Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [101]
For instance, Microsoft’s biggest 2010 gaming offering was the Kinect, a movement-based interface: basically, a Wii minus the Wiimote. (Sony’s top in 2010 was the PlayStation Move, a kludgy combo of Kinect and Wii technologies.) If you wanted to steer in a racing game, turn an invisible wheel: to hit a tennis ball, wave your hand back and forth. It incorporated voice commands as well, just like on Star Trek. It offered game play that the Wii couldn’t, which stole from the Nintendo playbook. In promoting the Kinect, one of the producers even said it was as innovative as Super Mario Bros. Microsoft saw the future, and it was Marcel Marceau. The Nintendo-doesn’t-count argument wasn’t working, so Microsoft (and Sony) had about-faced and were now trying to out-Nintendo Nintendo.
There were differences between their companies and Nintendo. Microsoft and Sony wanted to gobble up every hour of your free time however they could, for your life to become devoted to their games and products. Which was a fine business model for companies with an enviable record selling electronics and computer programs. Nintendo had wanted that too, at one point, but not anymore. It had learned its product wasn’t hardware or software: it was amusement. With games for staying in shape, training a pet, gardening, playing music, shooting pool, and fishing, its goal now was to reflect your life via games. The Wii was an existence simulator.
Nintendo had researched a look-ma-just-hands interface when designing the Wii, and decided against it. With no physical matter to press or hold, players would have to learn the mimetics of how to play a game all over again. And that was if the technology worked perfectly: Microsoft’s version was plagued with rumors that the seeing eye couldn’t yet detect hand motion if players sat. And Sony had already tried the motion-sensing controller gambit before, with its Sixaxis controller, which had been phased out due to lack of use. Even if it worked perfectly, was there an audience? Would anyone who wanted a Wii drop double its price to play an imitation of it years later? Such were the E3 rumors: not only were Kinect and Move carbon copies of Nintendo’s idea, they were smudged copies. Nintendo, for its part, lost millions later than year when it denied a rumor that the 3DS would be in stores for Christmas: sorry, not until next year.
The everything-box syndrome was most in evidence for portable devices. Nintendo’s DS was now competing not only with Sony’s waning PSP, but also with Apple’s waxing iPhone. iPhone models featured a touch screen, a high-speed 3G connection for phone and Internet access, and a nifty but small on-screen keyboard. Most notably, it featured a shockingly robust “App Store” with hundreds of thousands of programs, either for free or for a few bucks. This led to a cadre of other touch-screen phones, each one with its own geometrically increasing pile of apps and games. How they differed from the DS on paper was negligible. So if mobile devices were providing gaming, what could Nintendo do with the DS to compete?
Nintendo had copied Apple to a degree, opening its own minigame store for the DS. It branded many of its regular DS games “Touch Generations,” calling them “Great games anyone can play.” (Mario does not appear in any Touch Generation title, save for a Tetris cameo.) And, like a guidance counselor recommending a career as a guidance counselor, Nintendo offered for download a free title like Flipnote Studio, where gamers could make their own animated films, and WarioWare D.I.Y., whose purpose is making and distributing hand-crafted games online, for free. A way to find the next Miyamoto? (Nintendo was so worried they’d lose Miyamoto the same way they lost Yokoi they recently forbid him from walking or biking to work.) Or a devious trick to outsource new Mario content? Maybe