by Jeff Ryan
This was nothing compared to what happened to poor Link. He was stuck in three bad games: Link: the Faces of Evil, Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, and Zelda’s Adventure. The first two games, developed in concord, used the side-scrolling format from Zelda II: Link’s Adventure. Where exactly to begin? The subpar animation? Casting nonactors for live-action sequences? Game play that supposed took two entire years merely to play-test for bugs? Choppy, disappointing level design? The games’ plots at least showed promise: Faces of Evil starts off with a bored Link practically begging for some adventure; he gets it when a villain kidnaps Zelda. The other two finally make Zelda the star of the show, instead of Link.
But Zelda was never about plot. Indeed, one’s head could explode if all the games were considered one story, since Link is always meeting Zelda and villainous Gannon for the first time. Imagine trying to explain why James Bond has stayed forty years old for forty years, while changing faces and hair color. Better to accept the story as a constant retelling, and don’t dwell on continuity matters. Mario has made a cottage industry of jokes about how Bowser had only one playbook—kidnap the princess—and this time it’ll work! He’s utterly incapable of coming up with any other plan. Aside from that one time he obtained a degree in hotel management.
Nintendo deserved the mess of Hotel Mario after its poor behavior in the CD-ROM debacle. It was the sort of behavior only the cool kids would try to get away with. Certainly Sony was left holding the bag of a half-developed CD-ROM/SNES console. It could swallow the loss, or try to finish the console and compete with one of the most dominant, and litigious, companies in existence. Sony execs wanted vengeance, though, and decided to keep developing. Even without SNES support, it could find some CD-ROM PC games to bring over.
In determined defiance to the any CD-based graphics and derringdo, Nintendo and Shigeru Miyamoto chose this as the time to release their new Mario game . . . a Donkey Kong port for the Game Boy. Huh? The first four levels of this version were faithful to the four levels of the arcade hit. Then, right when Mario gets Pauline back, Donkey Kong charges back on screen, and grabs Pauline once again. Mario has four different levels to traverse before another fight with the big guy. Then another four, and another four. A total of a hundred levels, ninety-six of them brand-new.
It was a clear passion project, Miyamoto returning to his first game. And he definitely deserved to follow his muse wherever it went; Hiroshi Yamauchi was becoming a billionaire thanks to it. But it was the exact opposite of hip, cool, or edgy. It was a tribute to a fifteenyear-old game much of Nintendo’s audience was already too young to remember. Other people were promising graphics as good as a movie—and Nintendo was still trying to sell Donkey Kong? Didn’t they know the future was CD-based?
Sony’s half-baked console, before the drama happened, was going to be called Nintendo Play Station. Now, it would just be Play Station. Nintendo sued, saying that it owned the name. After a brief run of a few hundred SNES-capable Play Stations, Sony went back to the drawing board, and designed a machine without any SNES port. One deleted space later, the spelled-solid PlayStation was released, featuring 3-D polygon graphics, massive environments, full-motion videos, and graphics better than the arcade. Leagues better than anything the SNES could produce, Mode 7 or not.
Philips and Sony, pinky-swearing that no one would get between their friendship again, patched things up. They collaborated once again on a new format for a CD-based technology, the DVD, in the hopes it would become a global standard. It of course did. And, as Nintendo feared, the copyable nature of Sony’s CD-based PlayStation’s games led to gamers burning vast libraries of unbought games, playable via a soldered-on modchip. In one last twist, this ironically led to a massively increased install base for the PlayStation—because, like Napster did for music, it let you play games for “free.” The piracy Nintendo so feared was Sony’s bread and butter.
15 – MARIO’S KART(RIDGE)
VIRTUAL BOY AND OTHER THREE-DIMENSIONAL FUN
At this point in the early nineties, The Simpsons was the go-to joke for overcommercialized characters. Bart’s often-pirated face looked out from T-shirts, mugs, hats, and dolls. Creator Matt Groening has a collection of such items, favoring the cheap plagiarized knockoffs. Cartoon characters are the hill-kings of branding, unfettered by the base-level dignity of celebrity actors, musicians, and sports stars. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, like Ado Annie in Oklahoma!, just cain’t say no.
But Springfield’s finest have nothing on Mario and company. Yamauchi wanted Mario’s face to appear as often as possible, anywhere it could. To encourage this, he took the counterintuitive step of prohibiting any Zelda or Link merchandising. If someone wanted a Nintendo character for a doll or mug, it was Mario or nothing. Everything you’d expect to see Mario’s face on has had his face on them: board games, Valentine’s day cards, jigsaw puzzles, bedding, water guns, pens, toys.
Want some battery-powered tech? How about a Mario bike alarm, singalong AM radio, walkie-talkie, calculator, clock, or musical toothbrush?
The real creativity came after the easy-to-brand items had been plastered. Who, for instance, thought of using the Mario-plumbing connection to manufacture a licensed handheld shower? It features a plastic Mario and Luigi on each other’s shoulders as a handle aiming a hose of water. “SCALD PROTECTION,” notes the all-caps packaging. Perfect for washing off the Mario shampoo with the Mario bath sponge and playing with the Mario bath toys! (All real, by the way.)
Once out of the scald-resistant shower, dry off with a Mario towel, and put on Mario-branded sunglasses, belt buckles, ties, suspenders, slippers, Nike sneakers, T-shirts, jackets, sweatshirts, sweatpants, underwear, Halloween costumes. Hungry? Chow down on some fruit snacks, lemonade, energy drinks, candy bars, cereal, candy, lollipops, ice cream bars, or ice cream sandwiches. Carry around your stuff with Mario-quality folders, fanny packs, suitcases, backpacks, or glasses cases. What stuff? Why, cups, egg cups, cup dispensers, pens, Pez dispensers, cookie jars, cookie cutters, place mats, scratch-off cards, wallpaper, stickers, stamps, 110 film cameras, light fixtures, pins, golf balls, curtains, computer mouses, mouse pads, trophies, phones, remote-controlled car phones, music boxes, sleeping bags, temporary tattoos, wallets, phone cards, umbrellas, trash cans, Viewmasters, finger puppets, balls, flash drives, banks, greeting cards, coloring books, storybooks, holograms, and calendars.
For Mario fans not old enough to drive, how about remote-controlled cars and helicopters? Or Mario fuzzy dice, windshield screen, floor mats, car deodorizers, antenna toppers, and car seat covers? There are almost a hundred different types of Mario-branded key chains alone.
Who decided to green-light a Mario ceiling fan? To go with the Mario ceiling fan pull? A Mario Orbits Cube? Speakers? Tissue box? Bandages? Computer cover? Debit card? Dry erase board? Was there a decision to have every single purchasable item have a Mario version of it? Or even make up new items, like a piece of jewelry called a “bow biter” that lets Mario and Luigi hang from your shoelaces? Or a Super Mario cross-stitch? Or a $6,999 (insured for eleven thousand dollarsplus) solid-gold Mario pendant, with diamonds in red, blue, white, and black? (The same people make a Bart Simpson pendant, thanks to yellow diamonds.) At least there was history with, say, a Mario-brand set of hanafuda cards.
As new collectible trends arose—Beanie Babies, pogs, lunch boxes, figurines, plush chairs, trading cards, Christmas ornaments, stress relievers, K’Nex, Dots (a Japanese fad that mixed Lite Brites with Lego blocks), or Byggis (a Swedish Lego knockoff), Mario was there. Things that aren’t even designed as collectibles have a market among this Mario mania. The neon signs saying “Nintendo AUTHORIZED REPAIR CENTER” showing Mario gamely holding a flathead screwdriver, for instance, fetch four hundred dollars. Arcade games sell for reasonable rates, considering they’re twenty-five-year-old computers that weigh as much as a safe.
Nintendo must have, at some point, said no to a Mario marketing opportunity it deemed contrary to the character’
s youth appeal. There are Mario lighters. There are Mario slot machines, albeit ones that use play money. Moving onto the unlicensed (and illegal), Finnish police have confiscated tabs of acid with Mario’s face on them. In the nearby University of Copenhagen they sometimes serve Mario-themed shots: the Super Mario is equal amounts of grenadine, Blue Bols, and tequila silver, and a 1-Up (whipped cream, green frosting, milk, vodka, and Melon Bols) looks disturbingly like the green-and-white mushroom.
Long years of lucrative evidence have proven to Nintendo that licensing is a double-plus-good endeavor—people pay the company to advertise Mario! For a character that doesn’t exist outside of commercials, the more exposure the better. This was why Nintendo traded up its advertising firms in 1990, going from McCann-Erickson and Foot, Cone & Belding to the giant Leo Burnett. One of Burnett’s first ads, for Super Mario Bros. 3, didn’t feature anything as pedestrian as game play, but instead millions of cheering Mario fans, ending with a satellite view of Earth, and all the fans making Mario’s smiling face. Mario wasn’t a fun character, the star of a nifty game. He was an idol, to be worshipped and adored. Graven images helped that process.
HASBRO WORKED FOR YEARS ON A DEVICE NICKNAMED Sliced Bread, a virtual-reality machine that would enter it into the video-game world. Hasbro killed Sliced Bread in 1995, after forty-five million dollars’ of investment. Nintendo was hoping for better luck than that. The Kyoto office was developing an in-your-face console as well. If this worked, it would break new ground. It wouldn’t be as impressive as the Nintendo network perpetually in the skunk works, true. But that was Yamauchi’s vision for Nintendo, not Arakawa’s or really anyone else’s. As a result, the father-in-law would every few months talk about how we’d all soon be playing online games and trading stocks from our SNES, and then nothing would happen. (There was at least one decent-size network test, to let people play the Minnesota State Lottery via the SNES. It was scrubbed because ten-year-olds would likely end up gambling—and with their parents’ money.)
Pushing games into virtual reality would be a game-changer for the game-makers. Suddenly the Genesis, the PlayStation, the 3DO, all the other consoles with high polygon counts and fluid character movement would look as jerky as claymation. “In videogames,” Yokoi wrote in his memoir, “there is always an easy way out if you don’t have any good ideas . . . CPU competition.” Nintendo was going to press for full 3-D, just like a monster movie from the fifties. Already it was cutting prices on the SNES, so that the Genesis would have to follow suit. If the 3-D gamble worked, everyone else would go broke playing catch-up.
One way it had already succeeded was in avoiding violent games, the sort that sold well among older (read: Sega) audiences but drew the ire of parents and Congress. Sega tried to play it safe by making its own game ratings system in 1993 it hoped Nintendo would adopt. Nintendo didn’t bother making its own: instead it adopted the Entertainment Software Ratings Board’s letter-grade system instead (with M reserved for what would get an R in the movies). Sega (and 3DO, who had its own system as well) tried to claim the high ground for gaming morality, but the level playing field of a unified system put an end to that pipe dream.
In the meantime, M-rated or not, Nintendo needed some new games. It had to live up to the recent New Yorker cartoon of Santa booking a lunch meeting with Mario and Luigi. Nintendo needed 3-D, by hook or by crook. They had a 1993 hit thanks to two English designers, whose special “Mario chip” was digital steroids, flooding an SNES cartridge with extra oomph. Miyamoto worked the pair to tighten up their flight game’s playability, drafting a story about talking animal pilots onto the superb technical display. They even included actual spoken dialogue, to simulate intercom chatter among the furry space aces. Star Fox was born, a new Nintendo franchise.
The Mario chip, which was marketed as the “Super FX chip,” indirectly led to Donkey Kong Country, the first DK title not made by Miyamoto. Instead it was made by a second-party company, Rare, which had a long history porting arcade hits to the NES and designing surrealist classics like Battletoads. DKC was a fun side-scrolling action platformer: much closer to Super Mario Bros. than to Donkey Kong. To clear the air, it begins by introducing the angry Donkey Kong from the original series, now aged and called Cranky Kong. Cranky’s son, Junior, is now all grown up, and the current Donkey Kong. Very confusing, made even worse by subsequent games that negated this already-revised history: Cranky Kong was canonically the grandfather, Junior the father, and the new DK the grandson. From the people who brought you Mario Mario and five reincarnations of Zelda.
But the big boast, like Star Fox, was 3-D graphics. And with no expensive Super FX chip, either, to cut away from profits. How, when Pixar hadn’t even released Toy Story, could there be fully 3-D characters in a mere SNES game?
The magic formula came from Aladdin, a recent Genesis platformer with outstandingly good graphics. It looked just like the cartoon! In fact, it was: Disney animators had drawn all the sprites. There were enough pixels in sprites to allow for a variety of drawing styles, not just the Lego-style pixel-by-pixel building that game developers were used to. In fact, if a company acquired high-end rendering hardware from Silicon Graphics, as Rare did, it could make its own computer-generated images, save them frame by frame, and add them to a game as the sprites.
That was the secret behind Donkey Kong Country: prerendered graphics. And it looked a whole lot better than most of the clunky, jittery 3-D of some 32-bit competitors with their lackluster launch games. Why buy Atari’s Jaguar console (a sad attempt to be first to market, and with a monstrosity of a controller that looked like a cable box) or the seven-hundred-dollar 3DO when the mere SNES still was cranking out such great 3-D games? It sparked a shortage, and became the hot Christmas toy of 1994, beating Sonic and Knuckles.
But there was a downside of trumpeting such 3-D graphics: they became expected. The console of Mario was now the console of 3-D, thanks to Star Fox and now DKC. Whatever Nintendo did next had to be 3-D, to keep the new brand up. For Killer Instinct, an arcade fighting game, that was a no-brainer. Rare was making it, using the same prerendered graphics but for an intense fighting game that merged Street Fighter II’s depth of fighting with the gory Mortal Kombat death moves. A lot of its bells and whistles were lost in the port to SNES, and most all of them lost for the Game Boy port, but the gameplay held up. The same couldn’t be said for Stunt Race FX and Vortex, whose slow frame rates killed the attempted realism.
Miyamoto wouldn’t let that happen to Mario. Ever since Star Fox he had been working on Mario FX, a 3-D game for the SNES, but the graphics and gameplay just weren’t there yet. They might never be: that was okay, it was all a part of nemawashi. What was important was that Mario not look like one of the “Money for Nothing” furniture movers. The Mushroom Kingdom worlds had to be the friendly places kids grew up visiting, not a harshly geometric backdrop. Every Mario project Miyamoto had made was a new style of game (first-person for Yoshi’s Safari, racing for Super Mario Kart, art for Mario Paint). Just because 3-D was popular now didn’t mean that Mario FX wasn’t still a game too imperfect for release.
Mario was Miyamoto’s baby, in other words: the developer protected his character. That was his job. In fact, protecting Baby Mario would become the basis of the next title, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island. The story, which gleefully did away with past games’ continuity, had a stork carrying Baby Mario and Baby Luigi attacked by a minion of Baby Bowser. Baby Mario falls on Yoshi’s island, and Yoshi has to carry the helpless hero (wearing a red hat he hasn’t grown into yet) on his back. This allowed Miyamoto to play with new game-play forms: Yoshi collects various eggs, which bounce along behind him until he uses them. He can briefly transform into various vehicles, but can’t take Baby Mario with him during the change. And Baby Mario can become Super Baby Mario, capable of flight, and with a cute red cape. Miyamoto used the Super FX chip to augment the game’s graphics, but in subtle ways: some villains were 3-D, and the chip helped the graphics have f
iner resolution.
But the Nintendo marketing team rejected Miyamoto’s game. This was akin to correcting the pope on scripture. The game play was fine, but the graphics weren’t good enough. Maybe something more like Donkey Kong Country. Could it be more like that?
No one puts Baby Mario in the corner. Miyamoto, who had been uncharacteristically critical of Donkey Kong Country for its “mediocre game play,” now had to change his game to look like the flavor of the month? He wasn’t going to have it. They wanted distinct graphics? Fine, he’d give them distinct graphics. But his way.
That was how Yoshi’s Island became the first video game that looked as if it had been drawn not only by hand, but by crayon. Baby Mario looks like a political cartoon who dropped a sash identifying him as Tariff Agreements. Yoshi looks like a middle-schooler’s doodle. The backgrounds were made to look like rough sketches of mountains and trees, not pixel-built, and certainly not waxy CG creations. It was a living comic book.
Yoshi’s Island, with its new look and characteristically fantastic gameplay, sold more than four million copies. It wasn’t as flashy as Donkey Kong Country, which had sold twice as many units, but it held its own. Rare, meanwhile, got its revenge on “Dr. Miyamoto” (as many in the industry called him) in its Donkey Kong Land Game Boy game, which obviously would have none of the fancy graphics of Donkey Kong Country.
The game opened metafictionally, with Cranky Kong congratulating DK on the success of his SNES game. “Course, put a few fancy graphics and some modern music in a game, and kids’ll buy anything nowadays . . . Back in our days, understand, we had an extremely limited color palette to work with, and we still made great games . . . No way you could duplicate that feat today, Donkey my boy! No siree!” Donkey Kong goes on to to prove his aged, out-of-touch, fourth wallbreaking ancestor wrong, by having the same sort of side-scrolling adventure as in his SNES version, sans CGI. (Rare later made it up to Doc Miyamoto by, in Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy Kong’s Quest, having Mario, Link, and Yoshi exhibits in Cranky’s Video Game Heroes museum. Sonic’s shoes were next to a trash can, labeled “no-hopers.”) Donkey Kong Land was a fun game despite the poison pen intro, sold well (though not as well as Yoshi’s Island), and prompted some sequels.
