Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [1]
There are 240 million Super Mario games out there. Just one game, the original Super Mario Bros., has more than forty million copies in print, not counting releases on other platforms or the uncountable emulators that let you play samizdat versions on your computer. Broken down by hour, it’s an extremely economical buy: few will spend twenty-five hours watching a single twenty-five-dollar DVD, but most everyone who purchases a fifty-dollar Mario game can put in fifty hours or more to explore its nooks and crannies.
Let’s talk about economy some more. Do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: the number of Mario games sold times fifty bucks each, the average price of a game. This number is going to be off, since it doesn’t account for games being bundled with consoles, which are discounted. But it also doesn’t account for merchandise and tie-in games like Dr. Mario, or for anything else Nintendo sells: Mario games are only one or two of its hundreds of titles a year, and that’s all just the software. Hopefully you used a commercial-size envelope: the ballpark figure of Nintendo’s Mario’s sales is $12 billion. If each one of Mario’s gold coins was worth a million dollars, to collect that much moola he would have to knock his head on a coin block for almost three and a half hours.
Mario is unique in that he seems to offer so little appeal. What person who had been living in a cave the last few decades would have picked Super Mario as the dominant game franchise, over the Halo (30 million sold), Tomb Raider (35 million), Guitar Hero (40 million), Resident Evil (43 million), and Madden (85 million) game franchises combined? And that doesn’t even count Mario’s other appearances, such as Mario Kart (12 million) and Mario Party (5 million). The other top franchises let you experience the adrenaline and horrors of war, or deep fantasy worlds, or pro sports. A Mario game lets you pretend to be a middle-aged chubster hopping onto a turtle shell. Huh? No superheroes? No soldiers? No wizards? What sort of cut-rate wish fulfillment is this?
There’s something to Mario more than just looks. Games are different from all other entertainment due to their interactivity: they light up totally different parts of the brain than watching a movie or reading a book does. And Mario’s bland persona is part of his appeal: he’s a one-size-fits-all hero. For twenty years everyone tried to create distinct memorable avatars for us to control: Sonic, Lara Croft, Mega Man. That trend has reversed, and popular games now feature silent, unknown characters such as Halo’s Master Chief and the faceless grunts from Call of Duty and SOCOM. Yet they’re still copying Mario, who is both wackily specific (an overalled plumber) and vague as fog (anyone ever see him unclog a drain?).
My own Mario memories probably aren’t too different from anyone else’s. My first experience was with the cardboard box the NES came in, rather than any game. A schoolmate brought it on the bus every day to show off, and we crowded around to look at the screen shots on its obverse side. A few months later our parents bought us a NES, and my brothers and I put it through usage that would put a Miami air conditioner to shame. We traded games with neighbors, kids older and younger than us, even traded out of the middle-school caste system with the cool kids. We started a neighborhood fan club: to get in, you had to beat a game and find a secret. Most everyone’s secrets were from Super Mario Bros., which had them in spades.