Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [58]
14 – MARIO’S ADVANCE
NINTENDO’S DISCS
If the human mind is divided into the ego, superego, and id, then Mario is the id: working off of instinct, never having much of a plan, always able to leap into the middle of things. We all become younger as we play Mario, because when we’re Mario we simply play.
Miyamoto has given us more Freudian pop psych than that, though: his elfin warrior Link is an excellent ego. “I am not Link,” Miyamoto joked, “but I know him!” While Mario has just the clothes on his back, Link has a cache of rubies, bombs, arrows, a series of swords, various other items, and a broad swatch of Hyrule to explore. Different games for different parts of the psyche. Both Mario and Link try to save princesses, true. But few imagine Mario as more than asexual, wanting to save the princess because Bowser is bad and needs a time out. Link, on the other hand, is a teenager after the girl of his dreams.
Link’s SNES debut The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past has been voted by Entertainment Weekly as the best video game of all time. It took the tile-based action adventure of the first Zelda and added many elements from role-playing games (RPGs) for the sequel, combining them for a game that plays just as well today, despite blocky visuals. The biggest change was the Dark World, a nighttime level which repopulated the world with new villains, and doubled the size of the game. Further replayability came from trying to boost Link’s statistics by finding, say, every last Heart Container piece. Miyamoto found a new flow balance: give players the choice of scouring or charging forward.
Miyamoto also oversaw the Zelda Game Boy outing, Link’s Awakening . The setting was moved out of Hyrule—perhaps in tribute to Super Mario Land, which also left its homeland for a new (all-green) world. That may also explain Mario and Princess Toadstool’s cameos (as pictures on the wall): was Link secretly in the Mushroom Kingdom?
Link would not appear in a Nintendo game for another five years. It was an eternity in the video-game world: five Christmases where millions of boys could have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to swing virtual swords and clobber Octorocks. Certainly Nintendo didn’t let Mario take a year off between games: his mug was on something or other every other month. But the reason why Link didn’t appear officially for five years might have had something to do with an embarrassing unofficial appearance, still joked about in the same terms as Ishtar and Battlefield Earth. As bad as Link and Zelda look in these awful games, someone else in the story—Nintendo—ends up looking worse.
IN 1994, NOT MANY PEOPLE HAD HEARD OF MOORE’S LAW—
Intel cofounder Gordon Moore’s prediction from way back in 1965 that transistor usage could double every two years. But everyone was living through the implications: what was top of the line in 1990 wouldn’t be so in 1992, much less 1994. Special effects went from Patrick Swayze walking through a wall to a liquid-metal robot to computer-generated dinosaurs to Forrest Gump shaking hands with John F. Kennedy.
Within a year or so of the SNES’s release, fans started spreading rumors about what would come after it. The words “multimedia” and “interactive entertainment” were thrown around like they referred to specific software applications, instead of generalities. It seemed clear, though, that previously separate aspects of life would blend together, just as previously separate forms of media would merge. One word: cyberspace.
It all boiled down to the concrete