by Jeff Ryan
That interactivity is the rub: what the best art strives to accomplish—connection—even the most shoddy games get automatically. In one sense, then, games are superior to any other art form: if connectivity to the audience is the goal. But the art of, uh, art is forging that connection through passive observation. It’s almost not fair to compare a painting with a painting you can jump into. All parties can agree on one thing, though: if not art himself, Mario is a very reliable muse for other artists.
GAME DEVELOPERS LOVE AND LOATHE LOS ANGELES THE third week of June, for the yearly Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, trade show. Whatever they’re working on, no matter the release date, needs to have a playable demo plus a kickass trailer ready for mid-June. Time your production schedule wrong, and a full month of your development time can go to creating a very fancy ad for a select few people, who will scoff at anything other than a fully finished product. This is one of Miyamoto’s grievances as well: people who spend hours and hours on a simple presentation to him, instead of devoting that time to the game and sending him a memo.
Yet skipping E3 is a forfeit, so everyone in gaming attends, and makes his big promises, and spends the rest of the year trying to live up to those lofty words. It’s gotten better over the years, scaled down to keep the Comic-Con crowd of fans away. But E3 remains a place where no one eats steak but everyone orders the sizzle.
Microsoft’s ascent into gaming had been very successful. The Xbox 360 was a tremendous gaming instrument, and its superlative Xbox Live infrastructure recreated a vital multiplayer world. There were people out there who had played a hundred hours of Halo 3, and hadn’t once played it single-player—or ever played with an actual second person sitting next to them. Like Sega and Sony before it, it had defined itself as the base camp for the core gamer. BusinessWeek estimated Xbox Live’s subscription costs alone were bringing in a billion dollars for Microsoft a year. It spent money by the forklift to enter the gaming world, and now forklifts were bringing that money back home. There was only one problem: Microsoft was losing.
Sony was in a very close race with Microsoft. Both were trying to claim the same territory of core gamers. Sony’s PS3 architecture was arguably superior to the 360’s, but a developer could do just about anything with either machine. Many of Sony’s wounds were selfinflicted, going back to launch where its blustery president claimed it was sold out in every store, an easily disproven claim. Some outstanding games made all forgiven with the geek crowd: titles like Uncharted, Resistance, LittleBigPlanet, and Assassin’s Creed were epics. There was only one problem: Sony was in third place.
Microsoft and Sony had the same problem the book industry had during J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter opus. Bestseller lists started excluding them from the “adult” bestseller lists, saying they were for children and thus didn’t count. This conveniently freed up the number-one spot for other authors. This strategy was a sound one, so Microsoft and Sony had for five years said they were duking it out for first in sales, not second, because they didn’t consider the mere Wii as a competitor.
It wasn’t working: sales figures of the three consoles side by side by side looked like pencil marks of a child’s height at age five, six, and nineteen. Nintendo, whose plebian console wasn’t even HD, had been the one to redefine terms, really: coming up with a whole new market-place with new preferences. Its console sales bested Microsoft and Sony combined. If Nintendo had just stayed on the same playing field it would be in third, where it belonged!
For Nintendo execs, the E3 challenge was to have as much spring in their step as possible. They were coming off a lackluster year: few exciting games, a wounded stock price, and increased competition. Execs that year lowered sales estimates by more than a billion dollars, mostly due to the strong yen, which strangled export profits. They were still winning, but the profits weren’t miraculously growing every year. Nintendo had learned from past success stories (notably Microsoft in the nineties) to always feel the underdog, never rest on your laurels. They weren’t even taking the easy out of blaming low sales on piracy or the yen: Iwata stated that Nintendo’s job was to “increase the number of our consumers who are willing to shell out their money to purchase our products.”
So they started setting up “Nintendo Zone” Wi-Fi hot spots in Tokyo McDonalds. They gave out baseball stats to folk who brought their DSes to Mariners games. They arranged for the best game designers in the world to fall over themselves praising Super Mario Bros. for its twenty-fifth anniversary. Miyamoto had the month before E3 earned global applause for Super Mario Galaxy 2. Even the NASCAR car GameSpot sponsored, which was painted with Mario and Yoshi, won its first race: a good omen.
Nintendo had perfected the art of attracting casual fans with one hand, while luring over the core fans with the other. It has taken years for third parties to figure out how to make decent Wii games, but now they were cranking out hits like EA Sports Active and Tecmo’s We Ski. But the casual fans had deep pockets: they would buy the Wii, a Wii Board, Wii Fit, and even the Wii toys given away at Wendy’s, and then never use them. They also picked up an ever-growing pile of one-game-only peripherals: billiard sticks, cooking gear, crossbows, helmets, steering wheels, paintbrushes. All three consoles were guilty of this for instruments, thanks to Guitar Hero and Rock Band, selling hundred-dollar plastic axes. The cash of the fair-weather fans who try out video games like a hobby was just as green as the fanboy’s.
The Wii’s new stated goal, Satoru Iwata said, was to break the PS2’s record to become the world’s most popular console. That was a steep cliff. The Wii already had eighty-four million units after five years, spurred on by a 2009 price drop. That number looks great—it’s more than twice as many Atari 2600s sold—except when measured next to the PS2’s 143 million (and counting). In 2009 the PS2 was still outselling the PS3 certain months. There are more PS2s than there are residents of Japan. Could Wii sales still be practically doubled? No one could tell Iwata he wasn’t setting his ambition as high as Yamauchi.
The yearly product demos of the three console makers, as well as A-list publishers like EA and Ubisoft, are true stage shows. Microsoft brought out Cirque du Soleil. Sony had rising comic Joel McHale host for them. Nintendo was not averse to playing this game either: it had sent a Mario mascot into zero gravity with Buzz Aldrin to promote the first Galaxy game. For E3, Nintendo used not celebrities or performers but its own in-house celebrities. No, not Mario and Link.
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata walks on the stage, introduces himself, then lets a white screen drop down. Iwata (wearing the same suit) appears on screen, picks up a DS console, and sees Mario’s hand sticking out. Mario slaps a fake mustache on him, and then Iwata is sucked into the machine like it’s a Ghostbusters floor trap. Shigeru Miyamoto (recently voted the most influential person in the world in a 2008 Time magazine poll) enters, has a Nintendog jump out of the screen into his arms, then is sucked in as well. Finally, NOA president and COO Reggie Fils-Aims comes out, and chuckles at what he sees on the screen: Bowser in a lava dungeon chasing the two Nintendo creatives. Then Bowser sticks his head out through the DS and breathes cartoony fire all over Fils-Aims. The screen goes up, and the Regginator stands there for real, dressed in a burned suit. Cue applause for Nintendo’s yearly company play.
What they demonstrated was the 3DS, a new iteration of its venerable DS system. (Fils-Amie jetted to New York to show it off on talk shows later that week. Miyamoto raved about it in L.A., but kept to his rule to not appear on Japanese television: he doesn’t want to start getting mobbed for autographs when he’s walking his dog.) The DS had miraculously eclipsed the Game Boy’s total sales, become popular with boys and girls, adults and kids, all around the world. The 3DS, as the name suggests, delivered 3-D images (the bottom screen remained 2-D, but touch sensitive). Its big launch game was a new franchise that Nintendo was dusting off: Kid Icarus, last seen (in anything more than a cameo in a Smash Bros. game) in 1991. The 3DS didn’t require glasses, a trick that Nintend
o guarded like the Coca-Cola formula but would be found out soon enough. The main suspect was parallax barrier LCD, which no one had used for a film because it only worked from one seat in the house, dead ahead. Sony’s PlayStation 3, in perpetual third place, could show 3-D games, but only with glasses—and an expensive 3-D-capable flat screen.
The 3DS also allowed Nintendo to cash in on a new media stream: 3-D movies. There had been a sharp increase in 3-D films, which theater owners loved because of the higher ticket prices. Studios fell over themselves to convert 2-D movies into 3-D. But there was no easy way to replicate the experience of watching a hit like Avatar at home: despite the fifty-two-inch plasma display and the six-speaker sound, it was flat as a pancake.
Nintendo’s comparative tiny screen, smaller than a YouTube window (but with better resolution), had the movie theater beat. Players could take a break from Paper Mario (one of the first wave of 3-D games, along with Nintendogs + Cats, Pilotwings and Star Fox flight titles, and of course Mario Kart) to try Nintendo’s deep third-party support (DJ Hero, Resident Evil, and Kingdom Hearts) or watch a hit 3-D film like How to Train Your Dragon. Being Nintendo, they dragged their feet for six months after E3 before mentioning that Miyamoto was working on not one but two 3-D Mario games. One would be an oldfashioned side-scroller, and the other would be a 3-D Mario game in, uh, the other kind of 3-D. Miyamoto said working on the games was bringing back Virtual Boy memories, which might not be the best thing to bring up.
The 3DS was also an MP3 player, could get you online, and even let you chat in 3-D. There was enough to it so that even if you didn’t play games, you could want one. This was a pyrrhic defeat for Nintendo, which had purposefully kept the peanut butter of other applications out of the chocolate of their game system: witness no DVD player on the Wii. The big N was caving to nongame interests: it had recently let Netflix stream movies via the Wii, years after the 360 and PS3 were serving them to millions of viewers. Nintendo’s consistency defense was that all the bells and whistles were just ways to keep the game system from being forgotten.
Nintendo’s drift away from gaming could be called the “everything box” syndrome, named after the Holy Grail of electronic companies: a set-top box that provides broadband, music, movies, games, and all conceivable applications. There are few technical boundaries to making such a box anymore. But try lining up third-party developers for a satellite receiver with a game controller. Try getting movie studios to stream their new hits on your wireless router. Try getting people to make a phone call from their GPS. When convergence lets anything do everything, the mission-statement navel-gazing of what a company’s actual purpose is, and what sets it apart, becomes critically important.
For instance, Microsoft’s biggest 2010 gaming offering was the Kinect, a movement-based interface: basically, a Wii minus the Wiimote. (Sony’s top in 2010 was the PlayStation Move, a kludgy combo of Kinect and Wii technologies.) If you wanted to steer in a racing game, turn an invisible wheel: to hit a tennis ball, wave your hand back and forth. It incorporated voice commands as well, just like on Star Trek. It offered game play that the Wii couldn’t, which stole from the Nintendo playbook. In promoting the Kinect, one of the producers even said it was as innovative as Super Mario Bros. Microsoft saw the future, and it was Marcel Marceau. The Nintendo-doesn’t-count argument wasn’t working, so Microsoft (and Sony) had about-faced and were now trying to out-Nintendo Nintendo.
There were differences between their companies and Nintendo. Microsoft and Sony wanted to gobble up every hour of your free time however they could, for your life to become devoted to their games and products. Which was a fine business model for companies with an enviable record selling electronics and computer programs. Nintendo had wanted that too, at one point, but not anymore. It had learned its product wasn’t hardware or software: it was amusement. With games for staying in shape, training a pet, gardening, playing music, shooting pool, and fishing, its goal now was to reflect your life via games. The Wii was an existence simulator.
Nintendo had researched a look-ma-just-hands interface when designing the Wii, and decided against it. With no physical matter to press or hold, players would have to learn the mimetics of how to play a game all over again. And that was if the technology worked perfectly: Microsoft’s version was plagued with rumors that the seeing eye couldn’t yet detect hand motion if players sat. And Sony had already tried the motion-sensing controller gambit before, with its Sixaxis controller, which had been phased out due to lack of use. Even if it worked perfectly, was there an audience? Would anyone who wanted a Wii drop double its price to play an imitation of it years later? Such were the E3 rumors: not only were Kinect and Move carbon copies of Nintendo’s idea, they were smudged copies. Nintendo, for its part, lost millions later than year when it denied a rumor that the 3DS would be in stores for Christmas: sorry, not until next year.
The everything-box syndrome was most in evidence for portable devices. Nintendo’s DS was now competing not only with Sony’s waning PSP, but also with Apple’s waxing iPhone. iPhone models featured a touch screen, a high-speed 3G connection for phone and Internet access, and a nifty but small on-screen keyboard. Most notably, it featured a shockingly robust “App Store” with hundreds of thousands of programs, either for free or for a few bucks. This led to a cadre of other touch-screen phones, each one with its own geometrically increasing pile of apps and games. How they differed from the DS on paper was negligible. So if mobile devices were providing gaming, what could Nintendo do with the DS to compete?
Nintendo had copied Apple to a degree, opening its own minigame store for the DS. It branded many of its regular DS games “Touch Generations,” calling them “Great games anyone can play.” (Mario does not appear in any Touch Generation title, save for a Tetris cameo.) And, like a guidance counselor recommending a career as a guidance counselor, Nintendo offered for download a free title like Flipnote Studio, where gamers could make their own animated films, and WarioWare D.I.Y., whose purpose is making and distributing hand-crafted games online, for free. A way to find the next Miyamoto? (Nintendo was so worried they’d lose Miyamoto the same way they lost Yokoi they recently forbid him from walking or biking to work.) Or a devious trick to outsource new Mario content? Maybe Nintendo can allow the best designers the chance to whitewash their fence.
Nintendo’s twin concerns were losing market share and mind share. Would a DS unit play as sweet if a user had another device in her pocket that let her play games? But how much push could it give the Wi-Fi and cameras before forgetting those were features added so people would merely, in Nintendo’s corporate walleye view, have it on hand more often to play games? That was the hail-Mary genius of the 3DS: a function ideal for gaming that no other device had, which introduced a whole new suite of activities, all exclusive to the 3DS. Suddenly the other everything boxes didn’t have everything.
AS OF 2010, THE FIRST DECADE OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY was over, with nine more to go. Every bit of technology, every way people lived, would be changed due to the new connectivity and speed of culture. Many of these changes have already happened: music fans who hear a new artist download the track (sometimes they even pay) instead of trekking to a music store to buy the whole album. No one visits the library when he can Google a subject in .00007 second. We accept that ads will infiltrate their way into every aspect of our life, a problem that can be alleviated with an ice-cold Coors Light. And the hallmark of this connectivity is interaction. All avenues of our lives, in other words, are turning into video games.
How will this affect games? In a lot of ways it already has. Xbox Live (and its Wii and PS3 counterparts) are online communities where you can compete with or against friends or strangers. Nintendo lags in this, stressing its own limited interactivity. Iwata and Miyamoto have both said that Nintendo is probably not doing enough when it comes to online gaming.
But there’s more to connectivity than that. Facebook’s low-res fare such as Parking Wars is a glorified game of
mail chess, where each time you log on you see your friends’ moves, and respond in turn. Others are old-school remixes: Farmville looks familiar to Sim City players, and Mafia Wars is an isometric beat-em-up: Civilization via the Corleones. Facebook, Twitter, and Xbox Live, it was announced around the time of E3, would soon share update threads. But Facebook’s ubiquity, its platform, makes for a threat bigger than any rival peripheral. It wasn’t much discussed, but during the show word got out that Google had invested up to $200 million in Zynga, the company behind many top Facebook games. OnLive, a cloud-computing service that let owners of run-of-the-mill laptops play A-list PC games such as Assassins’ Creed II, had just launched. It was getting easier every year, every month, to imagine a world with so much bandwidth and processing oomph available that specialized machines just to play games wouldn’t be needed.
Speaking of those specialized machines, what happened to the concept of new consoles? All three consoles are at least five years old by this time: E3 should have been rife with chatter about PS4 prices, or Xbox 720 release dates. Instead, Microsoft and Sony spun their Wiiclone add-ons as if they were whole new game platforms, not just accessories. Nintendo, in turn, kept making new console games as if the concept of a Wiiquel was inconceivable. This was because Microsoft and Sony were on ten-year plans, kicking the can of the console death spiral to 2015. Making the most of seasoned technology? Another page out of the Nintendo playbook.
