Super Mario

by Jeff Ryan

  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.

  It was all coalescing. Donkey Kong would be situated at the top of the screen, with Jumpman fighting his way up: gamers were used to enemies up top. What better setting than a construction site? Donkey Kong could roll barrels down the bare I beams, and Jumpman would have to jump to avoid them. The “sloping” girders were progressively tiered, since angling them wasn’t possible with mere raster graphics.

  Miyamoto gave Jumpman a choice of ladders to ascend. (Yokoi had suggested seesaws instead, but that would have strained the Z80 processor more than angled girders.) The farther ladder was safer, but it took longer to reach. This gave players a true choice right away: take the quick and difficult path, or the slow and easy one? Crushing barrels and jumping over them was worth some points, but finishing early was worth a lot too. Another choice: go for the high score with the barrels, or try to beat the clock?

  Miyamoto wanted his story to progress like a chase, and chases needed multiple locations. The four-person Ikegami Tsushinki development team was baffled; variations on a theme were what sequels were for. Why put all this work into level 2 (with five stories of conveyor belts) when 90 percent of players won’t ever see it? Not to mention level 3, with elevators and springs. And now a level 4, with Jumpman smashing rivets to finally bring down Donkey Kong?

  Miyamoto couldn’t program, but he could play the piano, and he knew that Radar Scope had a solid DAC converter. He composed a brief score to go with the game, not just beeps and blasts. There was an intro, a breezy, sad affair that established Jumpman and the Lady’s moods. When Jumpman died, there was a four-note dirge. And when Jumpman grabbed a hammer, the soundtrack celebrated with a zippy little march. In true Zen fashion, the happy music was tinged with sadness, and the sad music was tinged with happiness.

  What’s more, instead of just an introductory screen leading into the game, Miyamoto wanted an animated story to appear after each quarter was plunked. Donkey Kong, with the Lady in hand, would climb to the top of the (not yet slanted) construction site. When he stomped his feet, the screen would tilt into its now-familiar jackstraws shape. After the first level, Miyamoto wanted another cut scene, in which Jumpman and the Lady would be reunited briefly, before Donkey Kong would grab her again and climb higher up the I beams.

  Start to finish, Donkey Kong was twenty thousand lines of code, way more than usual. Some extra sound equipment had to be added to get the audio to work. But since Miyamoto had composed his music digitally, it took up a fraction of the space of a much shorter clip of true digitized sound, such as a speech sample.

  While Miyamoto and Yokoi were designing the new chip in Japan, Minoru Arakawa was moving his American team cross-country again. New York may be Toy Central, but it was too far from Japan. Moving the warehouse from New Jersey to Tukwila, Washington, would save two weeks per shipment, and let the Arakawas return to the Pacific Northwest. The small Nintendo of America staff (including Mino and Yoko Arakawa, Ron Judy, Al Stone, and a gofer they hired named Howard Phillips) would work out of the new warehouse.

  At first, Donkey Kong was no picnic to sell. Arcade vendors and sales crews were as comfortable with shooting games as the kids dropping quarters into them were. This game was quite literally a different animal. How do you sell a title about a carpenter fighting a monkey who throws barrels at him? With a name that makes no sense in English? Jumpman never once attacks Donkey Kong: the worst he does is destabilize a platform he’s on. Some hero. It didn’t fit into any recognizable category—not a sports game, not a shooter, not even a driving game. Couldn’t Miyamoto have just let you shoot the gorilla with a gun?

  At least it was hard: most gamers killed off their allotted three Jumpmen after a minute or so. Nothing dropped a game’s profit margins like making a quarter last half an hour. The secret was, like the tiny basketball hoop in carnivals, to make it only seem easy. And if somehow a gamer got past all four levels, the game started over again in an even tougher mode.

  The first conversion kits were readied. Arakawa had the name Donkey Kong trademarked. (All attempts by Nintendo of America to change the name failed. An urban legend has it the name was originally Monkey Kong, and was changed due to a misheard phone call or garbled fax.) Out of the two thousand dusty Radar Scope cabinets, fresh from Jersey, two were chosen for test subjects.

  The old game board had to be removed and the new one put in. The wiring harness had to be perfectly connected. One incorrect wire could fry the game board, or overload the monitor so it would smoke out. The wires weren’t labeled (this was not a Dell computer), so it wasn’t clear which wire went where. And the team assembling the games—including Mino and Yoko—was not brimming with electrical engineering know-how. Next, the old art from the red-colored cabinets—the marquee overlay in front of the screen, the control panel, the instructions along the side—had to be slid ou
t from its protective plastic and replaced with the Donkey Kong art and text. And they had to do this during unseasonably hot summer months: it hit a record 107 degrees in nearby Shelton in August.

  The rebranding was important for the game, and not just to remove evidence of its previous life as Radar Scope. Good cabinet art set an atmosphere for the game that its limited graphics couldn’t meet. It was too bad most games were lined up between other cabinets like so many Laundromat washers. Arakawa lost a fight to rename both Donkey Kong the game and Donkey Kong the character, but he received permission to rechristen Jumpman and Lady.

  The warehouse where the Radar Scopes had been gathering dust was run by Don James, whose wife was named Polly. As a way of thanking the warehouse manager, who received a lot of heat from the landlord over Nintendo’s uncollected rent, they decided to rename “Lady” after his wife. Lady became Pauline, close enough to Polly.

  Around this time, the Tukwila warehouse’s owner showed up in person to angrily remind Arakawa about the rent. As the legend goes, the owner, Mario Segale, interrupted a conversation over what to call Jumpman. Segale said his piece, and he grew so incensed he almost jumped up and down himself. After the landlord left, eviction threat delivered, someone suggested the name Mario. It was a joke, since both men had mustaches. But everyone liked the name.

  To the Japanese, the name has a familiar consonant-vowel pattern—Yukio, Hanako, Hiroto, Mario. Just one letter away from the Japanese girl’s name Mariko, in fact. No troubling Ls that could cause lallation errors, not so commonplace as to be heard regularly in America, not already associated with anyone too famous (Godfather author Mario Puzo was about it), and yet not so unusual that it drew undue attention. Although most people think of it as an exclusively Italian name, it’s also Spanish and Portuguese. Mario is a variant of the Latin Marius or Marcus—both of which are believed to derive from Mars, the Roman god of war. Sometimes it’s used as a masculine version of Mary, which means “star of the sea.” For the past thirty years, it’s made the list of the two hundred most popular boys’ names in America, peaking at 111 in the 1980s.

  Yes, Mario would be a super name for Jumpman. If Mr. Segale had only shaved that morning, who can say what name the character on the screen might have been given. Super Carlos? Super Ivan? Super Stavros? Would that alternate-universe name have made a difference in Nintendo’s success? Under any other name, would Mario play as sweet?

  With the two cabinet conversions done, Nintendo then needed a guinea pig. Ron and Al placed the Donkey Kong games in two bars in the Seattle area that already had Radar Scope machines: the Spot Tavern and Goldies. They visited every day, mostly because the few quarters in the machines were their business’s sole source of income. The bars therefore served as an ersatz product testing ground for arriviste games. Donkey Kong immediately started to deliver more than thirty dollars a day in quarters, much more than Radar Scope was pulling in. Ron and Al added more cabinets, and each game pulled in more than two hundred dollars a week. That’s close to ten pounds in change.

  Converting the rest of the two thousand cabinets took months, but each was a guaranteed sale. As they were being completed, new Donkey Kong games arrived from Japan, this time with blue cabinets. (The red-cabinet conversions eventually became collector’s items.) Demand seemed to increase exponentially, with every arcade-game venue needing a cabinet, then two, then three. At one point, there were sixty thousand Donkey Kong machines in simultaneous use worldwide. You were sixty times more likely to find a Donkey Kong machine than a theater playing Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981’s most popular film, on opening week.

  Modern pinball offered basically no correlation between what you do (pull a plunger) and the “reward” of a hundred buzzers and doodads making a racket. Its addiction quotient was low. Space Invaders offered a regular reward schedule: ten, twenty, or forty points per ship hit. Its addiction quotient was high. Donkey Kong had an irregular reward schedule, since what earned you points changed each level, and you could also score points by speed. Like a slot machine with the slightest house advantage, this was a formula for a stratospherically addicting game, one in which either your skill or your luck may make all the difference next game. That is, until you were out of quarters.

  And Mario’s abiogenesis would never have happened if Radar Scope was a bit more popular, if Arakawa had swallowed the financial loss, if Yamauchi had given the reconfiguration project to experienced designers, if Yokoi hadn’t given Miyamoto free rein to design, or if Miyamoto had decided to just make a game—instead of tell a story.

  3 – MARIO’S BRAWL

  THE MCA UNIVERSAL LAWSUIT

  In Hollywood, Florida, a sixteen-year-old pinball wizard with the apple-pie name of Billy Mitchell was the best player in town. He had learned all the physics tricks: tipping the machine without tilting the solenoid, keeping multiple balls in play, trapping balls and flicking them directly into scoops or drop targets. This used to impress people. But not anymore: all the arcade loiterers were over watching a video game. Billy, who lettered in three sports in high school, considered video games beneath his abilities. “Video games were something new and different,” he said in an Oxford American interview, “and I don’t like new and different.”

  “But they started getting more popular,” he said. “Everyone was standing around the Donkey Kong machine, and I wanted that attention.” Mitchell, whose father owned a restaurant that featured arcade games, started devoting himself to long hours every day getting a feel for Donkey Kong: when Mario should run, when he should jump, when he should grab the hammer. Mitchell discovered a place to stand in one level free of dangers: perfect for bathroom breaks.

  Mitchell also learned about the last board of Donkey Kong—in the 22nd level, the 117th total screen. The game was supposed to have infinite levels, which plateaued at the highest level of difficulty and simply cycled over and over. But the algorithm to determine how much time to give Mario per screen was written without knowledge that people like Billy Mitchell would treat Donkey Kong like a rental car on a racetrack, pushing it to its engineering limits. In this case, the limit was 100 x (10 x (22 + 4)), which for any computer nowadays would run the same if that 22 was a 21 or a 23. But Donkey Kong’s Z-80 was an 8-bit chip, with a memory counter of only 256 places. Like an odometer hitting a million miles, it rolls back to 000001. For Donkey Kong, the rollover on board 117 causes a “kill screen”—Mario is simply not given enough time to complete the level before time runs out.

  Billy moved onto Centipede, and BurgerTime, and Pac-Man. He was the best player anyone in South Florida had seen. When an arcade owner in Iowa, Walter Day of Twin Galaxies, started keeping track of reported top scores in games, Billy called up to question a reported Donkey Kong score of 1.6 million. He knew it was false because he hadn’t cracked a million before hitting the kill screen, and if he couldn’t, no one could. Billy was right: the seven-digit score was bogus. He’s held the Donkey Kong top score more or less since then.

  A 2007 documentary about arcade games, The King of Kong, shows a duel between Mitchell, whose ego and eloquence make him an easy villain in the film, and a challenger, sweet teacher Steve Wiebe, who lives in Mario’s hometown of Redmond, Washington. Mitchell comes off somewhere between Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant and wrestling’s Mr. Perfect. He’s clearly unwilling to give up his title, and hasn’t played Donkey Kong for years. Yet the victory means so much to him he resorts to psychological warfare and character assassination against the guileless Wiebe. Since then, he and Wiebe have broken and rebroken each other’s records: As of July 27, 2007, Mitchell still holds the live record, with 1,050,200 points. Hank Chien, a Harvard-trained plastic surgeon, videotaped a 1,068,000-point score in late 2010.

  Billy wasn’t the only one addicted to Donkey Kong. Those initial two thousand units were long gone from the Tukwila warehouse by the fall of 1981. Just about every unit that came off a boat from Japan was immediately put onto a truck to somewhere in Middle America. Why? Pop
psychology would say that while most every other game offered a way to destroy, and Pac-Man offered a way to escape, Donkey Kong offered a way to rescue. That didn’t affect the mimetics of the game play, but it certainly changed the motivation of the players: a girl’s life was at stake here! Some desperate arcades had even started to buy a blatant clone, Falcon’s Crazy Kong. Others bought expensive counterfeits.

  Minowa Arakawa had Don James, his new head of operations (after having lured James away from Segale), hire some Washingtonians to manufacture the parts in Redmond. That way, the finished machines wouldn’t have to ride the slow boat from next-to-China to get there. Plus, Seattle had tech-savvy workers and one of the world’s great reserves of lumber for the cabinets. This reduced production cycle allowed Nintendo to manufacture more DKs while it was still popular with arcade-goers. Up to fifty units a day of the big ape were made in 1982, more than a thousand a month, more than Radar Scope ever sold in its lifetime.

  Nintendo’s distributors Ron Judy and Al Stone were two of the six people who piece by piece converted every one of the original Radar Scope games to Donkey Kong. They were being paid on straight commission, which had nearly bankrupted them in the early days. Now Judy and Stone were millionaires. Arakawa—whose wife, Yoko, had been another one of the six crawling inside machines with soldering irons—found himself responsible for a global property that brought in $180 million in its first year in the United States alone. That was more than any film released in 1982, save for E.T.

  Amazingly, DK brought in $100 million in its second year, well beyond any other sophomore game other than Pac-Man and Space Invaders. “Video Games Are Blitzing the World,” read a Time magazine cover in January 1982. Miyamoto’s originality of concept contributed to Donkey Kong’s long-lasting success. There were tons of shooter games and maze games, but no other “ape-throwing-barrels” game. (Atari’s Kangaroo that year was closest, with its evil monkeys and a high-jumping hero.) If Nintendo was just another flash-in-the-pan toy company, this was quite a long flash.