Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [49]
These changes seemed minor, but there were more substantial alterations. The world maps looked more like maps than grids. Moving the far mountains slowly as Mario walked, called parallax scrolling, augmented the illusion of depth. Redrawing all the sprites to look more 3-D helped too. Finishing an area called the Special Zone caused a sprite swap, turning piranha plants into pumpkins, giving turtles Mario masks to wear, and switching many other map and creature colors around.
But the drop-dead date of November 21, 1990 (its Japanese release), was unavoidable. Miyamoto had been late with all three Super Mario games, and didn’t like the feeling that ready or not, out this one would go in time for Christmas. One of his quotes has become regularly used in game design: “A late game is only late until it ships. A bad game is bad until the end of time.” The finished game has a hefty seventy-two levels, and rewarded players who found its dozens and dozens of secrets. It could have had even more, Miyamoto rued. But he still considers it his favorite of all the Mario titles.
Super Mario World was the pack-in game for the SNES, so it was the default guide to the new game system. The SNES sold for twenty-five thousand yen, a little over two hundred dollars, more than the TG-16 or the Genesis. It sold out in mere hours. New shipments were sent to stores at night, to avoid falling off the truck into the underground economy. Super Mario World would move three and a half million copies in Japan, and the SNES a whopping 17 million units.
Three days after the U.S. launch on August 13, 1991, American stores were out of consoles too. Some retailers started bundling the system with additional games, tacking on another C-note worth of goods onto a two-hundred-dollar purchase. Almost 13 million people paid for SMW bundle units domestically, close to four times the number in Japan. More than 23 million SNESes were sold stateside overall. The system even earned America’s ultimate compliment—it made it on The Simpsons, where fan favorite Ralph Wiggum called his principal’s boss “Super Nintendo” instead of “superintendent.” Every game system since has launched with various retail “bundles,” adding mandatory extra controllers or games to beef up the store’s sales.
Promoting the SNES on Pepsi and Kool-Aid packages helped young people know about the product launch. Oh, and Kraft’s Super Mario Macaroni & Cheese, and Sunshine’s Super Mario cookies. And the four-pack of Shasta sodas—Mario Punch, Luigi Berry, Yoshi Apple, and Princess Toadstool Cherry. Mario’s face was as sure a sign of unhealthy food as high-fructose corn syrup. (A golden opportunity was missed to rebrand Nes-Quik to SNES-Quik.)
But as Gore Vidal said, it’s not enough to succeed: others must fail. The SNES and Super Mario World were both smashes, but gamers didn’t abandon Sega just because Nintendo had a 16-bit system. There was finally a balance in the video game world. Nintendo’s years of writing its own rules for retailers and customers were coming to an end. It could no longer, say, try to muscle Blockbuster out of renting its games for three dollars for three days. If you wanted to rent a SNES game, Nintendo preferred you did so from a hotel room, for seven dollars an hour. But the big N wasn’t the only game in town anymore.
Perhaps that’s why a third style of NES was designed, and released in 1993 for a mere fifty dollars. It played the same NES Mario games, but removed the zero-insertion-force port for a top-loading toasterstyle slot, and a dog-bone controller. It also lost the expensive 10NES chip, so it could play unlicensed games. Sega still put out Master System games despite the Genesis’s popularity. Nintendo—without acknowledging it—was taking a page from Sega’s book, and keeping the fan base for the previous system happy.
For this redesigned NES, Miyamoto tried his hand at designing a puzzle game, with the seemingly simple Yoshi. (Around this time he