Super Mario (25 page)

Mario pops up often in the variously branded gamer-friend subsets of music known as nerdcore (geek-referencing hip-hip), geek rock, and marching band music, which often uses disposable pop ditties (TV theme songs, ad jingles) to draw a reaction from a halftime crowd. The University of Maryland at College Park even has a hundred-strong Gamer Symphony Orchestra. The 14-Year-Old Girls—who have songs like “Castlevania Punk,” “Run Lolo Run,” and “1-800-255-3700” (Nintendo’s customer service number)—depict themselves as the rocking cast of
Super Mario Bros. 2
on the cover of their album
Zombies In, Robots Out
. Another band calls itself the Minibosses, and has a song called “Super Mario Bros. 2.” Rapper Benefit, in the song “Super Mario Bros.,” starts off his reimagining of the game plot with “It’s 1986 I’m in the first grade / I’m workin’ really hard to get Mario laid.” Other Mario-named bands include the Lost Levels, Stage 3-1, and Tanooki Rebirth.

It’s not a recent trend. In the early nineties, reggae singer Shinehead recorded “The World of the Video Game,” sampling the
Super Mario Bros.
music. Nintendo capitalized on the love of Kondō’s music, via
Super Mario Bros.
sheet music and even a Mario & Yoshi Music Center synthesizer. Perhaps some of these modern musicians got their start via Mario. Or maybe musicians and gamers have a rebellious connection. “Video games are bad for you?” a well-known Miyamoto quote goes. “That what they said about rock and roll.”

 

MIYAMOTO’S WORK ON THE GAMECUBE WAS AKIN TO A political aide in the last days of a failing campaign. He flew around the world to talk up the Gamecube hardware, software, and pipeline. He challenged his team of designers to explore territory they never thought they’d encounter as Nintendo employees. He took Mario places he’d never been before. All in a futile rush to keep the eversinking balloon of Nintendo’s PR campaign up in the air, one mad swipe at a time.

It had all started a few years ago, with Conker. Conker was a cute squirrel designed by Rare, who made his first appearance in 1997’s
Diddy Kong Racing
. (His name comes from a British game of swinging horse chestnuts at each other, to smash them open.) He got his own Game Boy Color game,
Conker’s Pocket Tales
, two years later. Work began on a N64 game for a 2001 release, one of Nintendo’s final offerings before switching gears to the Gamecube.

What was eventually released as
Conker’s Bad Fur Day
goes up there with
Super KKK Bros.
for video-game infamy. In one puzzle, Conker reaches a switch by filling up a huge vault with cow diarrhea and swimming through it. He jumps to a hard-to-access area by bouncing on a female character’s enormous breasts. Characters curse, and they’re English so they curse well. The evil teddy bear characters are Nazis, and explode into stuffing when shot. One character is a talking pile of dung. Conker can urinate on others for extra damage, one of his powers when drunk. The game opens with a tribute to
A Clockwork Orange
.

Unlike most other infamous games,
Conker’s Bad Fur Day
was also amazingly good. Technically, it was the N64’s flat-out best game. The designers were inspired by
South Park
, a show that could play on the disgust of viewers the way Yo-Yo Ma could bow a cello. There were vast rolling hills of lip-synched dialogue, great textures, and no load times. It was a spitball thrown at the blackboard by Randy Johnson. Rare had gone the offensive route so the game wouldn’t be lost in the crowd of fuzzy-animal platform games, like its own
Banjo-Kazooie
series. (Which did edge into
Conker
territory by featuring Loggo, the talking toilet: at one point he’s clogged and asks someone to call you-knowwho.)
Conker
didn’t sell well, but it certainly was noticed inside the company.

Post-
Conker
, the rules were changed for Nintendo. Conker was vulgar, but Miyamoto knew that its real enticements were graphics and game play. Every other franchise needed to have a new personality for the Gamecube. If it couldn’t promise the best graphics or sound, then it would scrape together enough sheer moxie to draw attention. Miyamoto sometimes told staffers, when they had an unworkable idea, to put it in a drawer, because one day the technology would be around the fix the problem. It was time to root through that drawer.

First up was
Metroid
, which had never received a N64 game and had been forgotten. It was in development as a 3-D sci-fi exploration, through cramped dark spaceships and distant planets teeming with hostile life. Exploring around in ball form would be a game in itself. A new
Star Fox
flight-combat game was also in the works, as well as a new
Zelda
title.

That was fine, but Miyamoto pushed for more. A twist, something no one expected.
Metroid
, he announced halfway through development, would be a first-person shooter.
Star Fox
would keep the flight-combat angle, but Fox himself would get out of his vehicle and explore around as well.
Zelda
was going to use a new rendering tool called celshading to make Link and Ganon look like hand-drawn 3-D cartoons.

For the
new F-Zero
game
GX
, there weren’t many changes other than increasing speed and challenges. There is no such thing as a racer that’s too difficult, so Miyamoto and company were free to reach for insanely difficult levels, while showcasing the neon explosions that made
GX
comparable to the best PS2 or Xbox experiences. The biggest change was behind the scenes: Miyamoto’s team codesigned the game with Amusement Vision, one of Sega’s game-making divisions. Perhaps to take himself down a notch, Miyamoto included a fat mustached android, with a Starman on his belt, designed by a “Shiggs Mopone,” called Mr. EAD. (EAD was the name of Miyamoto’s R&D division.) Shiggs’ favorite food? Italian, of course.

And then there was
Eternal Darkness
, Nintendo’s foray into survival horror, and Shigeru Miyamoto’s first M-rated video game. It was about Alexandra Roivas, who finds an ancient evil book that attracts monsters and makes the possessor go insane. She gets flashbacks to previous generations who possessed the book, and the player has to survive the flashbacks to find out what happens to Alexandra and the Tome. The game had a sanity meter; see too much weirdness and hallucinatory monsters start surrounding you. Get scared enough and the Gamecube will even start acting like it’s possessed, spitting out illusory error messages.

All of this was great, of course, but none of it was a new Miyamoto Mario game. He hadn’t made a true Mario game since
Super Mario 64
way back in 1996. Now everyone and his brother had 3-D platformers. Developers had learned to program in 3-D. Mario, like a rich movie star who flirts with retirement every picture, had more to lose than gain from a new game.

Certainly Mario titles were attempted:
Super Mario 64 2
was announced for the 64DD, then failed to materialize. Then
Super Mario 128
, which had turned into
Pikmin
. Mario needed something new, something distinct. At the same time, one of Miyamoto’s many protégées, Yoshiaki Koizumi, was working on a water-gun game. The Gamecube allowed for great water effects, as
Wave Race: Blue Storm
showed, and Koizumi had game-play ideas for how to use a power washer—to clean graffiti, propel around like a jetpack, hover, and batter down doors.

There was enough there for a
Super Mario
– type game: instead of getting new suits, Mario would get new nozzles. Years of 3-D experience would make the challenges a mix of exploration and action. The tropical-isle setting (Isle Delfino, a wink to the Gamecube’s development name of Dolphin) would be kept, which would also make this look very different than
Super Mario 64
’s digital Mushroom Kingdom. The new villain was Shadow Mario, very much like Sonic’s adversary, an evil hedgehog also called Shadow. Of course, Shadow Mario would kidnap the Princess and ended up one being of Bowser’s Koopa Kids.
Plus ça change
. . .

Miyamoto had worked closely with Koizumi on many Zelda and Link games, and knew and trusted the younger man’s vision. Miyamoto had reached the management stage where so long as he knew the project was successful, he’d let developers follow their muse without too much interference. He let Koizumi sneak story elements into the
Zelda
games, for instance. But Miyamoto had always come back as director for the
Super Mario
franchise. For
Super Mario Sunshine
, though, he handed the baton to Koizumi. Miyamoto would still produce, but he had been making Mario adventures for twenty-two years. It was time for a successor. This retirement possibly prompted an industry rumor that Miyamoto had died of a heart attack.

Nintendo publicized
Super Mario Sunshine
by cooking a Guinness World Record-winning 3,265 pounds of spaghetti in San Francisco’s Little Italy, dubbed “Pasta a la Mario.” Prizes were hidden in it, and six fans dressed as Mario dove in
Double Dare
– style to find them. The game sold 5.5 million copies, beaten only by
Super Smash Bros.
and
Mario Kart
(both sold seven million copies) in Gamecube popularity. But the hit games from Xbox and PS2—
Halo
, the
Gran Turismo
and
Final Fantasy
franchises—all outsold Gamecube’s best. All three
Grand Theft Auto
PS2 games outsold Mario as well, a sign of the times.

The year 2002 was a transition for Hiroshi Yamauchi as well. For more than a decade he had been hinting at retirement, and had considered various different leaders to take over his business. The natural choice would be Minoru Arakawa, Nintendo of America’s president—he was family, he was Japanese, he had strong American ties, no one knew the business better than him. And the seventy-three-year-old billionaire had once had his eye on the son-in-law, true.

But Arakawa and Yamauchi had had a strained couple of years. Yamauchi, whose top showing as Japan’s richest man on the yearly
Forbes
billionaire list was no longer a lock, refused to visit his daughter, son-in-law, and grandkids in Seattle—or even meet them halfway in their shared Hawaii home. Arakawa wasn’t grooming himself to be the attack dog Nintendo would need to survive, Yamauchi felt. In one infamous moment, Arakawa had fallen asleep in front of clients, almost dooming a partnership. Yamauchi’s zori were too big to be filled by just any feet.

Since the early nineties, Yamauchi took glee in saying that whomever he picked as successor, it would not be his son-in-law. Arakawa, perhaps saving face, began stating that Yamauchi was the only good choice for Nintendo president, and publicly agreed with Pop’s decision to look elsewhere. In fact, in early 2002 Arakawa announced his retirement from Nintendo of America at age fifty-five, beating the old man to the punch.

Banker Tatsumi Kimishima, who had been hired to run the
Pokémon
division as CFO and then president, was promoted to Nintendo of America’s president. He was the sort of mature, buttoned-down person who seemed to have been born an old man, and he was now running Nintendo’s biggest division. Perhaps, though, a money man was too conservative a choice.

Four years later, Kimishima would be replaced by the boisterous Reggie Fils-Aime (pronounced
Fee
-a-
me
), who opened a press conference by claiming, “I’m about kickin’ ass, I’m about takin’ names, and
we’re
about makin’ games.” Fils-Aime, quickly nicknamed the Regginator, was not only American but black. Nintendo of America’s leadership went from Grandpa Ojiisan to Will Smith. Fils-Aime’s broad features and goofy, energetic manner made him seem like a character escaped from one of Nintendo’s own games.

But who could sit behind Yamuachi’s desk in Kyoto? It couldn’t be anyone new to the industry, since he’d just feel that Nintendo needed to get some skin in the hardware arms race of Sony and Microsoft. Nintendo’s corporate philosophy of creativity being king must not change. Did anyone else have the decades of experience, the variety of backgrounds, the ability to win holding Nintendo’s cards?

Yes, it turned out. The choice of successor revealed Yamauchi’s skill at management, and at go. Go is a devilishly complex game, in which an opponent’s all-black board can be turned snow white with just a few perfectly placed white stones. Yamauchi was a famous fan: the first NES game he ever bothered to play was a game of go. He hardly ever lost. It’s just about impossible to become a billionaire without gamesmanship, not mere money, driving you. Yamauchi was placing some of his last pieces, and they were going to turn the dark board white as rice.

He picked Satoru Iwata, forty-three, the HAL Laboratories developer who was one of Nintendo’s second-party vendors. Iwata had been president of HAL since 1993, when he helped bring it back from the brink of bankruptcy. (Yamauchi bailed HAL out on the promise that Iwata become HAL’s president.) Before that he was a designer, working on the
Kirby
games. In 2000 Yamauchi had brought him into Nintendo’s fold proper, as head of corporate planning. In retrospect, it was a try-out job, to see what Iwata would do with the throne.

Iwata was aligned with Nintendo’s (and Yamauchi’s) belief that bigger wasn’t better. His
Kirby
games were designed for beginning players, yet were still fun. The
Pokémon
games certainly weren’t breaking new graphical ground, but they were a hit too. This was when developers were cranking out violent epics that cost tens of millions of dollars. That was great for hard-core gamers, but there was a whole world out there besides young males at 2 A.M. online sessions. Game-play innovations could lead to cheaper, quickly designed quality games that could outsell behemoths such as
True Crime: Streets of LA
and
Battlefield: 1942
.

Hiroshi Yamauchi stayed on as head of the board of directors, an honorary (read: rubber-stamp) position in Japan. He turned down his pension, letting Nintendo reinvest it. “Hiroshi” does mean “generous,” but as a billionaire, he could afford to turn down about $10 million—or he was canny enough to know it would net him more in Nintendo’s hands than in his own. He also started dishing out collateral-free loans to Gamecube developers, to entice them. After three years heading the board, he left at age seventy-five, passing the chairman/CEO baton for the Seattle Mariners to Howard Lincoln. He currently holds a 10 percent share of Nintendo stock, and due to Japan’s rebounded economy is no longer in the top five of
Forbes
’s richest-in-Japan list. The Yamauchi shogunate would continue, with a new shogun.