Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [61]
In determined defiance to the any CD-based graphics and derringdo, Nintendo and Shigeru Miyamoto chose this as the time to release their new Mario game . . . a Donkey Kong port for the Game Boy. Huh? The first four levels of this version were faithful to the four levels of the arcade hit. Then, right when Mario gets Pauline back, Donkey Kong charges back on screen, and grabs Pauline once again. Mario has four different levels to traverse before another fight with the big guy. Then another four, and another four. A total of a hundred levels, ninety-six of them brand-new.
It was a clear passion project, Miyamoto returning to his first game. And he definitely deserved to follow his muse wherever it went; Hiroshi Yamauchi was becoming a billionaire thanks to it. But it was the exact opposite of hip, cool, or edgy. It was a tribute to a fifteenyear-old game much of Nintendo’s audience was already too young to remember. Other people were promising graphics as good as a movie—and Nintendo was still trying to sell Donkey Kong? Didn’t they know the future was CD-based?
Sony’s half-baked console, before the drama happened, was going to be called Nintendo Play Station. Now, it would just be Play Station. Nintendo sued, saying that it owned the name. After a brief run of a few hundred SNES-capable Play Stations, Sony went back to the drawing board, and designed a machine without any SNES port. One deleted space later, the spelled-solid PlayStation was released, featuring 3-D polygon graphics, massive environments, full-motion videos, and graphics better than the arcade. Leagues better than anything the SNES could produce, Mode 7 or not.
Philips and Sony, pinky-swearing that no one would get between their friendship again, patched things up. They collaborated once again on a new format for a CD-based technology, the DVD, in the hopes it would become a global standard. It of course did. And, as Nintendo feared, the copyable nature of Sony’s CD-based PlayStation’s games led to gamers burning vast libraries of unbought games, playable via a soldered-on modchip. In one last twist, this ironically led to a massively increased install base for the PlayStation—because, like Napster did for music, it let you play games for “free.” The piracy Nintendo so feared was Sony’s bread and butter.
15 – MARIO’S KART(RIDGE)
VIRTUAL BOY AND OTHER THREE-DIMENSIONAL FUN
At this point in the early nineties, The Simpsons was the go-to joke for overcommercialized characters. Bart’s often-pirated face looked out from T-shirts, mugs, hats, and dolls. Creator Matt Groening has a collection of such items, favoring the cheap plagiarized knockoffs. Cartoon characters are the hill-kings of branding, unfettered by the base-level dignity of celebrity actors, musicians, and sports stars. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, like Ado Annie in Oklahoma!, just cain’t say no.
But Springfield’s finest have nothing on Mario and company. Yamauchi wanted Mario’s face to appear as often as possible, anywhere it could. To encourage this, he took the counterintuitive step of prohibiting any Zelda or Link merchandising. If someone wanted a Nintendo character for a doll or mug, it was Mario or nothing. Everything you’d expect to see Mario’s face on has had his face on them: board games, Valentine’s day cards, jigsaw puzzles, bedding, water guns, pens, toys.
Want some battery-powered tech? How about a Mario bike alarm, singalong AM radio, walkie-talkie, calculator, clock, or musical toothbrush?
The real creativity came after the easy-to-brand items had been plastered. Who, for instance, thought of using the Mario-plumbing connection to manufacture