Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [66]
The final product looked like a toolbox, not a pair of goggles, and arrived with an avalanche of bad press. It launched with the pack-in game Mario’s Tennis, a decent game whose obvious selling point was that the returned ball would be flying right in Mario’s (read: your) face. Other launch games were the Star Fox-y flight combat game Red Alarm, Galactic Pinball, and a Bomberman title. But a game of tennis, for $180? Didn’t seem like much of a bargain. Perhaps the Virtual Boy’s greatest failure wasn’t its red graphics or eyestrain or rush to market but poor launch games. Why buy one if there’s nothing worth playing for it yet, or even in the pipeline?
The closest thing to a hit was Mario Clash, a reimagining of the original Mario Bros. Mario had to throw red turtle shells across a series of red 3-D sewers to hit the invading (and red) sewer critters. The dimensional view was impressive, for those who didn’t lose their lunch. But the game itself wasn’t that deep. Once players got used to Mario both near and far, they were left with a game from 1982 that cost a whole lot more than a quarter to play.
Yokoi did not want the Virtual Boy released when it was, in 1995: he preferred to wait until a full-color version was feasible. (But even then, early testers said the colors made for double vision, not 3-D.) Yamauchi had wanted the project out early, at a reasonable price point that still brought in money for every unit sold. Wanting something, though, as he had learned about the Nintendo Network, was not the same as achieving it.
The Virtual Boy flopped like a koi. Nintendo experienced firsthand what it had taken such schadenfreude in witnessing in others: the price fell down and down and down, third-party game developers disappeared like the cool kids from a lame party, the industry went from making fun of it to honestly forgetting it was still on sale. Like an ER doc calling the time of death, Nintendo halted development on first-party games like Mario Kart: Virtual Cup and a side-scrolling Super Mario adaptation.
Perhaps if Yokoi had had another year, he could at least have introduced color, and one or two decent games. But he was rushed to market, and the console died because of it. To rub salt in the wound, the suits in Kyoto started blaming Yokoi, not themselves, for developing an expensive system people didn’t want to play. Yokoi entered into the peculiar Japanese tradition of the window-seat tribe, the madogiwazoku . This is when exiled employees are put as far away as possible from the group—the windows. At some point, the errant madogiwazoku’s penance would be complete, and they’d be allowed to sit at the cool lunch table again.
Yokoi, perhaps with some window glare in his eyes, went to work on a new Game Boy variant, a smaller one with a black-and-white display instead of green. It was more battery efficient as well. But around the time of release (when it made Nintendo more millions), one of Mario’s two fathers decided he had had enough of Nintendo. Anywhere else, Yokoi would have been already poached away, fired, or left on his own. But Japanese culture is loyal to the company, and vice versa, making resignation an even more painful break. (Miyamoto has said that he stays at Nintendo for the money: not the yen they pay him, but the yen they let him develop with.)
Yokoi retired from Nintendo, and founded his own game company, Koto. One of its first clients was Nintendo (the blood wasn’t that bad between them), who hired him as a consultant. Yokoi also worked with Bandai, where he developed a new handheld console: it would at last have a color screen, but no 3-D. It was called the WonderSwan, and it became a cult hit in Japan.
It was his