. Arakawa’s job was to get them all sold. If he succeeded, Nintendo would have a toehold in the American market.

  It would take a few months to assemble that many Radar Scope cabinets, so Arakawa starting preselling them. His first solo decision for the company was to focus almost exclusively on Radar Scope, and cut bait on the others: its success and Nintendo’s success would be one. Nintendo farmed out the distribution of Space Firebird to Gremlin, a company that worked with other Japanese companies such as Nichibutsu, Namco, and Konami. Space Fever never saw U.S. shores. Sheriff was released by Exidy as Bandido. None were big hits, which must have been a relief to all concerned.

  But this wasn’t Let’s Make a Deal: just because all the other doors had donkeys behind them didn’t mean that the one Yamauchi and Arakawa chose had a new car. Arcade vendors found Radar Scope’s beeping annoying. (Presumably they knew their beeps, working among a hundred machines all set to “migraine.”) The news that the game was big in Japan didn’t impress. And did arcade vendors need yet another cloned Space Invaders, an expensive one at that, from a company with next to no track record?

  Arakawa was able to wheel and deal about a thousand of the Radar Scope units, breaking even on production and shipping costs. But Yamauchi had sent him three thousand. Now two thousand of them were collecting dust in a warehouse in New Jersey, aging about as well as unrefrigerated milk. This was exactly why Yoko, who was now a three-pack-a-day smoker, hadn’t wanted her husband to go into business with her father.

  It hardly seemed a success. Certainly not to Ron and Al back in Seattle, who were getting killed by their commission-based deal on an expensive game. What could Arakawa do to prove himself to his father-in-law? Keep selling it, to even more diminishing returns? Or write off the loss and move on to next year’s models? Yamauchi might fire him for either decision. He had plenty of experience canning his own relatives: back in 1949, Yamauchi fired first his relatives, then every last executive, to remove all institutional memory of anyone but himself in charge. To avoid their fate, what should Arakawa choose?

  There was a third option: Arakawa could preemptively resign, to keep his dignity intact. But this wasn’t Japan, where the samurai’s wakizashi sword was a constant metaphor for reclaiming one’s honor after a loss. This was America, the land where the breakfast flake, the ice cream cone, the microwave, and the Post-it note were all botched engineering projects salvaged into worldwide sensations. Failure, not necessity, was the mother of invention. Arakawa had an idea, a cavalier and audacious one—something that would never fly in Japan. Even if the new plan didn’t work, though, it would be a game changer.

  2 – MARIO’S ARTIST

  SHIGERU MIYAMOTO AND THE CREATION OF DONKEY KONG

  Minoru Arakawa, a little Mino in a big pond, can’t be blamed for failing to break into the arcade game market. It was tough enough for American companies such as Exidy or Cinematronics to compete with the Atari juggernaut, especially since Atari had huge crews of employees churning out hit game after hit game, thousands of cabinets at a time. And Atari was now owned by Warner Communications, meaning it had pockets $
100 million deep. Arakawa had no way of knowing he would defeat Nintendo’s eight-hundred-pound gorilla of a competitor with his own eight-hundred-pound gorilla.

  One of Arakawa’s stumbling blocks was in trying to sell games himself. The way most Japanese game makers got their games into American arcades was by licensing them to U.S. firms. Both Namco’s Pac-Man and Taito’s Space Invaders were released in America by the same company: Midway. (Midway’s name came from the carnival midway, not the Battle of Midway, presumably a sore spot for Japan.) Nintendo had grown profitable in Japan by controlling distribution, and Yamauchi wanted to be his own distributor in America as well. That gave Arakawa two different challenges to overcome: come up with a game to sell, and keep the middlemen out of it.

  Neither challenge looked surmountable at present. Nintendo could only deliver cabinets to arcades if it sold them first. The arcade business was entirely cash based, run by vendors so sleazy that towns regularly tried to chase them out adult bookstore – style. Arcades were considered one step away from circus life, and not a step up. It was no stretch to suppose that games made their way into arcades on something other than merit.

  Japanese game makers were used to this—they dealt with Yakuza knockoffs of their games often enough, after all. This was yet another reason for Yamauchi to want a distribution network: if he had the power, no one else could touch Nintendo for fear of reprisals. So he was willing to hear out Arakawa, who called up, laid out the facts, then proposed his game-changing solution.

  Fact: Radar Scope wasn’t going to sell any more units. Fact: To keep Ron and Al from walking away, Arakawa had promised them that the next Nintendo game would be a smash. Fact: They needed a new game to sell. Fact: despite adding words such as “explosive,” “pulsating,” and “ecstasy” next to the hot chicks in their trade-magazine ads, Nintendo had little up its sleeve, sexy or not. (All game ads of the time featured such big-haired Spandexed women, perhaps on break from leaning suggestively next to sports cars.) Fact: There were two thousand cabinets wasting away in Jersey. Conclusion: The new game had to arrive soon. It had to sell well. And the game changer? Change the game.

  Arakawa’s gamble was to create not a new game, but a conversion kit for Radar Scope, to freshen it up with something new. It would save Nintendo the cost of the two thousand cabinets, plus it would be a whole lot quicker than making two thousand cabinets in Kyoto and shipping them halfway around the globe. Conversion kits were a form of aftermarket sales for arcades, which let arcade owners squeeze more life out of their older machines such as Asteroids by juicing them up with new elements. But they were for older hit games, not brand-new duds.

  It was certainly a bold idea, trying to reheat yesterday’s blue plate special into a new entrée. And cracking the American market—or at this point merely minimizing the loss—was worth one last halfhearted try. Yamauchi agreed; he’d get a new game made to try to move the two thousand Radar Scopes. But he hedged his bet. Yamauchi’s top designers were all busy on their own games, and he wasn’t going to pull any of them off their projects for this rush job. So he announced an internal competition for conversion ideas. He received several ideas from a surprising source, a boyish, shaggy-haired staff artist with an industrial design degree but no previous game experience. The kid had designed the casings for some Nintendo products: maybe he’d be good designing their guts as well.

  That staff artist was Shigeru Miyamoto, then twenty-nine. Miyamoto hadn’t been a fan of the first video games he played, such as Taito’s Western Gun. He was raised on puppets and manga and baseball in the Kyoto suburb of Sonobo, and was much more into music (he loved the Beatles and bluegrass) than electronics. While he preferred his left hand, Shigeru was cross-dominant, which put him in the rarefied company of some of the world’s great thinkers: Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Ben Franklin, Michelangelo, Ludwig van Beethoven, Leonardo da Vinci, and Mohandus Gandhi.

  Despite all this potential, Miyamoto took five years to get his four-year engineering degree. His father had to get him the job with Nintendo, helping design toys and sometimes painting the cabinets. He hadn’t even been interested in video games until Space Invaders came along, with its high-concept plot and ever-increasing game-play speed. But Yamauchi saw something beyond the slacker haircut, and decided to give him a shot.

  Yamauchi wasn’t crazy, so he assigned Gunpei Yokoi to help translate Miyamoto’s vision for the new game—whatever it would be—into reality. Yokoi was ten years older and wiser than Miyamoto, and would show him the gaming ropes. Yokoi was the optimist, focusing on what could be done. Miyamoto worked negatively, always aware of limitations. Yin and yang. Miyamoto and Yokoi then contracted the services of Ikegami Tsushinki, a company that had designed many of Nintendo’s arcade games, so the two wouldn’t be flying blind hammering out a solid-state motherboard. Ikegami Tsushinki had built Radar Scope, so it knew what its own components could do.

  Inside Radar Scope was a Sanyo monitor turned sideways, displaying pixel-based raster graphics. (A fancy way of saying it couldn’t display the bouncing geometric shapes of a Tron or a Tempest.) It had a DAC (digital-to-analog) converter, so it could turn electronic semaphore from the game board into sounds. It was running the Zilog Z80 8-bit microprocessor, an inexpensive alternative to Intel’s 8080 microprocessor. The Z80’s affordability and utility quickly made it the generic drug of computer chips: just as good, at a fraction of the cost. So far so good.

  Radar Scope had a control panel with one joystick and one button. This was perfectly normal for a shooting game; multiple buttons were a few years away. So whatever the game would do, it would have one primary mode of interaction. Which was usually shooting: what else would you do?

  Yamauchi wanted the replacement game to be based on the cartoon Popeye, since a live-action movie starring Robin Williams as the titular sailor was in the works. Twenty years ago Nintendo, in a bout of corporate identity confusion, had tried to be a food manufacturer: one of its products was Popeye Ramen. Thus, it had an in for the rights, and Yokoi was designing a Game & Watch Popeye title. Whatever that turned out to be might be good enough for an arcade game. Yokoi and Miyamoto would figure out the details. Even if the game stunk, what great marketing!

  But Yamauchi found out it would take years for Nintendo to acquire the rights to a global property such as Popeye for the arcades. If he wanted to play with the big boys, he had to follow their rules. So no Popeye. It was probably for the best: anyone who knew arcades knew that game play was more important than the often laughable story. Sega’s Motocross didn’t do any better when it was renamed Fonz, after the Happy Days character, did it?

  Miyamoto, though, was committed not so much to the story of Popeye as to its goal: defeat the villain to save the girl. The main characters were the barrel-chested hero (“I just made a vague set of characteristics for him as a middle-aged man with a strong sense of justice who is not handsome,” he would later say), the enormous hairy opponent, and the tall, willowy heroine who needed rescuing. These storytelling archetypes made the hero an underdog, gave him a noble reason to fight, and even gave some sympathy to the villain. No hero named Popeye? Fine, Miyamoto wouldn’t call him Popeye. No boulder-size Bluto? Fine, “Bluto” would be someone else. Popeye by any other name would play the same. And Miyamoto liked the idea of naming a video game after the bad guy, as in Space Invaders or Sinistar. It’d be easy to come up with a good name for a big gorilla of a villain.

  A big, angry gorilla. What a perfect antagonist. A big, angry, dumb gorilla won’t let Olive Oyl—er, some other lady—go free. Miyamoto decided to use King Kong, a Japanese synonym for ape. King Kong, after all, had scaled the Empire State Building and fought Godzilla: a shared cultural foil for a Japanese American game.

  Miyamoto then took a stab at translating. He understood English pretty well since his dad taught it in school, but never could get his tongue around speaking it correctly. He wanted the English word for “stubborn,” since a stubborn gorilla was the heart of th
e game he envisioned. And what animal was more stubborn than a donkey? Thus, a game about an ape was named after a pack animal. (Miyamoto, like many true artists, has since told this story a few different ways.)

  Miyamoto now had both a name and a villain in Donkey Kong. The story would be a brave man fighting the big dumb ape to get his girl back. A love triangle. Recognizing that actions and motivations were more important than mere names, the damsel in distress would just be “Lady”—a generic MacGuffin of a character. Even the hero lacked a true name: he was “Jumpman.” (Miyamoto originally thought of him as “Mr. Video,” or just ossan—“middle-aged man.”) Borrowing the mukokuseki concept of ethnically generic people from the manga comics he loved, Miyamoto set about building his digital hero, pixel by pixel.

  And as his name would suggest, Jumpman jumped. Quite a phenomenal gravity-defying leap at that: from a standing position, he could spring his full body height. While walking or running, Jumpman could clear an obstacle the relative size of a trash bin. In bold defiance of the one-button controls, Miyamoto came up with a second activity for the athletic Jumpman. He scattered hammers throughout the level that Jumpman could acquire by touching them. With a hammer he was unable to jump, presumably because of its weight. But he could pound away on obstacles with a well-timed wallop of the (now dual-) action button.