Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [11]
The rebranding was important for the game, and not just to remove evidence of its previous life as Radar Scope. Good cabinet art set an atmosphere for the game that its limited graphics couldn’t meet. It was too bad most games were lined up between other cabinets like so many Laundromat washers. Arakawa lost a fight to rename both Donkey Kong the game and Donkey Kong the character, but he received permission to rechristen Jumpman and Lady.
The warehouse where the Radar Scopes had been gathering dust was run by Don James, whose wife was named Polly. As a way of thanking the warehouse manager, who received a lot of heat from the landlord over Nintendo’s uncollected rent, they decided to rename “Lady” after his wife. Lady became Pauline, close enough to Polly.
Around this time, the Tukwila warehouse’s owner showed up in person to angrily remind Arakawa about the rent. As the legend goes, the owner, Mario Segale, interrupted a conversation over what to call Jumpman. Segale said his piece, and he grew so incensed he almost jumped up and down himself. After the landlord left, eviction threat delivered, someone suggested the name Mario. It was a joke, since both men had mustaches. But everyone liked the name.
To the Japanese, the name has a familiar consonant-vowel pattern—Yukio, Hanako, Hiroto, Mario. Just one letter away from the Japanese girl’s name Mariko, in fact. No troubling Ls that could cause lallation errors, not so commonplace as to be heard regularly in America, not already associated with anyone too famous (Godfather author Mario Puzo was about it), and yet not so unusual that it drew undue attention. Although most people think of it as an exclusively Italian name, it’s also Spanish and Portuguese. Mario is a variant of the Latin Marius or Marcus—both of which are believed to derive from Mars, the Roman god of war. Sometimes it’s used as a masculine version of Mary, which means “star of the sea.” For the past thirty years, it’s made the list of the two hundred most popular boys’ names in America, peaking at 111 in the 1980s.
Yes, Mario would be a super name for Jumpman. If Mr. Segale had only shaved that morning, who can say what name the character on the screen might have been given. Super Carlos? Super Ivan? Super Stavros? Would that alternate-universe name have made a difference in Nintendo’s success? Under any other name, would Mario play as sweet?
With the two cabinet conversions done, Nintendo then needed a guinea pig. Ron and Al placed the Donkey Kong games in two bars in the Seattle area that already had Radar Scope machines: the Spot Tavern and Goldies. They visited every day, mostly because the few quarters in the machines were their business’s sole source of income. The bars therefore served as an ersatz product testing ground for arriviste games. Donkey Kong immediately started to deliver more than thirty dollars a day in quarters, much more than Radar Scope was pulling in. Ron and Al added more cabinets, and each game pulled in more than two hundred dollars a week. That’s close to ten pounds in change.
Converting the rest of the two thousand cabinets took months, but each was a guaranteed sale. As they were being completed, new Donkey Kong games arrived from Japan, this time with blue cabinets. (The red-cabinet conversions eventually became collector’s items.) Demand seemed to increase exponentially, with every arcade-game venue needing a cabinet, then two, then three. At one point, there were sixty thousand Donkey