Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [37]
In Mario, though, it would create another abstraction level, a thinning of the barrier between our world and Mario’s. Level 1 begins with a small map, with a squarish Mario facing a fork in the road. The right fork is locked, forcing him to go to the left, to the square labeled 1. After that is 2. After that he can choose from another fork, to move ahead to 3, skip it via a side path to 4, or bypass both 3 and 4 and go straight to the Picture Game, a slot machine game where players can win extra lives and coins if they hit the right buttons.
This built upon the warp zone concept, where Mario could jump ahead multiple boards. Here it’s not a secret hidden door but right in front of you, clear as day. If you want to go fight the bad guy at the castle, you can do it in a mere seven boards. But if you want to fully explore the world, you have 12 boards’ worth of adventure ahead of you. This game, more than any other before it, was built to reward the completionist. Simply winning wasn’t the goal anymore. The new goal was to visit every location the game offered, do every activity, soak in each experience. This wasn’t a race, it was an amusement park.
SMB3 cribbed many other stylistic tricks from theme parks. Each level had its own theme—ice, grasslands, an inventive Giant Land where all the enemies and obstacles are four times normal size. Each level had its own theme music. Each had its own new enemies, and new powers for Mario to acquire. Each had a distinct layout: Pipe Land was a big confusing maze, Ocean Land was an archipelago of semiconnected islands, and Koopa’s castle was hidden in the dark. Level 3 leads Mario to a Japan-shaped island chain, with a castle smack-dab in Kyoto. Players received multiple audiovisual clues as to location identity, and each level was as separate as Tomorrowland is from Main Street, USA.
Miyamoto’s success showed why the Mario cartoons never caught on. Mario isn’t about jumping on mushrooms and fighting turtles any more than the heritage of Italian-Americans. It’s about play, what Croatian-born psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “flow.” The fun of “flow” is its feeling of accomplishment and fulfillment while engaged in an activity. Anyone who’s ever lost happy hours tinkering with a car engine, shopping for clothes, talking with friends, or playing music has experienced flow. The sweet spot when a game’s not too easy or too hard, the just-right porridge, is flow. Showing a tennis fan a documentary about the polymers in her racket would interest her as much as Mario’s players would be interested in a cartoon.
Nintendo itself learned that it would be richly rewarded for increasing the “flow” of gamers. Arakawa put a toll-free phone number in the thick instruction booklet of Miyamoto’s original Zelda, in case anyone was confused. Four people manned the lines. They were soon swamped, many times over. And not just for Zelda: for Super Mario Bros. and Punch-Out and every other Nintendo game.
Arakawa increased the number of operators exponentially: eventually two hundred people staffed the lines. (The staff increased up to five hundred for the holiday rush.) He removed the toll-free number, and they still called. It’s among the best jobs in the Seattle area for hard-core gamers: a small cube outfitted with the newest game systems, manuals of past tips and tricks, and a hot line that never stops ringing. And it further cemented Nintendo’s reputation as caring for its customers.
Nintendo also expanded on its fan club newsletter, secretly working on what would be Nintendo Power magazine. (Super Mario Bros. 2 graced the cover of the first issue, July/August 1988.) Everyone in the fan club got a free subscription. The idea came from Japan, where millions of copies of Dragon Warrior games had been sold because of a write-up in a manga magazine. The same plan worked stateside, with Nintendo as its own publisher. Soon the Nintendo Club was like the National Geographic Society, with millions of members. The magazine