Super Mario (3 page)

There was a third option: Arakawa could preemptively resign, to keep his dignity intact. But this wasn’t Japan, where the samurai’s
wakizashi
sword was a constant metaphor for reclaiming one’s honor after a loss. This was America, the land where the breakfast flake, the ice cream cone, the microwave, and the Post-it note were all botched engineering projects salvaged into worldwide sensations. Failure, not necessity, was the mother of invention. Arakawa had an idea, a cavalier and audacious one—something that would never fly in Japan. Even if the new plan didn’t work, though, it would be a game changer.

M
inoru Arakawa, a little Mino in a big pond, can’t be blamed for failing to break into the arcade game market. It was tough enough for American companies such as Exidy or Cinematronics to compete with the Atari juggernaut, especially since Atari had huge crews of employees churning out hit game after hit game, thousands of cabinets at a time. And Atari was now owned by Warner Communications, meaning it had pockets $100 million deep. Arakawa had no way of knowing he would defeat Nintendo’s eight-hundred-pound gorilla of a competitor with his own eight-hundred-pound gorilla.

One of Arakawa’s stumbling blocks was in trying to sell games himself. The way most Japanese game makers got their games into American arcades was by licensing them to U.S. firms. Both Namco’s
Pac-Man
and Taito’s
Space Invaders
were released in America by the same company: Midway. (Midway’s name came from the carnival midway, not the Battle of Midway, presumably a sore spot for Japan.) Nintendo had grown profitable in Japan by controlling distribution, and Yamauchi wanted to be his own distributor in America as well. That gave Arakawa two different challenges to overcome: come up with a game to sell, and keep the middlemen out of it.

Neither challenge looked surmountable at present. Nintendo could only deliver cabinets to arcades if it sold them first. The arcade business was entirely cash based, run by vendors so sleazy that towns regularly tried to chase them out adult bookstore – style. Arcades were considered one step away from circus life, and not a step up. It was no stretch to suppose that games made their way into arcades on something other than merit.

Japanese game makers were used to this—they dealt with Yakuza knockoffs of their games often enough, after all. This was yet another reason for Yamauchi to want a distribution network: if he had the power, no one else could touch Nintendo for fear of reprisals. So he was willing to hear out Arakawa, who called up, laid out the facts, then proposed his game-changing solution.

Fact:
Radar Scope
wasn’t going to sell any more units. Fact: To keep Ron and Al from walking away, Arakawa had promised them that the next Nintendo game would be a smash. Fact: They needed a new game to sell. Fact: despite adding words such as “explosive,” “pulsating,” and “ecstasy” next to the hot chicks in their trade-magazine ads, Nintendo had little up its sleeve, sexy or not. (All game ads of the time featured such big-haired Spandexed women, perhaps on break from leaning suggestively next to sports cars.) Fact: There were two thousand cabinets wasting away in Jersey. Conclusion: The new game had to arrive soon. It had to sell well. And the game changer? Change the game.

Arakawa’s gamble was to create not a new game, but a conversion kit for
Radar Scope
, to freshen it up with something new. It would save Nintendo the cost of the two thousand cabinets, plus it would be a whole lot quicker than making two thousand cabinets in Kyoto and shipping them halfway around the globe. Conversion kits were a form of aftermarket sales for arcades, which let arcade owners squeeze more life out of their older machines such as
Asteroids
by juicing them up with new elements. But they were for older hit games, not brand-new duds.

It was certainly a bold idea, trying to reheat yesterday’s blue plate special into a new entrée. And cracking the American market—or at this point merely minimizing the loss—was worth one last halfhearted try. Yamauchi agreed; he’d get a new game made to try to move the two thousand
Radar Scope
s. But he hedged his bet. Yamauchi’s top designers were all busy on their own games, and he wasn’t going to pull any of them off their projects for this rush job. So he announced an internal competition for conversion ideas. He received several ideas from a surprising source, a boyish, shaggy-haired staff artist with an industrial design degree but no previous game experience. The kid had designed the casings for some Nintendo products: maybe he’d be good designing their guts as well.

That staff artist was Shigeru Miyamoto, then twenty-nine. Miyamoto hadn’t been a fan of the first video games he played, such as Taito’s
Western Gun
. He was raised on puppets and manga and baseball in the Kyoto suburb of Sonobo, and was much more into music (he loved the Beatles and bluegrass) than electronics. While he preferred his left hand, Shigeru was cross-dominant, which put him in the rarefied company of some of the world’s great thinkers: Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Ben Franklin, Michelangelo, Ludwig van Beethoven, Leonardo da Vinci, and Mohandus Gandhi.

Despite all this potential, Miyamoto took five years to get his four-year engineering degree. His father had to get him the job with Nintendo, helping design toys and sometimes painting the cabinets. He hadn’t even been interested in video games until
Space Invaders
came along, with its high-concept plot and ever-increasing game-play speed. But Yamauchi saw something beyond the slacker haircut, and decided to give him a shot.

Yamauchi wasn’t crazy, so he assigned Gunpei Yokoi to help translate Miyamoto’s vision for the new game—whatever it would be—into reality. Yokoi was ten years older and wiser than Miyamoto, and would show him the gaming ropes. Yokoi was the optimist, focusing on what could be done. Miyamoto worked negatively, always aware of limitations. Yin and yang. Miyamoto and Yokoi then contracted the services of Ikegami Tsushinki, a company that had designed many of Nintendo’s arcade games, so the two wouldn’t be flying blind hammering out a solid-state motherboard. Ikegami Tsushinki had built
Radar Scope
, so it knew what its own components could do.

Inside
Radar Scope
was a Sanyo monitor turned sideways, displaying pixel-based raster graphics. (A fancy way of saying it couldn’t display the bouncing geometric shapes of a
Tron
or a
Tempest
.) It had a DAC (digital-to-analog) converter, so it could turn electronic semaphore from the game board into sounds. It was running the Zilog Z80 8-bit microprocessor, an inexpensive alternative to Intel’s 8080 microprocessor. The Z80’s affordability and utility quickly made it the generic drug of computer chips: just as good, at a fraction of the cost. So far so good.

Radar Scope
had a control panel with one joystick and one button. This was perfectly normal for a shooting game; multiple buttons were a few years away. So whatever the game would do, it would have one primary mode of interaction. Which was usually shooting: what else would you do?

Yamauchi wanted the replacement game to be based on the cartoon
Popeye
, since a live-action movie starring Robin Williams as the titular sailor was in the works. Twenty years ago Nintendo, in a bout of corporate identity confusion, had tried to be a food manufacturer: one of its products was Popeye Ramen. Thus, it had an in for the rights, and Yokoi was designing a Game & Watch Popeye title. Whatever that turned out to be might be good enough for an arcade game. Yokoi and Miyamoto would figure out the details. Even if the game stunk, what great marketing!

But Yamauchi found out it would take years for Nintendo to acquire the rights to a global property such as Popeye for the arcades. If he wanted to play with the big boys, he had to follow their rules. So no Popeye. It was probably for the best: anyone who knew arcades knew that game play was more important than the often laughable story. Sega’s
Motocross
didn’t do any better when it was renamed
Fonz
, after the
Happy Days
character, did it?

Miyamoto, though, was committed not so much to the story of Popeye as to its goal: defeat the villain to save the girl. The main characters were the barrel-chested hero (“I just made a vague set of characteristics for him as a middle-aged man with a strong sense of justice who is not handsome,” he would later say), the enormous hairy opponent, and the tall, willowy heroine who needed rescuing. These storytelling archetypes made the hero an underdog, gave him a noble reason to fight, and even gave some sympathy to the villain. No hero named Popeye? Fine, Miyamoto wouldn’t call him Popeye. No boulder-size Bluto? Fine, “Bluto” would be someone else. Popeye by any other name would play the same. And Miyamoto liked the idea of naming a video game after the bad guy, as in
Space Invaders
or
Sinistar
. It’d be easy to come up with a good name for a big gorilla of a villain.

A big, angry gorilla. What a perfect antagonist. A big, angry, dumb gorilla won’t let Olive Oyl—er, some other lady—go free. Miyamoto decided to use King Kong, a Japanese synonym for ape. King Kong, after all, had scaled the Empire State Building
and
fought Godzilla: a shared cultural foil for a Japanese American game.

Miyamoto then took a stab at translating. He understood English pretty well since his dad taught it in school, but never could get his tongue around speaking it correctly. He wanted the English word for “stubborn,” since a stubborn gorilla was the heart of the game he envisioned. And what animal was more stubborn than a donkey? Thus, a game about an ape was named after a pack animal. (Miyamoto, like many true artists, has since told this story a few different ways.)

Miyamoto now had both a name and a villain in
Donkey Kong
. The story would be a brave man fighting the big dumb ape to get his girl back. A love triangle. Recognizing that actions and motivations were more important than mere names, the damsel in distress would just be “Lady”—a generic MacGuffin of a character. Even the hero lacked a true name: he was “Jumpman.” (Miyamoto originally thought of him as “Mr. Video,” or just
ossan
—“middle-aged man.”) Borrowing the
mukokuseki
concept of ethnically generic people from the manga comics he loved, Miyamoto set about building his digital hero, pixel by pixel.

And as his name would suggest, Jumpman jumped. Quite a phenomenal gravity-defying leap at that: from a standing position, he could spring his full body height. While walking or running, Jumpman could clear an obstacle the relative size of a trash bin. In bold defiance of the one-button controls, Miyamoto came up with a second activity for the athletic Jumpman. He scattered hammers throughout the level that Jumpman could acquire by touching them. With a hammer he was unable to jump, presumably because of its weight. But he could pound away on obstacles with a well-timed wallop of the (now dual-) action button.

Jumpman, like most every movable “sprite” in early video games, was limited to three colors. (Designers fudged black by leaving some spaces blank, and having their sprite move on a black background.) Peach was Miyamoto’s first color, for Jumpman’s face, ear (just a square block of four pixels), and hand (another four pixels, plus a fifth on the side for a thumb). Blue served two purposes. On his boots (seven pixels each), his shirt, and his single-pixel eye, it was true blue. But on his hair it doubled for black, just as Superman’s spit curl was tinged with blue in comic books to show shininess. Miyamoto gave Jumpman a bushy mustache, mostly so players could tell where the nose ended and the mouth began. Two superfluous blue pixels by the sideburns and nape gave Jumpman a bushy, early eighties hairdo—not unlike Miyamoto’s own.

Making video game hair look realistic was (and still is) a problem—especially blue hair. So Jumpman got a hat—a red one. And because red fulfilled the three-color quota, that meant Jumpman’s pants would have to be red as well. By adding more and more pixels, and crucially placing a single peach pixel to suggest a button, Miyamoto was able to make Jumpman a credible pair of overalls. And quite a paunch, especially for a high jumper. (Author Steven Poole has hypothesized that game characters’ bodies are so squat because it gives more proportional room for their head and eyes, which allows the gamer to connect with them better.)

The Lady was designed differently. She was more than a head taller than Jumpman, a Barbie next to a troll doll. She had flowing orange hair, a cinched pink dress with white trim on the bottom, and skin as white as the font flashing the game’s high score. Hotter than Olive Oyl, Miyamoto joked.

Donkey Kong (nicknamed DK) himself was built bigger still, to fulfill Miyamoto’s idea of having three characters of different sizes mixing it up. DK used up about six times as many pixels as Jumpman, as befitted a true heavy, and was technically multiple sprites Voltroned together into one body. Dark and light brown did most of the color work, showing a thickly muscled, nippled chest; big, hairy arms; legs that ended in wide-splayed simian feet; and ears that would have looked comically big if they hadn’t bookended a mouth the size of an August watermelon. His teeth and eyes alone were white, which made them stand out that much more.

Who wore overalls? People in construction jobs such as carpentry and plumbing. So Jumpman gained an occupation: he would be . . . a carpenter. His plumbing years were to come, but he wasn’t the first video game plumber. That honor goes to 1973’s forgotten safecracking arcade game
Watergate Caper
, where gamers played as one of the leakplugging “plumbers” who broke into Democratic National Committee headquarters.

If Jumpman died, he would return at the bottom of the screen, ready to take on the challenge of the level again. Each game created three Jumpmen (three lives were standard in gaming), with more earned for high scores. There was something quite spiritual about the concept of a man returning from the dead again and again to complete a task left undone. Facing the monster was a ritual of purity for Jumpman, with impurity of form (i.e., getting clobbered) punished by death. This game of Miyamoto’s, and most every video game since, could be seen as a digital Shinto purification ceremony.