Super Mario (9 page)

Happy was a guiding light for the project. Difficulty was a doubleedged sword for any game: too easy and there’s no replay challenge, too hard and you repel players. How to keep people playing regardless of what was happening? Keep ’em smiling. Therefore, the villains were cute mushroom “Goombas” toddling around on stubby legs, Venus’s flytrap “Pirhana plants” with luscious rep lips, and white squid “Bloopers” that resembled curious bells.

The music, most of all, was happy. The score for level 1 (or, to use the game’s nomenclature, World 1-1) is an infectiously happy synthesizer salsa. When Mario has an underground level, a bass-heavy score fraught with tension kicks in. When he’s underwater, the music is soothing and muted, almost submerged. And when Mario grabs a power-up star, the beat turns as fast and frantic as anything this side of Beethoven’s Ninth played at 33-1/3 speed.

This was all the work of Kōji Kondō, the new hire. Kondō had a limited palette of sounds to work with. Forget writing for piano: he had two monophonic channels, a synthesized triangle wave, and a white-noise generator. Try to write good music with a hearing tone, a wooden block, and two chanting monks as your “band.” It was possible, of course, but it would first require writing a synthesizer program that could turn sine waves into piano licks.

Sneaking into the Famicon’s source code led Kondō to discover an extra sound channel: a pulse-code modulation channel designated for sound effects. And those two monophonic channels could be used together to create harmonies. He set up the white-noise generator as percussion, with the triangle wave working as a bass. Drums, bass, chords: the band was starting to come together, all inside a computer chip. He passed on what he had discovered to others, penning the section in the computer-language cartridge
Famicon BASIC
on sound programming.

Some things couldn’t be taught, though: they needed trial and error. Kondō didn’t write just one theme to
Super Mario Bros.
, he wrote lots. Each one he played over footage of gaming sessions, and kept in a loop in his head. Was the score fast enough? Was it too fast? Did it contrast with the sound effects he had for the actions: the
sproing
of a jump, the smack of an enemy’s hit? Did a section go on for too long before repeating, or not long enough? He grew satisfied with the underground music, the battle music for bosses, and the underwater music. But not the main theme.

Eventually, Kondō perfected his little score. The secret was to write multiple minisongs, each a few seconds long, and string them together. They were a series of pop hooks destined to worm their way into the world’s auditory canals. When played in a row, they somehow never sounded like one song on repeat. They even sped up in tempo as Mario’s time ran out. The song’s lyrics and title, “Go Go Mario,” are awkward and probably best forgotten. The first two bars: “Today, full of energy, Mario is still running, running / Go save Princess Peach! Go!” But the melody is unimprovable.

If this hadn’t been a Nintendo game, it might have ended with World 1-4, or World 2-4. Both times Mario defeats a large adversary, a “boss.” A princess comes out at the end of each fight, and says “Thank you, Mario” . . . followed by “But our princess is in another castle!” (Complete with royal thumbs-ups that might be mistaken for middle fingers.) The use of the word “Our” instead of “the” or “Your” includes the player alongside Mario as questers for the princess’s freedom. And to have the same bad joke delivered level after level turns Mario into some sort of Odysseus, forced to storm castle after castle, never to reunite with his Penelope. (Or Toadstool, as the princess was execrably called in the American edition.)

Further mixing the character’s and the player’s adventures were the Warp Zones. Scattered here and there were secret chambers, with “Welcome to Warp Zone!” displayed over three identical pipes. They all led to different levels of the game. It was a built-in cheat, letting Mario bypass vast swatches of the game if he wanted. Another bit of humor, addressing just how Brobdignagian the game had become: what book lets you know you can skip ahead to page 320 if you want?

It must have been frustrating for Yamauchi, not a patient man, to watch the development. His A-team of designers produced a great game, gave it a perfect end point, and then added a dumb joke to explain why they had to design another four levels to play. And then the
same
dumb joke again. And again! Shades of
The Agony and the Ecstasy
, with the pope continually asking Michelangelo when the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling will be completed, and the painter responding, “When I’m finished!”

In the end,
Super Mario Bros.
had thirty-two levels, and eight boss battles. Mario could gain a hit point by eating a mushroom, and grow much larger in size. He could gain temporary invincibility from sparkly stars. He could throw bouncing fireballs if he touched a flower. He climbed beanpoles to the sky, fought off a reptile king, and battled a series of turtles wielding hammers, wings, and spines. He saved any number of women who were not our princess. He jumped on floating platforms, avoided flaming windmills, and ducked living bullets fired at him. He would gain another life if he found a “1-up” mushroom, or collected a hundred coins.

While the game took forever to make, it also took many hours to play through completely. This was
Donkey Kong
if each level was ten times regular size, and if the levels never repeated. Each board had so many hidden coins and power-ups, so many enemies and dangers, so many secrets! This wasn’t a simulation; it was a world to get lost in, as replayable as a favorite book or movie or album. It was supposed to ship in the summer, but Miyamoto saki for a few more weeks to fix bugs. It shipped on Friday, September 13, not the most auspicious of dates. When it arrived in Japanese arcades, players kept plopping quarters in long after they defeated King Koopa, just to find all the Easter eggs. Everyone played it as Billy Mitchell did, trying to wring the computer chip of every last secret.

Now if only someone would sell it. Yamauchi had hit wall after wall trying to get the Famicon, an established hit on its way to selling more than 19 million copies in Japan, on American shelves. Japan had about 120 million people at that time, so almost one in six owned a Famicon. Yet video game consoles remained radioactive to U.S. retailers. It was their loss, of course, but also Nintendo’s.

Before Famicon’s success, Yamauchi sat down with Atari and offered them a sweetheart deal. Nintendo would make Famicons, and Atari would sell them as an Atari product, with Nintendo taking a hefty slice of the revenue. Nintendo would lose its darling distribution network, but it trusted it would be in safe hands with Atari. The deal fell apart, mostly because Atari itself fell apart during the ’83 crash. Nintendo was left without an American partner. Atari was left to kick itself over letting a golden goose fly away.

After the Famicon had proved itself in Japan, Yamauchi sent it (and Arakawa) to electronics trade shows. The console received a new Americanized name, the Advanced Video System: Famicon was too Japanese. It worked with a typing keyboard, played songs with a music keyboard, and featured dozens of great games. Attendees thought it was a quality product, but doomed. Who’d try to sell a new video game system now, in 1985? This wasn’t selling coal to Newcastle, it was selling smog to Los Angeles.

How to break in? If Mario really was Odysseus, questing away forever, maybe Homer had the answer to Yamauchi ’s problem as well. The Greeks gave their rivals the Trojans a big wooden horse as a surrender gift. The Trojans took it inside their fortress—and out poured the Greeks. All Nintendo had to do to sell their video game system . . . was to hide it.

Gunpei Yokoi was tasked with designing a twentieth-century Trojan horse. It was a foot-tall robot that could move its head and arms, pivot, and pick up certain objects. It was the Robotic Operating Buddy, or R.O.B. R.O.B. wasn’t that functional: only two lackluster games were designed that used him,
Gyromite
and
Stack-Up
. But R.O.B. made the video game console a robot that happened to come with an accessory that worked as a video game system. Toy stores sold robots no problem. And, Nintendo ported over its recent arcade hits like
Duck Hunt
and
Hogan’s Alley
complete with the Zapper, a light-gun peripheral.

American audiences must have been familiar with Homer. Toy stores once again rejected the console (again rechristened: it was now the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, with a sleek gray makeover), even with the robot and the gun. It was a pretty lousy ruse: toy manufacturers weren’t dolts, and knew a game console when they saw one.

Arakawa thought this was Nintendo of America’s end, and wanted to pull out. One company could only be so lucky: refurnishing
Radar Scope
, winning the Universal lawsuit, and making a ton of money in a scant three years was enough. Arakawa had opened up a successful Chuck E. Cheese in Vancouver, and then two other restaurants. Maybe resurrecting the home video game market wasn’t worth it. He was at heart a contented person, satisfied with his victories so far.

Yamauchi was not, at heart, happy. He always wanted more and bigger success, a curse peculiar to captains of industry. If American chains weren’t buying, Nintendo would start trotting the damn things door to door. The machine sold in Japan, after all, and it would sell in the United States if someone had the guts to realize one bad year did not make all video game systems Kryptonite. Games were huge in Japan, huge in Europe—hell, huge in Canada still. Even in the United States, arcades were still doing okay. Kids still played (and bought) games for the Commodore 64. The market was ready, the product was ready: he just needed to convince the idiot retailers.

Yamauchi had a hundred thousand NES units shipped to a warehouse in Hackensack, New Jersey, and had most of his American staff move out there as well. That fall of 1985, they’d hand sell as many systems to as many toy stores, electronics shops, and department stores in the New York City area as they could. The Manhattan-based toy manufacturers would notice all the local toy shops were stocking the NES. They’d see that it sold. They’d get the message, and start buying it on a national level. That was the plan.

Arakawa raised Yamauchi’s bet: any unsold Nintendo Entertainment System, he promised retailers, could be returned for full value. No retailer could lose a dime by stocking the NES, just floor space. Yamauchi had refused to offer such a guarantee—why don’t you just cut the price in half, or stuff the machine with twenty-dollar bills?—but Arakawa went behind his father-in-law’s back and made the promise. A desperate measure, for a desperate time. His small team worked nonstop every waking hour to set up holiday displays in toy stores. If this didn’t work, to quote Bill Paxton from that year’s
Aliens
, “Game over, man.” For their effort, they were rewarded by having their Seattle flight back home for Christmas cancelled due to fog.

As with
Radar Scope
, the NES sold some but nowhere near all of its units for the Christmas rush. Fifty thousand units out the door wasn’t great, but it was a start. Enough to convince the next test market, Los Angeles, to try in early 1986. (Toy stores were more willing to try new products in the non-Christmas months.) Then Chicago. Then San Francisco.

Just in time for the fall’86 toy season, with the seeds sown in four big markets, Nintendo began a national launch. The big N signed up with toymaker Worlds of Wonder, who was selling a pair of hot products, Teddy Ruxpin and Laser Tag. They’d sell the NES as well, for a trifecta of must-have products. Mattel handled distribution in Canada.

Yamauchi had one more trick up his sleeve for the country-wide rollout. That game Miyamoto had taken forever to make was finally done, and a recent hit in arcades. He had cannily started selling Famicons packaged with it, just like Colecovision did with
Donkey Kong
. Japanese sales were high. He’d do the same overseas in the United States. Every NES, sold for a mere $130, would come with the console, two controllers . . . and a copy of
Super Mario Bros.
For an extra twenty dollars customers got a Zapper and a second game,
Duck Hunt
.

Thirty-four million U.S.-sold NES systems later, Yamauchi seems to have made the right call. The ultimate legacy of the game, though, can be seen throughout the many worlds of geekdom it cultivated, a vast nerderie of games, book, movies, music, and shows that have moved from niche to limelight. (A preferred word for geek,
otaku
, comes from the Japanese.) Mario was dense, and called for deep exploration instead of facile button mashing. It rewarded the extra energy to explore it. A generation of fans with the first fix of gaming depth started rewarding other deep games with huge sales. No exaggeration: the RPG series
Dragon Warrior
is by Japanese law not allowed to be released on a weekday, since too many people take off school or work to start leveling up.

Mario’s shadow has fallen outside of games, since fans of depth didn’t only want it in 8-bit form. Think
Harry Potter
,
Twilight
,
Star Wars
,
The Matrix
,
Lord of the Rings
,
Lost
, even comedies such as
Arrested Development
and
30 Rock
. These very different books, movies, and TV shows weren’t inspired by Mario, of course, but their
fans
have been. Instead of passively ingesting their entertainment they study it in miniature, read up on each new installment, create and maintain wiki sites to document all its facets. A big film can’t arrive anymore without a tie-in comic prequel, an alternate-reality game in the weeks prior to release, extra scenes shot for the special-edition home release, and what
Spaceballs
’ Brooklynite Yoda called “moichindizin’.” The cross-platform blockbusters that fuels the modern entertainment economy are fanned by, well, fans. And all those enthusiasts, like torches lit by one eternal flame, were indoctrinated into existence by a single fire flower.