Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [10]
Miyamoto wanted his story to progress like a chase, and chases needed multiple locations. The four-person Ikegami Tsushinki development team was baffled; variations on a theme were what sequels were for. Why put all this work into level 2 (with five stories of conveyor belts) when 90 percent of players won’t ever see it? Not to mention level 3, with elevators and springs. And now a level 4, with Jumpman smashing rivets to finally bring down Donkey Kong?
Miyamoto couldn’t program, but he could play the piano, and he knew that Radar Scope had a solid DAC converter. He composed a brief score to go with the game, not just beeps and blasts. There was an intro, a breezy, sad affair that established Jumpman and the Lady’s moods. When Jumpman died, there was a four-note dirge. And when Jumpman grabbed a hammer, the soundtrack celebrated with a zippy little march. In true Zen fashion, the happy music was tinged with sadness, and the sad music was tinged with happiness.
What’s more, instead of just an introductory screen leading into the game, Miyamoto wanted an animated story to appear after each quarter was plunked. Donkey Kong, with the Lady in hand, would climb to the top of the (not yet slanted) construction site. When he stomped his feet, the screen would tilt into its now-familiar jackstraws shape. After the first level, Miyamoto wanted another cut scene, in which Jumpman and the Lady would be reunited briefly, before Donkey Kong would grab her again and climb higher up the I beams.
Start to finish, Donkey Kong was twenty thousand lines of code, way more than usual. Some extra sound equipment had to be added to get the audio to work. But since Miyamoto had composed his music digitally, it took up a fraction of the space of a much shorter clip of true digitized sound, such as a speech sample.
While Miyamoto and Yokoi were designing the new chip in Japan, Minoru Arakawa was moving his American team cross-country again. New York may be Toy Central, but it was too far from Japan. Moving the warehouse from New Jersey to Tukwila, Washington, would save two weeks per shipment, and let the Arakawas return to the Pacific Northwest. The small Nintendo of America staff (including Mino and Yoko Arakawa, Ron Judy, Al Stone, and a gofer they hired named Howard Phillips) would work out of the new warehouse.
At first, Donkey Kong was no picnic to sell. Arcade vendors and sales crews were as comfortable with shooting games as the kids dropping quarters into them were. This game was quite literally a different animal. How do you sell a title about a carpenter fighting a monkey who throws barrels at him? With a name that makes no sense in English? Jumpman never once attacks Donkey Kong: the worst he does is destabilize a platform he’s on. Some hero. It didn’t fit into any recognizable category—not a sports game, not a shooter, not even a driving game. Couldn’t Miyamoto have just let you shoot the gorilla with a gun?
At least it was hard: most gamers killed off their allotted three Jumpmen after a minute or so. Nothing dropped a game’s profit margins like making a quarter last half an hour. The secret was, like the tiny basketball hoop in carnivals, to make it only seem easy. And if somehow a gamer got past all four levels, the game started over again in an even tougher mode.
The first conversion kits were readied. Arakawa had the name Donkey Kong trademarked. (All attempts by Nintendo of America to change the name failed. An urban legend has it the name was originally Monkey Kong, and was changed due to a misheard phone call or garbled fax.) Out of the two thousand dusty Radar Scope cabinets, fresh from Jersey, two were chosen for test subjects.
The old game board had to be removed and the new one put in. The wiring harness had to be perfectly connected. One incorrect wire could fry the game board, or overload the monitor