by Jeff Ryan
Miyamoto, possibly with a raised eyebrow, decided to deliver on exactly that. His new protégé, Takashi Tezuka (memorably credited as “Ten Ten”), would do most of the work for a Super Mario Bros. sequel that would look and play like the original. Gamers would be immediately comfortable: this was what they wanted. Question mark blocks! Smashable bricks! Mushrooms! Digital comfort food!
Then, they’d go grab that mushroom, which in the previous game made Mario super. And they’d see what a little difference could do. (Insert maniacal laughter here.) In this game, the first mushroom would kill Mario. Boom, dead. Miyamoto could never pull a stunt like that with an arcade game: folks would demand their quarters back. But home console players would have touched the hot stove, and learned: okay, the mushrooms are all deadly.
Except only certain mushrooms were deadly, not all of them. That was only the beginning. The swimming “Blooper” squid here could swim on land and air. One endpoint could only be reached by climbing a vine, which in the previous game was just for bonus levels. A new element was rain, which could stir up from nowhere to push Mario back. All jumps now had to be weighed against the possibility that a freak shower would blow Mario off course.
Developers have a code of conduct about how to make a proper game. No blind jumps, for instance: Mario had to see both ledges. Miyamoto wouldn’t break those commandments. But he’d certainly tweak them. If the first game had Mario schlep his way up a pyramid to get a 1-Up, this one would create a similar obstacle course that led to a worthless poison mushroom. Mario’s warp zones took him forward in the first game? The warp zones in the sequel might take him back to the beginning of the game. Level after level, Miyamoto was pranking the player.
This was exactly, precisely, what video gamers had said they wanted. They wanted a game just like Super Mario Bros., but with new challenges. But did they really? Or did they want the illusion of difficulty? The thrill of accomplishment, without a constant ramp-up in difficulty? Just because all NES owners had a copy of Super Mario Bros. didn’t mean they all mastered it. This was a true continuation of the series, in that it started out at a difficulty level higher than the last level of the first game.
The finished game was released in Japan in 1986, and met with mixed reaction. Japan had become a testing ground for new Nintendo products. And if the more accepting Japanese crowd thought it was too hard, imagine the American audience’s reaction. The Big N couldn’t release it: skittish retailers already were saying the NES was a one-year fad, and this game might prove them right. Mario’s lone appearance for that year would be as a guest referee in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out. (Arakawa scored a coup signing up the then-heavyweight champ for his likeness to be added to the boxing game.)
Miyamoto didn’t have time to go back to the drawing board: his team was already working on another game. He had tried vertical and horizontal side-scrolling, so this one would be a top-down tile-based game. Each board would be a grid populated with traversable ground, obstacles, enemies, and hazards. The square hero would run from board to board, free to explore a vast map of territory. He could even find hidden caves, just like from Miyamoto’s childhood, to further his fantasy quest.
And since Nintendo’s two biggest franchises were named after the hero and villain of a love triangle, why not name this one after the captured heroine? There was an American name he had come across, reading about F. Scott Fitzgerald: Zelda. Sounded like a princess. And keeping with the triangle theme, he’d make the MacGuffin device a mystical triangle called the Triforce.
While Miyamoto and company were limning The Legend of Zelda (in the credit he was “S Miyahon”), other designers were hard at work at transforming a standalone video game into a Mario game. Dream Factory: Heart-Pounding Panic (Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic) was an Arabian-themed NES game, based on a Fuji Television cartoon. Players could choose one of four family members to play as, each with a different skill. They used genie lamps to hop into a backwards midnight world, rode flying carpets, and fought giant rodents, masked opponents called Shyguys, and living desert cacti. One opponent was a bow-wearing cross-dressing dinosaur who shot eggs from his (her?) mouth. Most notable was the family’s attack: they pulled vegetables out of the ground to hurl at opponents.
What Nintendo would do, to make a new Mario game, was the same thing hackers were doing to make an Alice Cooper game. They’d swap out the sprites of the four main characters, and replace them with Mario folk. Imajin, the son, was changed to Mario. Papa, who was strong, became Toad. Mama, who had a springy jump, was Luigi. And Lina, who could float if her jump button was held, was Princess Toadstool. The lizardlike villain became Bowser once again.
Yume Kōjō’s plot of someone attacking dreams was replaced by Bowser attacking the kingdom for a second time. A few other changes were made, to generally make the game easier than the original. (No point going through all this just to release an equally hard game!) But even when it was finished, it didn’t feel in the same spirit as the other Mario games. There were hit points. Mario didn’t get bigger or smaller. There was no score—and hence no way to compare friends’ best games. No Goombahs or turtles. If Mario jumped on an enemy, nothing happened: the bad guy would just keep trundling along, like a rhino with a bird on its back. And suffice to say no one in the Donkey Kong games ever picked and threw rutabagas.
But Yamauchi’s gut, once again, was proven right. 1987’s Super Mario Bros. 2 went on to sell more than seven million copies. It was a step down from 40 million, to be sure, but about 6.75 million more than Dream Factory would have gotten sans Mario. Indie comics hero Scott Pilgrim was a fan: he named his fictional band Sex Bob-omb after a SMB2 villain. The game prompted a video game giveaway for drinking Pepsi’s soda brand Slice, which gave Nintendo millions in free publicity. It’s one of the more successful Mario games, even if everyone agrees that it doesn’t play like a Mario game. It’s been rereleased for multiple Nintendo consoles as well, where its reputation has been rebolstered. So, though, has Miyamoto’s original take on a Super Mario Bros. sequel. Now known as the Lost Levels, it’s considered by some to be his Finnegans Wake, his dissertation on form.
8 – MARIO’S SMASH
SUPER MARIO BROS. 3
Captain” Lou Albano had a lot of gimmicks in his decades of professional wrestling. He’d been both heel (a bad guy) and face (a good guy). He was billed as a captain—Albano served in the army, but had never gotten three stars on his lapel. He played up his Italian heritage as part of the tag-team group the Sicilians. He wore often-unbuttoned Hawaiian-print shirts. Even when he wasn’t wrestling but merely “managing”—which allowed him to throw a punch or two but mostly keep out of harm’s way—he was one of the most popular stars of the squared circle.
Albano’s biggest trademark, though, might be his beard. It was a wily goatee, grown down and out over years, and it looked like a tiny patch of Gandalf mixed in with an extra large hank of tiki bar bouncer. He weaved rubber bands into the graying beard, and hooked more rubber bands to his earrings. Another rubber band was pierced into his cheek. He resembled an uncle who had rummaged through a junk drawer trying to be funny.
As wrestling got more mainstream in the eighties, Lou Albano seemed the personification of its fun. If Hulk Hogan and André the Giant were the strong men, Albano was the joker who stole the show. He showed up in a Cyndi Lauper video. And a Brian DePalma movie. And an episode of Miami Vice. He was game for anything, loved getting a reaction from a crowd, and was able to sell it to the back row. Like many wrestlers, his biggest fans were children.
Maybe this was because he was a dead ringer for Super Mario. He had a beefy thickness run to fat by years of good living. His hair and mustache were full and bushy. He certainly looked like a plumber from Brooklyn—he was from Westchester, close enough to get the Noo Yawk accent right. And at five feet ten, he’d allow a tall actor as Luigi to play Laurel to his Hardy.
The only thing wrong, in fact, was the beard. (Well, that and the rubber bands.) Mario didn’t
have a beard. Ever canny in ways of promotion, Albano shaved it off on live television, in front of Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford. Soon he was outfitted in custom red overalls, a blue work shirt, and a big red cap. Veteran actor Danny Wells played Luigi. Together, they hosted the Super Mario Bros. Super Show!
The syndicated show mixed live-action and cartoons. Albano and Wells, in a basement set, had mild adventures that acted as bookends for each show. Guests would show up—one time it was Ghostbuster Ernie Hudson—with a problem for Mario and Luigi to solve. Sometimes they’d do double-duty as mustached women—Mariana and Luigiana. The show’s theme song doubled as dance instructions: “Do the Mario! Swing your arms from side to side. Come on it’s time to go. Do the Mario! Take one step and then again.” Between the bookends were Super Mario cartoons, which Albano and Wells voiced as well. The cartoon was light adventure with a lot of pop-culture parody. On Fridays, Mario and Luigi hosted a Legend of Zelda action cartoon. This setup allowed the show to run five days a week and yet only be halfanimated.
Also airing in the fall of 1989 was NBC’s Captain N: The Game Master . He wasn’t a real captain either, incidentally, but a teenage Nintendo fan who got sucked into a video game world. He met up with various Japanese-based third-party characters—Simon Belmont from Konami’s Castlevania, Capcom’s Mega Man, and Nintendo’s own Kid Icarus. Notably absent was, of course, Mario, which was like visiting Egypt and not seeing the pyramids.
Captain Lou’s bookended segments were dropped after a year, in favor of a bunch of “radical” teens called Club Mario. The cartoons in the middle remained. Eventually they all aired in one big loop in syndication. The following year, a new Mario cartoon with no live-action component was introduced, called The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3. Working actor Walker Boone took over the Mario role. The year after that, the show was renamed Super Mario World. If a quality Mario cartoon could not be made, then the audience would have to settle for quantity.
This came to a head with a live-action production so abysmal it merits comparison to the underground cult classic Star Wars Holiday Special: the Super Mario Ice Capades. Teen hosts Jason Bateman and Alyssa Milano are backstage, wearing sweaters that can be carbondated to December 1989 (his is Cosbyrific, hers has no shoulders and is Day-Glo yellow) talking about how good Bateman is at Super Mario Bros. When he calls himself a “video prince,” the screen starts to flash. Bateman says it’s a computer virus that will magically infect all the computers in the world if it’s not stopped. Then Mr. Belvedere appears.
Christopher Hewett, the British actor who starred in Mr. Belvedere, floats on the ice as King Koopa, to take responsibility for the virus. He’s not skating but being pushed around on a chair designed to look like Bowser’s brick castle, against a Mushroom Kingdom backdrop that’s actually quite good. Hewett’s wearing a green velvet jacket, red plaid pants, a jester’s hat, and about nine seconds’ worth of green makeup.
A surprisingly authentic-looking Princess Toadstool skates out, complete with a head bigger than a prize-winning pumpkin. She calls on the Mario Bros. to help her, and they float down from the sky. They too have heads the size of dishwashers. Peach calls out to a bunch of children to help them, Luigi uses a fireworks gun to shoot all the Goombas dead, and Mario and kids twirl around Koopa until he explodes, replaced (via trick photography) with a white phosphorus blast. The princess pins the Purple Plunger of Bravery on Mario and Luigi for their efforts. The audience at home received no such prize for the effort of watching it.
Shigeru Miyamoto couldn’t control how Mario was marketed or licensed. The various comics and cartoon shows about his adventures were, as continuity quibblers say, noncanonical. But Mario himself wasn’t a creature of “canon.” He was a pop culture superstar, even making it on the cover of Mad magazine. There were more important things to worry about.
Nintendo used to be an arcade company. Now it made arcade games, Game & Watch titles, NES games, plus two new consoles in the works, and all that licensing revenue. As producer, Miyamoto was overseeing the baker’s dozen of staff members who were actually designing and coding each game. It took him a while to feel comfortable stepping back, but the Dream Factory fiasco helped him distance himself.
Miyamoto was management now, and developing his own Sphinxlikestyle. Instead of saying “let’s make a maze game,” he’d ask his staff to consider a game built around a chase, or around moving walls. This helped engender the creativity in others, and also led many to mythologize Miyamoto as a Delphic oracle who spoke exclusively in puzzles, about making puzzles. Mario was a purposeful blank, and Shigeru was a purposeful cipher. In truth, though, he was often just tongue-tied trying to say what he felt, and when he tried to explain it sounded like a fortune cookie.
He stayed hands-off for the sequel to his beloved Legend of Zelda game, letting Kazuaki Morita program it. He also guided another role-playing adventure, called Mother, which was too unusual to be released in the United States. Ironically, one of the elements that made it odd was that instead of a medieval fantasy, it took place in the United States and starred an American boy named Ness (ha-ha) with a baseball bat. At one point a boy asks Ness if he’s played Super Mario Bros. 7. Ha-ha again.
But Miyamoto couldn’t stay away from Mario: there would indeed be seven Super Marios one day. The sour taste in his mouth from Super Mario Bros. 2 was a powerful propellant. It took many games for him to feel the dreaded “sophomore slump,” but here it was. Here was the dumped superstar, back to redeem himself. Whatever Super Mario Bros. 3 would be, it would also serve as a quest of honor.
All the verbosity of being an artist and experiencing change and taking risks boils down to doing something different. Sometimes it’s dramatic: Jackson Pollock deciding to drizzle paint instead of spreading it. Sometimes it’s flexing a new muscle: Woody Allen trying dramas instead of comedies. Sometimes it’s mercenary: Madonna’s new look for each song. But it’s always necessary. Artists can’t simply redo the exact same thing over and over. Artistry, perhaps, is at its core being able to control change in interesting ways.
Miyamoto was not someone accustomed to change: his parents told him to not “change vessels,” meaning to stay who you are regardless of circumstances. That was why he still biked to work, still kept the same rescued-castaway haircut, and not incidentally still worked at Nintendo rather than go start his own firm. “I don’t really chase after the American dream—that idea of continually changing with success,” he said. But unless he wanted to make Lost Levels II, he would have to change.
Miyamoto had gotten into game design in the tail end of the arcade era, and was now comfortable in the home console world. Not many of his cabinet colleagues made the jump: not Space Invaders’s Tomohiro Nishikado, Atari’s Nolan Bushnell, or even one of Miyamoto’s idols, Pac-Man creator Tōru Iwatani. They were all masters of their era’s technology, but they lost that mastery with the advent of new innovations. Without a master narrative guiding them beyond engineering prowess, they were back at square one.
So what was Miyamoto’s master narrative for Mario? Was it the athletic exploration that he poured into Super Mario Bros., whose magic he wasn’t able to bottle a second time when he went back to the well? Or was it something even more basic than that? Something that would not only allow for a regular series of great Mario games, but of a roster of other great franchises? Miyamoto’s decisions for SMB3 would set the stage for the rest of his life.
Miyamoto decided that gameplay was king. How Mario interacted with the world was the core of the game. This was a slight change from Lost Levels, where the game play was mostly identical to the original, except much more difficult. Now, though, he wanted new ideas, new opponents, new powers for Mario. That was why people said Lost Levels wasn’t Mario, not because it varied from some ethereal formula but because it did not.
So Mario got a series of “suits” he could wear. The frog suit made him swim faster. The bizarre Tanooki suit turned Mario into unmovable stone, let him
fly, and gave him a tail to hit enemies. (Mythological Japanese tanuki attack with a less family friendly weapon: their heavy testicles, wielded like morning stars.)
That creative game play, built around running and jumping, was what was missing from Lost Levels. Certainly it was missing from many of the side-scrolling imitators that had sprung up, where the sole challenge was in navigating incredibly difficult boards and fighting incredibly easy foes. Miyamoto added more and more power-ups and extra lives in the earlier stages, and held them back as the game progressed. That helped new gamers keep playing, without making experienced ones feel like they were playing a baby game.
Miyamoto also decided to end the one-man-show operations. SMB3 was a collaborative effort, which meant every contributor would have a section, a character, an obstacle they could point at and say “that was mine.” His job was to produce games, which meant giving others the tools so they could shine.
Perhaps the most innovative element of SMB3 was the game board. In the previous games Mario was exclusively seen from the side profile. But Nintendo had had success using two views in the Zelda II game: tile-based when traversing a large map, and side-scrolling for the fights and town/dungeon exploration. It let Link’s journey feel more epic.
In Mario, though, it would create another abstraction level, a thinning of the barrier between our world and Mario’s. Level 1 begins with a small map, with a squarish Mario facing a fork in the road. The right fork is locked, forcing him to go to the left, to the square labeled 1. After that is 2. After that he can choose from another fork, to move ahead to 3, skip it via a side path to 4, or bypass both 3 and 4 and go straight to the Picture Game, a slot machine game where players can win extra lives and coins if they hit the right buttons.
