Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [53]
Second, Nintendo advertised to children, who controlled many family purse strings but didn’t have the BS detectors of adults. Adults played too, and Nintendo was working to place its products in electronics stores as well as toy shops. But its fan base was eight- to thirteen-year-old boys.
Third, Nintendo was enormous, controlling about 85 percent of the video game marketplace. It raked in billions every year. And it used its heft to insert onerous clauses into business contracts no one with any choice would agree to. For instance, Nintendo invariably was paid in full from just about everyone they did business with. It had no accounts receivable, despite being hugely liquid, and easily able to offer credit to its vendors.
Fourth, Nintendo’s fear of “pulling an Atari” and letting the market be flooded with shoddy cartridges turned into a miserly refusal to let anyone else manufacture Nintendo cartridges. This left Nintendo with fewer profits that it might have had. But an unexpected windfall of sales would make the stock price fluctuate—up with the good news, then down when the spree was over. The risk was the dip might be greater than the extra sales, leaving Nintendo with the absurd choice of either doing nothing and making a profit or decreasing shareholder value due to better-than-expected sales. Nintendo chose slow and steady. Nabisco had done the same thing with Oreo cookies recently, underselling the market and leaving hundreds of millions of potential cookie sales on the table, to avoid a jittery Wall Street.
The best thing for Nintendo, really, was Sega. Sega grabbed hundreds in millions of dollars in sales, set up Nintendo’s first console rival with the Genesis, and helped retailers have more of a say in their video game business. Nintendo had been an unstoppable power, yes, but now it had competition. And with it came a reason other than artistic satisfaction to release quality games. That would result in better sales, better deals for third-party vendors, and more discounts for retailers. Nintendo was the game industry for a while, but the Genesis’s arrival made it a two-person race. Seeing the writing on the wall, Nintendo allowed its vendors to make Genesis games. It was nice to level the playing field, but this move also reduced the number of “exclusive” titles for the Genesis.
Proof of Nintendo’s new ingenuity could be found at a 1994 gaming trade show. Arakawa wanted to impress people more so than usual, and contacted a company that could develop real-time computer graphics. At the trade show, the virtual Mario was going to talk. All they needed was a convincing Mario—someone other than Bob Hoskins.
Vocal actors learn to be broad, so the personality comes across more. “Italian plumber from Brooklyn,” for most voice actors, would signify a “fuhgeddaboutit” type of voice. Having their cherished icon sound like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas would have been terrible, disastrous. But one auditioner, not knowing who Mario was, went for more of a Chico Marx.
His chipper falsetto started pouring forth, in a genial ramble about how nice it was to be there, how much he liked everyone, and how they’d all go make a pizza. “It’s-a me, Mario! Wee-heee!” Mickey Mouse via Milan. The actor, Charles Martinet, got the job working the Mario-in-Real-Time (MIRT) device, thanks to the spicy meat-a-ball accent. Small sensors were glued onto his face, and he hid behind an Oz-ian curtain for the trade show. On the MIRT monitor, an on-thefly animated Mario conversed with everyone who walked by, talking video games, Italian food, plumbing, family, whatever.
Martinet has gone on to voice countless Mario cartoons and video games, buttoning down just about every appearance since. (He’s also the voice of the Cat in the Hat, and records in fluent French