Super Mario (5 page)

Minowa Arakawa had Don James, his new head of operations (after having lured James away from Segale), hire some Washingtonians to manufacture the parts in Redmond. That way, the finished machines wouldn’t have to ride the slow boat from next-to-China to get there. Plus, Seattle had tech-savvy workers and one of the world’s great reserves of lumber for the cabinets. This reduced production cycle allowed Nintendo to manufacture more
DK
s while it was still popular with arcade-goers. Up to fifty units a day of the big ape were made in 1982, more than a thousand a month, more than
Radar Scope
ever sold in its lifetime.

Nintendo’s distributors Ron Judy and Al Stone were two of the six people who piece by piece converted every one of the original
Radar Scope
games to
Donkey Kong
. They were being paid on straight commission, which had nearly bankrupted them in the early days. Now Judy and Stone were millionaires. Arakawa—whose wife, Yoko, had been another one of the six crawling inside machines with soldering irons—found himself responsible for a global property that brought in $180 million in its first year in the United States alone. That was more than any film released in 1982, save for
E.T
.

Amazingly,
DK
brought in $100 million in its second year, well beyond any other sophomore game other than
Pac-Man
and
Space Invaders
. “Video Games Are Blitzing the World,” read a
Time
magazine cover in January 1982. Miyamoto’s originality of concept contributed to
Donkey Kong
’s long-lasting success. There were tons of shooter games and maze games, but no other “ape-throwing-barrels” game. (Atari’s
Kangaroo
that year was closest, with its evil monkeys and a high-jumping hero.) If Nintendo was just another flash-in-the-pan toy company, this was quite a long flash.

Arakawa had a new challenge: how to spend the money. The original plan of marketing the Japanese product overseas for an additional slice of profit was becoming inverted: America ate up the games like cheeseburgers. Nintendo needed an American hub, not just a rented warehouse. (Mr. Segale, presumably, was all squared away by this point.) Arakawa purchased twenty-seven acres of land in Redmond in July 1982. Nintendo could have paid in rolls of quarters.

Arakawa may have needed a proper headquarters just to hold back the people knocking on his door, cash in hand. Licensing companies left and right were eager to have Nintendo sign deals for the likeness of
Donkey Kong
’s hero and villain. Pajamas, breakfast cereal, Saturday morning cartoons, plush stuffed animals, Topps trading cards, Fleer candy. The B-side of the Buckner and Garcia novelty song “Pac-Man Fever” was “Do the Donkey Kong.” Arakawa’s worries now weren’t that he’d go out of business, but that he’d leave money on the table.

Milton Bradley even adapted
Donkey Kong
as a board game: Kong himself was a toy that could throw small yellow barrels, as one to four Marios (drawn with a long chin and a bouffant mustache that would soon characterize Luigi) moved up the
Chutes-and-Ladders
– style board. The game was simple, but came with instructions longer than the prescribing information for most pharmaceuticals.

And, of course,
Donkey Kong
became a console video game. Taito offered a big chunk of its
Space Invaders
money to Nintendo for all rights to
Donkey Kong
. Nintendo knew to sell the milk, not the cow. American companies such as Coleco and Atari also vied for the rights. Yamauchi looked at who had the best technology, who had the most avenues for distribution, and who would fork over the most per unit sold. The decision from Kyoto: Coleco would get the exclusive rights. “It was the hungriest company,” Yamauchi explained. It was also, notably, American. Atari was offering more money, but Coleco execs camped out in Arakawa’s hotel room one night, imploring on Nintendo to honor Yamauchi’s decision. Arakawa did, saying he was impressed with Coleco’s passion.

Coleco received all tabletop and cartridge rights to
Donkey Kong
. In exchange, Nintendo received a lump-sum payment, plus a buck in royalties for every tabletop game, and $1.40 for each console game. Coleco packed
Donkey Kong
with every unit of its new ColecoVision game system: after six months of exclusivity there, Coleco would port it to rival consoles such as the Intellivision and the 2600s. The prestige of bundling such a popular game with its new console helped make the company half a billion dollars in sales, and $40 million in pure profit. Mario should have been called Midas.

In Kyoto, Shigeru Miyamoto was tasked with making a sequel. He had had huge plans for the original
Donkey Kong
, but had had to work with the sloppy seconds of
Radar Scope’s
primordial ooze. Now, though, he had carte blanche—and a team to do the grunt work of designing it for him. Millions of quarters had given his initial vision validation. Gamers around the world wanted to go on another adventure with the heroic Mario.

Miyamoto wasn’t feeling that, though. He wanted to rotate the love triangle, give the big ape some respect. Donkey Kong, being too big for 1982-era machines to make a playable character, would play the Pauline role, the helpless kidnapped one. A new character, Donkey Kong Jr., a smaller and more agile ape, would be the hero. He’d also get the game named after him, à la
Ms. Pac-Man,
gaming’s most successful sequel.

That left one more character and one more role to fill. Miyamoto knew it was good drama to upend audience conventions, to make them all of a sudden have pity on a villain, and also to see the unexpected mean streak in the one they thought was a hero. So Mario would be the villain, the master who locks up his pet and won’t let him go free. And tries to kill the son who attempts a jailbreak. It was a natural next step for the relationships, for the story.

Numerous licensers who paid big money to slap a grinning Mario and a snarling Donkey Kong onto their products must have been shocked. This was not how a brand was built! Miyamoto found himself accused of not knowing his characters, at a time when the characters barely were extant. But
Donkey Kong Jr.
was hardly a misstep, even if it too altered expectations. The single-jump button was still there, but Junior could climb up a series of chains and vines, as well as jump. There were items in the chains and vines, and by touching them Junior dropped them onto various enemies below. That replaced the hammer attack.

And the enemies! There were living bear traps, snapping madly and dragging unleashed chains behind them. There were yellow-andpurple birds that hopped around and glided through the air in deadly assaults on Junior. And there were sparks, living dollops of anthropomorphic electricity that ever so slowly inched their way up the chains. Miyamoto had the “Snapjaws” move in two different ways, and colored them differently as a clue. It would become a Mario tradition: the recolored sprite attacking in a different manner. Mario himself showed up with an identical twin, to move a cage around: perhaps Luigi borrowed his brother’s red overalls for the day.

Donkey Kong Jr.
wasn’t what anyone expected for a sequel, but no one expected
Donkey Kong
to come out of the guts of a space shooter. Nintendo was virtually printing cash by putting anything with Mario or Donkey Kong’s face on it, so it crossed its corporate fingers and sent the game out into the world of 1982.

It was a hit. Notably, it was a different enough game from
Donkey Kong
—not a remake, not an improvement, but a new series of levels to conquer—that it seemed to have an almost negligible effect on the popularity of the original. Nintendo and Mario would learn this lesson well: a franchise character could appear in various different types of games and not glut the market—provided the games were all suitably different from each other. (Later franchises from
Army Men
to
Star Wars
failed to learn this, to their dismay.)

Coleco, which was still preparing its dominant ColecoVision, was contacted by MCA Universal, which wanted to invest in the company. As reported by Steven Kent in
The Ultimate History of Video Games
, the investment pitch in Los Angeles, including a walk-on visit by Universal’s wunderkind Steven Spielberg, was more assassination than assignation. Once the two companies’ presidents were in the same room, Universal’s president dropped the pretense of an investment and threatened to sue (read: destroy) Coleco if it shipped the ColecoVision with
Donkey Kong
.
Donkey Kong
, Universal felt, was an infringement on its own King Kong character.

A telex (this was before e-mail) laid it on the line to Coleco: destroy all
Donkey Kong
property, stop any and all marketing, and give us every cent you’ve made off the ape. Universal sent the same telex to Nintendo of America. Coleco, desperate to have an unblocked path to release the ColecoVision, quickly agreed to fork over 3 percent of net profits to Universal. The profit-slice turned out to be worth almost $5 million. Coleco didn’t inform Nintendo about this, which seems puzzling, since the lawsuit implies that Nintendo had licensed an illegal product.

Nintendo’s initial response to the telex was similar to Coleco’s: let’s pay up to get rid of this quickly. They certainly had enough money lying around: $5 million of it might save a lawsuit. Anyone in gaming knew that success drew lawsuits: if not from Atari or Magnavox, then Universal. Wait, how about $7 million?

Then, Nintendo of America’s lawyer Howard Lincoln had an epiphany. Lincoln, formerly Al Stone and Ron Judy’s attorney, had the previous year arranged for trademark protection for
Donkey Kong
, paving the way for millions in lucrative licensing fees. Millions and millions, in fact. Nintendo had the money to fight this, if it wanted. It wasn’t a six-person start-up anymore. Furthermore, Lincoln did some research and realized Nintendo had a tremendous case against Universal.
Donkey Kong
and
King Kong
were different animals. Arakawa was chagrined to not just pay some hush money, as Yamauchi wanted. But Lincoln convinced him it was the right thing to do.

A three-party meeting was held in Los Angeles, Universal’s backyard, to attempt to straighten things out. Arakawa and Lincoln attended for Nintendo, along with reps for Universal and Coleco (who still hadn’t told Nintendo it had capitulated). Nintendo said Universal was, to skip the legalese, full of it. There were lots of other unlicensed
King Kong
products on the market, and Universal hadn’t gone after any of them. This was about Nintendo’s money. Coleco sheepishly tried to get Nintendo to fold to Universal. But Nintendo wasn’t budging.

Universal promised Nintendo it would send a chain of title for
King Kong
, documented proof that it owned the property. That would be the easy part of the legal battle, of course: the hard part was proving that
Donkey Kong
was a rip-off of
King Kong
. No one had ever asked a judge or jury to decide how close a video game had to be to impinge on a film. But no chain of title arrived in the mail at Redmond. When Nintendo asked again for it, Universal instead demanded a royalty payment. It was a foreshadowing of Universal’s poor legal standing.

In a possibly perfidious piece of brinkmanship, Nintendo arranged a special meeting with Universal, to discuss matters. These sorts of meeting are only called when there’s something to discuss, i.e., Nintendo caving in to Universal’s demands. Universal’s president personally attended, wanting to see the upstart Nintendo fall on its own sword and offer him royalties. But Lincoln and Arakawa merely reiterated their already-stated belief: we’re not liable and won’t be paying you anything. To quote Ice Cube, it was on like Donkey Kong.

“His reaction was shock,” Lincoln recalled. Universal made movies, and its movements seemed reflective of this: big, bombastic, very entertaining, but as ephemeral as the fog around Skull Island. Nintendo, on the other hand, was a game company. Its lawyer just scored a major tactical victory, without the pieces on the board moving a whit.

As if the suit wasn’t complicated enough, a new player entered: Tiger Electronics. Tiger had exclusively licensed
King Kong
from Universal for a handheld game. Universal realized that if Tiger kept that exclusive license, and
Donkey Kong
was shown to be the same as
King Kong
, then only Tiger would be able to sell
Donkey Kong
games. Furthermore, Tiger’s
King Kong
game was a pretty blatant swipe from
Donkey Kong
. (The layers of irony are like a lasagna.) Universal rejected the game. Tiger redesigned it to have bombs instead of barrels, and straight instead of crooked platforms. Also, the hero was given a fireman’s hat.

Universal continued its aggressive actions, officially suing not only Nintendo but six other companies to whom Nintendo had licensed
Donkey Kong
. It collected royalties from all but two of them: Milton Bradley for the
Donkey Kong
board game (which refused to pay) and Ralston-Purina for
Donkey Kong
cereal (which offered a measly five grand, which Universal rejected). Combined with Coleco’s payments, Universal was already making steady money off of a case that hadn’t even started yet. This was the benefit of lawyering up: smaller companies backed down so fast, it was almost a legal form of theft.

Nintendo was seeing this through to the courtroom, though. Howard Lincoln had pulled in a hotshot trial lawyer named John Kirby to mount the Nintendo defense.
Universal City Studios Inc. v. Nintendo Co. Ltd.
lasted seven days. Kirby listened to Universal’s legal team explain its case: the two have similar plots, they’re both apes named Kong, so in conclusion give us the money. Kirby, in turn, highlighted every difference between the game and the film. He read deposed statements from Shigeru Miyamoto, explaining how the game was designed.

Then, Kirby sprung the trap. In 1975, Universal had sued RKO, the original makers of
King Kong
. Universal, in a case-winning argument, had proved that
King Kong
was in public domain, since the movie was from 1933. Universal didn’t need to pay a dime to the “owners” of
King Kong
, because anyone could do whatever he wanted with King Kong. Kong was as unownable as Huck Finn. Then, Kirby asked for a summary dismissal of the suit. Granted.