Super Mario (13 page)

No matter. The Game Boy sold out in Japan upon its launch in April 1989, and sold out in America four months later. (Toys “R” Us offered to be the exclusive home of the Game Boy: Arakawa was smart enough to say no.) Millions upon millions of each of the four launch games were sold. President Bush was photographed using one. It was huge in Europe, much bigger than the NES. A Russian cosmonaut took one into space—to play
Tetris
, of course.
Super Mario Land
alone sold 18.4 million copies over its lifetime. It more than made up for no NES Mario game released in 1989. The Game Boy would go on to sell a flabbergasting 118 million units. There are more Game Boys in the world than people in Mexico. You could tile half the states in New England with Game Boys. Nintendo, it seemed, could do no wrong. The prestigious
Japan Economic Journal
that year named Nintendo the best company in Japan, besting Toyota.

Nintendo was so confident, it even closed the book on one of its first cash cows, the Game & Watch. The final game,
Mario the Juggler
, was Nintendo in a nutshell. Its simple premise was that Mario had to keep juggling. It was, in fact, a redesigned version of the original Game & Watch game
Ball
, from ten years earlier. Simple, inexpensive to make, proven popularity, a certain Italian mascot: all of the Big N’s grace notes. Long-running TV shows have aired final episodes that weren’t as contemplative, respectful, or tributary. One wonders if Gunpei Yokoi wanted to include Mario bowing a tearful farewell as an LCD curtain fell.

The Game Boy had loads of room for improvement. Any system with a color screen was a better game-playing machine. Atari’s Lynx and Sega’s Game Gear both claimed that: both used backlights, too. Their games were graphically superior to regular NES games, let alone Game Boy’s four flavors of creamed spinach. But—as Yokoi knew they must—these handhelds gobbled up batteries at a shocking rate, six every four hours. A fraction of the Game Boy shelf space was allotted to whatever high-price, high-quality, high-weight competitor was out there. They never caught on, despite years of marketing and many solid games.

Gamers already had a Game Boy by then. They already equated portable consoles with puzzles, low-impact gameplay, and inexpensiveness. Sega, Atari, and TurboGrafix had color screens, but did they have a Yokoi? Did they have a Miyamoto? If not, too bad. Every new all-green Game Boy title made competitors green—with envy.

E
very issue of
Nintendo Power
contained a Howard and Nester comic strip. Howard was the clueless do-gooder, and Nester the wild child. They’d jump into game worlds (whatever was on the cover the previous month) and pass on a game tip. Nester looked like a skate punk waiting for puberty. Howard was a tall gangly redhead in a bowtie—the red hair tying into the Richie Cunningham/Jimmy Olson/Archie Andrews trifecta of unthreatening all-American rubes.

Nester was fictional, hence his name, the NES-ster. Howard, though, was based on Howard Phillips, one of the American branch’s first employees. (And yes, there was a Howdy Doody quality to him.) Phillips had been the first person to think that
Donkey Kong
was a better game than
Radar Scope
. He was one of the original six who had converted the two thousand units shipped over from Jersey. During the Universal lawsuit, he flew to New York to demonstrate
Donkey Kong
in court. A few years later, he moved to the New York area and spent months setting up World of Nintendo displays. He helped choose which games from the hundreds of Famicon titles would be NES launch releases. His current job was to evaluate games up for review, passing on notes for changes. Most designers admitted his suggestions were right on the money. After the NES launch he had been given the official job description, on business cards and everything, of Game Master.

As a
Nintendo Power
editor, Phillips helped come up with the modern strategy guide. Images of each board of
Super Mario Bros.
were stitched together to display every obstacle and villain Mario would face, and printed small enough so a good dozen screen were included per row. The result looked like Cinerama film strips from a virtual world. The board stretched on for miles, branching off into multiple avenues, sometimes betraying when an underground jaunt didn’t correspond in length with its aboveground stretch.

This was done to help sell the games, but it had a value beyond mere marketing. The guides helped gamers through tough sequences, which not only kept them playing but showed them facets of the game that only experts would otherwise find. Strategy guides for video games now bring in over a hundred million dollars a year. In addition, every game (no matter how small) has a dozen or more fan-made walkthroughs, contributed and collected at sites like gameFAQs.com. The Mario game walkthroughs are the length of Victorian novels.

“Howard” disappeared from the strip two years into its run, replaced by just Nester. This was because Howard Phillips himself left Nintendo, poached away by LucasArts to be their games guru. Nintendo was in continual expansion, so having someone leave was almost unprecedented, especially from the job of “spokesgamer.” (It still is: Nintendo employees stay on for decades.) The coolest job at the coolest company had its downside, though: long hours; low wages—despite Nintendo literally making billions each year, it paid its employees conservatively; and poor job security. Howard Phillips had clear competition as company mascot, competition who sold millions of games every year. Nintendo’s focus was shifting from gamers (like Phillips) to games. And there just wasn’t anyone in creation who could be a worthy rival to Mario.

Since the late 1970s, Sega wasn’t so much the Pepsi to Nintendo’s Coke as it was the RC Cola. It had been Rosencrantzing and Guildensterning its way around the gaming world for decades, always buffeted by the wake of others, rarely the one making waves.

Sega began life in 1940 as Standard Games, running penny arcades on military bases in the territory of Hawaii. A decade later, under the name of Service Games, it merged with American expatriate David Rosen’s company, which was putting photo booths around Tokyo. The combined venture was called Sega Enterprises—SeGa for Service Games.

Sega was bought in 1969 by Gulf + Western, an American
zaibatsu-
style conglomerate parodied in the Mel Brooks film
Silent Movie
as Engulf + Devour. Rosen stayed on as Sega moved from electromechanical hits like
Periscope
to video games such as
Zaxxon
and
005
, a James Bond knockoff. The arcade titles (including
Congo Bongo
, a suspiciously familiar game about an angry ape throwing things) brought in $200 million worth of quarters over the years. But Sega also tried its hand at some home consoles—1981’s SG-1000 and a cheapo sequel a few years later. Gulf + Western dropped Sega like a hot potato in 1983, thinking that gaming was a bubble that had just burst.

Sega’s third console was the Mark III, which it quickly renamed the Master System. Its merits were dubious: it was backward compatible with two previous game systems no one knew about; it could accept cards or cartridge-based games; its mascot was an egg-shaped spaceship name Opa-Opa. When Opa-Opa flopped as a character, Sega replaced the spaceship with Alex Kidd, a monkey boy whose dull, difficult, different adventures (in subsequent games he fights ninjas, then playing cards, then fights a boss called Mari-Oh [!], then is a BMX rider) gave him little identity. Alex was a winded rival’s sad attempt to “make” a Mario by plopping the same character in radically divergent games.

Then, like the dawning of a new day, came the Genesis. Called the Mega Drive in Japan when it was released in 1988, it was a 16-bit system, allowing for exponentially better graphics, sound, and—most crucially—speed. More than sixty possible colors, eighty movable sprites on screen at a time, and a resolution rate that was actually slowed so that the processor could have more juice for faster animation.

Any 1988 console would (and should) be leaps and bounds better than the NES, which was five years old. The paradox of launching a game system was how to attract third-party support when they would only make games for a system with a big install base . . . which of course would only happen with third-party support. Sega was having little luck attracting vendors to design for their great machine. Nintendo had inserted exclusivity clauses for all of its third-party designers, to starve any possible competitor. If they released a Genesis game, they’d be breaching their contract.

Furthermore, Nintendo wouldn’t let companies make their own products: everything was made by Nintendo, to further its control of distribution. This micromanagement came to a head during a chip shortage in Japan, where Nintendo both slashed orders down to a fraction of their size and forbade companies from finding their own U.S. or European chips. Those who complained could see their chip allotment cut further, and fewer mentions in
Nintendo Power
. Making your business partners codependently kiss your ring in exchange for such paltry treatment was a recipe for misery, and game makers no doubt hoped Sega would offer an escape hatch from the draconian Nintendo.

The Genesis sold for $189, nearly double the NES price. It was backwards compatible with the Master System, not much of a feature since few in America had one. In Japan, it wasn’t doing particularly well: it was third, behind the NES and then NEC’s Turbo-Grafx 16. The TG-16 was very popular in Japan—it had a 16-bit graphics chip before the Genesis did—but it cheated with an 8-bit microprocessor and wasn’t as robust a machine. Still, Nintendo’s and NEC’s market advantage of being there first and building a customer base shut Sega out. (The Genesis and the TG-16 launched in the United States around the same time: the Genesis’s superior games would essentially end NEC’s chance of American success. It ranked a distant fourth in the U.S. market.)

Sega made bold moves to win over American audiences, which in toto would achieve so much success that any claims of Nintendo’s coercive monopoly would crumble. It allied with Tonka to distribute its systems. It called out Nintendo by name in its ads, running sideby-side pictures that Sega’s Japanese exec thought were in bad taste. It made its own series of sports games, paying out millions to the biggest names in the field—Joe Montana, Tommy Lasorda, Arnold Palmer, Pat Riley, and (in a possible bid for industrial sabotage) hockey’s Super Mario Lemieux—for their names and likenesses. (Nintendo had stayed far away from athlete licensing ever since Mike Tyson was accused of spousal abuse.) It lured computer game giant Electronic Arts, which Nintendo had never hired, to make Genesis games. Sega even hired the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, for a beat-em-up called
Moonwalker
. It happily sold its games to Blockbuster.

And, in 1991, it unleashed its Sonic boom.
Sonic the Hedgehog
was a new genre of game, a mix of racing game and platformer. Sonic’s goal was ostensibly the same as Mario’s: trek from one end of the world to the other, while picking up all the goodies. But while Mario’s focus was on replaying each level until all the treasures were found, Sonic’s was on lightning-quick reflexes and the adrenaline rush of caroming up hills, through loop-de-loops, around lateral twists, and then banging into pinball bumpers to do it all again backward. Sonic used only one button, jump. This was done to simplify game play—Mario and his wardrobe of costumes seemed baroque by comparison. Even Sonic’s jump was literally sharp. He spun into a quill-lined ball to bowl over others. Each impact with an opponent presumably left them covered in barbs.

Sonic’s creator, his Miyamoto, was Yuji Naka. Naka was young: he had been in high school during the crash of ’83. He was from Osaka, and had grown up a generation removed from the war. He spoke fluent English, but loved Japanese synth-pop. He was handsome. Figuring he’d learn more with on-the-job training, he never went to college, and talked his way into Sega as a programmer. He had cut his teeth on the
Phantasy Star
line of role-playing games, which were easily among the Master System’s best. He had a hard time managing staff, preferring to do everything himself. For fun, and to show off, he built an NES emulator for the Master System.

Sonic was different: he was the poster child for the ADHD generation, an anime speedster with spiky hair, a constant smirk, and what in retrospect would be the defining hallmark of the nascent 1990s: “attitude.” He looked like Mickey Mouse channeling Sid Vicious, or Felix the Cat as a base jumper. Sonic’s finger waggled at you from the title screen, like he was on
The Jerry Springer Show
(which also premiered in 1991). If you left the controller idle while playing, he impatiently tapped his feet. As a character, he was expressly built to showcase Nintendo’s weaknesses. Mario was jolly: Sonic was rude. Mario was happily unrushed: Sonic’s express purpose was to rush. Mario changed into lots of clever outfits. Sonic didn’t have to change: he was as ruthlessly perfect as a shark.

This was new for Nintendo. Plenty of people had made inferior side-scrolling platform adventures. They were fan fiction at best, people who didn’t understand what made Mario tick trying to duplicate his efforts. Naka’s
Sonic
was a four-fingered glove across Nintendo’s cheek. He cast all of Nintendo’s positives as negatives. Affordability and creativity became inferiority and impotence. Nintendo was popular? Well, as the middle-school logic goes, it’s not cool anymore if everyone likes it. If Nintendo was the jovial uncle Mario happy to play with the kids, then the Genesis was the rebellious teen cousin Sonic who drove too fast and snuck cigarettes.

This argument between corporate mascots is, of course, risible. Sega and Nintendo were in the same business, operating under the same rules. Corporate philosophy may drive a board of directors’ meeting, but for the designers trying to digitally paint a background or map out some extra processing power, it was academic. Yet this was a serious issue for the young consumer. Mario was lame and Sonic was cool, went the new social paradigm. You could still play a Mario game, just like you could go pick flowers for your mom if you wanted. At school you pretended you were allowed to stay up late to watch the overtime, you said you loved all the hit new music, and you praised Sonic for being def and rad and bitchin’.