Super Mario

by Jeff Ryan

  This trilogy of games (none designed by Miyamoto) makes it clear what Nintendo was aiming to set up for Mario: a cartoonlike role as the eager employee, trying to cope in any number of stressful environments. No one who played Mickey & Donald thought “Hey, wasn’t Mickey a sorcerer’s apprentice instead of a firefighter? This guy’s career is all over the place.” Mickey was a symbol for Disney, and Mario would be that exact same symbol for Nintendo.

  To accomplish this, Nintendo would ignore Mario’s role as a villain in Donkey Kong Jr. Mario would jump with both feet into whatever challenge Nintendo put in front of him, be it war, monsters, or the perils of just-in-time supply chain management.

  Mario’s father, Miyamoto, moved on as well to new jobs. After Mario Bros. he worked to design a game called Devil World, the only game of his never released in North America. It was a maze game, with the clever conceit that the monsters in the maze would move the walls, instead of just chase the hero. That wasn’t what kept it from U.S. shores, though. In the game’s story line, a green dragon named Tamagon descends into Hell in order to fight Satan. The Pac-Man – style power pellets are replaced by crosses and Bibles. For an industry called devil worshipers by some extremists, a game featuring the devil (even as a villain) was a no-no.

  There was a push to make a lot of games for Yamauchi’s new game console. Nintendo was excellent at nemawashi, a Japanese gardening term for digging around the roots of a to-be-transplanted tree. Nemawashi referred to the business necessity of quietly laying the correct groundwork of success. For Nintendo, nemawashi demanded that a game console have many games ready for release, and many more in the pipeline. Otherwise, it’d be as deserved a failure as all the American consoles that rushed to market without any quality in their product. And they had to be a different breed of game, not necessarily engineered like arcade games to end quickly.

  As soon as Devil World was finished, Miyamoto received a promotion. He had been working with his mentor, Gunpei Yokoi, who was on the Game & Watch development team and also pitched in overseeing the Donkey Kong franchise. But Yamauchi wanted to keep Yokoi working on Game & Watch: it was Yokoi’s idea, and each new game added to Nintendo’s coffers. Yamauchi decided his company’s new golden boy, shaggy Shiggy Miyamoto, was management material. Miyamoto supposed that Yamauchi saw in him a surrogate son—or grandson.

  Miyamoto officially stepped back into a producer’s role with his new position. He hadn’t trained as a software designer: it wasn’t where his skills lay. He knew enough to be able to explain what he wanted, how he wanted it, and how it could be done. Like Mario, just because he was good at a job didn’t mean there wasn’t a better fit for him somewhere else. Yokoi’s management style was encouragement: he told future Metroid designer Yoshi Sakamoto, “If you can draw pixel art, you can make a game.” Miyamoto continued the style of choosing carrots over sticks with his crew. (His leadership turned out to be better than his organizational skills: he needed an assistant just to keep track of things.) A new designer named Kazuaki Morita served as Miyamoto’s protégé. Which put the thirty-something Miyamoto in the role of mentor.

  Their first challenge was Ice Climber, which seemed like a polarthemed Mario Bros. Except that as Popo and Nana, the cute titular Eskimo kids, advanced to the top of the screen, it panned up with them. The “level” was about five screens high! Scrolling upward also allowed the cut-off lower screen to become a deadly obstacle if the climbers fell below it. Miyamoto also supervised a horizontally panning game called Excitebike, whose controls used one of motocross’s elements, overheating, as the game’s crutch. (Miyamoto bicycled to work instead of driving a car, so he had an interest in things two wheeled.) Both buttons sped up the bike: the A button was regular speed and the B button was a sizzling form of turbo power. Use it too much and the bike cooks. Use it too little, and get lapped.

  The Famicon was released in Japan on July 13, 1983. Two controllers were hardwired into the white and maroon system, with vertical holding slots built into the console to store them when not in use. Player one had a start and select button, with the power cord sticking out from the left. Player two, with the power cord to the right, had an internal microphone instead. The Famicon accepted sixty-pin game cartridges from a top-down slot, and could be expanded to accept certain discs and allow modem support. (Yes: modem support in 1983. America Online started in 1983 as well, as Gameline, a service offering modem support for the Atari 2600.)

  The Famicon launched with three games, all ports of Nintendo’s arcade hits: Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Popeye. A dozen more games were in the works. This wasn’t a mere arcade game, rigged to play just one game, or a rinky-dink piece of LCD electronics. This was a full-fledged computer! Yamauchi didn’t get his wish of a price under ¥10,000, but the retail price of ¥14,800 was still on the low side for a console, and helped it gain market penetration.

  Then the Famicons started to break. Computers were indeed difficult to make: one little mistake on one little chip could cause players’ games to freeze or crash midsession. Reports trickled in of this happening with multiple consoles all over Japan. The batch of chips used in production, it turned out, was shoddy. Nintendo had put out a product with a bad component. When retailers found out, they would pull the Famicon off their shelves.

  Nintendo had never made bad products, and it wasn’t going to start now. In a move that echoed Tylenol’s voluntary recall after a tampering scare, Yamauchi ordered a product recall of every single Famicon, even those without the bad component. Those who had bought one could send it in and have it repaired free of charge. Nintendo would rip out the entire motherboard, not just the bad chip, and replace the whole system. Yamauchi knew Nintendo had the money to essentially rebuild each Famicon manufactured or sold. The question was whether anyone would buy them, or let them back on shelves, once the recall was completed. Recalls done wrong tainted the brand forever. Done right, though, they could be a blessing in disguise.

  Erring on the side of caution paid off. Japanese retailers liked that one high-tech company finally took responsibility for its errors and fixed them for free. (Nintendo continues to do so today, to the point of reapplying kids’ stickers onto a new console if the old one has to be replaced instead of repaired.) Sales were great for the rest of 1983: Nintendo moved half a million consoles, and Sharp started production of a TV set with a built-in Famicon. And as those new games from Miyamoto came out, the Famicon became Japan’s biggest-selling game console, selling three million consoles by 1984. Yamauchi even found a cheap way to drum up new arcade games: convert existing Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. cabinets to Nintendo Vs. machines, which played a series of beefed-up Famicon titles. Replacing it with new games would be as easy as restocking a vending machine. The same idea was reused for the Play Choice arcade games.

  Miyamoto wasn’t the only producer generating new games for the nascent Famicon. Yamauchi ran his R&D team with three divisions, run by three daimyos. (Daimyos were the medieval lords of Japan, all powerful save for the kingly shogun. Yamauchi, of course, was the shogun in this metaphor.) All could design games, hardware, accessories, whatever they wanted. Gunpei Yokoi was head of one of these three divisions now. Masayuki Uemura, who designed the Famicon, headed the second. Genyo Takeda, who would come up with the battery-save feature for the NES, headed up the third. All three of Nintendo’s daimyos had expertise in hardware, not software.

  In 1984, Miyamoto was given the honor of heading up a new fourth division. As a daimyo, his job was to rally his people to produce the most value, and the best advancement, to please the shogun—er, the president. Yamauchi-sama (no mere Yamauchi-san for him) was happy to play the role of judge; no game went forward without his express permission. He had a sixth sense for knowing what would sell well in which markets. Amazingly, he did this without ever playing a game, instead just watching a scant minute or two of game play. It’s wildly out of character for both Yamauchi and his company, but the image of a drug lord refusing to sniff his own pr
oduct does come to mind.

  One of Miyamoto’s “rival” R&D divisions decided to make a game called Wrecking Crew, and Miyamoto “lent” them Mario and Luigi to star in it. The brothers play demolition workers taking down a hundred levels of concrete and brick, which much be taken out in the correct order. To keep the cerebral nature of the game, Mario and Luigi can’t jump. Mario received a makeover for the role: he gained a hard hat, switched to an all-red sleeveless ensemble instead of overalls, and trimmed his mustache to look like Tom Selleck’s.

  Mario also shows up as a bonus character in Nintendo’s Pinball, in a bonus where he can save Pauline in a Breakout-style extra level. And there he is again as the line judge in Tennis, yet another game generated for the console’s launch. And again in Donkey Kong Hockey: he and DK slap the puck back and forth, and whoever has the slower reflexes gets scored on. He also appears in Mario Bros. Special (only in Japan) in an awkward port of Mario Bros. made by Hudson Soft, and in F-1 Race, where he waves on the Formula One cars. Mario appears in Punch Ball Mario Bros., another failed attempt by Hudson Soft to adapt Mario Bros. that involved, as you might expect, Mario punching a ball. And he’s in the audience for the arcade game Punch-Out! It might be easier to list the Nintendo games of that time into which Mario was not shoehorned.

  This was the Mickey Mouse philosophy, all right: could anyone remember Mickey as a cartoon character anymore? With a distinct personality? No, Mickey was just a mascot. Just a smile and a pair of ears. Donald Duck, now he had a personality. Goofy too. Mario was a brainwashing victim: what little there was about him—he could jump, he was a hero, he had a bushy mustache, he was a carpenter—had all been rewritten.

  Nintendo’s attempts to keep vague Mario plugging away at job after job were not promising for long-term success. One could go Sanrio’s Hello Kitty route and have abstract form but no meaning. Or one could go the Bugs Bunny route and make a strong defined character. But to survive, Mario would need a consistent hook. Look at King Arthur, on whose story hangs various unrelated legends: the King Uther tale, Lancelot sleeping with his wife, the quest for the Grail. Yet everyone knows King Arthur’s core; he was England’s greatest king. Despite glaring contradictions (he can’t pull Excalibur from a rock if he’s already been given it by the Lady in the Lake), his core character remains the same.

  If Mario was to be Nintendo’s cynosure, he needed a constant narrative. Not just whatever ridiculous workplace needed a hapless light industrial employee: a world of his own.

  6 – MARIO’S SUNSHINE

  SUPER MARIO BROS. AND THE NINTENDO ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEM

  When the Famicon was released, in 1983, twenty-three-year-old Kōji Kondō heard about a job through his college in Osaka. He was considering graduate school to further his music studies. He wanted to play professionally, and had learned both the piano and the cello. He had even experimented with composing and arranging music using a computer, being one of the first digital audio converts of a still-analog world.

  The position was with the people who had made Donkey Kong. Kondō loved Donkey Kong, and especially loved the brief little bursts of original music for each level. The job was nearby, in Kyoto. And it combined two of his favorite pastimes: video games and music. Kondō would apply, of course, but so would everyone else. He didn’t have any demo tapes of his compositions. But Kōji had grown up with electronic music, playing the Yamaha Electone, a downmarket version of Hammond’s drawbar electronic organ. He had developed the skills to imitate his English rock heroes—such as John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin and Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake & Palmer—in a cover band. He lived for this sort of music, and it must have shown in the interview.

  Kōji Kondō got the job at Nintendo, and became a professional composer for video games. With all the games they put out they needed one: for Mario Bros. they stole a page from Looney Tunes and digitized Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik for a score. Within a matter of months Kondō had scored two arcade games: Golf and a boxing game called Punch-Out. He learned about the challenges of writing music that would be listened to over and over without becoming annoying, bland, or too jingley.

  He started working more closely with a man named Miyamoto, who was a few years older. Miyamoto had shaggy hair: Kondō was always scared of letting his grow out—for fear of not being employable. Miyamoto loved the groove bands Kondō did—and bluegrass too! The two of them worked together on a new endeavor, a secret electronics project that they said would change the world—although they said this about all their secret projects. And Kondō would get to score the transformation.

  Mario needed a narrative in his new game, and Miyamoto was on it. He had designed side-scrolling racing games and vertical-scrolling “athletic” games for the Famicon, so why not a side-scrolling “athletic” game? With his protégé Morita, the pair might be able to get five or six decent levels out of it. By increasing the cartridge size by adding a chip, it could even be super. And it could answer the question of who Mario was.

  Miyamoto was leaning strongly toward form. His game idea involved a fantasy land accessible by sewer pipes, where Mario would go on epic adventures in land, sea, and air. He would grow to a great size, and shrink back down. He would be able to control fire (which replaced an earlier idea of giving him a gun), and breathe underwater. He would battle living fungi, malevolent clouds, and demonic animals. In short, he would again be nothing like any previous iteration.

  Here was the narrative: Mario the explorer. Miyamoto could retell the oldest tale in the world: the stranger coming to town. The Mushroom Kingdom, as it would be called, could afford an endless number of beasts, inventions, characters, tasks, environments, and challenges. Miyamoto didn’t realize he was making a world as imaginative as Star Wars’s bestiary of planets, Star Trek’s galactic Federation, or the Marvel Universe’s hero-clogged New York City.

  Yes, Mario technically was still a plumber. An eldritch pipe would take him to the Mushroom Kingdom. There would be pipes everywhere, so much so that players would stop thinking it odd that open vertical sewage tunnels painted kelly green served as the only way to ever get from point A to point B. For consistency Mario still had his move set from Mario Bros.—the head butt, the jump-stomp, and the prone-enemy kick. Moves that never made it beyond the drawing board included a rocket pack and a second kick attack.

  Figuring out the controls was itself a matter of control. Miyamoto wanted up on the directional pad to be the jump control, freeing A and B for actions. No, no, others said, jumping is too important to not be given its own button. His coworkers wore him down, and Miyamoto eventually agreed to make A the constant jump button, with B for fireballs when tapped, and running when held. By “losing” the argument, Miyamoto showed he would let the better idea win, even if it lost the daimyo a bit of face. Ironically, this commitment to quality gained him unparalleled face.

  One of the biggest changes was the background: every previous Mario game had had a black background, the better to make the colors more vibrant. Most all games followed this rule. But Super Mario Bros. (the game was given a superlative adjective) took place on a beautiful bright day, with a Montana-worthy horizon of periwinkle sky. A few scattered clouds and distant mountains (the clouds and the bushes were, in fact, the same fluffy image colored white or green) made for a feeling of scope, that this two-dimensional land truly existed. It was, in a word, happy.

  Happy was a guiding light for the project. Difficulty was a doubleedged sword for any game: too easy and there’s no replay challenge, too hard and you repel players. How to keep people playing regardless of what was happening? Keep ’em smiling. Therefore, the villains were cute mushroom “Goombas” toddling around on stubby legs, Venus’s flytrap “Pirhana plants” with luscious rep lips, and white squid “Bloopers” that resembled curious bells.

  The music, most of all, was happy. The score for level 1 (or, to use the game’s nomenclature, World 1-1) is an infectiously happy synthesizer salsa. When Mario has an underground level, a b
ass-heavy score fraught with tension kicks in. When he’s underwater, the music is soothing and muted, almost submerged. And when Mario grabs a power-up star, the beat turns as fast and frantic as anything this side of Beethoven’s Ninth played at 33-1/3 speed.

  This was all the work of Kōji Kondō, the new hire. Kondō had a limited palette of sounds to work with. Forget writing for piano: he had two monophonic channels, a synthesized triangle wave, and a white-noise generator. Try to write good music with a hearing tone, a wooden block, and two chanting monks as your “band.” It was possible, of course, but it would first require writing a synthesizer program that could turn sine waves into piano licks.

  Sneaking into the Famicon’s source code led Kondō to discover an extra sound channel: a pulse-code modulation channel designated for sound effects. And those two monophonic channels could be used together to create harmonies. He set up the white-noise generator as percussion, with the triangle wave working as a bass. Drums, bass, chords: the band was starting to come together, all inside a computer chip. He passed on what he had discovered to others, penning the section in the computer-language cartridge Famicon BASIC on sound programming.

  Some things couldn’t be taught, though: they needed trial and error. Kondō didn’t write just one theme to Super Mario Bros., he wrote lots. Each one he played over footage of gaming sessions, and kept in a loop in his head. Was the score fast enough? Was it too fast? Did it contrast with the sound effects he had for the actions: the sproing of a jump, the smack of an enemy’s hit? Did a section go on for too long before repeating, or not long enough? He grew satisfied with the underground music, the battle music for bosses, and the underwater music. But not the main theme.