Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [48]
Uemura decided that, as with the NES, the SNES would be designed to showcase the audio and visual aspects of the game. Its microprocessor, the 65816 (this was still the era when chips were numbered instead of named) dated from 1984, so by 1990 it was well understood, and widely available at a low cost. Two additional chips were used in tandem to make the graphics. The SNES, essentially, could show a digital photo slideshow if it wanted.
The sound was beefed up, too: eight-channel, 16-bit sound (including a digital signal processor good enough to be in a synthesizer) that was almost completely removed architecturally from the graphics. You want a digital voice? A clip of a song? A barrage of sounds effects for a character’s actions? Can do.
The controller was changed from a brick to a more ergonomic dog’s bone shape. There were now four rainbow-colored action buttons, not just two or three. In addition, there were two shoulder buttons. This broke away from Nintendo’s original simplicity. But if a designer needed six distinct buttons for six different actions (think Street Fighter II), the SNES could do that. The Genesis couldn’t.
What the SNES couldn’t do, though, was lift. The Genesis has a beefier processor, which let Sega games run as fast as its spiny mascot. The SNES would never be able to do that, and it wisely didn’t try. What made Nintendo so successful wasn’t its hardware but its games. And, of course, its acumen; locking up third-party developers, doling out needed chips only to the companies that pleased Nintendo the most, testing out concepts in regional markets, selling the razors cheaply and making a fortune on the blades.
Shigeru Miyamoto’s team was given a mere fifteen months to get to know the SNES, learn to program it, and spit out the first three games. His producer job became a writ-large version of a Game & Watch classic; running to the Pilotwings development team, then going to check in on the F-Zero group, then racing over to Team Mario. Miyamoto didn’t drink, so for stress relief he smoked and hit the pachinko parlors. But he had grown into the producer role with aplomb. At last, Miyamoto was living the artist’s dream; to imagine an idea, have others do the work, and receive all the credit!
The Mario atelier was designing Super Mario World with two different goals in mind. One was to create a worthy follow-up to Super Mario Bros. 3. A new item, a feather, let Mario fly. A spin jump lets Mario crouch down to careen up extra high. Mario’s fire flower not only killed bad guys, but also made them turn into valuable coins. And to make Mario’s powers less of a crapshoot, players could gain and stockpile power-ups, deploying them when needed.
The other guiding principle was to show off what the SNES could do. Certain yellow bricks spun when hit, an animation the NES would have been hard-pressed to do convincingly. The bricks themselves were given softer edges, like well-worn toy blocks, which made Mario seem more like a toy himself. Mario now had a white circle on his hat, with a red M on it. His overalls were a lighter blue, more suggestive of denim. He could duck, be cartoonishly scorched, and shriek in comic horror at his fate.
Sometimes showing off and making a good game went hand in hand. Miyamoto, for years, had wanted Mario to do one specific thing he could never attain with the NES architecture: ride a freakin’ dinosaur. Now Mario could. In keeping with the series’ nomenclature confusion, the dinosaur he rode was called Yoshi (big Y)—but the species of dinosaur was also called a yoshi (little Y). Taxonomy was never Miyamoto’s strongest suit. While Mario stayed the same size, Yoshi started out small, and needed to be made bigger by his signature attack: gulping down enemies.
Many game changes were to strike the right balance for the best flow. Halfway through every level was a checkpoint: if Mario died, he would come back to life at the checkpoint, instead of the beginning. After playing through a level once, Mario could quit mid-level, just by hitting start. These functions,