Super Mario (23 page)

Sega had experienced a one-two punch of this hesitancy. First, people stopped buying 1996’s Saturn, which upon release had cut the legs out from all of Sega’s various other Genesis-based consoles. Sega had foolishly announced a new console (what would be the Dreamcast) right when it should have been hyping the brand-new Saturn. People passed by the Saturn, the way bakery customers will wait for fresh bread and ignore the loaf sitting in front of them.

The Dreamcast, hot out of the oven, arrived in Japan on November 27, 1998. It sold out in the United States when it arrived a year later, with more than three hundred thousand preorders, and quickly hit a million units sold worldwide. Sega designed a fleet of exemplary “2K” Sega Sports titles, to make up for EA wanting nothing to do with Sega. It brought out a strong
Sonic
game,
Sonic Adventure
. It included a modem with every Dreamcast, which let gamers play RPGs like
Phantasy Star Online
with friends from around the world. It easily had the best graphics of any system so far.

The second-part of Sega’s one-two punch was a clock-cleaning haymaker, not from Nintendo but Sony. Sony announced the PlayStation’s successor, the PlayStation 2, would be available in spring 2000 in Japan, and six months later in America. The PS2 would have a DVD player built in: this alone went for three hundred dollars, so buying a PS2 practically gave away a video game system for free. Developers working on Dreamcast games put their fingers up, felt the wind, and decided to make PS2 games instead.

There was a theory among video game intelligensia that three video game consoles might not be sustainable. One certainly was sustainable: the 2600 and the NES had their unchallenged heydays. Two, yes: the SNES and Genesis both did well. But three might be pushing it. Like brands of soda, like political parties, like nuclear superpowers, you could have two working to spur each other on to greatness, but a third was the odd man out. Sega looked to be this third wheel, neither the family favorite (clearly Nintendo) nor the cool kids’ choice (PlayStation).

This would have been fine for Nintendo, save for Nintendo being uncomfortably close to Sega’s position. Both had lost third-party developers to Sony, and relied heavily (if not almost exclusively) on first-party content. Both had more powerful machines than Sony. Both had quickly followed up Sony’s great idea of re-releasing top-selling games for a reduced price in a Greatest Hits brand: Nintendo’s was called Player’s Choice and Sega’s was All Stars. Both had been around the block long enough, like Marvel and DC, to feel comfy in their rivalry. Mario and Sonic were opposites joined at the hip.

Sega’s Dreamcast had beaten Nintendo’s new console to market. Nintendo’s new console, nicknamed the Dolphin (later Gamecube), would be out in 2001. It was still cranking out above-average games for the N64 until just a few months before launch. An upside to Nintendo’s when-it’s-done philosophy was that it released games all the time, not just in October when they’d sell best. A downside? Some games’ graphics stunk, because they were so behind the times.

Paper Mario
was an interesting example of both: it was a sequel to
Super Mario RPG
, yet it couldn’t use that title (or any new characters in it, or its isometric look) due to Square’s co-ownership rights. To protect themselves, the developers (it was Gunpei Yokoi’s old R&D team, now renamed Intelligent Systems) designed a game that was a parody of the Mode 7 SNES style, with 3-D backgrounds and two-dimensional cutouts walking around like paper dolls. The turn-based timed combat was intact, with new sidekicks given to Mario over the long adventure. The plot was inventive too—Bowser kidnapped not only the Princess but her entire castle.

Learning from their mistakes was what Nintendo’s new console was supposed to be all about. The Gamecube would have no more heavy expensive cartridges, for instance: Nintendo was finally going with discs. Yamauchi, ever in love with proprietary formats, had Matsushita design a special smaller disc, measuring eight centimeters across, not twelve. A smaller disc allowed for an overall smaller machine. The missing circumference meant that a few games would have to be dual-disc affairs, and many more would have to compress their audio and video.

It also meant that unlike the PS2, the Gamecube couldn’t play CDs or DVDs. This kept its retail price down to $249, and stymied pirates, but made it seem like a lesser console. It also included a port for a modem (Yamauchi could never give up the modem idea), but only one or two unpopular games ever allowed for online play.

The wing-grip controller was designed to discreetly house lots of buttons: there was a big green “A” button that fit above the thumb, promoting the idea of simple one-button games. A smaller red “B” button, two eyebrowlike gray bottoms around the green A, and three shoulder buttons gave plenty of options for designers who needed lots of inputs. The controller also had two control sticks (one gray, one yellow) and a gray D-pad.

The Gamecube’s insides were powered by a special IBM chip called Gekko, designed at a billion-dollar price tag to do everything the N64 could, but better. The N128? Not quite: the numerical nomenclature began to break down because the chips’ design matters more than sheer horsepower. The 485-MHz Gekko only had a 32-bit integer unit, but a 64-bit bus, a 64-kilobyte cache, and a 64-bit floating-bit unit, which was often used as two 32-bit vector instruction units. What was that, 128 plus 32 in total? In any case, the Dreamcast had a Hitachi 200-MHz processor, and the PS2’s “emotion engine” was 64-bit bus clocked at close to 300 MHz. There were no apples-to-apples comparisons anymore.

The look of the machine, a compact purple cube, wasn’t anything like previous Nintendo consoles. Purple was a new color, one Nintendo promoted heavily for the next few years. Color theory links purple to feelings of royalty: hail to the King, baby. Dreamcast had chosen white with neon orange highlights: orange was the color of happiness. Sony’s PlayStation was gray, but its PS2 was black with distinctive blue piping: blue is the color of intelligence. These weren’t accidental choices.

Miyamoto had had two launch games lined up for the new console, and two more for the weeks after.
Wave Race: Blue Storm
showcased sloshing, sloppy water in sun-soaked tropical locales. A companion title, the snowboarding sequel
1080: White Storm
(featuring a golden calf – ish Mario ice sculpture), was delayed for years, and ended up being quietly released as
1080˚ Avalanche
. As with previous launch games,
Blue Storm
was a showoff of the Gamecube’s physics engine first and a racing game second.

Also on tap was
Pikmin
, which had started out life as a trade-show demo called
Super Mario 128
. The demo, now an urban legend due to Miyamoto’s insistence that it was a game and not a demo, showed Mario, who divided into two Marios, then divided again and again. The Mario army stood on a sphere so small they filled the whole globe. It showed off two new Gamecube developments: the ability to have lots of different characters on screen (128, as promised) and the planetary gravity system to allow some Marios to stick upside down.

Super Mario 128
would never come out, but its two key ideas were salvaged. The multiple-character trick was used in
Pikmin
, about a tiny stranded spaceman collecting pieces of his broken spaceship to return to the planet Hocotate (named after Nintendo’s Kyoto address). For help, he plucks homunculi plantmen from the ground, who obey his command. The player controls both Captain Olimar (whose name anagrams to Mario L) and the dozens of picked Pikmin. It was a real-time strategy game, done the Miyamoto way, which is to say like no one had ever done before.

Third on Miyamoto’s Gamecube launch list was
Super Smash Bros. Melee
. The updated fighting game crammed in a dizzying array of music, characters, and weapons. The sequel added a hundred different winnable trophies, each one a mounted piece of Nintendo history. It would have been unbearably in-jokey and obscure, if millions of fans weren’t winningly enthusiastic about being able to, say, have the Ice Climbers attack Mr. Game N Watch with Ness’s home run bat in the Pokémon Stadium, to win a Super Scope.

And then there was the haunted house game, with a ghostbusting character who stunned ghosts with a flashlight, then twirled a control stick to wring the hit points out of them. His weapon of choice, a vacuum, prompted one game rival to scrap plans for a Hoover-powered character. It featured wonderful light sourcing and a creepy feel: Nintendo’s version of a survival horror game like
Resident Evil
. Add one Luigi searching for the ghostnapped Mario, and the game found its title:
Luigi’s Mansion
. It sold well (more than 2.5 million copies), but it was not a sign of confidence in the new system. All previous consoles became hits with their long, captivating Mario games . . . but a Luigi game? The Frank Stallone of the Mushroom Kingdom? (Trivia: Frank Stallone played a Mario brother in
Hudson Hawk
.) There was a full-on Mario game in the works, but the Luigi game was a bad omen that the Gamecube wasn’t as comparatively worthy as previous Nintendo consoles.

If Sega had chosen to go the Nintendo route by foregoing third-party developers on the Dreamcast, Nintendo went the Sony route by trying to woo them back for the Gamecube. Its eleven launch titles were from eight different companies, including heavy hitters like EA, Activision, and LucasArts. It locked in some exclusive titles, and made porting games developed for the PS2 over to Gamecube as simple as it could. Developers were more than happy to be wooed by Nintendo: it beat being bullied by them.

One of Nintendo’s wooed developers delivered two arcade hits,
Crazy Taxi
and
Super Monkey Ball
, as launch titles.
Super Monkey Ball
was even a Gamecube exclusive. Its initials,
SMB
, were the same as the legendary
Super Mario Bros.
but the simians in this
SMB
looked more like Sega’s aborted mascot Alex Kidd than Mario. Which made sense:
Super Monkey Ball
was a Sega game.

Seeing the writing on the wall, Sega had bailed on the Dreamcast, announcing in early 2001 (not even two years since its U.S. release) that
NHL 2002
would be its funeral cortege, its final game. All other games would be converted to more popular systems. It was a smart move. Sega’s great strength was in developers like
Sonic
’s Yuki Naka and
Virtua Fighter
’s Yu Suzuki, and studios such as Visual Concepts, which created Sega’s brilliant
2K
sports lineup. Now regardless of what console gamers voted for with their MasterCards, they could play
NFL 2K2
, or a
Sonic
game.
Sonic the Hedgehog
became a Gamecube exclusive. Sega’s console and arcade games would still sell, but years of debt racked up trying to compete with Nintendo had hobbled the company’s books.

Nintendo had played a very good hand leading up to the Gamecube release. And if its opponents had been ascending Sony and descending Sega, it would have been in a solid contest for the gold. But a fourth company had thrown its hat into the video game ring. That company, with its superb console, finger-of-God marketing power, and literally billions of dollars in ready cash, had been what really scared Sega out of the console business. Hell, it scared Sony so much the PS2 started paying for big games like
Grand Theft Auto III
and
Metal Gear Solid II
to be PS2 exclusives.

The new company in gaming was Nintendo’s neighbor from Redmond, Washington: Microsoft. Microsoft, the only American company of the four, launched its Xbox three days before the Gamecube. It had bought up a cadre of fine developers for first-party games, most notably Bungie, who delivered the outstanding shooter
Halo: Combat Evolved
. It convinced many of the big developers (EA, Konami, Midway, Tecmo) to sign up for third-party launches. Nintendo and Sony helped sign them up, too, in a way: Nintendo was late in sending out Gamecube software development kits and Sony had a shortage of PS2s. Both setbacks made the Xbox a more viable option. The Xbox launched in the United States first, a canny move, since American tech never did as well in the land of the rising sun.

Microsoft was so committed to its new console, according to Dean Takahasi’s book
Opening the Xbox
, it even inquired about buying Nintendo outright as a developer. Arakawa brought the idea to Yamauchi, who quashed it. Microsoft also weighed buying Sega and Square, but decided in the end to buy smaller developers for its first-party content instead of an industry big boy. It wasn’t ever a money issue; internal estimates said Microsoft was willing to sink $5 billion or $6 billion into the endeavor before expecting a profit.

This was the PlayStation all over again: a new rich kid in town with the best toys becomes the most popular. And what toys: the Xbox had a 733 MHz Intel processor, a DVD drive, and enough standard parts from PCs that it looked like a tower inside its large black case. (The black came with hints of green: green is the color of renewal.) It had an 8 GB hard drive, which cost a pretty penny, and a meaty controller that had breakaway cords for safety. Biggest of all was the Xbox Live service, letting players throw on a headset and chat with friends or strangers as they joined multiplayer games. (Coming full circle, one of Xbox Live’s data centers is in Tukwila, Washington, Nintendo’s one-time home.)

For all the innovations Nintendo has pushed for its modems over the years, online game playing was not one of them. Its games focused on single-player campaigns (see: Mario), with a multiplayer option (see: Luigi). But Microsoft came from the computer world, of
Counter-Strike
LAN parties and
Quake
and
Unreal
death matches. Multiplayer came first for them, so every Xbox had a free Ethernet card installed. Later games would be required to have an online component for Microsoft to release them. Xbox Live was a one-stop shop for a football match, a game of capture the flag, some boxing, racing, whatever you and your friends list wanted.