Super Mario (15 page)

The controller was changed from a brick to a more ergonomic dog’s bone shape. There were now four rainbow-colored action buttons, not just two or three. In addition, there were two shoulder buttons. This broke away from Nintendo’s original simplicity. But if a designer needed six distinct buttons for six different actions (think
Street Fighter II
), the SNES could do that. The Genesis couldn’t.

What the SNES couldn’t do, though, was lift. The Genesis has a beefier processor, which let Sega games run as fast as its spiny mascot. The SNES would never be able to do that, and it wisely didn’t try. What made Nintendo so successful wasn’t its hardware but its games. And, of course, its acumen; locking up third-party developers, doling out needed chips only to the companies that pleased Nintendo the most, testing out concepts in regional markets, selling the razors cheaply and making a fortune on the blades.

Shigeru Miyamoto’s team was given a mere fifteen months to get to know the SNES, learn to program it, and spit out the first three games. His producer job became a writ-large version of a Game & Watch classic; running to the
Pilotwings
development team, then going to check in on the
F-Zero
group, then racing over to Team Mario. Miyamoto didn’t drink, so for stress relief he smoked and hit the pachinko parlors. But he had grown into the producer role with aplomb. At last, Miyamoto was living the artist’s dream; to imagine an idea, have others do the work, and receive all the credit!

The Mario atelier was designing
Super Mario World
with two different goals in mind. One was to create a worthy follow-up to
Super Mario Bros. 3
. A new item, a feather, let Mario fly. A spin jump lets Mario crouch down to careen up extra high. Mario’s fire flower not only killed bad guys, but also made them turn into valuable coins. And to make Mario’s powers less of a crapshoot, players could gain and stockpile power-ups, deploying them when needed.

The other guiding principle was to show off what the SNES could do. Certain yellow bricks spun when hit, an animation the NES would have been hard-pressed to do convincingly. The bricks themselves were given softer edges, like well-worn toy blocks, which made Mario seem more like a toy himself. Mario now had a white circle on his hat, with a red M on it. His overalls were a lighter blue, more suggestive of denim. He could duck, be cartoonishly scorched, and shriek in comic horror at his fate.

Sometimes showing off and making a good game went hand in hand. Miyamoto, for years, had wanted Mario to do one specific thing he could never attain with the NES architecture: ride a freakin’ dinosaur. Now Mario could. In keeping with the series’ nomenclature confusion, the dinosaur he rode was called Yoshi (big Y)—but the species of dinosaur was also called a yoshi (little Y). Taxonomy was never Miyamoto’s strongest suit. While Mario stayed the same size, Yoshi started out small, and needed to be made bigger by his signature attack: gulping down enemies.

Many game changes were to strike the right balance for the best flow. Halfway through every level was a checkpoint: if Mario died, he would come back to life at the checkpoint, instead of the beginning. After playing through a level once, Mario could quit mid-level, just by hitting start. These functions, along with plentiful warp doors, worked as a virtual fast-forward button, letting gamers replay their favorite parts.

These changes seemed minor, but there were more substantial alterations. The world maps looked more like maps than grids. Moving the far mountains slowly as Mario walked, called parallax scrolling, augmented the illusion of depth. Redrawing all the sprites to look more 3-D helped too. Finishing an area called the Special Zone caused a sprite swap, turning piranha plants into pumpkins, giving turtles Mario masks to wear, and switching many other map and creature colors around.

But the drop-dead date of November 21, 1990 (its Japanese release), was unavoidable. Miyamoto had been late with all three
Super Mario
games, and didn’t like the feeling that ready or not, out this one would go in time for Christmas. One of his quotes has become regularly used in game design: “A late game is only late until it ships. A bad game is bad until the end of time.” The finished game has a hefty seventy-two levels, and rewarded players who found its dozens and dozens of secrets. It could have had even more, Miyamoto rued. But he still considers it his favorite of all the Mario titles.

Super Mario World
was the pack-in game for the SNES, so it was the default guide to the new game system. The SNES sold for twenty-five thousand yen, a little over two hundred dollars, more than the TG-16 or the Genesis. It sold out in mere hours. New shipments were sent to stores at night, to avoid falling off the truck into the underground economy.
Super Mario World
would move three and a half million copies in Japan, and the SNES a whopping 17 million units.

Three days after the U.S. launch on August 13, 1991, American stores were out of consoles too. Some retailers started bundling the system with additional games, tacking on another C-note worth of goods onto a two-hundred-dollar purchase. Almost 13 million people paid for
SMW
bundle units domestically, close to four times the number in Japan. More than 23 million SNESes were sold stateside overall. The system even earned America’s ultimate compliment—it made it on
The Simpsons
, where fan favorite Ralph Wiggum called his principal’s boss “Super Nintendo” instead of “superintendent.” Every game system since has launched with various retail “bundles,” adding mandatory extra controllers or games to beef up the store’s sales.

Promoting the SNES on Pepsi and Kool-Aid packages helped young people know about the product launch. Oh, and Kraft’s Super Mario Macaroni & Cheese, and Sunshine’s Super Mario cookies. And the four-pack of Shasta sodas—Mario Punch, Luigi Berry, Yoshi Apple, and Princess Toadstool Cherry. Mario’s face was as sure a sign of unhealthy food as high-fructose corn syrup. (A golden opportunity was missed to rebrand Nes-Quik to SNES-Quik.)

But as Gore Vidal said, it’s not enough to succeed: others must fail. The SNES and
Super Mario World
were both smashes, but gamers didn’t abandon Sega just because Nintendo had a 16-bit system. There was finally a balance in the video game world. Nintendo’s years of writing its own rules for retailers and customers were coming to an end. It could no longer, say, try to muscle Blockbuster out of renting its games for three dollars for three days. If you wanted to rent a SNES game, Nintendo preferred you did so from a hotel room, for seven dollars an hour. But the big N wasn’t the only game in town anymore.

Perhaps that’s why a third style of NES was designed, and released in 1993 for a mere fifty dollars. It played the same NES
Mario
games, but removed the zero-insertion-force port for a top-loading toasterstyle slot, and a dog-bone controller. It also lost the expensive 10NES chip, so it could play unlicensed games. Sega still put out Master System games despite the Genesis’s popularity. Nintendo—without acknowledging it—was taking a page from Sega’s book, and keeping the fan base for the previous system happy.

For this redesigned NES, Miyamoto tried his hand at designing a puzzle game, with the seemingly simple
Yoshi
. (Around this time he also began fantasizing about a toy game as devilishly simple as Enzo Rubik’s Cube, which is still just a daydream twenty years later.) The
Yoshi
screen was only four columns wide, and pieces (they looked like Mario villains) fell two at a time. Mario had to shuffle the pieces so like fell on like. It was fun for what it was, but nowhere near
Tetris
, or even
Dr. Mario
.

Nintendo also rejiggered a Japanese golf game,
Mario Golf
, as
NES Open Tournament Golf
. The American release had fewer courses, easier holes, and more replayability, thanks to adding prize money for good performance. It was a microcosm of the difference between what Japan wanted—hard simulation games to be studied and then discarded—and the United States—fun arcade-style endeavors that could be replayed over and over.

Assuming, of course, that America wanted Nintendo at all, instead of Sega.

D
ustin Hoffman—two-time best actor Oscar winner, six-time nominee—wanted to play Super Mario. That there would be a movie made about Mario was eventual: it couldn’t be worse than action movies about paintball (
Gotcha!
), gymnastics (
Gymkata
), or skateboarding (
Gleaming the Cube
). For pity’s sake, the Garbage Pail Kids and Howard the Duck had movies.

And one of the greatest actors in the world wanted to play him. It was too bad. Nintendo wanted Danny DeVito: you couldn’t get a better physical match. And DeVito was in more family friendly movies: kids knew the Penguin from
Batman Returns
more than Carl Bernstein or Ratso Rizzo.

But Danny DeVito wasn’t interested: he was directing, producing, and acting in
Hoffa
, with Jack Nicholson as the union leader. Nintendo’s producers signed another comic actor, who like DeVito was trying to move beyond just comedy. They landed him for five million dollars: he was taller and thinner than Mario, and he wasn’t Italian, but he did have dark hair and a family film pedigree. Tom Hanks it was.

Nintendo, in perhaps not the best use of its seasoned technology mindset, didn’t want to pay five million for its lead. It wanted Bob Hoskins, a versatile British actor the approximate size and shape of Mario, who was asking for less. Kids knew him from
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
and
Hook
. So Nintendo went with Hoskins, and in the first of many dire signs, fired Tom Hanks for not being a bankable movie star. (This could have made his career: would Hanks have won Oscars for
Philadelphia
and
Forrest Gump—
would he have even been cast—if he was fresh in people’s minds as Mr. Super Mario?)

For Luigi, producers picked a rising star named John Leguizamo, also great with impressions, who passed over a starring sitcom deal for the role. The film used Princess Daisy (of the Game Boy’s
Super Mario Land
) instead of Princess Toadstool as the heroine, probably because Daisy wasn’t called Toadstool. Daisy was written as Luigi’s love interest, as played by Samantha Mathis. (She and Leguizamo dated during filming.)

King Koopa went to Dennis Hopper, an old hand at playing villains. (And a step up from Mr. Belvedere.) But this King Koopa wasn’t a big evil turtle but, strangely, a human who had evolved from a
Tyrannosaurus rex.
The whole movie had a devolution theme, with the parallel world Mario and Luigi go into being attacked by biological forces of decay. It’s way more David Cronenberg or David Lynch than Walt Disney.

The directors, Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, seemed like a fine choice on paper. The British partners had cut their teeth directing New Wave videos for Elvis Costello and the Talking Heads. They also created Max Headroom, that definitive eighties character, an emblem for the bizarre world we thought computers would make. After capably directing a standard thriller (
DOA
), they were ready to handle a big budget (forty-eight million dollars, a lot in those days), a large cast, and a lot of action and special effects.

The set for the alternate universe “Dinohattan” was the interior of an old cement warehouse outside of Wilmington, North Carolina. It was big and crowded, with lots of extras dressed up for a rave. Various NES and SNES equipment was used in the movie: the devolution gun, for instance, was a clearly repainted Super Scope. Bits like that made the
Blade Runner
– inspired production design the most interesting part of the film.

The directors had a shoot-length argument with the studio over whether they were making a movie for adults (they filmed a scene with strippers, which was cut) or for children (they refused to have Mario and Luigi in costume, thinking them silly, but eventually relented). Production ran very long: Leguizamo and Hoskins started doing shots of scotch just to make it through the day. Hoskins hadn’t known he was making a video game movie until his son told him who Mario was. Rewrites to the script were done on a daily basis. Rocky Morton reportedly poured a cup of hot coffee over an extra, because he wanted his costume dirtier. Leguizamo drove a van drunk during one shot, and braked too hard. It caused the sliding door to slam on Hoskins’ finger: he wore a pink cast for most subsequent shots. The crew started to wear T-shirts with rude phrases the directors had said, as a form of protest.

The result, a film that seemed embarrassed and apologetic about its very existence, was not fun for kids or adults. It opened in fourth place over Memorial Day weekend of 1993, and within a month had dropped from the top twenty. The dinosaurs of
Jurassic Park
chased it out of theaters. Morton and Jankel retreated into directing commercials. Hoskins told the
Guardian
it’s “the worst thing I ever did.” Leguizamo at least got a relationship out of it—until Mathis dumped him for new costar River Phoenix. But, as with true film flops, it disappeared from theaters so quickly that most people weren’t even aware of it. It didn’t even get nominated for a Razzie—for that, Mario should thank his lucky star sprites he came out the same year as three Sylvester Stallone films.

 

GAME DESIGNERS IN KYOTO WERE EXCITED FOR A REASON that had nothing to do with Hollywood. Uemura had designed eight “modes” for the SNES, called Mode 0 through Mode 7. This gave designers eight different game machines to program. Mode 7 was the most dramatic: It allowed the camera to scale and rotate a 2-D surface, creating what appeared to be a 3-D world. It was a narcissist’s dream come true: the world literally revolved around the character. And if that surface was, say, a racetrack, you could continually move the point of reference to simulate velocity.

Mode 7 was the place to be. Certainly it wasn’t something that the Genesis or the weak TG-16 could do. Shigeru Miyamoto based two of his three launch games around Mode 7 architecture: the third was, of course,
Super Mario World
.
Pilotwings
started life as
Dragonfly
, a game about gun-ladened insects involved in dogfights. By the time the game was finished, the insect combat theme had morphed into a more simple concept: flight simulator. The ground got very blurry up close, but players only saw the ground right before a crash—or a safe landing.