All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (12 page)

In real life, Miyamoto was still all about going off the beaten path in the quest for adventure. He would walk down a sidewalk and turn down an alley or head through a pitch-black tunnel and imagine it held ghosts or goblins and, at the end, a treasure. His Mario games were full of flights of fancy and, with those ever present mushrooms, perhaps odes to the magic of drugs in
Alice in Wonderland
. As the years passed, Mario would sprout wings and fly or swim into great murky depths or fly through space, boldly going where no Mario had gone before. Beyond appealing to kids, Miyamoto felt he was making games for the many adults like him who sometimes saw the world as children. Those same adults went to the Disney animated films and the swashbuckling adventures of Errol Flynn, or today still love everything from
Star Wars
, which features men fighting with sword-like light sabers, to
Scrubs
, which showcases grown men as doctors who act like children when they aren’t treating patients.

After Donkey Kong’s success, Miyamoto and the engineers at Nintendo continued to innovate throughout the 1980s, and much of what they put on the shelves seemed sparkling and new to gamers. No one could the stop the Nintendo revolution. Its Famicom console started slow. But soon doe-eyed kids lined up and camped out to buy
it in Japan—even though some units were flawed and broken and had to be recalled. Donkey Kong ruled the arcades, and when Universal Studios sued because the gorilla looked like King Kong, they lost because they no longer had the rights to the famous movie beast. And then came the Famicon makeover, the Nintendo Entertainment System, an agile juggernaut that could not be halted, not by Atari or by any other console maker.

In 1985 Nintendo mined a vein of gold with that console. During its design and manufacturing period, there had been some serious trepidation within the company due to the recent videogame crash that had decimated publishers and made retailers reluctant to stock games. Who would buy it? Was the $199 sticker price too much for consumers to pay? Perhaps, but what if Super Mario Bros., their new platform game, was added to the package? Would that be enough? Bolstered by the success of Donkey Kong in the arcades, Yamauchi was certain that the console would be successful the world over. He felt the crash, though deep and worrisome, was part of a cycle and that games would rise again, renewed and reinvigorated. In the United States, the Nintendo Entertainment System featured some of the best offerings ever created in the Golden Age of Videogames in the 1980s. Its blocky eight-bit graphics were splendid, especially considering the machine had a mere two kilobytes of RAM to show them off. Really, it was the games more than the system that pushed the envelope, so much so that the machine would sell nearly sixty-two million units over time.

The aptly but clumsily named Jumpman was renamed Mario and given the working class job of ace plumber. Super Mario Bros. had kids forking over tons of cash, so much so that more than forty million copies hit living rooms and bedrooms, making it the second biggest selling Nintendo game of all time.

There you were in Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom in a psychedelic war against scaly, lizardy monsters like the grumpy Bowser.
And Miyamoto outdid Alice in one respect. The Mario mushrooms were stranger and wilder than the fungi that Alice consumed while being watched by the hookah-smoking caterpillar. Orange ones with green dots gave you an extra life. Super Mushrooms let you grow into a giant (a fine thing for a small guy). Fire Flowers let you pitch great balls of conflagration. The Starman, like an aboral-armed doctor on house call, gave you health when you were wounded. You’d creep into green pipes and castles, never quite knowing where you’d emerge—in a dank cave where enormous Venus flytraps nipped at your loins, or within the wet, navy depths where white-tentacled jellyfish tried to sting you. And you even saved the girl, something you might never have done in real life. What a trip it was—sheer, empowering fantasy, where dreams came true so lucidly, if only for a while. Paul McCartney was so enthralled by the game, he said he would rather meet Mr. Miyamoto than visit Mount Fuji.

Or take the story and action within another Miyamoto classic, the bucolic The Legend of Zelda. In this console series Miyamoto’s particular kind of genius seemed to rival the mastery of a George Lucas or a John Huston. As Miyamoto sat down to make the game, he recalled with almost photographic accuracy the paths he had traversed as a Boy Scout, how the forest looked through the evergreen needles, how the vision of the crystal blue lake at the top of the mountain engulfed his senses. With the brilliant Takashi Tezuka, who came to Nintendo in 1984, Miyamoto created a mysterious world of caves, waterfalls, forests, and artifacts that was part Peter Pan, part Zorro, and part Robin Hood. Zelda, the stunningly pretty princess of the fictional Hyrule, was named after Zelda Fitzgerald, the wild, energetic flapper who so entranced literary icon F. Scott Fitzgerald that he became obsessed with her. With its many monsters and short, haiku-like instructions, The Legend of Zelda made you feel like a hero. Even when life in the real world was full of unemployment or chronic illness, you could always wield a sharp and
wizardly sword as the strapping, green-suited Link, to save someone who needed your help. In Zelda, you really could feel strong and victorious—no matter your age. The experience in the Zelda series was so deep and enchanting for so many that it spawned a book of essays called
The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy: I Link, Therefore I Am
.

Because Miyamoto was very right brain oriented, he had to learn how to manage and organize his time. But, always anxious to please, he adapted quickly. Promoted to the rank of producer, Miyamoto worked on multiple games at once, some taking more than a year and a half to finish. As many as a score of people would work on each game. The teams preferred to work late into the night during the increasingly brutal crunch times. They would go home past midnight and fall exhausted into bed, only to get to Nintendo again by eleven a.m. and do it all over again.

Once Nintendo became the “it” console maker and developer, Yamauchi and Arakawa became insatiable. They charged outrageous licensing fees to companies seeking to produce games for the hit console. A Nintendo contract of the time stated that the company had to approve the game—with no hard deadline and in its own good time—before it was given a green light for distribution. And they had the right, if they saw fit, to insert their own promotional materials into each package. Then the game’s publisher had to purchase at least ten thousand cartridges from Nintendo, which Nintendo or one of their manufacturing arms produced. From 1983 onward, independent game studios worldwide complained about Nintendo royalty fees, which could peak at an astronomical 20 percent—and eventually led to a congressional investigation led by the drawling Texas Democratic representative Bob Eckhardt. But Nintendo was of the mind, as executives would verbalize in closed door meetings with potential licensees, “If you want to play, you have to pay.” Nintendo was sued constantly for unfair and monopolistic trade
practices. The idea of going to court never bothered Yamauchi too much—as long as Nintendo won in the end. And Yamauchi really didn’t need to worry. Nintendo had terrific lawyers in the United States, like Howard Lincoln, who was a bulldog in and out of the courtroom.

Inside the Japanese offices, Yamauchi ruled with an iron fist. He was not a gamer by any means. But he could smell a hit. At the end, it was up to Yamauchi whether a game would see the light of day. Game designers and engineers cowered when he was scheduled to look at one of their inventions. Everyone, including Miyamoto, worried about his approval to the point of hand wringing. When support came, it was better than sex with a dream partner. It validated the engineer. He felt worthy, accepted, a real man. It was something that money couldn’t buy. A thumbs-up from Yamauchi was validation, and in validation there was strength to go on to the next project, to start the crazed design process all over again. And if Yamauchi shook his head with a no, it was devastating, belittling, a sickening belly blow from which it took weeks to recover.

In the United States, Nintendo launched a kind of fanzine that touted tips on how to play its games. Kids could also call a hotline for information about upcoming offerings. The enterprise was helmed not by a journalist but by a marketer, named Gail Tilden. Its purpose was not to report objective news, but to sell more games by saying nice things about Nintendo and Mr. Miyamoto. Because it was successful, this was the sad template for much of gaming “journalism” for many years to come. Videogame writers of the time were also dyed-in-the-wool fans who looked at the company with subjective eyes. Very few had hard news backgrounds; they didn’t need any semblance of objectivity when press releases and tips about how to play were all kids who played seemed to want. Not many asked the tough questions, for fear of being cut off by Nintendo. The long and short of it was that Nintendo presented itself as the new Disney.
Anyone who wasn’t completely on board was deemed to be an enemy of the company. There was little transparency. To the contrary, there was a concrete wall so thick even Superman’s X-ray vision couldn’t permeate its molecules.

Miyamoto was constantly lauded in
Nintendo Power
magazine as a hero, a star, a videogame character come to life, who could do no wrong. The well-kept secret of the time was that the shaggy-pated Miyamoto had as many as two dozen people working on games with him. But no matter. The not-so-subtle marketing word from Nintendo was clear: Mr. Miyamoto would save you, your very essence, if only you played his games. Miyamoto’s plate was full, and it became fuller as his star rose and he was required to make personal appearances and do interviews. When Miyamoto couldn’t take the pressure of helping to make so many games at one time, he began to haunt the pachinko gambling parlors of Kyoto. It was a way to blow off steam, to relax after a long day at work, “to escape the cycle of worries I had.” It likely wasn’t just one simple anxiety, which he had pushed aside in the name of game making. It was the confluence of many, not the least of which was Nintendo’s constant demand to have supremely successful games, one after the other. Yet pachinko began to become a habit, probably one at which the game designer began to lose money. Gambling was no longer a sweet release. Just as Donkey Kong took quarter after quarter from the determined gamer, pachinko took coin after coin from Miyamoto. After some time and effort, he substituted exercise in order to eschew the vice.

Just as Miyamoto was lauded as the human face of Nintendo and the man who helped to save the videogame industry, Yamauchi was despised by many as the superpowerful puppeteer behind the scenes. His attitude served the company well, and his commandment that there should be space in the game universe for “one strong company and the rest weak” has been true throughout the history of videogame companies. But it alienated his family. And no one ever
got the impression that Yamauchi was truly a happy man. He was too caught up in the constant hope and drive to be number one to have the time to enjoy life fully and completely … or even to save the girl. It happens in other industries, so much so that it’s almost considered cliché. Chicken mogul Frank Perdue was so business-driven that he had no family life and his wife eventually divorced him. Henry Ford was a complete workaholic as chief engineer with Edison Illuminating Company long before he began his auto manufacturing business.

At least Miyamoto had his art and his family to save him. Once he got home in the evening, he would not think of videogames—most of the time. He could sit in his garden at night and still be transported to that world that tantalized him as a child.

In the end, the often sullen Yamauchi only had his company to comfort him—and his endless love for the next dollar. He brought Nintendo and all of its weight home with him. His stomach would tie up in knots at the smallest error, and his moods swung as wildly as the stock market. He had taken over the family business, and like a loyal soldier, when called to duty, he made Nintendo the best videogame company in the world. He made people of all languages and many nations happy. Sullen as he could be, he was responsible for entertaining the millions of children of the world. Yet the great Yamauchi was never really at ease. Yes, Nintendo controlled nearly 90 percent of the worldwide console game market. Consumers purchased sixty-two million units of the NES console, far outpacing other systems of the day and eclipsing sales of the Atari 2600, which sold half as much in its heyday. Yes, Nintendo’s games were engineering feats that stoked many a gamer’s imagination. But Yamauchi always wanted more and more.

Yet he could take solace in the fact that Miyamoto would always think the best of him for giving him his big break. For that reason alone, Miyamoto would always think of his boss as a good man.
Yamauchi and Miyamoto, the oddest of bedfellows, made videogames popular in a way they had never been before. Mario, with that bush of a mustache, was on his way to becoming more recognizable than Mickey Mouse, no small feat indeed. Certainly, creating a star character was something Atari had never done, perhaps because Bushnell considered himself the star. (To be fair, no one else has had success with mascots, with the exception of Namco’s Pac-Man and Sega’s Sonic.) The plumber was so beloved by kids that they would remember him as they grew into college students and adults. Bob Hoskins would play Mario in a live-action Super Mario Bros. movie, which didn’t evoke a smidgeon of that essential sense of wonder. Better was
The Wizard
, a movie about an intense, joyful videogame competition featuring Super Mario Bros. 3—even before the game was released to the public. Beyond film, Mario smiled in a “Got Milk?” ad, toiled as the star of a syndicated weekly TV series, and was the first videogame celebrity to be memorialized in wax at Madame Tussaud’s museum. Adults, still wistful, would later buy Mario games for their kids; after all, they were brilliantly designed, and they were never lewd, crude, or demeaning. Not only were Mario games smart, trustworthy pieces of popular culture, they made Miyamoto the Walt Disney of games.