Super Mario (14 page)

Worst of all for Nintendo was, appropriately, Sonic’s speed. From its launch day on June 23,
Sonic
was the Genesis’ new pack-in game. Anyone who recently bought a Genesis with
Altered Beast
packed in could receive a free
Sonic
. Sega even retrofitted a version to play on the Master System.
Sonic
soon appeared in a hit series of cartoons, comic books, and all the merchandise that went in between. Sega dropped the Genesis’s price to $150, and set up a domestic gaming division to makes games for American audiences. After fifty years in the gaming business, Sega was an enfant terrible.

Nintendo hadn’t had an easy climb to the top, but once it was there it continued to act like a team down by fourteen, instead of up by twenty-one. (Psych journals have reported on this “overdog” effect, showing that teams work harder when they have more face to lose.) It made toy stores, who usually had a “December 12” policy of not having to pay for any shipments until well into the Christmas season, pay up-front for everything. It continued to manufacture all cartridges, putting third-party vendors at Nintendo’s mercy during parts shortages. It set up its own divisions in the United Kingdom and Canada. It went after rental companies like Blockbuster. It attacked Taiwainese software pirates. For all the billions it was bringing in, it took almost no risks. Such was the benefit of controlling the distribution.

Sega found a way to challenge Nintendo despite not having available third-party support, or an established fan base, or known brands.
Sonic
wasn’t a perfect game—it was very short, and too easy. But pointing that out in public would be treating them as equals, which played into
Sonic
’s and Sega’s game. For Pete’s sake, Paul McCartney was just in Japan, and he passed up a visit to Mount Fuji to meet Shigeru Miyamoto. Any Beatles stopping by Sega headquarters? “Sega is nothing,” Yamauchi said to a reporter, a quote that ended up pasted onto many Sega employees’ doors.

Minoru Arakawa’s strategy to fight Sonic, then, was to do little other than cross his fingers that Sega went bankrupt. Mario licensing was big: the first of a dozen
Nintendo Adventure
books had just hit bookstores, featuring choose-your-own-adventure style adventures for Mario. Nintendo already had its new 16-bit console in development. It would be foolish to rush it to market too early, or to launch in the United States and Japan simultaneously: Japan was the acid test for gaming. (One that Sega failed, incidentally.)

But maybe they could gin up a new Mario game, a sort of hail Mario pass. Gunpei Yokoi’s team had designed an excellent Game Boy puzzle title, which built on the success of
Tetris
. The screen starts out full of blocks in one of three hues, and the player has to drop two-block units down to clear the rows. It played like starting a half-lost game of
Tetris
. And, it was a Mario game. The game field was a bottle, the blocks were viruses, and Mario had to drop “pills” to clear the board. It was closer to waste management than medicine, but
Garbage Man Mario
didn’t have a good ring to it.
Dr. Mario
did, though. And since its graphic needs were so basic, quality versions could be made for the NES, Game Boy, and the arcade. (Where one of the big hits of the year was Sega’s own puzzle game,
Columns
.)

Dr. Mario
did quite well, selling more than five million copies, further establishing the puzzle genre as a viable field.
Tetris
had given gamers a jones for puzzle games. And while great ones were hard to make, imperfect ones practically grew on trees. For the Game Boy especially, it seemed half of all the new games released were puzzle games:
Boxxle
,
Pipe Dream
,
Qix
. But only a few had the simplicity of game play and design to be intuitive:
Dr. Mario
,
Tetris
, and
Columns
. (In fact, Nintendo released a combo cartridge called
Tetris & Dr. Mario
.)

Another
Dr. Mario
accomplishment was to upgrade Mario to the star of a game that had nothing to do with Mario’s wheelhouse of jumping, costumes, turtles, saving princesses from King Koopa, etc. It was a puzzle game, pure and simple. Having Mario be in it was fine—discovering him in a Nintendo game was like finding the Alfred Hitchcock cameo, or searching out the word Nina in an Al Hirschfeld drawing. But to
name
the game after him? Who would see the word “Mario” and think “puzzle game”?

Dr. Mario
wasn’t phoned in, and Nintendo felt its quality earned the right to have Mario on the cover. Mario was a celebrity endorser, Michael Jordan in overalls. While Sega was building its mascot Sonic with mercenary aplomb, Nintendo turned Mario into the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

Sonic’s rebellious attitude apparently wasn’t a whole-cloth invention from Yuji Naka. He cut ties with Sega’s Japanese headquarters—he wasn’t being paid what he deserved, he said—and went to work for one of Sega’s new U.S. divisions. He brought a slew of Japanese designers with him; the development team was a little bit of Tokyo in the heart of Los Angeles. It was as if Naka couldn’t stay, but didn’t really want to leave, either. There is a philosophical term invented by Schopenhauer for being equally hurt by staying too close or staying too far away. It is called the hedgehog’s dilemma—think prickly animals needing to huddle together for body heat.

Naka continued working on more
Sonic
games, eventually weaving in a supporting cast—Tails the fox, Knuckles the Echidna, another hedgehog named Amy Rose—that reinforced Sonic’s bad-boy image. Amy Rose pined for Sonic—but he was too busy to ever notice. Tails looked up to Sonic like a younger sibling. Knuckles was Sonic’s bitter rival. All existed to smartly shine Sonic’s rising star, and make him the centerpiece of the game.

Mario, on the other hand, didn’t need a crew of characters who all said how awesome he was. He was kept purposefully mute, a mere avatar for the audience, his specificity of look and demeanor making him that much more universal. Nintendo would not change its actions just because a competitor had finally made some grounds in terms of market share.

Besides, the next Mario game in the pipeline would crush Sega.

T
he man behind the Nintendo Entertainment System was Masayuki Uemura. Uemura had grown up in Japan’s poor postwar years without much money. He taught himself engineering, and successfully built a remote-controlled airplane from bits of scrap he found in a junkyard. This skill led him to study electrical engineering in college, and then to work for Sharp with the new technology of solar cells. He specialized in optical semiconductors, which were the infrastructure of the power source.

Part of Uemura’s job was explaining this new technology to potential clients. One day around 1971, Sharp sent him, with his thatch of thick hair parted evenly over a growing forehead, to a potential client in Kyoto. It was a toy and card manufacturer named Nintendo. Uemura and one of Nintendo’s engineers, Gunpei Yokoi, hit it off, as only two grown men still interested in designing toys can. Yokoi’s knack for finding the fun in everything, combined with Uemura’s knowledge of the solar cells, could bear fruit.

Or it could bear arms. This solar-cell technology could be used for a light gun game. Shooting a light gun at a sheet of such cells would light up only the one that was hit. It’d be as direct as pushing a button on a calculator. But it would require a whole screen of photodiodes, which was impractical.

It would take an engineering genius to think of a practical solution; luckily, two of them were working on the project. The trick was to reverse the iconic thinking of the gun as the transmitter and the screen as the receiver. If the gun were the
receiver
, all you would need was one small photodiode in the cannon. For the screen to be the
transmitter
, whatever image it currently showed would have to be replaced (when the trigger was pulled) for a single frame with blackness, then another frame of blackness save for the white target. If the photodiode ever saw white, then it was aimed at the target at the time of firing. Thus was born Nintendo’s Beam Gun, one of its first hit electronic games. Out of this technology grew a slew of Nintendo products: the
Wild Gunman
electromechanical arcade game, the
Laser Clay Pigeon Shooting System
(which set up in bowling alleys), and the NES Zapper.

Uemura stayed on at Nintendo, and became not only its technical guru but also one of President Yamauchi’s wisest advisors. When he saw the Magnavox Odyssey, he told Yamauchi that Nintendo could get into the same business, if it partnered with someone with experience making mass-market electronics products. That led to a partnership with Mitsubishi, and the Color TV Game 6 and 15.

Once the Game & Watch line was a hit in 1980, Uemura started work on a new home console, this one cartridge-based. Just a few years had made for a tremendous increase in technology speed, and for much less yen. Arcade-quality graphics, stereo sound, and screens brimming with sprites were now possible. He could even make a 16-bit system, more powerful than most personal computers at the time.

Uemura remembered, however, that this was Nintendo. Yamauchi would have a fit if he saw how much 16-bit processors cost. Uemura scaled down his ambitions to 8 bits. Yamauchi helped lower the costs in his own way: brutal negotiations. He promised Ricoh a sale of three million semiconductors, only if they were sold at the bargain price of two thousand yen each. Nintendo’s computers would cost less to make and could be sold for less, while still being an order of magnitude better than the Atari 2600 and its ilk.

The Famicon took a few years to develop, and as it moved to the United States and became the NES it lost many of its computer features. But it still had flaws. While the Famicon was top-loading, the NES was set up like a VCR, with cartridges inserted sideways. Too much pressure, or too much use, could make the connector pins bend. And the wide alley collected dust. Notoriously, people tried to fix their dusty systems by blowing into the NES, and onto their cartridges’ exposed pins. Moist air, though, was to computer parts as garlic was to vampires. Uemura knew that the “zero-insertion-force” drive on the NES was a mistake, even if it hadn’t affected American sales. He’d not make the same mistake again on his new video game system.

The mere fact that Yamauchi allowed a successor to the NES took years of argument. The Atari 2600, the Apple II, the Vic-20: all became dead as the Sargasso sea once their successors were announced. Consumers didn’t want to buy a system with a death date, developers didn’t want to program for it, and retailers didn’t want to stock it. And for every successful successor—the Commodore 64 for the Vic-20—there was an Edsel-ish Atari 5200. Yamauchi didn’t want to pull the brakes on the gravy train just yet.

He had already experienced one hardware failure—the Famicon Disk System. It was an add-on peripheral that accepted proprietary three-inch floppy disks, which contained more storage than a regular Famicon cartridge. That is, until developers started putting extra chips in the cartridges, making games that started out life as disk games, like
Super Mario Bros.
, playable on the NES. The disks’ other feature was their erasability: when you’re done with one game, wipe it clean at the game store and load on another. But the idea of paying for a license was new: what if you wanted to replay the old game? Yamauchi didn’t help by inflicting onerous licenses on any store who wanted a Disk System hub. Despite selling in the millions, the Disk System never made it out of Japan.

And Nintendo’s “Family Computer Communications Network System”—using the Japanese Famicon’s modem capability—wasn’t the huge success Yamauchi had envisioned either. People needed a computer, a screen, and a modem to download recipes, trade stocks (the NintenDow?), and read sports scores. But it also took a societal evolution, and society was still getting used to video games and computers. It would be another decade before “the series of tubes” (as a joke t-shirt put it, depicting Super Mario navigating some pipes) would snake their way into the world’s homes. Not even the game sellers showed much interest in joining “Club Super Mario,” a supposed pipeline for new product information.

The Turbo-Grafx-16 and the Genesis were gaining market share. Their graphics were undeniably more detailed: they were better engines for gaming. People hadn’t stopped buying Nintendo games, but “Nintendo” was no longer synonymous for “video game.” Arakawa’s laissez-faire strategy wasn’t working. Nintendo had to act—but when? Like a squad leader waiting for the right second to order his archers to fire, Yamauchi waited, and waited, and waited. One day in 1988, he saw the whites of their eyes, and gave the order: Develop a 16-bit game system.

The new system would be called the Super Famicon, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in America. The entire console was given the adjective of its most popular game series, Super Mario. (That Mario’s face wasn’t emblazoned on the D-pads was a sign of restraint.) Backward compatibility would have cost an extra seventy-five dollars per unit, so Yamauchi and Awakawa decided to forego it. It was a tough call, but being inexpensive was worth the ire of NES owners.

Uemura decided that, as with the NES, the SNES would be designed to showcase the audio and visual aspects of the game. Its microprocessor, the 65816 (this was still the era when chips were numbered instead of named) dated from 1984, so by 1990 it was well understood, and widely available at a low cost. Two additional chips were used in tandem to make the graphics. The SNES, essentially, could show a digital photo slideshow if it wanted.

The sound was beefed up, too: eight-channel, 16-bit sound (including a digital signal processor good enough to be in a synthesizer) that was almost completely removed architecturally from the graphics. You want a digital voice? A clip of a song? A barrage of sounds effects for a character’s actions? Can do.