Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [18]
The two rivals, though, would be parting ways. Shigeru Miyamoto introduced a new human protagonist for 1983’s Donkey Kong 3, Stanley the exterminator. Donkey Kong, residing in the upper center of the screen, and again in the heavy role, is hanging between two jungle vines. When he punches a hive, a staggering variety of bugs pile out, ready to attack Stanley with all-different attack patterns. The exterminator has to zap them all with his bug spray, then once they’re gone grab some super bug spray and spritz Donkey Kong himself. (No little fun has been had with Stanley’s only available target: the gorilla’s rear end. The gorilla braces when he receives the bidet-style insecticide.)
Donkey Kong 3 was, behind the jungle canopy, a clever reworking of Space Firebird, Nintendo’s old dogfighting game. Space games weren’t selling that well, but the game play was almost identical. Besides, Miyamoto was working on two games at the same time (not counting the DK3 adaptation Green House for the Game & Watch), and couldn’t be expected to generate all-original content for both.
For that other game, Miyamoto was spinning off Mario into his own title. Mario was originally a carpenter, since he was at a construction site. But, a friend told Miyamoto, the overalls and hat and pudgy willingness to leap into nasty situations made him really more of a plumber. Hmm, Miyamoto thought. There could be a video game about plumbing. And Mario could be the star.
The idea he came up with bears as much relation to plumbing as Pac-Man does to fighting the paranormal. Mario, down in the cavernous sewers of New York, jumps around on platforms four stories high. Open sewer pipes emit a series of nasties—crabs, turtles, flies. Mario attacks not by hammer or bug spray, but by jumping on enemies. Furthermore, the platforms are mutable: head butting one from below buckles it like a plank-and-rope bridge, and flips enemies. If Mario collides with them while they’re upside-down, he kicks them to the edge of the screen. Kick or bop them all offscreen, and the level is clear.
The enemies were all “palette-swapped,” the same design with two paint jobs, which doubled the menagerie crawling out of the huge green drainage pipes. The Sidestepper crab started off red, but if not kicked offscreen after being flipped would turn a speedy blue. Good attacks and quick finishes rewarded Mario with points, as well as coins that went clattering around like a shanked football. The game’s grand challenge wasn’t just defeating the creatures, or winning before time ran out, or amassing valuable coins. It was finding an amalgam of all three. It was noticeably easier than Donkey Kong to finish a level, but—appropriate for a game located underground—much deeper.
The game was called Mario Bros., which raises the question of who Mario’s brother was. To create a sibling, Miyamoto palette-swapped Mario himself. The plumber’s red shirt was now black, and his blue overalls and red hat were now Day-Glo green. Better electronics let Miyamoto have a whopping six colors at his disposal. So Mario and his sibling received slightly different skin tones and hair colors. One pair of ugly-even-by-1983-standards indigo sneakers later, and taa-da!: Luigi was born.
Luigi’s wardrobe has been updated slightly since then: his green hat now matches his green shirt, he wears blue overalls like Mario, and the indigo sneakers are exiled. His name supposedly came from an Italian bistro near Redmond, called Mario and Luigi’s. Or maybe it’s a pun: ruiji means “similar” in Japanese. Or, as some have pointed out, maybe someone at Nintendo was a cinephile, and remembered Yves Montand as Mario in 1953’s The Wages of Fear, a stout mustached man with a hat, who had a tall lean friend named Luigi.
Luigi’s controls were identical to Mario, which, of course, was even easier to program than a palette-swap.