by Jeff Ryan
As an addition to the animation feature, Mario Paint featured a Music Composer, so the stories could have music to them. (There was another, more complex way of adding music, but it involved many AV cables and at least two VCRs.) Previously, Nintendo had been pushing the Miracle keyboard for the NES, touting its educational nature. Not many were sold. Now it had stealthily given players a music simulator program, hidden in an arts and crafts activity. A good portion of today’s game developers probably got their start designing and animating with Mario Paint.
As a salve, two minigames that used the mouse were included in Mario Paint. Gamers could also click on each letter of MARIO PAINT on the title screen for more Easter eggs. But what Miyamoto had designed made few pretenses of being a game. Most saw it as a toy, a digital Crayola set, l’il PhotoShop. And it was.
Now that the mouse was in place, a bevy of other games were made with mouse controls. Finally PC-based games with complicated on-screen menus—including Populous and Civilization—could get ported to a console. But mouse devices require a flat surface like a desk, not a couch or a coffee table littered with controllers. And wouldn’t people who wanted to play video games using a mouse play on their computer?
A few years later, Nintendo tried the online endeavor again, with the Satellaview modem. It hooked into Japanese Super Famicons, and for a subscription fee allowed them to upload new games on a special blank cartridge. Many were older titles—the addictive blockmatching game Undake 30 Same Game (pronounced saw-me gaw-me) and Excitebike were two—repopulated with the Mario crew. What new content the Satellaview had was the sort of stuff that wouldn’t sell well in stores—a sequel to the forgotten Wrecking Crew. Its success was limited by the Internet, which began offering much more gaming content, such as SNES and NES emulators, for an unbeatable price—nothing.
As if it were being paid by the Dickensian word, Nintendo spent 1992 and 1993 cranking out Mario game after Mario game. There were so many that they could afford to take a risk with a Mario Paint: anything branded Mario was good. So along came Yoshi’s Cookie (the rare multiplatform game for Game Boy, NES, and SNES), another Yoshiand-Mario puzzle game that added a Rubik’s-Cube flavor to blockclearing. Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins for Game Boy continued the Sarasaland adventure. The educational PC game Mario Is Missing (later for the NES and SNES) tried—without much success—to merge Mario-style game play with Carmen SanDiego’s geography fu, teaching about the world based on retrieving what Bowser stole. The very similar Mario’s Time Machine had Bowser once again stealing artifacts.
It was an arms race with Sega, who was only too willing to put up record numbers for Sonic games. In the same two-year time period, Sonic went from starring in one game to ten, including two games that make it into the bizarre name hall of fame, Waku Waku Sonic Patrol Car and Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine. Arcades, Master System, Genesis, Game Gear; action, racing, puzzle: Sonic was there. Sega capped off 1993 by introducing the Sonic the Hedgehog balloon into the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, the first such balloon based on a video game character. (True to form, Sonic went too fast, and crashed into a Columbus Circle lamppost.) Some were natural fits—a pinball game is perfect for a character who rolls into a ball and bounces around. Some were not—Sonic as a traffic cop arresting speeders smacks of hypocrisy.
Sonic’s comfort in Generation X culture—alternative rock, grim and gritty superheroes, ironic detachment—was not something that Mario could compete with. Mario was politesse and friendly—his years of tormenting an exotic pet were way behind him. Still, they were both role models compared to the other games out there. A Time magazine cover featured Mario, Sonic, and fearsome predators from three game series: Jurassic Park, Mortal Kombat, and Star Trek. Mario and Sonic, at least, didn’t seem eager to kill you.
An early attempt to try to edge Mario up—the first-person shooter Yoshi’s Safari—was an embarrassment. Players sat on Yoshi as he wandered around a Mode 7-animated track, and blasted away at anything that moved. Players could use the Super Scope light gun to blow the Goombas and Koopas away. The gameplay’s cutesy graphics clashed with the kill-’em-all mentality. Certainly Mario’s actions didn’t match up with anyone sporting a save-the-whales pin on their backpack. (A later Pokémon game reused the shooter idea, but had players take pictures of animals, a family friendly compromise.)
A much better response to the times was spinning off the villain of Super Mario Land 2, Mario’s evil twin, Wario, into his own game. Wario as a name worked on a variety of levels—in English it suggested war and wariness, the literal flipside of Mario. In Japanese, wariu means bad. He was given a gin blossomy nose, a mustache like Charlie Brown’s sweater zigzag, and a big, mean build that piled on the muscle and fat. He wore yellow and purple—although, of course, for the Game Boy that was green on green.
If Mario started off life as a carpenter, Wario was a deconstruction worker. He was the titular star of Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3. The game may well have been designed by the Zucker Brothers, or at least Jacques Derrida: Wario is a sneering greedy bully, knocking over anyone who stands in his way. The positive goal of trying to get a high score is recast as pure avarice. With enough gold coins, Wario can buy a castle. And with a castle, he can rub it in Mario’s face. (Wario’s eyes are green, after all.) He moves like an angry ape, and is immune to most damage since he knocks over whoever he touches. But Wario never has easy access to the enemies he wants to clobber, so he has to puzzle out how to reach them.
The antihero nature of Wario must have had its attractors, especially since it didn’t seem to change the mechanics of the gameplay so much as the framing of it. He’s since been the Manicean star of over a dozen subsequent games, including a rare crossover into another franchise, Wario Blast: Featuring Bomberman! Many of these use his concupiscent invincibility as its key platforming mimetic. He shows up in the Mario racing or sports games as well. (A villainous Luigi, named Waluigi and with a purple-and-yellow color scheme, followed a few years later.)
As with politicians stopping by Saturday Night Live for an awkward chat with the comedian dressed up as them, Mario and Wario worked best apart from each other. The only platform game that featured both of them was 1993’s Mario & Wario, which was never released in the United States. Wario had, in a lackluster evil plan, put a bucket on Mario’s head. Players used the SNES mouse to help a flying fairy named Wanda make Mario avoid obstacles as he marched blindly forward.
But perhaps it was Mario and Wario’s pairing that kept it from U.S. shores. You couldn’t pretend Mario was Wario if they shared a screen and were facing off against each other. Wario was the Mr. Hyde, the Angelus, the Darth Vader. Just as Miyamoto’s Lost Levels challenged the concept of game play by critically ignoring the rules, the Wario weltanschauung showed the inherent falsity of any game—including Mario’s games—where the purpose was measured in personal gain. But as long as Wario existed, with his cackle and his Walter Huston gold fever, Mario got to stay as pure in motives as a saint. San Mario del Regno Fungo.
THE U.S. SHORES ENDED UP BEING A TENSE PLACE TO BE IN 1993. Yamauchi was tired of seeing declining profits from the American division, which had let Sega build up momentum. He never played video games, but was invincible in Go, the game where one move changes everything. He made one of those moves when he created a chairman position for Nintendo of America—and gave it not to Arakawa but to Howard Lincoln. An American, in charge of the American division. As if this wasn’t a clear statement, he publicly shamed Arakawa, saying the son-in-law would be let go if the lethargic performance continued.
Yamauchi may have been trying to force a crack in the friendship between the two men: believing that great men could only be great alone. It didn’t work. Arakawa and Lincoln continued to work well together, according to reports of the time, taking more initiative stateside for game design, and going after Sega in new ads. They also cranked out Super Mario All-Stars, a SNES game collecting the first three Super Mario NES titles. Those were
all tactical decisions, though. To really take on Sega, they would have to make some bold strategic moves. Little did they know one of these moves would create Nintendo’s all-time greatest rival—and give that rival the very technology to bring Nintendo to its knees.
14 – MARIO’S ADVANCE
NINTENDO’S DISCS
If the human mind is divided into the ego, superego, and id, then Mario is the id: working off of instinct, never having much of a plan, always able to leap into the middle of things. We all become younger as we play Mario, because when we’re Mario we simply play.
Miyamoto has given us more Freudian pop psych than that, though: his elfin warrior Link is an excellent ego. “I am not Link,” Miyamoto joked, “but I know him!” While Mario has just the clothes on his back, Link has a cache of rubies, bombs, arrows, a series of swords, various other items, and a broad swatch of Hyrule to explore. Different games for different parts of the psyche. Both Mario and Link try to save princesses, true. But few imagine Mario as more than asexual, wanting to save the princess because Bowser is bad and needs a time out. Link, on the other hand, is a teenager after the girl of his dreams.
Link’s SNES debut The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past has been voted by Entertainment Weekly as the best video game of all time. It took the tile-based action adventure of the first Zelda and added many elements from role-playing games (RPGs) for the sequel, combining them for a game that plays just as well today, despite blocky visuals. The biggest change was the Dark World, a nighttime level which repopulated the world with new villains, and doubled the size of the game. Further replayability came from trying to boost Link’s statistics by finding, say, every last Heart Container piece. Miyamoto found a new flow balance: give players the choice of scouring or charging forward.
Miyamoto also oversaw the Zelda Game Boy outing, Link’s Awakening . The setting was moved out of Hyrule—perhaps in tribute to Super Mario Land, which also left its homeland for a new (all-green) world. That may also explain Mario and Princess Toadstool’s cameos (as pictures on the wall): was Link secretly in the Mushroom Kingdom?
Link would not appear in a Nintendo game for another five years. It was an eternity in the video-game world: five Christmases where millions of boys could have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to swing virtual swords and clobber Octorocks. Certainly Nintendo didn’t let Mario take a year off between games: his mug was on something or other every other month. But the reason why Link didn’t appear officially for five years might have had something to do with an embarrassing unofficial appearance, still joked about in the same terms as Ishtar and Battlefield Earth. As bad as Link and Zelda look in these awful games, someone else in the story—Nintendo—ends up looking worse.
IN 1994, NOT MANY PEOPLE HAD HEARD OF MOORE’S LAW—
Intel cofounder Gordon Moore’s prediction from way back in 1965 that transistor usage could double every two years. But everyone was living through the implications: what was top of the line in 1990 wouldn’t be so in 1992, much less 1994. Special effects went from Patrick Swayze walking through a wall to a liquid-metal robot to computer-generated dinosaurs to Forrest Gump shaking hands with John F. Kennedy.
Within a year or so of the SNES’s release, fans started spreading rumors about what would come after it. The words “multimedia” and “interactive entertainment” were thrown around like they referred to specific software applications, instead of generalities. It seemed clear, though, that previously separate aspects of life would blend together, just as previously separate forms of media would merge. One word: cyberspace.
It all boiled down to the concrete technology of compact discs. These thin twelve-centimeter circles of plastic had a central layer of aluminum indented much the way a vinyl record or wax cylinder was. A laser bouncing back and forth read so many thousands of infinitesimal “pits” a second it boggles the mind. Massive amounts of data could be stored on one disc cheaper than a cassette. Entire double-disc music albums, saved with undegradable sound quality free of pops or skips. Entire encyclopedias. Entire museums’ worth of art.
Everyone involved in technology wanted to be part of it. Nintendo and Sega were in a dilemma: developing a new console would shut the door on their successful SNES and Genesis platforms. But new competitors like NEC and 3DO were already prepping CD-ROM-based video game consoles. Appropriately enough for the makers of Mario and Sonic, the task for Nintendo and Sega was knowing exactly when to take the running jump.
Nintendo went first, announcing a deal with Sony back in 1988 to codevelop a CD-ROM game system, which would also have a cartridge slot for SNES games. Sega countered in 1991, saying a CD-ROM system would be ready that year attachable to any Genesis. But it only expanded the size of the game, not the quality of graphics. Sega CD was a dud. Nintendo’s CD would have been similar—offering more game, but not better game—and it died after years of quiet delays.
But Nintendo, like a paranoiac whose brash actions truly do get others conspiring against them, created a self-fulfilling prophecy in its urge to quash the competition. Its deal with Sony allowed the Japanese electronics giant the licensing rights to the special game-playing format it used, Super Disc. Big mistake. Nintendo’s fortune had come in large part from owning licensing rights for NES and SNES games. It would never have that with the Sony console: Sony would get sole licensing fees for each CD-based game. As Sony execs got ready to enter the multibillion-dollar gaming industry, Yamauchi sensed they would steamroll over friend and foe alike.
It helps to imagine what happens next being the actions of Degrassi kids, not Consumer Electronics Show attendees. See, Lincoln and Arakawa had been two-timing Sony with Philips, Sony’s Netherlands-based rival. And Nintendo threatened to break up with Sony if Sony wasn’t cool with this. Sony swallowed its pride and announced its “exclusive” deal with Nintendo at CES, and double-dealing Nintendo the very next day talked about how it’s now exclusive with Philips, that hussy, for a CD-based console.
Philips was little more than a rebound partnership, never destined for more than a few brief awkward weeks. It was working on the CD-i, which it wanted to make into the standard format for game-playing consoles, the same way it had successfully come up with a standard format for CDs with Sony back in 1982. A deal with Nintendo would kill two birds with one stone, it felt, and help create a CD-ROM standard for games. Every game would play on every player. And once the standard was set, the golden age of information was imminent.
Nintendo had massively profited from proprietary media formats in the past, and planned on doing so well into the future. Any system that was based on CD-ROMs was copyable. The big N had made a mint on lockout-chipped cartridges, which was very tough to copy. Any ten-year-old with a PC could plunk a CD-ROM into a burner (which were getting affordable) and make a perfect copy of a game for the cost of a blank CD. Without the lockout chip, Nintendo felt it was signing its death warrant with a CD-ROM system surer than dealing with Sony.
But it was a long time dying. Sony came back to Nintendo despite the Panasonic deal, and the three agreed to give Nintendo the game royalties it wanted and let the games be playable on Panasonic’s CD-i as well as the Sony/Nintendo console. Now the only problem was all the CD-based games were flops, and expensive ones to boot. Nintendo decided to sever ties with both parties at once, and convert its CD-BASED games in development into regular SNES titles. It just, like, needed some space, man.
Before being dumped, Panasonic had gained rights to produce its own Legend of Zelda and Mario games for the nascent CD-i. And like e-mailing embarrassing love letters postbreakup, it released them to the world in 1994. Well, it released them to whoever was watching TV at 3:30 A.M.: with no better avenue of getting the CD-i into stores, Philips shilled them via infomercial. Philips saw it as a bargain: a game system, stereo, karaoke machine, and video player all in one. The few insomniac viewers, thou0gh, just saw a seven-hundred-dollar game machine, and passed.
Much has been made about how terrible Philips�
�s sole released Mario game, Hotel Mario, is. Bowser has taken over the Mushroom Kingdom, and kidnapped the princess. So far, so standard. He’s turned the whole place into a series of themed hotels, which is admittedly odd. But every Mario game introduces new elements: riding a dinosaur and turning into a statue seem odder than Bowser’s Donald Trump ambitions. The sole feature of Hotel Mario, though, is a series of single-screen boards filled with open hotel-room doors. Mario has to shut them all, while avoiding obstacles and enemies and finding ways to go from floor to floor. Miyamoto clearly had no role in producing this. It was, as one Internet wag put it, the NES game Elevator Action without the action. Or, a puzzle game without anything too puzzling: you simply walked to a door to close it.
Even odder was that Hotel Mario, whose mechanics would easily be playable on an Atari 2600, was used to launch a new seven-hundred-dollar console that was touting enhanced graphics and unparalleled game play. To make it seem more complex, animated full-motion video segments were added between levels. Previous games had a pixelated Mario with a line of word-ballooned dialogue over his head between levels. Now there was broadcast-quality animation cut scenes of Mario and Luigi traipsing through a tree hotel, an underground hotel, and a cloud hotel, between what seemed like levels of a lesser Game Boy puzzle game.
As with a lot of flops, Hotel Mario is nowhere near as bad as critics say. Still, it’s a fair shake to call it one of Mario’s worst games, if not the worst. If Philips hadn’t pulled the plug on its game system, it would have seen some much better Mario games. Mario’s Wacky Worlds was a traditional side-scroller featuring Mario in ancient Greece, an Aztec temple, an all-neon world, an all-plaid world, and so on. Mario Takes America was going to merge real video footage of American cities and landmarks and allow a computer-generated Mario to fly around them like Superman.