by Jeff Ryan
Of the dozens of rumored and halfway developed games, only nine eventually saw release. The most notable was Sim City 64. Many others, such as sequels for Earthbound, Kirby, a platformer called Banjo-Kazooie, and two Zelda games, were reworked as regular N64 games (or in one case, stripped down for a portable edition.) Most were canceled, giving its various developers further proof to stay far, far away from Nintendo for its original projects.
Not many company presidents would have pushed for the 64DD, after the Satellaview and the NES modem both went belly-up due to lack of interest. But Hiroshi’s neuroses had driven the company for decades into some odd choices, and they were rarely wrong. It might be several decades ahead of the curve, but Nintendo had geologic patience. Perhaps Yamauchi was secretly a rock Pokémon.
18 – MARIO’S MELEE
THE GAMECUBE
There are no Mario amusement park rides. It’s a bit surprising, considering the huge marketability he has, and Nintendo’s willingness to slap his face on everything from underwear to life-size replicas. Every new hit Disney movie—and even the misses—prompt new park rides. Universal Studios had gotten in the act, making rides out of hot properties Disney didn’t have the rights to: Terminator 2, Jaws, and Back to the Future.
There have been rides based on Song of the South, on Wind in the Willows, on Murder, She Wrote, and on Swamp Thing. In Minnesota, the Trix Rabbit and the Lucky Charms leprechaun have their own theme park. Dolly Parton has her own, Dollywood. But no Super Mario Park. What gives? Nintendo’s stable of characters seems custom made for a massive amusement park, with themed regions based on game series. A 3-D show where pipes squirt water at you. Princess Peach’s pretty castle. The high-tech Sector Z for Star Fox, Metroid, and F-Zero. Kirby the toddler zone, with lots of soft bouncy foam. Hyrule for older kids, with Zelda roller coasters and a Link dungeon-crawl ride. A Pokémon petting zoo.
That these are easily dreamed ideas is exactly why they haven’t been implemented, Kokatu.com reports. Nintendo’s specialty isn’t in big Disney-style entertainments, and no one has yet approached them with a dynamic new idea that wouldn’t just palette-swap a Disney park with Mario and Luigi. Nintendo learned its lesson from educational games, and PC games, and movies, and Internet services, all the way back to rice and love hotels. Stick with what you do best.
Nintendo might also recall SegaWorld. In 1996, right around the time Sega was in talks with Bandai about a possible merger, Sega opened up SegaWorld London, an indoor amusement park/arcade/gift shop selling Sega swag. In Canada, a series of Sega City Playdiums followed. A year later it premiered Sega World Sydney, right in the shopping mecca Darling Harbor. Its building was a giant red cube with an enormous glass pyramid reaching up out of it. It was billed as Australia’s DisneyWorld. Sega’s plan was to build hype for four years, then steal the show when the 2000 Summer Olympics came to town.
But not even Disney could open up EuroDisney without years of poor attendance. Not even Spielberg could make GameWorks work as anything other than, ultimately, Chuck E. Cheese with beer. The Sega World Sydney rides weren’t based on Sonic or Sega’s other game heroes, like Shinobi or Virtua Fighter. They were just unbranded rides, with the Sega brand promising a speedy, “rad,” interactive style that wasn’t delivered. The only thing truly Sega was Sonic Live in Sydney, a children’s stage show based on the popular Sonic cartoon.
The park lost money four years straight, even after the hundredplus games were all turned free-play. (That might have cost Sega more in lost quarters than it gained them in attendance.) Sega World Sydney held on until the Olympics, but not even that attendance boost helped. Nintendo stole Sega’s thunder on the cheap by having a Pokémon World Championship at Sydney University, paralleling the Olympics. The entire Darling Harbor economy (IMAX theater, restaurants, trendy shops) plunged like a high-diver following the Olympics. Sega World Sydney closed for good two months after the Olympics concluded. The stunning cube-and-pyramid architecture became a furniture warehouse, then was demolished in 2008.
Nintendo did try out a traveling Pokémon Park for a few months starting in 2005, which drew more than four million visitors. The closest Mario has gotten to a permanent home, though, is in block form. A Lego version of a certain plumber wearing blue overalls and a red shirt is on display at California’s Legoland, quite appropriate enough for a character who was first constructed from square pixels. This plumber, though, is carrying an accessory we’ve never seen in any Mario games in all his years of adventure through pipes: a toilet.
Recently, students at New York University’s “Big Games” class—who previously made a live-action Pac-Man through the streets of midtown called Pac-Manhattan—came up with the Nintendo Amusement Park. It’s a fancy name for a military-grade haptic winch, which allows users to jump fifteen feet in the air and be safely lowered down. Students dress up like Mario or Luigi (complete with hats and fake mustaches) and jump on a papier-mâché Goombah and around a Bob-omb. They’re hoping Nintendo takes them up on the theme-park ride idea: who wouldn’t want to hop around in the Mushroom Kingdom?
ONE OF NINTENDO’S SECRET WEAPONS OVER THE YEARS was trepidation. Gamers were scared they’d plunk down money for Console X, only to see their friends all buy Console Y games so they could trade with each other. Only diehards had the discretionary income to buy both. Most bought one new game every few months, the exact rate Nintendo released big first-party titles.
Sega had experienced a one-two punch of this hesitancy. First, people stopped buying 1996’s Saturn, which upon release had cut the legs out from all of Sega’s various other Genesis-based consoles. Sega had foolishly announced a new console (what would be the Dreamcast) right when it should have been hyping the brand-new Saturn. People passed by the Saturn, the way bakery customers will wait for fresh bread and ignore the loaf sitting in front of them.
The Dreamcast, hot out of the oven, arrived in Japan on November 27, 1998. It sold out in the United States when it arrived a year later, with more than three hundred thousand preorders, and quickly hit a million units sold worldwide. Sega designed a fleet of exemplary “2K” Sega Sports titles, to make up for EA wanting nothing to do with Sega. It brought out a strong Sonic game, Sonic Adventure. It included a modem with every Dreamcast, which let gamers play RPGs like Phantasy Star Online with friends from around the world. It easily had the best graphics of any system so far.
The second-part of Sega’s one-two punch was a clock-cleaning haymaker, not from Nintendo but Sony. Sony announced the PlayStation’s successor, the PlayStation 2, would be available in spring 2000 in Japan, and six months later in America. The PS2 would have a DVD player built in: this alone went for three hundred dollars, so buying a PS2 practically gave away a video game system for free. Developers working on Dreamcast games put their fingers up, felt the wind, and decided to make PS2 games instead.
There was a theory among video game intelligensia that three video game consoles might not be sustainable. One certainly was sustainable: the 2600 and the NES had their unchallenged heydays. Two, yes: the SNES and Genesis both did well. But three might be pushing it. Like brands of soda, like political parties, like nuclear superpowers, you could have two working to spur each other on to greatness, but a third was the odd man out. Sega looked to be this third wheel, neither the family favorite (clearly Nintendo) nor the cool kids’ choice (PlayStation).
This would have been fine for Nintendo, save for Nintendo being uncomfortably close to Sega’s position. Both had lost third-party developers to Sony, and relied heavily (if not almost exclusively) on first-party content. Both had more powerful machines than Sony. Both had quickly followed up Sony’s great idea of re-releasing top-selling games for a reduced price in a Greatest Hits brand: Nintendo’s was called Player’s Choice and Sega’s was All Stars. Both had been around the block long enough, like Marvel and DC, to feel comfy in their rivalry. Mario and Sonic were opposites joined at the hip.
Sega’s Dreamcast had beaten Nintendo’s new con
sole to market. Nintendo’s new console, nicknamed the Dolphin (later Gamecube), would be out in 2001. It was still cranking out above-average games for the N64 until just a few months before launch. An upside to Nintendo’s when-it’s-done philosophy was that it released games all the time, not just in October when they’d sell best. A downside? Some games’ graphics stunk, because they were so behind the times.
Paper Mario was an interesting example of both: it was a sequel to Super Mario RPG, yet it couldn’t use that title (or any new characters in it, or its isometric look) due to Square’s co-ownership rights. To protect themselves, the developers (it was Gunpei Yokoi’s old R&D team, now renamed Intelligent Systems) designed a game that was a parody of the Mode 7 SNES style, with 3-D backgrounds and two-dimensional cutouts walking around like paper dolls. The turn-based timed combat was intact, with new sidekicks given to Mario over the long adventure. The plot was inventive too—Bowser kidnapped not only the Princess but her entire castle.
Learning from their mistakes was what Nintendo’s new console was supposed to be all about. The Gamecube would have no more heavy expensive cartridges, for instance: Nintendo was finally going with discs. Yamauchi, ever in love with proprietary formats, had Matsushita design a special smaller disc, measuring eight centimeters across, not twelve. A smaller disc allowed for an overall smaller machine. The missing circumference meant that a few games would have to be dual-disc affairs, and many more would have to compress their audio and video.
It also meant that unlike the PS2, the Gamecube couldn’t play CDs or DVDs. This kept its retail price down to $249, and stymied pirates, but made it seem like a lesser console. It also included a port for a modem (Yamauchi could never give up the modem idea), but only one or two unpopular games ever allowed for online play.
The wing-grip controller was designed to discreetly house lots of buttons: there was a big green “A” button that fit above the thumb, promoting the idea of simple one-button games. A smaller red “B” button, two eyebrowlike gray bottoms around the green A, and three shoulder buttons gave plenty of options for designers who needed lots of inputs. The controller also had two control sticks (one gray, one yellow) and a gray D-pad.
The Gamecube’s insides were powered by a special IBM chip called Gekko, designed at a billion-dollar price tag to do everything the N64 could, but better. The N128? Not quite: the numerical nomenclature began to break down because the chips’ design matters more than sheer horsepower. The 485-MHz Gekko only had a 32-bit integer unit, but a 64-bit bus, a 64-kilobyte cache, and a 64-bit floating-bit unit, which was often used as two 32-bit vector instruction units. What was that, 128 plus 32 in total? In any case, the Dreamcast had a Hitachi 200-MHz processor, and the PS2’s “emotion engine” was 64-bit bus clocked at close to 300 MHz. There were no apples-to-apples comparisons anymore.
The look of the machine, a compact purple cube, wasn’t anything like previous Nintendo consoles. Purple was a new color, one Nintendo promoted heavily for the next few years. Color theory links purple to feelings of royalty: hail to the King, baby. Dreamcast had chosen white with neon orange highlights: orange was the color of happiness. Sony’s PlayStation was gray, but its PS2 was black with distinctive blue piping: blue is the color of intelligence. These weren’t accidental choices.
Miyamoto had had two launch games lined up for the new console, and two more for the weeks after. Wave Race: Blue Storm showcased sloshing, sloppy water in sun-soaked tropical locales. A companion title, the snowboarding sequel 1080: White Storm (featuring a golden calf – ish Mario ice sculpture), was delayed for years, and ended up being quietly released as 1080˚ Avalanche. As with previous launch games, Blue Storm was a showoff of the Gamecube’s physics engine first and a racing game second.
Also on tap was Pikmin, which had started out life as a trade-show demo called Super Mario 128. The demo, now an urban legend due to Miyamoto’s insistence that it was a game and not a demo, showed Mario, who divided into two Marios, then divided again and again. The Mario army stood on a sphere so small they filled the whole globe. It showed off two new Gamecube developments: the ability to have lots of different characters on screen (128, as promised) and the planetary gravity system to allow some Marios to stick upside down.
Super Mario 128 would never come out, but its two key ideas were salvaged. The multiple-character trick was used in Pikmin, about a tiny stranded spaceman collecting pieces of his broken spaceship to return to the planet Hocotate (named after Nintendo’s Kyoto address). For help, he plucks homunculi plantmen from the ground, who obey his command. The player controls both Captain Olimar (whose name anagrams to Mario L) and the dozens of picked Pikmin. It was a real-time strategy game, done the Miyamoto way, which is to say like no one had ever done before.
Third on Miyamoto’s Gamecube launch list was Super Smash Bros. Melee. The updated fighting game crammed in a dizzying array of music, characters, and weapons. The sequel added a hundred different winnable trophies, each one a mounted piece of Nintendo history. It would have been unbearably in-jokey and obscure, if millions of fans weren’t winningly enthusiastic about being able to, say, have the Ice Climbers attack Mr. Game N Watch with Ness’s home run bat in the Pokémon Stadium, to win a Super Scope.
And then there was the haunted house game, with a ghostbusting character who stunned ghosts with a flashlight, then twirled a control stick to wring the hit points out of them. His weapon of choice, a vacuum, prompted one game rival to scrap plans for a Hoover-powered character. It featured wonderful light sourcing and a creepy feel: Nintendo’s version of a survival horror game like Resident Evil. Add one Luigi searching for the ghostnapped Mario, and the game found its title: Luigi’s Mansion. It sold well (more than 2.5 million copies), but it was not a sign of confidence in the new system. All previous consoles became hits with their long, captivating Mario games . . . but a Luigi game? The Frank Stallone of the Mushroom Kingdom? (Trivia: Frank Stallone played a Mario brother in Hudson Hawk.) There was a full-on Mario game in the works, but the Luigi game was a bad omen that the Gamecube wasn’t as comparatively worthy as previous Nintendo consoles.
If Sega had chosen to go the Nintendo route by foregoing third-party developers on the Dreamcast, Nintendo went the Sony route by trying to woo them back for the Gamecube. Its eleven launch titles were from eight different companies, including heavy hitters like EA, Activision, and LucasArts. It locked in some exclusive titles, and made porting games developed for the PS2 over to Gamecube as simple as it could. Developers were more than happy to be wooed by Nintendo: it beat being bullied by them.
One of Nintendo’s wooed developers delivered two arcade hits, Crazy Taxi and Super Monkey Ball, as launch titles. Super Monkey Ball was even a Gamecube exclusive. Its initials, SMB, were the same as the legendary Super Mario Bros. but the simians in this SMB looked more like Sega’s aborted mascot Alex Kidd than Mario. Which made sense: Super Monkey Ball was a Sega game.
Seeing the writing on the wall, Sega had bailed on the Dreamcast, announcing in early 2001 (not even two years since its U.S. release) that NHL 2002 would be its funeral cortege, its final game. All other games would be converted to more popular systems. It was a smart move. Sega’s great strength was in developers like Sonic’s Yuki Naka and Virtua Fighter’s Yu Suzuki, and studios such as Visual Concepts, which created Sega’s brilliant 2K sports lineup. Now regardless of what console gamers voted for with their MasterCards, they could play NFL 2K2, or a Sonic game. Sonic the Hedgehog became a Gamecube exclusive. Sega’s console and arcade games would still sell, but years of debt racked up trying to compete with Nintendo had hobbled the company’s books.
Nintendo had played a very good hand leading up to the Gamecube release. And if its opponents had been ascending Sony and descending Sega, it would have been in a solid contest for the gold. But a fourth company had thrown its hat into the video game ring. That company, with its superb console, finger-of-God marketing power, and literally billions of dollars in ready cash, had been wha
t really scared Sega out of the console business. Hell, it scared Sony so much the PS2 started paying for big games like Grand Theft Auto III and Metal Gear Solid II to be PS2 exclusives.
The new company in gaming was Nintendo’s neighbor from Redmond, Washington: Microsoft. Microsoft, the only American company of the four, launched its Xbox three days before the Gamecube. It had bought up a cadre of fine developers for first-party games, most notably Bungie, who delivered the outstanding shooter Halo: Combat Evolved. It convinced many of the big developers (EA, Konami, Midway, Tecmo) to sign up for third-party launches. Nintendo and Sony helped sign them up, too, in a way: Nintendo was late in sending out Gamecube software development kits and Sony had a shortage of PS2s. Both setbacks made the Xbox a more viable option. The Xbox launched in the United States first, a canny move, since American tech never did as well in the land of the rising sun.
Microsoft was so committed to its new console, according to Dean Takahasi’s book Opening the Xbox, it even inquired about buying Nintendo outright as a developer. Arakawa brought the idea to Yamauchi, who quashed it. Microsoft also weighed buying Sega and Square, but decided in the end to buy smaller developers for its first-party content instead of an industry big boy. It wasn’t ever a money issue; internal estimates said Microsoft was willing to sink $5 billion or $6 billion into the endeavor before expecting a profit.
This was the PlayStation all over again: a new rich kid in town with the best toys becomes the most popular. And what toys: the Xbox had a 733 MHz Intel processor, a DVD drive, and enough standard parts from PCs that it looked like a tower inside its large black case. (The black came with hints of green: green is the color of renewal.) It had an 8 GB hard drive, which cost a pretty penny, and a meaty controller that had breakaway cords for safety. Biggest of all was the Xbox Live service, letting players throw on a headset and chat with friends or strangers as they joined multiplayer games. (Coming full circle, one of Xbox Live’s data centers is in Tukwila, Washington, Nintendo’s one-time home.)
