Super Mario (7 page)

The same wasn’t true of fledgling video games, barely a decade old as a business. Arcades had grown like overnight mushrooms in the quarter-rich atmosphere, and seen a generation of grass-smoking hippies and disco cats grow up and leave, turning into Walkman-wearing yuppies. The arcade culture had existed for a hundred years before video games, but video games made them ever-present places where you could bum a smoke off an older kid, watch
Yars’ Revenge
masters ply their trade, listen to Kiss, and feel cool. But as with any game, the fun only lasted so long.

Distributors were now placing cabinets anywhere they could: supermarkets, restaurants, barber shops, drugstores, gas stations. They overloaded the market with too many games, games that weren’t worth a quarter, games too hard for John Q-Bert Public. Distributors started going broke, since the machines they bought on credit weren’t bringing in the cash to pay back the bank. The writing had been on the wall for a year already, when in 1982 Atari’s projected earnings were reset to be less Daedalian. After that, it was a matter of time before game companies too close to the sun started to fall out of the sky.

Where the pinch was really being felt, though, was in the home console market, which was five years newer than even arcade video games. The market began with its own minibubble, when Atari released
Home Pong
. Literally more than a hundred competitors followed, all with their own
Pong
-style games. It was grossly expensive and impractical to require consumers to purchase an entire console to play one game.

Atari’s 2600, released in 1977 as the VCS, had become the dominant gaming machine. But by 1983, its colorful graphics and varied gaming styles had become old hat. Too many companies—including Atari—were releasing too many games. Disgruntled Atari workers left to form their own companies, and sell their own 2600 games—Accolade, Activision, Acclaim (all named to come before Atari in the phone book). Simply buying “a” video game was now as inconceivable as buying “a” book or “a” sneaker: you had to know what type of experience you wanted, and which titles offered the best and most challenging game play and graphics.

Even knowing the game from the arcade didn’t guarantee your port of the game would be the pick of the variorum of possible conversions.
Donkey Kong
was a prime example. ColecoVision players received three solid levels, while Atari 2600 players only got two so-so levels. Since the arcade version had four levels, both were abridgements.
Donkey Kong Jr
. was even more bisected: the Atari 2600 game was atrocious, but the Intellivision edition was like setting up the arcade in your living room. And the
Mario Bros.
Atari 2600 version was phenomenal. (The ad for it was not. It featured an actor dressed as Mario in a boiler room frantically fighting giant crabs coming out of green pipes. Then he operatically sings “Mario, where are you?” Apparently the ad makers never understood that the plumber in red
was
Mario.)

Conventional wisdom says the sheer number of these bad games was the primary cause for the video game crash of 1983. Certainly two bad games stand out. Atari’s wretched
Pac-Man
, for instance, was manufactured to the quantity of 12 million cartridges. Atari had only sold 10 million 2600s, though, a decision as catastrophic as drying wet dynamite over a campfire. Add to that the other much-maligned 2600 game, the rushed
E.T.
, whose box-office ubiquity was tarnished by a hard, unfun game. These games’ final fate is that rarest of things: an urban legend that’s actually true. With millions of unsellable titles, Atari had to eat the loss and dispose of them. But it feared that if the games were merely thrown away they’d be stolen from the trash and resold, further cutting sales. So, in an act of overkill usually reserved for Rasputin, they pulverized the cartridges with steamrollers, dug a pit in an Alamagordo landfill, buried the games deep, and smothered everything with concrete.

But the way to avoid a bad game, as with a bad album or bad magazine, is simply not to buy it. Consumers might get burned from a shoddy product, but they’d learn not to touch that particular hot stove again. It’s the most basic role of capitalism: weak products don’t sell.

The real problem came from the retail side. Department stores, toy stores, and electronics stores needed to stock the latest games and consoles. Nowadays, and more or less ever since 1983, that has meant three or four home consoles, and maybe one or two portable consoles, plus a selection of games for each system.

Imagine what it was like in 1983. The Atari 2600 was still dominant. Its replacement, the Atari 5200, has recently hit stores. It was competing for shelf space with the ColecoVision and Coleco’s new Gemini, Mattel’s Intellivision and Intellivision II, the Bally Astrocade, the Fairchild Channel F System II, the Magnavox Odyssey
²
, the Vectrex, the Emerson Arcadia 2001, and the VTech CreatiVision. Individual stores such as Sears and Radio Shack had proprietary systems as well—Tele-Games and the Tandyvision.

And these were just the consoles! Atari had branched out into computers with the Atari 400 and 800 personal computers. Add to that the Texas Instruments TI 99/4A, the Commodore VIC-20 and Commodore 64, the Timex Sinclair, the Apple II and Lisa, the Mattel Aquarius, and the Coleco Adam. Each one had its own software library. Each had a half dozen accessories. All were sold as game machines that could also run a spreadsheet or type a letter. None were compatible with the others. Just about every company had announced plans to ship a brand-new console or computer in 1984. And, in a bout of desperation, they had all begun to slash prices to draw in a customer base. When
Time
magazine had said the person of the year for 1982 was the computer, it didn’t imagine the very next year there’d be an overpopulation problem.

The poor electronics retailer had seen this before, with VHS and Betamax, and before that tape versus videodisc. Eight-track versus cassette, record versus reel-to-reel, FM versus AM. Laserdisc, in 1983, was trying (and failing) to supplant videotape. But these format battles were usually two-party affairs. Retailers would stock both modestly, and allocate more and more shelf space to whoever was winning. But this rhododendron hell of a dozen different video game companies all trying to put the others out of business would bring everyone down—as well as any retailer foolish enough to try to stock a little bit of everything.

All through 1982 retailers had seen their groaning partitioned shelves grow dusty. Even for the Christmas season, consumers didn’t want to commit to any one console, any one computer. Now, in 1983, store owners drew a line. They started pushing back unsold products. They demanded refunds, and refused to stock any new games or consoles. Time to get out of this cloud-cuckoo land, this nine-person game of
Joust
.

But the game manufacturers had no cash on hand to return to the stores, since neither their new games nor the existing inventory were being sold. One company, US Games, went bankrupt. Another, Games By Apollo, followed. Private companies that had entered gaming to rack up a quick IPO shuttered their doors. Public companies like Atari’s Warner Brothers saw their stock prices plummet. System after system ended up being marked for clearance prices. What used to cost $300 was ratcheted down in $50 installments until it was being given away for less than it cost to manufacture. Forty-dollar games went for $10, then for $5—anything to get them out of the store. Like maggots on a corpse, a new crop of game manufacturers appeared, selling cheapo games already priced at $5.

The gaming retailers adopted the motto of the video-game-playing computer WOPR from 1983’s
Wargames
: The only way to win . . . is not to play. They hesitated to stock any more video games. They absolutely refused to stock any more video game consoles. The glut of bad games had salted the earth of Sears and poisoned the well of Toys “R” Us. Kids would still be able to buy their GI Joes, Cabbage Patch Kids, and My Little Ponys. Toy stores, like arcades, would survive. But they’d never let another video game system pass through their receiving bays again.

T
imes were tough for U.S. game makers: Coleco collapsed. Milton Bradley, weakened from the Vectrex, was gobbled up by Hasbro, which didn’t have any skin in video games. Mattel lost millions from its Intellivision flop, and stuck to selling Barbies and Hot Wheels. Warner sold the Atari business for parts, as documented in Scott Cohen’s book
Zap
. The Commodore 64 and Apple II stayed strong, and became the home gaming systems of choice. Companies like EA, Epyx, and MicroProse vied to be to the computer what Atari was to the home console. Filling the void, VCR sales skyrocketed.

The American video game crash did not affect Japan at all. Or rather, it benefited Japan. Its retailers, shaking their heads from across the Pacific, had only stocked a negligible amount of most of the American video game systems. And those Colecos and Vectrexes that had made the trip were mere curiosities, no more a threat than wasabi peas are to Doritos in the States. The video game crash-and-burn gave Nintendo an unparalleled opportunity: the chance to enter a billion-dollar market where the others had just forced themselves out in a Mexican standoff gone wrong.

President Hiroshi Yamauchi had had engineers working on a game-playing home computer for years, since before he asked Shigeru Miyamoto to refurbish
Radar Scope
. (He briefly considered buying and branding the ColecoVision, but they wanted Nintendo to pay wholesale for it:
no-sankyu
.) He based it on Atari’s wonderful 2600, which used a lesser version of Motorola’s 650 chip, the 6507, to generate its titles. Nintendo would upgrade to a specialized chip made by Ricoh. The Ricoh chip was specially engineered to produce sounds, accept inputs from a controller, and generate tricolored sprites. It outputted as much image and sound as an 8-bit processor could, which was good, because it was going to have to duplicate
Donkey Kong
using a fraction of the arcade game’s horsepower.

Instead of a joystick, Nintendo’s “family computer” (or Famicon) would use one of Gunpei Yokoi’s innovations from the Game & Watch line: the raised directional pad. Joysticks broke with repeated use. Flat discs like the Intellivision’s were better, but still didn’t produce much tactile satisfaction. D-pads, little plus signs, were the future. There would be square action buttons as well, but only two. The sparse button selection was a “forcing device” to ensure developers made easy-to-play games. The controller was simple, elegant, and offered a diversity of options for designers.

Yamauchi believed in the Famicon so much he canceled Nintendo’s arcade division to focus funds and experience on it. Price was one of Yamauchi’s no-compromise angles. The Famicon had to be cheap, cheaper than most everything else on the market. After all, Apple’s Lisa and Xerox’s Star were top-of-the-line machines, but flopped due to five-digit price tags. In fact, Yamauchi wanted a price point of under ten thousand yen, about seventy-five dollars—and wanted to make a profit off each console. This seemed a pipe dream, to double-dip from the two-part tariff business model. This model, most famously used by Gillette, sets a one-time price for the razor, and an ongoing price for the blades. Yamauchi insisted Nintendo profit from both the games and the consoles, no easy feat.

By 1983, Nintendo had released dozens of different Game & Watches. It had widened the screen, and then introduced dual-screen games that doubled the playing space. Most games were original, but franchise characters such as Snoopy, Mickey Mouse, and Donald Duck made appearances. Nintendo had smartly ported over one-level versions of its arcade hits:
Donkey Kong
and
Donkey Kong Jr
.

Mario had three different Game & Watch titles in 1983, doing three different jobs. He retained his contractor creds in
Mario’s Cement Factory
, where he worked filling up cement mixers. For
Mario Bros.,
instead of adapting the sewer game, designers put Mario and Luigi to work in a bottle factory. (This version was ported to the Commodore 64 as
Mario Bros. II
.) And for
Mario’s Bombs Away
, he becomes an ace commando, grabbing lit bombs from a battlefield and tossing them into the enemy camp.

This trilogy of games (none designed by Miyamoto) makes it clear what Nintendo was aiming to set up for Mario: a cartoonlike role as the eager employee, trying to cope in any number of stressful environments. No one who played
Mickey & Donald
thought “Hey, wasn’t Mickey a sorcerer’s apprentice instead of a firefighter? This guy’s career is all over the place.” Mickey was a symbol for Disney, and Mario would be that exact same symbol for Nintendo.

To accomplish this, Nintendo would ignore Mario’s role as a villain in
Donkey Kong Jr.
Mario would jump with both feet into whatever challenge Nintendo put in front of him, be it war, monsters, or the perils of just-in-time supply chain management.

Mario’s father, Miyamoto, moved on as well to new jobs. After
Mario Bros.
he worked to design a game called
Devil World
, the only game of his never released in North America. It was a maze game, with the clever conceit that the monsters in the maze would move the walls, instead of just chase the hero. That wasn’t what kept it from U.S. shores, though. In the game’s story line, a green dragon named Tamagon descends into Hell in order to fight Satan. The
Pac-Man
– style power pellets are replaced by crosses and Bibles. For an industry called devil worshipers by some extremists, a game featuring the devil (even as a villain) was a no-no.

There was a push to make a lot of games for Yamauchi’s new game console. Nintendo was excellent at
nemawashi
, a Japanese gardening term for digging around the roots of a to-be-transplanted tree.
Nemawashi
referred to the business necessity of quietly laying the correct groundwork of success. For Nintendo,
nemawashi
demanded that a game console have many games ready for release, and many more in the pipeline. Otherwise, it’d be as deserved a failure as all the American consoles that rushed to market without any quality in their product. And they had to be a different breed of game, not necessarily engineered like arcade games to end quickly.