Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [23]
Mario had three different Game & Watch titles in 1983, doing three different jobs. He retained his contractor creds in Mario’s Cement Factory, where he worked filling up cement mixers. For Mario Bros., instead of adapting the sewer game, designers put Mario and Luigi to work in a bottle factory. (This version was ported to the Commodore 64 as Mario Bros. II.) And for Mario’s Bombs Away, he becomes an ace commando, grabbing lit bombs from a battlefield and tossing them into the enemy camp.
This trilogy of games (none designed by Miyamoto) makes it clear what Nintendo was aiming to set up for Mario: a cartoonlike role as the eager employee, trying to cope in any number of stressful environments. No one who played Mickey & Donald thought “Hey, wasn’t Mickey a sorcerer’s apprentice instead of a firefighter? This guy’s career is all over the place.” Mickey was a symbol for Disney, and Mario would be that exact same symbol for Nintendo.
To accomplish this, Nintendo would ignore Mario’s role as a villain in Donkey Kong Jr. Mario would jump with both feet into whatever challenge Nintendo put in front of him, be it war, monsters, or the perils of just-in-time supply chain management.
Mario’s father, Miyamoto, moved on as well to new jobs. After Mario Bros. he worked to design a game called Devil World, the only game of his never released in North America. It was a maze game, with the clever conceit that the monsters in the maze would move the walls, instead of just chase the hero. That wasn’t what kept it from U.S. shores, though. In the game’s story line, a green dragon named Tamagon descends into Hell in order to fight Satan. The Pac-Man – style power pellets are replaced by crosses and Bibles. For an industry called devil worshipers by some extremists, a game featuring the devil (even as a villain) was a no-no.
There was a push to make a lot of games for Yamauchi’s new game console. Nintendo was excellent at nemawashi, a Japanese gardening term for digging around the roots of a to-be-transplanted tree. Nemawashi referred to the business necessity of quietly laying the correct groundwork of success. For Nintendo, nemawashi demanded that a game console have many games ready for release, and many more in the pipeline. Otherwise, it’d be as deserved a failure as all the American consoles that rushed to market without any quality in their product. And they had to be a different breed of game, not necessarily engineered like arcade games to end quickly.
As soon as Devil World was finished, Miyamoto received a promotion. He had been working with his mentor, Gunpei Yokoi, who was on the Game & Watch development team and also pitched in overseeing the Donkey Kong franchise. But Yamauchi wanted to keep Yokoi working on Game & Watch: it was Yokoi’s idea, and each new game added to Nintendo’s coffers. Yamauchi decided his company’s new golden boy, shaggy Shiggy Miyamoto, was management material. Miyamoto supposed that Yamauchi saw in him a surrogate son—or grandson.
Miyamoto officially stepped back into a producer’s role with his new position. He hadn’t trained as a software designer: it wasn’t where his skills lay. He knew enough to be able to explain what he wanted, how he wanted it, and how it could be done. Like Mario, just because he was good at a job didn’t mean there wasn’t a better fit for him somewhere else. Yokoi’s management style was encouragement: he told future Metroid designer Yoshi Sakamoto, “If you can draw pixel art, you can make a game.” Miyamoto continued the style of choosing carrots over sticks with his crew. (His leadership turned out to be better than his organizational skills: he needed an assistant just to keep track of things.) A new designer named Kazuaki Morita served as Miyamoto’s protégé. Which put the thirty-something Miyamoto in the role of mentor.
Their first challenge was Ice Climber, which seemed like a polarthemed Mario Bros. Except