Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [65]
That was how Yoshi’s Island became the first video game that looked as if it had been drawn not only by hand, but by crayon. Baby Mario looks like a political cartoon who dropped a sash identifying him as Tariff Agreements. Yoshi looks like a middle-schooler’s doodle. The backgrounds were made to look like rough sketches of mountains and trees, not pixel-built, and certainly not waxy CG creations. It was a living comic book.
Yoshi’s Island, with its new look and characteristically fantastic gameplay, sold more than four million copies. It wasn’t as flashy as Donkey Kong Country, which had sold twice as many units, but it held its own. Rare, meanwhile, got its revenge on “Dr. Miyamoto” (as many in the industry called him) in its Donkey Kong Land Game Boy game, which obviously would have none of the fancy graphics of Donkey Kong Country.
The game opened metafictionally, with Cranky Kong congratulating DK on the success of his SNES game. “Course, put a few fancy graphics and some modern music in a game, and kids’ll buy anything nowadays . . . Back in our days, understand, we had an extremely limited color palette to work with, and we still made great games . . . No way you could duplicate that feat today, Donkey my boy! No siree!” Donkey Kong goes on to to prove his aged, out-of-touch, fourth wallbreaking ancestor wrong, by having the same sort of side-scrolling adventure as in his SNES version, sans CGI. (Rare later made it up to Doc Miyamoto by, in Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy Kong’s Quest, having Mario, Link, and Yoshi exhibits in Cranky’s Video Game Heroes museum. Sonic’s shoes were next to a trash can, labeled “no-hopers.”) Donkey Kong Land was a fun game despite the poison pen intro, sold well (though not as well as Yoshi’s Island), and prompted some sequels.
NINTENDO AVOIDED ENTERING THE 32-BIT GAME WITH THE two-step of boosting its 16-bit games’ graphics and continually talking up the Ultra 64, a system that basic arithmetic proved was better than anything 32-bit. (And since bits were exponential, not geometric, 264 was vastly bigger than 232.) The Ultra 64 was supposed to come out in 1995, but it wasn’t ready. However, Nintendo stunned the gaming world by announcing it had a successor to the blockbuster Game Boy ready instead for 1995: a 32-bit handheld system . . . in full 3-D.
The Virtual Boy was credited to Gunpei Yokoi, Nintendo’s ace designer. But Yokoi was merely a smart shopper. He had been shown a device of start-up company Reflections Technology, a new headset console they called “Red World.” It used oscillating mirrors, red LED lights, and a 32-bit processor to create a 3-D environment inside the pilot-style helmet. This was Nintendo’s bailiwick, Yokoi felt: a new technology that changed the very idea of games.
3-D wasn’t a new idea for Nintendo. In 1987 it tried out a pair of 3-D goggles for the Famicon Disk System, using the same LCD shutter technology used in some 3-D glasses today. The add-on system only had a few games, and as a peripheral to a peripheral was quickly forgotten. Sega’s 3-D glasses for the Master System received a similarly dour debut.
Yokoi spent four years with his R&D team developing Red World, renamed Virtual Boy, never getting it right. The Virtual Boy was stuck displaying only red and black, for instance, because the green and blue LED lights needed for color combinations weren’t affordable. (They wouldn’t be until 1996, a year after launch.) It gobbled up batteries, even using just red, the most efficient and inexpensive color of LED. It was too heavy to wear. This was solved by giving it a stand: so much for being portable. But even without neck strain, even without headtracking technology, it still gave people headaches.
All forced-perspective 3-D does, or at least should. It’s called shoboshobo in Japanese, or “bleary eyes.” Humans’ eyes have had a lifetime to verge and accommodate in symphony with each other—to track an object and to change focus on it at the same time. With a forced-3-D image projected onto a flat surface, vergance is separated