Super Mario

by Jeff Ryan

  Eventually, Kondō perfected his little score. The secret was to write multiple minisongs, each a few seconds long, and string them together. They were a series of pop hooks destined to worm their way into the world’s auditory canals. When played in a row, they somehow never sounded like one song on repeat. They even sped up in tempo as Mario’s time ran out. The song’s lyrics and title, “Go Go Mario,” are awkward and probably best forgotten. The first two bars: “Today, full of energy, Mario is still running, running / Go save Princess Peach! Go!” But the melody is unimprovable.

  If this hadn’t been a Nintendo game, it might have ended with World 1-4, or World 2-4. Both times Mario defeats a large adversary, a “boss.” A princess comes out at the end of each fight, and says “Thank you, Mario” . . . followed by “But our princess is in another castle!” (Complete with royal thumbs-ups that might be mistaken for middle fingers.) The use of the word “Our” instead of “the” or “Your” includes the player alongside Mario as questers for the princess’s freedom. And to have the same bad joke delivered level after level turns Mario into some sort of Odysseus, forced to storm castle after castle, never to reunite with his Penelope. (Or Toadstool, as the princess was execrably called in the American edition.)

  Further mixing the character’s and the player’s adventures were the Warp Zones. Scattered here and there were secret chambers, with “Welcome to Warp Zone!” displayed over three identical pipes. They all led to different levels of the game. It was a built-in cheat, letting Mario bypass vast swatches of the game if he wanted. Another bit of humor, addressing just how Brobdignagian the game had become: what book lets you know you can skip ahead to page 320 if you want?

  It must have been frustrating for Yamauchi, not a patient man, to watch the development. His A-team of designers produced a great game, gave it a perfect end point, and then added a dumb joke to explain why they had to design another four levels to play. And then the same dumb joke again. And again! Shades of The Agony and the Ecstasy, with the pope continually asking Michelangelo when the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling will be completed, and the painter responding, “When I’m finished!”

  In the end, Super Mario Bros. had thirty-two levels, and eight boss battles. Mario could gain a hit point by eating a mushroom, and grow much larger in size. He could gain temporary invincibility from sparkly stars. He could throw bouncing fireballs if he touched a flower. He climbed beanpoles to the sky, fought off a reptile king, and battled a series of turtles wielding hammers, wings, and spines. He saved any number of women who were not our princess. He jumped on floating platforms, avoided flaming windmills, and ducked living bullets fired at him. He would gain another life if he found a “1-up” mushroom, or collected a hundred coins.

  While the game took forever to make, it also took many hours to play through completely. This was Donkey Kong if each level was ten times regular size, and if the levels never repeated. Each board had so many hidden coins and power-ups, so many enemies and dangers, so many secrets! This wasn’t a simulation; it was a world to get lost in, as replayable as a favorite book or movie or album. It was supposed to ship in the summer, but Miyamoto saki for a few more weeks to fix bugs. It shipped on Friday, September 13, not the most auspicious of dates. When it arrived in Japanese arcades, players kept plopping quarters in long after they defeated King Koopa, just to find all the Easter eggs. Everyone played it as Billy Mitchell did, trying to wring the computer chip of every last secret.

  Now if only someone would sell it. Yamauchi had hit wall after wall trying to get the Famicon, an established hit on its way to selling more than 19 million copies in Japan, on American shelves. Japan had about 120 million people at that time, so almost one in six owned a Famicon. Yet video game consoles remained radioactive to U.S. retailers. It was their loss, of course, but also Nintendo’s.

  Before Famicon’s success, Yamauchi sat down with Atari and offered them a sweetheart deal. Nintendo would make Famicons, and Atari would sell them as an Atari product, with Nintendo taking a hefty slice of the revenue. Nintendo would lose its darling distribution network, but it trusted it would be in safe hands with Atari. The deal fell apart, mostly because Atari itself fell apart during the ’83 crash. Nintendo was left without an American partner. Atari was left to kick itself over letting a golden goose fly away.

  After the Famicon had proved itself in Japan, Yamauchi sent it (and Arakawa) to electronics trade shows. The console received a new Americanized name, the Advanced Video System: Famicon was too Japanese. It worked with a typing keyboard, played songs with a music keyboard, and featured dozens of great games. Attendees thought it was a quality product, but doomed. Who’d try to sell a new video game system now, in 1985? This wasn’t selling coal to Newcastle, it was selling smog to Los Angeles.

  How to break in? If Mario really was Odysseus, questing away forever, maybe Homer had the answer to Yamauchi ’s problem as well. The Greeks gave their rivals the Trojans a big wooden horse as a surrender gift. The Trojans took it inside their fortress—and out poured the Greeks. All Nintendo had to do to sell their video game system . . . was to hide it.

  Gunpei Yokoi was tasked with designing a twentieth-century Trojan horse. It was a foot-tall robot that could move its head and arms, pivot, and pick up certain objects. It was the Robotic Operating Buddy, or R.O.B. R.O.B. wasn’t that functional: only two lackluster games were designed that used him, Gyromite and Stack-Up. But R.O.B. made the video game console a robot that happened to come with an accessory that worked as a video game system. Toy stores sold robots no problem. And, Nintendo ported over its recent arcade hits like Duck Hunt and Hogan’s Alley complete with the Zapper, a light-gun peripheral.

  American audiences must have been familiar with Homer. Toy stores once again rejected the console (again rechristened: it was now the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, with a sleek gray makeover), even with the robot and the gun. It was a pretty lousy ruse: toy manufacturers weren’t dolts, and knew a game console when they saw one.

  Arakawa thought this was Nintendo of America’s end, and wanted to pull out. One company could only be so lucky: refurnishing Radar Scope, winning the Universal lawsuit, and making a ton of money in a scant three years was enough. Arakawa had opened up a successful Chuck E. Cheese in Vancouver, and then two other restaurants. Maybe resurrecting the home video game market wasn’t worth it. He was at heart a contented person, satisfied with his victories so far.

  Yamauchi was not, at heart, happy. He always wanted more and bigger success, a curse peculiar to captains of industry. If American chains weren’t buying, Nintendo would start trotting the damn things door to door. The machine sold in Japan, after all, and it would sell in the United States if someone had the guts to realize one bad year did not make all video game systems Kryptonite. Games were huge in Japan, huge in Europe—hell, huge in Canada still. Even in the United States, arcades were still doing okay. Kids still played (and bought) games for the Commodore 64. The market was ready, the product was ready: he just needed to convince the idiot retailers.

  Yamauchi had a hundred thousand NES units shipped to a warehouse in Hackensack, New Jersey, and had most of his American staff move out there as well. That fall of 1985, they’d hand sell as many systems to as many toy stores, electronics shops, and department stores in the New York City area as they could. The Manhattan-based toy manufacturers would notice all the local toy shops were stocking the NES. They’d see that it sold. They’d get the message, and start buying it on a national level. That was the plan.

  Arakawa raised Yamauchi’s bet: any unsold Nintendo Entertainment System, he promised retailers, could be returned for full value. No retailer could lose a dime by stocking the NES, just floor space. Yamauchi had refused to offer such a guarantee—why don’t you just cut the price in half, or stuff the machine with twenty-dollar bills?—but Arakawa went behind his father-in-law’s back and made the promise. A desperate measure, for a desperate time. His small team worked nonstop every waking hour to set up
holiday displays in toy stores. If this didn’t work, to quote Bill Paxton from that year’s Aliens, “Game over, man.” For their effort, they were rewarded by having their Seattle flight back home for Christmas cancelled due to fog.

  As with Radar Scope, the NES sold some but nowhere near all of its units for the Christmas rush. Fifty thousand units out the door wasn’t great, but it was a start. Enough to convince the next test market, Los Angeles, to try in early 1986. (Toy stores were more willing to try new products in the non-Christmas months.) Then Chicago. Then San Francisco.

  Just in time for the fall’86 toy season, with the seeds sown in four big markets, Nintendo began a national launch. The big N signed up with toymaker Worlds of Wonder, who was selling a pair of hot products, Teddy Ruxpin and Laser Tag. They’d sell the NES as well, for a trifecta of must-have products. Mattel handled distribution in Canada.

  Yamauchi had one more trick up his sleeve for the country-wide rollout. That game Miyamoto had taken forever to make was finally done, and a recent hit in arcades. He had cannily started selling Famicons packaged with it, just like Colecovision did with Donkey Kong. Japanese sales were high. He’d do the same overseas in the United States. Every NES, sold for a mere $130, would come with the console, two controllers . . . and a copy of Super Mario Bros. For an extra twenty dollars customers got a Zapper and a second game, Duck Hunt.

  Thirty-four million U.S.-sold NES systems later, Yamauchi seems to have made the right call. The ultimate legacy of the game, though, can be seen throughout the many worlds of geekdom it cultivated, a vast nerderie of games, book, movies, music, and shows that have moved from niche to limelight. (A preferred word for geek, otaku, comes from the Japanese.) Mario was dense, and called for deep exploration instead of facile button mashing. It rewarded the extra energy to explore it. A generation of fans with the first fix of gaming depth started rewarding other deep games with huge sales. No exaggeration: the RPG series Dragon Warrior is by Japanese law not allowed to be released on a weekday, since too many people take off school or work to start leveling up.

  Mario’s shadow has fallen outside of games, since fans of depth didn’t only want it in 8-bit form. Think Harry Potter, Twilight, Star Wars, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Lost, even comedies such as Arrested Development and 30 Rock. These very different books, movies, and TV shows weren’t inspired by Mario, of course, but their fans have been. Instead of passively ingesting their entertainment they study it in miniature, read up on each new installment, create and maintain wiki sites to document all its facets. A big film can’t arrive anymore without a tie-in comic prequel, an alternate-reality game in the weeks prior to release, extra scenes shot for the special-edition home release, and what Spaceballs’ Brooklynite Yoda called “moichindizin’.” The cross-platform blockbusters that fuels the modern entertainment economy are fanned by, well, fans. And all those enthusiasts, like torches lit by one eternal flame, were indoctrinated into existence by a single fire flower.

  7 – MARIO’S BOMB

  THE LOST LEVELS

  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Just ask the Great Giana Sisters.

  In 1987, Rainbow Arts made a game called The Great Giana Sisters for various computers. It was an almost perfect replica of Super Mario Bros., except with spiky-haired girls as the leads. Nintendo found out about it, made some threats, and Rainbow Arts pulled the game off shelves.

  Or ask All Night Nippon Mario Bros. All Night Nippon was a popular Japanese late-night radio show, which asked Nintendo to change up the game’s sprites for a promotional giveaway. Some of the levels had their sky colors changed from blue to black (it is night, after all), and various bad guys had their sprites replaced with eighties singers and disc jockeys.

  Or ask Super Bald Bros., a hacked version of the game where Mario and Luigi have no hair. Or replaced Mario’s face with that of glam rocker Alice Cooper. Or made Mario Russian, or a pimp, or simply hatless. Or replaced Mario with characters from a grab bag of other games—River City Ransom, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or Bomberman . (Worst of all would be the Super KKK Bros. hack, about which nothing more will be said.)

  The samizdat hacks were merely the logical reaction to Miyamoto’s philosophy. He had designed Super Mario Bros. to be not just played but studied. Certain valuable boxes were invisible, findable by heuristic trial and error. Players spent hours leaping into the air at every point of every level, looking for them. They discovered Mario could get an extra life if he jumped high enough on the level-ending flagpole. They found the “minus levels,” including one water board that simply extended forever until time ran out. They found the invisible walls, where Miyamoto had cached extra loot. They even watched the odd anime movie Super Mario Bros.: Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach, which features Peach escaping from her own video game, Mario searching for magical items to restore a prince who had been transformed into a dog, and King Koopa demoted to working at a grocery store.

  After investing so much time in a mere game, not everyone wanted to let it go. The NES was a computer, after all, and computers could be hacked. A cottage industry of NES hackers was emerging. They learned about the technical changes made when the Famicon became the NES. While the Famicon was top-loading, for instance, the NES was side-loading. Its controllers were uniform, and had round instead of square buttons. (Despite passing a “million-punch test,” the square buttons were jamming.) The mike and modem support were gone. And, oddly, the game cartridges were bigger, 72-pin instead of 60-pin.

  That was to accommodate the 10NES chip, Yamauchi’s newest brainstorm. Atari and other console makers couldn’t stop outside parties from making games: anyone could whip together a game, and shove it into a 2600 cartridge. The 10NES was a lockout chip: before the NES did anything else with a cartridge, it checked to see if the inserted game cartridge had a 10NES chip. If it did, game on. If not, no dice.

  This additional chip added cost to every unit, but it allowed Nintendo to once again control distribution. If you wanted to make a game for the NES, Nintendo had to approve it. Yamauchi signed up as many Japanese publishers as he could: Komani, Capcom, Bandai, Taito, Hudson Soft, Namco. The more the merrier: third-party content (i.e., games not made by Nintendo, or by companies Nintendo hired) was how the Apple II grew successful. Yamauchi limited them to five games a year; any more, and the market might get glutted. Some companies went so far as to create shell corporations to put out additional games while keeping to the letter of Yamauchi’s law. Few American game publishers wanted in: they stuck with computer games.

  That first launch year, 1986, America bought three million NES consoles. The following year, six million more. Worlds of Wonder was cleaning up with the NES, but the company faced bankruptcy since it had a veritable sleuth of unsold Teddy Ruxpins on its hands. Nintendo ended up hiring the WOW sales force from the floundering company. Yearly, Nintendo was bringing in millions from the console, more millions from its own games, and more millions still from third-party developers’ games. Arakawa even got a licensor, MGA Entertainment (of future Bratz doll fame) to import the Game & Watch titles from Kyoto to the United States. Add on arcade games and licensing, and Nintendo was living out Naomi Klein’s description of a modern company’s “race toward weightlessness: whoever owns the least, has the fewest employees on the payroll and produces the most powerful images.” To this day, as journalist Osame Inoue points out, it continues to have an employee-cost ratio in seven figures—that is, divide the profits by the staff and each employee ends up bringing in over a million dollars a year.

  Now if only they could get a sequel for that most powerful of images. Super Mario Bros. would end up selling an astounding forty million copies. As in Japan, one in six Americans bought a copy. That number would stand as the world’s bestselling game for over two decades, thanks to every NES buyer getting one. It wasn’t just dumb kids playing. When Booker Prize – winner Salman Rushdie was asked what he did while in hiding after Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling f
or his death, he said he mastered Super Mario Bros. (He’s since based a book on the game’s themes.) To celebrate the game’s twentieth anniversary, Japan released a set of eighty-yen Super Mario stamps. This was some game.

  In lieu of a proper sequel, Mario and Donkey Kong were going to star in an educational game, Donkey Kong’s Fun With Music. Players would be able to jam alongside Donkey Kong on the upright bass, Mario on the keyboard, Pauline on vocals, and Junior on the drums. While jamming, players would learn about rhythm, and how to sightread music. Miyamoto and Kondō both loved music, and this was a perfect way to make learning a true joy.

  But the music project was canceled. The first U.S.-released game in the series, Donkey Kong Jr. Math, was a dud. Junior had to answer math problems by maneuvering through vines and chains littered with numbers, picking the right integers and actions to get the correct number. It was fun, and reinforced math fundamentals, but it was challenging. There was another game, one that taught basic English reading, called Popeye’s English Game, or Popeye no Eigo Asobi. Obviously, it was for Japanese audiences, and not released in the U.S. After swinging 0 for 2, Nintendo gave up on the NES being a learning machine.

  Another never-finished game was Return of Donkey Kong. It was a remix of the first three Donkey Kong games, with the clever conceit that Mario (with his jumping) and Junior (with his swinging ability) would have to navigate the same board in two different ways to get from point A to point B. The game would have redesigned levels from all three games, adding challenges for both sets of characters. It was two different new games in one, masquerading as three warmed-over games.

  All these games that never made it out of development hell must have been frustrating. Great ideas, great execution, and they get killed because people wouldn’t understand them. People just wanted more of Mario in the Mushroom Kingdom. More of the same, just, you know, a little different.