Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [17]
Universal countersued Nintendo, and the ensuing battle took a few more years to conclude. Universal lost every suit. In the end, it had to pay nearly $2 million to Nintendo to cover its rival’s legal fees. This wasn’t counting all the other lawsuits it had on its hands, or the millions in fees it spent trying to prove, in an “abuse of judicial process,” that Donkey Kong and King Kong were one and the same.
Coleco got its money back (via Universal buying a chunk of its stock), but its lack of business fortitude was now public. It and Atari were both working on computers. Coleco was going to include Donkey Kong on a floppy disc as the pack-in game for its “Adam” computer. Adam premiered, playing Donkey Kong, at a Chicago trade show. Coleco was promptly contacted by lawyers from Atari. Nintendo had licensed the floppy-disc rights to Atari for its Atari 800 computer. Coleco had assumed it had them, as part of the console and tabletop rights. Yamauchi intervened, and bullied Coleco into shelving its unlicensed game. He almost certainly chose to play a game of chicken with Coleco because he remembered Coleco caving in to Universal. Coleco caved again. (The floppy-disc version for Atari’s computer, the Atari 800, was never released.)
Nintendo’s victory, in comparison, was unparalleled. Most other game companies either went out of business or were gobbled up by the big boys. But Nintendo faced down a muscular extortionist of a rival. Like a boy who realizes during a bully showdown that he has become a man, Nintendo learned how powerful it really was, after a mere two years. Howard Lincoln, for his part, rose from being Nintendo’s lawyer to being its senior vice president and general counsel.
And trial attorney John Kirby was given a boat. The thirty-thousand-dollar sailboat was named, of course, Donkey Kong. Kirby was also given “exclusive worldwide rights to use the name for sailboats.” Finally, as Mr. Segale before him, Mr. Kirby may have been rewarded with Nintendo’s greatest honor. Starting in 1992, Nintendo released a popular series of games about a cute little pink fluffball. His name? Kirby.
4 – MARIO’S EARLY YEARS
THE VIDEO GAME CRASH OF 1983
Voice actor Peter Cullen may not have a recognizable name, but everyone’s heard his pipes. For the last twenty years he’s been everyone from the sad-sack Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh, to the villainous K.A.R.R. in Knight Rider, to the clicking flange-jawed Predator. He hit the trifecta of giant-morphing-robot cartoons in the early eighties, doing voices for Go-Bots, Voltron, and most memorably Optimus Prime in Transformers. (He still voices a CGI Optimus for the live-action remakes.)
But before Optimus Prime became his trademark role, Cullen was Mario. An animated anthology program called the Saturday Supercade on CBS in 1983 featured characters from various video games, all with brief cartoons in a half-hour show. Q*Bert, the hopping star of a maze game, became a fifties-style teenager on the run from bullies. Frogger, about a poor animal trying to cross a busy road, was now about an amphibious reporter. Pitfall, at least, was a more traditional action-adventure, since Pitfall Harry was a blatant Indiana Jones rip-off.
Mario was clearly the second banana (sorry) in the cartoon of Donkey Kong: Soupy Sales’s titular gorilla was the lead. DK was a Bugs Bunny type, always one step ahead of his circus trainer, Mario, who was trying to recage him. Mario was reduced to the Elmer Fudd role. Pauline was recast as Mario’s niece, who intervened on Donkey Kong’s behalf when Mario grew too close to capture.
The slapstick portrayals didn’t mesh with the game, where tension and death awaited every misstep. And the show gained an odiously revisionist second act when the Donkey Kong Jr. cartoon premiered the following year, featuring