Super Mario (19 page)

For Mario fans not old enough to drive, how about remote-controlled cars and helicopters? Or Mario fuzzy dice, windshield screen, floor mats, car deodorizers, antenna toppers, and car seat covers? There are almost a hundred different types of Mario-branded key chains alone.

Who decided to green-light a Mario ceiling fan? To go with the Mario ceiling fan pull? A Mario Orbits Cube? Speakers? Tissue box? Bandages? Computer cover? Debit card? Dry erase board? Was there a decision to have every single purchasable item have a Mario version of it? Or even make up new items, like a piece of jewelry called a “bow biter” that lets Mario and Luigi hang from your shoelaces? Or a Super Mario cross-stitch? Or a $6,999 (insured for eleven thousand dollarsplus) solid-gold Mario pendant, with diamonds in red, blue, white, and black? (The same people make a Bart Simpson pendant, thanks to yellow diamonds.) At least there was history with, say, a Mario-brand set of hanafuda cards.

As new collectible trends arose—Beanie Babies, pogs, lunch boxes, figurines, plush chairs, trading cards, Christmas ornaments, stress relievers, K’Nex, Dots (a Japanese fad that mixed Lite Brites with Lego blocks), or Byggis (a Swedish Lego knockoff), Mario was there. Things that aren’t even designed as collectibles have a market among this Mario mania. The neon signs saying “Nintendo AUTHORIZED REPAIR CENTER” showing Mario gamely holding a flathead screwdriver, for instance, fetch four hundred dollars. Arcade games sell for reasonable rates, considering they’re twenty-five-year-old computers that weigh as much as a safe.

Nintendo must have, at some point, said no to a Mario marketing opportunity it deemed contrary to the character’s youth appeal. There are Mario lighters. There are Mario slot machines, albeit ones that use play money. Moving onto the unlicensed (and illegal), Finnish police have confiscated tabs of acid with Mario’s face on them. In the nearby University of Copenhagen they sometimes serve Mario-themed shots: the Super Mario is equal amounts of grenadine, Blue Bols, and tequila silver, and a 1-Up (whipped cream, green frosting, milk, vodka, and Melon Bols) looks disturbingly like the green-and-white mushroom.

Long years of lucrative evidence have proven to Nintendo that licensing is a double-plus-good endeavor—people pay the company to advertise Mario! For a character that doesn’t exist outside of commercials, the more exposure the better. This was why Nintendo traded up its advertising firms in 1990, going from McCann-Erickson and Foot, Cone & Belding to the giant Leo Burnett. One of Burnett’s first ads, for
Super Mario Bros. 3
, didn’t feature anything as pedestrian as game play, but instead millions of cheering Mario fans, ending with a satellite view of Earth, and all the fans making Mario’s smiling face. Mario wasn’t a fun character, the star of a nifty game. He was an idol, to be worshipped and adored. Graven images helped that process.

 

HASBRO WORKED FOR YEARS ON A DEVICE NICKNAMED Sliced Bread, a virtual-reality machine that would enter it into the video-game world. Hasbro killed Sliced Bread in 1995, after forty-five million dollars’ of investment. Nintendo was hoping for better luck than that. The Kyoto office was developing an in-your-face console as well. If this worked, it would break new ground. It wouldn’t be as impressive as the Nintendo network perpetually in the skunk works, true. But that was Yamauchi’s vision for Nintendo, not Arakawa’s or really anyone else’s. As a result, the father-in-law would every few months talk about how we’d all soon be playing online games and trading stocks from our SNES, and then nothing would happen. (There was at least one decent-size network test, to let people play the Minnesota State Lottery via the SNES. It was scrubbed because ten-year-olds would likely end up gambling—and with their parents’ money.)

Pushing games into virtual reality would be a game-changer for the game-makers. Suddenly the Genesis, the PlayStation, the 3DO, all the other consoles with high polygon counts and fluid character movement would look as jerky as claymation. “In videogames,” Yokoi wrote in his memoir, “there is always an easy way out if you don’t have any good ideas . . . CPU competition.” Nintendo was going to press for full 3-D, just like a monster movie from the fifties. Already it was cutting prices on the SNES, so that the Genesis would have to follow suit. If the 3-D gamble worked, everyone else would go broke playing catch-up.

One way it had already succeeded was in avoiding violent games, the sort that sold well among older (read: Sega) audiences but drew the ire of parents and Congress. Sega tried to play it safe by making its own game ratings system in 1993 it hoped Nintendo would adopt. Nintendo didn’t bother making its own: instead it adopted the Entertainment Software Ratings Board’s letter-grade system instead (with M reserved for what would get an R in the movies). Sega (and 3DO, who had its own system as well) tried to claim the high ground for gaming morality, but the level playing field of a unified system put an end to that pipe dream.

In the meantime, M-rated or not, Nintendo needed some new games. It had to live up to the recent New Yorker cartoon of Santa booking a lunch meeting with Mario and Luigi. Nintendo needed 3-D, by hook or by crook. They had a 1993 hit thanks to two English designers, whose special “Mario chip” was digital steroids, flooding an SNES cartridge with extra oomph. Miyamoto worked the pair to tighten up their flight game’s playability, drafting a story about talking animal pilots onto the superb technical display. They even included actual spoken dialogue, to simulate intercom chatter among the furry space aces.
Star Fox
was born, a new Nintendo franchise.

The Mario chip, which was marketed as the “Super FX chip,” indirectly led to
Donkey Kong Country
, the first
DK
title not made by Miyamoto. Instead it was made by a second-party company, Rare, which had a long history porting arcade hits to the NES and designing surrealist classics like
Battletoads
.
DKC
was a fun side-scrolling action platformer: much closer to
Super Mario Bros.
than to
Donkey Kong
. To clear the air, it begins by introducing the angry Donkey Kong from the original series, now aged and called Cranky Kong. Cranky’s son, Junior, is now all grown up, and the current Donkey Kong. Very confusing, made even worse by subsequent games that negated this already-revised history: Cranky Kong was canonically the grandfather, Junior the father, and the new DK the grandson. From the people who brought you Mario Mario and five reincarnations of Zelda.

But the big boast, like
Star Fox
, was 3-D graphics. And with no expensive Super FX chip, either, to cut away from profits. How, when Pixar hadn’t even released
Toy Story
, could there be fully 3-D characters in a mere SNES game?

The magic formula came from
Aladdin
, a recent Genesis platformer with outstandingly good graphics. It looked just like the cartoon! In fact, it was: Disney animators had drawn all the sprites. There were enough pixels in sprites to allow for a variety of drawing styles, not just the Lego-style pixel-by-pixel building that game developers were used to. In fact, if a company acquired high-end rendering hardware from Silicon Graphics, as Rare did, it could make its own computer-generated images, save them frame by frame, and add them to a game as the sprites.

That was the secret behind
Donkey Kong Country
: prerendered graphics. And it looked a whole lot better than most of the clunky, jittery 3-D of some 32-bit competitors with their lackluster launch games. Why buy Atari’s Jaguar console (a sad attempt to be first to market, and with a monstrosity of a controller that looked like a cable box) or the seven-hundred-dollar 3DO when the mere SNES still was cranking out such great 3-D games? It sparked a shortage, and became the hot Christmas toy of 1994, beating
Sonic and Knuckles
.

But there was a downside of trumpeting such 3-D graphics: they became expected. The console of Mario was now the console of 3-D, thanks to
Star Fox
and now
DKC.
Whatever Nintendo did next had to be 3-D, to keep the new brand up. For
Killer Instinct
, an arcade fighting game, that was a no-brainer. Rare was making it, using the same prerendered graphics but for an intense fighting game that merged
Street Fighter II
’s depth of fighting with the gory
Mortal Kombat
death moves. A lot of its bells and whistles were lost in the port to SNES, and most all of them lost for the Game Boy port, but the gameplay held up. The same couldn’t be said for
Stunt Race FX
and
Vortex
, whose slow frame rates killed the attempted realism.

Miyamoto wouldn’t let that happen to Mario. Ever since
Star Fox
he had been working on
Mario FX
, a 3-D game for the SNES, but the graphics and gameplay just weren’t there yet. They might never be: that was okay, it was all a part of
nemawashi.
What was important was that Mario not look like one of the “Money for Nothing” furniture movers. The Mushroom Kingdom worlds had to be the friendly places kids grew up visiting, not a harshly geometric backdrop. Every Mario project Miyamoto had made was a new style of game (first-person for
Yoshi’s Safari
, racing for
Super Mario Kart
, art for
Mario Paint
). Just because 3-D was popular now didn’t mean that
Mario FX
wasn’t still a game too imperfect for release.

Mario was Miyamoto’s baby, in other words: the developer protected his character. That was his job. In fact, protecting Baby Mario would become the basis of the next title,
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island
. The story, which gleefully did away with past games’ continuity, had a stork carrying Baby Mario and Baby Luigi attacked by a minion of Baby Bowser. Baby Mario falls on Yoshi’s island, and Yoshi has to carry the helpless hero (wearing a red hat he hasn’t grown into yet) on his back. This allowed Miyamoto to play with new game-play forms: Yoshi collects various eggs, which bounce along behind him until he uses them. He can briefly transform into various vehicles, but can’t take Baby Mario with him during the change. And Baby Mario can become Super Baby Mario, capable of flight, and with a cute red cape. Miyamoto used the Super FX chip to augment the game’s graphics, but in subtle ways: some villains were 3-D, and the chip helped the graphics have finer resolution.

But the Nintendo marketing team rejected Miyamoto’s game. This was akin to correcting the pope on scripture. The game play was fine, but the graphics weren’t good enough. Maybe something more like
Donkey Kong Country
. Could it be more like that?

No one puts Baby Mario in the corner. Miyamoto, who had been uncharacteristically critical of
Donkey Kong Country
for its “mediocre game play,” now had to change his game to look like the flavor of the month? He wasn’t going to have it. They wanted distinct graphics? Fine, he’d give them distinct graphics. But his way.

That was how
Yoshi’s Island
became the first video game that looked as if it had been drawn not only by hand, but by crayon. Baby Mario looks like a political cartoon who dropped a sash identifying him as Tariff Agreements. Yoshi looks like a middle-schooler’s doodle. The backgrounds were made to look like rough sketches of mountains and trees, not pixel-built, and certainly not waxy CG creations. It was a living comic book.

Yoshi’s Island
, with its new look and characteristically fantastic gameplay, sold more than four million copies. It wasn’t as flashy as
Donkey Kong Country
, which had sold twice as many units, but it held its own. Rare, meanwhile, got its revenge on “Dr. Miyamoto” (as many in the industry called him) in its
Donkey Kong Land
Game Boy game, which obviously would have none of the fancy graphics of
Donkey Kong Country
.

The game opened metafictionally, with Cranky Kong congratulating DK on the success of his SNES game. “Course, put a few fancy graphics and some modern music in a game, and kids’ll buy anything nowadays . . . Back in our days, understand, we had an extremely limited color palette to work with, and we still made great games . . . No way you could duplicate that feat today, Donkey my boy! No siree!” Donkey Kong goes on to to prove his aged, out-of-touch, fourth wallbreaking ancestor wrong, by having the same sort of side-scrolling adventure as in his SNES version, sans CGI. (Rare later made it up to Doc Miyamoto by, in
Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy Kong’s Quest
, having Mario, Link, and Yoshi exhibits in Cranky’s Video Game Heroes museum. Sonic’s shoes were next to a trash can, labeled “no-hopers.”)
Donkey Kong Land
was a fun game despite the poison pen intro, sold well (though not as well as
Yoshi’s Island
), and prompted some sequels.

 

NINTENDO AVOIDED ENTERING THE 32-BIT GAME WITH THE two-step of boosting its 16-bit games’ graphics and continually talking up the Ultra 64, a system that basic arithmetic proved was better than anything 32-bit. (And since bits were exponential, not geometric, 2
⁶⁴
was vastly bigger than 2
³²
.) The Ultra 64 was supposed to come out in 1995, but it wasn’t ready. However, Nintendo stunned the gaming world by announcing it had a successor to the blockbuster Game Boy ready instead for 1995: a 32-bit handheld system . . . in full 3-D.

The Virtual Boy was credited to Gunpei Yokoi, Nintendo’s ace designer. But Yokoi was merely a smart shopper. He had been shown a device of start-up company Reflections Technology, a new headset console they called “Red World.” It used oscillating mirrors, red LED lights, and a 32-bit processor to create a 3-D environment inside the pilot-style helmet. This was Nintendo’s bailiwick, Yokoi felt: a new technology that changed the very idea of games.

3-D wasn’t a new idea for Nintendo. In 1987 it tried out a pair of 3-D goggles for the Famicon Disk System, using the same LCD shutter technology used in some 3-D glasses today. The add-on system only had a few games, and as a peripheral to a peripheral was quickly forgotten. Sega’s 3-D glasses for the Master System received a similarly dour debut.