Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [26]
The position was with the people who had made Donkey Kong. Kondō loved Donkey Kong, and especially loved the brief little bursts of original music for each level. The job was nearby, in Kyoto. And it combined two of his favorite pastimes: video games and music. Kondō would apply, of course, but so would everyone else. He didn’t have any demo tapes of his compositions. But Kōji had grown up with electronic music, playing the Yamaha Electone, a downmarket version of Hammond’s drawbar electronic organ. He had developed the skills to imitate his English rock heroes—such as John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin and Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake & Palmer—in a cover band. He lived for this sort of music, and it must have shown in the interview.
Kōji Kondō got the job at Nintendo, and became a professional composer for video games. With all the games they put out they needed one: for Mario Bros. they stole a page from Looney Tunes and digitized Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik for a score. Within a matter of months Kondō had scored two arcade games: Golf and a boxing game called Punch-Out. He learned about the challenges of writing music that would be listened to over and over without becoming annoying, bland, or too jingley.
He started working more closely with a man named Miyamoto, who was a few years older. Miyamoto had shaggy hair: Kondō was always scared of letting his grow out—for fear of not being employable. Miyamoto loved the groove bands Kondō did—and bluegrass too! The two of them worked together on a new endeavor, a secret electronics project that they said would change the world—although they said this about all their secret projects. And Kondō would get to score the transformation.
Mario needed a narrative in his new game, and Miyamoto was on it. He had designed side-scrolling racing games and vertical-scrolling “athletic” games for the Famicon, so why not a side-scrolling “athletic” game? With his protégé Morita, the pair might be able to get five or six decent levels out of it. By increasing the cartridge size by adding a chip, it could even be super. And it could answer the question of who Mario was.
Miyamoto was leaning strongly toward form. His game idea involved a fantasy land accessible by sewer pipes, where Mario would go on epic adventures in land, sea, and air. He would grow to a great size, and shrink back down. He would be able to control fire (which replaced an earlier idea of giving him a gun), and breathe underwater. He would battle living fungi, malevolent clouds, and demonic animals. In short, he would again be nothing like any previous iteration.
Here was the narrative: Mario the explorer. Miyamoto could retell the oldest tale in the world: the stranger coming to town. The Mushroom Kingdom, as it would be called, could afford an endless number of beasts, inventions, characters, tasks, environments, and challenges. Miyamoto didn’t realize he was making a world as imaginative as Star Wars’s bestiary of planets, Star Trek’s galactic Federation, or the Marvel Universe’s hero-clogged New York City.
Yes, Mario technically was still a plumber. An eldritch pipe would take him to the Mushroom Kingdom. There would be pipes everywhere, so much so that players would stop thinking it odd that open vertical sewage tunnels painted kelly green served as the only way to ever get from point A to point B. For consistency Mario still had his move set from Mario Bros.—the head butt, the jump-stomp, and the prone-enemy kick. Moves that never made it beyond the drawing board included a rocket pack and a second kick attack.
Figuring out the controls was itself a matter of control. Miyamoto wanted up on the directional pad to be the jump control, freeing A and B for actions. No, no, others said, jumping is too important to not be given its own button. His coworkers wore him down, and Miyamoto eventually agreed to