All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture

by Harold Goldberg

  His first big success came with the 1959 licensing of Disney characters, which would be placed on the back of American-style playing cards. Later ventures lost huge amounts of money—like a line of instant rice and a love hotel, where rooms were rented by the hour. When the card business suffered a precipitous decline, Yamauchi became dedicated to diversifying, and he was more than willing to experiment. Because the Disney cards had done so well, children’s entertainment wasn’t far from his radar. In the mid-1960s, upon seeing his self-effacing inventor Gunpei Yokoi’s extendable claw, which the engineer had made just for fun, Yamauchi decided to try the toy business.

  When he saw the claw, Yamauchi became excited and pursed his lips—about as close to a truly open smile as he ever came. In a moment of synchronicity with his designers, Yamauchi greenlit the 1966 Ultra Hand, an extending arm that gripped the three colorful balls included in the package. It sold like Hula hoops—1.2 million units—putting Nintendo into the black with a brand-new business. In 1969, Nintendo branded and marketed the perfect-for-hippies Love Tester, a battery-operated device that, at first blush, looked like something a CIA agent would use for torture. Instead, it buzzed as it supposedly gauged compatibility between partners. Both of these products went along with the Yamauchi theory of manufacturing, which the handsome, impeccably dressed Yokoi espoused over and over again. Unabashedly, Yokoi said, “The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply.”

  Yamauchi saw the potential in videogames as soon as he saw Baer’s Magnavox Odyssey, which Nintendo licensed and distributed in Japan in 1974.* The dashing Yokoi created an ingenious portable line of games simply called Game & Watch, starting in 1980 and continuing until 1987. The first in a series of about sixty (which would include Mario, Popeye, and Snoopy models) was a portable alarm clock with a game called Ball that let you feel some of the extreme joys and defeats of being a juggler. Although the humorous character’s schnoz is Jimmy Durante–sized and there’s no sound whatsoever, the game let you imagine being in a fast-paced circus, the crowd yelling for more as you deftly kept the tossed balls in the air, even while you stood on one foot. The caffeinated announcer spewed somewhat suggestively in a commercial: “They’re pocket power! They tell you the score! And even the time!” Seeing that advertisement on Saturday morning TV, you’d forget your Kellogg’s to continue playing until your stomach groaned and gurgled from hunger. You didn’t need no stinkin’ sustenance: You had games. You could be anything or anyone.

  But it would be an early Nintendo arcade offering that would put the card maker on the map as a serious, inventive entrant in the nascent videogame space. It was one that Miyamoto would revamp and reinvent. But it wouldn’t have happened if Miyamoto had found a job in the industry he first loved, comic books. Although Shigeru was searching for a job as a manga comics artist, a friend of his father was acquainted with Yamauchi. An interview at Nintendo’s headquarters was set up immediately.

  “Why should I hire you?” asked the bespectacled boss. He looked imposing. Everything in the office did, even his big desk. While Yamauchi had agreed to the interview as a friendly gesture, he felt he needed more engineers, not the artist and cartoon maker that the young graduate from Kanazawa Munici College so obviously wanted to be.

  From a bag, Miyamoto produced some wooden hangers with elephant heads on them. Then, he showed off a sketch for an alarm clock with an amusement park theme. Yamauchi saw some promise, especially because Miyamoto was honest and enthusiastic.

  Yamauchi nodded, but he didn’t crack a smile. “If I hire you,” he said, “it’s because you have the talent, not because someone I know recommended you. The things you made are quite good.” Yamauchi asked if Miyamoto could come up with a revolutionary playing card game, something big, something no one had ever done. Miyamoto didn’t say he could. But he didn’t say he couldn’t.

  After making Miyamoto wait for one month, Yamauchi had an underling hire him over the phone with the words “We hear you have an idea for a revolutionary card game.” Miyamoto began his working days as a lowly apprentice in Nintendo’s planning department, toiling quietly as an artist at the company’s Kyoto headquarters for three years. Without that revolutionary card game, he was assigned to spice up the artwork for three Disney-themed board games featuring Mickey, Donald, Chip ’n Dale, and Snow White, old games he had played as a child. He liked what he was doing, sort of. But there was no real challenge to it. Yet he didn’t have the temerity to ask for more.

  In mid-1980, Yamauchi approached Miyamoto. It was a short conversation. But it was one that would change Miyamoto’s life forever.

  “What do you think of videogames?”

  “Well, sir. I like them a lot.” Miyamoto began to speak sincerely and enthusiastically, telling Yamauchi more than he needed to know. At one point, the young artist said, “The games are good. I like Pong. I like Breakout. But they should be more like movies or books. They should tell a story. They—”

  Yamauchi interrupted. A look of concern came over his face. He didn’t have time for a long, one-sided conversation. “You may know we have Radar Scope games for the arcade. It has not done well.” In fact, the game, released earlier in 1980, had done abysmally.*

  Since Nintendo had made three thousand Radar Scope coin-op games, they wanted to salvage what they could of the failure. Yamauchi had one question. “Can you make Radar Scope better?”

  Under the supervision of Yokoi, Miyamoto tried to improve the military action game. He was unexcited about the project, to say the least. The young artist found the game lacked style and substance. Not only was the crosshatched grid daunting to him, the graphics seemed more like blips on a screen than ships. Plus, he didn’t like the idea of war games. In his mind, the best movies were about humanity, where the hero saved the girl, where miraculous fantasies replaced the mundane routine, where players could fit in and rule their destinies—at least electronically, for twenty or thirty minutes at a time. With Radar Scope, Miyamoto felt there was little to engage players in the way of drama and, more important, soulfulness. So, with pen in hand, Miyamoto drew from both his daydreams and his love for Hollywood to create a new game that would eventually be called Donkey Kong. At first, he thought he could make the game work with Popeye, a license that Nintendo had used with success in the Game & Watch product. Miyamoto worked on it tirelessly, drawing sketches and thinking of a possible story to include Olive Oyl and Bluto. When the contract with Popeye’s producer and syndicator, King Features, was delayed, Miyamoto began to invent his own characters based closely on Popeye and other pop culture classics he’d loved so much as a child. He worked with a mix of fear and joy and all the elation that comes with having something to prove. More than anything, he wanted to be a valued Nintendo employee, not just an artist slaving away in obscurity. Yamauchi quickly saw the potential in what Miyamoto had done. It didn’t take much convincing for the boss to come on board—especially since that Popeye contract wasn’t going to be signed for some time to come. Yamauchi greenlit Miyamoto’s game, which would be placed into the cabinets that held Radar Scope.

  In the North American territories where Nintendo had gambled and opened satellite offices, the arrival of Donkey Kong arcade machines befuddled everyone who had toiled night and day to make the subpar Radar Scope a success. No one knew what the name meant. The guys in charge of sales and distribution, Ron Judy and Al Stone, were nonplussed. In fact, when Al Stone saw how the game played, he literally walked out of the room. They all feared that Nintendo, especially in America, was doomed: Donkey Kong was too Japanese, too foreign, too strange, too wacky, to become a hit.

  Even Minoru Arakawa, Yamauchi’s MIT-educated son-in-law, didn’t approve of Miyamoto’s brainchild. Yamauchi had trusted Arakawa enough to bring him into the family, agreeing to let him marry his daughter Yoko. Then, he bullied Yamauchi until he agreed to start Nintendo’s North American division. In the late 1970s,
Yoko and Mino struggled at first, in Vancouver, but they never asked for money from their families. Arakawa, who bought into profitable Vancouver real estate ventures for Nintendo, eventually amassed twenty-seven acres in Redmond, Washington, to house the company’s headquarters. Then he purchased thirty-three acres more. Nintendo of America would remain there for decades to come.

  If Yamauchi wanted everyone in the United States to push Donkey Kong, Arakawa and his motley crew would indeed suck it up and do their best to make the machine a hit. Arakawa himself wasn’t above getting his hands dirty. When he met with distributors, he felt certain that some of them were connected to the Mafia. He would sing the praises of a game like Donkey Kong even as he saw the barrel of a gun flashing in a holster beneath an unbuttoned Italian blazer. Rattled, he would find the gumption to soldier on, always striving to make a deal.

  Even as Donkey Kong went to market, Arakawa was leery of the fact that a lowly apprentice was making the game that would fit into the Radar Scope shell. Despite the doubts at Nintendo in the United States, the elder Yamauchi was forceful and unyielding: He believed the game was stellar, that Miyamoto was creative, if not a genius, and that Donkey Kong would be a big hit.

  Yamauchi was right. Everyone else was wrong.

  Miyamoto, Donkey Kong, and Nintendo would be responsible for revitalizing the videogame industry and for making Japan the world’s most revolutionary publisher of videogames. Donkey Kong, which was released in 1981, ushered in a new kind of frantic but precision-oriented gaming for which arcade heads seemed to be longing. In its first year, Donkey Kong made $180 million for Nintendo. While most coin-operated games had a short life span, of a few months, Donkey Kong earned another $100 million in year two. The videogame industry wasn’t just burgeoning once again. It was coming back big-time, thanks to Donkey Kong (and another Japanese arcade game, Frogger). With 255 levels to play, Ms. Pac-Man certainly aided the resurgence too. More than 110,000 Ms. Pac-Man machines were distributed throughout the states.

  Seemingly instantly, the self-effacing Miyamoto had become a star of sorts. In fact, Nintendo was one of the first game companies to see the wisdom in showcasing its lead designer as a media hero. Within a year, the young, childlike Miyamoto would be the face of Nintendo.

  The instructions on many of the machines began with “Save the Lady from Donkey Kong.” While the characters in later years would have more backstory than Spock and Kirk in the Star Trek series, they were fairly generic in the insanely difficult game, the first running and jumping game ever made. The powder blue and brown case coaxed players near, just as the graphics of the giant gorilla were detailed enough to show a toothy, satisfied ape who would often become dour, frowning, and angry as he tossed barrels and constantly grabbed the Lady from Jumpman, just as the sad little guy was about to rescue her.

  Donkey Kong, which introduced the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Mario the plumber only as Jumpman, a carpenter, was Nintendo’s bestselling game though the first half of 1983.*

  For a gamer, the result was like a compelling TV show that continued from week to week. Each screen was the ultimate cliffhanger, and Jumpman was kind of like your own personal Jack Bauer, seemingly finishing the job, only to be daunted yet again. On-screen graphics showed his poor pink heart breaking in two tragically, over and over again. He might never get the girl. It was so like life, it hurt.

  In real life, Miyamoto was still all about going off the beaten path in the quest for adventure. He would walk down a sidewalk and turn down an alley or head through a pitch-black tunnel and imagine it held ghosts or goblins and, at the end, a treasure. His Mario games were full of flights of fancy and, with those ever present mushrooms, perhaps odes to the magic of drugs in Alice in Wonderland. As the years passed, Mario would sprout wings and fly or swim into great murky depths or fly through space, boldly going where no Mario had gone before. Beyond appealing to kids, Miyamoto felt he was making games for the many adults like him who sometimes saw the world as children. Those same adults went to the Disney animated films and the swashbuckling adventures of Errol Flynn, or today still love everything from Star Wars, which features men fighting with sword-like light sabers, to Scrubs, which showcases grown men as doctors who act like children when they aren’t treating patients.

  After Donkey Kong’s success, Miyamoto and the engineers at Nintendo continued to innovate throughout the 1980s, and much of what they put on the shelves seemed sparkling and new to gamers. No one could the stop the Nintendo revolution. Its Famicom console started slow. But soon doe-eyed kids lined up and camped out to buy it in Japan—even though some units were flawed and broken and had to be recalled. Donkey Kong ruled the arcades, and when Universal Studios sued because the gorilla looked like King Kong, they lost because they no longer had the rights to the famous movie beast. And then came the Famicon makeover, the Nintendo Entertainment System, an agile juggernaut that could not be halted, not by Atari or by any other console maker.

  In 1985 Nintendo mined a vein of gold with that console. During its design and manufacturing period, there had been some serious trepidation within the company due to the recent videogame crash that had decimated publishers and made retailers reluctant to stock games. Who would buy it? Was the $199 sticker price too much for consumers to pay? Perhaps, but what if Super Mario Bros., their new platform game, was added to the package? Would that be enough? Bolstered by the success of Donkey Kong in the arcades, Yamauchi was certain that the console would be successful the world over. He felt the crash, though deep and worrisome, was part of a cycle and that games would rise again, renewed and reinvigorated. In the United States, the Nintendo Entertainment System featured some of the best offerings ever created in the Golden Age of Videogames in the 1980s. Its blocky eight-bit graphics were splendid, especially considering the machine had a mere two kilobytes of RAM to show them off. Really, it was the games more than the system that pushed the envelope, so much so that the machine would sell nearly sixty-two million units over time.

  The aptly but clumsily named Jumpman was renamed Mario and given the working class job of ace plumber. Super Mario Bros. had kids forking over tons of cash, so much so that more than forty million copies hit living rooms and bedrooms, making it the second biggest selling Nintendo game of all time.

  There you were in Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom in a psychedelic war against scaly, lizardy monsters like the grumpy Bowser. And Miyamoto outdid Alice in one respect. The Mario mushrooms were stranger and wilder than the fungi that Alice consumed while being watched by the hookah-smoking caterpillar. Orange ones with green dots gave you an extra life. Super Mushrooms let you grow into a giant (a fine thing for a small guy). Fire Flowers let you pitch great balls of conflagration. The Starman, like an aboral-armed doctor on house call, gave you health when you were wounded. You’d creep into green pipes and castles, never quite knowing where you’d emerge—in a dank cave where enormous Venus flytraps nipped at your loins, or within the wet, navy depths where white-tentacled jellyfish tried to sting you. And you even saved the girl, something you might never have done in real life. What a trip it was—sheer, empowering fantasy, where dreams came true so lucidly, if only for a while. Paul McCartney was so enthralled by the game, he said he would rather meet Mr. Miyamoto than visit Mount Fuji.

  Or take the story and action within another Miyamoto classic, the bucolic The Legend of Zelda. In this console series Miyamoto’s particular kind of genius seemed to rival the mastery of a George Lucas or a John Huston. As Miyamoto sat down to make the game, he recalled with almost photographic accuracy the paths he had traversed as a Boy Scout, how the forest looked through the evergreen needles, how the vision of the crystal blue lake at the top of the mountain engulfed his senses. With the brilliant Takashi Tezuka, who came to Nintendo in 1984, Miyamoto created a mysterious world of caves, waterfalls, forests, and artifacts that was part Peter Pan, part Zorro, and part Robin Hood. Zelda, the stunningly pretty princess of the fictional Hyrule, was named after Zelda Fitzgerald, the wil
d, energetic flapper who so entranced literary icon F. Scott Fitzgerald that he became obsessed with her. With its many monsters and short, haiku-like instructions, The Legend of Zelda made you feel like a hero. Even when life in the real world was full of unemployment or chronic illness, you could always wield a sharp and wizardly sword as the strapping, green-suited Link, to save someone who needed your help. In Zelda, you really could feel strong and victorious—no matter your age. The experience in the Zelda series was so deep and enchanting for so many that it spawned a book of essays called The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy: I Link, Therefore I Am.

  Because Miyamoto was very right brain oriented, he had to learn how to manage and organize his time. But, always anxious to please, he adapted quickly. Promoted to the rank of producer, Miyamoto worked on multiple games at once, some taking more than a year and a half to finish. As many as a score of people would work on each game. The teams preferred to work late into the night during the increasingly brutal crunch times. They would go home past midnight and fall exhausted into bed, only to get to Nintendo again by eleven a.m. and do it all over again.

  Once Nintendo became the “it” console maker and developer, Yamauchi and Arakawa became insatiable. They charged outrageous licensing fees to companies seeking to produce games for the hit console. A Nintendo contract of the time stated that the company had to approve the game—with no hard deadline and in its own good time—before it was given a green light for distribution. And they had the right, if they saw fit, to insert their own promotional materials into each package. Then the game’s publisher had to purchase at least ten thousand cartridges from Nintendo, which Nintendo or one of their manufacturing arms produced. From 1983 onward, independent game studios worldwide complained about Nintendo royalty fees, which could peak at an astronomical 20 percent—and eventually led to a congressional investigation led by the drawling Texas Democratic representative Bob Eckhardt. But Nintendo was of the mind, as executives would verbalize in closed door meetings with potential licensees, “If you want to play, you have to pay.” Nintendo was sued constantly for unfair and monopolistic trade practices. The idea of going to court never bothered Yamauchi too much—as long as Nintendo won in the end. And Yamauchi really didn’t need to worry. Nintendo had terrific lawyers in the United States, like Howard Lincoln, who was a bulldog in and out of the courtroom.