Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [70]
Miyamoto knew gamers would go nuts exploring the 3-D world, so he made such exploration integral to winning. Each world had a hundred coins in it; finding all hundred earned one of the seven stars needed to complete a level. The other six stars come from tasks, which often could only be performed in a certain order. So Mario would find, say, a star piece high on a cliff, and not be able to get there until he acquired a Wing Cap. Exploration, action, plus the greater puzzle of figuring out what had to be done in what order.
Miyamoto had his team focus on designing fun environments to run around in, and only afterward come up with challenges to fit into them. This helps make Super Mario 64 one of the first sandbox-style games, where there’s no time limit or oppressive enemy, but a series of optional side quests. Do them, or just play around in a virtual world. Such exploration just wasn’t possible in a 2-D Mario game, where everything was encountered in sequence: here, you could choose any path you wanted, or backflip off the beaten path.
Miyamoto wanted forty different levels, each chockablock with puzzles and assignments. But Super Mario 64 was penciled in as a launch game, and there was no way Nintendo would pull a Sega and release the console without its star. The whole system would be delayed if Miyamoto was late. And he was late: the N64 was supposed to come out in 1995. Even months behind schedule, accounting for hundreds of millions in delayed and possibly lost profits, not to mention shelving perfectly good titles like Star Fox 2, with Yamauchi breathing down his neck, Miyamoto was still trying to shoehorn in new boards. But the big problem was the cartridge format: there just wasn’t enough room. The same back-and-forth from the original Super Mario Bros. repeated itself: it’s good enough! No, it’s not! Yes, it is!
Eventually, Miyamoto accepted that thirteen levels of this degree of excellence would have to be enough. It was still an amazingly deep and polished launch title. Plus, he was working on a 3-D Zelda at the same time, so many of his unused Mario ideas migrated over to Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. (The N64 Mario and Zelda games feel similar because of this, both mixing puzzle-based exploration and 3-D platforming.) The N64 arrived in Japan on June 23, 1996, and three months later hit American shores, selling for $199. Games were an unconscionable sixty-nine dollars each at first. (Some SNES games, such as Super Mario RPG, were an even steeper seventy-five dollars.)
Super Mario 64 was the best-selling N64 game ever, with 11.8 million copies, so fans seemed to like it. (Super Mario RPG sold more than two million units as well, no mean feat.) The 3-D Mario was featured in a Got Milk ad, escaping from the TV to chug some cow juice, which worked as a power-up. Taco Bell featured Mario’s 64-bit adventures in a series of kids’ meal giveaways. Nintendo also had a “one in 64 wins!” contest on Kellogg’s cereals, giving away more than 1.4 million prizes. It even pulled an about-face with Blockbuster, with which it was feuding over rentals. By 1996, Blockbuster was Nintendo’s “Official Rental Station,” offering new titles to rent as well as consoles, for seventeen dollars for three days.
Its happiness was short-lived. Square, one of Nintendo’s aces in the hole, announced it was leaving Nintendo. Dragon Warrior VII and Final Fantasy VII were going to become PlayStation games, for Sony. The reason? Cartridges. Despite being 64-bit, the N64’s cartridges didn’t have the memory Square needed to produce a top-quality game.
Square led the exodus of third-party developers to the promised land of the PlayStation. It could manufacture CD-based games cheaper, make more money off them, and have them be easier to program: a trifecta. Each defection was a vote of no confidence