by Jeff Ryan
Even better than two screens was the touch screen. The base screen had a resistive panel, which turns the whole image into a digital button. Wherever pressure was applied, the two resistive layers connected, sending an electrical impulse, no different than when the A or B button was pressed. ATMs used the same technology. “Touching is good,” went the naughty advertising campaign slogan. All DSes shipped with a stylus as well, so people didn’t smudge the screen.
The DS was backward-compatible with the GBA games, but designers didn’t kill themselves trying to accommodate Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, which had slightly larger cartridges. That 1989 version of Tetris, alas, wasn’t playable anymore. Twin speakers allowed for true stereo sound. Puzzlingly, there wasn’t room for a headphone jack: anyone who wanted to listen on a train had to buy an adaptor. The screen resolution was also anemic compared to high-end cell phones. A small mike in one corner allowed for talking games—some Pokémon games were already planned using the mike.
The DS’s guts featured a 67 MHz CPU designed for 3-D rendering, as well as a less powerful 33 MHz chip to display the 2-D graphics on half of the screen, and to emulate the GBA. What this meant was, despite the measly megahertz, the DS was capable of running a Nintendo 64 game. And what better way of showing this off than by repeating the GBA trick of launching with a Mario port?
Wisely, the launch team chose a more fondly remembered game than Super Mario Bros. 2 to port over: the 3-D marvel Super Mario 64.
Miyamoto had the chance to add in all the extras he couldn’t cram into the N64 game’s original release. Most of those ideas had been incorporated into Zelda or Star Fox projects, though, so he made new changes. The DS CPU could crank out more polygons, and didn’t have to rely on compression techniques. The gameplay was altered as well; instead of Mario getting different hats and exploring solo, he, Luigi, Yoshi, and frenemy Wario took turns exploring. Each character had distinct abilities, so what once required Mario’s Metal Hat now required switching to Wario.
The top of the screen was the 3-D game: on the bottom was a 2-D map, along with icons showing where all four characters were in relation to each other. Using the stylus while playing took some getting used to: some preferred greasy fingertips. The touch screen was also used for a series of Mario Party – esque minigames, which could be “won” by chasing after in-game rabbits. A modest multiplayer battle mode was helped out by an essential new option, “Download Play.” This let up to four DSes link up not only without a cable, but without four copies of the game.
The DS used a digital D-pad, which many disliked. Digital controls either send a 0 or 1, but couldn’t capture any fractional shades of gray in between. Analog control sticks, on the other hand, could slice a thumb press into 256 gradations. Just about every 3-D game was moved by an analog stick, so reverting to digital made the controls “sticky.” Hence Mario was tough to move around.
The most radical addition to the handheld might not have been the double screen, or even the touch screen. Keeping with the if-atfirst (and second, third, fourth)-you-don’t-succeed ethos, the DS included a way to get Nintendo gamers online. Technology and society had finally caught up with Yamauchi’s vision. People didn’t just dial up to AOL on a 14.4K modem, or access a swift T1 cable line: they bought new gadgets every year based on what they looked like, how small they were, and what they could do. Wireless communication was a key feature. A three-inch touch screen that collapsed to the size of a sunglasses case, with Wi-Fi access? That played Nintendo games? For $150? Sold.
Interestingly, Iwata’s first console was released in the United States first, on November 21, then Japan on December 2. The Japanfirst philosophy had changed, but only for this one console. Japanese tech buyers can be a fickle lot. Odds are Nintendo wanted its first launch site to be a big success. It spoke to Iwata’s nervousness about the DS that he changed the normal release schedule to front-load it with more positive press. The DS did turn out to be a slow initial seller in Japan, where portable doodads have to weather a much more acidic litmus test than in the States. This is, after all, a culture that recently spawned the keitai shousetsu literary genre, novels written on cell phones as epistolary text messages. Its standards might be insulted by Nintendo trying to cram Internet access into a gussied-up Game Boy.
The DS wasn’t aimed at kids who wanted to play Pokémon, though they were certainly welcome. It was aimed at adults, with their Black-Berrys, and cell phones, and MP3 players. Adults had loads of money to drop for accessories like a Bluetooth headset or a chromium skin. They would be into brief games: no long adventure campaigns, just something to kill five or ten minutes between appointments. They wouldn’t consider themselves “gamers,” but would routinely spend an hour sweeping mines or shuffling through Spider Solitaire.
In addition to Super Mario 64 DS (the original title was even worse: Super Mario 64 x 4), the DS launched with a healthy spread of olderskewing titles. There was Sonic creator Yuki Naka’s Feel the Magic: XX/ XY, a minigame collection. There was The Urbs, an achingly hip Sims spinoff about building up “rep.” There was a Madden, a Spider-Man, and a driving game called Asphalt Urban GT—sense an “urban” theme?
Trying to attract another underserved audience group—females—brought Super Princess Peach, a game where Peach finally avoids being princess-napped. Bowser kidnaps Mario and Luigi instead, and it’s up to her for once to save them. The second-wave feminism lasts as long as it takes Peach to acquire a magical talking parasol. Peach’s powers manifest through her emotional states. When she is calm she can heal herself, when happy she can fly, when glum she can water plants with her tears, and when angry she literally catches on fire. Using emotions as part of basic game play is a daring concept, and feel free to sub in “insulting” or “outrageous” or “awesome” for “daring.” The concept might have been taken more seriously if not for touches like the pink umbrella, and Peach having unlimited lives—core gamers hate being unable to die.
Another game that showed off the new controls was Yoshi Touch & Go. It was essentially a Game & Watch title, with Yoshi running to get Baby Mario to the end of the crayon-drawn level in time. Players controlled neither Yoshi nor Baby Mario but used their styluses to draw clouds that Yoshi walked on, letting him lemming his way to the level’s end. To get rid of a cloud, players blew into the microphone. It was almost pure game play, an Aristotelian demonstration of how the DS changed how people could play games. But the cartoonish look and kid-friendly vibe made anyone older than eight—aka the target audience—stay away.
Miyamoto wasn’t involved in producing Super Princess Peach or Yoshi Touch & Go. He was too busy walking the dog. His family had gotten a new pet a few years ago, a breed called a Shetland sheepdog that looks like a collie without shins. Miyamoto named his family’s Sheltie Pikku, after banjo picks. Games were fun, but dogs were responsibilities. Dogs could play with you in unexpected ways. They had their own lives, likes, and interactions. It got Miyamoto thinking. The virtualpet idea was not new: Tamigotchis were a big hit in 1996. But that was simple button-pushing: give it food every X hours, water every Y hours.
Dogs needed more than kibble and walkies. They needed to be petted: hey, look, a touch screen. You could teach dogs to understand your commands: hey, a microphone. You could take them to the dog park: hello, Download Play. You could choose what type of dog you adopted: therefore the simulation would come in one of four cover breeds, Chihuahua, Dalmatian, Dachshund, and Labrador Retriever. You could unlock up to fifteen breeds total, plus a hidden characters named “Shiggy” and his Sheltie Pikku. It would be a simulation, not a game. That was okay, since the people Nintendo was luring to the DS weren’t gamers, but casual fans. After decades of making shonen games for boys, Nintendo finally hit upon making a true shōjo game for girls.
Thus did the distaff Nintendogs launch, going on to rack up over twenty-one million copies worldwide. It won awards from places expected (GameSpot, IGN) and unexpected (People for the Ethical Treatment of Anim
als, the Associated Press). Such was the power of the girl gamer. One strange consequence of the game’s success was a company ban on Miyamoto talking too much about his personal life. He thought of Pikmin while gardening, and Nintendogs while playing with a pet. If the world knew he, say, liked to hang-glide, or swim, imagine the industrial sabotage . . . ! Unfortunately for Nintendo, it was already well known that he was a fan of music, tilting their hand of an eventual music game.
One thing everyone already knew that Miyamoto loved was his alter ego, Mario. His Mario game, New Super Mario Bros., certainly seemed as if it was yet another shovelful of 1989 into a new handheld. But this was a different beast. There were new levels. There were new items, including the Blue Koopa Shell, which made him hide like a frightened turtle, a Mega-Mushroom to Godzilla him up to supersize, and as a yang to that yin, a Mini-Mushroom to bring him down to ant level. The camera zoomed in and out on the action, the bottom screen displayed a DVR-like display of how far was left in each level, and modern physics engines allowed Mario to interact in a pliable, mutable world. It was the big-budget remake of a classic TV show.
For the first time since 1992, Mario was in a side-scroller. Credit producer Takashi Tezuka for doing what music producers Rick Rubin and Dae Bennett did for Johnny Cash and Tony Bennett, respectively: revitalized their long careers by cutting away artifice and showing them doing what made them great. In Tezuka’s case, it was injecting a breath of fresh air into supervising producer Shigeru Miyamoto’s original side-scrolling style of game play.
Don’t believe, though, that this meant Mario wasn’t getting more exposure than a Speedo wearer in the desert. Just about every Mario game you can think of—Mario Kart, Mario & Luigi RPG, Yoshi’s Island, even Mario Vs Donkey Kong—received a sequel or two. He showed up in original titles as well: Taiko Drum Master, a mah-jong game called Yakuman DS. And Mario Hoops 3-on-3 added yet another sport to Mario’s Thorpe-ian letterman’s jacket, basketball—he also cameoed his rock skills in NBA Street V3, and snowboarded his way into SSX on Tour.
In March 2005, Shigeru Miyamoto, who let so many millions chase after stars, received one of his own. He was one of two video game creators to be given the first stars in the new Walk of Game in San Francisco’s Metreon mall: Atari’s Nolan Bushnell was the other. Bushnell’s picture shows his large frame in a gray silk shirt, no tie or jacket, top button undone: the portrait of a software pioneer. Miyamoto’s is covered with stuffed animals: Mario, Wario, Yoshi, Donkey Kong, a hidden Bowser over his shoulder. He wears a blue blazer and cream ribbed turtleneck that, combined with his unkempt hair, makes him seem to have walked off the Regal Beagle set from a Three’s Company taping. Four game franchises were inducted. Two of them were Miyamoto’s: Zelda and Mario. Halo and Sonic rounded out the list. Miyamoto did not attend, but sent a foam-headed mustached emissary in his place. The Metreon stopped giving the award out the year after, but Miyamoto’s steel star remains. He left his mark in San Francisco.
A short stroll from that star is a Sony-branded PlayStation store, selling nothing but PS2 this and PS2 that. Starting in 2005, it and every other video game store in the United States started stocking the PlayStation Portable, the biggest-ever threat to Nintendo’s handheld hegemony.
Sony didn’t seem to have many weak spots in its frontal assault on the DS. The PSP had a big screen: a whopping 4.3 inches wide. Its capacity was big; it used optical discs for its storage, and could play entire films on special Universal Media Discs. Its memory was big: it had 16 GB of flash storage. Its controls were big: it had a modified PS2 controller hidden around the wide screen, including a nub of a joystick. Its games were big: it played note-perfect PlayStation ports, and launched with some of the best initial games ever: Spider-Man, Need for Speed, Tony Hawk, Tiger Woods, NBA Street, Metal Gear, Twisted Metal. Its extras were big: it had Wi-Fi access. Aha, Nintendo maniacs countered, but its energy drain was big: players had four to six hours on a charge. And that $250 price tag? Big.
The PSP roared in popularity in 2005. Its promised connectivity with the PS3, its widescreen movies, its software-running abilities, its hit game franchises: the PSP could do no wrong. Then, as if living up to the PlayStation heritage, a wave of piracy began, aided by Internet access and capacious memory sticks. Despite regular security patches, scofflaw gamers could still download just about any game they wanted, including PlayStation titles never released on the PSP in the first place. This led to third-party makers ceasing production, and Sony overcompensating by announcing that it didn’t want their games in the first place. Within a year, you’d be forgiven if you thought the PSP was a media-watching device, based on how few people were ever seen in public playing a game on it.
Almost double the 25 million who bought a PSP (many in Japan, where it remains very popular) went for a DS, which (stop me if you’ve heard this before) wasn’t as technically powerful or robust but had a longer battery life and offered more distinctive gaming choices. In response to the PSP, Nintendo released the redesigned DS Lite, and sales almost doubled again. PSP countered with its own redesigns, the thinner PSP Slim & Lite and then the PSP Go, which hid its controls the way texting phones hide their keyboards. Nintendo countered with the DSi, which has a pair of cameras, then the supersized DSX. The PSP remains a legitimate gaming system that makes Sony a lot of money every year. But it’s living the life of Napoleon in Elba, a conquered conqueror waiting for the next chance to strike.
22 – MARIO’S PRINCESS
THE WII
Video games get compared to movies quite often. Certainly game makers themselves have helped bolster this parallel.
They bill themselves as directors and producers, hire actors as voice talent, feature long full-motion video sequences, and frame their shots for maximum cinematic impact. But maybe films aren’t the best metaphor. They’re both audiovisual experiences, yes, but films are passive. Games aren’t. Gamers’ imagination and resources determine what happens, and how much enjoyment they get out of it.
Perhaps the better media comparison is with books. Think of a big-box bookstore, two stories high with titles of every stripe. Most every video game ever made would go into one of a paltry few stacks: science fiction, fantasy, young adult. Indeed, these are where the novelizations of many of these games, the Mario novels included, are found. But the majority of the sections would be almost barren of video games. Business and finance? Cookbooks? Reference? Biographies? Address books? Calendars? Whatever people enjoy doing, shouldn’t there be an audience who wants to do that in a game? Most games were escapist adventures: but not everyone wants or needs to escape from his or her life.
Video games were a specific stripe of genre fiction, in other words. Even the puzzle games were given a story: players couldn’t just play a tile-matching game, they had to pretend to be feuding pirates who fight via pseudo Tetris. Putting the yoke of such a story on an experience was limiting. Adding insult to injury, often it was a terrible story, with derivative plots, wooden characters, and rank dialogue. All those empty shelves represented a massive untapped market.
NINTENDO’S GAMECUBE SUCCESSOR, WITH THE WORKING name of Revolution, promised to be exactly that: a revolution. It would have to be, going up against both the PS3 and the Xbox 360. Its biggest weapon was a man, with the initials SM, who was the worldwide symbol of excellence in games. And he was not an Italian plumber. Whatever the new system would be, credit would go to Shigeru Miyamoto, who on March 13, 2006, was honored as a knight of arts and literature by the French minister of culture. His appointment book was now peppered with lifetime achievement awards receptions.
The PS3, out in 2006, was going to be the most powerful game system yet, and came standard with a Blu-ray player. (Which helped eliminate its rival HD-DVD: both systems cost hundreds of dollars, but only one shipped with a free video game system.) The Xbox 360, which would be first to market in November 2005, was outputting frame rates and picture quality so precise that only flat-screen televisions were sophisticated enough
to show its details. Microsoft and Sony had thrown themselves into the megahertz measuring contest with full force. Both systems produced a quality of output that was often comparable to the special effects of summer blockbusters.
The Revolution, by contrast, was not trying to be the biggest or the baddest. In fact, its modest abilities led to one frustrated developer saying it was just a pair of Gamecubes duct-taped together. It used Intel’s Broadway chip, successor to its Gecko Gamecube chip that used 20 percent less power and ran 50 percent faster. Great for Nintendo, maybe not so great for someone who expected a 2006 console (running at 729 MHz) to be more powerful than a 2001 Xbox (733 MHz). It was designed to be small and sleek, no bigger than three DVD cases, and so efficient it didn’t need a cooling fan. This frustrated Nintendo’s third-party developers: the spectacular graphics that they made for the 360 and the PS3 had to be severely dumbed down to be ported to Nintendo’s new console. The end result was like watching a long R-rated movie on network television: time-compressed, edited for broadcast, pan-and-scanned, replete with cuts. Why bother?
Nintendo’s seasoned-technology mindset had never been so evident—or so daring. It was purposefully taking itself out of the arms race driving its competitors. Making money from selling hardware was part of Nintendo’s success story. Let the others price the bare-bones Xbox 360 at $300 and PS3 at $499—with gamers having to fork over another C-note if they want to actually get online with either. Nintendo would compete on price—$250. Saying good-bye to an easy couple of hundred million dollars each year, it announced that all online play would be free.
The entire console was Satoru Iwata’s Radar Scope, the one big decision that would decide his company’s fate. But this wasn’t a brash moment of putting the life savings on the number-four horse. First off, zigging where others zagged was Nintendo’s consistent strategy. If anything, the watered-down Gamecube was when Nintendo tried—and failed—to join the slam-dunk club. Once Iwata and Miyamoto saw the success of the DS, specifically its new operating system, they felt their new paradigm would find favor when it was released.
