Super Mario (6 page)

The word “hubris” might not be strong enough for Universal at that time. It had, after all, knowingly collected millions of dollars, and started a half dozen lawsuits, all on a claim that it had proven, in the public record no less, to be bogus. How did it think it was going to succeed?

Judge Robert W. Sweet tore into Universal, in a blow-by-blow beating as thorough as it was brutal. First, Universal didn’t own
King Kong
. Second, even if it did,
Donkey Kong
wasn’t a copy of
King Kong
. Third,
even if it was
, it would be considered parody, which is legal.

Sweet was just getting started. Any company Universal had hit with cease-and-desist letters had the right to sue Universal to get back its “royalty” payments and more. There was one clear copyright violation that came to light, though. Judge Sweet felt Tiger’s
King Kong
game, even with its superficial changes (a fireman’s hat!) was a clear knockoff of
Donkey Kong
. Universal had to pay a license fee to Nintendo for Tiger’s game. Universal’s loss could only have been greater if the judge ordered back royalties to the planet Earth for its use in the film company’s logo.

Universal countersued Nintendo, and the ensuing battle took a few more years to conclude. Universal lost every suit. In the end, it had to pay nearly $2 million to Nintendo to cover its rival’s legal fees. This wasn’t counting all the other lawsuits it had on its hands, or the millions in fees it spent trying to prove, in an “abuse of judicial process,” that
Donkey Kong
and
King Kong
were one and the same.

Coleco got its money back (via Universal buying a chunk of its stock), but its lack of business fortitude was now public. It and Atari were both working on computers. Coleco was going to include
Donkey Kong
on a floppy disc as the pack-in game for its “Adam” computer. Adam premiered, playing
Donkey Kong
, at a Chicago trade show. Coleco was promptly contacted by lawyers from Atari. Nintendo had licensed the floppy-disc rights to Atari for its Atari 800 computer. Coleco had assumed it had them, as part of the console and tabletop rights. Yamauchi intervened, and bullied Coleco into shelving its unlicensed game. He almost certainly chose to play a game of chicken with Coleco because he remembered Coleco caving in to Universal. Coleco caved again. (The floppy-disc version for Atari’s computer, the Atari 800, was never released.)

Nintendo’s victory, in comparison, was unparalleled. Most other game companies either went out of business or were gobbled up by the big boys. But Nintendo faced down a muscular extortionist of a rival. Like a boy who realizes during a bully showdown that he has become a man, Nintendo learned how powerful it really was, after a mere two years. Howard Lincoln, for his part, rose from being Nintendo’s lawyer to being its senior vice president and general counsel.

And trial attorney John Kirby was given a boat. The thirty-thousand-dollar sailboat was named, of course,
Donkey Kong
. Kirby was also given “exclusive worldwide rights to use the name for sailboats.” Finally, as Mr. Segale before him, Mr. Kirby may have been rewarded with Nintendo’s greatest honor. Starting in 1992, Nintendo released a popular series of games about a cute little pink fluffball. His name? Kirby.

V
oice actor Peter Cullen may not have a recognizable name, but everyone’s heard his pipes. For the last twenty years he’s been everyone from the sad-sack Eeyore in
Winnie the Pooh,
to the villainous K.A.R.R. in
Knight Rider
, to the clicking flange-jawed Predator. He hit the trifecta of giant-morphing-robot cartoons in the early eighties, doing voices for
Go-Bots
,
Voltron
, and most memorably Optimus Prime in
Transformers
. (He still voices a CGI Optimus for the live-action remakes.)

But before Optimus Prime became his trademark role, Cullen was Mario. An animated anthology program called the
Saturday Supercade
on CBS in 1983 featured characters from various video games, all with brief cartoons in a half-hour show.
Q*Bert
, the hopping star of a maze game, became a fifties-style teenager on the run from bullies.
Frogger
, about a poor animal trying to cross a busy road, was now about an amphibious reporter.
Pitfall
, at least, was a more traditional action-adventure, since Pitfall Harry was a blatant Indiana Jones rip-off.

Mario was clearly the second banana (sorry) in the cartoon of
Donkey Kong
: Soupy Sales’s titular gorilla was the lead. DK was a Bugs Bunny type, always one step ahead of his circus trainer, Mario, who was trying to recage him. Mario was reduced to the Elmer Fudd role. Pauline was recast as Mario’s niece, who intervened on Donkey Kong’s behalf when Mario grew too close to capture.

The slapstick portrayals didn’t mesh with the game, where tension and death awaited every misstep. And the show gained an odiously revisionist second act when the
Donkey Kong Jr.
cartoon premiered the following year, featuring lonely Junior’s quest to find his missing father. The show made DK seem to be a deadbeat dad, undeserving of his son’s efforts at reunion. But perhaps the gentle good humor helped soften Mario and Donkey Kong’s edges.

The two rivals, though, would be parting ways. Shigeru Miyamoto introduced a new human protagonist for 1983’s
Donkey Kong 3
, Stanley the exterminator. Donkey Kong, residing in the upper center of the screen, and again in the heavy role, is hanging between two jungle vines. When he punches a hive, a staggering variety of bugs pile out, ready to attack Stanley with all-different attack patterns. The exterminator has to zap them all with his bug spray, then once they’re gone grab some super bug spray and spritz Donkey Kong himself. (No little fun has been had with Stanley’s only available target: the gorilla’s rear end. The gorilla braces when he receives the bidet-style insecticide.)

Donkey Kong 3
was, behind the jungle canopy, a clever reworking of
Space Firebird
, Nintendo’s old dogfighting game. Space games weren’t selling that well, but the game play was almost identical. Besides, Miyamoto was working on two games at the same time (not counting the
DK3
adaptation
Green House
for the Game & Watch), and couldn’t be expected to generate all-original content for both.

For that other game, Miyamoto was spinning off Mario into his own title. Mario was originally a carpenter, since he was at a construction site. But, a friend told Miyamoto, the overalls and hat and pudgy willingness to leap into nasty situations made him really more of a plumber. Hmm, Miyamoto thought. There could be a video game about plumbing. And Mario could be the star.

The idea he came up with bears as much relation to plumbing as
Pac-Man
does to fighting the paranormal. Mario, down in the cavernous sewers of New York, jumps around on platforms four stories high. Open sewer pipes emit a series of nasties—crabs, turtles, flies. Mario attacks not by hammer or bug spray, but by jumping on enemies. Furthermore, the platforms are mutable: head butting one from below buckles it like a plank-and-rope bridge, and flips enemies. If Mario collides with them while they’re upside-down, he kicks them to the edge of the screen. Kick or bop them all offscreen, and the level is clear.

The enemies were all “palette-swapped,” the same design with two paint jobs, which doubled the menagerie crawling out of the huge green drainage pipes. The Sidestepper crab started off red, but if not kicked offscreen after being flipped would turn a speedy blue. Good attacks and quick finishes rewarded Mario with points, as well as coins that went clattering around like a shanked football. The game’s grand challenge wasn’t just defeating the creatures, or winning before time ran out, or amassing valuable coins. It was finding an amalgam of all three. It was noticeably easier than
Donkey Kong
to finish a level, but—appropriate for a game located underground—much deeper.

The game was called
Mario Bros.
, which raises the question of who Mario’s brother was. To create a sibling, Miyamoto palette-swapped Mario himself. The plumber’s red shirt was now black, and his blue overalls and red hat were now Day-Glo green. Better electronics let Miyamoto have a whopping six colors at his disposal. So Mario and his sibling received slightly different skin tones and hair colors. One pair of ugly-even-by-1983-standards indigo sneakers later, and taa-da!: Luigi was born.

Luigi’s wardrobe has been updated slightly since then: his green hat now matches his green shirt, he wears blue overalls like Mario, and the indigo sneakers are exiled. His name supposedly came from an Italian bistro near Redmond, called Mario and Luigi’s. Or maybe it’s a pun:
ruiji
means “similar” in Japanese. Or, as some have pointed out, maybe someone at Nintendo was a cinephile, and remembered Yves Montand as Mario in 1953’s
The Wages of Fear
, a stout mustached man with a hat, who had a tall lean friend named Luigi.

Luigi’s controls were identical to Mario, which, of course, was even easier to program than a palette-swap. The game, though, was called
Mario Bros.
Wasn’t Mario the
first
name? Thanks to what comic book fans call a ret-con (retroactive continuity), Mario’s brief history was rewritten to have Mario be the family name. That made Luigi’s name Luigi Mario. But then what was Mario’s first name? Mario as well. Mario Mario. If he was a real person, he’d have had a rough childhood.

The two-player simultaneity was “inspired” by a 1982 Williams game called
Joust
, which in turn seemed to be inspired by
Donkey Kong
’s platform-jumping control scheme, combined with the sheer lunacy of crazy animals running around. In
Joust
, players mounted either an ostrich or a stork, which could fly by repeatedly hitting the “flap” button. They bounded around a board suspiciously similar in layout to
Mario Bros.
: a series of tiered platforms arranged like a splitlevel stairway minus the stairs. Due to a programming glitch that defined the ethos “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature,” when the ostrich or stork crossed the far left side of the board, they popped through to the right side, like a secret passageway in
Clue
.

Joust
was a glorified game of chicken. Players charged at flying monsters, and whoever had his lance higher when they collided won. The loser was, in a plot twist worthy of Gabriel García Márquez, transformed into an egg, and would hatch back into play if the winning jouster didn’t come and stomp it within a few seconds. One final, crucial aspect of
Joust
? Players could—and did—attack each other, as well as the on-screen baddies.

Mario Bros.
did not copy
Joust
’s singular attack style. Its rule was the same as in the previous game: if Mario (or Luigi) touched an opponent, he died instantly. It varied the types of attacks: jumping, flipping, kicking, or head butting the once-a-level POW block landmine, which wipes everyone out. The platforms were placed a bit closer, since Mario had to access them in a single jump. One final, crucial aspect of
Mario Bros.
? Mario and Luigi couldn’t kill each other.

Cooperation in games wasn’t a much-traveled avenue. Certainly, from
Pong
onward, people understood the joys of two-player rivalries. It was loved on the business side as well, since it gobbled up two quarters instead of one. Shooter games were more difficult to make two player. Put a second controllable sprite on an existing board, and whatever challenge there was gets ruined by double the laser fire. Beef up the number of enemies, and you ended up designing two games. And trying to throw more villains in the mix on the fly was pushing things in 1983. The solution, it seemed, was to turn whatever game you had into a duel, with the winner the one simply left alive.
Joust
,
Space Duel
,
Space Wars
,
Tank
, and numerous others found ways of turning any number of game genres into death matches.

But not
Mario Bros
. There was no easy way to hurt Luigi. The best players could do was to kick an enemy at him. The only honest way to beat Luigi was to outscore him, trying to trample the monsters and claim the coin reward before he could. This invested Mario in a taut, competitive friendship with his brother, one eye on the beasts and the other on the current high score. It was cooperative competition, rather than simply throat-slitting. And with no in-game story other than sewer stomping, the “story” became you versus your friend.

Mario Bros.
made for the fourth
Donkey Kong
game in three years, not counting an Epyx game based on the
DK
game play called, in a probable homage,
Jumpman
. Plus, Nintendo finally acquired the
Popeye
rights Miyamoto had wondered about, and made a game for the spinach-eating sailor that clearly reflected its
Donkey Kong
– ish roots. But Nintendo was merely keeping pace.
Pac-Man
alone generated 1981’s
Ms. Pac-Man
, 1982’s
Super Pac-Man,
and 1983’s
Pac & Pal
and
Pac-Man & Chomp-Chomp
.
Gradius
,
Space Invaders
,
Asteroids
, and
Galaxian
all churned out yearly arcade sequels.

These games didn’t provide the only automated entertainment in the early eighties. The same quick-and-dirty aesthetic accounted for: disposable Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers slasher movies; a barrage of TV spinoffs (
Knots Landing
from
Dallas
, and the
Facts of Life
from
Diff’rent Strokes
); and a cavalcade of synthesizer-y New Wave music (Depeche Mode, A-Ha, and the Pet Shop Boys). But people understood that when one fad in entertainment ended (bye, Howard Jones) another would take its place (hello, Huey Lewis and the News).