Super Mario

by Jeff Ryan

  The result, a film that seemed embarrassed and apologetic about its very existence, was not fun for kids or adults. It opened in fourth place over Memorial Day weekend of 1993, and within a month had dropped from the top twenty. The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park chased it out of theaters. Morton and Jankel retreated into directing commercials. Hoskins told the Guardian it’s “the worst thing I ever did.” Leguizamo at least got a relationship out of it—until Mathis dumped him for new costar River Phoenix. But, as with true film flops, it disappeared from theaters so quickly that most people weren’t even aware of it. It didn’t even get nominated for a Razzie—for that, Mario should thank his lucky star sprites he came out the same year as three Sylvester Stallone films.

  GAME DESIGNERS IN KYOTO WERE EXCITED FOR A REASON that had nothing to do with Hollywood. Uemura had designed eight “modes” for the SNES, called Mode 0 through Mode 7. This gave designers eight different game machines to program. Mode 7 was the most dramatic: It allowed the camera to scale and rotate a 2-D surface, creating what appeared to be a 3-D world. It was a narcissist’s dream come true: the world literally revolved around the character. And if that surface was, say, a racetrack, you could continually move the point of reference to simulate velocity.

  Mode 7 was the place to be. Certainly it wasn’t something that the Genesis or the weak TG-16 could do. Shigeru Miyamoto based two of his three launch games around Mode 7 architecture: the third was, of course, Super Mario World. Pilotwings started life as Dragonfly, a game about gun-ladened insects involved in dogfights. By the time the game was finished, the insect combat theme had morphed into a more simple concept: flight simulator. The ground got very blurry up close, but players only saw the ground right before a crash—or a safe landing.

  F-Zero went in another direction—and went there at about three hundred miles per hour. The year was 2560, humanity had used alien technology to perfect society’s ills, and bored billionaires had started a hovercraft league as a sort of twenty-sixth-century polo; the new sport of kings. Miyamoto gave his developers a lot of freedom to follow their bliss with the games: the insect combat game could lose both the insect and the combat angles. The racing game could develop very strong anime influences. So long as they played well, and looked good, their content was secondary. Not unimportant, mind you. But 3-D was new, and people would take a year or so to get used to it before they wanted to do more than just zoom around in (forced) three dimensions.

  Topping the wish list was a two-player racing game. But simply doubling the Mode 7 via a split screen would make the racers move comically slow: no way this would ever pass as F-Zero 2. But slower would work fine for a go-kart race, where no one’s expecting speed. That idea freed up the team to give the characters big cartoony heads, in the spirit of fun. One of Miyamoto’s designers drew up a character to sit in the kart—a man wearing overalls. This was probably a homage to Miyamoto’s Mario. To further the tribute, another designer added Mario’s head to the guy in overalls. It looked pretty good. All of a sudden, the team realized they had been building a Super Mario game all along: Super Mario Kart.

  Well, if it was a Mario game then some changes had to be made. The oil can weapon used for Spy Hunter-style spinouts would become a banana peel. The weapons that would shoot forward from the karts could be turtle shells, which ricocheted around in Mario’s world. A power star, as in every other game, made whoever grabbed it temporarily invulnerable. A mushroom would parley a burst of speed. A feather would hop you up in the air. Best of all was the lightning: it shrunk everyone save for you. The tracks became Mario-centric as well: one was inside Bowser’s castle, and another aped the Donut Plains from Super Mario Land.

  As for the racers? Mario himself was a given, naturally. But the original idea was that each racer would have different abilities, like in Super Mario Bros. 2. That roster—Mario, Luigi, Toad, and the Princess—would be four racers right there. Yoshi, the breakout character from the last Mario game, was a fifth. Bowser the villain would be sixth. A welcome throwback was Donkey Kong Jr. And lacking a better eighth, a Koopa Troopa was given the last spot. (In future installments he was replaced by Mario’s evil twin Wario.)

  The characters were all drawn from multiple angles, since otherwise they’d always be facing the camera (as in games like Doom) and thus would always look like they were racing you backwards. This was a revolutionary idea for 1992, if you’ll pardon the pun, despite also giving them a distinctly underrendered look. Single-player gamers were given an aerial view of the whole map, with all eight characters ratcheting for pole position. Kōji Kondō even wrote music that sped up in the final lap.

  Between the one-person computer races, the cup races, and the two-person options, players had a nearly endless combination of races to try. Miyamoto and company were cognizant enough to realize the real challenge lay not from the weapons, but the buddy sitting next to you. He (or very often she—Super Mario Kart is famously popular with women) is out to get you in ways you’ll never guess. The Guinness World Records lists Super Mario Kart as the most influential title in gaming history, beating Tetris and Grand Theft Auto. (There are five other Mario games on the list, and another seven Miyamoto-associated titles.) Over fifty kart-racing titles have come out since then, for everything from Nicktoons to South Park.

  Super Mario Kart, combined with Dr. Mario, showed that Mario was able to exist as a character beyond Jumpman. The clever idea of having the Mario crew be racing rivals served to further deflate Bowser: who could be scared of this guy squatting in a little putt-putt ride? It helped free later Mario games from having any real semblance of danger. You never want to lose, but aren’t scared that Mario will get hurt. By who, his impotent go-kart buddy over there?

  Nintendo at this point was in the odd position of being America’s most favorite and least favorite company. Most everyone loved their products, and it was clear that the NES and Game Boy games had some extra advantage to them that Sega and NEC lacked. Nintendo had made gaming a lifestyle, a community, not just something the friendless did. This was parodied in Gary Larson’s Far Side comic: proud parents watching their son play the NES dream of a newspaper want-ad section (from the future of September 2, 2005). “Looking for good Mario Brothers players. $100,000 plus your own car.” “Can you save the princess? We need skilled men and women. $75,000 + retirement.” “So you laugh in the face of killer goombas? Call us.”

  On the other hand were more problems than even a Power Glove could hold. First of all, Nintendo was a Japanese company, when Japan was seen as an economic superpower trying to conquer us, as in the novels Rising Sun by Michael Crichton and Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy. (Those authors, incidentally, would later license video game adaptations of their books.) Both sides of the Pacific agreed: the Japanese were different.

  Second, Nintendo advertised to children, who controlled many family purse strings but didn’t have the BS detectors of adults. Adults played too, and Nintendo was working to place its products in electronics stores as well as toy shops. But its fan base was eight- to thirteen-year-old boys.

  Third, Nintendo was enormous, controlling about 85 percent of the video game marketplace. It raked in billions every year. And it used its heft to insert onerous clauses into business contracts no one with any choice would agree to. For instance, Nintendo invariably was paid in full from just about everyone they did business with. It had no accounts receivable, despite being hugely liquid, and easily able to offer credit to its vendors.

  Fourth, Nintendo’s fear of “pulling an Atari” and letting the market be flooded with shoddy cartridges turned into a miserly refusal to let anyone else manufacture Nintendo cartridges. This left Nintendo with fewer profits that it might have had. But an unexpected windfall of sales would make the stock price fluctuate—up with the good news, then down when the spree was over. The risk was the dip might be greater than the extra sales, leaving Nintendo with the absurd choice of either doing nothing and making a profit or decreasing shareholder value due to bette
r-than-expected sales. Nintendo chose slow and steady. Nabisco had done the same thing with Oreo cookies recently, underselling the market and leaving hundreds of millions of potential cookie sales on the table, to avoid a jittery Wall Street.

  The best thing for Nintendo, really, was Sega. Sega grabbed hundreds in millions of dollars in sales, set up Nintendo’s first console rival with the Genesis, and helped retailers have more of a say in their video game business. Nintendo had been an unstoppable power, yes, but now it had competition. And with it came a reason other than artistic satisfaction to release quality games. That would result in better sales, better deals for third-party vendors, and more discounts for retailers. Nintendo was the game industry for a while, but the Genesis’s arrival made it a two-person race. Seeing the writing on the wall, Nintendo allowed its vendors to make Genesis games. It was nice to level the playing field, but this move also reduced the number of “exclusive” titles for the Genesis.

  Proof of Nintendo’s new ingenuity could be found at a 1994 gaming trade show. Arakawa wanted to impress people more so than usual, and contacted a company that could develop real-time computer graphics. At the trade show, the virtual Mario was going to talk. All they needed was a convincing Mario—someone other than Bob Hoskins.

  Vocal actors learn to be broad, so the personality comes across more. “Italian plumber from Brooklyn,” for most voice actors, would signify a “fuhgeddaboutit” type of voice. Having their cherished icon sound like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas would have been terrible, disastrous. But one auditioner, not knowing who Mario was, went for more of a Chico Marx.

  His chipper falsetto started pouring forth, in a genial ramble about how nice it was to be there, how much he liked everyone, and how they’d all go make a pizza. “It’s-a me, Mario! Wee-heee!” Mickey Mouse via Milan. The actor, Charles Martinet, got the job working the Mario-in-Real-Time (MIRT) device, thanks to the spicy meat-a-ball accent. Small sensors were glued onto his face, and he hid behind an Oz-ian curtain for the trade show. On the MIRT monitor, an on-thefly animated Mario conversed with everyone who walked by, talking video games, Italian food, plumbing, family, whatever.

  Martinet has gone on to voice countless Mario cartoons and video games, buttoning down just about every appearance since. (He’s also the voice of the Cat in the Hat, and records in fluent French and Spanish.) Even though Mario rarely says more than “whoa!” and “whoo!,” the same person has been recording it anew for each new game for two decades. Martinet is also Luigi, Wario, Waluigi, Baby Mario, and a handful of smaller characters. After the big-screen debacle, Nintendo finally found the right actor to play Mario.

  13 – MARIO THE JUGGLER

  MARIO PAINT

  People mixed up the two prominent men named Howard at Nintendo of America. Howard Phillips was the Games Master and star of the Nintendo Power cartoon. Once Philips left, though, VP and general counsel Howard Lincoln wasn’t mistaken for anyone else.

  Many people say they had a Norman Rockwell childhood, but Lincoln has the evidence. He and his Boy Scout troop posed for Rockwell’s painting The Scoutmaster: Howard is the boy just to the right of the campfire. He grew up to be an Eagle Scout, got his law degree, and then took on two clients who ran a modest import business.

  Those two clients were Ron Judy and Al Stone, and when NOA brought them into the fold, and then needed a lawyer, they brought him in. He had been a Nintendo exec ever since the King Kong fiasco, and he and Arakawa had complementary skills. Lincoln brought the press-savvy glad-handing, while Arakawa was more of a CEO, keeping the operation running smoothly. Despite their titles, Lincoln sometimes seemed more like a corporate president, especially since he talked with reporters more often than Awakawa.

  Lincoln was also white: he had an aquiline nose and Johnny Carson’s knowing grin. Most of the NOA higher-ups were Japanese: for a division with “America” in its name, its management didn’t look much like America. In fact, there had been criticisms that NOA had so few black employees. By 1992 Nintendo had upgraded to a more diverse workforce, but the complaints about the company were just beginning.

  Despite turning iD Software away, Nintendo decided that maybe one or two educational computer games might not be too harmful to its hegemony. So they allowed Interplay to release the self-explanatory Mario Teaches Typing for DOS and then Mac. When the world did not collapse in on itself, Nintendo followed this up with a pair of DOS-BASED digital coloring books, with line drawings of Mario and Luigi in action that kids could print out at home.

  Keeping with the educational theme, Nintendo released a trio of educational SNES games, the Mario’s Early Years series. It was a McDonalds-worthy attempt to turn Mario into every child’s friend, someone Mom and Dad would find friendly and inoffensive. (Years later there would be whole colleges devoted to ludology, the study of games.) But no matter how good Mario’s edutainment games were, he could not break out of his fun-buddy box to become a teacher. The reverse is true as well: imagine 1992’s Barney the Dinosaur, the lowest of low-hanging pop culture targets, trying to sell an action-adventure show to teens.

  Nintendo’s goodwill efforts, such as a hands-free controller so paralyzed kids could game, were backfiring in ways it couldn’t imagine. Senator Slade Gorton (R-Wash) had asked Nintendo (with its Scrooge McDuck money vault of cash) to save the Seattle Mariners baseball franchise, which would otherwise be moving down to Florida. He had helped lure baseball back to Seattle, after the Seattle Pilots left after its first year, 1969, to become the Milwaukee Brewers. Gorton had already been turned down by Bill Gates of Microsoft. Arakawa called up Yamauchi, and was shocked to hear his father-in-law agree, offering seventy-five million dollars of his own money. Gorton structured the deal so others controlled the team: Yamauchi wanted little say. It was the sort of lousy deal—expensive, little chance of long-term profits, and absolutely no short-term gains—that prompted conspiracy theories that the Japanese were trying to buy the world.

  This was maybe the first time Nintendo’s contacts with U.S. senators was positive. Every year another politician would make a speech or hold an inquiry about video games: were they too violent? Should they be regulated? Did they harm the nation’s children? Were they letting American companies compete? One of these was symbolically held on December 7, Pearl Harbor Day. Nintendo felt it had done many things right: it refused to show blood in any game, for instance, which severely cut into its profits for a gruesome title like Mortal Kombat. What could be wrong about helping Seattle keep its team?

  When word got out Nintendo was trying to save the Mariners, it was branded not as a helping hand but as Japan trying to buy our national pastime. Even some Japanese thought it was in poor taste. A commission of baseball owners was formed to decide if the move would be allowed. Commissioner Fay Vincent’s initial comments against the purchase came off as more anti-Japanese than pro-American. Things looked bleak.

  The deal’s savior may well have been the managing general partner of the Texas Rangers, who helped convince the other owners that the Nintendo purchase was best for the game, and for America. That owner had a notable name, George W. Bush. His father was the president, who counted Japan as a key trading ally. Bush Junior convinced the other owners to approve the purchase. He would go on to use his powers of persuasion as a politician himself, getting elected as a two-term governor of Texas, then president.

  Miyamoto wasn’t involved in the Mario educational games; they were done by outside firms. But he thought the flow potential of coloring a Mario image on screen was strong. It was part of his team’s job to draw everything in the game, after all, and his team loved its jobs. So what about a drawing program? This would be Mario’s oddest departure from the platformer genre yet, since unlike puzzle or sports games a painting simulation wasn’t even a game. No time limit, no points, no dangers, no characters, no bonuses. But to Miyamoto, Mario was about play, not just gameplay.

  The biggest immediate hurdle was the interface: the SNES controller wasn’t calibrated to mo
ve as fast or as accurately as a mouse. Even if it was, asking players to gain that supple movement just in their thumb was a too-tall order. Mouse users moved their whole hand, and the device scaled down that movement. It just wasn’t replicable in a directional pad without a fatally fast cursor. Miyamoto had recently quit gambling in honor of his fortieth birthday. As a follow-up, he quit smoking and started exercising. If he could accccomplish all that, he could get over this hurdle.

  They needed a mouse. This gibed with Yamauchi’s long-term vision of Nintendo as a communications company. Its NES, after all, started off life as a Famicon, with a keyboard and a modem and an AOL-like network. Sega forced his hand to release a 16-bit system, and to close the book on having the world funnel every aspect of life—work, play, cooking, sports, finance—through the NES. Arakawa had his doubts about the idea, and preferred to keep the company focused on games, instead of trying to compete with Silicon Valley. But getting a computer device into homes was a great second chance for Yamauchi’s strategy of Nintendo as a communications company.

  For starters, Mario Paint (which would come bundled with a mouse and mouse pad for sixty dollars) offered a decent painting simulator, complete with a gray mouse with two purple buttons. Line drawings of various Mario characters were included, for coloring fun. A tool let players place individual pixels, just like the designers at Nintendo did, to recreate favorite characters. (It was more difficult than it appeared.) Players could design their own stamps, move them around, and make an animated short. (More than a decade later, the first of Web comic Homestar Runner’s animated episodes was made this way, with a presumably hacked ROM of Mario Paint.) The practically mandatory Mario Paint strategy guide included pixel-by-pixel images of about every Mario character under the sun, and then some.