Super Mario

by Jeff Ryan

  It would take an engineering genius to think of a practical solution; luckily, two of them were working on the project. The trick was to reverse the iconic thinking of the gun as the transmitter and the screen as the receiver. If the gun were the receiver, all you would need was one small photodiode in the cannon. For the screen to be the transmitter, whatever image it currently showed would have to be replaced (when the trigger was pulled) for a single frame with blackness, then another frame of blackness save for the white target. If the photodiode ever saw white, then it was aimed at the target at the time of firing. Thus was born Nintendo’s Beam Gun, one of its first hit electronic games. Out of this technology grew a slew of Nintendo products: the Wild Gunman electromechanical arcade game, the Laser Clay Pigeon Shooting System (which set up in bowling alleys), and the NES Zapper.

  Uemura stayed on at Nintendo, and became not only its technical guru but also one of President Yamauchi’s wisest advisors. When he saw the Magnavox Odyssey, he told Yamauchi that Nintendo could get into the same business, if it partnered with someone with experience making mass-market electronics products. That led to a partnership with Mitsubishi, and the Color TV Game 6 and 15.

  Once the Game & Watch line was a hit in 1980, Uemura started work on a new home console, this one cartridge-based. Just a few years had made for a tremendous increase in technology speed, and for much less yen. Arcade-quality graphics, stereo sound, and screens brimming with sprites were now possible. He could even make a 16-bit system, more powerful than most personal computers at the time.

  Uemura remembered, however, that this was Nintendo. Yamauchi would have a fit if he saw how much 16-bit processors cost. Uemura scaled down his ambitions to 8 bits. Yamauchi helped lower the costs in his own way: brutal negotiations. He promised Ricoh a sale of three million semiconductors, only if they were sold at the bargain price of two thousand yen each. Nintendo’s computers would cost less to make and could be sold for less, while still being an order of magnitude better than the Atari 2600 and its ilk.

  The Famicon took a few years to develop, and as it moved to the United States and became the NES it lost many of its computer features. But it still had flaws. While the Famicon was top-loading, the NES was set up like a VCR, with cartridges inserted sideways. Too much pressure, or too much use, could make the connector pins bend. And the wide alley collected dust. Notoriously, people tried to fix their dusty systems by blowing into the NES, and onto their cartridges’ exposed pins. Moist air, though, was to computer parts as garlic was to vampires. Uemura knew that the “zero-insertion-force” drive on the NES was a mistake, even if it hadn’t affected American sales. He’d not make the same mistake again on his new video game system.

  The mere fact that Yamauchi allowed a successor to the NES took years of argument. The Atari 2600, the Apple II, the Vic-20: all became dead as the Sargasso sea once their successors were announced. Consumers didn’t want to buy a system with a death date, developers didn’t want to program for it, and retailers didn’t want to stock it. And for every successful successor—the Commodore 64 for the Vic-20—there was an Edsel-ish Atari 5200. Yamauchi didn’t want to pull the brakes on the gravy train just yet.

  He had already experienced one hardware failure—the Famicon Disk System. It was an add-on peripheral that accepted proprietary three-inch floppy disks, which contained more storage than a regular Famicon cartridge. That is, until developers started putting extra chips in the cartridges, making games that started out life as disk games, like Super Mario Bros., playable on the NES. The disks’ other feature was their erasability: when you’re done with one game, wipe it clean at the game store and load on another. But the idea of paying for a license was new: what if you wanted to replay the old game? Yamauchi didn’t help by inflicting onerous licenses on any store who wanted a Disk System hub. Despite selling in the millions, the Disk System never made it out of Japan.

  And Nintendo’s “Family Computer Communications Network System”—using the Japanese Famicon’s modem capability—wasn’t the huge success Yamauchi had envisioned either. People needed a computer, a screen, and a modem to download recipes, trade stocks (the NintenDow?), and read sports scores. But it also took a societal evolution, and society was still getting used to video games and computers. It would be another decade before “the series of tubes” (as a joke t-shirt put it, depicting Super Mario navigating some pipes) would snake their way into the world’s homes. Not even the game sellers showed much interest in joining “Club Super Mario,” a supposed pipeline for new product information.

  The Turbo-Grafx-16 and the Genesis were gaining market share. Their graphics were undeniably more detailed: they were better engines for gaming. People hadn’t stopped buying Nintendo games, but “Nintendo” was no longer synonymous for “video game.” Arakawa’s laissez-faire strategy wasn’t working. Nintendo had to act—but when? Like a squad leader waiting for the right second to order his archers to fire, Yamauchi waited, and waited, and waited. One day in 1988, he saw the whites of their eyes, and gave the order: Develop a 16-bit game system.

  The new system would be called the Super Famicon, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in America. The entire console was given the adjective of its most popular game series, Super Mario. (That Mario’s face wasn’t emblazoned on the D-pads was a sign of restraint.) Backward compatibility would have cost an extra seventy-five dollars per unit, so Yamauchi and Awakawa decided to forego it. It was a tough call, but being inexpensive was worth the ire of NES owners.

  Uemura decided that, as with the NES, the SNES would be designed to showcase the audio and visual aspects of the game. Its microprocessor, the 65816 (this was still the era when chips were numbered instead of named) dated from 1984, so by 1990 it was well understood, and widely available at a low cost. Two additional chips were used in tandem to make the graphics. The SNES, essentially, could show a digital photo slideshow if it wanted.

  The sound was beefed up, too: eight-channel, 16-bit sound (including a digital signal processor good enough to be in a synthesizer) that was almost completely removed architecturally from the graphics. You want a digital voice? A clip of a song? A barrage of sounds effects for a character’s actions? Can do.

  The controller was changed from a brick to a more ergonomic dog’s bone shape. There were now four rainbow-colored action buttons, not just two or three. In addition, there were two shoulder buttons. This broke away from Nintendo’s original simplicity. But if a designer needed six distinct buttons for six different actions (think Street Fighter II), the SNES could do that. The Genesis couldn’t.

  What the SNES couldn’t do, though, was lift. The Genesis has a beefier processor, which let Sega games run as fast as its spiny mascot. The SNES would never be able to do that, and it wisely didn’t try. What made Nintendo so successful wasn’t its hardware but its games. And, of course, its acumen; locking up third-party developers, doling out needed chips only to the companies that pleased Nintendo the most, testing out concepts in regional markets, selling the razors cheaply and making a fortune on the blades.

  Shigeru Miyamoto’s team was given a mere fifteen months to get to know the SNES, learn to program it, and spit out the first three games. His producer job became a writ-large version of a Game & Watch classic; running to the Pilotwings development team, then going to check in on the F-Zero group, then racing over to Team Mario. Miyamoto didn’t drink, so for stress relief he smoked and hit the pachinko parlors. But he had grown into the producer role with aplomb. At last, Miyamoto was living the artist’s dream; to imagine an idea, have others do the work, and receive all the credit!

  The Mario atelier was designing Super Mario World with two different goals in mind. One was to create a worthy follow-up to Super Mario Bros. 3. A new item, a feather, let Mario fly. A spin jump lets Mario crouch down to careen up extra high. Mario’s fire flower not only killed bad guys, but also made them turn into valuable coins. And to make Mario’s powers less of a crapshoot, players could gain and stockp
ile power-ups, deploying them when needed.

  The other guiding principle was to show off what the SNES could do. Certain yellow bricks spun when hit, an animation the NES would have been hard-pressed to do convincingly. The bricks themselves were given softer edges, like well-worn toy blocks, which made Mario seem more like a toy himself. Mario now had a white circle on his hat, with a red M on it. His overalls were a lighter blue, more suggestive of denim. He could duck, be cartoonishly scorched, and shriek in comic horror at his fate.

  Sometimes showing off and making a good game went hand in hand. Miyamoto, for years, had wanted Mario to do one specific thing he could never attain with the NES architecture: ride a freakin’ dinosaur. Now Mario could. In keeping with the series’ nomenclature confusion, the dinosaur he rode was called Yoshi (big Y)—but the species of dinosaur was also called a yoshi (little Y). Taxonomy was never Miyamoto’s strongest suit. While Mario stayed the same size, Yoshi started out small, and needed to be made bigger by his signature attack: gulping down enemies.

  Many game changes were to strike the right balance for the best flow. Halfway through every level was a checkpoint: if Mario died, he would come back to life at the checkpoint, instead of the beginning. After playing through a level once, Mario could quit mid-level, just by hitting start. These functions, along with plentiful warp doors, worked as a virtual fast-forward button, letting gamers replay their favorite parts.

  These changes seemed minor, but there were more substantial alterations. The world maps looked more like maps than grids. Moving the far mountains slowly as Mario walked, called parallax scrolling, augmented the illusion of depth. Redrawing all the sprites to look more 3-D helped too. Finishing an area called the Special Zone caused a sprite swap, turning piranha plants into pumpkins, giving turtles Mario masks to wear, and switching many other map and creature colors around.

  But the drop-dead date of November 21, 1990 (its Japanese release), was unavoidable. Miyamoto had been late with all three Super Mario games, and didn’t like the feeling that ready or not, out this one would go in time for Christmas. One of his quotes has become regularly used in game design: “A late game is only late until it ships. A bad game is bad until the end of time.” The finished game has a hefty seventy-two levels, and rewarded players who found its dozens and dozens of secrets. It could have had even more, Miyamoto rued. But he still considers it his favorite of all the Mario titles.

  Super Mario World was the pack-in game for the SNES, so it was the default guide to the new game system. The SNES sold for twenty-five thousand yen, a little over two hundred dollars, more than the TG-16 or the Genesis. It sold out in mere hours. New shipments were sent to stores at night, to avoid falling off the truck into the underground economy. Super Mario World would move three and a half million copies in Japan, and the SNES a whopping 17 million units.

  Three days after the U.S. launch on August 13, 1991, American stores were out of consoles too. Some retailers started bundling the system with additional games, tacking on another C-note worth of goods onto a two-hundred-dollar purchase. Almost 13 million people paid for SMW bundle units domestically, close to four times the number in Japan. More than 23 million SNESes were sold stateside overall. The system even earned America’s ultimate compliment—it made it on The Simpsons, where fan favorite Ralph Wiggum called his principal’s boss “Super Nintendo” instead of “superintendent.” Every game system since has launched with various retail “bundles,” adding mandatory extra controllers or games to beef up the store’s sales.

  Promoting the SNES on Pepsi and Kool-Aid packages helped young people know about the product launch. Oh, and Kraft’s Super Mario Macaroni & Cheese, and Sunshine’s Super Mario cookies. And the four-pack of Shasta sodas—Mario Punch, Luigi Berry, Yoshi Apple, and Princess Toadstool Cherry. Mario’s face was as sure a sign of unhealthy food as high-fructose corn syrup. (A golden opportunity was missed to rebrand Nes-Quik to SNES-Quik.)

  But as Gore Vidal said, it’s not enough to succeed: others must fail. The SNES and Super Mario World were both smashes, but gamers didn’t abandon Sega just because Nintendo had a 16-bit system. There was finally a balance in the video game world. Nintendo’s years of writing its own rules for retailers and customers were coming to an end. It could no longer, say, try to muscle Blockbuster out of renting its games for three dollars for three days. If you wanted to rent a SNES game, Nintendo preferred you did so from a hotel room, for seven dollars an hour. But the big N wasn’t the only game in town anymore.

  Perhaps that’s why a third style of NES was designed, and released in 1993 for a mere fifty dollars. It played the same NES Mario games, but removed the zero-insertion-force port for a top-loading toasterstyle slot, and a dog-bone controller. It also lost the expensive 10NES chip, so it could play unlicensed games. Sega still put out Master System games despite the Genesis’s popularity. Nintendo—without acknowledging it—was taking a page from Sega’s book, and keeping the fan base for the previous system happy.

  For this redesigned NES, Miyamoto tried his hand at designing a puzzle game, with the seemingly simple Yoshi. (Around this time he also began fantasizing about a toy game as devilishly simple as Enzo Rubik’s Cube, which is still just a daydream twenty years later.) The Yoshi screen was only four columns wide, and pieces (they looked like Mario villains) fell two at a time. Mario had to shuffle the pieces so like fell on like. It was fun for what it was, but nowhere near Tetris, or even Dr. Mario.

  Nintendo also rejiggered a Japanese golf game, Mario Golf, as NES Open Tournament Golf. The American release had fewer courses, easier holes, and more replayability, thanks to adding prize money for good performance. It was a microcosm of the difference between what Japan wanted—hard simulation games to be studied and then discarded—and the United States—fun arcade-style endeavors that could be replayed over and over.

  Assuming, of course, that America wanted Nintendo at all, instead of Sega.

  12 – MARIO’S GALAXY

  SPINOFFS GALORE

  Dustin Hoffman—two-time best actor Oscar winner, six-time nominee—wanted to play Super Mario. That there would be a movie made about Mario was eventual: it couldn’t be worse than action movies about paintball (Gotcha!), gymnastics (Gymkata), or skateboarding (Gleaming the Cube). For pity’s sake, the Garbage Pail Kids and Howard the Duck had movies.

  And one of the greatest actors in the world wanted to play him. It was too bad. Nintendo wanted Danny DeVito: you couldn’t get a better physical match. And DeVito was in more family friendly movies: kids knew the Penguin from Batman Returns more than Carl Bernstein or Ratso Rizzo.

  But Danny DeVito wasn’t interested: he was directing, producing, and acting in Hoffa, with Jack Nicholson as the union leader. Nintendo’s producers signed another comic actor, who like DeVito was trying to move beyond just comedy. They landed him for five million dollars: he was taller and thinner than Mario, and he wasn’t Italian, but he did have dark hair and a family film pedigree. Tom Hanks it was.

  Nintendo, in perhaps not the best use of its seasoned technology mindset, didn’t want to pay five million for its lead. It wanted Bob Hoskins, a versatile British actor the approximate size and shape of Mario, who was asking for less. Kids knew him from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Hook. So Nintendo went with Hoskins, and in the first of many dire signs, fired Tom Hanks for not being a bankable movie star. (This could have made his career: would Hanks have won Oscars for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump—would he have even been cast—if he was fresh in people’s minds as Mr. Super Mario?)

  For Luigi, producers picked a rising star named John Leguizamo, also great with impressions, who passed over a starring sitcom deal for the role. The film used Princess Daisy (of the Game Boy’s Super Mario Land) instead of Princess Toadstool as the heroine, probably because Daisy wasn’t called Toadstool. Daisy was written as Luigi’s love interest, as played by Samantha Mathis. (She and Leguizamo dated during filming.)

  King Koopa went to Dennis Hopper, an old han
d at playing villains. (And a step up from Mr. Belvedere.) But this King Koopa wasn’t a big evil turtle but, strangely, a human who had evolved from a Tyrannosaurus rex. The whole movie had a devolution theme, with the parallel world Mario and Luigi go into being attacked by biological forces of decay. It’s way more David Cronenberg or David Lynch than Walt Disney.

  The directors, Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, seemed like a fine choice on paper. The British partners had cut their teeth directing New Wave videos for Elvis Costello and the Talking Heads. They also created Max Headroom, that definitive eighties character, an emblem for the bizarre world we thought computers would make. After capably directing a standard thriller (DOA), they were ready to handle a big budget (forty-eight million dollars, a lot in those days), a large cast, and a lot of action and special effects.

  The set for the alternate universe “Dinohattan” was the interior of an old cement warehouse outside of Wilmington, North Carolina. It was big and crowded, with lots of extras dressed up for a rave. Various NES and SNES equipment was used in the movie: the devolution gun, for instance, was a clearly repainted Super Scope. Bits like that made the Blade Runner – inspired production design the most interesting part of the film.

  The directors had a shoot-length argument with the studio over whether they were making a movie for adults (they filmed a scene with strippers, which was cut) or for children (they refused to have Mario and Luigi in costume, thinking them silly, but eventually relented). Production ran very long: Leguizamo and Hoskins started doing shots of scotch just to make it through the day. Hoskins hadn’t known he was making a video game movie until his son told him who Mario was. Rewrites to the script were done on a daily basis. Rocky Morton reportedly poured a cup of hot coffee over an extra, because he wanted his costume dirtier. Leguizamo drove a van drunk during one shot, and braked too hard. It caused the sliding door to slam on Hoskins’ finger: he wore a pink cast for most subsequent shots. The crew started to wear T-shirts with rude phrases the directors had said, as a form of protest.