Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [42]
As a Nintendo Power editor, Phillips helped come up with the modern strategy guide. Images of each board of Super Mario Bros. were stitched together to display every obstacle and villain Mario would face, and printed small enough so a good dozen screen were included per row. The result looked like Cinerama film strips from a virtual world. The board stretched on for miles, branching off into multiple avenues, sometimes betraying when an underground jaunt didn’t correspond in length with its aboveground stretch.
This was done to help sell the games, but it had a value beyond mere marketing. The guides helped gamers through tough sequences, which not only kept them playing but showed them facets of the game that only experts would otherwise find. Strategy guides for video games now bring in over a hundred million dollars a year. In addition, every game (no matter how small) has a dozen or more fan-made walkthroughs, contributed and collected at sites like gameFAQs.com. The Mario game walkthroughs are the length of Victorian novels.
“Howard” disappeared from the strip two years into its run, replaced by just Nester. This was because Howard Phillips himself left Nintendo, poached away by LucasArts to be their games guru. Nintendo was in continual expansion, so having someone leave was almost unprecedented, especially from the job of “spokesgamer.” (It still is: Nintendo employees stay on for decades.) The coolest job at the coolest company had its downside, though: long hours; low wages—despite Nintendo literally making billions each year, it paid its employees conservatively; and poor job security. Howard Phillips had clear competition as company mascot, competition who sold millions of games every year. Nintendo’s focus was shifting from gamers (like Phillips) to games. And there just wasn’t anyone in creation who could be a worthy rival to Mario.
Since the late 1970s, Sega wasn’t so much the Pepsi to Nintendo’s Coke as it was the RC Cola. It had been Rosencrantzing and Guildensterning its way around the gaming world for decades, always buffeted by the wake of others, rarely the one making waves.
Sega began life in 1940 as Standard Games, running penny arcades on military bases in the territory of Hawaii. A decade later, under the name of Service Games, it merged with American expatriate David Rosen’s company, which was putting photo booths around Tokyo. The combined venture was called Sega Enterprises—SeGa for Service Games.
Sega was bought in 1969 by Gulf + Western, an American zaibatsu-style conglomerate parodied in the Mel Brooks film Silent Movie as Engulf + Devour. Rosen stayed on as Sega moved from electromechanical hits like Periscope to video games such as Zaxxon and 005, a James Bond knockoff. The arcade titles (including Congo Bongo, a suspiciously familiar game about an angry ape throwing things) brought in $200 million worth of quarters over the years. But Sega also tried its hand at some home consoles—1981’s SG-1000 and a cheapo sequel a few years later. Gulf + Western dropped Sega like a hot potato in 1983, thinking that gaming was a bubble that had just burst.
Sega’s third console was the Mark III, which it quickly renamed the Master System. Its merits were dubious: it was backward compatible with two previous game systems no one knew about; it could accept cards or cartridge-based games; its mascot was an egg-shaped spaceship name Opa-Opa. When Opa-Opa flopped as a character, Sega replaced the spaceship with Alex Kidd, a monkey boy whose dull, difficult, different adventures (in subsequent games he fights ninjas, then playing cards, then fights a boss called Mari-Oh [!], then is a BMX rider) gave him little identity. Alex was a winded rival’s sad attempt to “make” a Mario by plopping the same