Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [54]
13 – MARIO THE JUGGLER
MARIO PAINT
People mixed up the two prominent men named Howard at Nintendo of America. Howard Phillips was the Games Master and star of the Nintendo Power cartoon. Once Philips left, though, VP and general counsel Howard Lincoln wasn’t mistaken for anyone else.
Many people say they had a Norman Rockwell childhood, but Lincoln has the evidence. He and his Boy Scout troop posed for Rockwell’s painting The Scoutmaster: Howard is the boy just to the right of the campfire. He grew up to be an Eagle Scout, got his law degree, and then took on two clients who ran a modest import business.
Those two clients were Ron Judy and Al Stone, and when NOA brought them into the fold, and then needed a lawyer, they brought him in. He had been a Nintendo exec ever since the King Kong fiasco, and he and Arakawa had complementary skills. Lincoln brought the press-savvy glad-handing, while Arakawa was more of a CEO, keeping the operation running smoothly. Despite their titles, Lincoln sometimes seemed more like a corporate president, especially since he talked with reporters more often than Awakawa.
Lincoln was also white: he had an aquiline nose and Johnny Carson’s knowing grin. Most of the NOA higher-ups were Japanese: for a division with “America” in its name, its management didn’t look much like America. In fact, there had been criticisms that NOA had so few black employees. By 1992 Nintendo had upgraded to a more diverse workforce, but the complaints about the company were just beginning.
Despite turning iD Software away, Nintendo decided that maybe one or two educational computer games might not be too harmful to its hegemony. So they allowed Interplay to release the self-explanatory Mario Teaches Typing for DOS and then Mac. When the world did not collapse in on itself, Nintendo followed this up with a pair of DOS-BASED digital coloring books, with line drawings of Mario and Luigi in action that kids could print out at home.
Keeping with the educational theme, Nintendo released a trio of educational SNES games, the Mario’s Early Years series. It was a McDonalds-worthy attempt to turn Mario into every child’s friend, someone Mom and Dad would find friendly and inoffensive. (Years later there would be whole colleges devoted to ludology, the study of games.) But no matter how good Mario’s edutainment games were, he could not break out of his fun-buddy box to become a teacher. The reverse is true as well: imagine 1992’s Barney the Dinosaur, the lowest of low-hanging pop culture targets, trying to sell an action-adventure show to teens.
Nintendo’s goodwill efforts, such as a hands-free controller so paralyzed kids could game, were backfiring in ways it couldn’t imagine. Senator Slade Gorton (R-Wash) had asked Nintendo (with its Scrooge McDuck money vault of cash) to save the Seattle Mariners baseball franchise, which would otherwise be moving down to Florida. He had helped lure baseball back to Seattle, after the Seattle Pilots left after its first year, 1969, to become the Milwaukee Brewers. Gorton had already been turned down by Bill Gates of Microsoft. Arakawa called up Yamauchi, and was shocked to hear his father-in-law agree, offering seventy-five million dollars of his own money. Gorton structured the deal so others controlled the team: Yamauchi wanted little say. It was the sort of lousy deal—expensive, little chance of long-term profits, and absolutely no short-term gains—that prompted conspiracy theories that the Japanese were trying to buy the world.
This was maybe the first time Nintendo’s contacts with U.S. senators was positive. Every year another politician would make a speech or hold an inquiry about video games: were they too violent? Should they be regulated? Did