by Jeff Ryan
But I would like to, cautiously, and with a book’s worth of evidence as backup, make a claim about who will be the designers of the unified era’s first blockbuster title. Shigeru Miyamoto, in one of his last great performances for Nintendo, will use the knowledge gleaned from his shuttle diplomacy missions between the core and casual camps. He’ll understand what lizard-brain types of game play appeal to both groups, and what sort of structure that foundation would best support. Satoru Iwata, continuing a tradition, will premiere another new console like the Wii and the 3DS that makes up for in innovation what it lacks in horsepower. Reggie Fils-Aime will continue to merge the roles of hype man and president, tailoring his sales pitch to what people want to buy, not to what he wants to sell.
Nintendo will need a hook for this new console, a specific game that couldn’t be played, or conceived, on any other platform, even with down-to-the-atom motion sensing or a Beowulf cluster of processing power. But they’ll already have their star lined up. Miyamoto and Iwata and Fils-Aime will call up Nintendo’s most famous character, propelling him once more unto the breach. Super Mario will be back. And he will be as big a star as ever, in this new game that will unite the great schism of gaming. It will take a few years, and maybe a few misfires, but the plumber will reclaim his throne.
THANKS, MARIO, BUT OUR NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ARE IN ANOTHER CASTLE
Just kidding.
I hope it doesn’t come off as bragging when I say that this book could have been double in size. There’s a lot of Mario out there, but not all of it moves the Nintendo story forward. Much of my editing work was in snipping out lines, paragraphs, and in two instances entire chapters that were tributaries that diverged too far from the stream. Those two chapters are available at www.supermariobook.com, if you want to learn more extensively about Nintendo’s relationship to Japan in its early days, and about the fascinating and very secretive man Mario is named after, Mario Segale. Think of them as downloadable content, to use a gaming term.
I’ve listed most all of my book sources in the bibliography, but the list of Web sites I consulted would probably go on for half the length of the book itself. Just about any possible question I could ask myself, regarding facts or analysis about Nintendo, someone before me had asked and answered. Thanks to them, I had a true surplus of video game heritage and trivia to immerse myself in. The beginning of chapter 23, for instance, grew just about daily. Just because I found a hundred different types of Mario shirts doesn’t mean all hundred have to be described.
There seems to be a pact among Wikipedia users: they’ll use it but never actually cop to doing so. I will gladly cop not only to looking at but to printing out and reviewing (on an hourly basis) two Wikipedia pages: one on Mario’s appearances ordered by year, and one of Miyamoto’s games, arranged the same way. It’s very difficult to find an error on Wikipedia: I became an expert on Mario and Nintendo, and I only found a few minor release-date discrepancies. The stigma persists, though, and thus I didn’t use a Wikipedia source if I could get the same information any other way.
Other Web sites I visited for information include 1up.com, businessweek.com, slate.com, newyorker.com vintagecomputing .com, oxfordamericanmag.org, industrygamers.com, kokatu.com, and joystiq.com. Nintendo fan sites (miyamotoshrine.com, gonintendo .com, n-sider.com, zeldauniverse.net, among others) were great portal sites to find older, Google-ignored coverage of Nintendo moments. I’d like to especially call out GameSpot.com, which ran an exhaustive history-of-Mario series; VGChartz.com, from which I found most all of the sales figures in this book; and Nintendo’s own Iwata Asks series, where I got to be a fly on the wall as Nintendo execs held candid postmortems about what went right and wrong during development.
People were often the best sources. Some lent books, others helped with translations, and others (well, just one) volunteered to put on a mustache and red overalls to make a promotional video. Thanks go to Justin Brennan, Philip Jan, John Merriman, Kristin Linsday, Benj Edwards, Deanna Talamantez, Alison Holt Brummelkamp, Candace Smart, Mikkel Paige Mihlrad, Konstantin Karpenyuk, James Brennan, and Vinnie Nardiello. Jeannette Fee, Sean Ryan, and Cynthia Ryan were early readers, and offered edits so good I felt embarrassed I hadn’t thought of them first. Also there was that one guy at the Gamestop in the mall, and that other guy at the other Gamestop in the same mall . . . People want to talk when they find out you’re writing a Mario book.
My parents could have written off $200 from their 1987 taxes if they knew I’d write this book. Thanks to Kathleen Ryan and Dennis Ryan for resisting the urge to buy an Atari 5200 for Christmas, and thus starting me on my literary endeavor. And to Brendan Ryan, Bridgette Parker, and again Sean Ryan, three siblings I love more every year.
I’ve done my best to make the professionals at Portfolio and Penguin not regret their decision to publish a book about video games. Thanks to Emily Angell, Christy D’Agostini, Maureen Cole, Faren Bachelis, Linda Cowen, Daniel Lagin, Dan Donohue, Jennifer Tait, Eric Meyers, and my editor Courtney Young. Without all of you, the world would never know about Hotel Mario. And thanks to my agent Lynn Johnston, who set me up with my first interview, her fifth-grade daughter, soon after we sold the book.
I dedicated this book to Bill Rudowski. Who is he? He’s who won the book dedication auction, with all proceeds going to Child’s Play, which donates toys and games to children’s hospitals. Thanks to him, Laura Whalen, Ed Byrne, Jimi Cullen, Andrew Melzinek, and everyone else who stopped by eBay for a bidding roller-coaster ride.
The various people I’ve met over the years at Nintendo—from the Redmond and Kyoto branches and their Golin Harris press office—have been very generous and helpful, arranging interviews, providing review copies of material, touring me around the facilities, even setting up an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto. But Nintendo is a particular company, and one of those particularities is not cooperating with the press when it comes to books. So most all of that access dried up when I told them I was working on something longer than a magazine article. My time spent embedded in the Mushroom Kingdom was thus unofficial.
I’ve thanked Cindy Ryan for her editing before, which she’s done for my writing projects since before we were married. She’s also responsible for buying me our Wii, defeating the Pit of 100 Trials, outracing me without the aid of any red shells, and winning several NES games in the Animal Crossing village of Qwerty. She’s also brought two princesses into our lives, Sylvia and Holly, which makes her twice the hero Mario is. I would say more wonderful things about her, but I’m running out of ways to couch them in video-game argot. Here’s one more: my life is super because of you.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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INDEX
Adventures of Super Mario Bros.
The
Albano, Lou
All Night Nippon Mario Bros.
amusement parks
Apple
Apple II
iPhone
Arakawa, Minoru “Mino,”
Donkey Kong and
Game Boy and
Lincoln and
retirement of
Arakawa, Yoko
Arthur, King
Atari
Ball
Beam Gun
Bissell, Tom
Bleszinski, Cliff
Boone, Walker
Bowser’s Inside Story
Bush, George W.
Bushnell, Nolan
BusinessWeek
cakes
Captain N: The Game Master
CDs
Chien, Hank
China
Christenson, Clayton
Club Mario
Coleco
computers
Conker
Crazy Kong
Cullen, Peter
Day, Walter
Devil World
DeVito, Danny
Dr. Mario
Donkey Kong
board game
cartoon
Coleco and
Mitchell and
music in
Universal suit and
Donkey Kong 3
Donkey Kong Country
Donkey Kong Jr.
cartoon based on
Donkey Kong Jr. Math
Donkey Kong Land
Donkey Kong’s Fun With Music
Dragonfly
Dragon Warrior
Dreamcast
Dream Factory: Heart-Pounding Panic
Ebert, Roger
Economist
Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3)
E.T.
Eternal Darkness
Excitebike
Extra Lives (Bissell)
Facebook
Famicon, see Nintendo Entertainment System
Far Side, The
Fils-Aime, Reggie
Foxconn
Frogger
F-Zero
Game & Watch
Game Boy
Game Boy Advance (GBA)
Gamecube
Genesis
Google
Gorton, Slade
Great Giana Sisters, The
Greenpeace
Groening, Matt
GX
HAL Laboratories
Hanks, Tom
Hasbro
Hewett, Christopher
Hoffman, Dustin
Homestar Runner
Hopper, Dennis
Hoskins, Bob
Hotel Mario
Howard and Nester
Ice Climber
Ikegami Tsushinki
Inoue, Osame
Internet
iPhone
Iwata, Satoru
at Electronic Entertainment Expo
Iwatani, Tōru
James, Don
James, Polly
Jankel, Annabel
Joust
Judy, Ron
Jumpman
Jumpman
Kangaroo
Kent, Steven
Kid Icarus
Kimishima, Tatsumi
Kinect
King Kong
King of Kong, The
Kirby
Kirby, John
Klein, Naomi
Kohler, Chris
Koizumi, Yoshiaki
Kōjō, Yume
Kondō, Kōji
Larson, Gary
Legend of Zelda, The
Legend of Zelda, The: A Link to the Past
Leguizamo, John
Lincoln, Howard
Link
Link’s Awakening
Luigi
Luigi’s Mansion
Mann, Jonathan
Mario:
in bonus-character roles
and creation of Donkey Kong
Jumpman incarnation of
merchandising of
name of
Sonic compared with
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games
Mario Artist
Mario Bros.
music in
Mario Clash
Mario FX
Mario Golf
Mario Opera, The
Mario Paint
Mario Party
Mario’s Bombs Away
Mario’s Cement Factory
Mario’s Early Years
Mario’s Time Machine
Mario’s Wacky Worlds
Mario Takes America
Mario Teaches Typing
Mario the Juggler
Mario vs. Donkey Kong
Martinet, Charles
Mathis, Samantha
MCA Universal
Metroid
Mickey Mouse
Microsoft
Kinect
Xbox
Xbox
Xbox Live
Midway
Mii Channel
Milton Bradley
Mitchell, Billy
Miyamoto, Shigeru
Donkey Kong and
Donkey Kong 3 and
Donkey Kong Jr. and
at Electronic Entertainment Expo
first Mario Bros. game created by
honors and awards of
Nintendogs and
retirement as designer
Super Mario Bros. and
Super Mario Bros. 3 and
Super Mario Galaxy and
Super Mario 64 and
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island and
Wii and
Moore, Gordon
Moore’s Law
Morita, Kazuaki
Morton, Rocky
Mother
Ms. Pac-Man
music
Naka, Yuji
Neo Geo Pocket Color
Netflix
New Super Mario Bros.
Nintendo Adventure
Nintendo Club
Nintendo DS
Nintendo Entertainment System (NES; Famicon)
Disk System
Game Boy and
hackers and
Super (SNES)
Nintendogs
Nintendo Power
Nintendo 64 (N64)
Nintendo 64DD
Nishikado, Tomohiro
