Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [108]
Just kidding.
I hope it doesn’t come off as bragging when I say that this book could have been double in size. There’s a lot of Mario out there, but not all of it moves the Nintendo story forward. Much of my editing work was in snipping out lines, paragraphs, and in two instances entire chapters that were tributaries that diverged too far from the stream. Those two chapters are available at www.supermariobook.com, if you want to learn more extensively about Nintendo’s relationship to Japan in its early days, and about the fascinating and very secretive man Mario is named after, Mario Segale. Think of them as downloadable content, to use a gaming term.
I’ve listed most all of my book sources in the bibliography, but the list of Web sites I consulted would probably go on for half the length of the book itself. Just about any possible question I could ask myself, regarding facts or analysis about Nintendo, someone before me had asked and answered. Thanks to them, I had a true surplus of video game heritage and trivia to immerse myself in. The beginning of chapter 23, for instance, grew just about daily. Just because I found a hundred different types of Mario shirts doesn’t mean all hundred have to be described.
There seems to be a pact among Wikipedia users: they’ll use it but never actually cop to doing so. I will gladly cop not only to looking at but to printing out and reviewing (on an hourly basis) two Wikipedia pages: one on Mario’s appearances ordered by year, and one of Miyamoto’s games, arranged the same way. It’s very difficult to find an error on Wikipedia: I became an expert on Mario and Nintendo, and I only found a few minor release-date discrepancies. The stigma persists, though, and thus I didn’t use a Wikipedia source if I could get the same information any other way.
Other Web sites I visited for information include 1up.com, businessweek.com, slate.com, newyorker.com vintagecomputing .com, oxfordamericanmag.org, industrygamers.com, kokatu.com, and joystiq.com. Nintendo fan sites (miyamotoshrine.com, gonintendo .com, n-sider.com, zeldauniverse.net, among others) were great portal sites to find older, Google-ignored coverage of Nintendo moments. I’d like to especially call out GameSpot.com, which ran an exhaustive history-of-Mario series; VGChartz.com, from which I found most all of the sales figures in this book; and Nintendo’s own Iwata Asks series, where I got to be a fly on the wall as Nintendo execs held candid postmortems about what went right and wrong during development.
People were often the best sources. Some lent books, others helped with translations, and others (well, just one) volunteered to put on a mustache and red overalls to make a promotional video. Thanks go to Justin Brennan, Philip Jan, John Merriman, Kristin Linsday, Benj Edwards, Deanna Talamantez, Alison Holt Brummelkamp, Candace Smart, Mikkel Paige Mihlrad, Konstantin Karpenyuk, James Brennan, and Vinnie Nardiello. Jeannette Fee, Sean Ryan, and Cynthia Ryan were early readers, and offered edits so good I felt embarrassed I hadn’t thought of them first. Also there was that one guy at the Gamestop in the mall, and that other guy at the other Gamestop in the same mall . . . People want to talk when they find out you’re writing a Mario book.
My parents could have written off $200 from their 1987 taxes if they knew I’d write this book. Thanks to Kathleen Ryan and Dennis Ryan for resisting the urge to buy an Atari 5200 for Christmas, and thus starting me on my literary endeavor. And to Brendan Ryan, Bridgette Parker, and again Sean Ryan, three siblings I love more every year.
I’ve done my best to make the professionals at Portfolio and Penguin not regret their decision to publish a book about video games. Thanks to Emily Angell, Christy D’Agostini, Maureen Cole, Faren Bachelis, Linda Cowen, Daniel Lagin, Dan Donohue, Jennifer Tait, Eric Meyers, and my editor Courtney Young. Without all of you, the world would never know about Hotel Mario. And thanks to my agent Lynn Johnston, who set me up with my first interview, her fifth-grade