Super Mario (29 page)

Miyamoto, who had serious involvement with the project, even agreed to put out
Super Mario Galaxy 2
a few years later, filled with all the gameplay they couldn’t cram into the first game. Plus, he helped whip up a whole new side-scroller,
New Super Mario Bros. Wii
, which rocketed to ten million sales in its first two months after release.

Shigeru Miyamoto ended 2006 being profiled in
Time
magazine’s list of Asian heroes. He was not put on the Artists & Thinkers list, alongside Akira Kurosawa, Hayao Miyazaki, and Salman Rushdie. Instead, he was added to the Business Leaders section, alongside microloan pioneer Mohammad Yunus, Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, and ramen noodle creator Momofuku Ando. True to form, Miyamoto is a goofball in the photo, holding out his arms so a squad of Pikmin can stand on them. The following year, the goofball was given the Innovation Award for Consumer Goods by
The Economist
.

T
o properly demonstrate the scope of Mariolatry, let’s look at one slice of it: cake. Mario and friend show up on a lot of cake.

Groom cakes, birthday cakes, sheet cakes, multilayer cakes, cakes with Mario’s face, cakes with Mario leaping out like a stripper, cakes of Peach’s castle, cakes shaped like particular consoles, cakes so vast they replicate an entire level of the game. He’s even prolific in the handheld console of baking, the cupcake: clever bakers have arranged colored cupcakes or brownies to make Mario out of delicious pixels. (An allbrown version was also done in the medium of burned toast.) Other artists draw different characters and icons on each circular spread of icing. A search for “Mario cake” in Google images returned 1,490,000 results.

And then there’s statuary. Michaelangelo’s
Pieta
has been parodied, life size, with Princess Peach cradling fallen Mario. Another Mario statue, six feet tall, was made out of thousands of Lego blocks. It is far from the only Mario Lego sculpture. A life-size piranha plant out of
papier-mâché
. Mario on a red hydrant. Mario on a bowling pin. A wiener dog as Mario. Mario out of four thousand cans of food. A SMB mushroom out of ice.

Mario’s pixilated origins, and his variety of designs over the years, affords him the ability to be re-created in media that wouldn’t be able to show, say, Sonic. A Mario cross-stitch? No problem. Mario out of poker chips? Line ’em up! Pushpins? Push away! Bullets? Ready, aim, fire! Crocheted squares? It’s hip to be square! Floppy discs? Boot it up! Bottle caps? Let’s twist! Rubik’s Cube squares, broken off and rearranged? Pivot away! A supermarket display of a thousand twelvepacks of soda? It’ll take all weekend but it’ll be worth it.

Novelty T-shirts? There’s a new one every week. A piranha plant in a green pipe, underneath Magritte’s famous phrase “
Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”
An impressionistic painting of Donkey Kong’s first screen. A gray shirt that emulates the NES cartridge design. A winged Mario: WING MAN. A red mushroom: GROW UP. A green one: GET A LIFE. A gold coin: OLD SCHOOL GOLD FARMER. A question block: I’D HIT THAT. A gold coin, a star, and Princess Peach: FIRST YOU GET THE MONEY, THEN YOU GET THE POWER, THEN YOU GET THE WOMAN.

Want to, say, decorate your car to look like it drove out of the Mushroom Kingdom? It’s been done. Trick out a bass guitar to look like Bullet Bill? Done. Mock up condom wrappers with names like Donkey Schlong and Sextris? Rerecord “It’s a Wonderful World” with a Louie Armstrong impersonator singing about
Super Mario World?
Play the
SMB
theme using half-filled beer bottles or wineglasses? Put on a Mario-themed burlesque? Paint your nails with Mario designs? Sketch what Wario would have looked like as a baby? Pornography, of all Mario-inspired manners? Make Luigi a robot? Freeze him in carbonite? Mario, King Koopa, and Yoshi in a samurai-style Japanese print? Mario dissected? Princess Peach as the Virgin Mary? Mario and Luigi as zombies? Propose in-game? Make Super Mario Little Pony Bros.? Imagine Mario as a gay hustler? Design Mario furniture? Mario Russian nesting dolls? Mario graffiti? Raise a hundred thousand dollars by playing a marathon Mario session for charity? Done, done, done. Well, surely no one is dedicated enough to a video-game character to tattoo him on his or her skin permanently? Tell that to the half a million results on Google Images.

An ongoing discussion among critics had tackled the question of whether games can be art. Film critic Roger Ebert says no, that the freedom games give you overrules any possible message a creator could hope to deliver. (Miyamoto agrees with the decision, if not the rationale: he says games are entertaining and challenging, but claims no art status for them.) On the other hand, Tom Bissell in
Extra Lives
says yes, they can be, but only if they move away from aping films and give the player alternate worlds in which to make choices and accept consequences you could never do in real life. The debate continues, but the key objection is interactivity: I watch a Kurosawa film, and observe a Dalí painting, but I take part in a Miyamoto game.

That interactivity is the rub: what the best art strives to accomplish—connection—even the most shoddy games get automatically. In one sense, then, games are superior to any other art form: if connectivity to the audience is the goal. But the art of, uh, art is forging that connection through passive observation. It’s almost not fair to compare a painting with a painting you can jump into. All parties can agree on one thing, though: if not art himself, Mario is a very reliable muse for other artists.

 

GAME DEVELOPERS LOVE AND LOATHE LOS ANGELES THE third week of June, for the yearly Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, trade show. Whatever they’re working on, no matter the release date, needs to have a playable demo plus a kickass trailer ready for mid-June. Time your production schedule wrong, and a full month of your development time can go to creating a very fancy ad for a select few people, who will scoff at anything other than a fully finished product. This is one of Miyamoto’s grievances as well: people who spend hours and hours on a simple presentation to him, instead of devoting that time to the game and sending him a memo.

Yet skipping E3 is a forfeit, so everyone in gaming attends, and makes his big promises, and spends the rest of the year trying to live up to those lofty words. It’s gotten better over the years, scaled down to keep the Comic-Con crowd of fans away. But E3 remains a place where no one eats steak but everyone orders the sizzle.

Microsoft’s ascent into gaming had been very successful. The Xbox 360 was a tremendous gaming instrument, and its superlative Xbox Live infrastructure recreated a vital multiplayer world. There were people out there who had played a hundred hours of
Halo 3
, and hadn’t once played it single-player—or ever played with an actual second person sitting next to them. Like Sega and Sony before it, it had defined itself as the base camp for the core gamer.
BusinessWeek
estimated Xbox Live’s subscription costs alone were bringing in a billion dollars for Microsoft a year. It spent money by the forklift to enter the gaming world, and now forklifts were bringing that money back home. There was only one problem: Microsoft was losing.

Sony was in a very close race with Microsoft. Both were trying to claim the same territory of core gamers. Sony’s PS3 architecture was arguably superior to the 360’s, but a developer could do just about anything with either machine. Many of Sony’s wounds were selfinflicted, going back to launch where its blustery president claimed it was sold out in every store, an easily disproven claim. Some outstanding games made all forgiven with the geek crowd: titles like
Uncharted
,
Resistance
,
LittleBigPlanet
, and
Assassin’s Creed
were epics. There was only one problem: Sony was in third place.

Microsoft and Sony had the same problem the book industry had during J. K. Rowling’s
Harry Potter
opus. Bestseller lists started excluding them from the “adult” bestseller lists, saying they were for children and thus didn’t count. This conveniently freed up the number-one spot for other authors. This strategy was a sound one, so Microsoft and Sony had for five years said they were duking it out for first in sales, not second, because they didn’t consider the mere Wii as a competitor.

It wasn’t working: sales figures of the three consoles side by side by side looked like pencil marks of a child’s height at age five, six, and nineteen. Nintendo, whose plebian console wasn’t even HD, had been the one to redefine terms, really: coming up with a whole new market-place with new preferences. Its console sales bested Microsoft and Sony combined. If Nintendo had just stayed on the same playing field it would be in third, where it belonged!

For Nintendo execs, the E3 challenge was to have as much spring in their step as possible. They were coming off a lackluster year: few exciting games, a wounded stock price, and increased competition. Execs that year lowered sales estimates by more than a billion dollars, mostly due to the strong yen, which strangled export profits. They were still winning, but the profits weren’t miraculously growing every year. Nintendo had learned from past success stories (notably Microsoft in the nineties) to always feel the underdog, never rest on your laurels. They weren’t even taking the easy out of blaming low sales on piracy or the yen: Iwata stated that Nintendo’s job was to “increase the number of our consumers who are willing to shell out their money to purchase our products.”

So they started setting up “Nintendo Zone” Wi-Fi hot spots in Tokyo McDonalds. They gave out baseball stats to folk who brought their DSes to Mariners games. They arranged for the best game designers in the world to fall over themselves praising
Super Mario Bros.
for its twenty-fifth anniversary. Miyamoto had the month before E3 earned global applause for
Super Mario Galaxy 2
. Even the NASCAR car GameSpot sponsored, which was painted with Mario and Yoshi, won its first race: a good omen.

Nintendo had perfected the art of attracting casual fans with one hand, while luring over the core fans with the other. It has taken years for third parties to figure out how to make decent Wii games, but now they were cranking out hits like
EA Sports Active
and Tecmo’s
We Ski
. But the casual fans had deep pockets: they would buy the Wii, a Wii Board, Wii Fit, and even the Wii toys given away at Wendy’s, and then never use them. They also picked up an ever-growing pile of one-game-only peripherals: billiard sticks, cooking gear, crossbows, helmets, steering wheels, paintbrushes. All three consoles were guilty of this for instruments, thanks to
Guitar Hero
and
Rock Band
, selling hundred-dollar plastic axes. The cash of the fair-weather fans who try out video games like a hobby was just as green as the fanboy’s.

The Wii’s new stated goal, Satoru Iwata said, was to break the PS2’s record to become the world’s most popular console. That was a steep cliff. The Wii already had eighty-four million units after five years, spurred on by a 2009 price drop. That number looks great—it’s more than twice as many Atari 2600s sold—except when measured next to the PS2’s 143 million (and counting). In 2009 the PS2 was still outselling the PS3 certain months. There are more PS2s than there are residents of Japan. Could Wii sales still be practically doubled? No one could tell Iwata he wasn’t setting his ambition as high as Yamauchi.

The yearly product demos of the three console makers, as well as A-list publishers like EA and Ubisoft, are true stage shows. Microsoft brought out Cirque du Soleil. Sony had rising comic Joel McHale host for them. Nintendo was not averse to playing this game either: it had sent a Mario mascot into zero gravity with Buzz Aldrin to promote the first
Galaxy
game. For E3, Nintendo used not celebrities or performers but its own in-house celebrities. No, not Mario and Link.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata walks on the stage, introduces himself, then lets a white screen drop down. Iwata (wearing the same suit) appears on screen, picks up a DS console, and sees Mario’s hand sticking out. Mario slaps a fake mustache on him, and then Iwata is sucked into the machine like it’s a
Ghostbusters
floor trap. Shigeru Miyamoto (recently voted the most influential person in the world in a 2008
Time
magazine poll) enters, has a Nintendog jump out of the screen into his arms, then is sucked in as well. Finally, NOA president and COO Reggie Fils-Aims comes out, and chuckles at what he sees on the screen: Bowser in a lava dungeon chasing the two Nintendo creatives. Then Bowser sticks his head out through the DS and breathes cartoony fire all over Fils-Aims. The screen goes up, and the Regginator stands there for real, dressed in a burned suit. Cue applause for Nintendo’s yearly company play.

What they demonstrated was the 3DS, a new iteration of its venerable DS system. (Fils-Amie jetted to New York to show it off on talk shows later that week. Miyamoto raved about it in L.A., but kept to his rule to not appear on Japanese television: he doesn’t want to start getting mobbed for autographs when he’s walking his dog.) The DS had miraculously eclipsed the Game Boy’s total sales, become popular with boys and girls, adults and kids, all around the world. The 3DS, as the name suggests, delivered 3-D images (the bottom screen remained 2-D, but touch sensitive). Its big launch game was a new franchise that Nintendo was dusting off:
Kid Icarus
, last seen (in anything more than a cameo in a
Smash Bros.
game) in 1991. The 3DS didn’t require glasses, a trick that Nintendo guarded like the Coca-Cola formula but would be found out soon enough. The main suspect was parallax barrier LCD, which no one had used for a film because it only worked from one seat in the house, dead ahead. Sony’s PlayStation 3, in perpetual third place, could show 3-D games, but only with glasses—and an expensive 3-D-capable flat screen.

The 3DS also allowed Nintendo to cash in on a new media stream: 3-D movies. There had been a sharp increase in 3-D films, which theater owners loved because of the higher ticket prices. Studios fell over themselves to convert 2-D movies into 3-D. But there was no easy way to replicate the experience of watching a hit like
Avatar
at home: despite the fifty-two-inch plasma display and the six-speaker sound, it was flat as a pancake.