Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [105]
All of Nintendo’s plotting and fighting for the casual fan has one giant flaw: the casual fan. Nintendo can’t get them if they’re too casual, otherwise they’ll drift to no-cost options like Facebook. (Iwata has forcefully denied that Nintendo would ever make a browser game or an app: no lateral software without paying for seasoned hardware first!) But they’re also unable to use what for three decades has been their heavy artillery, Mario, for fear of scaring their new audience away. Nintendo’s Touch Generations games don’t feature Mario. Mario is core, not casual. He has to let Nintendo fight this fight without him.
Nintendo not letting itself make a browser Mario game has not stopped a flash flood of in-browser Mario games. Super Mario Flash, New Super Mario Bros. Flash, Infinite Mario, and the amazing Super Mario Crossover, which lets you play the original SMB games using characters from Castlevania, Excitebike, Ninja Gaidan, and more. (If you like that, try Abobo’s Big Adventure.) There are free (and unlicensed) Mario games where he rides a motorbike, takes a shotgun to the Mushroom Kingdom, decides to fight with his fists, is replaced by Sonic, replaces Pac-Man in a maze game, and plays dress-up. They receive no admonition from Nintendo’s once-ferocious legal department. Why not? Iwata’s explanation is commonsensical: “[I]t would not be appropriate if we treated people who did something based on affection for Nintendo as criminals.” This is also why no one has been told by lawyers to stop selling Wario-as-a-pimp T-shirts.
Nintendo’s most recent successes have made it clear: Mario is no longer Nintendo’s biggest draw. The Wii and the DS’s lifestyle games sit in that throne now, and they try very hard to be unlike other video games. Mario’s still the most popular man in the world, but despite his range he’s a limited performer. Casual fans are fine with him in small doses—a race, a fight, a minigame. But they don’t want any hint of story other than their own improvement, any more than Xbox 360 players want cute minigames. (Sorry, Kinect!) The closest he’s gotten to these new gamers is cameoing in one picture on one matching game from Big Brain Academy. Five years ago, that game would have had his name on it.
Mario games, both platformer and spinoff, still sell very well. Super Mario Galaxy 2 is one of the best-reviewed games in years, earning rare perfect tens left and right. And he’ll always be a favorite for Halloween costumes. But he’s not the king anymore, the perpetual emperor of physics engines. Take a look in the mirror to see the new face of Nintendo gaming: it’s you. You—Time named “you” the person of the year in 2006, so don’t be modest—have taken Mario’s job away from him. He’s still uniquely qualified to bounce around on Goombahs’ heads, and will still sell millions of copies in even a bad game. But he belonged to the first wave of video games.
Current nomenclature says that there are seven video game “generations.” The dominant consoles for the seven generations are: Atari Pong (first), Atari 2600 (second), the NES (third), the SNES (fourth), the PlayStation (fifth), the PlayStation 2 (sixth), and the Xbox 360 (seventh). This order assumes that the Wii shouldn’t even be counted as a seventh-gen system, since what it does well is almost unrelated to the red-queen advancements in capabilities of the muscular Xbox 360 and PS3.
From the point of view of Mario, and Nintendo, though, there have only been three eras. One began with Pong, of course, and lasted through the video game crash of ’83 and the early Famicon/NES years. Call this the joystick era. Games were totally original, written from scratch every time, all with dynamic (and often unique) control schemes. Often they