Super Mario

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

First published in 2011 by Portfolio / Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

Copyright © Jeff Ryan, 2011

All rights reserved

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Ryan, Jeff, 1976 –

Super Mario : how Nintendo conquered America / Jeff Ryan. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN : 978-1-101-51763-5

1. Nintendo Kabushiki Kaisha. 2. Video games industry—United States. 3. Nintendo video

games. I. Title.
HD9993.E454N5767 2011
338.7’6179480973—dc22 2011004054

 

 

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

 

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I’MMA GONNA WIN!

THANKS, MARIO, BUT OUR NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ARE IN ANOTHER CASTLE 277

BIBLIOGRAPHY 281

INDEX 285

W
hile Super Mario is a plumber by profession, exploration is at the heart of his stories. As with other distinguished explorers of Italian descent, such as Christopher Columbus, the place he discovered was already inhabited. It was the world of play, a world to which all of us are born holding passports. (As one Royal Geographical Society wag presciently put it more than a hundred years ago, “Explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and a need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men.” He could have been yelling it down the stairs into a modern rec room.) Most of us let that passport expire, but Mario gives us a way to renew it, and revisit our homeland.

There are 240 million Super Mario games out there. Just one game, the original
Super Mario Bros.,
has more than forty million copies in print, not counting releases on other platforms or the uncountable emulators that let you play samizdat versions on your computer. Broken down by hour, it’s an extremely economical buy: few will spend twenty-five hours watching a single twenty-five-dollar DVD, but most everyone who purchases a fifty-dollar Mario game can put in fifty hours or more to explore its nooks and crannies.

Let’s talk about economy some more. Do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: the number of Mario games sold times fifty bucks each, the average price of a game. This number is going to be off, since it doesn’t account for games being bundled with consoles, which are discounted. But it also doesn’t account for merchandise and tie-in games like
Dr. Mario
, or for anything else Nintendo sells: Mario games are only one or two of its hundreds of titles a year, and that’s all just the software. Hopefully you used a commercial-size envelope: the ballpark figure of Nintendo’s Mario’s sales is $12 billion. If each one of Mario’s gold coins was worth a million dollars, to collect that much moola he would have to knock his head on a coin block for almost three and a half hours.

Mario is unique in that he seems to offer so little appeal. What person who had been living in a cave the last few decades would have picked
Super Mario
as the dominant game franchise, over the
Halo
(30 million sold),
Tomb Raider
(35 million),
Guitar Hero
(40 million),
Resident Evil
(43 million), and
Madden
(85 million) game franchises
combined
? And that doesn’t even count Mario’s other appearances, such as
Mario Kart
(12 million) and
Mario Party
(5 million). The other top franchises let you experience the adrenaline and horrors of war, or deep fantasy worlds, or pro sports. A Mario game lets you pretend to be a middle-aged chubster hopping onto a turtle shell. Huh? No superheroes? No soldiers? No wizards? What sort of cut-rate wish fulfillment is this?

There’s something to Mario more than just looks. Games are different from all other entertainment due to their interactivity: they light up totally different parts of the brain than watching a movie or reading a book does. And Mario’s bland persona is part of his appeal: he’s a one-size-fits-all hero. For twenty years everyone tried to create distinct memorable avatars for us to control: Sonic, Lara Croft, Mega Man. That trend has reversed, and popular games now feature silent, unknown characters such as
Halo
’s Master Chief and the faceless grunts from
Call of Duty
and
SOCOM
. Yet they’re still copying Mario, who is both wackily specific (an overalled plumber) and vague as fog (anyone ever see him unclog a drain?).

My own Mario memories probably aren’t too different from anyone else’s. My first experience was with the cardboard box the NES came in, rather than any game. A schoolmate brought it on the bus every day to show off, and we crowded around to look at the screen shots on its obverse side. A few months later our parents bought us a NES, and my brothers and I put it through usage that would put a Miami air conditioner to shame. We traded games with neighbors, kids older and younger than us, even traded out of the middle-school caste system with the cool kids. We started a neighborhood fan club: to get in, you had to beat a game and find a secret. Most everyone’s secrets were from
Super Mario Bros.
, which had them in spades.

Then high school and college and life happened, and I stopped gaming, save for a PC shooter once a year or so. I never chose to quit gaming—it just fell off my priorities list. Then about ten years ago, I landed a copyediting job at a dot-com. No one had any copy for me to proof before noon, yet I was coming in at 8:30 A.M. I asked my managing editor if there was anything I could write, to help out.

There was. She gave me a press release about a
Pokémon
tournament. The company had been using a freelancer for its irregular reporting of video game news and reviews. Having me write for this section of the site would bolster that coverage—and for free, since I was salaried. I typed up the piece, handed it in, and a few minutes later heard my editor on the phone firing the freelancer. She said they had just hired a new video game expert. Gulp.

In the months that followed I studied video games in a way very few others have. I wasn’t actually playing them, since I was at work. I wasn’t designing them, either, so I didn’t need to know alias coding or texture mapping. I needed to know why they were popular, what made one title better or “cooler” than the next. I made myself an expert in all things Sega, Sony, and Nintendo.

And just about all things Nintendo, I found out, were connected to Mario. He was everywhere: in sports games, fighting games, role-playing games, puzzle games, racing games, and every bit of branding imaginable. He had become a one-word shortcut for Nintendo, for gaming itself, and (I’m sure Nintendo hoped) for the concept of fun. Streets were named after him. There was even an unofficial holiday for him, on March 10 (MAR 10, get it?).

“Super Mario” has become the default nickname for any Mario. Formula One champion Mario Andretti (born in 1940) sometimes gets asked if he’s named after Super Mario. (He says he is, to the delight of the seven-year-olds who ask.) Chef Mario Batali is called Super Mario as well. If you’re good at a professional sport, and your name is Mario, you know what your nickname will be. Just ask hockey’s Mario Lemieux, football’s Mario Williams, ultimate fighting’s Mario Miranda, cycling’s Mario Cipollini, and soccer’s Mario Basler, Mario Gomez, and Mario Balotelli. They are, respectively, Canadian, American, Brazilian, Italian, German, Spanish, and Ghanaese. The nickname cannot be avoided wherever on the globe you are a Mario.

At some point I realized that the “life story” of Super Mario is the history of gaming itself. Yes, it’s a history of Nintendo and its creators: designer Shigeru Miyamoto, billionaire Hiroshi Yamauchi, and his underestimated son-in-law Minoru Arakawa. But at its core, it’s the biography of a man who’s not real, but has a Q rating up there with Mickey Mouse. A figure whose specific tale of the tape—pudgy Italian plumber from Brooklyn—merely serves to make him as perpetual an underdog as that undertall Italian boxer from Philadelphia, Rocky Balboa. A world-beloved character with roots across three continents: Asian invention, American setting, European name. A character almost totally blank, yet beloved. A hero who is at once us, more than us, and so much less than us. A guy with a brother named Luigi, and a princess to save.