Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [102]
Nintendo’s twin concerns were losing market share and mind share. Would a DS unit play as sweet if a user had another device in her pocket that let her play games? But how much push could it give the Wi-Fi and cameras before forgetting those were features added so people would merely, in Nintendo’s corporate walleye view, have it on hand more often to play games? That was the hail-Mary genius of the 3DS: a function ideal for gaming that no other device had, which introduced a whole new suite of activities, all exclusive to the 3DS. Suddenly the other everything boxes didn’t have everything.
AS OF 2010, THE FIRST DECADE OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY was over, with nine more to go. Every bit of technology, every way people lived, would be changed due to the new connectivity and speed of culture. Many of these changes have already happened: music fans who hear a new artist download the track (sometimes they even pay) instead of trekking to a music store to buy the whole album. No one visits the library when he can Google a subject in .00007 second. We accept that ads will infiltrate their way into every aspect of our life, a problem that can be alleviated with an ice-cold Coors Light. And the hallmark of this connectivity is interaction. All avenues of our lives, in other words, are turning into video games.
How will this affect games? In a lot of ways it already has. Xbox Live (and its Wii and PS3 counterparts) are online communities where you can compete with or against friends or strangers. Nintendo lags in this, stressing its own limited interactivity. Iwata and Miyamoto have both said that Nintendo is probably not doing enough when it comes to online gaming.
But there’s more to connectivity than that. Facebook’s low-res fare such as Parking Wars is a glorified game of mail chess, where each time you log on you see your friends’ moves, and respond in turn. Others are old-school remixes: Farmville looks familiar to Sim City players, and Mafia Wars is an isometric beat-em-up: Civilization via the Corleones. Facebook, Twitter, and Xbox Live, it was announced around the time of E3, would soon share update threads. But Facebook’s ubiquity, its platform, makes for a threat bigger than any rival peripheral. It wasn’t much discussed, but during the show word got out that Google had invested up to $200 million in Zynga, the company behind many top Facebook games. OnLive, a cloud-computing service that let owners of run-of-the-mill laptops play A-list PC games such as Assassins’ Creed II, had just launched. It was getting easier every year, every month, to imagine a world with so much bandwidth and processing oomph available that specialized machines just to play games wouldn’t be needed.
Speaking of those specialized machines, what happened to the concept of new consoles? All three consoles are at least five years old by this time: E3 should have been rife with chatter about PS4 prices, or Xbox 720 release dates. Instead, Microsoft and Sony spun their Wiiclone add-ons as if they were whole new game platforms, not just accessories. Nintendo, in turn, kept making new console games as if the concept of a Wiiquel was inconceivable. This was because Microsoft and Sony were on ten-year plans, kicking the can of the console death spiral to 2015. Making the most of seasoned technology? Another page out of the Nintendo playbook.
24 – MARIO’S LEGEND
THE FUTURE OF NINTENDO
Mario, somewhat infamously, is stuck in a Groundhog Day of perpetually having to rescue the princess from Bowser. Even when the plot is new, the story stays old: Mario stops the big bad and saves the girl. Imagine Sherlock Holmes if every single Sherlock Holmes story had to involve Moriarty stealing the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London: it would get old fast. But we merely read Sherlock Holmes, and try to understand him via his actions and interactions. We play as Mario, and have a completely different relationship with him. We are him: his frustration at missing a jump is