Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [14]
And, of course, Donkey Kong became a console video game. Taito offered a big chunk of its Space Invaders money to Nintendo for all rights to Donkey Kong. Nintendo knew to sell the milk, not the cow. American companies such as Coleco and Atari also vied for the rights. Yamauchi looked at who had the best technology, who had the most avenues for distribution, and who would fork over the most per unit sold. The decision from Kyoto: Coleco would get the exclusive rights. “It was the hungriest company,” Yamauchi explained. It was also, notably, American. Atari was offering more money, but Coleco execs camped out in Arakawa’s hotel room one night, imploring on Nintendo to honor Yamauchi’s decision. Arakawa did, saying he was impressed with Coleco’s passion.
Coleco received all tabletop and cartridge rights to Donkey Kong. In exchange, Nintendo received a lump-sum payment, plus a buck in royalties for every tabletop game, and $1.40 for each console game. Coleco packed Donkey Kong with every unit of its new ColecoVision game system: after six months of exclusivity there, Coleco would port it to rival consoles such as the Intellivision and the 2600s. The prestige of bundling such a popular game with its new console helped make the company half a billion dollars in sales, and $40 million in pure profit. Mario should have been called Midas.
In Kyoto, Shigeru Miyamoto was tasked with making a sequel. He had had huge plans for the original Donkey Kong, but had had to work with the sloppy seconds of Radar Scope’s primordial ooze. Now, though, he had carte blanche—and a team to do the grunt work of designing it for him. Millions of quarters had given his initial vision validation. Gamers around the world wanted to go on another adventure with the heroic Mario.
Miyamoto wasn’t feeling that, though. He wanted to rotate the love triangle, give the big ape some respect. Donkey Kong, being too big for 1982-era machines to make a playable character, would play the Pauline role, the helpless kidnapped one. A new character, Donkey Kong Jr., a smaller and more agile ape, would be the hero. He’d also get the game named after him, à la Ms. Pac-Man, gaming’s most successful sequel.
That left one more character and one more role to fill. Miyamoto knew it was good drama to upend audience conventions, to make them all of a sudden have pity on a villain, and also to see the unexpected mean streak in the one they thought was a hero. So Mario would be the villain, the master who locks up his pet and won’t let him go free. And tries to kill the son who attempts a jailbreak. It was a natural next step for the relationships, for the story.
Numerous licensers who paid big money to slap a grinning Mario and a snarling Donkey Kong onto their products must have been shocked. This was not how a brand was built! Miyamoto found himself accused of not knowing his characters, at a time when the characters barely were extant. But Donkey Kong Jr. was hardly a misstep, even if it too altered expectations. The single-jump button was still there, but Junior could climb up a series of chains and vines, as well as jump. There were items in the chains and vines, and by touching them Junior dropped them onto various enemies below. That replaced the hammer attack.
And the enemies! There were living bear traps, snapping madly and dragging unleashed chains behind them. There were yellow-andpurple birds that hopped around and glided through the air in deadly assaults on Junior. And there were sparks, living dollops of anthropomorphic electricity that ever so slowly inched their way up the chains. Miyamoto had the “Snapjaws” move in two different ways, and colored them differently as a clue. It would become a Mario tradition: the recolored sprite attacking in a different manner. Mario himself showed