Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [51]
The directors had a shoot-length argument with the studio over whether they were making a movie for adults (they filmed a scene with strippers, which was cut) or for children (they refused to have Mario and Luigi in costume, thinking them silly, but eventually relented). Production ran very long: Leguizamo and Hoskins started doing shots of scotch just to make it through the day. Hoskins hadn’t known he was making a video game movie until his son told him who Mario was. Rewrites to the script were done on a daily basis. Rocky Morton reportedly poured a cup of hot coffee over an extra, because he wanted his costume dirtier. Leguizamo drove a van drunk during one shot, and braked too hard. It caused the sliding door to slam on Hoskins’ finger: he wore a pink cast for most subsequent shots. The crew started to wear T-shirts with rude phrases the directors had said, as a form of protest.
The result, a film that seemed embarrassed and apologetic about its very existence, was not fun for kids or adults. It opened in fourth place over Memorial Day weekend of 1993, and within a month had dropped from the top twenty. The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park chased it out of theaters. Morton and Jankel retreated into directing commercials. Hoskins told the Guardian it’s “the worst thing I ever did.” Leguizamo at least got a relationship out of it—until Mathis dumped him for new costar River Phoenix. But, as with true film flops, it disappeared from theaters so quickly that most people weren’t even aware of it. It didn’t even get nominated for a Razzie—for that, Mario should thank his lucky star sprites he came out the same year as three Sylvester Stallone films.
GAME DESIGNERS IN KYOTO WERE EXCITED FOR A REASON that had nothing to do with Hollywood. Uemura had designed eight “modes” for the SNES, called Mode 0 through Mode 7. This gave designers eight different game machines to program. Mode 7 was the most dramatic: It allowed the camera to scale and rotate a 2-D surface, creating what appeared to be a 3-D world. It was a narcissist’s dream come true: the world literally revolved around the character. And if that surface was, say, a racetrack, you could continually move the point of reference to simulate velocity.
Mode 7 was the place to be. Certainly it wasn’t something that the Genesis or the weak TG-16 could do. Shigeru Miyamoto based two of his three launch games around Mode 7 architecture: the third was, of course, Super Mario World. Pilotwings started life as Dragonfly, a game about gun-ladened insects involved in dogfights. By the time the game was finished, the insect combat theme had morphed into a more simple concept: flight simulator. The ground got very blurry up close, but players only saw the ground right before a crash—or a safe landing.
F-Zero went in another direction—and went there at about three hundred miles per hour. The year was 2560, humanity had used alien technology to perfect society’s ills, and bored billionaires had started a hovercraft league as a sort of twenty-sixth-century polo; the new sport of kings. Miyamoto gave his developers a lot of freedom to follow their bliss with the games: the insect combat game could lose both the insect and the combat angles. The racing game could develop very strong anime influences. So long as they played well, and looked good, their content was secondary. Not unimportant, mind you. But 3-D was new, and people would take a year or so to get used to it before they wanted to do more than just zoom around in (forced) three dimensions.
Topping the wish list was a two-player racing game. But simply doubling the Mode 7 via a split screen would make the racers move comically slow: no way this would ever pass as F-Zero 2. But slower would work fine for a go-kart race, where no one’s expecting speed. That idea freed up the team to give the