Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [39]
The corporate thumb, though, pointed down. If gamers could play Nintendo’s games outside of the NES, they might stop buying the NES. As a computer game maker, no matter how profitable, Nintendo would be following, not leading. So it turned down what would have been some nice short-term money to ensure its long-term stability. Discouraged but not beaten, the indie developers moved to Dallas and developed an original PC side-scroller, Commander Keen. Then the game engine’s inventor, John Carmack, devised a way to simulate 3-D first-person graphics on a computer. He, and id Software cofounder John Romero, went on to create the classics: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and the entire shooter genre. They all might have been Nintendo exclusives, if Nintendo had been willing to share Mario with the computer.
9 – MARIO’S BROTHERS
THE NES AND THE GAME BOY
Shigeru Miyamoto’s reputation as a Steven Spielberg or George Lucas of video games was being built with every new title. But games are a young franchise compared to film. Spielberg, Lucas, and their seventies ilk were building on close to a hundred years of filmmaking grammar, from cutaway close-ups to ending with a big explosion.
Video games were barely twenty years old: their storytelling grammar was still being developed. Miyamoto would more properly be compared to Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, a gifted prodigy whose breezy onscreen antics belie how incredibly difficult it was to pull off. Miyamoto’s mentor Gunpei Yokoi, then would be in the D. W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMille role, the patriarch whose work was the foundation upon which all others build upon. Anyone who uses a directional pad, after all, is playing a Yokoi game.
Yokoi certainly racked up internal accolades for his work, serving as one of Yamauchi’s top R&D daimyos. But he was an inventor first, and seemed to have a side business of inventing new profit centers for Nintendo, and finding new leaders to run them. First came the Ultra Hand and various other devices. Then the Game & Watch series, which continued throughout the eighties. Then his handholding for Miyamoto on the Donkey Kong series. When Miyamoto was given his own R&D division, Yokoi worked with new talent to create games like Clu Clu Land (a maze game) and Balloon Fight (which copied everything from Joust that Mario Bros. didn’t). Yokoi’s team was fast, learned quick, and got better with every game.
After mastering the basic programming skills, Yokoi let his crew run wild with Kid Icarus, which merged the Ice Climber verticality with more action. Then came Metroid, an outstanding achievement that merged multiple play styles, horizontal and vertical action, and a tense, gripping, science-fiction atmosphere. Plus, it has a stunner of an ending: Samus Arau takes off his spacesuit to reveal that “he” is really a she, gaming’s first great heroine.
But by 1989, the Game & Watch franchise was dying down. Why buy a whole system (albeit a sliver of one) to play just one game? Yokoi began brainstorming a handheld gaming system with removable cartridges. They’d been tried before, but the results were poor, hard to decipher, and worst of all expensive. Yokoi understood price, hardware, playability, and consumer interest. He could do it.
Price, as with the Famicon, was king. It had to be cheap, but not cheaply made. Yokoi insisted on using existing technology instead of cutting-edge hardware, which was both expensive and untested by time. It was his philosophy: Kareta Gijutsu no Suihei Shikou, which awkwardly translates to Lateral Thinking of Seasoned Technology, or applying new ideas using off-the-shelf parts. (Kareta can also be translated as the elegant “mature” or the condescending “withered.”) Technology, memory, transistor speed: everything grew smaller and cheaper. So why pay for top-dollar top-shelf parts, and have