Super Mario (17 page)

The deal’s savior may well have been the managing general partner of the Texas Rangers, who helped convince the other owners that the Nintendo purchase was best for the game, and for America. That owner had a notable name, George W. Bush. His father was the president, who counted Japan as a key trading ally. Bush Junior convinced the other owners to approve the purchase. He would go on to use his powers of persuasion as a politician himself, getting elected as a two-term governor of Texas, then president.

Miyamoto wasn’t involved in the Mario educational games; they were done by outside firms. But he thought the flow potential of coloring a Mario image on screen was strong. It was part of his team’s job to draw everything in the game, after all, and his team loved its jobs. So what about a drawing program? This would be Mario’s oddest departure from the platformer genre yet, since unlike puzzle or sports games a painting simulation wasn’t even a game. No time limit, no points, no dangers, no characters, no bonuses. But to Miyamoto, Mario was about play, not just gameplay.

The biggest immediate hurdle was the interface: the SNES controller wasn’t calibrated to move as fast or as accurately as a mouse. Even if it was, asking players to gain that supple movement just in their thumb was a too-tall order. Mouse users moved their whole hand, and the device scaled down that movement. It just wasn’t replicable in a directional pad without a fatally fast cursor. Miyamoto had recently quit gambling in honor of his fortieth birthday. As a follow-up, he quit smoking and started exercising. If he could accccomplish all that, he could get over this hurdle.

They needed a mouse. This gibed with Yamauchi’s long-term vision of Nintendo as a communications company. Its NES, after all, started off life as a Famicon, with a keyboard and a modem and an AOL-like network. Sega forced his hand to release a 16-bit system, and to close the book on having the world funnel every aspect of life—work, play, cooking, sports, finance—through the NES. Arakawa had his doubts about the idea, and preferred to keep the company focused on games, instead of trying to compete with Silicon Valley. But getting a computer device into homes was a great second chance for Yamauchi’s strategy of Nintendo as a communications company.

For starters,
Mario Paint
(which would come bundled with a mouse and mouse pad for sixty dollars) offered a decent painting simulator, complete with a gray mouse with two purple buttons. Line drawings of various Mario characters were included, for coloring fun. A tool let players place individual pixels, just like the designers at Nintendo did, to recreate favorite characters. (It was more difficult than it appeared.) Players could design their own stamps, move them around, and make an animated short. (More than a decade later, the first of Web comic
Homestar Runner
’s animated episodes was made this way, with a presumably hacked ROM of
Mario Paint
.) The practically mandatory
Mario Paint
strategy guide included pixel-by-pixel images of about every Mario character under the sun, and then some.

As an addition to the animation feature,
Mario Paint
featured a Music Composer, so the stories could have music to them. (There was another, more complex way of adding music, but it involved many AV cables and at least two VCRs.) Previously, Nintendo had been pushing the Miracle keyboard for the NES, touting its educational nature. Not many were sold. Now it had stealthily given players a music simulator program, hidden in an arts and crafts activity. A good portion of today’s game developers probably got their start designing and animating with
Mario Paint
.

As a salve, two minigames that used the mouse were included in
Mario Paint
. Gamers could also click on each letter of MARIO PAINT on the title screen for more Easter eggs. But what Miyamoto had designed made few pretenses of being a game. Most saw it as a toy, a digital Crayola set, l’il PhotoShop. And it was.

Now that the mouse was in place, a bevy of other games were made with mouse controls. Finally PC-based games with complicated on-screen menus—including
Populous
and
Civilization
—could get ported to a console. But mouse devices require a flat surface like a desk, not a couch or a coffee table littered with controllers. And wouldn’t people who wanted to play video games using a mouse play on their computer?

A few years later, Nintendo tried the online endeavor again, with the Satellaview modem. It hooked into Japanese Super Famicons, and for a subscription fee allowed them to upload new games on a special blank cartridge. Many were older titles—the addictive blockmatching game
Undake 30 Same Game
(pronounced saw-me gaw-me) and
Excitebike
were two—repopulated with the Mario crew. What new content the Satellaview had was the sort of stuff that wouldn’t sell well in stores—a sequel to the forgotten
Wrecking Crew
. Its success was limited by the Internet, which began offering much more gaming content, such as SNES and NES emulators, for an unbeatable price—nothing.

As if it were being paid by the Dickensian word, Nintendo spent 1992 and 1993 cranking out Mario game after Mario game. There were so many that they could afford to take a risk with a
Mario Paint
: anything branded Mario was good. So along came
Yoshi’s Cookie
(the rare multiplatform game for Game Boy, NES, and SNES), another Yoshiand-Mario puzzle game that added a Rubik’s-Cube flavor to blockclearing.
Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins
for Game Boy continued the Sarasaland adventure. The educational PC game
Mario Is Missing
(later for the NES and SNES) tried—without much success—to merge Mario-style game play with
Carmen SanDiego
’s geography fu, teaching about the world based on retrieving what Bowser stole. The very similar
Mario’s Time Machine
had Bowser once again stealing artifacts.

It was an arms race with Sega, who was only too willing to put up record numbers for Sonic games. In the same two-year time period, Sonic went from starring in one game to ten, including two games that make it into the bizarre name hall of fame,
Waku Waku Sonic Patrol Car
and
Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine
. Arcades, Master System, Genesis, Game Gear; action, racing, puzzle: Sonic was there. Sega capped off 1993 by introducing the Sonic the Hedgehog balloon into the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, the first such balloon based on a video game character. (True to form, Sonic went too fast, and crashed into a Columbus Circle lamppost.) Some were natural fits—a pinball game is perfect for a character who rolls into a ball and bounces around. Some were not—Sonic as a traffic cop arresting speeders smacks of hypocrisy.

Sonic’s comfort in Generation X culture—alternative rock, grim and gritty superheroes, ironic detachment—was not something that Mario could compete with. Mario was politesse and friendly—his years of tormenting an exotic pet were way behind him. Still, they were both role models compared to the other games out there. A
Time
magazine cover featured Mario, Sonic, and fearsome predators from three game series:
Jurassic Park
,
Mortal Kombat
, and
Star Trek
. Mario and Sonic, at least, didn’t seem eager to kill you.

An early attempt to try to edge Mario up—the first-person shooter
Yoshi’s Safari
—was an embarrassment. Players sat on Yoshi as he wandered around a Mode 7-animated track, and blasted away at anything that moved. Players could use the Super Scope light gun to blow the Goombas and Koopas away. The gameplay’s cutesy graphics clashed with the kill-’em-all mentality. Certainly Mario’s actions didn’t match up with anyone sporting a save-the-whales pin on their backpack. (A later
Pokémon
game reused the shooter idea, but had players take pictures of animals, a family friendly compromise.)

A much better response to the times was spinning off the villain of
Super Mario Land 2
, Mario’s evil twin, Wario, into his own game. Wario as a name worked on a variety of levels—in English it suggested war and wariness, the literal flipside of Mario. In Japanese, wariu means bad. He was given a gin blossomy nose, a mustache like Charlie Brown’s sweater zigzag, and a big, mean build that piled on the muscle and fat. He wore yellow and purple—although, of course, for the Game Boy that was green on green.

If Mario started off life as a carpenter, Wario was a deconstruction worker. He was the titular star of
Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3
. The game may well have been designed by the Zucker Brothers, or at least Jacques Derrida: Wario is a sneering greedy bully, knocking over anyone who stands in his way. The positive goal of trying to get a high score is recast as pure avarice. With enough gold coins, Wario can buy a castle. And with a castle, he can rub it in Mario’s face. (Wario’s eyes are green, after all.) He moves like an angry ape, and is immune to most damage since he knocks over whoever he touches. But Wario never has easy access to the enemies he wants to clobber, so he has to puzzle out how to reach them.

The antihero nature of Wario must have had its attractors, especially since it didn’t seem to change the mechanics of the gameplay so much as the framing of it. He’s since been the Manicean star of over a dozen subsequent games, including a rare crossover into another franchise,
Wario Blast: Featuring Bomberman!
Many of these use his concupiscent invincibility as its key platforming mimetic. He shows up in the Mario racing or sports games as well. (A villainous Luigi, named Waluigi and with a purple-and-yellow color scheme, followed a few years later.)

As with politicians stopping by
Saturday Night Live
for an awkward chat with the comedian dressed up as them, Mario and Wario worked best apart from each other. The only platform game that featured both of them was 1993’s
Mario & Wario
, which was never released in the United States. Wario had, in a lackluster evil plan, put a bucket on Mario’s head. Players used the SNES mouse to help a flying fairy named Wanda make Mario avoid obstacles as he marched blindly forward.

But perhaps it was Mario and Wario’s pairing that kept it from U.S. shores. You couldn’t pretend Mario
was
Wario if they shared a screen and were facing off against each other. Wario was the Mr. Hyde, the Angelus, the Darth Vader. Just as Miyamoto’s
Lost Levels
challenged the concept of game play by critically ignoring the rules, the Wario
weltanschauung
showed the inherent falsity of any game—including Mario’s games—where the purpose was measured in personal gain. But as long as Wario existed, with his cackle and his Walter Huston gold fever, Mario got to stay as pure in motives as a saint. San Mario del Regno Fungo.

 

THE U.S. SHORES ENDED UP BEING A TENSE PLACE TO BE IN 1993. Yamauchi was tired of seeing declining profits from the American division, which had let Sega build up momentum. He never played video games, but was invincible in Go, the game where one move changes everything. He made one of those moves when he created a chairman position for Nintendo of America—and gave it not to Arakawa but to Howard Lincoln. An American, in charge of the American division. As if this wasn’t a clear statement, he publicly shamed Arakawa, saying the son-in-law would be let go if the lethargic performance continued.

Yamauchi may have been trying to force a crack in the friendship between the two men: believing that great men could only be great alone. It didn’t work. Arakawa and Lincoln continued to work well together, according to reports of the time, taking more initiative stateside for game design, and going after Sega in new ads. They also cranked out
Super Mario All-Stars
, a SNES game collecting the first three Super Mario NES titles. Those were all tactical decisions, though. To really take on Sega, they would have to make some bold strategic moves. Little did they know one of these moves would create Nintendo’s all-time greatest rival—and give that rival the very technology to bring Nintendo to its knees.

I
f the human mind is divided into the ego, superego, and id, then Mario is the id: working off of instinct, never having much of a plan, always able to leap into the middle of things. We all become younger as we play Mario, because when we’re Mario we simply play.

Miyamoto has given us more Freudian pop psych than that, though: his elfin warrior Link is an excellent ego. “I am not Link,” Miyamoto joked, “but I know him!” While Mario has just the clothes on his back, Link has a cache of rubies, bombs, arrows, a series of swords, various other items, and a broad swatch of Hyrule to explore. Different games for different parts of the psyche. Both Mario and Link try to save princesses, true. But few imagine Mario as more than asexual, wanting to save the princess because Bowser is bad and needs a time out. Link, on the other hand, is a teenager after the girl of his dreams.

Link’s SNES debut
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
has been voted by
Entertainment Weekly
as the best video game of all time. It took the tile-based action adventure of the first Zelda and added many elements from role-playing games (RPGs) for the sequel, combining them for a game that plays just as well today, despite blocky visuals. The biggest change was the Dark World, a nighttime level which repopulated the world with new villains, and doubled the size of the game. Further replayability came from trying to boost Link’s statistics by finding, say, every last Heart Container piece. Miyamoto found a new flow balance: give players the choice of scouring or charging forward.

Miyamoto also oversaw the Zelda Game Boy outing,
Link’s Awakening
. The setting was moved out of Hyrule—perhaps in tribute to
Super Mario Land
, which also left its homeland for a new (all-green) world. That may also explain Mario and Princess Toadstool’s cameos (as pictures on the wall): was Link secretly in the Mushroom Kingdom?

Link would not appear in a Nintendo game for another five years. It was an eternity in the video-game world: five Christmases where millions of boys could have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to swing virtual swords and clobber Octorocks. Certainly Nintendo didn’t let Mario take a year off between games: his mug was on something or other every other month. But the reason why Link didn’t appear officially for five years might have had something to do with an embarrassing unofficial appearance, still joked about in the same terms as
Ishtar
and
Battlefield Earth
. As bad as Link and Zelda look in these awful games, someone else in the story—Nintendo—ends up looking worse.