Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [12]
Modern pinball offered basically no correlation between what you do (pull a plunger) and the “reward” of a hundred buzzers and doodads making a racket. Its addiction quotient was low. Space Invaders offered a regular reward schedule: ten, twenty, or forty points per ship hit. Its addiction quotient was high. Donkey Kong had an irregular reward schedule, since what earned you points changed each level, and you could also score points by speed. Like a slot machine with the slightest house advantage, this was a formula for a stratospherically addicting game, one in which either your skill or your luck may make all the difference next game. That is, until you were out of quarters.
And Mario’s abiogenesis would never have happened if Radar Scope was a bit more popular, if Arakawa had swallowed the financial loss, if Yamauchi had given the reconfiguration project to experienced designers, if Yokoi hadn’t given Miyamoto free rein to design, or if Miyamoto had decided to just make a game—instead of tell a story.
3 – MARIO’S BRAWL
THE MCA UNIVERSAL LAWSUIT
In Hollywood, Florida, a sixteen-year-old pinball wizard with the apple-pie name of Billy Mitchell was the best player in town. He had learned all the physics tricks: tipping the machine without tilting the solenoid, keeping multiple balls in play, trapping balls and flicking them directly into scoops or drop targets. This used to impress people. But not anymore: all the arcade loiterers were over watching a video game. Billy, who lettered in three sports in high school, considered video games beneath his abilities. “Video games were something new and different,” he said in an Oxford American interview, “and I don’t like new and different.”
“But they started getting more popular,” he said. “Everyone was standing around the Donkey Kong machine, and I wanted that attention.” Mitchell, whose father owned a restaurant that featured arcade games, started devoting himself to long hours every day getting a feel for Donkey Kong: when Mario should run, when he should jump, when he should grab the hammer. Mitchell discovered a place to stand in one level free of dangers: perfect for bathroom breaks.
Mitchell also learned about the last board of Donkey Kong—in the 22nd level, the 117th total screen. The game was supposed to have infinite levels, which plateaued at the highest level of difficulty and simply cycled over and over. But the algorithm to determine how much time to give Mario per screen was written without knowledge that people like Billy Mitchell would treat Donkey Kong like a rental car on a racetrack, pushing it to its engineering limits. In this case, the limit was 100 x (10 x (22 + 4)), which for any computer nowadays would run the same if that 22 was a 21 or a 23. But Donkey Kong’s Z-80 was an 8-bit chip, with a memory counter of only 256 places. Like an odometer hitting a million miles, it rolls back to 000001. For Donkey Kong, the rollover on board 117 causes a “kill screen”—Mario is simply not given enough time to complete the level before time runs out.
Billy moved onto Centipede, and BurgerTime, and Pac-Man. He was the best player anyone in South Florida had seen. When an arcade owner in Iowa, Walter Day of Twin Galaxies, started keeping track of reported top scores in games, Billy called up to question a reported Donkey Kong score of 1.6 million. He knew it was false because he hadn’t cracked a million before hitting the kill screen, and if he couldn’t, no one could. Billy was right: the seven-digit score was bogus. He’s held the Donkey Kong top score more or less since then.
A 2007 documentary about arcade games, The King of Kong, shows a duel between Mitchell, whose ego and eloquence make him an easy villain in the film, and a challenger, sweet teacher Steve Wiebe, who lives in Mario’s hometown of Redmond, Washington. Mitchell comes off somewhere between