Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [36]
All the verbosity of being an artist and experiencing change and taking risks boils down to doing something different. Sometimes it’s dramatic: Jackson Pollock deciding to drizzle paint instead of spreading it. Sometimes it’s flexing a new muscle: Woody Allen trying dramas instead of comedies. Sometimes it’s mercenary: Madonna’s new look for each song. But it’s always necessary. Artists can’t simply redo the exact same thing over and over. Artistry, perhaps, is at its core being able to control change in interesting ways.
Miyamoto was not someone accustomed to change: his parents told him to not “change vessels,” meaning to stay who you are regardless of circumstances. That was why he still biked to work, still kept the same rescued-castaway haircut, and not incidentally still worked at Nintendo rather than go start his own firm. “I don’t really chase after the American dream—that idea of continually changing with success,” he said. But unless he wanted to make Lost Levels II, he would have to change.
Miyamoto had gotten into game design in the tail end of the arcade era, and was now comfortable in the home console world. Not many of his cabinet colleagues made the jump: not Space Invaders’s Tomohiro Nishikado, Atari’s Nolan Bushnell, or even one of Miyamoto’s idols, Pac-Man creator Tōru Iwatani. They were all masters of their era’s technology, but they lost that mastery with the advent of new innovations. Without a master narrative guiding them beyond engineering prowess, they were back at square one.
So what was Miyamoto’s master narrative for Mario? Was it the athletic exploration that he poured into Super Mario Bros., whose magic he wasn’t able to bottle a second time when he went back to the well? Or was it something even more basic than that? Something that would not only allow for a regular series of great Mario games, but of a roster of other great franchises? Miyamoto’s decisions for SMB3 would set the stage for the rest of his life.
Miyamoto decided that gameplay was king. How Mario interacted with the world was the core of the game. This was a slight change from Lost Levels, where the game play was mostly identical to the original, except much more difficult. Now, though, he wanted new ideas, new opponents, new powers for Mario. That was why people said Lost Levels wasn’t Mario, not because it varied from some ethereal formula but because it did not.
So Mario got a series of “suits” he could wear. The frog suit made him swim faster. The bizarre Tanooki suit turned Mario into unmovable stone, let him fly, and gave him a tail to hit enemies. (Mythological Japanese tanuki attack with a less family friendly weapon: their heavy testicles, wielded like morning stars.)
That creative game play, built around running and jumping, was what was missing from Lost Levels. Certainly it was missing from many of the side-scrolling imitators that had sprung up, where the sole challenge was in navigating incredibly difficult boards and fighting incredibly easy foes. Miyamoto added more and more power-ups and extra lives in the earlier stages, and held them back as the game progressed. That helped new gamers keep playing, without making experienced ones feel like they were playing a baby game.
Miyamoto also decided to end the one-man-show operations. SMB3 was a collaborative effort, which meant every contributor would have a section, a character, an obstacle they could point at and say “that was mine.” His job was to produce games, which meant giving others the tools so they could shine.
Perhaps the most innovative element of SMB3 was the game board. In the previous games Mario was exclusively seen from the side profile. But Nintendo had had success using two views in the Zelda II game: tile-based when traversing a large map, and side-scrolling for the