Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [44]
Sonic’s creator, his Miyamoto, was Yuji Naka. Naka was young: he had been in high school during the crash of ’83. He was from Osaka, and had grown up a generation removed from the war. He spoke fluent English, but loved Japanese synth-pop. He was handsome. Figuring he’d learn more with on-the-job training, he never went to college, and talked his way into Sega as a programmer. He had cut his teeth on the Phantasy Star line of role-playing games, which were easily among the Master System’s best. He had a hard time managing staff, preferring to do everything himself. For fun, and to show off, he built an NES emulator for the Master System.
Sonic was different: he was the poster child for the ADHD generation, an anime speedster with spiky hair, a constant smirk, and what in retrospect would be the defining hallmark of the nascent 1990s: “attitude.” He looked like Mickey Mouse channeling Sid Vicious, or Felix the Cat as a base jumper. Sonic’s finger waggled at you from the title screen, like he was on The Jerry Springer Show (which also premiered in 1991). If you left the controller idle while playing, he impatiently tapped his feet. As a character, he was expressly built to showcase Nintendo’s weaknesses. Mario was jolly: Sonic was rude. Mario was happily unrushed: Sonic’s express purpose was to rush. Mario changed into lots of clever outfits. Sonic didn’t have to change: he was as ruthlessly perfect as a shark.
This was new for Nintendo. Plenty of people had made inferior side-scrolling platform adventures. They were fan fiction at best, people who didn’t understand what made Mario tick trying to duplicate his efforts. Naka’s Sonic was a four-fingered glove across Nintendo’s cheek. He cast all of Nintendo’s positives as negatives. Affordability and creativity became inferiority and impotence. Nintendo was popular? Well, as the middle-school logic goes, it’s not cool anymore if everyone likes it. If Nintendo was the jovial uncle Mario happy to play with the kids, then the Genesis was the rebellious teen cousin Sonic who drove too fast and snuck cigarettes.
This argument between corporate mascots is, of course, risible. Sega and Nintendo were in the same business, operating under the same rules. Corporate philosophy may drive a board of directors’ meeting, but for the designers trying to digitally paint a background or map out some extra processing power, it was academic. Yet this was a serious issue for the young consumer. Mario was lame and Sonic was cool, went the new social paradigm. You could still play a Mario game, just like you could go pick flowers for your mom if you wanted. At school you pretended you were allowed to stay up late to watch the overtime, you said you loved all the hit new music, and you praised Sonic for being def and rad and bitchin’.
Worst of all for Nintendo was, appropriately, Sonic’s speed. From its launch day on June 23, Sonic was the Genesis’ new pack-in game. Anyone who recently bought a Genesis with Altered Beast packed in could receive a free Sonic. Sega even retrofitted a version to play on the Master System. Sonic soon appeared in a hit series of cartoons, comic books, and all the merchandise that went in between. Sega dropped the Genesis’s price to $150, and set up a domestic gaming division to makes games for American audiences. After fifty years in the gaming business, Sega was an enfant terrible.
Nintendo hadn’t had an easy climb to the top, but once it was there it continued to act like a team down by fourteen, instead of up by twenty-one. (Psych journals have reported on this “overdog” effect, showing that teams work harder when they have more face to lose.) It made toy stores, who usually had a “December 12” policy of not having to pay for any shipments until well into the Christmas season, pay up-front for everything. It continued to manufacture all cartridges, putting third-party vendors at Nintendo’s mercy during parts shortages. It set up its own divisions in