Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [25]
In 1984, Miyamoto was given the honor of heading up a new fourth division. As a daimyo, his job was to rally his people to produce the most value, and the best advancement, to please the shogun—er, the president. Yamauchi-sama (no mere Yamauchi-san for him) was happy to play the role of judge; no game went forward without his express permission. He had a sixth sense for knowing what would sell well in which markets. Amazingly, he did this without ever playing a game, instead just watching a scant minute or two of game play. It’s wildly out of character for both Yamauchi and his company, but the image of a drug lord refusing to sniff his own product does come to mind.
One of Miyamoto’s “rival” R&D divisions decided to make a game called Wrecking Crew, and Miyamoto “lent” them Mario and Luigi to star in it. The brothers play demolition workers taking down a hundred levels of concrete and brick, which much be taken out in the correct order. To keep the cerebral nature of the game, Mario and Luigi can’t jump. Mario received a makeover for the role: he gained a hard hat, switched to an all-red sleeveless ensemble instead of overalls, and trimmed his mustache to look like Tom Selleck’s.
Mario also shows up as a bonus character in Nintendo’s Pinball, in a bonus where he can save Pauline in a Breakout-style extra level. And there he is again as the line judge in Tennis, yet another game generated for the console’s launch. And again in Donkey Kong Hockey: he and DK slap the puck back and forth, and whoever has the slower reflexes gets scored on. He also appears in Mario Bros. Special (only in Japan) in an awkward port of Mario Bros. made by Hudson Soft, and in F-1 Race, where he waves on the Formula One cars. Mario appears in Punch Ball Mario Bros., another failed attempt by Hudson Soft to adapt Mario Bros. that involved, as you might expect, Mario punching a ball. And he’s in the audience for the arcade game Punch-Out! It might be easier to list the Nintendo games of that time into which Mario was not shoehorned.
This was the Mickey Mouse philosophy, all right: could anyone remember Mickey as a cartoon character anymore? With a distinct personality? No, Mickey was just a mascot. Just a smile and a pair of ears. Donald Duck, now he had a personality. Goofy too. Mario was a brainwashing victim: what little there was about him—he could jump, he was a hero, he had a bushy mustache, he was a carpenter—had all been rewritten.
Nintendo’s attempts to keep vague Mario plugging away at job after job were not promising for long-term success. One could go Sanrio’s Hello Kitty route and have abstract form but no meaning. Or one could go the Bugs Bunny route and make a strong defined character. But to survive, Mario would need a consistent hook. Look at King Arthur, on whose story hangs various unrelated legends: the King Uther tale, Lancelot sleeping with his wife, the quest for the Grail. Yet everyone knows King Arthur’s core; he was England’s greatest king. Despite glaring contradictions (he can’t pull Excalibur from a rock if he’s already been given it by the Lady in the Lake), his core character remains the same.
If Mario was to be Nintendo’s cynosure, he needed a constant narrative. Not just whatever ridiculous workplace needed a hapless light industrial employee: a world of his own.
6 – MARIO’S SUNSHINE
SUPER MARIO BROS. AND THE NINTENDO ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEM
When the Famicon was released, in 1983, twenty-three-year-old Kōji Kondō heard about a job through his college in Osaka. He was considering graduate school to further his music studies. He wanted to play