Super Mario (11 page)

C
aptain” Lou Albano had a lot of gimmicks in his decades of professional wrestling. He’d been both heel (a bad guy) and face (a good guy). He was billed as a captain—Albano served in the army, but had never gotten three stars on his lapel. He played up his Italian heritage as part of the tag-team group the Sicilians. He wore often-unbuttoned Hawaiian-print shirts. Even when he wasn’t wrestling but merely “managing”—which allowed him to throw a punch or two but mostly keep out of harm’s way—he was one of the most popular stars of the squared circle.

Albano’s biggest trademark, though, might be his beard. It was a wily goatee, grown down and out over years, and it looked like a tiny patch of Gandalf mixed in with an extra large hank of tiki bar bouncer. He weaved rubber bands into the graying beard, and hooked more rubber bands to his earrings. Another rubber band was pierced into his cheek. He resembled an uncle who had rummaged through a junk drawer trying to be funny.

As wrestling got more mainstream in the eighties, Lou Albano seemed the personification of its fun. If Hulk Hogan and André the Giant were the strong men, Albano was the joker who stole the show. He showed up in a Cyndi Lauper video. And a Brian DePalma movie. And an episode of
Miami Vice
. He was game for anything, loved getting a reaction from a crowd, and was able to sell it to the back row. Like many wrestlers, his biggest fans were children.

Maybe this was because he was a dead ringer for Super Mario. He had a beefy thickness run to fat by years of good living. His hair and mustache were full and bushy. He certainly looked like a plumber from Brooklyn—he was from Westchester, close enough to get the Noo Yawk accent right. And at five feet ten, he’d allow a tall actor as Luigi to play Laurel to his Hardy.

The only thing wrong, in fact, was the beard. (Well, that and the rubber bands.) Mario didn’t have a beard. Ever canny in ways of promotion, Albano shaved it off on live television, in front of Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford. Soon he was outfitted in custom red overalls, a blue work shirt, and a big red cap. Veteran actor Danny Wells played Luigi. Together, they hosted the
Super Mario Bros. Super Show
!

The syndicated show mixed live-action and cartoons. Albano and Wells, in a basement set, had mild adventures that acted as bookends for each show. Guests would show up—one time it was Ghostbuster Ernie Hudson—with a problem for Mario and Luigi to solve. Sometimes they’d do double-duty as mustached women—Mariana and Luigiana. The show’s theme song doubled as dance instructions: “Do the Mario! Swing your arms from side to side. Come on it’s time to go. Do the Mario! Take one step and then again.” Between the bookends were
Super Mario
cartoons, which Albano and Wells voiced as well. The cartoon was light adventure with a lot of pop-culture parody. On Fridays, Mario and Luigi hosted a
Legend of Zelda
action cartoon. This setup allowed the show to run five days a week and yet only be halfanimated.

Also airing in the fall of 1989 was NBC’s
Captain N: The Game Master
. He wasn’t a real captain either, incidentally, but a teenage Nintendo fan who got sucked into a video game world. He met up with various Japanese-based third-party characters—Simon Belmont from Konami’s
Castlevania
, Capcom’s
Mega Man
, and Nintendo’s own
Kid Icarus
. Notably absent was, of course, Mario, which was like visiting Egypt and not seeing the pyramids.

Captain Lou’s bookended segments were dropped after a year, in favor of a bunch of “radical” teens called Club Mario. The cartoons in the middle remained. Eventually they all aired in one big loop in syndication. The following year, a new Mario cartoon with no live-action component was introduced, called
The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3
. Working actor Walker Boone took over the Mario role. The year after that, the show was renamed
Super Mario World
. If a quality Mario cartoon could not be made, then the audience would have to settle for quantity.

This came to a head with a live-action production so abysmal it merits comparison to the underground cult classic
Star Wars Holiday Special
: the
Super Mario Ice Capades
. Teen hosts Jason Bateman and Alyssa Milano are backstage, wearing sweaters that can be carbondated to December 1989 (his is Cosbyrific, hers has no shoulders and is Day-Glo yellow) talking about how good Bateman is at
Super Mario Bros.
When he calls himself a “video prince,” the screen starts to flash. Bateman says it’s a computer virus that will magically infect all the computers in the world if it’s not stopped. Then Mr. Belvedere appears.

Christopher Hewett, the British actor who starred in
Mr. Belvedere
, floats on the ice as King Koopa, to take responsibility for the virus. He’s not skating but being pushed around on a chair designed to look like Bowser’s brick castle, against a Mushroom Kingdom backdrop that’s actually quite good. Hewett’s wearing a green velvet jacket, red plaid pants, a jester’s hat, and about nine seconds’ worth of green makeup.

A surprisingly authentic-looking Princess Toadstool skates out, complete with a head bigger than a prize-winning pumpkin. She calls on the Mario Bros. to help her, and they float down from the sky. They too have heads the size of dishwashers. Peach calls out to a bunch of children to help them, Luigi uses a fireworks gun to shoot all the Goombas dead, and Mario and kids twirl around Koopa until he explodes, replaced (via trick photography) with a white phosphorus blast. The princess pins the Purple Plunger of Bravery on Mario and Luigi for their efforts. The audience at home received no such prize for the effort of watching it.

Shigeru Miyamoto couldn’t control how Mario was marketed or licensed. The various comics and cartoon shows about his adventures were, as continuity quibblers say, noncanonical. But Mario himself wasn’t a creature of “canon.” He was a pop culture superstar, even making it on the cover of
Mad
magazine. There were more important things to worry about.

Nintendo used to be an arcade company. Now it made arcade games, Game & Watch titles, NES games, plus two new consoles in the works, and all that licensing revenue. As producer, Miyamoto was overseeing the baker’s dozen of staff members who were actually designing and coding each game. It took him a while to feel comfortable stepping back, but the
Dream Factory
fiasco helped him distance himself.

Miyamoto was management now, and developing his own Sphinxlikestyle. Instead of saying “let’s make a maze game,” he’d ask his staff to consider a game built around a chase, or around moving walls. This helped engender the creativity in others, and also led many to mythologize Miyamoto as a Delphic oracle who spoke exclusively in puzzles, about making puzzles. Mario was a purposeful blank, and Shigeru was a purposeful cipher. In truth, though, he was often just tongue-tied trying to say what he felt, and when he tried to explain it sounded like a fortune cookie.

He stayed hands-off for the sequel to his beloved
Legend of Zelda
game, letting Kazuaki Morita program it. He also guided another role-playing adventure, called
Mother
, which was too unusual to be released in the United States. Ironically, one of the elements that made it odd was that instead of a medieval fantasy, it took place in the United States and starred an American boy named Ness (ha-ha) with a baseball bat. At one point a boy asks Ness if he’s played
Super Mario Bros. 7
. Ha-ha again.

But Miyamoto couldn’t stay away from Mario: there would indeed be seven
Super Marios
one day. The sour taste in his mouth from
Super Mario Bros. 2
was a powerful propellant. It took many games for him to feel the dreaded “sophomore slump,” but here it was. Here was the dumped superstar, back to redeem himself. Whatever
Super Mario Bros. 3
would be, it would also serve as a quest of honor.

All the verbosity of being an artist and experiencing change and taking risks boils down to doing something different. Sometimes it’s dramatic: Jackson Pollock deciding to drizzle paint instead of spreading it. Sometimes it’s flexing a new muscle: Woody Allen trying dramas instead of comedies. Sometimes it’s mercenary: Madonna’s new look for each song. But it’s always necessary. Artists can’t simply redo the exact same thing over and over. Artistry, perhaps, is at its core being able to control change in interesting ways.

Miyamoto was not someone accustomed to change: his parents told him to not “change vessels,” meaning to stay who you are regardless of circumstances. That was why he still biked to work, still kept the same rescued-castaway haircut, and not incidentally still worked at Nintendo rather than go start his own firm. “I don’t really chase after the American dream—that idea of continually changing with success,” he said. But unless he wanted to make
Lost Levels II
, he would have to change.

Miyamoto had gotten into game design in the tail end of the arcade era, and was now comfortable in the home console world. Not many of his cabinet colleagues made the jump: not
Space Invaders
’s Tomohiro Nishikado, Atari’s Nolan Bushnell, or even one of Miyamoto’s idols,
Pac-Man
creator Tōru Iwatani. They were all masters of their era’s technology, but they lost that mastery with the advent of new innovations. Without a master narrative guiding them beyond engineering prowess, they were back at square one.

So what was Miyamoto’s master narrative for Mario? Was it the athletic exploration that he poured into
Super Mario Bros.
, whose magic he wasn’t able to bottle a second time when he went back to the well? Or was it something even more basic than that? Something that would not only allow for a regular series of great Mario games, but of a roster of other great franchises? Miyamoto’s decisions for
SMB3
would set the stage for the rest of his life.

Miyamoto decided that gameplay was king. How Mario interacted with the world was the core of the game. This was a slight change from
Lost Levels
, where the game play was mostly identical to the original, except much more difficult. Now, though, he wanted new ideas, new opponents, new powers for Mario. That was why people said
Lost Levels
wasn’t Mario, not because it varied from some ethereal formula but because it did
not
.

So Mario got a series of “suits” he could wear. The frog suit made him swim faster. The bizarre Tanooki suit turned Mario into unmovable stone, let him fly, and gave him a tail to hit enemies. (Mythological Japanese tanuki attack with a less family friendly weapon: their heavy testicles, wielded like morning stars.)

That creative game play, built around running and jumping, was what was missing from
Lost Levels
. Certainly it was missing from many of the side-scrolling imitators that had sprung up, where the sole challenge was in navigating incredibly difficult boards and fighting incredibly easy foes. Miyamoto added more and more power-ups and extra lives in the earlier stages, and held them back as the game progressed. That helped new gamers keep playing, without making experienced ones feel like they were playing a baby game.

Miyamoto also decided to end the one-man-show operations.
SMB3
was a collaborative effort, which meant every contributor would have a section, a character, an obstacle they could point at and say “that was mine.” His job was to produce games, which meant giving others the tools so they could shine.

Perhaps the most innovative element of
SMB3
was the game board. In the previous games Mario was exclusively seen from the side profile. But Nintendo had had success using two views in the
Zelda II
game: tile-based when traversing a large map, and side-scrolling for the fights and town/dungeon exploration. It let Link’s journey feel more epic.

In Mario, though, it would create another abstraction level, a thinning of the barrier between our world and Mario’s. Level 1 begins with a small map, with a squarish Mario facing a fork in the road. The right fork is locked, forcing him to go to the left, to the square labeled 1. After that is 2. After that he can choose from another fork, to move ahead to 3, skip it via a side path to 4, or bypass both 3 and 4 and go straight to the Picture Game, a slot machine game where players can win extra lives and coins if they hit the right buttons.

This built upon the warp zone concept, where Mario could jump ahead multiple boards. Here it’s not a secret hidden door but right in front of you, clear as day. If you want to go fight the bad guy at the castle, you can do it in a mere seven boards. But if you want to fully explore the world, you have 12 boards’ worth of adventure ahead of you. This game, more than any other before it, was built to reward the completionist. Simply winning wasn’t the goal anymore. The new goal was to visit every location the game offered, do every activity, soak in each experience. This wasn’t a race, it was an amusement park.

SMB3
cribbed many other stylistic tricks from theme parks. Each level had its own theme—ice, grasslands, an inventive Giant Land where all the enemies and obstacles are four times normal size. Each level had its own theme music. Each had its own new enemies, and new powers for Mario to acquire. Each had a distinct layout: Pipe Land was a big confusing maze, Ocean Land was an archipelago of semiconnected islands, and Koopa’s castle was hidden in the dark. Level 3 leads Mario to a Japan-shaped island chain, with a castle smack-dab in Kyoto. Players received multiple audiovisual clues as to location identity, and each level was as separate as Tomorrowland is from Main Street, USA.

Miyamoto’s success showed why the Mario cartoons never caught on. Mario isn’t about jumping on mushrooms and fighting turtles any more than the heritage of Italian-Americans. It’s about play, what Croatian-born psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “flow.” The fun of “flow” is its feeling of accomplishment and fulfillment while engaged in an activity. Anyone who’s ever lost happy hours tinkering with a car engine, shopping for clothes, talking with friends, or playing music has experienced flow. The sweet spot when a game’s not too easy or too hard, the just-right porridge, is flow. Showing a tennis fan a documentary about the polymers in her racket would interest her as much as Mario’s players would be interested in a cartoon.