by Jeff Ryan
NINTENDO AVOIDED ENTERING THE 32-BIT GAME WITH THE two-step of boosting its 16-bit games’ graphics and continually talking up the Ultra 64, a system that basic arithmetic proved was better than anything 32-bit. (And since bits were exponential, not geometric, 264 was vastly bigger than 232.) The Ultra 64 was supposed to come out in 1995, but it wasn’t ready. However, Nintendo stunned the gaming world by announcing it had a successor to the blockbuster Game Boy ready instead for 1995: a 32-bit handheld system . . . in full 3-D.
The Virtual Boy was credited to Gunpei Yokoi, Nintendo’s ace designer. But Yokoi was merely a smart shopper. He had been shown a device of start-up company Reflections Technology, a new headset console they called “Red World.” It used oscillating mirrors, red LED lights, and a 32-bit processor to create a 3-D environment inside the pilot-style helmet. This was Nintendo’s bailiwick, Yokoi felt: a new technology that changed the very idea of games.
3-D wasn’t a new idea for Nintendo. In 1987 it tried out a pair of 3-D goggles for the Famicon Disk System, using the same LCD shutter technology used in some 3-D glasses today. The add-on system only had a few games, and as a peripheral to a peripheral was quickly forgotten. Sega’s 3-D glasses for the Master System received a similarly dour debut.
Yokoi spent four years with his R&D team developing Red World, renamed Virtual Boy, never getting it right. The Virtual Boy was stuck displaying only red and black, for instance, because the green and blue LED lights needed for color combinations weren’t affordable. (They wouldn’t be until 1996, a year after launch.) It gobbled up batteries, even using just red, the most efficient and inexpensive color of LED. It was too heavy to wear. This was solved by giving it a stand: so much for being portable. But even without neck strain, even without headtracking technology, it still gave people headaches.
All forced-perspective 3-D does, or at least should. It’s called shoboshobo in Japanese, or “bleary eyes.” Humans’ eyes have had a lifetime to verge and accommodate in symphony with each other—to track an object and to change focus on it at the same time. With a forced-3-D image projected onto a flat surface, vergance is separated from accommodation: viewers only need to verge, since things become blurry when one tries to accommodate as well. That was as new and counterintuitive as trying to breathe underwater: a body’s reflexes often refuse to do it. There were findings that playing too long could cause headaches, and Yokoi added a mandatory pause feature every twenty minutes or so to each cartridge.
The final product looked like a toolbox, not a pair of goggles, and arrived with an avalanche of bad press. It launched with the pack-in game Mario’s Tennis, a decent game whose obvious selling point was that the returned ball would be flying right in Mario’s (read: your) face. Other launch games were the Star Fox-y flight combat game Red Alarm, Galactic Pinball, and a Bomberman title. But a game of tennis, for $180? Didn’t seem like much of a bargain. Perhaps the Virtual Boy’s greatest failure wasn’t its red graphics or eyestrain or rush to market but poor launch games. Why buy one if there’s nothing worth playing for it yet, or even in the pipeline?
The closest thing to a hit was Mario Clash, a reimagining of the original Mario Bros. Mario had to throw red turtle shells across a series of red 3-D sewers to hit the invading (and red) sewer critters. The dimensional view was impressive, for those who didn’t lose their lunch. But the game itself wasn’t that deep. Once players got used to Mario both near and far, they were left with a game from 1982 that cost a whole lot more than a quarter to play.
Yokoi did not want the Virtual Boy released when it was, in 1995: he preferred to wait until a full-color version was feasible. (But even then, early testers said the colors made for double vision, not 3-D.) Yamauchi had wanted the project out early, at a reasonable price point that still brought in money for every unit sold. Wanting something, though, as he had learned about the Nintendo Network, was not the same as achieving it.
The Virtual Boy flopped like a koi. Nintendo experienced firsthand what it had taken such schadenfreude in witnessing in others: the price fell down and down and down, third-party game developers disappeared like the cool kids from a lame party, the industry went from making fun of it to honestly forgetting it was still on sale. Like an ER doc calling the time of death, Nintendo halted development on first-party games like Mario Kart: Virtual Cup and a side-scrolling Super Mario adaptation.
Perhaps if Yokoi had had another year, he could at least have introduced color, and one or two decent games. But he was rushed to market, and the console died because of it. To rub salt in the wound, the suits in Kyoto started blaming Yokoi, not themselves, for developing an expensive system people didn’t want to play. Yokoi entered into the peculiar Japanese tradition of the window-seat tribe, the madogiwazoku . This is when exiled employees are put as far away as possible from the group—the windows. At some point, the errant madogiwazoku’s penance would be complete, and they’d be allowed to sit at the cool lunch table again.
Yokoi, perhaps with some window glare in his eyes, went to work on a new Game Boy variant, a smaller one with a black-and-white display instead of green. It was more battery efficient as well. But around the time of release (when it made Nintendo more millions), one of Mario’s two fathers decided he had had enough of Nintendo. Anywhere else, Yokoi would have been already poached away, fired, or left on his own. But Japanese culture is loyal to the company, and vice versa, making resignation an even more painful break. (Miyamoto has said that he stays at Nintendo for the money: not the yen they pay him, but the yen they let him develop with.)
Yokoi retired from Nintendo, and founded his own game company, Koto. One of its first clients was Nintendo (the blood wasn’t that bad between them), who hired him as a consultant. Yokoi also worked with Bandai, where he developed a new handheld console: it would at last have a color screen, but no 3-D. It was called the WonderSwan, and it became a cult hit in Japan.
It was his last invention. On October 4, 1997, Yokoi was a passenger in a car that was involved in a minor accident on an Ishikawa Prefecture expressway, north of Tokyo. He left the car to examine the damage, and was sideswiped by traffic. Gunpei Yokoi died two hours later of his injuries, at age fifty-six.
Yokoi’s ideas, though, live on. Nintendo’s heritage and success could be summed up in five awkward words: “lateral thinking of seasoned technology.” All of its successes come from its inventiveness, not its state-of-the-art chips. His protégé Shigeru Miyamoto had taken that to heart; now Miyamoto was the world’s greatest game designer. Even the Virtual Boy, for all its flaws, gave the world a controller with two directional pads, one per thumb, which became industry standard.
And, as a festschrift to Yokoi, the first in a successful new series of Mario Game Boy games was released that year. Game & Watch Gallery repurposed Yokoi’s classic designs of Octopus, Manhole, Oil, and others, except with the Super Mario gang as the characters. The series has sold a few million copies: quite the lateral thinking. And since they started coming out in 1994, Gunpei Yokoi lived to see it: beloved characters he helped bring forth, placed in games he designed, ported onto a console he designed as well.
PART 4
THIRD PRIZE IS YOU’RE FIRED
16 – MARIO’S WORLD
THE N64
One of the reasons Nintendo kept confusing video game consoles with computers was that they were both new inventions. It seemed egregious that a household would willingly have two expensive machines in two different rooms that were essentially the same. Why not use that NES as a modem? Why not play games on the PC? Nintendo was still licensing Mario to PC game makers, seemingly under the instruction that no creative thought go into the games. The last two Mario PC games were a collection of checkers, dominoes, and card games where you played against Mario, and a port of the Mario’s FUNdementals learning franchise. Not exactly Myst.
Computers were always pitched as multiplatform devices, so playing games on one went hand in hand with word processing, spreadsheets, and online access. B
ut game consoles, despite being comparable to computers, often get punished when they try to get uppity and think they’re as good as a tower or a laptop. Look at the wide array of failed keyboards for consoles: no one wanted something that reeked of work in his living room after hours. But without a decent interface—no keyboard, no mouse—the modem project was in the Nintendoldrums.
While Nintendo was allured by the modem, Sega loved the idea of peripheral support. The Sega-CD attachment for the Genesis sold well despite a small selection of games. Now it introduced a second add-on, the 32X, which boosted the Genesis into a 32-bit system. This would require a new shelf of Sega games, besides the Genesis games and the Sega-CD games. Plus, there were a fourth group of games, CD32X games, which required both attachments to run. Oh, and Sega also released a kids’ version of the Genesis called the Pico, with its own games. Oh, and Sega was going to smoosh the 32X into the Genesis, and rerelease it as the Neptune. And of course there was Sega’s portable console, the Game Gear. And its portable Genesis, called the Nomad.
And one more thing: none of these were Sega’s actual new console. The new console, the Saturn, was a true 32-bit system, with a strong pipeline of 3-D arcade hits—Virtua Fighter, Daytona USA, Pebble Beach Golf. Unlike the 32X, the Saturn had a Sonic game, Sonic R, a footracer—or is that paw racer? It was released with the high price of $399. To make up for it, one spring day at a trade show Sega officials (who were dazed trying to keep track of all these consoles) decided to scuttle their “Saturnday” launch of September 2, 1995. Instead, on May 11, they announced they were releasing it to select stores right then and there!
Sega did not think through this strategy. Most all of the Saturn’s games wouldn’t be ready until September, the original launch date. So early adopters had precious little to play or buy. Stores that didn’t receive the Saturn were angry, and those that did receive them sold out immediately, with no second shipment for six months. The original release date had been demoted to a mere footnote. Sony shrewdly stole Sega’s thunder by cutting its quoted PlayStation price by $100 to $299 the following day, giving gamers a solid reason to wait out the Saturn launch. Sega’s Saturn would be a distant third in the console wars, behind the PlayStation, and Nintendo’s Ultra 64, if the Ultra 64 was ever released.
The Ultra 64 would never be released. At least, not under that name, a tribute to Nintendo’s Ultra devices from the 1970s. Konami had trademarked the name Ultra for a shell company (fittingly enough, one of its first releases was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles title) to release extra NES games back in the day. Nintendo backed off using the adjective for its new system, hastily redubbing it the Nintendo 64.
And what a console! The N64 was designed around a Silicon Graphics CPU designed especially for low costs and 3-D graphics. Its 64-bit CPU was attached to a 32-bit system bus, which was the reverse of the feeble Atari Jaguar, which had a few 64-bit chips (and one 32-bit chip) all pushing data through a bottlenecking 16-bit CPU. The Silicon Graphics chip turned out to be almost too powerful: some developers only used 32-bit processing to make their 3-D characters and environs.
Even the controller was amazing, shaped like a trident head—room for three hands! Gamers could hold it one way to use the analog control stick, which the N64 popularized for the modern gaming age. If they preferred the direction pad, they could hold it another way to access that. Four yellow “C” buttons in a diamond on the right would work as a third control mechanism, or let players swerve a floating camera around. There was an expansion port for a memory card (not that many games would ever use it, thanks to saves available in each cartridge). That slot could also be used for a “Rumble Pak” to force feedback into the controller, which soon became a mandatory feature of every game controller. The entire thing was designed around the launch game Super Mario 64.
So what was holding up this marvelous console’s release? Super Mario 64. After spending a whole year on Yoshi’s Island, and producing a quickie puzzle game called Mole Mania for Game Boy, Shigeru Miyamoto was ready to tackle Mario’s first outing on the N64. His never-finished Mario FX game could be reborn on the N64: A 3-D Mario in a 3-D world. For a while he considered not even having a game, just an environment for Mario to explore.
The move to 3-D would be the biggest single design change games had ever seen. Every game franchise would have to figure out how to upgrade its look without losing the core gameplay and enjoyment that made it distinct. Racing games wouldn’t have to rely on Mode 7 fudging anymore. Sports games, stuck with replicating the flat camera movements of sports broadcasting, would see armies of polygons crashing into each other—and often waving hands and arms through each other. First-person shooters would thrive like rabbits in Australia. Everyone would learn about the uncanny valley, which posits that the more realistic an illustration is to its source, the more noticeable the errors. Larry Bird as a pile of peach and green pixels looks fine, but a photorealistic Allen Iverson looks like a zombie, despite being a thousand times more realistic.
Miyamoto had a tough decision to make for Super Mario 64, an adventure game: what to do with the camera? It could stay in a fixed position, and thus make an isometric game like Populous or Q*Bert. It could move according to a set program, making for an on-rails adventure. Or it could move all around, and thus cause chaos and confusion and people zooming the camera on Mario’s knee and then wondering why they couldn’t see anything but knee. Was there a way to solve this as elegantly as in Super Mario Bros., where Miyamoto designed a larger Mario and then came up with a brilliantly fungal bit of gameplay to make the Super Mario part of the fun?
What would make everyone happy would be a SNES 3-D Mario game that Miyamoto could merely supervise, so he could focus on Mario 64 another year or so. He had already shelved one completed game—Star Fox 2— for the counterintuitive reason that it was in 3-D. Miyamoto wanted the N64 and 3-D to be linked in people’s minds, and releasing too many 3-D SNES titles would diminish that mental connection. He made an exception for a Mario RPG made by Square, the geniuses behind the Final Fantasy franchise, who had an office in the same Redmond office park as Nintendo.
The plot (yes, a real plot!) turned on new villain Smithy attacking the Mushroom Kingdom, forcing Mario and Bowser to ally against him. It would feature turn-based combat (the hallmark of RPGs) but with new action elements. For instance, selecting “jump” from a battle menu makes Mario jump on an enemy, but a well-timed button press during the jump animation will earn extra damage. The SNES, boosted by the Super FX chip, would display everything isometrically, as if the whole game were seen from a corner-mounted security camera. Square would prerender every element of the game in 3-D: characters from all angles, backgrounds, items, walls, coins. They’d even handle special lighting effects, which helped sell the illusion that this was a real place.
Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars would be Mario’s final outing on the SNES, and one of Square’s last on SNES too. Early SNESes had been around so long they were literally yellowing with age. Everyone was migrating to the N64: Square was already developing the seventh installments of Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy for it. Square, based in the busy port city of Yokohama, had been exclusive to Nintendo for a decade. But it had a problem with one of Nintendo’s recent decisions: cartridges.
Despite Nintendo’s and Sega’s debacles with their CD-based add-ons, storing game information on a cheap, capacious CD-ROM still seemed like a no-brainer. Certainly it would allow games such as Final Fantasy VII to create novelistic depths to its story and characters. There were some pluses to cartridges: they loaded information faster than CD-ROMs, they were harder to pirate, and they could be upgraded from game to game. But they held less than a tenth of the data a CD-ROM did, with little room for full-motion video or rich textures. And they were much more expensive, heavy, and tougher to manufacture. Yamauchi’s choice to yoke the N64 to cartridges was like an artist finding all the paint and canvas in the world, but still being told to sketch on napkins with a penc
il.
One way to avoid the texture-shading problem of too little data was to use something called Gouraud shading, which results in a bouncy, cartoonish look. That was perfect for Miyamoto, who used it well in Super Mario 64, and in the other 3-D launch game he was working on, a sequel to Pilotwings. But it would be tough for a game to not have a cartoony look on the N64, though, without serious blurriness. This continued the impression that Nintendo was just for kids.
While Super Mario RPG used the isometric camera, Miyamoto could go freeform with the camera for Super Mario 64. But first he had to get Mario’s movement right. His team worked for months moving around Mario and a sleepy bunny nicknamed Mips (which stood for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages, the N64’s flavor of CPU). The plumber gained a variety of new moves—backflips, wall jumps, double and triple jumps. To demonstrate how he wanted Mario’s swimming to look in 3-D, Miyamoto even stretched out on a desk and mimed it. Once Mario could move, and was done paying tribute to Lewis Carroll by chasing a rabbit around, the team settled on how the camera should move.
The Super Mario 64 plot hinges on a winningly awful MacGuffin: cake. Bowser takes over Princess Peach’s castle, full of paintings that are portals to other worlds. Mario, who stopped by because Princess Peach offered him some cake, has to defeat Bowser’s minions in each painting, get the star pieces, and beat Bowser. Only then will Princess Peach bake him a cake. (Perhaps in tribute, the action-puzzle game Portal opens with the same promise of cake: midway through the adventure graffiti proclaims “the cake is a lie.”)
