Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [2]
Then high school and college and life happened, and I stopped gaming, save for a PC shooter once a year or so. I never chose to quit gaming—it just fell off my priorities list. Then about ten years ago, I landed a copyediting job at a dot-com. No one had any copy for me to proof before noon, yet I was coming in at 8:30 A.M. I asked my managing editor if there was anything I could write, to help out.
There was. She gave me a press release about a Pokémon tournament. The company had been using a freelancer for its irregular reporting of video game news and reviews. Having me write for this section of the site would bolster that coverage—and for free, since I was salaried. I typed up the piece, handed it in, and a few minutes later heard my editor on the phone firing the freelancer. She said they had just hired a new video game expert. Gulp.
In the months that followed I studied video games in a way very few others have. I wasn’t actually playing them, since I was at work. I wasn’t designing them, either, so I didn’t need to know alias coding or texture mapping. I needed to know why they were popular, what made one title better or “cooler” than the next. I made myself an expert in all things Sega, Sony, and Nintendo.
And just about all things Nintendo, I found out, were connected to Mario. He was everywhere: in sports games, fighting games, role-playing games, puzzle games, racing games, and every bit of branding imaginable. He had become a one-word shortcut for Nintendo, for gaming itself, and (I’m sure Nintendo hoped) for the concept of fun. Streets were named after him. There was even an unofficial holiday for him, on March 10 (MAR 10, get it?).
“Super Mario” has become the default nickname for any Mario. Formula One champion Mario Andretti (born in 1940) sometimes gets asked if he’s named after Super Mario. (He says he is, to the delight of the seven-year-olds who ask.) Chef Mario Batali is called Super Mario as well. If you’re good at a professional sport, and your name is Mario, you know what your nickname will be. Just ask hockey’s Mario Lemieux, football’s Mario Williams, ultimate fighting’s Mario Miranda, cycling’s Mario Cipollini, and soccer’s Mario Basler, Mario Gomez, and Mario Balotelli. They are, respectively, Canadian, American, Brazilian, Italian, German, Spanish, and Ghanaese. The nickname cannot be avoided wherever on the globe you are a Mario.
At some point I realized that the “life story” of Super Mario is the history of gaming itself. Yes, it’s a history of Nintendo and its creators: designer Shigeru Miyamoto, billionaire Hiroshi Yamauchi, and his underestimated son-in-law Minoru Arakawa. But at its core, it’s the biography of a man who’s not real, but has a Q rating up there with Mickey Mouse. A figure whose specific tale of the tape—pudgy Italian plumber from Brooklyn—merely serves to make him as perpetual an underdog as that undertall Italian boxer from Philadelphia, Rocky Balboa. A world-beloved character with roots across three continents: Asian invention, American setting, European name. A character almost totally blank, yet beloved. A hero who is at once us, more than us, and so much less than us. A guy with a brother named Luigi, and a princess to save.
Super Mario.
PART 1
ARCADE FIRE
1 – BABY MARIO
THE BIRTH OF NINTENDO OF AMERICA
In 1980, starting an arcade game took a quarter. Starting an arcade-game company took a lot more. But the rewards were more than getting your initials up on the high score. Companies in the arcade-game business tapped into a gold mine by updating their old electromechanical games, which had been collecting first pennies and nickels and now dimes and quarters for nearly a hundred years. One by one they were replacing the solenoids and miniature puppet shows and blinking lights with fancy new “TV thrillers” and “video skill games.” These games, shown on sideways television screens, used solid-state electronics to lure players into a web of lighting-fast reflexes, sweaty palms, and cramped fingers, all in an attempt to defeat computer opponents.