Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [7]
Arakawa’s gamble was to create not a new game, but a conversion kit for Radar Scope, to freshen it up with something new. It would save Nintendo the cost of the two thousand cabinets, plus it would be a whole lot quicker than making two thousand cabinets in Kyoto and shipping them halfway around the globe. Conversion kits were a form of aftermarket sales for arcades, which let arcade owners squeeze more life out of their older machines such as Asteroids by juicing them up with new elements. But they were for older hit games, not brand-new duds.
It was certainly a bold idea, trying to reheat yesterday’s blue plate special into a new entrée. And cracking the American market—or at this point merely minimizing the loss—was worth one last halfhearted try. Yamauchi agreed; he’d get a new game made to try to move the two thousand Radar Scopes. But he hedged his bet. Yamauchi’s top designers were all busy on their own games, and he wasn’t going to pull any of them off their projects for this rush job. So he announced an internal competition for conversion ideas. He received several ideas from a surprising source, a boyish, shaggy-haired staff artist with an industrial design degree but no previous game experience. The kid had designed the casings for some Nintendo products: maybe he’d be good designing their guts as well.
That staff artist was Shigeru Miyamoto, then twenty-nine. Miyamoto hadn’t been a fan of the first video games he played, such as Taito’s Western Gun. He was raised on puppets and manga and baseball in the Kyoto suburb of Sonobo, and was much more into music (he loved the Beatles and bluegrass) than electronics. While he preferred his left hand, Shigeru was cross-dominant, which put him in the rarefied company of some of the world’s great thinkers: Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Ben Franklin, Michelangelo, Ludwig van Beethoven, Leonardo da Vinci, and Mohandus Gandhi.
Despite all this potential, Miyamoto took five years to get his four-year engineering degree. His father had to get him the job with Nintendo, helping design toys and sometimes painting the cabinets. He hadn’t even been interested in video games until Space Invaders came along, with its high-concept plot and ever-increasing game-play speed. But Yamauchi saw something beyond the slacker haircut, and decided to give him a shot.
Yamauchi wasn’t crazy, so he assigned Gunpei Yokoi to help translate Miyamoto’s vision for the new game—whatever it would be—into reality. Yokoi was ten years older and wiser than Miyamoto, and would show him the gaming ropes. Yokoi was the optimist, focusing on what could be done. Miyamoto worked negatively, always aware of limitations. Yin and yang. Miyamoto and Yokoi then contracted the services of Ikegami Tsushinki, a company that had designed many of Nintendo’s arcade games, so the two wouldn’t be flying blind hammering out a solid-state motherboard. Ikegami Tsushinki had built Radar Scope, so it knew what its own components could do.
Inside Radar Scope was a Sanyo monitor turned sideways, displaying pixel-based raster graphics. (A fancy way of saying it couldn’t display the bouncing geometric shapes of a Tron or a Tempest.) It had a DAC (digital-to-analog) converter, so it could turn electronic semaphore from the game board into sounds. It was running the Zilog Z80 8-bit microprocessor, an inexpensive alternative to Intel’s 8080 microprocessor. The Z80’s affordability and utility quickly made it the generic drug of computer chips: just as good, at a fraction of the cost. So far so good.
Radar Scope had a control panel with one joystick and one button. This was perfectly normal for a shooting game;