Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [38]
But simply putting Mario on the cover for Super Mario Bros. 3 wasn’t enough. Nintendo knew it had a tremendous game here, a deep, deep experience that it could use to show off its versatility. It also knew that this was Mario’s final outing for the NES: folks in the home office were working on an improved gaming console. Arakawa was working a deal with McDonald’s Happy Meals to distribute toy likenesses from the game. But Super Mario Bros. 3 needed a big publicity stunt to open it. Something a big Hollywood movie would do.
That thinking eventually truncated down to “make a Hollywood movie.” It so happened that work on a feature version of Universal’s The Jetsons, scheduled for a holiday 1989 release, was six months behind. Would Nintendo be interested in making a movie about the allure of its games? When someone else offers to pay for an hour-anda-half commercial for your new product, you say yes. The fact that Universal, which not five years previous was suing Nintendo up and down for stealing King Kong, was now offering to foot the bill for a feature-length Nintendo ad speaks to Nintendo’s clout. It could not only get a movie green-lighted, it could have Voldemort fund it.
The result, The Wizard, was a monumentally awkward fusing of video game culture and family melodrama. A preteen Fred Savage and a teenage Christian Slater go on a road trip with their possibly autistic younger brother, Jimmy, who is the eponymous wizard at video games. Only Nintendo games, of course: much of the film’s dialogue is about particular Nintendo titles. When a rival game-player is introduced, for instance, he uses Nintendo’s Power Glove peripheral.
The three brothers (plus a girl they pick up, Jenny Lewis) travel to California for a video-game tournament. Jimmy’s gaming prowess is portrayed as akin to Dustin Hoffman’s mathematical ability in Rain Man. He’s even an expert at games he’s never played before. The tournament-winning game, by the way, which all the characters gush over, and which Jimmy wins to incredible roars from the crowd, is Super Mario Bros. 3.
SMB3 was released in Japan in 1988, but not on U.S. shores until 1990. In the meantime, The Wizard, despite opening in fifth place at the box office, stoked the fire for its release. The movie was clunky, but it definitely whetted the appetite for its target audience. (And its cast and crew escaped relatively unscathed: Fred Savage made The Wonder Years, Christian Slater became a leading man, director Todd Holland went onto helm The Larry Sanders Show and Malcolm in the Middle, and Jenny Lewis sings with the band Rilo Kiley.)
Super Mario Bros. 3 moved millions of copies its first day of release, February 12, 1990, two months after The Wizard hit theaters. The game would go on to sell 18 million copies, setting a Guinness record for the most popular game not bundled with a system. It’s since been beaten, but only by other Nintendo games. The continual bettering of the Big N’s profits started a thousand Nintendo-is-buying-us rumors from toy companies such as Mattel and Hasbro.
Miyamoto was vindicated. He once again had topped himself, and in a way people loved. Super Mario Bros. 3 is still considered one of the finest video games ever made, for any system. And with his last great success, Miyamoto was finally able to feel comfortable in the producer role. Like the athlete who can’t retire until he has that world championship, Miyamoto was ready now to let others share in the fun of trying to fold, spindle, and mutilate gaming’s leading man.
But only on Nintendo systems. Around this time Nintendo was approached by a small Texas game developer, who had come up with a side-scrolling game program. After adapting (and sprite-swapping) some