Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [55]
When word got out Nintendo was trying to save the Mariners, it was branded not as a helping hand but as Japan trying to buy our national pastime. Even some Japanese thought it was in poor taste. A commission of baseball owners was formed to decide if the move would be allowed. Commissioner Fay Vincent’s initial comments against the purchase came off as more anti-Japanese than pro-American. Things looked bleak.
The deal’s savior may well have been the managing general partner of the Texas Rangers, who helped convince the other owners that the Nintendo purchase was best for the game, and for America. That owner had a notable name, George W. Bush. His father was the president, who counted Japan as a key trading ally. Bush Junior convinced the other owners to approve the purchase. He would go on to use his powers of persuasion as a politician himself, getting elected as a two-term governor of Texas, then president.
Miyamoto wasn’t involved in the Mario educational games; they were done by outside firms. But he thought the flow potential of coloring a Mario image on screen was strong. It was part of his team’s job to draw everything in the game, after all, and his team loved its jobs. So what about a drawing program? This would be Mario’s oddest departure from the platformer genre yet, since unlike puzzle or sports games a painting simulation wasn’t even a game. No time limit, no points, no dangers, no characters, no bonuses. But to Miyamoto, Mario was about play, not just gameplay.
The biggest immediate hurdle was the interface: the SNES controller wasn’t calibrated to move as fast or as accurately as a mouse. Even if it was, asking players to gain that supple movement just in their thumb was a too-tall order. Mouse users moved their whole hand, and the device scaled down that movement. It just wasn’t replicable in a directional pad without a fatally fast cursor. Miyamoto had recently quit gambling in honor of his fortieth birthday. As a follow-up, he quit smoking and started exercising. If he could accccomplish all that, he could get over this hurdle.
They needed a mouse. This gibed with Yamauchi’s long-term vision of Nintendo as a communications company. Its NES, after all, started off life as a Famicon, with a keyboard and a modem and an AOL-like network. Sega forced his hand to release a 16-bit system, and to close the book on having the world funnel every aspect of life—work, play, cooking, sports, finance—through the NES. Arakawa had his doubts about the idea, and preferred to keep the company focused on games, instead of trying to compete with Silicon Valley. But getting a computer device into homes was a great second chance for Yamauchi’s strategy of Nintendo as a communications company.
For starters, Mario Paint (which would come bundled with a mouse and mouse pad for sixty dollars) offered a decent painting simulator, complete with a gray mouse with two purple buttons. Line drawings of various Mario characters were included, for coloring fun. A tool let players place individual pixels, just like the designers at Nintendo did, to recreate favorite characters. (It was more difficult than it appeared.) Players could design their own stamps, move them around, and make an animated short. (More than a decade later, the first of Web comic Homestar Runner’s animated episodes was made this way, with a presumably hacked ROM of Mario Paint.) The practically mandatory Mario Paint strategy guide included pixel-by-pixel images of about every Mario character under the sun, and then some.
As an addition to the animation feature, Mario Paint featured a Music Composer, so the stories could have music to them. (There was another, more complex way of adding