by Jeff Ryan
For this new paradigm they could thank the same man who Yamauchi had once cursed: Mario. Mario stopped Nintendo from being anything more than an entertainment company. But amusing people was now the mission statement, the decree of the new shogun. Not being the biggest or fastest, but having the best games. Invention is needed for new amusements, and while this year’s inventions would be copied by the rest of the industry, Nintendo would continually invent new ones for next year.
It took work to find the revolutionary for the new console. Nintendo had considered making the Revolution’s controller a touch pad. That would copy the DS, though. Motion-control, via a camera? Too complicated. One authentic-looking fake ad was for a Virtual Boy – ish helmet called the Nintendo On. The On was not that far from the truth.
The reveal—of the official name, at least—came on April 26, 2006, a few months before release. Nintendo’s new console was the . . . Wii. Huh? The letter “W” was an emoticon meaning “smile” in Japan, and the two lowercase “i”s represented two players standing next to each other. And “we” implied family gaming. The initial ad campaign would feature two friendly Japanese men traveling through America, Johnny Appleseeding Wii systems across the fifty states.
History repeated itself. Just as Donkey Kong was saddled with a name that was just too easy to mock, Nintendo picked a name that was a synonym for urine. It was small, underpowered, and came after the weak Gamecube. It was being released in America on November 19, two weeks before Japan (December 2). It smelled like not screening a movie for critics.
One final nail in the Wii’s coffin? Just like the Gamecube, the Wii was launching without a Mario game. (Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which had Mario in it, wasn’t ready.) Instead it had a forgettable string of tie-in movie games—Barnyard, Cars, Open Season. There were a lot of minigame collections as well, such as Rayman Raving Rabbids and WarioWario: Smooth Moves.
Miyamoto had a guiding principle when designing the console: make moms happy. Moms had an uneasy relationship with the game machines that sucked the sand out of their kids’ hourglasses—and lured away the dads as well. Mom was the person who had to buy this stupid expensive time waster, and purchase new games every Christmas and birthday, writing down these ridiculously precise titles—not just Star Wars but Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast for Xbox—for fear of buying the wrong one.
One way to make moms happy was to give their console a simple, happy name: Wii. Another was a low(er) price. And there were the games: family friendly stuff younger brothers could stay in the room to watch. To further prep moms for this shift, McDonalds and Nintendo put out Mario Happy Meal toys aimed at encouraging healthy, active lifestyles. (Make your own jokes about that.) One huge mom advantage? Every Wii would have a pack-in game.
Wii Sports would contain five different games—tennis, bowling, boxing, golf, and baseball. Combined, they were a steal. Another game, Wii Play, took a similar format to activities like skeet shooting, air hockey, pool, and fishing. When it was bundled for no extra cost with a second controller, which alone retailed for forty dollars, Wii Play sold itself.
And that Wii controller . . . It may have started with the desire to not have long wires uglying up the living room. Nintendo had had success with the wireless Wavebird controller for the Gamecube. All of the Xbox 360 and PS3’s controllers, remarkably, were wireless. Their controllers had traditional setups: control stick on the left, lots of buttons on the right, index-finger triggers, plus more buttons and more control sticks. Mom was scared she would shoot off a nuke if she handled it the wrong way.
Finding a way to friendly it up challenged many of the long-held assumptions about gaming. Players moved with their left hand, and performed actions with their right hand. It synced up with clumsy pop neurology: the left brain was great with logic and spatial relations (such as where to move) and the right brain was for art (which creative method to dispatch the guard?). This basis more or less defined games as being Mario-ish third-person adventures, since that’s what it was designed to do. The games that tried to mix up controls were rare, and often counterintuitive to play at first.
Miyamoto went back to the drawing board, back to the beginning of games themselves. They were ways to pass the time, to have fun, to duplicate tasks your body would normally do. They were tools: tools for fun. Fun was much broader than controlling a character.
Years before Donkey Kong, Nintendo had marketed a light-gun game. Players held a toy gun and shot imaginary bullets. Games since then had lost that generality of play. Play was something everyone did. What had happened to the industry so a typical mom would say she wasn’t a “gamer”? This is someone who deals herself rounds of Freecell, actually enjoys Sorry and Chutes and Ladders, pretends to be a princess for a tea party, and helps her kids with batting practice. The same woman might tear through a Nora Roberts book, yet claim to not “read” because Nora isn’t Virginia Woolf. Well, she does read, and she does plays games. Nintendo just had to let her feel good about that.
Miyamoto and company looked at lots of different devices with buttons—not just game controllers but cell phones and channel changers. They wanted to see what felt right. After trying a cell phone – derived controller, they went with a remote-control shape. Unlike most remotes, this one would have only a few white-on-white buttons: their size and location denoted their relative importance. One-handed, no control stick, simple as a garage door opener. When the Wii’s name was released, the device—officially the Wii remote—got the inevitable nickname of Wiimote.
Building on the accelerometer research HAL did a few years previous, the Wiimote could sense movement. Three accelerometers controlled the horizontal, the vertical, and the yaw. A sensor strip along the top or bottom of the TV shone infrared LEDs, which the Wii used to constantly orient itself via triangulation. A small speaker built into the Wiimote, combined with a Rumble Pak, let force feedback and sound emit from the controller, two ways that made it easier to believe waving in the air was having a palpable effect.
It took years to get the controls right: for a while, any room with an incandescent bulb (or even a candle) would make the Wiimote act wonky. But once its bugs were squashed, the Wii offered not just a new interface but a new way of thinking about games, appealing to a vast audience who’d stayed away from consoles before this. There was consideration of releasing it as an accessory for the ailing Gamecube. But that system’s time was at an end. The current gaming market, to use another business-book analogy, was a red ocean, awash with blood and sharks. Nintendo had spent too many years being bitten by those sharks: time to take their more deserving Wii console into the blue ocean of an untapped market.
The Wii, though, was not exactly a more deserving console. It did do several things right: backward compatibility with Gamecube discs and controllers, standard-size twelve-centimeter optical discs, 512 MB of internal flash memory. The Wii’s expansion storage uses standard SD memory cards, the breath-strip-size flash cards found in digital cameras, and the Wiimotes have storage space as well. But what was going to sell the Wii was the presentation. When the game started up, players were shown the Wii menu, with a choice of screens to click on. There was whatever game was inserted. There was a News Channel—those hooked up to the Internet could see headlines, local weather, and sports. Wanna get online? You can.
The Wii menu was strongly influenced by Apple, beyond its soothing white color scheme. Apple’s MP3 players were very expensive, and hampered with digital rights issues. But they saw huge popularity thanks to an intuitive, simple interface: a click-wheel, a minimum of confusing buttons, a system that automatically finds each album’s cover art for you. Nintendo would do the same, and offer it at bargain prices. Take that, Steve Jobs.
The iStore equivalent, the place where people could painlessly browse and buy great tracks they never knew they needed, was the Wii Shop Channel. It sold older games playable on emulators of the NES, SNES, and even the Nintendo 64. Mario Bros. was a Wii Store launch game, and Mario
fare both well known and obscure soon followed—from Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. to Mario’s Super Picross. The Wii Shop offered WiiWare, original games not sold in stores, such as Dr. Mario Online Rx and Dr. Mario Express for the Wii and DS, and WarioWare: Snapped! for the DS. All of these were managed by Wii Points, digital tokens equivalent to a penny. Most NES games cost five bucks.
Nintendo was in no way unique at this point in selling downloadable content for its console, despite pioneering it decades ago. Xbox Live’s menu gave gamers a richer online experience than the Wii did. And the PS3’s PlayStation Network offered downloads of older hits, too. One true standout of the Wii Menu, though, was the Mii Channel. Clicking on it brought the user to a face-creation program, intuitively designed with an emphasis on eyebrows. There are strange omissions—no red hair? No dark skin tones? No body customizations other than height and width? But most any face can be created with a shocking degree of accuracy. (A regular contest for Wii users gives them famous people to design—Don Quixote, or Mario.) They were based on the Japanese art of kokeshi, armless wooden dolls.
The Miis weren’t just for Mario Paint – ish fun. Each family member would design his or her own Mii, which would be his or her avatar. The Miis showed up as spectators in other games, such as Mario Kart Wii. Character customization was once a true burden to use. The Mii Creator’s depths and ease made it a game to design a custom face. After all, game designers had fun designing characters: why not share that fun? Mario had been the default Nintendo face since 1981. The Wii offered a better option: us. (Or, we.)
The Wii’s popularity became a self-feeding fire, generating more attention and exposure, which prompted more sell-outs. Most consoles sell out for the first few weeks, or maybe until Christmas. The Wii sold out every month for three years straight. Retailers didn’t bother stocking them: shoppers would sniff them out in the supply room. Assisted-living facilities and nursing homes now have Wiis as a mainstay, right alongside the History Channel and stool softeners. Cruise ships have them. Malls and theme parks have Wii zones, where tourists can try out some archery with Link or racing with Princess Peach. Hard-core gamers sneer at the Wii the way they would a family film. But guess who tops at the box office, time and again? Steve Martin. Tim Allen. Robin Williams. More than eighty-four million Wiis have been sold at record speed.
Mario games still came out for the Wii, and on a regular basis. Mario Party 8 finally had a new reason to live: despite subpar graphics and the same warmed-over content as before, the minigame boardgame format was a hit with the Wiimote. (That same year, the virtual became real when the Mario characters showed up in a branded Monopoly game.) Super Smash Bros. Brawl finally came out, after years of development, and has become a top-selling game. A half dozen Mario games were released for the Virtual Console in 2007, with more every year since.
A Wii sports game tied into the 2008 Beijing Olympics was the digital equivalent of Ragnarok, matter and antimatter colliding, cats and dogs living together. The title? Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. Developed by Sega Sports, but supervised by Shigeru Miyamoto, it added double the star power to the minigame Olympic format. The Sonic canon (Amy Rose, Knuckles, Tails, etc.) and Mario’s klatch go oversized-head-to-oversized-head in a wealth of Olympic events. The game’s ads neutered Sonic by having him be the straight man, trying to give an interview while Mario foils it in slapstick fashion. Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games followed.
Super Paper Mario was a spiritual kin to New Super Mario Bros., plunking Mario down in a sedate side-scroller, then turning that world topsy-turvy. Super Paper Mario did so by letting Mario swivel the camera around to show the three-dimensional world hidden by forced perspective and overlapping images of 2-D. Clever. But the years of development (it was going to be a Gamecube game way back when) had a price: for a Wii game, there was next to no motion sensing. Also clever was the premise for the newest Mario & Luigi RPG game for the DS, called Bowser’s Inside Story. Mario and Luigi have to defeat a giantsize Bowser by traveling through him, fighting his cells.
Finally, there was the Mario game that everyone had been waiting for: Miyamoto’s true Mario sequel, which arrived once per console. Super Mario Galaxy did not disappoint. It took the unused gravity-field idea from the 128 Marios concept and applied it to an outer space setting. Mario blasted off from world to world, each a tiny sphere circumnavigable in seconds. Miyamoto, perhaps feeling his French oats, had followed up becoming a chevalier by essentially making Le Petit Prince as a video game.
Whatever dissatisfaction there was for Super Mario Sunshine disappeared with Super Mario Galaxy, which has sold nine million copies to date. Mario gains a new primary attack: spinning, performed with a satisfying shake of the Wiimote. The camera somehow never gets lost. Kōji Kondō wrote orchestral music for the game, to suit the bombastic sci-fi feel. There are new power suits (ghost suit, spring suit, bee suit), and even a modest two-player cooperative mode: one person is Mario, and the second is his star buddy, who mouses around the screen gobbling up valuable star pieces.
Miyamoto, who had serious involvement with the project, even agreed to put out Super Mario Galaxy 2 a few years later, filled with all the gameplay they couldn’t cram into the first game. Plus, he helped whip up a whole new side-scroller, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, which rocketed to ten million sales in its first two months after release.
Shigeru Miyamoto ended 2006 being profiled in Time magazine’s list of Asian heroes. He was not put on the Artists & Thinkers list, alongside Akira Kurosawa, Hayao Miyazaki, and Salman Rushdie. Instead, he was added to the Business Leaders section, alongside microloan pioneer Mohammad Yunus, Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, and ramen noodle creator Momofuku Ando. True to form, Miyamoto is a goofball in the photo, holding out his arms so a squad of Pikmin can stand on them. The following year, the goofball was given the Innovation Award for Consumer Goods by The Economist.
23 – MARIO’S PARTY
THREE DAYS IN THE LIFE OF NINTENDO
To properly demonstrate the scope of Mariolatry, let’s look at one slice of it: cake. Mario and friend show up on a lot of cake.
Groom cakes, birthday cakes, sheet cakes, multilayer cakes, cakes with Mario’s face, cakes with Mario leaping out like a stripper, cakes of Peach’s castle, cakes shaped like particular consoles, cakes so vast they replicate an entire level of the game. He’s even prolific in the handheld console of baking, the cupcake: clever bakers have arranged colored cupcakes or brownies to make Mario out of delicious pixels. (An allbrown version was also done in the medium of burned toast.) Other artists draw different characters and icons on each circular spread of icing. A search for “Mario cake” in Google images returned 1,490,000 results.
And then there’s statuary. Michaelangelo’s Pieta has been parodied, life size, with Princess Peach cradling fallen Mario. Another Mario statue, six feet tall, was made out of thousands of Lego blocks. It is far from the only Mario Lego sculpture. A life-size piranha plant out of papier-mâché. Mario on a red hydrant. Mario on a bowling pin. A wiener dog as Mario. Mario out of four thousand cans of food. A SMB mushroom out of ice.
Mario’s pixilated origins, and his variety of designs over the years, affords him the ability to be re-created in media that wouldn’t be able to show, say, Sonic. A Mario cross-stitch? No problem. Mario out of poker chips? Line ’em up! Pushpins? Push away! Bullets? Ready, aim, fire! Crocheted squares? It’s hip to be square! Floppy discs? Boot it up! Bottle caps? Let’s twist! Rubik’s Cube squares, broken off and rearranged? Pivot away! A supermarket display of a thousand twelvepacks of soda? It’ll take all weekend but it’ll be worth it.
Novelty T-shirts? There’s a new one every week. A piranha plant in a green pipe, underneath Magritte’s famous phrase “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” An impressionistic painting of Donkey Kong’s first screen. A gray shirt that emulates the NES cartridge design. A winged Mario: WING MAN. A red mushroom: GROW UP. A green one: GET A LIFE. A gold coin: OLD SCHOOL GOLD FARMER. A question block:
I’D HIT THAT. A gold coin, a star, and Princess Peach: FIRST YOU GET THE MONEY, THEN YOU GET THE POWER, THEN YOU GET THE WOMAN.
Want to, say, decorate your car to look like it drove out of the Mushroom Kingdom? It’s been done. Trick out a bass guitar to look like Bullet Bill? Done. Mock up condom wrappers with names like Donkey Schlong and Sextris? Rerecord “It’s a Wonderful World” with a Louie Armstrong impersonator singing about Super Mario World? Play the SMB theme using half-filled beer bottles or wineglasses? Put on a Mario-themed burlesque? Paint your nails with Mario designs? Sketch what Wario would have looked like as a baby? Pornography, of all Mario-inspired manners? Make Luigi a robot? Freeze him in carbonite? Mario, King Koopa, and Yoshi in a samurai-style Japanese print? Mario dissected? Princess Peach as the Virgin Mary? Mario and Luigi as zombies? Propose in-game? Make Super Mario Little Pony Bros.? Imagine Mario as a gay hustler? Design Mario furniture? Mario Russian nesting dolls? Mario graffiti? Raise a hundred thousand dollars by playing a marathon Mario session for charity? Done, done, done. Well, surely no one is dedicated enough to a video-game character to tattoo him on his or her skin permanently? Tell that to the half a million results on Google Images.
An ongoing discussion among critics had tackled the question of whether games can be art. Film critic Roger Ebert says no, that the freedom games give you overrules any possible message a creator could hope to deliver. (Miyamoto agrees with the decision, if not the rationale: he says games are entertaining and challenging, but claims no art status for them.) On the other hand, Tom Bissell in Extra Lives says yes, they can be, but only if they move away from aping films and give the player alternate worlds in which to make choices and accept consequences you could never do in real life. The debate continues, but the key objection is interactivity: I watch a Kurosawa film, and observe a Dalí painting, but I take part in a Miyamoto game.
