Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [31]
After investing so much time in a mere game, not everyone wanted to let it go. The NES was a computer, after all, and computers could be hacked. A cottage industry of NES hackers was emerging. They learned about the technical changes made when the Famicon became the NES. While the Famicon was top-loading, for instance, the NES was side-loading. Its controllers were uniform, and had round instead of square buttons. (Despite passing a “million-punch test,” the square buttons were jamming.) The mike and modem support were gone. And, oddly, the game cartridges were bigger, 72-pin instead of 60-pin.
That was to accommodate the 10NES chip, Yamauchi’s newest brainstorm. Atari and other console makers couldn’t stop outside parties from making games: anyone could whip together a game, and shove it into a 2600 cartridge. The 10NES was a lockout chip: before the NES did anything else with a cartridge, it checked to see if the inserted game cartridge had a 10NES chip. If it did, game on. If not, no dice.
This additional chip added cost to every unit, but it allowed Nintendo to once again control distribution. If you wanted to make a game for the NES, Nintendo had to approve it. Yamauchi signed up as many Japanese publishers as he could: Komani, Capcom, Bandai, Taito, Hudson Soft, Namco. The more the merrier: third-party content (i.e., games not made by Nintendo, or by companies Nintendo hired) was how the Apple II grew successful. Yamauchi limited them to five games a year; any more, and the market might get glutted. Some companies went so far as to create shell corporations to put out additional games while keeping to the letter of Yamauchi’s law. Few American game publishers wanted in: they stuck with computer games.
That first launch year, 1986, America bought three million NES consoles. The following year, six million more. Worlds of Wonder was cleaning up with the NES, but the company faced bankruptcy since it had a veritable sleuth of unsold Teddy Ruxpins on its hands. Nintendo ended up hiring the WOW sales force from the floundering company. Yearly, Nintendo was bringing in millions from the console, more millions from its own games, and more millions still from third-party developers’ games. Arakawa even got a licensor, MGA Entertainment (of future Bratz doll fame) to import the Game & Watch titles from Kyoto to the United States. Add on arcade games and licensing, and Nintendo was living out Naomi Klein’s description of a modern company’s “race toward weightlessness: whoever owns the least, has the fewest employees on the payroll and produces the most powerful images.” To this day, as journalist Osame Inoue points out, it continues to have an employee-cost ratio in seven figures—that is, divide the profits by the staff and each employee ends up bringing in over a million dollars a year.
Now if only they could get a sequel for that most powerful of images. Super Mario Bros. would end up selling an astounding forty million copies. As in Japan, one in six Americans bought a copy. That number would stand as the world’s bestselling game for over two decades, thanks to every NES buyer getting one. It wasn’t just dumb kids playing. When Booker Prize – winner Salman Rushdie was asked what he did while