Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [22]
PART 2
SUPER 8
5 – MARIO’S ISLAND
JAPAN AND THE FAMICON
Times were tough for U.S. game makers: Coleco collapsed. Milton Bradley, weakened from the Vectrex, was gobbled up by Hasbro, which didn’t have any skin in video games. Mattel lost millions from its Intellivision flop, and stuck to selling Barbies and Hot Wheels. Warner sold the Atari business for parts, as documented in Scott Cohen’s book Zap. The Commodore 64 and Apple II stayed strong, and became the home gaming systems of choice. Companies like EA, Epyx, and MicroProse vied to be to the computer what Atari was to the home console. Filling the void, VCR sales skyrocketed.
The American video game crash did not affect Japan at all. Or rather, it benefited Japan. Its retailers, shaking their heads from across the Pacific, had only stocked a negligible amount of most of the American video game systems. And those Colecos and Vectrexes that had made the trip were mere curiosities, no more a threat than wasabi peas are to Doritos in the States. The video game crash-and-burn gave Nintendo an unparalleled opportunity: the chance to enter a billion-dollar market where the others had just forced themselves out in a Mexican standoff gone wrong.
President Hiroshi Yamauchi had had engineers working on a game-playing home computer for years, since before he asked Shigeru Miyamoto to refurbish Radar Scope. (He briefly considered buying and branding the ColecoVision, but they wanted Nintendo to pay wholesale for it: no-sankyu.) He based it on Atari’s wonderful 2600, which used a lesser version of Motorola’s 650 chip, the 6507, to generate its titles. Nintendo would upgrade to a specialized chip made by Ricoh. The Ricoh chip was specially engineered to produce sounds, accept inputs from a controller, and generate tricolored sprites. It outputted as much image and sound as an 8-bit processor could, which was good, because it was going to have to duplicate Donkey Kong using a fraction of the arcade game’s horsepower.
Instead of a joystick, Nintendo’s “family computer” (or Famicon) would use one of Gunpei Yokoi’s innovations from the Game & Watch line: the raised directional pad. Joysticks broke with repeated use. Flat discs like the Intellivision’s were better, but still didn’t produce much tactile satisfaction. D-pads, little plus signs, were the future. There would be square action buttons as well, but only two. The sparse button selection was a “forcing device” to ensure developers made easy-to-play games. The controller was simple, elegant, and offered a diversity of options for designers.
Yamauchi believed in the Famicon so much he canceled Nintendo’s arcade division to focus funds and experience on it. Price was one of Yamauchi’s no-compromise angles. The Famicon had to be cheap, cheaper than most everything else on the market. After all, Apple’s Lisa and Xerox’s Star were top-of-the-line machines, but flopped due to five-digit price tags. In fact, Yamauchi wanted a price point of under ten thousand yen, about seventy-five dollars—and wanted to make a profit off each console. This seemed a pipe dream, to double-dip from the two-part tariff business model. This model, most famously used by Gillette, sets a one-time price for the razor, and an ongoing price for the blades. Yamauchi insisted Nintendo profit from both the games and the consoles, no easy feat.
By 1983, Nintendo had released dozens of different Game & Watches. It had widened the screen, and then introduced dual-screen games that doubled the playing space. Most games were original, but franchise characters