by Jeff Ryan
Post-Conker, the rules were changed for Nintendo. Conker was vulgar, but Miyamoto knew that its real enticements were graphics and game play. Every other franchise needed to have a new personality for the Gamecube. If it couldn’t promise the best graphics or sound, then it would scrape together enough sheer moxie to draw attention. Miyamoto sometimes told staffers, when they had an unworkable idea, to put it in a drawer, because one day the technology would be around the fix the problem. It was time to root through that drawer.
First up was Metroid, which had never received a N64 game and had been forgotten. It was in development as a 3-D sci-fi exploration, through cramped dark spaceships and distant planets teeming with hostile life. Exploring around in ball form would be a game in itself. A new Star Fox flight-combat game was also in the works, as well as a new Zelda title.
That was fine, but Miyamoto pushed for more. A twist, something no one expected. Metroid, he announced halfway through development, would be a first-person shooter. Star Fox would keep the flight-combat angle, but Fox himself would get out of his vehicle and explore around as well. Zelda was going to use a new rendering tool called celshading to make Link and Ganon look like hand-drawn 3-D cartoons.
For the new F-Zero game GX, there weren’t many changes other than increasing speed and challenges. There is no such thing as a racer that’s too difficult, so Miyamoto and company were free to reach for insanely difficult levels, while showcasing the neon explosions that made GX comparable to the best PS2 or Xbox experiences. The biggest change was behind the scenes: Miyamoto’s team codesigned the game with Amusement Vision, one of Sega’s game-making divisions. Perhaps to take himself down a notch, Miyamoto included a fat mustached android, with a Starman on his belt, designed by a “Shiggs Mopone,” called Mr. EAD. (EAD was the name of Miyamoto’s R&D division.) Shiggs’ favorite food? Italian, of course.
And then there was Eternal Darkness, Nintendo’s foray into survival horror, and Shigeru Miyamoto’s first M-rated video game. It was about Alexandra Roivas, who finds an ancient evil book that attracts monsters and makes the possessor go insane. She gets flashbacks to previous generations who possessed the book, and the player has to survive the flashbacks to find out what happens to Alexandra and the Tome. The game had a sanity meter; see too much weirdness and hallucinatory monsters start surrounding you. Get scared enough and the Gamecube will even start acting like it’s possessed, spitting out illusory error messages.
All of this was great, of course, but none of it was a new Miyamoto Mario game. He hadn’t made a true Mario game since Super Mario 64 way back in 1996. Now everyone and his brother had 3-D platformers. Developers had learned to program in 3-D. Mario, like a rich movie star who flirts with retirement every picture, had more to lose than gain from a new game.
Certainly Mario titles were attempted: Super Mario 64 2 was announced for the 64DD, then failed to materialize. Then Super Mario 128, which had turned into Pikmin. Mario needed something new, something distinct. At the same time, one of Miyamoto’s many protégées, Yoshiaki Koizumi, was working on a water-gun game. The Gamecube allowed for great water effects, as Wave Race: Blue Storm showed, and Koizumi had game-play ideas for how to use a power washer—to clean graffiti, propel around like a jetpack, hover, and batter down doors.
There was enough there for a Super Mario – type game: instead of getting new suits, Mario would get new nozzles. Years of 3-D experience would make the challenges a mix of exploration and action. The tropical-isle setting (Isle Delfino, a wink to the Gamecube’s development name of Dolphin) would be kept, which would also make this look very different than Super Mario 64’s digital Mushroom Kingdom. The new villain was Shadow Mario, very much like Sonic’s adversary, an evil hedgehog also called Shadow. Of course, Shadow Mario would kidnap the Princess and ended up one being of Bowser’s Koopa Kids. Plus ça change . . .
Miyamoto had worked closely with Koizumi on many Zelda and Link games, and knew and trusted the younger man’s vision. Miyamoto had reached the management stage where so long as he knew the project was successful, he’d let developers follow their muse without too much interference. He let Koizumi sneak story elements into the Zelda games, for instance. But Miyamoto had always come back as director for the Super Mario franchise. For Super Mario Sunshine, though, he handed the baton to Koizumi. Miyamoto would still produce, but he had been making Mario adventures for twenty-two years. It was time for a successor. This retirement possibly prompted an industry rumor that Miyamoto had died of a heart attack.
Nintendo publicized Super Mario Sunshine by cooking a Guinness World Record-winning 3,265 pounds of spaghetti in San Francisco’s Little Italy, dubbed “Pasta a la Mario.” Prizes were hidden in it, and six fans dressed as Mario dove in Double Dare – style to find them. The game sold 5.5 million copies, beaten only by Super Smash Bros. and Mario Kart (both sold seven million copies) in Gamecube popularity. But the hit games from Xbox and PS2—Halo, the Gran Turismo and Final Fantasy franchises—all outsold Gamecube’s best. All three Grand Theft Auto PS2 games outsold Mario as well, a sign of the times.
The year 2002 was a transition for Hiroshi Yamauchi as well. For more than a decade he had been hinting at retirement, and had considered various different leaders to take over his business. The natural choice would be Minoru Arakawa, Nintendo of America’s president—he was family, he was Japanese, he had strong American ties, no one knew the business better than him. And the seventy-three-year-old billionaire had once had his eye on the son-in-law, true.
But Arakawa and Yamauchi had had a strained couple of years. Yamauchi, whose top showing as Japan’s richest man on the yearly Forbes billionaire list was no longer a lock, refused to visit his daughter, son-in-law, and grandkids in Seattle—or even meet them halfway in their shared Hawaii home. Arakawa wasn’t grooming himself to be the attack dog Nintendo would need to survive, Yamauchi felt. In one infamous moment, Arakawa had fallen asleep in front of clients, almost dooming a partnership. Yamauchi’s zori were too big to be filled by just any feet.
Since the early nineties, Yamauchi took glee in saying that whomever he picked as successor, it would not be his son-in-law. Arakawa, perhaps saving face, began stating that Yamauchi was the only good choice for Nintendo president, and publicly agreed with Pop’s decision to look elsewhere. In fact, in early 2002 Arakawa announced his retirement from Nintendo of America at age fifty-five, beating the old man to the punch.
Banker Tatsumi Kimishima, who had been hired to run the Pokémon division as CFO and then president, was promoted to Nintendo of America’s president. He was the sort of mature, buttoned-down person who seemed to have been born an old man, and he was now running Nintendo’s biggest division. Perhaps, though, a money man was too conservative a choice.
Four years later, Kimishima would be replaced by the boisterous Reggie Fils-Aime (pronounced Fee-a-me), who opened a press conference by claiming, “I’m about kickin’ ass, I’m about takin’ names, and we’re about makin’ games.” Fils-Aime, quickly nicknamed the Regginator, was not only American but black. Nintendo of America’s leadership went from Grandpa Ojiisan to Will Smith. Fils-Aime’s broad features and goofy, energetic manner made him seem like a character escaped from one of Nintendo’s own games.
But who could sit behind Yamuachi’s desk in Kyoto? It couldn’t be anyone new to the industry, since he’d just feel that Nintendo needed to get some skin in the hardware arms race of Sony and Microsoft. Nintendo’s corporate philosophy of creativity being king must not change. Did anyone else have the decades of experience, the variety of backgrounds, the ability to win holding Nintendo’s cards?
Yes, it turned out. The choice of successor revealed Yamauchi’s skill at management, and at go. Go is a devilishly complex game, in which an opponent’s all-black board can be turned snow white with just a few perfectly placed white stones. Yamauchi was a famous fan: the first NES game he ever bothered to play was a game of go. He hardly ever lost. It’s just about impossible to become a billion
aire without gamesmanship, not mere money, driving you. Yamauchi was placing some of his last pieces, and they were going to turn the dark board white as rice.
He picked Satoru Iwata, forty-three, the HAL Laboratories developer who was one of Nintendo’s second-party vendors. Iwata had been president of HAL since 1993, when he helped bring it back from the brink of bankruptcy. (Yamauchi bailed HAL out on the promise that Iwata become HAL’s president.) Before that he was a designer, working on the Kirby games. In 2000 Yamauchi had brought him into Nintendo’s fold proper, as head of corporate planning. In retrospect, it was a try-out job, to see what Iwata would do with the throne.
Iwata was aligned with Nintendo’s (and Yamauchi’s) belief that bigger wasn’t better. His Kirby games were designed for beginning players, yet were still fun. The Pokémon games certainly weren’t breaking new graphical ground, but they were a hit too. This was when developers were cranking out violent epics that cost tens of millions of dollars. That was great for hard-core gamers, but there was a whole world out there besides young males at 2 A.M. online sessions. Game-play innovations could lead to cheaper, quickly designed quality games that could outsell behemoths such as True Crime: Streets of LA and Battlefield: 1942.
Hiroshi Yamauchi stayed on as head of the board of directors, an honorary (read: rubber-stamp) position in Japan. He turned down his pension, letting Nintendo reinvest it. “Hiroshi” does mean “generous,” but as a billionaire, he could afford to turn down about $10 million—or he was canny enough to know it would net him more in Nintendo’s hands than in his own. He also started dishing out collateral-free loans to Gamecube developers, to entice them. After three years heading the board, he left at age seventy-five, passing the chairman/CEO baton for the Seattle Mariners to Howard Lincoln. He currently holds a 10 percent share of Nintendo stock, and due to Japan’s rebounded economy is no longer in the top five of Forbes’s richest-in-Japan list. The Yamauchi shogunate would continue, with a new shogun.
Within months of each other, Miyamoto, Arakawa, and Yamauchi all took steps back from Nintendo. Miyamoto was busy trying to come up with ways of making each new Gamecube game have a special connectivity feature with the Game Boy Advance, which had a rearranging-deck-chairs futility to it. Yamauchi had to adjust to not walking through the front doors of 11-1 Kamitoba-Hokodatecho like he owned the place. And Arakawa was free of Yamauchi’s taunts, professionally if not as his son-in-law.
This was the end of an era for Nintendo, and the years that followed certainly seemed like they were on a sort of gotta-make-thedonuts autopilot. Mario Partys 4, 5, 6, and 7 came out, with many shared minigames. Mario Golf was upgraded, with the GC-GBA connectivity between Toadstool Tour (GC) and Advance Tour (GBA). A similar arrangement was made for Mario Power Tennis (GC) and Mario Tennis: Power Tour (GBA), which features the Mario Kart items for a dodgeball feel. Dr. Mario was repackaged a few more times. A Gamecube Mario Kart came out, and another Paper Mario. One of the Mario Partys was turned into an arcade game, then one of the Mario Karts. To paraphrase Jan Brady, it was Mario Mario Mario.
Many of these were solid games, but they didn’t expand the Mario brand as much as continue it. With not much game-play difference between the Gamecube and the Nintendo 64, the new versions were like the yearly Madden updates: incrementally slicker and improved versions of the previous year’s game.
Some games did try to push Mario into new territory, but met with resistance. Mario Pinball Land had Mario become the pinball to stop Bowser. The mix of adventure and rolling worked better with Super Monkey Ball. A Mario Mix version of Dance Dance Revolution came out, with Mario music and classical tunes to dance to. The attempt to lure in sports gamers with arcadey action continued with Mario Superstar Baseball (Mario knows baseball) and Super Mario Strikers (Mario knows soccer too).
Meanwhile, the PS2 and the Xbox were trying to be all things to all people. Continent-sized games routinely came out for both systems: God of War, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the Grand Theft Auto 3 series. In addition, Sony, Microsoft, and numerous third-party developers tried to make their own Mario-type platforming collection game. Jak and Daxter, Blinx, Ratchet and Clank, Sly Cooper, Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, Tak. They were added to the previous list of Mario wannabes—Spyro, Crash Bandicoot, Rayman, Bubsy, Gex, and of course Sonic. Only a few of these—Crash, Jak, Spyro, Ratchet, Sonic—stuck around.
Which meant, of course, that there was a big, gaping Mario-size hole in the lineups of the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Both systems had even more tremendous upgrades arriving soon: the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. Gamecube games that weren’t Nintendo-made were becoming more and more scarce. The user base for both systems was enormous, and growing. Sega had done very well making its 2K sports games, now rebranded ESPN, available for all three consoles. It was faltering with recent Sonic games, which were Gamecube exclusives. Was this the view from the top of the death spiral?
To an outsider, going multiconsole looked like Nintendo’s best bet. It’d receive a big increase in sales. Everyone loved the Mario franchise: it was parodied in everything from the Xbox sci-fi game Advent Rising (a secret room with three pipes) to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (with feuding friends Larion and Muigin, who complain about plants coming alive) to Assassin’s Creed II (with its Uncle Mario character). The Kyoto company would stay in business, and change with the times. Let other manufacturers make the razor blades—and at a loss. Nintendo could sell the blades. It’d be a step down, but it would keep them alive. If Yamauchi’s data about the gaming audience shrinking was true, how else could they survive?
Nintendo’s ship was being steered by Satori Iwata’s uncalloused hands now. When Yamauchi called Iwata into his office to promote him to president—Iwata has said he thought he was going to be fired—Yamauchi almost certainly demanded that Iwata not leave the hardware business. Nintendo made money selling its software, but also its hardware, a trick no one else in gaming had ever done long-term. It kept pushing gameplay innovations, but all the hardware was necessary for its premier software to be properly viewed. That was Nintendo’s essence: not Mario but Miyamoto, and Yokoi. (And Genyo Takeda and Masayuki Uemura, the underrecognized daimyos.) Bigger did not mean better, and quality of play was not related to quantity of megahertz.
Iwata had no plans for putting Nintendo games on anything other than Nintendo consoles. He and Fils-Aime were firm believers in Yokoi’s maxim. This belief had been recently reiterated in business guru Clayton Christenson’s “disruptive technology” theory, which said that new inventions—think of digital photography—could topple giants like Kodak. Nintendo was huge, but still David in the contest against the twin Goliaths Sony and Microsoft. But what could that disruptor be? Iwata and Fils-Aime started talking about disruptors all the time. Others might think them touched for believing this. But touching can be good.
PART 5
WII ARE THE CHAMPIONS
21 – MARIO’S REVOLUTION
THE DS
In the final months before the Game Boy Advance came out in 2001, HAL Laboratories designed a Game Boy Color game called Kirby Tilt ’n’ Tumble. The nifty twist was that instead of moving Kirby around with the D-pad, players tilted the Game Boy Color itself around to roll the puffball like a marble though a labyrinth.
It received little notice: Kirby games, aimed at kids, never did. But each translucent pink Kirby cartridge had an accelerometer in it, a cost-effective type called a micro-electromechanical system, or MEMS. The MEMS chip was basically a tiny spring with a weight on it: move it, and the spring registers the movement and translates it to Kirby. Accelerometers are used everywhere, in bridges and cars and medical devices.
It wasn’t a perfect fit. Game Boy users were accustomed to holding their machine in any number of slouchy ways: now that Kirby was as volatile as a blob of mercury, they had to keep things balanced—and pray there was sufficient light to see. The only practical way to make it work, Iwata concluded, would be to have a special console controller w
ith built-in accelerometers. Players could tilt that however they wanted, and still see their TV screen. No, it wouldn’t do for a handheld device. And Nintendo’s upcoming handheld, the DS, had enough hooks. “[Gamers have] given up on video games,” Iwata said at a trade show. “[W]e have to call them back in.”
Iwata, following through on Yamauchi’s vision, was introducing a new portable console in 2004. This was two years after his ascendancy to the top post, and only three years since the Game Boy Advance was released. It would be his first real test. He wasn’t running things the same way as Yamauchi; he encouraged the daimyos to cooperate and share staff, instead of feud. He talked nonstop to the staff, using reams of charts to back up his statements. Anything to measure up to the shogun and his inerrant instinct.
While he didn’t glower at people like Yamauchi did, Iwata lived and breathed Nintendo philosophy as much as the employees who had logged in decades of dedication. He larded vast hoards of cash, kept staff low, and refused to branch out beyond games. Yamauchi, still a board member, backed up Iwata in print . . . to a degree. “If we are unsuccessful with the Nintendo DS, we may not go bankrupt, but we will be crushed,” he told the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. “The next two years will be a really crucial time for Nintendo.” In other words: let’s see if he screws this up.
The Nintendo DS built off of the success of the GBA’s maturelooking edition. DS stood for Dual Screen, and each unit had two three-inch LCD screens. Mario could explore in a fold-out world with double the sky, jumping up into the second screen’s territory when faced with a high obstacle. Or, he could keep a constant map of his travels on one screen, along with possessions and various power meters. Or, turning the DS sideways, Mario could explore a portrait-oriented world instead of a landscape. The possibilities were untapped. Which young blood thought up the idea of reusing Gunpei Yokoi’s ancient Game and Watch two-screen idea? Yamauchi, who passed Iwata the idea just before retirement.
