Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [30]
Just in time for the fall’86 toy season, with the seeds sown in four big markets, Nintendo began a national launch. The big N signed up with toymaker Worlds of Wonder, who was selling a pair of hot products, Teddy Ruxpin and Laser Tag. They’d sell the NES as well, for a trifecta of must-have products. Mattel handled distribution in Canada.
Yamauchi had one more trick up his sleeve for the country-wide rollout. That game Miyamoto had taken forever to make was finally done, and a recent hit in arcades. He had cannily started selling Famicons packaged with it, just like Colecovision did with Donkey Kong. Japanese sales were high. He’d do the same overseas in the United States. Every NES, sold for a mere $130, would come with the console, two controllers . . . and a copy of Super Mario Bros. For an extra twenty dollars customers got a Zapper and a second game, Duck Hunt.
Thirty-four million U.S.-sold NES systems later, Yamauchi seems to have made the right call. The ultimate legacy of the game, though, can be seen throughout the many worlds of geekdom it cultivated, a vast nerderie of games, book, movies, music, and shows that have moved from niche to limelight. (A preferred word for geek, otaku, comes from the Japanese.) Mario was dense, and called for deep exploration instead of facile button mashing. It rewarded the extra energy to explore it. A generation of fans with the first fix of gaming depth started rewarding other deep games with huge sales. No exaggeration: the RPG series Dragon Warrior is by Japanese law not allowed to be released on a weekday, since too many people take off school or work to start leveling up.
Mario’s shadow has fallen outside of games, since fans of depth didn’t only want it in 8-bit form. Think Harry Potter, Twilight, Star Wars, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Lost, even comedies such as Arrested Development and 30 Rock. These very different books, movies, and TV shows weren’t inspired by Mario, of course, but their fans have been. Instead of passively ingesting their entertainment they study it in miniature, read up on each new installment, create and maintain wiki sites to document all its facets. A big film can’t arrive anymore without a tie-in comic prequel, an alternate-reality game in the weeks prior to release, extra scenes shot for the special-edition home release, and what Spaceballs’ Brooklynite Yoda called “moichindizin’.” The cross-platform blockbusters that fuels the modern entertainment economy are fanned by, well, fans. And all those enthusiasts, like torches lit by one eternal flame, were indoctrinated into existence by a single fire flower.
7 – MARIO’S BOMB
THE LOST LEVELS
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Just ask the Great Giana Sisters.
In 1987, Rainbow Arts made a game called The Great Giana Sisters for various computers. It was an almost perfect replica of Super Mario Bros., except with spiky-haired girls as the leads. Nintendo found out about it, made some threats, and Rainbow Arts pulled the game off shelves.
Or ask All Night Nippon Mario Bros. All Night Nippon was a popular Japanese late-night radio show, which asked Nintendo to change up the game’s sprites for a promotional giveaway. Some of the levels had their sky colors changed from blue to black (it is night, after all), and various bad guys had their sprites replaced with eighties singers and disc jockeys.
Or ask Super Bald Bros., a hacked version of the game where Mario and Luigi have no hair. Or replaced Mario’s face with that of glam rocker Alice Cooper. Or made Mario Russian, or a pimp, or simply hatless. Or replaced Mario with characters from a grab bag of other games—River City Ransom, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or Bomberman . (Worst of all would be the Super KKK Bros. hack, about which nothing more will be said.)
The samizdat hacks were merely the logical