Super Mario (32 page)

These almost certainly aren’t going to be what the hit games of tomorrow are. I’m not a game designer, and perhaps it shows in these examples. But there are currently two warring tribes consuming video games, and there’s no reason for them to be at war. It will take a few years, some olive-branch releases on both sides, before casual players accept a game with a story, and core players accept an activity without a game. And the first few games that try to bridge these camps may crash and burn, like Nintendo’s 64DD.

But I would like to, cautiously, and with a book’s worth of evidence as backup, make a claim about who will be the designers of the unified era’s first blockbuster title. Shigeru Miyamoto, in one of his last great performances for Nintendo, will use the knowledge gleaned from his shuttle diplomacy missions between the core and casual camps. He’ll understand what lizard-brain types of game play appeal to both groups, and what sort of structure that foundation would best support. Satoru Iwata, continuing a tradition, will premiere another new console like the Wii and the 3DS that makes up for in innovation what it lacks in horsepower. Reggie Fils-Aime will continue to merge the roles of hype man and president, tailoring his sales pitch to what people want to buy, not to what he wants to sell.

Nintendo will need a hook for this new console, a specific game that couldn’t be played, or conceived, on any other platform, even with down-to-the-atom motion sensing or a Beowulf cluster of processing power. But they’ll already have their star lined up. Miyamoto and Iwata and Fils-Aime will call up Nintendo’s most famous character, propelling him once more unto the breach. Super Mario will be back. And he will be as big a star as ever, in this new game that will unite the great schism of gaming. It will take a few years, and maybe a few misfires, but the plumber will reclaim his throne.

Just kidding.

I hope it doesn’t come off as bragging when I say that this book could have been double in size. There’s a lot of Mario out there, but not all of it moves the Nintendo story forward. Much of my editing work was in snipping out lines, paragraphs, and in two instances entire chapters that were tributaries that diverged too far from the stream. Those two chapters are available at
www.supermariobook.com
, if you want to learn more extensively about Nintendo’s relationship to Japan in its early days, and about the fascinating and very secretive man Mario is named after, Mario Segale. Think of them as downloadable content, to use a gaming term.

I’ve listed most all of my book sources in the bibliography, but the list of Web sites I consulted would probably go on for half the length of the book itself. Just about any possible question I could ask myself, regarding facts or analysis about Nintendo, someone before me had asked and answered. Thanks to them, I had a true surplus of video game heritage and trivia to immerse myself in. The beginning of chapter 23, for instance, grew just about daily. Just because I found a hundred different types of Mario shirts doesn’t mean all hundred have to be described.

There seems to be a pact among Wikipedia users: they’ll use it but never actually cop to doing so. I will gladly cop not only to looking at but to printing out and reviewing (on an hourly basis) two Wikipedia pages: one on Mario’s appearances ordered by year, and one of Miyamoto’s games, arranged the same way. It’s very difficult to find an error on Wikipedia: I became an expert on Mario and Nintendo, and I only found a few minor release-date discrepancies. The stigma persists, though, and thus I didn’t use a Wikipedia source if I could get the same information any other way.

Other Web sites I visited for information include 1up.com, businessweek.com, slate.com, newyorker.com vintagecomputing .com, oxfordamericanmag.org, industrygamers.com, kokatu.com, and joystiq.com. Nintendo fan sites (miyamotoshrine.com, gonintendo .com, n-sider.com, zeldauniverse.net, among others) were great portal sites to find older, Google-ignored coverage of Nintendo moments. I’d like to especially call out GameSpot.com, which ran an exhaustive history-of-Mario series; VGChartz.com, from which I found most all of the sales figures in this book; and Nintendo’s own Iwata Asks series, where I got to be a fly on the wall as Nintendo execs held candid postmortems about what went right and wrong during development.

People were often the best sources. Some lent books, others helped with translations, and others (well, just one) volunteered to put on a mustache and red overalls to make a promotional video. Thanks go to Justin Brennan, Philip Jan, John Merriman, Kristin Linsday, Benj Edwards, Deanna Talamantez, Alison Holt Brummelkamp, Candace Smart, Mikkel Paige Mihlrad, Konstantin Karpenyuk, James Brennan, and Vinnie Nardiello. Jeannette Fee, Sean Ryan, and Cynthia Ryan were early readers, and offered edits so good I felt embarrassed I hadn’t thought of them first. Also there was that one guy at the Gamestop in the mall, and that other guy at the other Gamestop in the same mall . . . People want to talk when they find out you’re writing a Mario book.

My parents could have written off $200 from their 1987 taxes if they knew I’d write this book. Thanks to Kathleen Ryan and Dennis Ryan for resisting the urge to buy an Atari 5200 for Christmas, and thus starting me on my literary endeavor. And to Brendan Ryan, Bridgette Parker, and again Sean Ryan, three siblings I love more every year.

I’ve done my best to make the professionals at Portfolio and Penguin not regret their decision to publish a book about video games. Thanks to Emily Angell, Christy D’Agostini, Maureen Cole, Faren Bachelis, Linda Cowen, Daniel Lagin, Dan Donohue, Jennifer Tait, Eric Meyers, and my editor Courtney Young. Without all of you, the world would never know about
Hotel Mario
. And thanks to my agent Lynn Johnston, who set me up with my first interview, her fifth-grade daughter, soon after we sold the book.

I dedicated this book to Bill Rudowski. Who is he? He’s who won the book dedication auction, with all proceeds going to Child’s Play, which donates toys and games to children’s hospitals. Thanks to him, Laura Whalen, Ed Byrne, Jimi Cullen, Andrew Melzinek, and everyone else who stopped by eBay for a bidding roller-coaster ride.

The various people I’ve met over the years at Nintendo—from the Redmond and Kyoto branches and their Golin Harris press office—have been very generous and helpful, arranging interviews, providing review copies of material, touring me around the facilities, even setting up an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto. But Nintendo is a particular company, and one of those particularities is not cooperating with the press when it comes to books. So most all of that access dried up when I told them I was working on something longer than a magazine article. My time spent embedded in the Mushroom Kingdom was thus unofficial.

I’ve thanked Cindy Ryan for her editing before, which she’s done for my writing projects since before we were married. She’s also responsible for buying me our Wii, defeating the Pit of 100 Trials, outracing me without the aid of any red shells, and winning several NES games in the
Animal Crossing
village of Qwerty. She’s also brought two princesses into our lives, Sylvia and Holly, which makes her twice the hero Mario is. I would say more wonderful things about her, but I’m running out of ways to couch them in video-game argot. Here’s one more: my life is super because of you.

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Albano, Lou

amusement parks

Apple

Apple II

iPhone

Arakawa, Minoru “Mino,”

Donkey Kong
and

Game Boy and

Lincoln and

retirement of

Arakawa, Yoko

Arthur, King

Atari

Beam Gun

Bissell, Tom

Bleszinski, Cliff

Boone, Walker

Bush, George W.

Bushnell, Nolan

cakes

CDs

Chien, Hank

China

Christenson, Clayton

Club Mario

Coleco

computers

Conker

Cullen, Peter

Day, Walter

DeVito, Danny

board game

cartoon