by Jeff Ryan
24 – MARIO’S LEGEND
THE FUTURE OF NINTENDO
Mario, somewhat infamously, is stuck in a Groundhog Day of perpetually having to rescue the princess from Bowser. Even when the plot is new, the story stays old: Mario stops the big bad and saves the girl. Imagine Sherlock Holmes if every single Sherlock Holmes story had to involve Moriarty stealing the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London: it would get old fast. But we merely read Sherlock Holmes, and try to understand him via his actions and interactions. We play as Mario, and have a completely different relationship with him. We are him: his frustration at missing a jump is our own, his joy in grabbing a coin is ours as well. That’s why his (or any other game character’s) story-mandated in-game conflicts seldom ring true emotionally for us: they’re breathers, a halftime show.
In fact, his lack of consequence has its definite advantages. No soap opera recasting: “The part of Mario will be played by Crash Bandicoot.” No Zelda-style collective amnesia over what happened in previous games. No Dune-style flame-outs where later stories are hamstrung by the originals. Tell a story long enough, even one like James Bond or Batman where the actors keep swapping in and out, and soon enough it has to be rebooted. That consistency, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous “hobgoblin of little minds,” becomes an anchor weighing down new ideas.
Mario has no such consistency issues: all Miyamoto wants from the guy is a connection to gamers. He’s at one end of a tug-of war, pulling for Mario to be recreational, away from the half-hour cut scenes of the storytellers on the other end of the rope. But Miyamoto is only one man, and thus some very clever story sometimes sneaks in under the portcullis.
For instance, the end of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door reveals that the big treasure Bowser and Mario have been questing for the whole game is . . . a ruse. Mario has really been doing a demon’s work, and his collected Crystal Stars will reassemble the Shadow Queen, an evil force who was banished a millennium ago. And the body she’s coming back in is Peach’s. Now Mario has to attack the princess he’s been trying all game to save: very troubling. After Mario and company drop her hit points by seventy-five, the Queen becomes invincible. Round after round, she no-sells whatever he throws at her. The player undergoes a level of panic paralleling Mario’s dilemma: there’s no way to win.
Then, since this is Mario, things get better. In a cut scene, Peach fights back and escapes to safety, Mario gets his hit points maxed out, and the next round of the fight begins with the Peach-free Shadow Queen. Mario (and you at home) can without agita now finish the fight.
Most any other game would feature more realistic-looking characters, proportioned not like giant toddlers but like adults. But the hydrocephalic Mario look ties in with cartoon academic Scott McCloud’s theory of simplistic empathy; the more basic a drawing, the more human and relatable it is. We feel for good old Charlie Brown’s heartbreak more than Funky Winkerbean’s, because Charlie Brown is simpler. We feel more with Mario than with a more realistically proportioned hero like Master Chief or Lara Croft. (Not that the buxom Ms. Croft is the best example of realistic proportions.)
Most every other gaming hero that’s come since has had the burden of creating a personality for its star. Crash is silly, Sonic is snarky, Jak is stoic. Mario has the freedom to have no personality at all: that’s why Charles Martinet’s Father Guido Sarducci voice seems so risible. When Mario opens his mouth he’s a specific person. Mute, he’s our eternal alter ego. To update Joseph Campbell’s line, Mario is the face of a thousand heroes.
MARIO MAY NEVER FIGHT AN OPPONENT OTHER THAN Bowser, but Nintendo is seeing some new rivalries. Let’s look global. Nintendo is at the very top of Greenpeace’s yearly naughty list for electronics companies. Unlike every other hardware manufacturer, Nintendo has no recycling program to strip out harmful toxins and heavy metals in its old Gamecubes and Game Boys. Greenpeace is promoting a contest to see which company goes green first, but Nintendo is the only one not even trying. This despite the Wii using five times less energy than competitors.
It would be Nintendo style to have been working on such a solution for years, and not want to rush things to meet Greenpeace’s deadline, and thus be branded the most irresponsible company in electronics. But it would also be Nintendo style not to have any such plan (because that’s what the competition is doing), or to have even considered the matter. But maybe it’s learning: all of its Wii releases now come in ecofriendly containers.
Part of Nintendo’s reluctance to talk about manufacturing is because no industrial company wants to discuss the real engine behind its low-cost quality goods. That engine is China. The conundrum of the China Price is one where Nintendo has gone along with the herd. Workers in Shenzhen costs a lot less than those in Kyoto or Redmond, and can assemble the same products with the same precision. And Chinese subcontractors have perfected the cutting-their-own-throat negotiation tactic, slashing their costs however they can to offer better and better deals for Europe, the Americas, and Japan. Like a union in reverse, they offer more and ask for less.
But there’s a price for the Price. Many of the world’s Wiis, and much of world’s tech products, are made at a single Foxconn plant in Shenzhen. The plant’s size is about a hundred times larger than you can imagine: 350,000 workers. Imagine if all of Cincinnati or Pittsburgh were twenty-five-year-old men, and worked for just one company, a company run like a boot camp that encouraged long hours, low pay, and no complaints. That’s Foxconn, where no one can afford anything they manufacture. Santa’s village, run by Mr. Burns.
Foxconn does offer a few benefits: company housing and life insurance. But the life insurance is worth much more, about ten years’ worth of salary, than the pittance its employees make. The Chinese workers are so uniformly desperate to support their rural families that a shocking number of them “fall” off the top of their dorms, suicides for the life insurance. That some of these workers made Mario games, about a jumping hero, is ugly to the point of disgust.
The factory has pledged to increase salaries by 20 percent. And Foxconn’s other big clients—Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Nintendo rival Sony—are in the same boat. Everyone wants this to go away. “This,” unfortunately, is the attention, not the process of cutting a small check and receiving a large pallet of goods from someplace far away.
Another Foxconn client, Apple, is shaping up to be a heavyweight Nintendo contender. After decades of “Apple gaming” being a joke among the PC community, Apple is making a killing selling touchbased games on its portable media devices. Apple and Nintendo are quite similar; both are famously closed-system, both have devoted fan bases across many ages and both genders, both emphasize style and fun. The main difference between the 3DS and the iPod, philosophically, is that only one has an off switch.
Apple, like Microsoft and Sony, is at heart an electronics company. It charges a lot more for the quality of its products. And then it comes up with subtle ways to make you unable to break the iHabit. If you have an iPod, why not use QuickTime, since Apple keeps asking to reinstall it alongside iTunes every two weeks? Why not keep iTunes running 24-7, since your podcasts won’t download otherwise? Why not throw away your six-month-old iPod because Apple’s new OS for some reason won’t communicate with it? On the other hand, Iwata had considered installing governors into the 3DS, so no child could play it too long. Don’t look for that as an app anytime soon.
Another new competitor is Wall Street, or rather Kabutocho, Japan’s financial district. Nintendo’s shares in the Tokyo Stock Exchange have been traditionally safe bets. But in early 2009, due to the cratering economy, Nintendo posted its first drop in profits since the handheld DS revitalized the company. This is bad if you play bridge—and the stock market is one giant continual round of contract bridge, trying to reward companies not only for high earnings but for correctly guessing in advance how well they thought they’d do. Nintendo’s stock crisis halved its $78 high down to $35. But Microsoft and Sony’s stocks lost billions more, and their new-
normal trading figures were about $16.
These are Nintendo’s new rivals: Apple, Greenpeace, Foxconn, Wall Street. And of course, social media and its addictive casual games. Not to mention Microsoft and Sony. Biggest of all is the specter that’s haunted Nintendo for two decades: the slow walk of young men growing up and putting away their childish things. Nintendo doesn’t covet this core audience as much as before, thanks to the 360 and PS3 fighting over them like dogs with a hunk of meat. But the great land run is on to claim the world’s lunch hours and puttering-around time of the casual audience.
All of Nintendo’s plotting and fighting for the casual fan has one giant flaw: the casual fan. Nintendo can’t get them if they’re too casual, otherwise they’ll drift to no-cost options like Facebook. (Iwata has forcefully denied that Nintendo would ever make a browser game or an app: no lateral software without paying for seasoned hardware first!) But they’re also unable to use what for three decades has been their heavy artillery, Mario, for fear of scaring their new audience away. Nintendo’s Touch Generations games don’t feature Mario. Mario is core, not casual. He has to let Nintendo fight this fight without him.
Nintendo not letting itself make a browser Mario game has not stopped a flash flood of in-browser Mario games. Super Mario Flash, New Super Mario Bros. Flash, Infinite Mario, and the amazing Super Mario Crossover, which lets you play the original SMB games using characters from Castlevania, Excitebike, Ninja Gaidan, and more. (If you like that, try Abobo’s Big Adventure.) There are free (and unlicensed) Mario games where he rides a motorbike, takes a shotgun to the Mushroom Kingdom, decides to fight with his fists, is replaced by Sonic, replaces Pac-Man in a maze game, and plays dress-up. They receive no admonition from Nintendo’s once-ferocious legal department. Why not? Iwata’s explanation is commonsensical: “[I]t would not be appropriate if we treated people who did something based on affection for Nintendo as criminals.” This is also why no one has been told by lawyers to stop selling Wario-as-a-pimp T-shirts.
Nintendo’s most recent successes have made it clear: Mario is no longer Nintendo’s biggest draw. The Wii and the DS’s lifestyle games sit in that throne now, and they try very hard to be unlike other video games. Mario’s still the most popular man in the world, but despite his range he’s a limited performer. Casual fans are fine with him in small doses—a race, a fight, a minigame. But they don’t want any hint of story other than their own improvement, any more than Xbox 360 players want cute minigames. (Sorry, Kinect!) The closest he’s gotten to these new gamers is cameoing in one picture on one matching game from Big Brain Academy. Five years ago, that game would have had his name on it.
Mario games, both platformer and spinoff, still sell very well. Super Mario Galaxy 2 is one of the best-reviewed games in years, earning rare perfect tens left and right. And he’ll always be a favorite for Halloween costumes. But he’s not the king anymore, the perpetual emperor of physics engines. Take a look in the mirror to see the new face of Nintendo gaming: it’s you. You—Time named “you” the person of the year in 2006, so don’t be modest—have taken Mario’s job away from him. He’s still uniquely qualified to bounce around on Goombahs’ heads, and will still sell millions of copies in even a bad game. But he belonged to the first wave of video games.
Current nomenclature says that there are seven video game “generations.” The dominant consoles for the seven generations are: Atari Pong (first), Atari 2600 (second), the NES (third), the SNES (fourth), the PlayStation (fifth), the PlayStation 2 (sixth), and the Xbox 360 (seventh). This order assumes that the Wii shouldn’t even be counted as a seventh-gen system, since what it does well is almost unrelated to the red-queen advancements in capabilities of the muscular Xbox 360 and PS3.
From the point of view of Mario, and Nintendo, though, there have only been three eras. One began with Pong, of course, and lasted through the video game crash of ’83 and the early Famicon/NES years. Call this the joystick era. Games were totally original, written from scratch every time, all with dynamic (and often unique) control schemes. Often they were solid state: no computer, just dedicated circuits soldered into a pattern that made a paddle game. Many tried to simply duplicate a fun activity: sports, racing, target practice, mazes. There was little connection to storytelling: any “story” was the age-old man-versus-opponent conflict.
The second era flared up with the NES’s popularity, especially with a certain overalled pipe fitter. This is Mario’s generation, starting with Donkey Kong. Call this era the D-pad era. The new paradigm of third-person took hold, making most every video game a gussied-up puppet theater where the toy du jour finds treasure and stomps enemies. Phrased another way, they were hunter-gatherer simulations. Mario, Sonic, Master Chief, Niko Bellic—it’s all playing atavistic caveman, rolling around in the basement of Maslow’s hierarchy of need. The message of the D-pad medium was third-person play. Even when joysticks returned, they were small thumb-size affairs used just like the D-pad. Computer keyboards? D-pads with extra buttons.
This era is still going on, but it’s overlapping with the third era. We now live in the first years of the motion era, started in 2004 with the Nintendo DS. (It had been nascent for decades, of course, in arcades and a garage sale’s worth of one-game-only peripherals for consoles.) One by one, players started drifting toward video games, with simple new control schemes: press the screen, wave a wand, strum a guitar. Not games as much as activities. You can be sure all eighth-generation game systems will come standard with motion-control setups.
These activities are basically all joystick-era games in philosophy. More lively, with a nebula’s improvement in graphics, but the same concepts: play at shooting, play sports, play with friends, basically just play. The character-driven D-pad ethos was too cumbersome: it was time to take a step back and perform activities without a fictional world being at stake.
As it stands now, the core gamers are loyal D-padders, and the casual gamers drift strongly to the motioners. There’s overlap and crossing over, but most people, like most games, fit into one camp more than the other. You can be sure that Nintendo will have a load of Mario games for years to come, for both camps. Mario is uniquely suited for such transition: games such as Mario Paint, Tennis, and Golf establishing him as a Renaissance man.
Most all other game characters are, to their detriment, actual characters, with personalities and story lines specific for their game. They’re often ramped up to absurd levels: look at any afro’ed character, ridiculous weapons like Gears of War’s chainsaw bayonet, or women who dress like strippers (this includes, sadly, almost all female characters). They try so hard to set themselves apart from Mario’s blandness, by whatever means necessary. And all this screaming for attention had made them stuck in a single game genre.
The motion era’s trademark is a return to the joystickers’ style of game play. Like swing music and bell-bottoms, the base-level creativity of early game developers is returning. What is a minigame, after all, but a joystick era game, now economically repriced to come forty to a pack? Some stink, just as some games back then stunk. (Recall sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon’s valuable law: 90 percent of everything is crap.) But developers are learning how to design creative short games, sports simulations that aren’t steroid fests, and innovative puzzle games.
Video games have changed the world in the forty years since Pong told us to “avoid missing ball for high score.” A new medium exists, produced by a multibillion-dollar industry. Its rise paralleled computers’ prominence: now many homes have one of each. It’s changed how people behave: business gurus preach that gamers are more selfmotivated employees if you give them tasks to accomplish instead of instructions to be obeyed. Games’ geeky scenarios have propelled science fiction and fantasy into the mainstream. Entertainment went from being something we saw in crowds to something we experienced as single players, a trend that is now shifting back to group interaction. The global quality of life is undeniably raised by all this dedication to a new form of pl
ay. Games—whether joystick, D-pad, or motion—are at their root enjoyable. They make the world a happier place.
There will come a fourth era of video games, which I’ll dub the unified era. This will blend the motion era’s accessibility with the D-pad era’s commitment to epic story and clever refinements of genre conventions. Perhaps it’ll also mix in whatever is the new gaming trend as well: thought-controlled games, say. In TV this era would reflect a Hill Street Blues, which married the police procedural and the soap opera into a synthesis where viewers cared about both the cases being cracked and the personal lives of the officers on duty. In books it would be Oliver Twist, mixing up the bawdy fare of an ongoing narrative with shocking indictments against society’s mistreatment of children: entertainment and information. In the theater it’s Shakespeare, writing to noblemen and commoners using the same pen. In movies it would be none other than Citizen Kane, which merged the theater-perfected melodrama with a fleet of technical camera tricks that made clear this was no filmed teleplay but a motion picture.
The games of the unified era may not come around for another ten years: the societal obstacles are profound. But they will combine the addictiveness of D-pad era games with the accessibility of motion fare. Imagine a football simulation where your perspective doesn’t shift from player to player but focuses on just one person: the running back always trying to get open, the quarterback constantly racing the clock, the linebacker stopping an unstoppable force every single play. (For that matter, imagine giving a hoot about characters in a sports game.) Or a fighting game where the damage you take doesn’t easily heal, where every character is a limping, scarred map of stress points. Or a racing game where you care so much about the other players you watch online matches you’re not in, to root for favorite drivers.
These almost certainly aren’t going to be what the hit games of tomorrow are. I’m not a game designer, and perhaps it shows in these examples. But there are currently two warring tribes consuming video games, and there’s no reason for them to be at war. It will take a few years, some olive-branch releases on both sides, before casual players accept a game with a story, and core players accept an activity without a game. And the first few games that try to bridge these camps may crash and burn, like Nintendo’s 64DD.
