by Jeff Ryan
Miyamoto knew gamers would go nuts exploring the 3-D world, so he made such exploration integral to winning. Each world had a hundred coins in it; finding all hundred earned one of the seven stars needed to complete a level. The other six stars come from tasks, which often could only be performed in a certain order. So Mario would find, say, a star piece high on a cliff, and not be able to get there until he acquired a Wing Cap. Exploration, action, plus the greater puzzle of figuring out what had to be done in what order.
Miyamoto had his team focus on designing fun environments to run around in, and only afterward come up with challenges to fit into them. This helps make Super Mario 64 one of the first sandbox-style games, where there’s no time limit or oppressive enemy, but a series of optional side quests. Do them, or just play around in a virtual world. Such exploration just wasn’t possible in a 2-D Mario game, where everything was encountered in sequence: here, you could choose any path you wanted, or backflip off the beaten path.
Miyamoto wanted forty different levels, each chockablock with puzzles and assignments. But Super Mario 64 was penciled in as a launch game, and there was no way Nintendo would pull a Sega and release the console without its star. The whole system would be delayed if Miyamoto was late. And he was late: the N64 was supposed to come out in 1995. Even months behind schedule, accounting for hundreds of millions in delayed and possibly lost profits, not to mention shelving perfectly good titles like Star Fox 2, with Yamauchi breathing down his neck, Miyamoto was still trying to shoehorn in new boards. But the big problem was the cartridge format: there just wasn’t enough room. The same back-and-forth from the original Super Mario Bros. repeated itself: it’s good enough! No, it’s not! Yes, it is!
Eventually, Miyamoto accepted that thirteen levels of this degree of excellence would have to be enough. It was still an amazingly deep and polished launch title. Plus, he was working on a 3-D Zelda at the same time, so many of his unused Mario ideas migrated over to Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. (The N64 Mario and Zelda games feel similar because of this, both mixing puzzle-based exploration and 3-D platforming.) The N64 arrived in Japan on June 23, 1996, and three months later hit American shores, selling for $199. Games were an unconscionable sixty-nine dollars each at first. (Some SNES games, such as Super Mario RPG, were an even steeper seventy-five dollars.)
Super Mario 64 was the best-selling N64 game ever, with 11.8 million copies, so fans seemed to like it. (Super Mario RPG sold more than two million units as well, no mean feat.) The 3-D Mario was featured in a Got Milk ad, escaping from the TV to chug some cow juice, which worked as a power-up. Taco Bell featured Mario’s 64-bit adventures in a series of kids’ meal giveaways. Nintendo also had a “one in 64 wins!” contest on Kellogg’s cereals, giving away more than 1.4 million prizes. It even pulled an about-face with Blockbuster, with which it was feuding over rentals. By 1996, Blockbuster was Nintendo’s “Official Rental Station,” offering new titles to rent as well as consoles, for seventeen dollars for three days.
Its happiness was short-lived. Square, one of Nintendo’s aces in the hole, announced it was leaving Nintendo. Dragon Warrior VII and Final Fantasy VII were going to become PlayStation games, for Sony. The reason? Cartridges. Despite being 64-bit, the N64’s cartridges didn’t have the memory Square needed to produce a top-quality game.
Square led the exodus of third-party developers to the promised land of the PlayStation. It could manufacture CD-based games cheaper, make more money off them, and have them be easier to program: a trifecta. Each defection was a vote of no confidence in Nintendo’s hardware, in Nintendo’s sales future, in Nintendo itself. For all the talk of Sega’s poor decisions thumping it out of business, Nintendo’s Sony dalliance now loomed like an iceberg over the Titanic.
The three rivals’ new systems were on the shelves. Sega’s Saturn was a decent enough console, but hampered by years of bad management. The PlayStation was a marvel, seemingly designed to entice developers to make great games for it. No cumbersome legacy problems, no bad blood. And Nintendo’s new console? Compared to the Saturn and PlayStation, it seemed obvious that the Nintendo 64 was designed for Nintendo’s benefit—more profits, no piracy, great Mario games—more than anyone else.
17 – MARIO’S COMMUNICATION KIT
THE NINTENDO 64DD
When the NES was the only game in town, Nintendo thrived, and kept its third-party developers kissing plumber posterior for approval. It arrived late to the 16-bit party with the SNES, allowing the Genesis to gain equal footing in the industry. Strong innovation helped Nintendo essentially wait out the 32-bit console cycle (not counting the Virtual Boy), so it could skip ahead and be first out the gate with a 64-bit system.
But it could no longer rely on the developers it had treated like peasants. Sony’s 32-bit PlayStation was a developer’s paradise, without having to learn the odd particulars of Nintendo architecture. Plus, a PlayStation game made more money for a developer per unit than a N64 game. One by one, Nintendo’s best Japanese developers started to make PlayStation games: first Konami and Namco, then Taito, Data East, and Capcom. American companies also joined: Midway, Acclaim, and EA. By the time Square defected, Nintendo was in panic mode: how to stop everyone from leaving?
Well, if a disc-based game system was so important to them, Nintendo would promote one. Nintendo’s 64DD, which sounds like a matronly foundation garment, would be an expansion disc drive (hence the DD) that attached underneath the N64. It would double the storage capacity of a typical N64 cartridge. A wild new DD program called Creator would add rich new textures, characters, and entire levels into games. It would have rewritable proprietary disks, and let gamers download updates to games and preview new ones. With it the N64 would be as invincible as Mario with a Starman.
Certainly that was the sales pitch for it. But from the time it was announced way back in 1994 (when it was still paired with the Ultra 64), it just seemed like the latest attempt to keep Yamauchi’s dream ofof a Nintendo network alive. Certainly the time seemed ripe. The “World Wide Web” had gone from some text-only bulletin boards to a series of walled-off networks by Compuserve, Prodigy, and America Online. Each offered a wealth of magazines, games, chat, and “community.” You could read sports scores, follow the stock market, look up recipes, read the news—everything the Nintendo Network had offered in Japan a decade ago.
But by 1996 there were even more players. Directory sites such as Yahoo and Alta Vista let people leave the walled-off compound and explore the Internet—as the information superhighway was becoming known. Newspapers and magazines started independently posting their content. Businesses began making “home pages,” along with individuals at GeoCities.com. Online stores even popped up: Amazon.com sold books, eToys sold toys, E-Trade sold stocks.
Yamauchi’s dream was coming true. Society had finally started using its computing devices as communications tools. Whole new media forms had developed: the web page, the e-mail, the instant message. Yet the various Nintendo networks had been only modest hits. Yamauchi could get people online for a fraction of the cost of a Compaq or Packard Bell “PC clone,” but they weren’t interested. Arakawa wasn’t even interested!
Mario was to blame. Mario was the de facto mission statement of Nintendo. He promised family friendly fun to kids of all ages. Nintendo would always be able to print money as long as Miyamoto and his ilk kept on cranking out quality games for its consoles. But Mario was also a jail sentence, dooming Nintendo to be seen as an entertainment company and not a communications company. Sony’s list of products included PlayStations, DVD and CD players, Walkmans, VCRs, cameras, and stereos. Yet it handily bought CBS Records and Columbia Pictures without dimming its brand recognition as “electronics.” Why couldn’t Nintendo even get its customers to use its cheap machine for a purpose everyone seemed to want: going online?
Stupid Mario, and his stupid, cherubic, mustached grin. As long as Nintendo pushed Mario as its mascot, it would be shackled to the game business with golden han
dcuffs. A business of which it had less market share every year. The whole game industry was receding, Yamauchi could see with his unequalled erudition. It would take a decade or more, he knew, but the “Internet” would provide the primary entertainment for a new generation, the way television had threatened the hegemony of the film studios. The numbers of people walking away from gaming were rising.
Well, if Nintendo was stuck with Mario, he’d work for his daily bread. With all the game companies moving to greener pastures, Nintendo’s first-party games would be more crucial than ever. It was in quite good shape for this sort of expensive development: for decades the big N had marketed and developed each major game like it was a blockbuster summer film. The game industry had revenue similar to movies: a few games were huge hits that everyone bought, and the curve rapidly dropped after that. There was no equivalent of a midlist novel or a cult TV show: either a nineties game sold a million copies and was all that and a bag of chips, or it was whack.
With enough great games, Nintendo would be able to ride out the lack of third-party developers. Who cared if the shelf was mostly Nintendo for the first few years? Most of the other games merely gave the illusion of choice. In reality, they sold as well as the dusty cake mix and pinto beans in the center aisle of a 7-Eleven. N64 gamers, like SNES and NES gamers before them, wanted Nintendo games. They wanted Mario, and Link, and little else.
So the grand dimensionalization project began, at Nintendo and everywhere else in the game world. Every 2-D franchise would, via trial and error, see what it would play like when placed in a virtual world. Just about every game franchise would have a stumble or two making this move. They were fundamentally different types of game play, and therefore resulted in different types of games. Tomb Raider may just be Pitfall with a supermodel, but the game play is quite different. Identical plots, but the Atari game was an obstacle course, and the 3-D game was a mix of puzzle-solving and action-adventure.
Castlevania, after one iffy switch to 3-D, went back to 2-D game play. Mega Man and Mortal Kombat did the same thing: both were thrown off-balance when characters wandered around instead of being corralled on a flat stage to confront opponents or obstacles. The look could change, but the content remained the same.
Mario had made the jump already, but he was holding down way more than one franchise. Besides the classic title, he had racked up the Donkey Kong, Super Mario Land, Mario’s Tennis, Mario Kart, Game & Watch Gallery, Yoshi’s Island, Super Mario RPG, and Dr. Mario franchises. For the N64 to seem robust in game selection, they’d all have to make the move to 3-D—and soon.
Some were easy: the original Super Mario Kart had practically herniated itself trying to mimic three dimensions, so its upgrade was a natural fit. (“Kick Asphalt,” went the tagline.) Donkey Kong got Donkey Kong 64, which was another natural fit—no more prerendering! A new sports title, Mario Golf (made with a Sega Saturn developer Nintendo stole, Camelot Software Planning), found a sweet spot between minigolf’s fun and actual golf’s skill requirement.
Miyamoto used his Super Mario 64 experience to chart true 3-D sequels for other Nintendo stars: Star Fox, F-Zero, and Wave Race. (Names for most of these were easy: just throw a “64” on the tail end.) He also created an original title: 1080˚ Snowboarding, predating the definitive action-sports title Tony Hawk Pro Skater (and his signature move, a mere seven-hundred-degree spin) by a year.
While Miyamoto was ginning up original games, why not some original Mario games? (Making a Zelda character, the lazy rancher Talon, resemble Mario was cute, but didn’t count.) Mario Party was a board game, with Mario and company acting out the game pieces. A kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria of minigames determined who went first in each subsequent round, and so on. It was so true to the board game conceit, though, that it was no fun to play single-person against the computer. The N64 had ports for four controllers, and the variety of minigames made this an ideal game for families, siblings, anyone without six hours of spare time a day to devote to freeing Hyrule or collecting all hundred coins.
Yet another new Mario franchise, Super Smash Bros., served as a greatest-hits retrospective. It was a simplistic fighting game—games could be won by unskilled button-mashing, a cardinal sin in the world of fighting games. But the characters went beyond the Mario Kart/ Party assortment: you could also choose Kirby, Link, Metroid’s Samus, or Fox from Star Fox. And there were more unlockable characters, including Captain Falcon from F-Zero, Ness from Earthbound, and Luigi. The music and scenery were all tributes to Nintendo games, and power objects rained down from the sky like Coke bottles in The Gods Must Be Crazy. Ever seen Mario with a sword, or Yoshi with a gun? Overall, the game treated the Nintendo canon like Wicked treated The Wizard of Oz: with a dollop of sass and irreverence.
Both of these games were made by HAL Laboratories, a Nintendo developer that had been behind the Adventures of Lolo and Kirby titles, as well as porting over Sim City. (HAL had inserted the gag that Sim cities erect a Mario statue at half a million residents.) One of its lead developers, Satoru Iwata, had been programming Nintendo games since the early days of the NES, and worked part-time for HAL while he was still in college. HAL was contracted to develop a N64 version of a recent Game Boy hit, about collecting cute little monsters and arranging playdatelike “battles” for them. It was called Pocket Monsters—or Pokémon.
Pokémon was in development for years, and was assumed (upon its 1996 release in Japan) to be a strictly Japanese game. It was role-playing, with minimal graphics, battles that ended with one fighter “fainting” instead of dying, and an obsessive-compulsive goal of finding 150 critters wandering in the woods. Its developer, Satoshi Tajiri, had collected bugs as a child, and found joy in their variety and abilities. He studied under Miyamoto to design the game, and the illusory simplicity of the game was straight from Doc Miyamoto. Since the idea was to play against a friend using the Game Boy’s link cable, there were two different colored cartridges, red and blue. Pokémon Red had Satoshi (changed to Ash Ketchum for America), and Pokémon Blue had Shigeru (Gary Oak in America). Other than that, they were just about identical.
The game was a bigger hit than anyone in Japan could have predicted. It tapped into the gaming zeitgeist of completion by having completion itself be the goal, instead of any nobler cause. When it became a card game, “gotta catch ’em all!” basically translated to “gotta buy them all!” Focus testing showed kids didn’t care about trainers Ash or Gary: they wanted to be the trainers themselves, and the game allowed for just that experience. That in turn prompted a top-rated anime show. (The first most Americans heard of Pokémon was a 1997 episode of the show that caused seven hundred Japanese children to have seizures.) It was released in America mere weeks before the Game Boy Color’s launch—and it was black and white. Clearly Nintendo didn’t think this game would go over much better than Earthbound or Mario Picross, both flops. Only Minoru Arakawa believed in its crossover potential—and then only if the complicated gameplay and minimal graphics were brought over unchanged.
Nintendo had nothing to worry about. The two Pokémons were enormous hits, helping keep the Game Boy dominant for years. Pokémon games for other consoles followed, beginning with Pokémon Stadium for the N64. (One Pokémon game featured a Mario cameo, a HAL calling card: Iwata also snuck Mario and friends into the crowd of a Kirby Super Star game.) The original’s graphical simplicity was part of the draw, forcing players to focus on strategy. Pokémon was a new type of chess: Charmander is a fire Pokémon and is great when attacking ice Pokémon, but not other fire types, or water types. Every Pokémon has a type, and each type is weak or strong against other types. How you stack your “deck” of six Pokémon, what order you play them, when is it time to waste a turn to retire an old one: this was the game. The boundless creativity of the punny edition’s names (Charmander, a fiery lizard, is a mix of charcoal and salamander) would make J. K. Rowling jealous.
Pokémon would soon become the world’s second-biggest gaming franchise, selling two
hundred million copies, mostly to eight-year-olds. (A covetous Miyamoto, who joked about fans sending him loose change because Nintendo didn’t pay him any royalties, reportedly said that Pokémon would only be a hit until his next Mario game was finished.) The pocket monsters’ various games would all sell well—save for Hey You, Pikachu!, a microphone game where players told a Pokémon to go pick up a carrot and other humdrum tasks. They even showed up in Super Smash Bros. They’d be that many more nails in the coffin for the idea of Nintendo being seen as more than an entertainment company. Mario was Crime and Punishment compared to Pokémon , whose appeal surged among the younger set, and diminished with puberty. For crying out loud, a plastic Pikachu was being hot glued to special editions of the N64: who would accept it as a computer with a cartoon gerbil (or mouse, or whatever he is) on it?
The rumors of the 64DD continued for years, much like how the N64 rumors spread soon after the SNES’s launch. In both cases, the crafty result was to keep gamers (and developers) from flocking to other consoles. But it wasn’t to be: after five years of talks, Nintendo quietly snuck out the 64DD in Japan in December 1999, releasing it exclusively through a mail-order subsidiary. The online service was shuttered after two years, due to low usage.
The biggest success of the 64DD, if such a term can be used, was the Mario Paint sequel Mario Artist. The first title in the series, Paint Studio, was a reworked version of the painting and stamp-making tool: Mario wore a beret on the cover. Then Talent Studio, which let artists add 2-D faces onto prerendered 3-D bodies and animate them South Park – style. After that was Polygon Studio, to allow users to experiments with three dimensions. Finally Communication Kit let users share their creations with others in the microscopic 64DD fan base. If it hadn’t been shut down, future Mario Artist titles would have included Game Maker, Graphical Message Maker, Sound Maker, and Video Jockey Maker.
