Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [100]
What they demonstrated was the 3DS, a new iteration of its venerable DS system. (Fils-Amie jetted to New York to show it off on talk shows later that week. Miyamoto raved about it in L.A., but kept to his rule to not appear on Japanese television: he doesn’t want to start getting mobbed for autographs when he’s walking his dog.) The DS had miraculously eclipsed the Game Boy’s total sales, become popular with boys and girls, adults and kids, all around the world. The 3DS, as the name suggests, delivered 3-D images (the bottom screen remained 2-D, but touch sensitive). Its big launch game was a new franchise that Nintendo was dusting off: Kid Icarus, last seen (in anything more than a cameo in a Smash Bros. game) in 1991. The 3DS didn’t require glasses, a trick that Nintendo guarded like the Coca-Cola formula but would be found out soon enough. The main suspect was parallax barrier LCD, which no one had used for a film because it only worked from one seat in the house, dead ahead. Sony’s PlayStation 3, in perpetual third place, could show 3-D games, but only with glasses—and an expensive 3-D-capable flat screen.
The 3DS also allowed Nintendo to cash in on a new media stream: 3-D movies. There had been a sharp increase in 3-D films, which theater owners loved because of the higher ticket prices. Studios fell over themselves to convert 2-D movies into 3-D. But there was no easy way to replicate the experience of watching a hit like Avatar at home: despite the fifty-two-inch plasma display and the six-speaker sound, it was flat as a pancake.
Nintendo’s comparative tiny screen, smaller than a YouTube window (but with better resolution), had the movie theater beat. Players could take a break from Paper Mario (one of the first wave of 3-D games, along with Nintendogs + Cats, Pilotwings and Star Fox flight titles, and of course Mario Kart) to try Nintendo’s deep third-party support (DJ Hero, Resident Evil, and Kingdom Hearts) or watch a hit 3-D film like How to Train Your Dragon. Being Nintendo, they dragged their feet for six months after E3 before mentioning that Miyamoto was working on not one but two 3-D Mario games. One would be an oldfashioned side-scroller, and the other would be a 3-D Mario game in, uh, the other kind of 3-D. Miyamoto said working on the games was bringing back Virtual Boy memories, which might not be the best thing to bring up.
The 3DS was also an MP3 player, could get you online, and even let you chat in 3-D. There was enough to it so that even if you didn’t play games, you could want one. This was a pyrrhic defeat for Nintendo, which had purposefully kept the peanut butter of other applications out of the chocolate of their game system: witness no DVD player on the Wii. The big N was caving to nongame interests: it had recently let Netflix stream movies via the Wii, years after the 360 and PS3 were serving them to millions of viewers. Nintendo’s consistency defense was that all the bells and whistles were just ways to keep the game system from being forgotten.
Nintendo’s drift away from gaming could be called the “everything box” syndrome, named after the Holy Grail of electronic companies: a set-top box that provides broadband, music, movies, games, and all conceivable applications. There are few technical boundaries to making such a box anymore. But try lining up third-party developers for a satellite receiver with a game controller. Try getting movie studios to stream their new hits on your wireless router. Try