Super Mario (21 page)

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
would be Mario’s final outing on the SNES, and one of Square’s last on SNES too. Early SNESes had been around so long they were literally yellowing with age. Everyone was migrating to the N64: Square was already developing the seventh installments of
Dragon Warrior
and
Final Fantasy
for it. Square, based in the busy port city of Yokohama, had been exclusive to Nintendo for a decade. But it had a problem with one of Nintendo’s recent decisions: cartridges.

Despite Nintendo’s and Sega’s debacles with their CD-based add-ons, storing game information on a cheap, capacious CD-ROM still seemed like a no-brainer. Certainly it would allow games such as
Final Fantasy VII
to create novelistic depths to its story and characters. There were some pluses to cartridges: they loaded information faster than CD-ROMs, they were harder to pirate, and they could be upgraded from game to game. But they held less than a tenth of the data a CD-ROM did, with little room for full-motion video or rich textures. And they were much more expensive, heavy, and tougher to manufacture. Yamauchi’s choice to yoke the N64 to cartridges was like an artist finding all the paint and canvas in the world, but still being told to sketch on napkins with a pencil.

One way to avoid the texture-shading problem of too little data was to use something called Gouraud shading, which results in a bouncy, cartoonish look. That was perfect for Miyamoto, who used it well in
Super Mario 64
, and in the other 3-D launch game he was working on, a sequel to
Pilotwings
. But it would be tough for a game to
not
have a cartoony look on the N64, though, without serious blurriness. This continued the impression that Nintendo was just for kids.

While
Super Mario RPG
used the isometric camera, Miyamoto could go freeform with the camera for
Super Mario 64
. But first he had to get Mario’s movement right. His team worked for months moving around Mario and a sleepy bunny nicknamed Mips (which stood for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages, the N64’s flavor of CPU). The plumber gained a variety of new moves—backflips, wall jumps, double and triple jumps. To demonstrate how he wanted Mario’s swimming to look in 3-D, Miyamoto even stretched out on a desk and mimed it. Once Mario could move, and was done paying tribute to Lewis Carroll by chasing a rabbit around, the team settled on how the camera should move.

The
Super Mario 64
plot hinges on a winningly awful MacGuffin: cake. Bowser takes over Princess Peach’s castle, full of paintings that are portals to other worlds. Mario, who stopped by because Princess Peach offered him some cake, has to defeat Bowser’s minions in each painting, get the star pieces, and beat Bowser. Only then will Princess Peach bake him a cake. (Perhaps in tribute, the action-puzzle game
Portal
opens with the same promise of cake: midway through the adventure graffiti proclaims “the cake is a lie.”)

Miyamoto knew gamers would go nuts exploring the 3-D world, so he made such exploration integral to winning. Each world had a hundred coins in it; finding all hundred earned one of the seven stars needed to complete a level. The other six stars come from tasks, which often could only be performed in a certain order. So Mario would find, say, a star piece high on a cliff, and not be able to get there until he acquired a Wing Cap. Exploration, action, plus the greater puzzle of figuring out what had to be done in what order.

Miyamoto had his team focus on designing fun environments to run around in, and only afterward come up with challenges to fit into them. This helps make
Super Mario 64
one of the first sandbox-style games, where there’s no time limit or oppressive enemy, but a series of optional side quests. Do them, or just play around in a virtual world. Such exploration just wasn’t possible in a 2-D Mario game, where everything was encountered in sequence: here, you could choose any path you wanted, or backflip off the beaten path.

Miyamoto wanted forty different levels, each chockablock with puzzles and assignments. But
Super Mario 64
was penciled in as a launch game, and there was no way Nintendo would pull a Sega and release the console without its star. The whole system would be delayed if Miyamoto was late. And he was late: the N64 was supposed to come out in 1995. Even months behind schedule, accounting for hundreds of millions in delayed and possibly lost profits, not to mention shelving perfectly good titles like
Star Fox 2
, with Yamauchi breathing down his neck, Miyamoto was still trying to shoehorn in new boards. But the big problem was the cartridge format: there just wasn’t enough room. The same back-and-forth from the original
Super Mario Bros.
repeated itself: it’s good enough! No, it’s not! Yes, it is!

Eventually, Miyamoto accepted that thirteen levels of this degree of excellence would have to be enough. It was still an amazingly deep and polished launch title. Plus, he was working on a 3-D
Zelda
at the same time, so many of his unused Mario ideas migrated over to
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
. (The N64
Mario
and
Zelda
games feel similar because of this, both mixing puzzle-based exploration and 3-D platforming.) The N64 arrived in Japan on June 23, 1996, and three months later hit American shores, selling for $199. Games were an unconscionable sixty-nine dollars each at first. (Some SNES games, such as
Super Mario RPG
, were an even steeper seventy-five dollars.)

Super Mario 64
was the best-selling N64 game ever, with 11.8 million copies, so fans seemed to like it. (
Super Mario RPG
sold more than two million units as well, no mean feat.) The 3-D Mario was featured in a Got Milk ad, escaping from the TV to chug some cow juice, which worked as a power-up. Taco Bell featured Mario’s 64-bit adventures in a series of kids’ meal giveaways. Nintendo also had a “one in 64 wins!” contest on Kellogg’s cereals, giving away more than 1.4 million prizes. It even pulled an about-face with Blockbuster, with which it was feuding over rentals. By 1996, Blockbuster was Nintendo’s “Official Rental Station,” offering new titles to rent as well as consoles, for seventeen dollars for three days.

Its happiness was short-lived. Square, one of Nintendo’s aces in the hole, announced it was leaving Nintendo.
Dragon Warrior VII
and
Final Fantasy VII
were going to become PlayStation games, for Sony. The reason? Cartridges. Despite being 64-bit, the N64’s cartridges didn’t have the memory Square needed to produce a top-quality game.

Square led the exodus of third-party developers to the promised land of the PlayStation. It could manufacture CD-based games cheaper, make more money off them, and have them be easier to program: a trifecta. Each defection was a vote of no confidence in Nintendo’s hardware, in Nintendo’s sales future, in Nintendo itself. For all the talk of Sega’s poor decisions thumping it out of business, Nintendo’s Sony dalliance now loomed like an iceberg over the
Titanic
.

The three rivals’ new systems were on the shelves. Sega’s Saturn was a decent enough console, but hampered by years of bad management. The PlayStation was a marvel, seemingly designed to entice developers to make great games for it. No cumbersome legacy problems, no bad blood. And Nintendo’s new console? Compared to the Saturn and PlayStation, it seemed obvious that the Nintendo 64 was designed for Nintendo’s benefit—more profits, no piracy, great Mario games—more than anyone else.

W
hen the NES was the only game in town, Nintendo thrived, and kept its third-party developers kissing plumber posterior for approval. It arrived late to the 16-bit party with the SNES, allowing the Genesis to gain equal footing in the industry. Strong innovation helped Nintendo essentially wait out the 32-bit console cycle (not counting the Virtual Boy), so it could skip ahead and be first out the gate with a 64-bit system.

But it could no longer rely on the developers it had treated like peasants. Sony’s 32-bit PlayStation was a developer’s paradise, without having to learn the odd particulars of Nintendo architecture. Plus, a PlayStation game made more money for a developer per unit than a N64 game. One by one, Nintendo’s best Japanese developers started to make PlayStation games: first Konami and Namco, then Taito, Data East, and Capcom. American companies also joined: Midway, Acclaim, and EA. By the time Square defected, Nintendo was in panic mode: how to stop everyone from leaving?

Well, if a disc-based game system was so important to them, Nintendo would promote one. Nintendo’s 64DD, which sounds like a matronly foundation garment, would be an expansion disc drive (hence the DD) that attached underneath the N64. It would double the storage capacity of a typical N64 cartridge. A wild new DD program called Creator would add rich new textures, characters, and entire levels into games. It would have rewritable proprietary disks, and let gamers download updates to games and preview new ones. With it the N64 would be as invincible as Mario with a Starman.

Certainly that was the sales pitch for it. But from the time it was announced way back in 1994 (when it was still paired with the Ultra 64), it just seemed like the latest attempt to keep Yamauchi’s dream ofof a Nintendo network alive. Certainly the time seemed ripe. The “World Wide Web” had gone from some text-only bulletin boards to a series of walled-off networks by Compuserve, Prodigy, and America Online. Each offered a wealth of magazines, games, chat, and “community.” You could read sports scores, follow the stock market, look up recipes, read the news—everything the Nintendo Network had offered in Japan a decade ago.

But by 1996 there were even more players. Directory sites such as Yahoo and Alta Vista let people leave the walled-off compound and explore the Internet—as the information superhighway was becoming known. Newspapers and magazines started independently posting their content. Businesses began making “home pages,” along with individuals at GeoCities.com. Online stores even popped up: Amazon.com sold books, eToys sold toys, E-Trade sold stocks.

Yamauchi’s dream was coming true. Society had finally started using its computing devices as communications tools. Whole new media forms had developed: the web page, the e-mail, the instant message. Yet the various Nintendo networks had been only modest hits. Yamauchi could get people online for a fraction of the cost of a Compaq or Packard Bell “PC clone,” but they weren’t interested. Arakawa wasn’t even interested!

Mario was to blame. Mario was the de facto mission statement of Nintendo. He promised family friendly fun to kids of all ages. Nintendo would always be able to print money as long as Miyamoto and his ilk kept on cranking out quality games for its consoles. But Mario was also a jail sentence, dooming Nintendo to be seen as an entertainment company and not a communications company. Sony’s list of products included PlayStations, DVD and CD players, Walkmans, VCRs, cameras, and stereos. Yet it handily bought CBS Records and Columbia Pictures without dimming its brand recognition as “electronics.” Why couldn’t Nintendo even get its customers to use its cheap machine for a purpose everyone seemed to want: going online?

Stupid Mario, and his stupid, cherubic, mustached grin. As long as Nintendo pushed Mario as its mascot, it would be shackled to the game business with golden handcuffs. A business of which it had less market share every year. The whole game industry was receding, Yamauchi could see with his unequalled erudition. It would take a decade or more, he knew, but the “Internet” would provide the primary entertainment for a new generation, the way television had threatened the hegemony of the film studios. The numbers of people walking away from gaming were rising.

Well, if Nintendo was stuck with Mario, he’d work for his daily bread. With all the game companies moving to greener pastures, Nintendo’s first-party games would be more crucial than ever. It was in quite good shape for this sort of expensive development: for decades the big N had marketed and developed each major game like it was a blockbuster summer film. The game industry had revenue similar to movies: a few games were huge hits that everyone bought, and the curve rapidly dropped after that. There was no equivalent of a midlist novel or a cult TV show: either a nineties game sold a million copies and was all that and a bag of chips, or it was whack.

With enough great games, Nintendo would be able to ride out the lack of third-party developers. Who cared if the shelf was mostly Nintendo for the first few years? Most of the other games merely gave the illusion of choice. In reality, they sold as well as the dusty cake mix and pinto beans in the center aisle of a 7-Eleven. N64 gamers, like SNES and NES gamers before them, wanted Nintendo games. They wanted Mario, and Link, and little else.

So the grand dimensionalization project began, at Nintendo and everywhere else in the game world. Every 2-D franchise would, via trial and error, see what it would play like when placed in a virtual world. Just about every game franchise would have a stumble or two making this move. They were fundamentally different types of game play, and therefore resulted in different types of games.
Tomb Raider
may just be
Pitfall
with a supermodel, but the game play is quite different. Identical plots, but the Atari game was an obstacle course, and the 3-D game was a mix of puzzle-solving and action-adventure.

Castlevania
, after one iffy switch to 3-D, went back to 2-D game play.
Mega Man
and
Mortal Kombat
did the same thing: both were thrown off-balance when characters wandered around instead of being corralled on a flat stage to confront opponents or obstacles. The look could change, but the content remained the same.

Mario had made the jump already, but he was holding down way more than one franchise. Besides the classic title, he had racked up the
Donkey Kong
,
Super Mario Land
,
Mario’s Tennis
,
Mario Kart
,
Game & Watch Gallery
,
Yoshi’s Island
,
Super Mario RPG
, and
Dr. Mario
franchises. For the N64 to seem robust in game selection, they’d all have to make the move to 3-D—and soon.