Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [67]
Yokoi’s ideas, though, live on. Nintendo’s heritage and success could be summed up in five awkward words: “lateral thinking of seasoned technology.” All of its successes come from its inventiveness, not its state-of-the-art chips. His protégé Shigeru Miyamoto had taken that to heart; now Miyamoto was the world’s greatest game designer. Even the Virtual Boy, for all its flaws, gave the world a controller with two directional pads, one per thumb, which became industry standard.
And, as a festschrift to Yokoi, the first in a successful new series of Mario Game Boy games was released that year. Game & Watch Gallery repurposed Yokoi’s classic designs of Octopus, Manhole, Oil, and others, except with the Super Mario gang as the characters. The series has sold a few million copies: quite the lateral thinking. And since they started coming out in 1994, Gunpei Yokoi lived to see it: beloved characters he helped bring forth, placed in games he designed, ported onto a console he designed as well.
PART 4
THIRD PRIZE IS YOU’RE FIRED
16 – MARIO’S WORLD
THE N64
One of the reasons Nintendo kept confusing video game consoles with computers was that they were both new inventions. It seemed egregious that a household would willingly have two expensive machines in two different rooms that were essentially the same. Why not use that NES as a modem? Why not play games on the PC? Nintendo was still licensing Mario to PC game makers, seemingly under the instruction that no creative thought go into the games. The last two Mario PC games were a collection of checkers, dominoes, and card games where you played against Mario, and a port of the Mario’s FUNdementals learning franchise. Not exactly Myst.
Computers were always pitched as multiplatform devices, so playing games on one went hand in hand with word processing, spreadsheets, and online access. But game consoles, despite being comparable to computers, often get punished when they try to get uppity and think they’re as good as a tower or a laptop. Look at the wide array of failed keyboards for consoles: no one wanted something that reeked of work in his living room after hours. But without a decent interface—no keyboard, no mouse—the modem project was in the Nintendoldrums.
While Nintendo was allured by the modem, Sega loved the idea of peripheral support. The Sega-CD attachment for the Genesis sold well despite a small selection of games. Now it introduced a second add-on, the 32X, which boosted the Genesis into a 32-bit system. This would require a new shelf of Sega games, besides the Genesis games and the Sega-CD games. Plus, there were a fourth group of games, CD32X games, which required both attachments to run. Oh, and Sega also released a kids’ version of the Genesis called the Pico, with its own games. Oh, and Sega was going to smoosh the 32X into the Genesis, and rerelease it as the Neptune. And of course there was Sega’s portable console, the Game Gear. And its portable Genesis, called the Nomad.
And one more thing: none of these were Sega’s actual new console. The new console, the Saturn, was a true 32-bit system, with a strong pipeline of 3-D arcade hits—Virtua Fighter, Daytona USA, Pebble Beach Golf. Unlike the 32X, the Saturn had a Sonic game, Sonic R, a footracer—or is that paw racer? It was released with the high price of $399. To make up for it, one spring day at a trade show Sega officials (who were dazed trying to keep track of all these consoles) decided to scuttle their “Saturnday” launch of September 2, 1995. Instead, on May 11, they announced they were releasing it to select stores right then and there!
Sega did not think through this strategy. Most all of the Saturn’s games wouldn’t be ready until September, the original launch date. So early adopters