Super Mario (4 page)

It was all coalescing. Donkey Kong would be situated at the top of the screen, with Jumpman fighting his way up: gamers were used to enemies up top. What better setting than a construction site? Donkey Kong could roll barrels down the bare I beams, and Jumpman would have to jump to avoid them. The “sloping” girders were progressively tiered, since angling them wasn’t possible with mere raster graphics.

Miyamoto gave Jumpman a choice of ladders to ascend. (Yokoi had suggested seesaws instead, but that would have strained the Z80 processor more than angled girders.) The farther ladder was safer, but it took longer to reach. This gave players a true choice right away: take the quick and difficult path, or the slow and easy one? Crushing barrels and jumping over them was worth some points, but finishing early was worth a lot too. Another choice: go for the high score with the barrels, or try to beat the clock?

Miyamoto wanted his story to progress like a chase, and chases needed multiple locations. The four-person Ikegami Tsushinki development team was baffled; variations on a theme were what sequels were for. Why put all this work into level 2 (with five stories of conveyor belts) when 90 percent of players won’t ever see it? Not to mention level 3, with elevators and springs. And now a level 4, with Jumpman smashing rivets to finally bring down Donkey Kong?

Miyamoto couldn’t program, but he could play the piano, and he knew that
Radar Scope
had a solid DAC converter. He composed a brief score to go with the game, not just beeps and blasts. There was an intro, a breezy, sad affair that established Jumpman and the Lady’s moods. When Jumpman died, there was a four-note dirge. And when Jumpman grabbed a hammer, the soundtrack celebrated with a zippy little march. In true Zen fashion, the happy music was tinged with sadness, and the sad music was tinged with happiness.

What’s more, instead of just an introductory screen leading into the game, Miyamoto wanted an animated story to appear after each quarter was plunked. Donkey Kong, with the Lady in hand, would climb to the top of the (not yet slanted) construction site. When he stomped his feet, the screen would tilt into its now-familiar jackstraws shape. After the first level, Miyamoto wanted another cut scene, in which Jumpman and the Lady would be reunited briefly, before Donkey Kong would grab her again and climb higher up the I beams.

Start to finish,
Donkey Kong
was twenty thousand lines of code, way more than usual. Some extra sound equipment had to be added to get the audio to work. But since Miyamoto had composed his music digitally, it took up a fraction of the space of a much shorter clip of true digitized sound, such as a speech sample.

While Miyamoto and Yokoi were designing the new chip in Japan, Minoru Arakawa was moving his American team cross-country again. New York may be Toy Central, but it was too far from Japan. Moving the warehouse from New Jersey to Tukwila, Washington, would save two weeks per shipment, and let the Arakawas return to the Pacific Northwest. The small Nintendo of America staff (including Mino and Yoko Arakawa, Ron Judy, Al Stone, and a gofer they hired named Howard Phillips) would work out of the new warehouse.

At first,
Donkey Kong
was no picnic to sell. Arcade vendors and sales crews were as comfortable with shooting games as the kids dropping quarters into them were. This game was quite literally a different animal. How do you sell a title about a carpenter fighting a monkey who throws barrels at him? With a name that makes no sense in English? Jumpman never once attacks Donkey Kong: the worst he does is destabilize a platform he’s on. Some hero. It didn’t fit into any recognizable category—not a sports game, not a shooter, not even a driving game. Couldn’t Miyamoto have just let you shoot the gorilla with a gun?

At least it was hard: most gamers killed off their allotted three Jumpmen after a minute or so. Nothing dropped a game’s profit margins like making a quarter last half an hour. The secret was, like the tiny basketball hoop in carnivals, to make it only
seem
easy. And if somehow a gamer got past all four levels, the game started over again in an even tougher mode.

The first conversion kits were readied. Arakawa had the name Donkey Kong trademarked. (All attempts by Nintendo of America to change the name failed. An urban legend has it the name was originally Monkey Kong, and was changed due to a misheard phone call or garbled fax.) Out of the two thousand dusty
Radar Scope
cabinets
,
fresh from Jersey, two were chosen for test subjects.

The old game board had to be removed and the new one put in. The wiring harness had to be perfectly connected. One incorrect wire could fry the game board, or overload the monitor so it would smoke out. The wires weren’t labeled (this was not a Dell computer), so it wasn’t clear which wire went where. And the team assembling the games—including Mino and Yoko—was not brimming with electrical engineering know-how. Next, the old art from the red-colored cabinets—the marquee overlay in front of the screen, the control panel, the instructions along the side—had to be slid out from its protective plastic and replaced with the
Donkey Kong
art and text. And they had to do this during unseasonably hot summer months: it hit a record 107 degrees in nearby Shelton in August.

The rebranding was important for the game, and not just to remove evidence of its previous life as
Radar Scope
. Good cabinet art set an atmosphere for the game that its limited graphics couldn’t meet. It was too bad most games were lined up between other cabinets like so many Laundromat washers. Arakawa lost a fight to rename both
Donkey Kong
the game and Donkey Kong the character, but he received permission to rechristen Jumpman and Lady.

The warehouse where the
Radar Scope
s had been gathering dust was run by Don James, whose wife was named Polly. As a way of thanking the warehouse manager, who received a lot of heat from the landlord over Nintendo’s uncollected rent, they decided to rename “Lady” after his wife. Lady became Pauline, close enough to Polly.

Around this time, the Tukwila warehouse’s owner showed up in person to angrily remind Arakawa about the rent. As the legend goes, the owner, Mario Segale, interrupted a conversation over what to call Jumpman. Segale said his piece, and he grew so incensed he almost jumped up and down himself. After the landlord left, eviction threat delivered, someone suggested the name Mario. It was a joke, since both men had mustaches. But everyone liked the name.

To the Japanese, the name has a familiar consonant-vowel pattern—Yukio, Hanako, Hiroto, Mario. Just one letter away from the Japanese girl’s name Mariko, in fact. No troubling Ls that could cause lallation errors, not so commonplace as to be heard regularly in America, not already associated with anyone too famous (
Godfather
author Mario Puzo was about it), and yet not so unusual that it drew undue attention. Although most people think of it as an exclusively Italian name, it’s also Spanish and Portuguese. Mario is a variant of the Latin Marius or Marcus—both of which are believed to derive from Mars, the Roman god of war. Sometimes it’s used as a masculine version of Mary, which means “star of the sea.” For the past thirty years, it’s made the list of the two hundred most popular boys’ names in America, peaking at 111 in the 1980s.

Yes, Mario would be a super name for Jumpman. If Mr. Segale had only shaved that morning, who can say what name the character on the screen might have been given. Super Carlos? Super Ivan? Super Stavros? Would that alternate-universe name have made a difference in Nintendo’s success? Under any other name, would Mario play as sweet?

With the two cabinet conversions done, Nintendo then needed a guinea pig. Ron and Al placed the
Donkey Kong
games in two bars in the Seattle area that already had
Radar Scope
machines: the Spot Tavern and Goldies. They visited every day, mostly because the few quarters in the machines were their business’s sole source of income. The bars therefore served as an ersatz product testing ground for arriviste games.
Donkey Kong
immediately started to deliver more than thirty dollars a day in quarters, much more than
Radar Scope
was pulling in. Ron and Al added more cabinets, and each game pulled in more than two hundred dollars a week. That’s close to ten pounds in change.

Converting the rest of the two thousand cabinets took months, but each was a guaranteed sale. As they were being completed, new
Donkey Kong
games arrived from Japan, this time with blue cabinets. (The red-cabinet conversions eventually became collector’s items.) Demand seemed to increase exponentially, with every arcade-game venue needing a cabinet, then two, then three. At one point, there were sixty thousand
Donkey Kong
machines in simultaneous use worldwide. You were sixty times more likely to find a
Donkey Kong
machine than a theater playing
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, 1981’s most popular film, on opening week.

Modern pinball offered basically no correlation between what you do (pull a plunger) and the “reward” of a hundred buzzers and doodads making a racket. Its addiction quotient was low.
Space Invaders
offered a regular reward schedule: ten, twenty, or forty points per ship hit. Its addiction quotient was high.
Donkey Kong
had an irregular reward schedule, since what earned you points changed each level, and you could also score points by speed. Like a slot machine with the slightest house advantage, this was a formula for a stratospherically addicting game, one in which either your skill or your luck may make all the difference next game. That is, until you were out of quarters.

And Mario’s abiogenesis would never have happened if
Radar Scope
was a bit more popular, if Arakawa had swallowed the financial loss, if Yamauchi had given the reconfiguration project to experienced designers, if Yokoi hadn’t given Miyamoto free rein to design, or if Miyamoto had decided to just make a game—instead of tell a story.

I
n Hollywood, Florida, a sixteen-year-old pinball wizard with the apple-pie name of Billy Mitchell was the best player in town. He had learned all the physics tricks: tipping the machine without tilting the solenoid, keeping multiple balls in play, trapping balls and flicking them directly into scoops or drop targets. This used to impress people. But not anymore: all the arcade loiterers were over watching a video game. Billy, who lettered in three sports in high school, considered video games beneath his abilities. “Video games were something new and different,” he said in an
Oxford American
interview, “and I don’t like new and different.”

“But they started getting more popular,” he said. “Everyone was standing around the
Donkey Kong
machine, and I wanted that attention.” Mitchell, whose father owned a restaurant that featured arcade games, started devoting himself to long hours every day getting a feel for
Donkey Kong
: when Mario should run, when he should jump, when he should grab the hammer. Mitchell discovered a place to stand in one level free of dangers: perfect for bathroom breaks.

Mitchell also learned about the last board of
Donkey Kong
—in the 22nd level, the 117th total screen. The game was supposed to have infinite levels, which plateaued at the highest level of difficulty and simply cycled over and over. But the algorithm to determine how much time to give Mario per screen was written without knowledge that people like Billy Mitchell would treat
Donkey Kong
like a rental car on a racetrack, pushing it to its engineering limits. In this case, the limit was 100 x (10 x (22 + 4)), which for any computer nowadays would run the same if that 22 was a 21 or a 23. But
Donkey Kong
’s Z-80 was an 8-bit chip, with a memory counter of only 256 places. Like an odometer hitting a million miles, it rolls back to 000001. For
Donkey Kong
, the rollover on board 117 causes a “kill screen”—Mario is simply not given enough time to complete the level before time runs out.

Billy moved onto
Centipede
, and
BurgerTime
, and
Pac-Man
. He was the best player anyone in South Florida had seen. When an arcade owner in Iowa, Walter Day of Twin Galaxies, started keeping track of reported top scores in games, Billy called up to question a reported
Donkey Kong
score of 1.6 million. He knew it was false because he hadn’t cracked a million before hitting the kill screen, and if he couldn’t, no one could. Billy was right: the seven-digit score was bogus. He’s held the
Donkey Kong
top score more or less since then.

A 2007 documentary about arcade games,
The King of Kong,
shows a duel between Mitchell, whose ego and eloquence make him an easy villain in the film, and a challenger, sweet teacher Steve Wiebe, who lives in Mario’s hometown of Redmond, Washington. Mitchell comes off somewhere between Harvey Keitel in
Bad Lieutenant
and wrestling’s Mr. Perfect. He’s clearly unwilling to give up his title, and hasn’t played
Donkey Kong
for years. Yet the victory means so much to him he resorts to psychological warfare and character assassination against the guileless Wiebe. Since then, he and Wiebe have broken and rebroken each other’s records: As of July 27, 2007, Mitchell still holds the live record, with 1,050,200 points. Hank Chien, a Harvard-trained plastic surgeon, videotaped a 1,068,000-point score in late 2010.

Billy wasn’t the only one addicted to
Donkey Kong
. Those initial two thousand units were long gone from the Tukwila warehouse by the fall of 1981. Just about every unit that came off a boat from Japan was immediately put onto a truck to somewhere in Middle America. Why? Pop psychology would say that while most every other game offered a way to destroy, and
Pac-Man
offered a way to escape,
Donkey Kong
offered a way to rescue. That didn’t affect the mimetics of the game play, but it certainly changed the motivation of the players: a girl’s life was at stake here! Some desperate arcades had even started to buy a blatant clone, Falcon’s
Crazy Kong
. Others bought expensive counterfeits.