Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [57]
A much better response to the times was spinning off the villain of Super Mario Land 2, Mario’s evil twin, Wario, into his own game. Wario as a name worked on a variety of levels—in English it suggested war and wariness, the literal flipside of Mario. In Japanese, wariu means bad. He was given a gin blossomy nose, a mustache like Charlie Brown’s sweater zigzag, and a big, mean build that piled on the muscle and fat. He wore yellow and purple—although, of course, for the Game Boy that was green on green.
If Mario started off life as a carpenter, Wario was a deconstruction worker. He was the titular star of Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3. The game may well have been designed by the Zucker Brothers, or at least Jacques Derrida: Wario is a sneering greedy bully, knocking over anyone who stands in his way. The positive goal of trying to get a high score is recast as pure avarice. With enough gold coins, Wario can buy a castle. And with a castle, he can rub it in Mario’s face. (Wario’s eyes are green, after all.) He moves like an angry ape, and is immune to most damage since he knocks over whoever he touches. But Wario never has easy access to the enemies he wants to clobber, so he has to puzzle out how to reach them.
The antihero nature of Wario must have had its attractors, especially since it didn’t seem to change the mechanics of the gameplay so much as the framing of it. He’s since been the Manicean star of over a dozen subsequent games, including a rare crossover into another franchise, Wario Blast: Featuring Bomberman! Many of these use his concupiscent invincibility as its key platforming mimetic. He shows up in the Mario racing or sports games as well. (A villainous Luigi, named Waluigi and with a purple-and-yellow color scheme, followed a few years later.)
As with politicians stopping by Saturday Night Live for an awkward chat with the comedian dressed up as them, Mario and Wario worked best apart from each other. The only platform game that featured both of them was 1993’s Mario & Wario, which was never released in the United States. Wario had, in a lackluster evil plan, put a bucket on Mario’s head. Players used the SNES mouse to help a flying fairy named Wanda make Mario avoid obstacles as he marched blindly forward.
But perhaps it was Mario and Wario’s pairing that kept it from U.S. shores. You couldn’t pretend Mario was Wario if they shared a screen and were facing off against each other. Wario was the Mr. Hyde, the Angelus, the Darth Vader. Just as Miyamoto’s Lost Levels challenged the concept of game play by critically ignoring the rules, the Wario weltanschauung showed the inherent falsity of any game—including Mario’s games—where the purpose was measured in personal gain. But as long as Wario existed, with his cackle and his Walter Huston gold fever, Mario got to stay as pure in motives as a saint. San Mario del Regno Fungo.
THE U.S. SHORES ENDED UP BEING A TENSE PLACE TO BE IN 1993. Yamauchi was tired of seeing declining profits from the American division, which had let Sega build up momentum. He never played video games, but was invincible in Go, the game where one move changes everything. He made one of those moves when he created a chairman position for Nintendo of America—and gave it not to Arakawa but to Howard Lincoln. An American, in charge of the American division. As if this wasn’t a clear statement, he publicly shamed Arakawa, saying the son-in-law would be let go if the lethargic performance continued.
Yamauchi may have been trying to force a crack in the friendship between the two men: believing that great men could only be great alone. It didn’t work. Arakawa and Lincoln continued