Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [63]
HASBRO WORKED FOR YEARS ON A DEVICE NICKNAMED Sliced Bread, a virtual-reality machine that would enter it into the video-game world. Hasbro killed Sliced Bread in 1995, after forty-five million dollars’ of investment. Nintendo was hoping for better luck than that. The Kyoto office was developing an in-your-face console as well. If this worked, it would break new ground. It wouldn’t be as impressive as the Nintendo network perpetually in the skunk works, true. But that was Yamauchi’s vision for Nintendo, not Arakawa’s or really anyone else’s. As a result, the father-in-law would every few months talk about how we’d all soon be playing online games and trading stocks from our SNES, and then nothing would happen. (There was at least one decent-size network test, to let people play the Minnesota State Lottery via the SNES. It was scrubbed because ten-year-olds would likely end up gambling—and with their parents’ money.)
Pushing games into virtual reality would be a game-changer for the game-makers. Suddenly the Genesis, the PlayStation, the 3DO, all the other consoles with high polygon counts and fluid character movement would look as jerky as claymation. “In videogames,” Yokoi wrote in his memoir, “there is always an easy way out if you don’t have any good ideas . . . CPU competition.” Nintendo was going to press for full 3-D, just like a monster movie from the fifties. Already it was cutting prices on the SNES, so that the Genesis would have to follow suit. If the 3-D gamble worked, everyone else would go broke playing catch-up.
One way it had already succeeded was in avoiding violent games, the sort that sold well among older (read: Sega) audiences but drew the ire of parents and Congress. Sega tried to play it safe by making its own game ratings system in 1993 it hoped Nintendo would adopt. Nintendo didn’t bother making its own: instead it adopted the Entertainment Software Ratings Board’s letter-grade system instead (with M reserved for what would get an R in the movies). Sega (and 3DO, who had its own system as well) tried to claim the high ground for gaming morality, but the level playing field of a unified system put an end to that pipe dream.
In the meantime, M-rated or not, Nintendo needed some new games. It had to live up to the recent New Yorker cartoon of Santa booking a lunch meeting with Mario and Luigi. Nintendo needed 3-D, by hook or by crook. They had a 1993 hit thanks to two English designers, whose special “Mario chip” was digital steroids, flooding an SNES cartridge with extra oomph. Miyamoto worked the pair to tighten up their flight game’s playability, drafting a story about talking animal pilots onto the superb technical display. They even included actual spoken dialogue, to simulate intercom chatter among the furry space aces. Star Fox was born, a new Nintendo franchise.
The Mario chip, which was marketed as the “Super FX chip,” indirectly led to Donkey Kong Country, the first DK title not made by Miyamoto. Instead it was made by a second-party company, Rare, which had a long history porting arcade hits to the NES and designing surrealist classics like Battletoads. DKC was a fun side-scrolling action platformer: much closer to Super Mario Bros. than to Donkey Kong. To clear the air, it begins by introducing the angry Donkey Kong from the original series, now aged and called Cranky Kong. Cranky’s son, Junior, is now all grown up, and the current Donkey Kong. Very confusing, made even worse by subsequent games that negated this already-revised history: Cranky Kong was canonically the grandfather, Junior the father, and the new DK the grandson. From the people who brought you Mario Mario and five reincarnations of Zelda.
But the big boast, like Star Fox, was 3-D graphics. And with no expensive Super FX chip, either, to cut away from profits. How, when Pixar hadn’t even released Toy Story, could there be fully