Super Mario (26 page)

Within months of each other, Miyamoto, Arakawa, and Yamauchi all took steps back from Nintendo. Miyamoto was busy trying to come up with ways of making each new Gamecube game have a special connectivity feature with the Game Boy Advance, which had a rearranging-deck-chairs futility to it. Yamauchi had to adjust to not walking through the front doors of 11-1 Kamitoba-Hokodatecho like he owned the place. And Arakawa was free of Yamauchi’s taunts, professionally if not as his son-in-law.

This was the end of an era for Nintendo, and the years that followed certainly seemed like they were on a sort of gotta-make-thedonuts autopilot.
Mario Party
s
4
,
5
,
6
, and
7
came out, with many shared minigames.
Mario Golf
was upgraded, with the GC-GBA connectivity between
Toadstool Tour
(GC) and
Advance Tour
(GBA). A similar arrangement was made for
Mario Power Tennis
(GC) and
Mario Tennis: Power Tour
(GBA), which features the
Mario Kart
items for a dodgeball feel.
Dr. Mario
was repackaged a few more times. A Gamecube
Mario Kart
came out, and another
Paper Mario
. One of the
Mario Party
s was turned into an arcade game, then one of the
Mario Karts
. To paraphrase Jan Brady, it was Mario Mario Mario.

Many of these were solid games, but they didn’t expand the Mario brand as much as continue it. With not much game-play difference between the Gamecube and the Nintendo 64, the new versions were like the yearly
Madden
updates: incrementally slicker and improved versions of the previous year’s game.

Some games did try to push Mario into new territory, but met with resistance.
Mario Pinball Land
had Mario become the pinball to stop Bowser. The mix of adventure and rolling worked better with
Super Monkey Ball
. A
Mario Mix
version of
Dance Dance Revolution
came out, with Mario music and classical tunes to dance to. The attempt to lure in sports gamers with arcadey action continued with
Mario Superstar Baseball
(Mario knows baseball) and
Super Mario Strikers
(Mario knows soccer too).

Meanwhile, the PS2 and the Xbox were trying to be all things to all people. Continent-sized games routinely came out for both systems:
God of War
,
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
, the
Grand Theft Auto 3
series. In addition, Sony, Microsoft, and numerous third-party developers tried to make their own Mario-type platforming collection game.
Jak and Daxter
,
Blinx
,
Ratchet and Clank
,
Sly Cooper
,
Ty the Tasmanian Tiger
,
Tak
. They were added to the previous list of Mario wannabes—
Spyro
,
Crash Bandicoot
,
Rayman
,
Bubsy
,
Gex
, and of course
Sonic
. Only a few of these—
Crash
,
Jak
,
Spyro
,
Ratchet
,
Sonic
—stuck around.

Which meant, of course, that there was a big, gaping Mario-size hole in the lineups of the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Both systems had even more tremendous upgrades arriving soon: the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. Gamecube games that weren’t Nintendo-made were becoming more and more scarce. The user base for both systems was enormous, and growing. Sega had done very well making its
2K
sports games, now rebranded
ESPN
, available for all three consoles. It was faltering with recent
Sonic
games, which were Gamecube exclusives. Was this the view from the top of the death spiral?

To an outsider, going multiconsole looked like Nintendo’s best bet. It’d receive a big increase in sales. Everyone loved the Mario franchise: it was parodied in everything from the Xbox sci-fi game
Advent Rising
(a secret room with three pipes) to Blizzard’s
World of Warcraft
(with feuding friends Larion and Muigin, who complain about plants coming alive) to
Assassin’s Creed II
(with its Uncle Mario character). The Kyoto company would stay in business, and change with the times. Let other manufacturers make the razor blades—and at a loss. Nintendo could sell the blades. It’d be a step down, but it would keep them alive. If Yamauchi’s data about the gaming audience shrinking was true, how else could they survive?

Nintendo’s ship was being steered by Satori Iwata’s uncalloused hands now. When Yamauchi called Iwata into his office to promote him to president—Iwata has said he thought he was going to be fired—Yamauchi almost certainly demanded that Iwata not leave the hardware business. Nintendo made money selling its software, but also its hardware, a trick no one else in gaming had ever done long-term. It kept pushing gameplay innovations, but all the hardware was necessary for its premier software to be properly viewed. That was Nintendo’s essence: not Mario but Miyamoto, and Yokoi. (And Genyo Takeda and Masayuki Uemura, the underrecognized daimyos.) Bigger did not mean better, and quality of play was not related to quantity of megahertz.

Iwata had no plans for putting Nintendo games on anything other than Nintendo consoles. He and Fils-Aime were firm believers in Yokoi’s maxim. This belief had been recently reiterated in business guru Clayton Christenson’s “disruptive technology” theory, which said that new inventions—think of digital photography—could topple giants like Kodak. Nintendo was huge, but still David in the contest against the twin Goliaths Sony and Microsoft. But what could that disruptor be? Iwata and Fils-Aime started talking about disruptors all the time. Others might think them touched for believing this. But touching can be good.

I
n the final months before the Game Boy Advance came out in 2001, HAL Laboratories designed a Game Boy Color game called
Kirby Tilt ’n’ Tumble.
The nifty twist was that instead of moving Kirby around with the D-pad, players tilted the Game Boy Color itself around to roll the puffball like a marble though a labyrinth.

It received little notice: Kirby games, aimed at kids, never did. But each translucent pink Kirby cartridge had an accelerometer in it, a cost-effective type called a micro-electromechanical system, or MEMS. The MEMS chip was basically a tiny spring with a weight on it: move it, and the spring registers the movement and translates it to Kirby. Accelerometers are used everywhere, in bridges and cars and medical devices.

It wasn’t a perfect fit. Game Boy users were accustomed to holding their machine in any number of slouchy ways: now that Kirby was as volatile as a blob of mercury, they had to keep things balanced—and pray there was sufficient light to see. The only practical way to make it work, Iwata concluded, would be to have a special console controller with built-in accelerometers. Players could tilt that however they wanted, and still see their TV screen. No, it wouldn’t do for a handheld device. And Nintendo’s upcoming handheld, the DS, had enough hooks. “[Gamers have] given up on video games,” Iwata said at a trade show. “[W]e have to call them back in.”

Iwata, following through on Yamauchi’s vision, was introducing a new portable console in 2004. This was two years after his ascendancy to the top post, and only three years since the Game Boy Advance was released. It would be his first real test. He wasn’t running things the same way as Yamauchi; he encouraged the daimyos to cooperate and share staff, instead of feud. He talked nonstop to the staff, using reams of charts to back up his statements. Anything to measure up to the shogun and his inerrant instinct.

While he didn’t glower at people like Yamauchi did, Iwata lived and breathed Nintendo philosophy as much as the employees who had logged in decades of dedication. He larded vast hoards of cash, kept staff low, and refused to branch out beyond games. Yamauchi, still a board member, backed up Iwata in print . . . to a degree. “If we are unsuccessful with the Nintendo DS, we may not go bankrupt, but we will be crushed,” he told the
Nihon Keizai Shimbun
. “The next two years will be a really crucial time for Nintendo.” In other words: let’s see if he screws this up.

The Nintendo DS built off of the success of the GBA’s maturelooking edition. DS stood for Dual Screen, and each unit had two three-inch LCD screens. Mario could explore in a fold-out world with double the sky, jumping up into the second screen’s territory when faced with a high obstacle. Or, he could keep a constant map of his travels on one screen, along with possessions and various power meters. Or, turning the DS sideways, Mario could explore a portrait-oriented world instead of a landscape. The possibilities were untapped. Which young blood thought up the idea of reusing Gunpei Yokoi’s ancient Game and Watch two-screen idea? Yamauchi, who passed Iwata the idea just before retirement.

Even better than two screens was the touch screen. The base screen had a resistive panel, which turns the whole image into a digital button. Wherever pressure was applied, the two resistive layers connected, sending an electrical impulse, no different than when the A or B button was pressed. ATMs used the same technology. “Touching is good,” went the naughty advertising campaign slogan. All DSes shipped with a stylus as well, so people didn’t smudge the screen.

The DS was backward-compatible with the GBA games, but designers didn’t kill themselves trying to accommodate Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, which had slightly larger cartridges. That 1989 version of
Tetris
, alas, wasn’t playable anymore. Twin speakers allowed for true stereo sound. Puzzlingly, there wasn’t room for a headphone jack: anyone who wanted to listen on a train had to buy an adaptor. The screen resolution was also anemic compared to high-end cell phones. A small mike in one corner allowed for talking games—some
Pokémon
games were already planned using the mike.

The DS’s guts featured a 67 MHz CPU designed for 3-D rendering, as well as a less powerful 33 MHz chip to display the 2-D graphics on half of the screen, and to emulate the GBA. What this meant was, despite the measly megahertz, the DS was capable of running a Nintendo 64 game. And what better way of showing this off than by repeating the GBA trick of launching with a Mario port?

Wisely, the launch team chose a more fondly remembered game than
Super Mario Bros. 2
to port over: the 3-D marvel
Super Mario 64
.

Miyamoto had the chance to add in all the extras he couldn’t cram into the N64 game’s original release. Most of those ideas had been incorporated into
Zelda
or
Star Fox
projects, though, so he made new changes. The DS CPU could crank out more polygons, and didn’t have to rely on compression techniques. The gameplay was altered as well; instead of Mario getting different hats and exploring solo, he, Luigi, Yoshi, and frenemy Wario took turns exploring. Each character had distinct abilities, so what once required Mario’s Metal Hat now required switching to Wario.

The top of the screen was the 3-D game: on the bottom was a 2-D map, along with icons showing where all four characters were in relation to each other. Using the stylus while playing took some getting used to: some preferred greasy fingertips. The touch screen was also used for a series of
Mario Party
– esque minigames, which could be “won” by chasing after in-game rabbits. A modest multiplayer battle mode was helped out by an essential new option, “Download Play.” This let up to four DSes link up not only without a cable, but without four copies of the game.

The DS used a digital D-pad, which many disliked. Digital controls either send a 0 or 1, but couldn’t capture any fractional shades of gray in between. Analog control sticks, on the other hand, could slice a thumb press into 256 gradations. Just about every 3-D game was moved by an analog stick, so reverting to digital made the controls “sticky.” Hence Mario was tough to move around.

The most radical addition to the handheld might not have been the double screen, or even the touch screen. Keeping with the if-atfirst (and second, third, fourth)-you-don’t-succeed ethos, the DS included a way to get Nintendo gamers online. Technology and society had finally caught up with Yamauchi’s vision. People didn’t just dial up to AOL on a 14.4K modem, or access a swift T1 cable line: they bought new gadgets every year based on what they looked like, how small they were, and what they could do. Wireless communication was a key feature. A three-inch touch screen that collapsed to the size of a sunglasses case, with Wi-Fi access? That played Nintendo games? For $150? Sold.

Interestingly, Iwata’s first console was released in the United States first, on November 21, then Japan on December 2. The Japanfirst philosophy had changed, but only for this one console. Japanese tech buyers can be a fickle lot. Odds are Nintendo wanted its first launch site to be a big success. It spoke to Iwata’s nervousness about the DS that he changed the normal release schedule to front-load it with more positive press. The DS did turn out to be a slow initial seller in Japan, where portable doodads have to weather a much more acidic litmus test than in the States. This is, after all, a culture that recently spawned the
keitai shousetsu
literary genre, novels written on cell phones as epistolary text messages. Its standards might be insulted by Nintendo trying to cram Internet access into a gussied-up Game Boy.

The DS wasn’t aimed at kids who wanted to play
Pokémon
, though they were certainly welcome. It was aimed at adults, with their Black-Berrys, and cell phones, and MP3 players. Adults had loads of money to drop for accessories like a Bluetooth headset or a chromium skin. They would be into brief games: no long adventure campaigns, just something to kill five or ten minutes between appointments. They wouldn’t consider themselves “gamers,” but would routinely spend an hour sweeping mines or shuffling through
Spider Solitaire
.