Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [47]
The Famicon took a few years to develop, and as it moved to the United States and became the NES it lost many of its computer features. But it still had flaws. While the Famicon was top-loading, the NES was set up like a VCR, with cartridges inserted sideways. Too much pressure, or too much use, could make the connector pins bend. And the wide alley collected dust. Notoriously, people tried to fix their dusty systems by blowing into the NES, and onto their cartridges’ exposed pins. Moist air, though, was to computer parts as garlic was to vampires. Uemura knew that the “zero-insertion-force” drive on the NES was a mistake, even if it hadn’t affected American sales. He’d not make the same mistake again on his new video game system.
The mere fact that Yamauchi allowed a successor to the NES took years of argument. The Atari 2600, the Apple II, the Vic-20: all became dead as the Sargasso sea once their successors were announced. Consumers didn’t want to buy a system with a death date, developers didn’t want to program for it, and retailers didn’t want to stock it. And for every successful successor—the Commodore 64 for the Vic-20—there was an Edsel-ish Atari 5200. Yamauchi didn’t want to pull the brakes on the gravy train just yet.
He had already experienced one hardware failure—the Famicon Disk System. It was an add-on peripheral that accepted proprietary three-inch floppy disks, which contained more storage than a regular Famicon cartridge. That is, until developers started putting extra chips in the cartridges, making games that started out life as disk games, like Super Mario Bros., playable on the NES. The disks’ other feature was their erasability: when you’re done with one game, wipe it clean at the game store and load on another. But the idea of paying for a license was new: what if you wanted to replay the old game? Yamauchi didn’t help by inflicting onerous licenses on any store who wanted a Disk System hub. Despite selling in the millions, the Disk System never made it out of Japan.
And Nintendo’s “Family Computer Communications Network System”—using the Japanese Famicon’s modem capability—wasn’t the huge success Yamauchi had envisioned either. People needed a computer, a screen, and a modem to download recipes, trade stocks (the NintenDow?), and read sports scores. But it also took a societal evolution, and society was still getting used to video games and computers. It would be another decade before “the series of tubes” (as a joke t-shirt put it, depicting Super Mario navigating some pipes) would snake their way into the world’s homes. Not even the game sellers showed much interest in joining “Club Super Mario,” a supposed pipeline for new product information.
The Turbo-Grafx-16 and the Genesis were gaining market share. Their graphics were undeniably more detailed: they were better engines for gaming. People hadn’t stopped buying Nintendo games, but “Nintendo” was no longer synonymous for “video game.” Arakawa’s laissez-faire strategy wasn’t working. Nintendo had to act—but when? Like a squad leader waiting for the right second to order his archers to fire, Yamauchi waited, and waited, and waited. One day in 1988, he saw the whites of their eyes, and gave the order: Develop a 16-bit game system.
The new system would be called the Super Famicon, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in America. The entire console was given the adjective of its most popular game series, Super Mario. (That Mario’s face wasn’t emblazoned on the D-pads was a sign of restraint.) Backward compatibility would have cost an extra seventy-five dollars per unit, so Yamauchi and Awakawa decided to forego it. It was a tough call, but being inexpensive was worth