Super Mario (30 page)

Nintendo’s comparative tiny screen, smaller than a YouTube window (but with better resolution), had the movie theater beat. Players could take a break from
Paper Mario
(one of the first wave of 3-D games, along with
Nintendogs + Cats
,
Pilotwings
and
Star Fox
flight titles, and of course
Mario Kart
) to try Nintendo’s deep third-party support (
DJ Hero
,
Resident Evil
, and
Kingdom Hearts
) or watch a hit 3-D film like
How to Train Your Dragon
. Being Nintendo, they dragged their feet for six months after E3 before mentioning that Miyamoto was working on not one but two 3-D Mario games. One would be an oldfashioned side-scroller, and the other would be a 3-D Mario game in, uh, the other kind of 3-D. Miyamoto said working on the games was bringing back Virtual Boy memories, which might not be the best thing to bring up.

The 3DS was also an MP3 player, could get you online, and even let you chat in 3-D. There was enough to it so that even if you didn’t play games, you could want one. This was a pyrrhic defeat for Nintendo, which had purposefully kept the peanut butter of other applications out of the chocolate of their game system: witness no DVD player on the Wii. The big N was caving to nongame interests: it had recently let Netflix stream movies via the Wii, years after the 360 and PS3 were serving them to millions of viewers. Nintendo’s consistency defense was that all the bells and whistles were just ways to keep the game system from being forgotten.

Nintendo’s drift away from gaming could be called the “everything box” syndrome, named after the Holy Grail of electronic companies: a set-top box that provides broadband, music, movies, games, and all conceivable applications. There are few technical boundaries to making such a box anymore. But try lining up third-party developers for a satellite receiver with a game controller. Try getting movie studios to stream their new hits on your wireless router. Try getting people to make a phone call from their GPS. When convergence lets anything do everything, the mission-statement navel-gazing of what a company’s actual purpose is, and what sets it apart, becomes critically important.

For instance, Microsoft’s biggest 2010 gaming offering was the Kinect, a movement-based interface: basically, a Wii minus the Wiimote. (Sony’s top in 2010 was the PlayStation Move, a kludgy combo of Kinect and Wii technologies.) If you wanted to steer in a racing game, turn an invisible wheel: to hit a tennis ball, wave your hand back and forth. It incorporated voice commands as well, just like on
Star Trek
. It offered game play that the Wii couldn’t, which stole from the Nintendo playbook. In promoting the Kinect, one of the producers even said it was as innovative as
Super Mario Bros.
Microsoft saw the future, and it was Marcel Marceau. The Nintendo-doesn’t-count argument wasn’t working, so Microsoft (and Sony) had about-faced and were now trying to out-Nintendo Nintendo.

There were differences between their companies and Nintendo. Microsoft and Sony wanted to gobble up every hour of your free time however they could, for your life to become devoted to their games and products. Which was a fine business model for companies with an enviable record selling electronics and computer programs. Nintendo had wanted that too, at one point, but not anymore. It had learned its product wasn’t hardware or software: it was amusement. With games for staying in shape, training a pet, gardening, playing music, shooting pool, and fishing, its goal now was to reflect your life via games. The Wii was an existence simulator.

Nintendo had researched a look-ma-just-hands interface when designing the Wii, and decided against it. With no physical matter to press or hold, players would have to learn the mimetics of how to play a game all over again. And that was if the technology worked perfectly: Microsoft’s version was plagued with rumors that the seeing eye couldn’t yet detect hand motion if players sat. And Sony had already tried the motion-sensing controller gambit before, with its Sixaxis controller, which had been phased out due to lack of use. Even if it worked perfectly, was there an audience? Would anyone who wanted a Wii drop double its price to play an imitation of it years later? Such were the E3 rumors: not only were Kinect and Move carbon copies of Nintendo’s idea, they were smudged copies. Nintendo, for its part, lost millions later than year when it denied a rumor that the 3DS would be in stores for Christmas: sorry, not until next year.

The everything-box syndrome was most in evidence for portable devices. Nintendo’s DS was now competing not only with Sony’s waning PSP, but also with Apple’s waxing iPhone. iPhone models featured a touch screen, a high-speed 3G connection for phone and Internet access, and a nifty but small on-screen keyboard. Most notably, it featured a shockingly robust “App Store” with hundreds of thousands of programs, either for free or for a few bucks. This led to a cadre of other touch-screen phones, each one with its own geometrically increasing pile of apps and games. How they differed from the DS on paper was negligible. So if mobile devices were providing gaming, what could Nintendo do with the DS to compete?

Nintendo had copied Apple to a degree, opening its own minigame store for the DS. It branded many of its regular DS games “Touch Generations,” calling them “Great games anyone can play.” (Mario does not appear in any Touch Generation title, save for a
Tetris
cameo.) And, like a guidance counselor recommending a career as a guidance counselor, Nintendo offered for download a free title like
Flipnote Studio
, where gamers could make their own animated films, and
WarioWare D.I.Y.
, whose purpose is making and distributing hand-crafted games online, for free. A way to find the next Miyamoto? (Nintendo was so worried they’d lose Miyamoto the same way they lost Yokoi they recently forbid him from walking or biking to work.) Or a devious trick to outsource new Mario content? Maybe Nintendo can allow the best designers the chance to whitewash their fence.

Nintendo’s twin concerns were losing market share and mind share. Would a DS unit play as sweet if a user had another device in her pocket that let her play games? But how much push could it give the Wi-Fi and cameras before forgetting those were features added so people would merely, in Nintendo’s corporate walleye view, have it on hand more often to play games? That was the hail-Mary genius of the 3DS: a function ideal for gaming that no other device had, which introduced a whole new suite of activities, all exclusive to the 3DS. Suddenly the other everything boxes didn’t have everything.

 

AS OF 2010, THE FIRST DECADE OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY was over, with nine more to go. Every bit of technology, every way people lived, would be changed due to the new connectivity and speed of culture. Many of these changes have already happened: music fans who hear a new artist download the track (sometimes they even pay) instead of trekking to a music store to buy the whole album. No one visits the library when he can Google a subject in .00007 second. We accept that ads will infiltrate their way into every aspect of our life, a problem that can be alleviated with an ice-cold Coors Light. And the hallmark of this connectivity is interaction. All avenues of our lives, in other words, are turning into video games.

How will this affect games? In a lot of ways it already has. Xbox Live (and its Wii and PS3 counterparts) are online communities where you can compete with or against friends or strangers. Nintendo lags in this, stressing its own limited interactivity. Iwata and Miyamoto have both said that Nintendo is probably not doing enough when it comes to online gaming.

But there’s more to connectivity than that. Facebook’s low-res fare such as
Parking Wars
is a glorified game of mail chess, where each time you log on you see your friends’ moves, and respond in turn. Others are old-school remixes:
Farmville
looks familiar to
Sim City
players, and
Mafia Wars
is an isometric beat-em-up:
Civilization
via the Corleones. Facebook, Twitter, and Xbox Live, it was announced around the time of E3, would soon share update threads. But Facebook’s ubiquity, its platform, makes for a threat bigger than any rival peripheral. It wasn’t much discussed, but during the show word got out that Google had invested up to $200 million in Zynga, the company behind many top Facebook games. OnLive, a cloud-computing service that let owners of run-of-the-mill laptops play A-list PC games such as
Assassins’ Creed II
, had just launched. It was getting easier every year, every month, to imagine a world with so much bandwidth and processing oomph available that specialized machines just to play games wouldn’t be needed.

Speaking of those specialized machines, what happened to the concept of new consoles? All three consoles are at least five years old by this time: E3 should have been rife with chatter about PS4 prices, or Xbox 720 release dates. Instead, Microsoft and Sony spun their Wiiclone add-ons as if they were whole new game platforms, not just accessories. Nintendo, in turn, kept making new console games as if the concept of a Wiiquel was inconceivable. This was because Microsoft and Sony were on ten-year plans, kicking the can of the console death spiral to 2015. Making the most of seasoned technology? Another page out of the Nintendo playbook.

M
ario, somewhat infamously, is stuck in a
Groundhog Day
of perpetually having to rescue the princess from Bowser. Even when the plot is new, the story stays old: Mario stops the big bad and saves the girl. Imagine Sherlock Holmes if every single Sherlock Holmes story had to involve Moriarty stealing the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London: it would get old fast. But we merely
read
Sherlock Holmes, and try to understand him via his actions and interactions. We
play
as Mario, and have a completely different relationship with him. We
are
him: his frustration at missing a jump is our own, his joy in grabbing a coin is ours as well. That’s why his (or any other game character’s) story-mandated in-game conflicts seldom ring true emotionally for us: they’re breathers, a halftime show.

In fact, his lack of consequence has its definite advantages. No soap opera recasting: “The part of Mario will be played by Crash Bandicoot.” No
Zelda
-style collective amnesia over what happened in previous games. No
Dune
-style flame-outs where later stories are hamstrung by the originals. Tell a story long enough, even one like James Bond or Batman where the actors keep swapping in and out, and soon enough it has to be rebooted. That consistency, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous “hobgoblin of little minds,” becomes an anchor weighing down new ideas.

Mario has no such consistency issues: all Miyamoto wants from the guy is a connection to gamers. He’s at one end of a tug-of war, pulling for Mario to be recreational, away from the half-hour cut scenes of the storytellers on the other end of the rope. But Miyamoto is only one man, and thus some very clever story sometimes sneaks in under the portcullis.

For instance, the end of
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
reveals that the big treasure Bowser and Mario have been questing for the whole game is . . . a ruse. Mario has really been doing a demon’s work, and his collected Crystal Stars will reassemble the Shadow Queen, an evil force who was banished a millennium ago. And the body she’s coming back in is Peach’s. Now Mario has to attack the princess he’s been trying all game to save: very troubling. After Mario and company drop her hit points by seventy-five, the Queen becomes invincible. Round after round, she no-sells whatever he throws at her. The player undergoes a level of panic paralleling Mario’s dilemma: there’s no way to win.

Then, since this is Mario, things get better. In a cut scene, Peach fights back and escapes to safety, Mario gets his hit points maxed out, and the next round of the fight begins with the Peach-free Shadow Queen. Mario (and you at home) can without agita now finish the fight.

Most any other game would feature more realistic-looking characters, proportioned not like giant toddlers but like adults. But the hydrocephalic Mario look ties in with cartoon academic Scott McCloud’s theory of simplistic empathy; the more basic a drawing, the more human and relatable it is. We feel for good old Charlie Brown’s heartbreak more than Funky Winkerbean’s, because Charlie Brown is simpler. We feel more with Mario than with a more realistically proportioned hero like Master Chief or Lara Croft. (Not that the buxom Ms. Croft is the best example of realistic proportions.)

Most every other gaming hero that’s come since has had the burden of creating a personality for its star. Crash is silly, Sonic is snarky, Jak is stoic. Mario has the freedom to have no personality at all: that’s why Charles Martinet’s Father Guido Sarducci voice seems so risible. When Mario opens his mouth he’s a specific person. Mute, he’s our eternal alter ego. To update Joseph Campbell’s line, Mario is the face of a thousand heroes.

 

MARIO MAY NEVER FIGHT AN OPPONENT OTHER THAN
Bowser, but Nintendo is seeing some new rivalries. Let’s look global. Nintendo is at the very top of Greenpeace’s yearly naughty list for electronics companies. Unlike every other hardware manufacturer, Nintendo has no recycling program to strip out harmful toxins and heavy metals in its old Gamecubes and Game Boys. Greenpeace is promoting a contest to see which company goes green first, but Nintendo is the only one not even trying. This despite the Wii using five times less energy than competitors.

It would be Nintendo style to have been working on such a solution for years, and not want to rush things to meet Greenpeace’s deadline, and thus be branded the most irresponsible company in electronics. But it would also be Nintendo style not to have any such plan (because that’s what the competition is doing), or to have even considered the matter. But maybe it’s learning: all of its Wii releases now come in ecofriendly containers.