Super Mario (22 page)

Some were easy: the original
Super Mario Kart
had practically herniated itself trying to mimic three dimensions, so its upgrade was a natural fit. (“Kick Asphalt,” went the tagline.)
Donkey Kong
got
Donkey Kong 64
, which was another natural fit—no more prerendering! A new sports title,
Mario Golf
(made with a Sega Saturn developer Nintendo stole, Camelot Software Planning), found a sweet spot between minigolf’s fun and actual golf’s skill requirement.

Miyamoto used his
Super Mario 64
experience to chart true 3-D sequels for other Nintendo stars:
Star Fox
,
F-Zero
, and
Wave Race
. (Names for most of these were easy: just throw a “64” on the tail end.) He also created an original title:
1080˚ Snowboarding
, predating the definitive action-sports title
Tony Hawk Pro Skater
(and his signature move, a mere seven-hundred-degree spin) by a year.

While Miyamoto was ginning up original games, why not some original Mario games? (Making a
Zelda
character, the lazy rancher Talon, resemble Mario was cute, but didn’t count.)
Mario Party
was a board game, with Mario and company acting out the game pieces. A kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria of minigames determined who went first in each subsequent round, and so on. It was so true to the board game conceit, though, that it was no fun to play single-person against the computer. The N64 had ports for four controllers, and the variety of minigames made this an ideal game for families, siblings, anyone without six hours of spare time a day to devote to freeing Hyrule or collecting all hundred coins.

Yet another new Mario franchise,
Super Smash Bros.
, served as a greatest-hits retrospective. It was a simplistic fighting game—games could be won by unskilled button-mashing, a cardinal sin in the world of fighting games. But the characters went beyond the
Mario Kart
/
Party
assortment: you could also choose Kirby, Link,
Metroid
’s Samus, or Fox from
Star Fox
. And there were more unlockable characters, including Captain Falcon from
F-Zero
, Ness from
Earthbound
, and Luigi. The music and scenery were all tributes to Nintendo games, and power objects rained down from the sky like Coke bottles in
The Gods Must Be Crazy
. Ever seen Mario with a sword, or Yoshi with a gun? Overall, the game treated the Nintendo canon like
Wicked
treated
The Wizard of Oz
: with a dollop of sass and irreverence.

Both of these games were made by HAL Laboratories, a Nintendo developer that had been behind the
Adventures of Lolo
and
Kirby
titles, as well as porting over
Sim City
. (HAL had inserted the gag that Sim cities erect a Mario statue at half a million residents.) One of its lead developers, Satoru Iwata, had been programming Nintendo games since the early days of the NES, and worked part-time for HAL while he was still in college. HAL was contracted to develop a N64 version of a recent Game Boy hit, about collecting cute little monsters and arranging playdatelike “battles” for them. It was called
Pocket Monsters
—or
Pokémon
.

Pokémon
was in development for years, and was assumed (upon its 1996 release in Japan) to be a strictly Japanese game. It was role-playing, with minimal graphics, battles that ended with one fighter “fainting” instead of dying, and an obsessive-compulsive goal of finding 150 critters wandering in the woods. Its developer, Satoshi Tajiri, had collected bugs as a child, and found joy in their variety and abilities. He studied under Miyamoto to design the game, and the illusory simplicity of the game was straight from Doc Miyamoto. Since the idea was to play against a friend using the Game Boy’s link cable, there were two different colored cartridges, red and blue.
Pokémon Red
had Satoshi (changed to Ash Ketchum for America), and
Pokémon Blue
had Shigeru (Gary Oak in America). Other than that, they were just about identical.

The game was a bigger hit than anyone in Japan could have predicted. It tapped into the gaming zeitgeist of completion by having completion itself be the goal, instead of any nobler cause. When it became a card game, “gotta catch ’em all!” basically translated to “gotta
buy
them all!” Focus testing showed kids didn’t care about trainers Ash or Gary: they wanted to be the trainers themselves, and the game allowed for just that experience. That in turn prompted a top-rated anime show. (The first most Americans heard of
Pokémon
was a 1997 episode of the show that caused seven hundred Japanese children to have seizures.) It was released in America mere weeks before the Game Boy Color’s launch—and it was black and white. Clearly Nintendo didn’t think this game would go over much better than
Earthbound
or
Mario Picross
, both flops. Only Minoru Arakawa believed in its crossover potential—and then only if the complicated gameplay and minimal graphics were brought over unchanged.

Nintendo had nothing to worry about. The two
Pokémons
were enormous hits, helping keep the Game Boy dominant for years.
Pokémon
games for other consoles followed, beginning with
Pokémon Stadium
for the N64. (One
Pokémon
game featured a Mario cameo, a HAL calling card: Iwata also snuck Mario and friends into the crowd of a
Kirby Super Star
game.) The original’s graphical simplicity was part of the draw, forcing players to focus on strategy.
Pokémon
was a new type of chess: Charmander is a fire Pokémon and is great when attacking ice Pokémon, but not other fire types, or water types. Every Pokémon has a type, and each type is weak or strong against other types. How you stack your “deck” of six Pokémon, what order you play them, when is it time to waste a turn to retire an old one: this was the game. The boundless creativity of the punny edition’s names (Charmander, a fiery lizard, is a mix of charcoal and salamander) would make J. K. Rowling jealous.

Pokémon
would soon become the world’s second-biggest gaming franchise, selling two hundred million copies, mostly to eight-year-olds. (A covetous Miyamoto, who joked about fans sending him loose change because Nintendo didn’t pay him any royalties, reportedly said that
Pokémon
would only be a hit until his next Mario game was finished.) The pocket monsters’ various games would all sell well—save for
Hey You, Pikachu!
, a microphone game where players told a Pokémon to go pick up a carrot and other humdrum tasks. They even showed up in
Super Smash Bros.
They’d be that many more nails in the coffin for the idea of Nintendo being seen as more than an entertainment company. Mario was
Crime and Punishment
compared to
Pokémon
, whose appeal surged among the younger set, and diminished with puberty. For crying out loud, a plastic Pikachu was being hot glued to special editions of the N64: who would accept it as a computer with a cartoon gerbil (or mouse, or whatever he is) on it?

The rumors of the 64DD continued for years, much like how the N64 rumors spread soon after the SNES’s launch. In both cases, the crafty result was to keep gamers (and developers) from flocking to other consoles. But it wasn’t to be: after five years of talks, Nintendo quietly snuck out the 64DD in Japan in December 1999, releasing it exclusively through a mail-order subsidiary. The online service was shuttered after two years, due to low usage.

The biggest success of the 64DD, if such a term can be used, was the
Mario Paint
sequel
Mario Artist
. The first title in the series,
Paint Studio
, was a reworked version of the painting and stamp-making tool: Mario wore a beret on the cover. Then
Talent Studio
, which let artists add 2-D faces onto prerendered 3-D bodies and animate them
South Park
– style. After that was
Polygon Studio
, to allow users to experiments with three dimensions. Finally
Communication Kit
let users share their creations with others in the microscopic 64DD fan base. If it hadn’t been shut down, future
Mario Artist
titles would have included
Game Maker
,
Graphical Message Maker
,
Sound Maker
, and
Video Jockey Maker
.

Of the dozens of rumored and halfway developed games, only nine eventually saw release. The most notable was
Sim City 64
. Many others, such as sequels for
Earthbound
,
Kirby
, a platformer called
Banjo-Kazooie
, and two
Zelda
games, were reworked as regular N64 games (or in one case, stripped down for a portable edition.) Most were canceled, giving its various developers further proof to stay far, far away from Nintendo for its original projects.

Not many company presidents would have pushed for the 64DD, after the Satellaview and the NES modem both went belly-up due to lack of interest. But Hiroshi’s neuroses had driven the company for decades into some odd choices, and they were rarely wrong. It might be several decades ahead of the curve, but Nintendo had geologic patience. Perhaps Yamauchi was secretly a rock Pokémon
.

T
here are no Mario amusement park rides. It’s a bit surprising, considering the huge marketability he has, and Nintendo’s willingness to slap his face on everything from underwear to life-size replicas. Every new hit Disney movie—and even the misses—prompt new park rides. Universal Studios had gotten in the act, making rides out of hot properties Disney didn’t have the rights to:
Terminator 2
,
Jaws
, and
Back to the Future.

There have been rides based on
Song of the South
, on
Wind in the Willows
, on
Murder, She Wrote
, and on
Swamp Thing
. In Minnesota, the Trix Rabbit and the Lucky Charms leprechaun have their own theme park. Dolly Parton has her own, Dollywood. But no Super Mario Park. What gives? Nintendo’s stable of characters seems custom made for a massive amusement park, with themed regions based on game series. A 3-D show where pipes squirt water at you. Princess Peach’s pretty castle. The high-tech Sector Z for
Star Fox
,
Metroid
, and
F-Zero
. Kirby the toddler zone, with lots of soft bouncy foam. Hyrule for older kids, with Zelda roller coasters and a Link dungeon-crawl ride. A
Pokémon
petting zoo.

That these are easily dreamed ideas is exactly why they haven’t been implemented, Kokatu.com reports. Nintendo’s specialty isn’t in big Disney-style entertainments, and no one has yet approached them with a dynamic new idea that wouldn’t just palette-swap a Disney park with Mario and Luigi. Nintendo learned its lesson from educational games, and PC games, and movies, and Internet services, all the way back to rice and love hotels. Stick with what you do best.

Nintendo might also recall SegaWorld. In 1996, right around the time Sega was in talks with Bandai about a possible merger, Sega opened up SegaWorld London, an indoor amusement park/arcade/gift shop selling Sega swag. In Canada, a series of Sega City Playdiums followed. A year later it premiered Sega World Sydney, right in the shopping mecca Darling Harbor. Its building was a giant red cube with an enormous glass pyramid reaching up out of it. It was billed as Australia’s DisneyWorld. Sega’s plan was to build hype for four years, then steal the show when the 2000 Summer Olympics came to town.

But not even Disney could open up EuroDisney without years of poor attendance. Not even Spielberg could make GameWorks work as anything other than, ultimately, Chuck E. Cheese with beer. The Sega World Sydney rides weren’t based on
Sonic
or Sega’s other game heroes, like
Shinobi
or
Virtua Fighter
. They were just unbranded rides, with the Sega brand promising a speedy, “rad,” interactive style that wasn’t delivered. The only thing truly Sega was Sonic Live in Sydney, a children’s stage show based on the popular
Sonic
cartoon.

The park lost money four years straight, even after the hundredplus games were all turned free-play. (That might have cost Sega more in lost quarters than it gained them in attendance.) Sega World Sydney held on until the Olympics, but not even that attendance boost helped. Nintendo stole Sega’s thunder on the cheap by having a Pokémon World Championship at Sydney University, paralleling the Olympics. The entire Darling Harbor economy (IMAX theater, restaurants, trendy shops) plunged like a high-diver following the Olympics. Sega World Sydney closed for good two months after the Olympics concluded. The stunning cube-and-pyramid architecture became a furniture warehouse, then was demolished in 2008.

Nintendo did try out a traveling Pokémon Park for a few months starting in 2005, which drew more than four million visitors. The closest Mario has gotten to a permanent home, though, is in block form. A Lego version of a certain plumber wearing blue overalls and a red shirt is on display at California’s Legoland, quite appropriate enough for a character who was first constructed from square pixels. This plumber, though, is carrying an accessory we’ve never seen in any Mario games in all his years of adventure through pipes: a toilet.

Recently, students at New York University’s “Big Games” class—who previously made a live-action Pac-Man through the streets of midtown called Pac-Manhattan—came up with the Nintendo Amusement Park. It’s a fancy name for a military-grade haptic winch, which allows users to jump fifteen feet in the air and be safely lowered down. Students dress up like Mario or Luigi (complete with hats and fake mustaches) and jump on a papier-mâché Goombah and around a Bob-omb. They’re hoping Nintendo takes them up on the theme-park ride idea: who wouldn’t want to hop around in the Mushroom Kingdom?

 

ONE OF NINTENDO’S SECRET WEAPONS OVER THE YEARS was trepidation. Gamers were scared they’d plunk down money for Console X, only to see their friends all buy Console Y games so they could trade with each other. Only diehards had the discretionary income to buy both. Most bought one new game every few months, the exact rate Nintendo released big first-party titles.