Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [40]
There would be no backlight, for instance. Backlights were expensive, they ate up battery, they were heavy. Sure, people would complain the “Game Boy” (as it was being called) couldn’t be played in the dark. But their unspoken desire for a light, cheap, long-lasting product outweighed the backlight’s pros. There would also be, alarmingly, no color—another battery drain. Yokoi instead proposed a grisaille color palette: all gray, or rather a Soviet olive-green. He almost gave himself an ulcer worrying about Sharp’s investment in the screens, especially when an early version was too hard to see head-on, and reflected a glare from an angle. But he and Sharp worked it out at the eleventh hour: the four different shades of green-gray pixels displayed fine. “Creamed spinach color,” as a rival’s advertisement snidely put it.
Yokoi was indulgent in other areas. Each Game Boy would come with ear bud headphones. This allowed a more private gaming experience, let the games exist in stereo instead of the mono speaker, and saved more precious batteries. A battery pack accessory would let gamers play 24-7. Two-player games would be possible with a link cable and a connector port. Many other small touches, like an on-off switch that locked in the cartridge, made the device durable and smart.
Yokoi’s team was at work on a suite of launch games, which read like a minihistory of gaming. First was Tennis, an update of Pong. Then Alleyway, a tribute to Breakout and other paddle-ball games. Then Baseball, a shared love of the United States and Japan. Of course, a Mario game was in development as well. The Game Boy would play identical to the NES, so developers already knew how to program for it.
Minoru Arakawa decided the Game Boy would have Tetris as a pack-in game, not Mario. Nintendo had been a part in a years-long battle over who owned rights to Alexis Pajitnov’s falling-block game. (The whole story is excellently told in David Sheff’s Game Over.) Like the Brooklyn Bridge, most of the people who said they owned it—this included a reformed Atari, who found a way around the lockout chip and were going to sell a NES Tetris without Nintendo’s approval—were sold bogus licenses. Turns out the Soviets never sold it in the first place—and all the millions of Tetris fans were all playing ultimately stolen games.
Arakawa went after the rights hard, following his own gut feeling that America would love the game in handheld form. He flew to Moscow to personally meet with the Soviets, and offered some of Nintendo’s cubic mile of cash. He walked away with console rights, handheld rights, and the eternal ire of Atari. Mikhail Gorbachev even weighed in, personally promising a rival company’s execs that Nintendo wouldn’t get the rights. It did no good, and Nintendo kept its rights. (Welcome to capitalism, tovarich.)
Tetris was a masterpiece. Puzzle games turned out to be the Game Boy’s bread and butter: no fancy graphics needed, and its portable nature let it be the new crossword puzzle or Rubik’s Cube. Plus, it meant that people wanting a Mario game still had to plunk down another thirty dollars to buy it. Just to be safe, Mario received cameos in Tetris (he and Luigi appear in two-person games), Tennis (he’s the player) and Alleyway (the blocks form his face at one point). Only Baseball escaped him.
Miyamoto was grinding away producing other Mario and Zelda games, so Yokoi and his new protégé Satoru Okada would try to shrink down the Mario experience without losing the grand scope. It would get a new name—Super Mario Land—because the conceit was this wasn’t the Mushroom Kingdom but a whole new land to explore, Sarasaland.
Many minor details were different. Mario still attacked by jumping, still grabbed coins and mushrooms, still shot fireballs and gained invincibility with stars. But instead of Princess Toadstool, Mario was saving a dark-haired princess named Daisy. He rode a submarine in one level, and an airplane in another. He could