All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture

by Harold Goldberg

  Inside the Japanese offices, Yamauchi ruled with an iron fist. He was not a gamer by any means. But he could smell a hit. At the end, it was up to Yamauchi whether a game would see the light of day. Game designers and engineers cowered when he was scheduled to look at one of their inventions. Everyone, including Miyamoto, worried about his approval to the point of hand wringing. When support came, it was better than sex with a dream partner. It validated the engineer. He felt worthy, accepted, a real man. It was something that money couldn’t buy. A thumbs-up from Yamauchi was validation, and in validation there was strength to go on to the next project, to start the crazed design process all over again. And if Yamauchi shook his head with a no, it was devastating, belittling, a sickening belly blow from which it took weeks to recover.

  In the United States, Nintendo launched a kind of fanzine that touted tips on how to play its games. Kids could also call a hotline for information about upcoming offerings. The enterprise was helmed not by a journalist but by a marketer, named Gail Tilden. Its purpose was not to report objective news, but to sell more games by saying nice things about Nintendo and Mr. Miyamoto. Because it was successful, this was the sad template for much of gaming “journalism” for many years to come. Videogame writers of the time were also dyed-in-the-wool fans who looked at the company with subjective eyes. Very few had hard news backgrounds; they didn’t need any semblance of objectivity when press releases and tips about how to play were all kids who played seemed to want. Not many asked the tough questions, for fear of being cut off by Nintendo. The long and short of it was that Nintendo presented itself as the new Disney. Anyone who wasn’t completely on board was deemed to be an enemy of the company. There was little transparency. To the contrary, there was a concrete wall so thick even Superman’s X-ray vision couldn’t permeate its molecules.

  Miyamoto was constantly lauded in Nintendo Power magazine as a hero, a star, a videogame character come to life, who could do no wrong. The well-kept secret of the time was that the shaggy-pated Miyamoto had as many as two dozen people working on games with him. But no matter. The not-so-subtle marketing word from Nintendo was clear: Mr. Miyamoto would save you, your very essence, if only you played his games. Miyamoto’s plate was full, and it became fuller as his star rose and he was required to make personal appearances and do interviews. When Miyamoto couldn’t take the pressure of helping to make so many games at one time, he began to haunt the pachinko gambling parlors of Kyoto. It was a way to blow off steam, to relax after a long day at work, “to escape the cycle of worries I had.” It likely wasn’t just one simple anxiety, which he had pushed aside in the name of game making. It was the confluence of many, not the least of which was Nintendo’s constant demand to have supremely successful games, one after the other. Yet pachinko began to become a habit, probably one at which the game designer began to lose money. Gambling was no longer a sweet release. Just as Donkey Kong took quarter after quarter from the determined gamer, pachinko took coin after coin from Miyamoto. After some time and effort, he substituted exercise in order to eschew the vice.

  Just as Miyamoto was lauded as the human face of Nintendo and the man who helped to save the videogame industry, Yamauchi was despised by many as the superpowerful puppeteer behind the scenes. His attitude served the company well, and his commandment that there should be space in the game universe for “one strong company and the rest weak” has been true throughout the history of videogame companies. But it alienated his family. And no one ever got the impression that Yamauchi was truly a happy man. He was too caught up in the constant hope and drive to be number one to have the time to enjoy life fully and completely … or even to save the girl. It happens in other industries, so much so that it’s almost considered cliché. Chicken mogul Frank Perdue was so business-driven that he had no family life and his wife eventually divorced him. Henry Ford was a complete workaholic as chief engineer with Edison Illuminating Company long before he began his auto manufacturing business.

  At least Miyamoto had his art and his family to save him. Once he got home in the evening, he would not think of videogames—most of the time. He could sit in his garden at night and still be transported to that world that tantalized him as a child.

  In the end, the often sullen Yamauchi only had his company to comfort him—and his endless love for the next dollar. He brought Nintendo and all of its weight home with him. His stomach would tie up in knots at the smallest error, and his moods swung as wildly as the stock market. He had taken over the family business, and like a loyal soldier, when called to duty, he made Nintendo the best videogame company in the world. He made people of all languages and many nations happy. Sullen as he could be, he was responsible for entertaining the millions of children of the world. Yet the great Yamauchi was never really at ease. Yes, Nintendo controlled nearly 90 percent of the worldwide console game market. Consumers purchased sixty-two million units of the NES console, far outpacing other systems of the day and eclipsing sales of the Atari 2600, which sold half as much in its heyday. Yes, Nintendo’s games were engineering feats that stoked many a gamer’s imagination. But Yamauchi always wanted more and more.

  Yet he could take solace in the fact that Miyamoto would always think the best of him for giving him his big break. For that reason alone, Miyamoto would always think of his boss as a good man. Yamauchi and Miyamoto, the oddest of bedfellows, made videogames popular in a way they had never been before. Mario, with that bush of a mustache, was on his way to becoming more recognizable than Mickey Mouse, no small feat indeed. Certainly, creating a star character was something Atari had never done, perhaps because Bushnell considered himself the star. (To be fair, no one else has had success with mascots, with the exception of Namco’s Pac-Man and Sega’s Sonic.) The plumber was so beloved by kids that they would remember him as they grew into college students and adults. Bob Hoskins would play Mario in a live-action Super Mario Bros. movie, which didn’t evoke a smidgeon of that essential sense of wonder. Better was The Wizard, a movie about an intense, joyful videogame competition featuring Super Mario Bros. 3—even before the game was released to the public. Beyond film, Mario smiled in a “Got Milk?” ad, toiled as the star of a syndicated weekly TV series, and was the first videogame celebrity to be memorialized in wax at Madame Tussaud’s museum. Adults, still wistful, would later buy Mario games for their kids; after all, they were brilliantly designed, and they were never lewd, crude, or demeaning. Not only were Mario games smart, trustworthy pieces of popular culture, they made Miyamoto the Walt Disney of games.

  Yet there would always be a mystery surrounding Miyamoto; while he had a fine sense of humor and a love for so much US culture, he could not speak English. So he spoke eloquently through games, which obsessed him. Nintendo mined this inscrutability to portray him, not as a mad scientist ever at work in his lab, but as more of a glad scientist who toiled so intensely, he didn’t have time to learn another language or talk intimately with the press. He would speak, but only under tightly controlled conditions. The occasional long-form interview still bubbled up over the years—notably, Nick Paumgarten’s 2010 New Yorker profile—but those occasions were very much exceptions to the Miyamoto rules. For the most part, writers got twenty minutes or half an hour with the legend, during which they might be able to submit a single tough question (if they dared even that). Fans would be left to muse upon a tiny crumb of fact, while everyone in the world awaited eagerly the next version of Mario or Zelda.

  In 1986, even as it held court upon the highest hill in the most magnificent of fortified castles, the Nintendo empire needed more. As they looked down upon the videogame world, there was one game Nintendo needed, one game Yamauchi coveted, one game Arakawa secretly yearned to own. It was a simple game, an addicting game, one that would herald the biggest-selling videogame series of all time, one that is played to this day and probably will be for decades to come. Its story is also one of the saddest, most frustrating dramas in entertainment history.

  * In a few years,
Magnavox would sue Nintendo for patent infringement. Nintendo would countersue, trying to invalidate Baer’s patent. Nintendo lost and had to continue paying royalties to Magnavox.

  * Nintendo’s previous effort, a clone of Space Invaders called Space Fever, lacked ingenuity. It was as if Nintendo didn’t have the smarts to work in videogames in any way, shape, or form. Only Sheriff, a Wild West game where one lone lawman had to fight against sixteen bandits, was better. While it was slow moving, it offered a sense of the Hollywood Western. After indulging, you wanted to swagger like John Wayne and quote lines from True Grit, like “Young fella, if you’re looking for trouble, I’ll accommodate ya.”

  * During the design phase, Miyamoto originally called the character that would become Mario “Mr. Video.” Like Alfred Hitchcock and the manga comic artists of the time who inspired him, Miyamoto hoped that his signature Mr. Video would appear in brief cameos in many games.

  FALLING BLOCKS, RISING FORTUNES

  Nineteen eighty-six. In the United States, it was the year of the yuppies, of overspending everywhere and the heavy haze of Macanudos emanating from private cigar bars. Masters of the Universe, the moniker Tom Wolfe gave to CEOs in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine, described the new videogame honchos perfectly. Nolan Bushnell had flamed out and sold out, but he still had a swagger as he flew the first President Bush around in his Learjet. Nintendo’s Yamauchi ruled the videogame roost with an iron fist. Coleco, which began as a maker of cheesy leather goods, hit it big with their Atari-inspired game consoles and then imploded when their Adam line of PCs didn’t work when you got them home.

  By 1986, the videogame world had recovered from its brief but grim recession, so much so that consoles and games accounted for a healthy $450 million in sales. The tally might have been much more, but Nintendo’s innovative Disk System, released only in Japan, featured games that could be hacked and copied. The smirking, hacking pirates of videogames went ho-ho-ho as offerings like Miyamoto’s The Legend of Zelda could be had for free if you had the right skills or the right connections.

  Much like the early days of the music industry, when R&B stars and master bluesmen received a Cadillac in lieu of millions in royalties, the videogame world was still full of carpetbaggers and snake oil salesmen. These Bastards of the Universe were game developer manipulators extraordinaire. And young Alexey Pajitnov, the man responsible for the biggest game phenomenon since Miyamoto’s Super Mario Bros., was about to be ripped off. If this had happened to a US developer like Nolan Bushnell, he would have yelled and moaned about unscrupulous business practices that were akin to torture.

  But Alexey Pajitnov, born in Soviet era Moscow, to middle class parents who were writers, wasn’t like that. Pajitnov was steeped in popular art from an early age, and he respected it. His mother, a well-regarded journalist whose focus was movies, took the child to many of the screenings she attended and the yearly Moscow Film Festival, as well. Pajitnov liked the action-oriented fare like James Bond as well as the intellectual on-screen machinations of the German cinema’s auteurs. While he and his family enjoyed viewing American culture from a distance, he was throughout his young life immersed in the theories of communism and the constant political repercussions of the Cold War. He and his family were raised to believe in the Soviet idea of common ownership, not capitalism and the American dream. While he was leery and even cynical about communism, it was these Russian tenets that would help him deal more easily with what would happen when the most alluring game in the batch of ten games he was coding began to take off.

  In school, Pajitnov gravitated to math because it offered a constant stream of puzzles for him to solve. He loved riddles and puzzles in general, including math games like Moonlanding and board games like Dungeons & Dragons (although the Russian translation of the time was terrible). Computers held his interest, but he didn’t exactly care for some of the drier, more technical aspects. He liked to muse upon the psychology of computing, what made people do certain things and why. Pajitnov considered himself a hacker, someone who took to coding for the pure, unadulterated art of it, like Steve “Slug” Russell and his pals had done so many years ago with Spacewar! The idea of money for art was not exactly an insult to the programmer, but he did not enter the world of coding with any thought of becoming rich. In his early twenties, he was already working in the area of artificial intelligence at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which was created in 1724 after a decree from the warring reformist Peter the Great. As Pajitnov moved through its corridors daily, he admired the expanse of the sprawling building, its tall ceilings, even its drafty corridors. He did not care for the pretense of the academy as a place for the Russian elite to gather in order to preen themselves. Certainly, he did not think of himself as special.

  Pajitnov had desk space in an echoing old hall, but he rarely used it. He spent most of his time at the computer table, where he placed his belongings and books, and smoked the strongest Russian cigarettes and drank the strongest tea he could find when evening approached. Sometimes, he’d spend sixty to seventy hours at the computer. He was that fascinated. But sometimes, he let loose, getting together with the team to drink hard. Those were the rare nights of debauchery, however. Pajitnov would often say to his cohorts, “Drinking is not compatible with working. For that you need fresh head.”

  With that clear mind, he kept going back to a game he played as a teenager, one that cost about 35 kopecks, or 40 cents. He had discovered the game back in the seventies, when he’d wandered into a toy store and begun looking at a dusty box of pentominoes. He pulled it off the shelf and opened it. Inside were seven plastic shapes that could be placed together to form a rectangle when he put them back in the box properly. The pentominoes game was likely based on the theories of polyominoes, first introduced as recreational mathematics dissection problems in Fairy Chess magazine in the 1930s, and later popularized by USC engineering professor and puzzle columnist Solomon Wolf Golomb in 1953. The game was always in the back of Pajitnov’s mind, and with the dawn of PCs, it was in the forefront again. He had seen bootleg versions of arcade games on computers. He thought, “I’m quite disappointed with the banality of ideas. The graphics fascinate me, like the Mario games. But they don’t keep me interested.” As if he were under a spell, he kept thinking about those shapes in that box, daydreaming about them. His mind was turning into a jigsaw puzzle–making machine. The opened toy store box was like Pandora’s, one that revealed little demons who would coax, nudge, and bully Pajitnov’s thoughts.

  In May 1984, he took a few long drags from his cigarette, bitched inwardly about the lack of tobacco in the wrapper, and coded at the old Elektronika 60 for so long that time seemed to stand still. He did this for two weeks, each night leaving the lab just before one a.m. to catch the last subway ride home. Sometimes, he was so stoked that the night got away from him and he couldn’t doze off, let alone sleep deeply. In the game he conceived, a kind of tight minimalism reigned. There was no timer, no way to score, no way to level up, no sounds, no color. It was just the hypnotic beauty of shapes falling silently, which, through the computer keyboard, had to be put together in rows at the bottom. Soon, his colleagues gathered around, mystified yet curious. The game was more than compelling. Beyond the skill needed to organize the pieces in rows, playing was like watching a soft rain on the water. It was peaceful, relaxing.

  “But what are the rules?” asked Dmitry Pavlovsky, a coworker who had made some games on his own as well, and who was interested in working with Pajitnov.

  “There are no rules yet. You just fit the shapes together.”

  Everyone in the computer center who played became an admirer. Pajitnov quietly confided to Pavlovsky, “I really think I have something.”

  Through Pavlovsky, Pajitnov met with a Vadim Gerasimov, a young computer genius who was interning at the academy. Pajitnov asked the sixteen-year-old to make a PC version of his new creation.

  “So what will you do with it
then?” asked Gerasimov.

  “Perhaps sell it,” said Pavlovsky.

  “Here? In the Soviet Union?” asked Gerasimov. The idea of individuals selling their own product was still highly irregular in the USSR. But he, too, loved the game, and made the personal computer version in less than three weeks. During the next month, the game was refined with sound, better graphics, and a way to keep score. They put some other games on a disk as well, including a clone of Xonix called Antic. Some say it was Gerasimov who copied the disk and passed it around. Others say Pajitnov made copies for colleagues, who made copies for friends, who made copies for their friends. Whatever the case, versions were being passed out all around Moscow. Tetris was the game people played far more than the others. The frenzy fed on itself. Copies were distributed and shared and then copied and shared again. They moved past the borders of Moscow to St. Petersburg and beyond the USSR itself. Not one was sold, not yet, not for even a ruble. Bootlegs of Tetris spread into Europe. For those in the know, it was the most alluring game they had ever played. And it cost them nothing. What a deal. “So much for selling it,” ruminated Pavlovsky.