Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [46]
Naka continued working on more Sonic games, eventually weaving in a supporting cast—Tails the fox, Knuckles the Echidna, another hedgehog named Amy Rose—that reinforced Sonic’s bad-boy image. Amy Rose pined for Sonic—but he was too busy to ever notice. Tails looked up to Sonic like a younger sibling. Knuckles was Sonic’s bitter rival. All existed to smartly shine Sonic’s rising star, and make him the centerpiece of the game.
Mario, on the other hand, didn’t need a crew of characters who all said how awesome he was. He was kept purposefully mute, a mere avatar for the audience, his specificity of look and demeanor making him that much more universal. Nintendo would not change its actions just because a competitor had finally made some grounds in terms of market share.
Besides, the next Mario game in the pipeline would crush Sega.
PART 3
SWEET 16
11 – MARIO’S CLASH
THE SONIC-MARIO SHOWDOWN
The man behind the Nintendo Entertainment System was Masayuki Uemura. Uemura had grown up in Japan’s poor postwar years without much money. He taught himself engineering, and successfully built a remote-controlled airplane from bits of scrap he found in a junkyard. This skill led him to study electrical engineering in college, and then to work for Sharp with the new technology of solar cells. He specialized in optical semiconductors, which were the infrastructure of the power source.
Part of Uemura’s job was explaining this new technology to potential clients. One day around 1971, Sharp sent him, with his thatch of thick hair parted evenly over a growing forehead, to a potential client in Kyoto. It was a toy and card manufacturer named Nintendo. Uemura and one of Nintendo’s engineers, Gunpei Yokoi, hit it off, as only two grown men still interested in designing toys can. Yokoi’s knack for finding the fun in everything, combined with Uemura’s knowledge of the solar cells, could bear fruit.
Or it could bear arms. This solar-cell technology could be used for a light gun game. Shooting a light gun at a sheet of such cells would light up only the one that was hit. It’d be as direct as pushing a button on a calculator. But it would require a whole screen of photodiodes, which was impractical.
It would take an engineering genius to think of a practical solution; luckily, two of them were working on the project. The trick was to reverse the iconic thinking of the gun as the transmitter and the screen as the receiver. If the gun were the receiver, all you would need was one small photodiode in the cannon. For the screen to be the transmitter, whatever image it currently showed would have to be replaced (when the trigger was pulled) for a single frame with blackness, then another frame of blackness save for the white target. If the photodiode ever saw white, then it was aimed at the target at the time of firing. Thus was born Nintendo’s Beam Gun, one of its first hit electronic games. Out of this technology grew a slew of Nintendo products: the Wild Gunman electromechanical arcade game, the Laser Clay Pigeon Shooting System (which set up in bowling alleys), and the NES Zapper.
Uemura stayed on at Nintendo, and became not only its technical guru but also one of President Yamauchi’s wisest advisors. When he saw the Magnavox Odyssey, he told Yamauchi that Nintendo could get into the same business, if it partnered with someone with experience making mass-market electronics products. That led to a partnership with Mitsubishi, and the Color TV Game 6 and 15.
Once the Game & Watch line was a hit in 1980, Uemura started work on a new home console, this one cartridge-based. Just a few years had made for a tremendous increase in technology speed, and for much less yen. Arcade-quality graphics, stereo sound, and screens brimming with sprites were now possible. He could even make a 16-bit system, more powerful than most personal computers at the time.
Uemura remembered, however, that this was Nintendo. Yamauchi would have a fit if he saw how much 16-bit processors cost. Uemura scaled