Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [45]
Sega found a way to challenge Nintendo despite not having available third-party support, or an established fan base, or known brands. Sonic wasn’t a perfect game—it was very short, and too easy. But pointing that out in public would be treating them as equals, which played into Sonic’s and Sega’s game. For Pete’s sake, Paul McCartney was just in Japan, and he passed up a visit to Mount Fuji to meet Shigeru Miyamoto. Any Beatles stopping by Sega headquarters? “Sega is nothing,” Yamauchi said to a reporter, a quote that ended up pasted onto many Sega employees’ doors.
Minoru Arakawa’s strategy to fight Sonic, then, was to do little other than cross his fingers that Sega went bankrupt. Mario licensing was big: the first of a dozen Nintendo Adventure books had just hit bookstores, featuring choose-your-own-adventure style adventures for Mario. Nintendo already had its new 16-bit console in development. It would be foolish to rush it to market too early, or to launch in the United States and Japan simultaneously: Japan was the acid test for gaming. (One that Sega failed, incidentally.)
But maybe they could gin up a new Mario game, a sort of hail Mario pass. Gunpei Yokoi’s team had designed an excellent Game Boy puzzle title, which built on the success of Tetris. The screen starts out full of blocks in one of three hues, and the player has to drop two-block units down to clear the rows. It played like starting a half-lost game of Tetris. And, it was a Mario game. The game field was a bottle, the blocks were viruses, and Mario had to drop “pills” to clear the board. It was closer to waste management than medicine, but Garbage Man Mario didn’t have a good ring to it. Dr. Mario did, though. And since its graphic needs were so basic, quality versions could be made for the NES, Game Boy, and the arcade. (Where one of the big hits of the year was Sega’s own puzzle game, Columns.)
Dr. Mario did quite well, selling more than five million copies, further establishing the puzzle genre as a viable field. Tetris had given gamers a jones for puzzle games. And while great ones were hard to make, imperfect ones practically grew on trees. For the Game Boy especially, it seemed half of all the new games released were puzzle games: Boxxle, Pipe Dream, Qix. But only a few had the simplicity of game play and design to be intuitive: Dr. Mario, Tetris, and Columns. (In fact, Nintendo released a combo cartridge called Tetris & Dr. Mario.)
Another Dr. Mario accomplishment was to upgrade Mario to the star of a game that had nothing to do with Mario’s wheelhouse of jumping, costumes, turtles, saving princesses from King Koopa, etc. It was a puzzle game, pure and simple. Having Mario be in it was fine—discovering him in a Nintendo game was like finding the Alfred Hitchcock cameo, or searching out the word Nina in an Al Hirschfeld drawing. But to name the game after him? Who would see the word “Mario” and think “puzzle game”?
Dr. Mario wasn’t phoned in, and Nintendo felt its quality earned the right to have Mario on the cover. Mario was a celebrity endorser, Michael Jordan in overalls. While Sega was building its mascot Sonic with mercenary aplomb, Nintendo turned Mario into the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
Sonic’s rebellious attitude apparently wasn’t a whole-cloth invention from Yuji Naka. He cut ties with Sega’s Japanese headquarters—he wasn’t being paid what he deserved, he said—and went to work for one of Sega’s new U.S. divisions. He brought a slew of Japanese designers with him; the development team was a little bit of Tokyo in the heart of Los Angeles. It was as if Naka couldn’t stay, but didn’t really want to leave, either. There is a philosophical term invented by Schopenhauer for being equally hurt by staying too close or staying too far away. It is called the hedgehog’s dilemma—think prickly