Super Mario (18 page)

 

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.

This was nothing compared to what happened to poor Link. He was stuck in three bad games:
Link: the Faces of Evil
,
Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon
, and
Zelda’s Adventure
. The first two games, developed in concord, used the side-scrolling format from
Zelda II: Link’s Adventure
. Where exactly to begin? The subpar animation? Casting nonactors for live-action sequences? Game play that supposed took two entire years merely to play-test for bugs? Choppy, disappointing level design? The games’ plots at least showed promise:
Faces of Evil
starts off with a bored Link practically begging for some adventure; he gets it when a villain kidnaps Zelda. The other two finally make Zelda the star of the show, instead of Link.

But
Zelda
was never about plot. Indeed, one’s head could explode if all the games were considered one story, since Link is always meeting Zelda and villainous Gannon for the first time. Imagine trying to explain why James Bond has stayed forty years old for forty years, while changing faces and hair color. Better to accept the story as a constant retelling, and don’t dwell on continuity matters. Mario has made a cottage industry of jokes about how Bowser had only one playbook—kidnap the princess—and
this
time it’ll work! He’s utterly incapable of coming up with any other plan. Aside from that one time he obtained a degree in hotel management.

Nintendo deserved the mess of
Hotel Mario
after its poor behavior in the CD-ROM debacle. It was the sort of behavior only the cool kids would try to get away with. Certainly Sony was left holding the bag of a half-developed CD-ROM/SNES console. It could swallow the loss, or try to finish the console and compete with one of the most dominant, and litigious, companies in existence. Sony execs wanted vengeance, though, and decided to keep developing. Even without SNES support, it could find some CD-ROM PC games to bring over.

In determined defiance to the any CD-based graphics and derringdo, Nintendo and Shigeru Miyamoto chose this as the time to release their new Mario game . . . a
Donkey Kong
port for the Game Boy. Huh? The first four levels of this version were faithful to the four levels of the arcade hit. Then, right when Mario gets Pauline back, Donkey Kong charges back on screen, and grabs Pauline once again. Mario has four different levels to traverse before another fight with the big guy. Then another four, and another four. A total of a hundred levels, ninety-six of them brand-new.

It was a clear passion project, Miyamoto returning to his first game. And he definitely deserved to follow his muse wherever it went; Hiroshi Yamauchi was becoming a billionaire thanks to it. But it was the exact opposite of hip, cool, or edgy. It was a tribute to a fifteenyear-old game much of Nintendo’s audience was already too young to remember. Other people were promising graphics as good as a movie—and Nintendo was still trying to sell
Donkey Kong
? Didn’t they know the future was CD-based?

Sony’s half-baked console, before the drama happened, was going to be called Nintendo Play Station. Now, it would just be Play Station. Nintendo sued, saying that it owned the name. After a brief run of a few hundred SNES-capable Play Stations, Sony went back to the drawing board, and designed a machine without any SNES port. One deleted space later, the spelled-solid PlayStation was released, featuring 3-D polygon graphics, massive environments, full-motion videos, and graphics better than the arcade. Leagues better than anything the SNES could produce, Mode 7 or not.

Philips and Sony, pinky-swearing that no one would get between their friendship again, patched things up. They collaborated once again on a new format for a CD-based technology, the DVD, in the hopes it would become a global standard. It of course did. And, as Nintendo feared, the copyable nature of Sony’s CD-based PlayStation’s games led to gamers burning vast libraries of unbought games, playable via a soldered-on modchip. In one last twist, this ironically led to a massively increased install base for the PlayStation—because, like Napster did for music, it let you play games for “free.” The piracy Nintendo so feared was Sony’s bread and butter.

A
t this point in the early nineties,
The Simpsons
was the go-to joke for overcommercialized characters. Bart’s often-pirated face looked out from T-shirts, mugs, hats, and dolls. Creator Matt Groening has a collection of such items, favoring the cheap plagiarized knockoffs. Cartoon characters are the hill-kings of branding, unfettered by the base-level dignity of celebrity actors, musicians, and sports stars. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, like Ado Annie in
Oklahoma!,
just cain’t say no.

But Springfield’s finest have nothing on Mario and company. Yamauchi wanted Mario’s face to appear as often as possible, anywhere it could. To encourage this, he took the counterintuitive step of prohibiting any Zelda or Link merchandising. If someone wanted a Nintendo character for a doll or mug, it was Mario or nothing. Everything you’d expect to see Mario’s face on has had his face on them: board games, Valentine’s day cards, jigsaw puzzles, bedding, water guns, pens, toys.

Want some battery-powered tech? How about a Mario bike alarm, singalong AM radio, walkie-talkie, calculator, clock, or musical toothbrush?

The real creativity came after the easy-to-brand items had been plastered. Who, for instance, thought of using the Mario-plumbing connection to manufacture a licensed handheld shower? It features a plastic Mario and Luigi on each other’s shoulders as a handle aiming a hose of water. “SCALD PROTECTION,” notes the all-caps packaging. Perfect for washing off the Mario shampoo with the Mario bath sponge and playing with the Mario bath toys! (All real, by the way.)

Once out of the scald-resistant shower, dry off with a Mario towel, and put on Mario-branded sunglasses, belt buckles, ties, suspenders, slippers, Nike sneakers, T-shirts, jackets, sweatshirts, sweatpants, underwear, Halloween costumes. Hungry? Chow down on some fruit snacks, lemonade, energy drinks, candy bars, cereal, candy, lollipops, ice cream bars, or ice cream sandwiches. Carry around your stuff with Mario-quality folders, fanny packs, suitcases, backpacks, or glasses cases. What stuff? Why, cups, egg cups, cup dispensers, pens, Pez dispensers, cookie jars, cookie cutters, place mats, scratch-off cards, wallpaper, stickers, stamps, 110 film cameras, light fixtures, pins, golf balls, curtains, computer mouses, mouse pads, trophies, phones, remote-controlled car phones, music boxes, sleeping bags, temporary tattoos, wallets, phone cards, umbrellas, trash cans, Viewmasters, finger puppets, balls, flash drives, banks, greeting cards, coloring books, storybooks, holograms, and calendars.