Super Mario (24 page)

This was just Nintendo’s luck: it spends decades flailing at one idea over and over like a jar that won’t open, and tosses it aside just in time for Microsoft to claim hero status for opening it. Hey, Nintendo loosened the lid! The PS2 launched a modem as well, but it was a separate (and sometimes damnably difficult) process to connect for each new game. The Dreamcast’s modem was a big hit, but only until the PS2 and Xbox showed up. As millions more got online every year, the time was finally right for online play.

Nintendo did try to get some skin in the online game. But it cost money and took disc space to develop online content, and on a mere 1.5 GB disc (compared to 8.5 GB discs for the PS2 and Xbox) there wasn’t much room for it. Third parties weren’t stepping up to the plate either. The same vicious circle that felled Sega started to churn around Nintendo: companies leave because third-party games didn’t sell, which meant fewer third-party games, which lowered overall sales. If you wanted online play, you went to Xbox. If you wanted a variety of games, you went PS2. Only if you wanted Nintendo games did you go Gamecube.

Most gamers chose either Xbox (24 million sold), or PS2 (a staggering 141 million, still the all-time record). Gamecube (approaching 22 million) was third overall. Nintendo’s games remained solid, but if an outside company had a new game to break—especially a gritty M-rated game—they turned to Microsoft or Sony. Speculation began that Microsoft’s rise, combined with the second market-leading console in a row by Sony, would be Nintendo’s doom. The Big N should follow Sega’s footsteps into third-party developer territory, the feeling went. Make
Super Mario
games for the PlayStation 2,
Legend of Zelda
games for Xbox. The profits would be smaller, true, and the loss of face immense, but the company would survive. The economy was cramping after the double damage of the tech bubble popping and then the 9/11 panic. People didn’t want a whole console just to play cute fun games. They want blood and guts, shooting and scaring, death and destruction. Nintendo wasn’t a synonym for gaming anymore. It wasn’t even a genre. It was a niche.

T
here had been several enhancements to the Game Boy over the years. It gained a different colored case—the Play It Loud edition. It got smaller—the Game Boy Pocket. It gained a backlight—the Game Boy Light, and a color screen—the Game Boy Color. Nintendo put out accessories like a camera and a printer, toyed with a 16-bit version in 1995, and considered a touch pad adapter in 1998. But through it all it was still essentially an 8-bit machine, making graphics in 1999 and 2000 that were only fresh by 1983 standards.

Like moths to a bug zapper, company after company tried its hand making a handheld that could compete with the
Mork & Mindy
– era visuals. Sega’s Game Gear, Atari’s Lynx, Bandai’s Wonderswan, NEC’s TurboExpress, and a Chinese system called the Gamate were all robust game systems with hardly any games or support, which could never claim double-digit market share. Tiger even released Game.com, which downloaded games from the Internet and included a touch screen and stylus. Good ideas, but (as Yamauchi knew, fresh from the 64DD disaster) the timing was wrong. They were all losing to a system whose biggest hit was
Super Mario Bros. Deluxe
, a barely retinkered fourteen-year-old game.

The Neo Geo Pocket Color, released in 1999, had the best chance of them all. It was inexpensive (under seventy dollars), came in a variety of colors (a tactic Nintendo borrowed to sell to collectors), and after an exclusive launch with eToys made its way into all the big retailers’ showrooms. It could communicate with the Sega Dreamcast, then a hot new console. Nintendo squashed it, thanks to advanced marketing buzz of a fully updated Game Boy. Customers knew that Nintendo was worth waiting for, and kept their debit cards in their wallets.

Twelve years—a cat’s lifetime—was apparently the right amount of time to wait for a true upgrade. The word “withered” was more and more apt for the Game Boy Color: eight bits? It was a legacy machine, surviving (and thriving) because few wanted to discard all the
Dr. Mario
and
Pokémon
cartridges they had amassed over the years.

Legacy, then, would be what the next edition would embrace. Codenamed Project Atlantis, it would include a Z80 coprocessor, which would allow it to be fully compatible with all the previous Game Boy cartridges. The screen would be wider, and the whole thing would be rounded, like a junk-food fruit pie. It would add on a pair of shoulder buttons, to allow for double the game-playing complexity while still keeping the aesthetics minimal. Gamers got a robust fifteen hours per pair of AA batteries. It would have a 32-bit CPU, which would be able to easily whip up near-perfect 16-bit graphics. Think “portable SNES.”

This, in fact, was exactly what Nintendo wanted third-party game developers to think. They had all made bundles with great SNES games a decade ago, before moving onto slick polygons and control sticks. All those games needed was a little retooling, and they’d be ready for the matte-black cartridge the size of a perforated graham cracker segment. Every game from 1990 on could have a second life, a paperback release, on the Game Boy Advance.

To prove it, Nintendo pulled a stunt that would have been called slothful and small-minded if it had failed. Its biggest launch games would be ports of previous games.
F-Zero: Maximum Velocity
was Miyamoto’s Mode 7 SNES launch game, with a little polish.
Super Mario Advance
, even more egregiously, was a port of a mere NES game,
Super Mario Bros. 2
! Technically it was a port of the
SMB2
upgrade in
Super Mario All-Stars
—which made things worse, because
All-Stars
was four or five refurbished games. Now just one of them was being split off to stand on its own. As a salve, a fresh upgrade of the original
Mario Bros.
was included as a bonus.

A dozen other games launched with the Game Boy Advance on June 11, 2001, a great showing. Many of them were SNES ports, with loads more (
Mario Kart: Super Circuit
) in the pipeline. Even if the reheated leftovers didn’t sell well, they didn’t cost much. And expectations were low: the fans only wanted to talk about the three-way Thunderdome fight between the Xbox, PS2, and Gamecube. With no challengers, the GBA was a forfeit from the horse-race perspective.

It was a great horse race for anyone with money on the filly, though. The Game Boy Advance would go on to sell over 81 million copies in its lifetime. This could be attributable to the
Candy Land
syndrome: Hasbro realized that the birth rate three years ago was an almost exact predictor of how many
Candy Land
games would be sold that year. Every toddler got one of his or her own. Same with the Game Boy series: every few years, a new generation would be getting it as a gift.

And, of course, that generation had never played any of the old Mario games: they were brand-new! Republishing existing works was standard in every other industry, but it represented a bold new chapter for Nintendo and video games. Its omnibus experiment with
Super Mario Advance
was now a whole new revenue stream for every developer.
Super Mario World
and its sequel
Yoshi’s Island
(the fourth and fifth
Super Mario
games) were rereleased as
Super Mario Advance 2
and
3
, beginning a which-came-first confusion rivaled only by the Narnia books being rearranged chronologically. Realizing it had forgotten its best game at a rest stop, the series doubled back and released
Super Mario Bros. 3
as
Super Mario Advance 4
.

There were new games, of course.
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga
was a spiritual sequel to the
Super Mario RPG/Paper Mario
series.
Mario & Luigi
relied more on quick timing and clever gameplay than fancy graphics. Mario sticks by Luigi’s side in this game, and the two of them have combo moves critical both for fighting and for exploration. The brothers venture to the Beanbean Kingdom to fight Cackletta the witch. Bowser’s lack of villainy is explained by amnesia: he’s forgotten he’s Mario’s enemy.

The nostalgia kick continued for Nintendo with the release of the e-Reader card, a nifty device that attached into the GBA cartridge slot. It was sold with five-packs of numbered trading cards, for early games such as
Excitebike
,
Donkey Kong
, and
Ice Climbers
. Each card had a strip of gray that was really binary dots in black or white. Sliding all five cards through the reader booted up a game. Nintendo had essentially brought back the punch card. And a cute town-exploration game,
Animal Crossing
, offered players one of nineteen different NES games as rewards, including seven
Mario
games, to be found or traded. Players could even collect real-world e-Reader cards and import them to the Gamecube via a special cable.

The quick-and-fun game play of early Nintendo games was brought back as well, thanks to the minigame action of the
Mario Party
and
WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$
franchises. Konami, Namco, and Tecmo were among companies that followed in Nintendo’s footsteps by releasing its old-school eighties hits in collections. Other Jurassic franchises such as
Pac-Man
and
Frogger
were given 3-D reimaginings. Nintendo shoved four previous
Zelda
games into one Gamecube package.
Madden
started to add entire previous
Madden
games, complete with the vintage roster, as a bonus.
Doom 3
came with free
Doom
and
Doom II
. Atari joysticks were sold sans Ataris: ten classic games were on a chip in the controller. History class was in session.

This was playing Nintendo’s game Nintendo’s way, of course. Sony couldn’t rerelease its 1990 games; it didn’t have any. Neither did Microsoft. The argument for respecting the past continuum of games was another way of keeping customers thinking Mario. But looked at another way, it was Nintendo’s admittance that the best it had to offer were reruns.

Nintendo freshened up the GBA’s look in 2003, because they realized it looked like a Game Boy. The Game Boy Advance SP (for “special”) resembled a wee laptop, moving the screen to the top flap and the controls to the base. It was squarish, and looked like the world’s smallest multimedia player, or maybe a PDA. Anything but a Game Boy. Which was exactly the point: don’t make it look like a game, and adults will come calling. Sales doubled.

Ironically, the GBA SP’s design aped the two-screen Game & Watch design from 1980. This was taken to the nth degree with the limited Game Boy Micro, which carried over Game & Watch design elements down to the gold-on-maroon color. Nintendo also released a series of NES games on GBA to celebrate the Famicon’s 20th anniversary. Such naval gazing would make Narcissus proud—well, prouder. But where were the new ideas?

The apotheosis of this self-promotion was
Mario vs. Donkey Kong
, an original Game Boy Advance game that paid tribute to everything from Mario’s ubiquitous marketing to
Donkey Kong
to Miyamoto’s 1994
Donkey Kong
tribute. (When an entire game is an homage to a game that was itself a homage, you’re low on gas.) The plot had a jealous Donkey Kong steal Mario dolls, and Mario run around Donkey Kong – esque boards to get the Nintendolls back.

Games like this shouldn’t have been passing muster. Where were the innovators? Shigeru Miyamoto didn’t have an original game for the GBA until the
Mario & Luigi RPG
game, three years into the system’s release. He had better things to do with the Gamecube, and so popped his greatest hits into the microwave every few months to satisfy the GBA audience. Other developers agreed: this was a portable SNES, and they had designed plenty of SNES games back in 1993. They’d rerelease those hits, and crank out subpar licensed dreck to tie in with new movies or cartoon shows. But write new games? No way. Despite huge sales, the GBA was fourth on most people’s console-priority list.

T
he word “opera” calls up great Italian names: Monteverdi,
Pagliacci
,
Tosca
, Caruso, Pavarotti. Opera’s mix of song and theater doesn’t necessarily require a classical protagonist such as Salome or Don Giovanni. California Institute of the Arts grad student Jonathan Mann, for instance, aimed his sights so low for a star that he found him in a sewer.

Plotwise, every Mario game is already an opera. We know the what of the plot—big surprise, Bowser has kidnapped the Princess—but not the hows. We are the show’s performers, though, not divas in Viking outfits. We act out the life-and-death struggle, we experience the ever-so-slightly modified emotions of each repeat performance.

The Mario Opera
begins where many operas end: a wedding. Mario crawls through a pipe, finds Princess Peach, they fall in love and get married. Then Bowser arrives and steals the princess. After being taunted by a Goomba, Mario stomps him to death, and is horrified by how good it felt to end another’s life. He rushes forward, transformed from Figaro to Sweeney Todd, killing all in sight in a berserker frenzy.

Then it gets weird. In a metafictional twist, first Bowser and then Mario become aware that this is not their first, or second, or even millionth time reenacting this conflict. They’re pawns being controlled by us the gamers, and have no free will of their own. What sort of hero is Mario, then? What sort of villain is Bowser? The first acts ends with Mario dead at the hands of MagiKoopa (called Lizard Wizard, for rhyming purposes), sure to be resurrected to try again. (Mann never finished the opera, but currently writes and posts a new song every day at songatron.com, so he’s kept busy.)

Mario shows up in harmonious form again and again: most recently in 2010’s
Super Claudio Bros
. parody musical in Washington, D.C. Nintendo always delivered great music for Mario’s games, from Miyamoto’s
Donkey Kong
ditties to Kōji Kondō’s hummable theme songs. These have been regularly released, both as music-from-thevideo-game albums and remixed in the 1993
Super Mario Compact Disco
album, whose title is the best thing about it. (The teen R&B singer Mario Barrett, who’s billed as just “Mario,” isn’t connected to Nintendo.)