Super Mario

by Jeff Ryan

  This built upon the warp zone concept, where Mario could jump ahead multiple boards. Here it’s not a secret hidden door but right in front of you, clear as day. If you want to go fight the bad guy at the castle, you can do it in a mere seven boards. But if you want to fully explore the world, you have 12 boards’ worth of adventure ahead of you. This game, more than any other before it, was built to reward the completionist. Simply winning wasn’t the goal anymore. The new goal was to visit every location the game offered, do every activity, soak in each experience. This wasn’t a race, it was an amusement park.

  SMB3 cribbed many other stylistic tricks from theme parks. Each level had its own theme—ice, grasslands, an inventive Giant Land where all the enemies and obstacles are four times normal size. Each level had its own theme music. Each had its own new enemies, and new powers for Mario to acquire. Each had a distinct layout: Pipe Land was a big confusing maze, Ocean Land was an archipelago of semiconnected islands, and Koopa’s castle was hidden in the dark. Level 3 leads Mario to a Japan-shaped island chain, with a castle smack-dab in Kyoto. Players received multiple audiovisual clues as to location identity, and each level was as separate as Tomorrowland is from Main Street, USA.

  Miyamoto’s success showed why the Mario cartoons never caught on. Mario isn’t about jumping on mushrooms and fighting turtles any more than the heritage of Italian-Americans. It’s about play, what Croatian-born psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “flow.” The fun of “flow” is its feeling of accomplishment and fulfillment while engaged in an activity. Anyone who’s ever lost happy hours tinkering with a car engine, shopping for clothes, talking with friends, or playing music has experienced flow. The sweet spot when a game’s not too easy or too hard, the just-right porridge, is flow. Showing a tennis fan a documentary about the polymers in her racket would interest her as much as Mario’s players would be interested in a cartoon.

  Nintendo itself learned that it would be richly rewarded for increasing the “flow” of gamers. Arakawa put a toll-free phone number in the thick instruction booklet of Miyamoto’s original Zelda, in case anyone was confused. Four people manned the lines. They were soon swamped, many times over. And not just for Zelda: for Super Mario Bros. and Punch-Out and every other Nintendo game.

  Arakawa increased the number of operators exponentially: eventually two hundred people staffed the lines. (The staff increased up to five hundred for the holiday rush.) He removed the toll-free number, and they still called. It’s among the best jobs in the Seattle area for hard-core gamers: a small cube outfitted with the newest game systems, manuals of past tips and tricks, and a hot line that never stops ringing. And it further cemented Nintendo’s reputation as caring for its customers.

  Nintendo also expanded on its fan club newsletter, secretly working on what would be Nintendo Power magazine. (Super Mario Bros. 2 graced the cover of the first issue, July/August 1988.) Everyone in the fan club got a free subscription. The idea came from Japan, where millions of copies of Dragon Warrior games had been sold because of a write-up in a manga magazine. The same plan worked stateside, with Nintendo as its own publisher. Soon the Nintendo Club was like the National Geographic Society, with millions of members. The magazine offered screen-capture walkthroughs of popular games, previews of upcoming titles, game-related comic strips, and tips for masterful performance. The first issue featured a list of Super Mario high scores: among them was thirteen-year-old Cliff Bleszinski, who’d grow up to make Gears of War. It was the Nintendo hot line between two glossy covers.

  But simply putting Mario on the cover for Super Mario Bros. 3 wasn’t enough. Nintendo knew it had a tremendous game here, a deep, deep experience that it could use to show off its versatility. It also knew that this was Mario’s final outing for the NES: folks in the home office were working on an improved gaming console. Arakawa was working a deal with McDonald’s Happy Meals to distribute toy likenesses from the game. But Super Mario Bros. 3 needed a big publicity stunt to open it. Something a big Hollywood movie would do.

  That thinking eventually truncated down to “make a Hollywood movie.” It so happened that work on a feature version of Universal’s The Jetsons, scheduled for a holiday 1989 release, was six months behind. Would Nintendo be interested in making a movie about the allure of its games? When someone else offers to pay for an hour-anda-half commercial for your new product, you say yes. The fact that Universal, which not five years previous was suing Nintendo up and down for stealing King Kong, was now offering to foot the bill for a feature-length Nintendo ad speaks to Nintendo’s clout. It could not only get a movie green-lighted, it could have Voldemort fund it.

  The result, The Wizard, was a monumentally awkward fusing of video game culture and family melodrama. A preteen Fred Savage and a teenage Christian Slater go on a road trip with their possibly autistic younger brother, Jimmy, who is the eponymous wizard at video games. Only Nintendo games, of course: much of the film’s dialogue is about particular Nintendo titles. When a rival game-player is introduced, for instance, he uses Nintendo’s Power Glove peripheral.

  The three brothers (plus a girl they pick up, Jenny Lewis) travel to California for a video-game tournament. Jimmy’s gaming prowess is portrayed as akin to Dustin Hoffman’s mathematical ability in Rain Man. He’s even an expert at games he’s never played before. The tournament-winning game, by the way, which all the characters gush over, and which Jimmy wins to incredible roars from the crowd, is Super Mario Bros. 3.

  SMB3 was released in Japan in 1988, but not on U.S. shores until 1990. In the meantime, The Wizard, despite opening in fifth place at the box office, stoked the fire for its release. The movie was clunky, but it definitely whetted the appetite for its target audience. (And its cast and crew escaped relatively unscathed: Fred Savage made The Wonder Years, Christian Slater became a leading man, director Todd Holland went onto helm The Larry Sanders Show and Malcolm in the Middle, and Jenny Lewis sings with the band Rilo Kiley.)

  Super Mario Bros. 3 moved millions of copies its first day of release, February 12, 1990, two months after The Wizard hit theaters. The game would go on to sell 18 million copies, setting a Guinness record for the most popular game not bundled with a system. It’s since been beaten, but only by other Nintendo games. The continual bettering of the Big N’s profits started a thousand Nintendo-is-buying-us rumors from toy companies such as Mattel and Hasbro.

  Miyamoto was vindicated. He once again had topped himself, and in a way people loved. Super Mario Bros. 3 is still considered one of the finest video games ever made, for any system. And with his last great success, Miyamoto was finally able to feel comfortable in the producer role. Like the athlete who can’t retire until he has that world championship, Miyamoto was ready now to let others share in the fun of trying to fold, spindle, and mutilate gaming’s leading man.

  But only on Nintendo systems. Around this time Nintendo was approached by a small Texas game developer, who had come up with a side-scrolling game program. After adapting (and sprite-swapping) some boards of Super Mario Bros. 3, which they dubbed Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement, the Texans converted all of the game’s first level to the PC. If Nintendo gave the thumbs-up, it would have a perfect DOS-based port.

  The corporate thumb, though, pointed down. If gamers could play Nintendo’s games outside of the NES, they might stop buying the NES. As a computer game maker, no matter how profitable, Nintendo would be following, not leading. So it turned down what would have been some nice short-term money to ensure its long-term stability. Discouraged but not beaten, the indie developers moved to Dallas and developed an original PC side-scroller, Commander Keen. Then the game engine’s inventor, John Carmack, devised a way to simulate 3-D first-person graphics on a computer. He, and id Software cofounder John Romero, went on to create the classics: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and the entire shooter genre. They all might have been Nintendo exclusives, if Nintendo had been willing to share Mario with the computer.

  9 – MARIO’S BROT
HERS

  THE NES AND THE GAME BOY

  Shigeru Miyamoto’s reputation as a Steven Spielberg or George Lucas of video games was being built with every new title. But games are a young franchise compared to film. Spielberg, Lucas, and their seventies ilk were building on close to a hundred years of filmmaking grammar, from cutaway close-ups to ending with a big explosion.

  Video games were barely twenty years old: their storytelling grammar was still being developed. Miyamoto would more properly be compared to Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, a gifted prodigy whose breezy onscreen antics belie how incredibly difficult it was to pull off. Miyamoto’s mentor Gunpei Yokoi, then would be in the D. W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMille role, the patriarch whose work was the foundation upon which all others build upon. Anyone who uses a directional pad, after all, is playing a Yokoi game.

  Yokoi certainly racked up internal accolades for his work, serving as one of Yamauchi’s top R&D daimyos. But he was an inventor first, and seemed to have a side business of inventing new profit centers for Nintendo, and finding new leaders to run them. First came the Ultra Hand and various other devices. Then the Game & Watch series, which continued throughout the eighties. Then his handholding for Miyamoto on the Donkey Kong series. When Miyamoto was given his own R&D division, Yokoi worked with new talent to create games like Clu Clu Land (a maze game) and Balloon Fight (which copied everything from Joust that Mario Bros. didn’t). Yokoi’s team was fast, learned quick, and got better with every game.

  After mastering the basic programming skills, Yokoi let his crew run wild with Kid Icarus, which merged the Ice Climber verticality with more action. Then came Metroid, an outstanding achievement that merged multiple play styles, horizontal and vertical action, and a tense, gripping, science-fiction atmosphere. Plus, it has a stunner of an ending: Samus Arau takes off his spacesuit to reveal that “he” is really a she, gaming’s first great heroine.

  But by 1989, the Game & Watch franchise was dying down. Why buy a whole system (albeit a sliver of one) to play just one game? Yokoi began brainstorming a handheld gaming system with removable cartridges. They’d been tried before, but the results were poor, hard to decipher, and worst of all expensive. Yokoi understood price, hardware, playability, and consumer interest. He could do it.

  Price, as with the Famicon, was king. It had to be cheap, but not cheaply made. Yokoi insisted on using existing technology instead of cutting-edge hardware, which was both expensive and untested by time. It was his philosophy: Kareta Gijutsu no Suihei Shikou, which awkwardly translates to Lateral Thinking of Seasoned Technology, or applying new ideas using off-the-shelf parts. (Kareta can also be translated as the elegant “mature” or the condescending “withered.”) Technology, memory, transistor speed: everything grew smaller and cheaper. So why pay for top-dollar top-shelf parts, and have to pass that cost onto the customer? It was Island Economics 101: import materials, add value, sell at a profit.

  There would be no backlight, for instance. Backlights were expensive, they ate up battery, they were heavy. Sure, people would complain the “Game Boy” (as it was being called) couldn’t be played in the dark. But their unspoken desire for a light, cheap, long-lasting product outweighed the backlight’s pros. There would also be, alarmingly, no color—another battery drain. Yokoi instead proposed a grisaille color palette: all gray, or rather a Soviet olive-green. He almost gave himself an ulcer worrying about Sharp’s investment in the screens, especially when an early version was too hard to see head-on, and reflected a glare from an angle. But he and Sharp worked it out at the eleventh hour: the four different shades of green-gray pixels displayed fine. “Creamed spinach color,” as a rival’s advertisement snidely put it.

  Yokoi was indulgent in other areas. Each Game Boy would come with ear bud headphones. This allowed a more private gaming experience, let the games exist in stereo instead of the mono speaker, and saved more precious batteries. A battery pack accessory would let gamers play 24-7. Two-player games would be possible with a link cable and a connector port. Many other small touches, like an on-off switch that locked in the cartridge, made the device durable and smart.

  Yokoi’s team was at work on a suite of launch games, which read like a minihistory of gaming. First was Tennis, an update of Pong. Then Alleyway, a tribute to Breakout and other paddle-ball games. Then Baseball, a shared love of the United States and Japan. Of course, a Mario game was in development as well. The Game Boy would play identical to the NES, so developers already knew how to program for it.

  Minoru Arakawa decided the Game Boy would have Tetris as a pack-in game, not Mario. Nintendo had been a part in a years-long battle over who owned rights to Alexis Pajitnov’s falling-block game. (The whole story is excellently told in David Sheff’s Game Over.) Like the Brooklyn Bridge, most of the people who said they owned it—this included a reformed Atari, who found a way around the lockout chip and were going to sell a NES Tetris without Nintendo’s approval—were sold bogus licenses. Turns out the Soviets never sold it in the first place—and all the millions of Tetris fans were all playing ultimately stolen games.

  Arakawa went after the rights hard, following his own gut feeling that America would love the game in handheld form. He flew to Moscow to personally meet with the Soviets, and offered some of Nintendo’s cubic mile of cash. He walked away with console rights, handheld rights, and the eternal ire of Atari. Mikhail Gorbachev even weighed in, personally promising a rival company’s execs that Nintendo wouldn’t get the rights. It did no good, and Nintendo kept its rights. (Welcome to capitalism, tovarich.)

  Tetris was a masterpiece. Puzzle games turned out to be the Game Boy’s bread and butter: no fancy graphics needed, and its portable nature let it be the new crossword puzzle or Rubik’s Cube. Plus, it meant that people wanting a Mario game still had to plunk down another thirty dollars to buy it. Just to be safe, Mario received cameos in Tetris (he and Luigi appear in two-person games), Tennis (he’s the player) and Alleyway (the blocks form his face at one point). Only Baseball escaped him.

  Miyamoto was grinding away producing other Mario and Zelda games, so Yokoi and his new protégé Satoru Okada would try to shrink down the Mario experience without losing the grand scope. It would get a new name—Super Mario Land—because the conceit was this wasn’t the Mushroom Kingdom but a whole new land to explore, Sarasaland.

  Many minor details were different. Mario still attacked by jumping, still grabbed coins and mushrooms, still shot fireballs and gained invincibility with stars. But instead of Princess Toadstool, Mario was saving a dark-haired princess named Daisy. He rode a submarine in one level, and an airplane in another. He could bypass boss fights by running past them out of the room. The final boss wasn’t King Koopa but an alien named Tatanga. And Okada gave Mario a reason to be universally attacked: Tatanga has hypnotized all the inhabitants. There were twelve levels, not as big as previous Mario adventures, but still a lot for a cartridge the size of a Ghirardelli chocolate. It wasn’t necessarily worse, just . . . off. Whatever the Platonic ideal Mario game was, this was not it.

  No matter. The Game Boy sold out in Japan upon its launch in April 1989, and sold out in America four months later. (Toys “R” Us offered to be the exclusive home of the Game Boy: Arakawa was smart enough to say no.) Millions upon millions of each of the four launch games were sold. President Bush was photographed using one. It was huge in Europe, much bigger than the NES. A Russian cosmonaut took one into space—to play Tetris, of course. Super Mario Land alone sold 18.4 million copies over its lifetime. It more than made up for no NES Mario game released in 1989. The Game Boy would go on to sell a flabbergasting 118 million units. There are more Game Boys in the world than people in Mexico. You could tile half the states in New England with Game Boys. Nintendo, it seemed, could do no wrong. The prestigious Japan Economic Journal that year named Nintendo the best company in Japan, besting Toyota.

  Nintendo was so confident, it even closed the book on one of its first cash cows, the Game & Watch.
The final game, Mario the Juggler, was Nintendo in a nutshell. Its simple premise was that Mario had to keep juggling. It was, in fact, a redesigned version of the original Game & Watch game Ball, from ten years earlier. Simple, inexpensive to make, proven popularity, a certain Italian mascot: all of the Big N’s grace notes. Long-running TV shows have aired final episodes that weren’t as contemplative, respectful, or tributary. One wonders if Gunpei Yokoi wanted to include Mario bowing a tearful farewell as an LCD curtain fell.

  The Game Boy had loads of room for improvement. Any system with a color screen was a better game-playing machine. Atari’s Lynx and Sega’s Game Gear both claimed that: both used backlights, too. Their games were graphically superior to regular NES games, let alone Game Boy’s four flavors of creamed spinach. But—as Yokoi knew they must—these handhelds gobbled up batteries at a shocking rate, six every four hours. A fraction of the Game Boy shelf space was allotted to whatever high-price, high-quality, high-weight competitor was out there. They never caught on, despite years of marketing and many solid games.

  Gamers already had a Game Boy by then. They already equated portable consoles with puzzles, low-impact gameplay, and inexpensiveness. Sega, Atari, and TurboGrafix had color screens, but did they have a Yokoi? Did they have a Miyamoto? If not, too bad. Every new all-green Game Boy title made competitors green—with envy.

  10 – MARIO’S DRIFT

  SEGA, THE GENESIS, AND A VERY FAST HEDGEHOG

  Every issue of Nintendo Power contained a Howard and Nester comic strip. Howard was the clueless do-gooder, and Nester the wild child. They’d jump into game worlds (whatever was on the cover the previous month) and pass on a game tip. Nester looked like a skate punk waiting for puberty. Howard was a tall gangly redhead in a bowtie—the red hair tying into the Richie Cunningham/Jimmy Olson/Archie Andrews trifecta of unthreatening all-American rubes.