Super Mario (10 page)

I
mitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Just ask the Great Giana Sisters.

In 1987, Rainbow Arts made a game called
The Great Giana Sisters
for various computers. It was an almost perfect replica of
Super Mario Bros.
, except with spiky-haired girls as the leads. Nintendo found out about it, made some threats, and Rainbow Arts pulled the game off shelves.

Or ask
All Night Nippon Mario Bros. All Night Nippon
was a popular Japanese late-night radio show, which asked Nintendo to change up the game’s sprites for a promotional giveaway. Some of the levels had their sky colors changed from blue to black (it is night, after all), and various bad guys had their sprites replaced with eighties singers and disc jockeys.

Or ask
Super Bald Bros.
, a hacked version of the game where Mario and Luigi have no hair. Or replaced Mario’s face with that of glam rocker Alice Cooper. Or made Mario Russian, or a pimp, or simply hatless. Or replaced Mario with characters from a grab bag of other games—
River City Ransom
, the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
, or
Bomberman
. (Worst of all would be the
Super KKK Bros.
hack, about which nothing more will be said.)

The samizdat hacks were merely the logical reaction to Miyamoto’s philosophy. He had designed
Super Mario Bros.
to be not just played but studied. Certain valuable boxes were invisible, findable by heuristic trial and error. Players spent hours leaping into the air at every point of every level, looking for them. They discovered Mario could get an extra life if he jumped high enough on the level-ending flagpole. They found the “minus levels,” including one water board that simply extended forever until time ran out. They found the invisible walls, where Miyamoto had cached extra loot. They even watched the odd anime movie
Super Mario Bros.: Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach
, which features Peach escaping from her own video game, Mario searching for magical items to restore a prince who had been transformed into a dog, and King Koopa demoted to working at a grocery store.

After investing so much time in a mere game, not everyone wanted to let it go. The NES was a computer, after all, and computers could be hacked. A cottage industry of NES hackers was emerging. They learned about the technical changes made when the Famicon became the NES. While the Famicon was top-loading, for instance, the NES was side-loading. Its controllers were uniform, and had round instead of square buttons. (Despite passing a “million-punch test,” the square buttons were jamming.) The mike and modem support were gone. And, oddly, the game cartridges were bigger, 72-pin instead of 60-pin.

That was to accommodate the 10NES chip, Yamauchi’s newest brainstorm. Atari and other console makers couldn’t stop outside parties from making games: anyone could whip together a game, and shove it into a 2600 cartridge. The 10NES was a lockout chip: before the NES did anything else with a cartridge, it checked to see if the inserted game cartridge had a 10NES chip. If it did, game on. If not, no dice.

This additional chip added cost to every unit, but it allowed Nintendo to once again control distribution. If you wanted to make a game for the NES, Nintendo had to approve it. Yamauchi signed up as many Japanese publishers as he could: Komani, Capcom, Bandai, Taito, Hudson Soft, Namco. The more the merrier: third-party content (i.e., games not made by Nintendo, or by companies Nintendo hired) was how the Apple II grew successful. Yamauchi limited them to five games a year; any more, and the market might get glutted. Some companies went so far as to create shell corporations to put out additional games while keeping to the letter of Yamauchi’s law. Few American game publishers wanted in: they stuck with computer games.

That first launch year, 1986, America bought three million NES consoles. The following year, six million more. Worlds of Wonder was cleaning up with the NES, but the company faced bankruptcy since it had a veritable sleuth of unsold Teddy Ruxpins on its hands. Nintendo ended up hiring the WOW sales force from the floundering company. Yearly, Nintendo was bringing in millions from the console, more millions from its own games, and more millions still from third-party developers’ games. Arakawa even got a licensor, MGA Entertainment (of future Bratz doll fame) to import the Game & Watch titles from Kyoto to the United States. Add on arcade games and licensing, and Nintendo was living out Naomi Klein’s description of a modern company’s “race toward weightlessness: whoever owns the least, has the fewest employees on the payroll and produces the most powerful images.” To this day, as journalist Osame Inoue points out, it continues to have an employee-cost ratio in seven figures—that is, divide the profits by the staff and each employee ends up bringing in over a million dollars a year.

Now if only they could get a sequel for that most powerful of images.
Super Mario Bros.
would end up selling an astounding forty million copies. As in Japan, one in six Americans bought a copy. That number would stand as the world’s bestselling game for over two decades, thanks to every NES buyer getting one. It wasn’t just dumb kids playing. When Booker Prize – winner Salman Rushdie was asked what he did while in hiding after Ayatollah Khomeini issued a
fatwa
calling for his death, he said he mastered
Super Mario Bros.
(He’s since based a book on the game’s themes.) To celebrate the game’s twentieth anniversary, Japan released a set of eighty-yen Super Mario stamps. This was some game.

In lieu of a proper sequel, Mario and Donkey Kong were going to star in an educational game,
Donkey Kong’s Fun With Music
. Players would be able to jam alongside Donkey Kong on the upright bass, Mario on the keyboard, Pauline on vocals, and Junior on the drums. While jamming, players would learn about rhythm, and how to sightread music. Miyamoto and Kondō both loved music, and this was a perfect way to make learning a true joy.

But the music project was canceled. The first U.S.-released game in the series,
Donkey Kong Jr. Math
, was a dud. Junior had to answer math problems by maneuvering through vines and chains littered with numbers, picking the right integers and actions to get the correct number. It was fun, and reinforced math fundamentals, but it was challenging. There was another game, one that taught basic English reading, called
Popeye’s English Game
, or
Popeye no Eigo Asobi
. Obviously, it was for Japanese audiences, and not released in the U.S. After swinging 0 for 2, Nintendo gave up on the NES being a learning machine.

Another never-finished game was
Return of Donkey Kong
. It was a remix of the first three
Donkey Kong
games, with the clever conceit that Mario (with his jumping) and Junior (with his swinging ability) would have to navigate the same board in two different ways to get from point A to point B. The game would have redesigned levels from all three games, adding challenges for both sets of characters. It was two different new games in one, masquerading as three warmed-over games.

All these games that never made it out of development hell must have been frustrating. Great ideas, great execution, and they get killed because people wouldn’t understand them. People just wanted more of Mario in the Mushroom Kingdom. More of the same, just, you know, a little different.

Miyamoto, possibly with a raised eyebrow, decided to deliver on exactly that. His new protégé, Takashi Tezuka (memorably credited as “Ten Ten”), would do most of the work for a
Super Mario Bros.
sequel that would look and play like the original. Gamers would be immediately comfortable: this was what they wanted. Question mark blocks! Smashable bricks! Mushrooms! Digital comfort food!

Then, they’d go grab that mushroom, which in the previous game made Mario super. And they’d see what a little difference could do. (Insert maniacal laughter here.) In this game, the first mushroom would kill Mario. Boom, dead. Miyamoto could never pull a stunt like that with an arcade game: folks would demand their quarters back. But home console players would have touched the hot stove, and learned: okay, the mushrooms are all deadly.

Except only certain mushrooms were deadly, not all of them. That was only the beginning. The swimming “Blooper” squid here could swim on land and air. One endpoint could only be reached by climbing a vine, which in the previous game was just for bonus levels. A new element was rain, which could stir up from nowhere to push Mario back. All jumps now had to be weighed against the possibility that a freak shower would blow Mario off course.

Developers have a code of conduct about how to make a proper game. No blind jumps, for instance: Mario had to see both ledges. Miyamoto wouldn’t break those commandments. But he’d certainly tweak them. If the first game had Mario schlep his way up a pyramid to get a 1-Up, this one would create a similar obstacle course that led to a worthless poison mushroom. Mario’s warp zones took him forward in the first game? The warp zones in the sequel might take him back to the beginning of the game. Level after level, Miyamoto was pranking the player.

This was exactly, precisely, what video gamers had said they wanted. They wanted a game just like
Super Mario Bros.
, but with new challenges. But did they really? Or did they want the illusion of difficulty? The thrill of accomplishment, without a constant ramp-up in difficulty? Just because all NES owners had a copy of
Super Mario Bros.
didn’t mean they all mastered it. This was a true continuation of the series, in that it started out at a difficulty level higher than the last level of the first game.

The finished game was released in Japan in 1986, and met with mixed reaction. Japan had become a testing ground for new Nintendo products. And if the more accepting Japanese crowd thought it was too hard, imagine the American audience’s reaction. The Big N couldn’t release it: skittish retailers already were saying the NES was a one-year fad, and this game might prove them right. Mario’s lone appearance for that year would be as a guest referee in
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out
. (Arakawa scored a coup signing up the then-heavyweight champ for his likeness to be added to the boxing game.)

Miyamoto didn’t have time to go back to the drawing board: his team was already working on another game. He had tried vertical and horizontal side-scrolling, so this one would be a top-down tile-based game. Each board would be a grid populated with traversable ground, obstacles, enemies, and hazards. The square hero would run from board to board, free to explore a vast map of territory. He could even find hidden caves, just like from Miyamoto’s childhood, to further his fantasy quest.

And since Nintendo’s two biggest franchises were named after the hero and villain of a love triangle, why not name this one after the captured heroine? There was an American name he had come across, reading about F. Scott Fitzgerald: Zelda. Sounded like a princess. And keeping with the triangle theme, he’d make the MacGuffin device a mystical triangle called the Triforce.

While Miyamoto and company were limning
The Legend of Zelda
(in the credit he was “S Miyahon”), other designers were hard at work at transforming a standalone video game into a Mario game.
Dream Factory: Heart-Pounding Panic
(
Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic
) was an Arabian-themed NES game, based on a Fuji Television cartoon. Players could choose one of four family members to play as, each with a different skill. They used genie lamps to hop into a backwards midnight world, rode flying carpets, and fought giant rodents, masked opponents called Shyguys, and living desert cacti. One opponent was a bow-wearing cross-dressing dinosaur who shot eggs from his (her?) mouth. Most notable was the family’s attack: they pulled vegetables out of the ground to hurl at opponents.

What Nintendo would do, to make a new Mario game, was the same thing hackers were doing to make an Alice Cooper game. They’d swap out the sprites of the four main characters, and replace them with Mario folk. Imajin, the son, was changed to Mario. Papa, who was strong, became Toad. Mama, who had a springy jump, was Luigi. And Lina, who could float if her jump button was held, was Princess Toadstool. The lizardlike villain became Bowser once again.

Yume Kōjō’s plot of someone attacking dreams was replaced by Bowser attacking the kingdom for a second time. A few other changes were made, to generally make the game easier than the original. (No point going through all this just to release an equally hard game!) But even when it was finished, it didn’t feel in the same spirit as the other Mario games. There were hit points. Mario didn’t get bigger or smaller. There was no score—and hence no way to compare friends’ best games. No Goombahs or turtles. If Mario jumped on an enemy, nothing happened: the bad guy would just keep trundling along, like a rhino with a bird on its back. And suffice to say no one in the
Donkey Kong
games ever picked and threw rutabagas.

But Yamauchi’s gut, once again, was proven right. 1987’s
Super Mario Bros. 2
went on to sell more than seven million copies. It was a step down from 40 million, to be sure, but about 6.75 million more than
Dream Factory
would have gotten sans Mario. Indie comics hero Scott Pilgrim was a fan: he named his fictional band Sex Bob-omb after a
SMB2
villain. The game prompted a video game giveaway for drinking Pepsi’s soda brand Slice, which gave Nintendo millions in free publicity. It’s one of the more successful Mario games, even if everyone agrees that it doesn’t play like a Mario game. It’s been rereleased for multiple Nintendo consoles as well, where its reputation has been rebolstered. So, though, has Miyamoto’s original take on a
Super Mario Bros.
sequel. Now known as the
Lost Levels
, it’s considered by some to be his
Finnegans Wake
, his dissertation on form.