Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [64]
The magic formula came from Aladdin, a recent Genesis platformer with outstandingly good graphics. It looked just like the cartoon! In fact, it was: Disney animators had drawn all the sprites. There were enough pixels in sprites to allow for a variety of drawing styles, not just the Lego-style pixel-by-pixel building that game developers were used to. In fact, if a company acquired high-end rendering hardware from Silicon Graphics, as Rare did, it could make its own computer-generated images, save them frame by frame, and add them to a game as the sprites.
That was the secret behind Donkey Kong Country: prerendered graphics. And it looked a whole lot better than most of the clunky, jittery 3-D of some 32-bit competitors with their lackluster launch games. Why buy Atari’s Jaguar console (a sad attempt to be first to market, and with a monstrosity of a controller that looked like a cable box) or the seven-hundred-dollar 3DO when the mere SNES still was cranking out such great 3-D games? It sparked a shortage, and became the hot Christmas toy of 1994, beating Sonic and Knuckles.
But there was a downside of trumpeting such 3-D graphics: they became expected. The console of Mario was now the console of 3-D, thanks to Star Fox and now DKC. Whatever Nintendo did next had to be 3-D, to keep the new brand up. For Killer Instinct, an arcade fighting game, that was a no-brainer. Rare was making it, using the same prerendered graphics but for an intense fighting game that merged Street Fighter II’s depth of fighting with the gory Mortal Kombat death moves. A lot of its bells and whistles were lost in the port to SNES, and most all of them lost for the Game Boy port, but the gameplay held up. The same couldn’t be said for Stunt Race FX and Vortex, whose slow frame rates killed the attempted realism.
Miyamoto wouldn’t let that happen to Mario. Ever since Star Fox he had been working on Mario FX, a 3-D game for the SNES, but the graphics and gameplay just weren’t there yet. They might never be: that was okay, it was all a part of nemawashi. What was important was that Mario not look like one of the “Money for Nothing” furniture movers. The Mushroom Kingdom worlds had to be the friendly places kids grew up visiting, not a harshly geometric backdrop. Every Mario project Miyamoto had made was a new style of game (first-person for Yoshi’s Safari, racing for Super Mario Kart, art for Mario Paint). Just because 3-D was popular now didn’t mean that Mario FX wasn’t still a game too imperfect for release.
Mario was Miyamoto’s baby, in other words: the developer protected his character. That was his job. In fact, protecting Baby Mario would become the basis of the next title, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island. The story, which gleefully did away with past games’ continuity, had a stork carrying Baby Mario and Baby Luigi attacked by a minion of Baby Bowser. Baby Mario falls on Yoshi’s island, and Yoshi has to carry the helpless hero (wearing a red hat he hasn’t grown into yet) on his back. This allowed Miyamoto to play with new game-play forms: Yoshi collects various eggs, which bounce along behind him until he uses them. He can briefly transform into various vehicles, but can’t take Baby Mario with him during the change. And Baby Mario can become Super Baby Mario, capable of flight, and with a cute red cape. Miyamoto used the Super FX chip to augment the game’s graphics, but in subtle ways: some villains were 3-D, and the chip helped the graphics have finer resolution.
But the Nintendo marketing team rejected Miyamoto’s game. This was akin to correcting the pope on scripture. The game play was fine, but the graphics weren’t good enough. Maybe something more like Donkey Kong Country. Could it be more like that?
No one puts Baby Mario in the corner. Miyamoto, who had been uncharacteristically critical of Donkey Kong Country for its “mediocre game play,” now had to change his game to look like the flavor of the month? He wasn’t going to have it. They wanted distinct graphics? Fine, he’d give them distinct