Super Mario (2 page)

Super Mario.

I
n 1980, starting an arcade game took a quarter. Starting an arcade-game company took a lot more. But the rewards were more than getting your initials up on the high score. Companies in the arcade-game business tapped into a gold mine by updating their old electromechanical games, which had been collecting first pennies and nickels and now dimes and quarters for nearly a hundred years. One by one they were replacing the solenoids and miniature puppet shows and blinking lights with fancy new “TV thrillers” and “video skill games.” These games, shown on sideways television screens, used solid-state electronics to lure players into a web of lighting-fast reflexes, sweaty palms, and cramped fingers, all in an attempt to defeat computer opponents. They were bits of science fiction dropped out of the twenty-third century into the polyester-plaid laps of the 1970s.

And the biggest game maker by far was Atari, the company that put out the first rock-star megahit game,
Pong
, in 1972. Atari followed
Pong
with hit after hit—
Asteroids
,
Tank
,
Lunar Lander
. In 1980, it introduced two big crazes:
Battlezone
, a wireframe game of tank combat, and
Missile Command
, a Cold War nightmare where players had to see how long they could keep civilization alive while shooting down nukes raining in from the USSR. Everyone else merely treaded in Atari’s wake. It brought in untold millions every year, it was run by a hippie, and it flat-out didn’t exist ten years ago. Everyone wanted a piece of Atari’s success: it spurred the game industry for a 5 percent
monthly
expansion rate.

No one dreamed of
beating
Atari.

A six-person start-up called Nintendo of America was ahead of the pack of wannabes in one crucial way: it was already a success. Too bad that was only in Japan. A Kyoto-based playing card manufacturer since 1894, Nintendo had craftily shifted over to the toy market to capitalize on its existing distribution route for cards. Lots of other Japanese firms were selling arcade games:
Pac-Man
’s Namco,
Frogger
’s Konami,
Bomberman
’s Hudson Soft, and
Space Invaders
’s Taito. Japan’s specialty, as journalist Chris Kohler has pointed out, was personality: its good guys and bad guys were characters, of a very crude sort, instead of abstract art come to life, like Atari’s
Breakout
or
Tempest
. If everyone else could make games, so could Nintendo.

Nintendo’s most skilled inventor was Gunpei Yokoi, who had started his lifelong career with Nintendo repairing its playing-card machinery. He made a telescoping fake hand as a gag, and company president Hiroshi Yamauchi decided to market it as a toy. The “Ultra Hand” sold over 1.2 million copies in 1970, and was soon followed by novelties such as the “Ten Billion Barrel” maze, the “Love Tester” device, and a Roomba-like remote-control vacuum.

Yokoi’s most recent success was in portable electronic games. After watching a salaryman playing with an electronic calculator on a train one day, Yokoi had the idea of making small games that could run off of watch batteries. (As with the Ultra Hand, Yokoi only told the imperious Yamauchi about his game idea because he was desperate for conversation. In this case he was stuck as the boss’s chauffeur for the day.) The inventor taught himself about segment display, which let the pieces of an LCD “8,” when lit up separately, represent all ten digits. By designing a man with many hands, and only lighting up two at a time, segment display could animate a cartoon character for a game. And thanks to the pocket calculator boom, LCD was cheap to acquire. Games people were paying a hundred yen each to play on machines weighing five hundred pounds could be engineered to fit into a shirt pocket. The resulting device was called Game & Watch.

The first Game & Watch game, 1980’s
Ball
, was a juggling game. Players watched a ball tick back and forth from one hand to another, and pressed either the left or right button to keep it airborne. Game A was two balls, Game B three. There were five games like this for the “Silver” collection, named after the shiny color of the case. Five more “Gold” games followed in 1981. All flew off the shelves, and lots more were in the works.

This was on top of Nintendo’s other game successes. It had joined the home-
Pong
clones, releasing its undistinguished but popular Color TV Game 6, with a fifteen-game follow-up the following year. It had found success with 1974’s EM game
Wild Gunman
, tanked with the malfunctioning horseracing title
EVR Race
, and rebounded with its first true video arcade game,
Computer Othello
. Now it had a team of designers (including Yokoi) cranking out new titles every few months, cresting the faddish wave of whatever was currently gobbling up hundred-yen pieces in smoky arcades. How hard could it be to duplicate Japan’s success overseas?

Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo’s president, ached to be a major player not just in Japan but in the world. He had his eyes opened during a mid-fifties trip to America, where he had met with Walt Disney executives about licensing its characters on cards. The experience had walloped him with the scope of the global market for entertainment, showing him just how rinky-dink his Japanese-only, family owned playing card business truly was. A small, intense man with prematurely silver hair, he had worked hard to keep it going in the postwar years and beyond. But true success in the era of global
zaibatsus
and international corporations meant making money all around the world.

Hiroshi’s great-grandfather Fusajiro Yamauchi opened a Kyoto card shop in 1894 manufacturing colorful flower cards called
hanafuda
, and named the shop Nintendo Koppai. (The word “Nintendo” means “leave luck to heaven” or “We do what we can,” which suggests the chance inherent in card games.) He sold to gamblers, who used a new deck every hand. The company hung on through thick and thin over the years, following Japan’s economic roller-coaster as it crashed after World War II, rebounded, then crashed again after the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

Hiroshi Yamauchi, who at age twenty-one took over from his grandfather in 1949 after the older man suffered a stroke, was at the forefront of Nintendo’s changes. Yamauchi tried out various new business models—rice, taxicabs, “love hotels” rentable by the hour. None clicked, until he decided to utilize his network of card and toy shops. His single-minded dedication to running
his
company
his
way made him few friends. Even his family was distant: his children were virtual strangers who feared him the rare times he was home. Like so many family businesses, the business became more important than the family it was supposed to enrich.

A family member would be needed to run the new American branch of Nintendo, Yamauchi knew. But who? Yamauchi’s son, Katsuhito, was too young to take over an American division, despite being older than Hiroshi was when he assumed control of the whole company. His other two kids were girls, Yoko and Fujiko. But the Yamauchis had a history of bringing sons-in-law into the family business. So his eldest daughter Yoko’s husband would run the U.S. branch.

If only the son-in-law wanted the job. Minoru “Mino” Arakawa, Yoko’s husband, was the second son of a wealthy Kyoto textile family. Mino had Western experience—he and Yoko were living in Canada for his real estate development job with the
zaibatsu
Marubeni. He spoke English, had a graduate degree from MIT, and had driven across the United States in a VW bus. He was a far cry from Yamauchi, a man so callous he took his daughter to one of his favorite geisha clubs for her twentieth birthday—and stayed there after she went home.

Arakawa turned down Nintendo jobs before, but Yamauchi was bred by his grandparents to be persistent. (Hiroshi’s father had abandoned his family, and a probable Nintendo presidency, for another woman.) In the end, Arakawa accepted the role as president of a new subsidiary, Nintendo of America. Taking the job meant going against his wife’s wishes—Yoko had a distant relationship with both her father and his company—but Yamauchi was just that convincing about the expansion opportunities. At least Arakawa didn’t have to change his last name to Yamauchi, like the two previous sons-in-law.

Nevertheless, Yoko’s bad premonitions were seemingly confirmed the day they left on a road trip from Vancouver to New York. They had set up a Seattle-based “distribution channel”—really just two truckers named Ron Judy and Al Stone, who had been importing used Nintendo arcade cabinets from Hawaii, and reselling them locally. Before heading out to the East Coast, Arakawa hired them, on commission, to set up distribution channels for the North American market. Then it was time to drive cross country to set up the New York headquarters of Nintendo of America. What was the bad omen? The day the couple crossed over from Canada into Washington State, May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted.

 

HAVING SURVIVED THE VOLCANO, THE ARAKAWAS SET UP shop an ash-free three thousand miles away in New York City, with a rented warehouse across the Hudson River in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The Arakawas were in the Big Apple because it was, and still is, the toy capital of the world. Visiting three buyers in a day took a dollar’s worth of subway tokens, not a week of airports and hotel lounges.

But it wasn’t a good fit. Kyoto was fourteen hours ahead of Manhattan, and any conversation with the home office required one party to stay up very late or wake up very early. Yoko didn’t know as much English as her husband, and New York’s cesspool vibe—this was the year of the transit strike, Studio 54 being shuttered, and John Lennon’s murder—was hardly the Asian-friendly Pacific Northwest of Vancouver. They were unhappy in the city, yet supposed to figure out what sort of games these American foreigners wanted to play. In the vigilante atmosphere of the Guardian Angels, they decided on a game about shooting.

The success of
Space Invaders
had started a worldwide rage for shooters. (Since its release in June 1978,
Space Invaders
was also responsible for a shortage of hundred-yen coins in Japan, and for giving the Japanese something to be as proud of as Brazil was of Pelé.) Namco released a color sequel,
Space Invaders, Part II
, in 1980: it was a worldwide hit as well. Taito responded with
Galaxian
in 1979, which was basically
Space Invaders
with some swooping attacks: it was a hit too. Its sequel,
Galaga
, came out in 1981, with minor upgrades: yet another global hit.

In Japan, Nintendo tried its hand at its own space shooter game in 1980,
Radar Scope
.
Radar Scope
’s twist was that the enemies flew down, but then retreated back to the safety at the top of the screen. There were no shields for players to hide behind, and the more blasts a player let fly, the slower the “rapid-fire laser blaster” would become. Finally, some wireframe buildings in the background made for the illusion you were standing among skyscrapers, looking up at the alien horde.

Radar Scope
was Nintendo’s biggest game of the year. Its catalog also boasted
Space Firebird,
a top-down dogfight game. There was also
Space Fever
, a straight-up replica of
Space Invaders
, from a year or two back.
Space Launcher
(sensing a theme to the names?) was a
Frogger-
style obstacle course game.
Monkey Magic
was a
Breakout
rip-off.
Head-on-N
was a maze game with race cars, except nowhere near as good as
Pac-Man
. Finally there was
Sheriff
, a Western-themed shooting game, which would seem perfect for America. But it had odd and frustrating controls, with two joysticks instead of one.

So, a few out-of-date knockoffs, a game that had players fuming over the lousy control scheme, and one proven hit. Yamauchi went all in on
Radar Scope
, telling Arakawa it had the best chance for American success. Nintendo started manufacturing three thousand cabinets, shipping them from Kyoto to the New Jersey warehouse. Arakawa’s job was to get them all sold. If he succeeded, Nintendo would have a toehold in the American market.

It would take a few months to assemble that many
Radar Scope
cabinets, so Arakawa starting preselling them. His first solo decision for the company was to focus almost exclusively on
Radar Scope
, and cut bait on the others: its success and Nintendo’s success would be one. Nintendo farmed out the distribution of
Space Firebird
to Gremlin, a company that worked with other Japanese companies such as Nichibutsu, Namco, and Konami.
Space Fever
never saw U.S. shores.
Sheriff
was released by Exidy as
Bandido
. None were big hits, which must have been a relief to all concerned.

But this wasn’t
Let’s Make a Deal
: just because all the other doors had donkeys behind them didn’t mean that the one Yamauchi and Arakawa chose had a new car. Arcade vendors found
Radar Scope
’s beeping annoying. (Presumably they knew their beeps, working among a hundred machines all set to “migraine.”) The news that the game was big in Japan didn’t impress. And did arcade vendors need yet another cloned
Space Invaders
, an expensive one at that, from a company with next to no track record?

Arakawa was able to wheel and deal about a thousand of the
Radar Scope
units, breaking even on production and shipping costs. But Yamauchi had sent him three thousand. Now two thousand of them were collecting dust in a warehouse in New Jersey, aging about as well as unrefrigerated milk. This was exactly why Yoko, who was now a three-pack-a-day smoker, hadn’t wanted her husband to go into business with her father.

It hardly seemed a success. Certainly not to Ron and Al back in Seattle, who were getting killed by their commission-based deal on an expensive game. What could Arakawa do to prove himself to his father-in-law? Keep selling it, to even more diminishing returns? Or write off the loss and move on to next year’s models? Yamauchi might fire him for either decision. He had plenty of experience canning his own relatives: back in 1949, Yamauchi fired first his relatives, then every last executive, to remove all institutional memory of anyone but himself in charge. To avoid their fate, what should Arakawa choose?