Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [71]
The three rivals’ new systems were on the shelves. Sega’s Saturn was a decent enough console, but hampered by years of bad management. The PlayStation was a marvel, seemingly designed to entice developers to make great games for it. No cumbersome legacy problems, no bad blood. And Nintendo’s new console? Compared to the Saturn and PlayStation, it seemed obvious that the Nintendo 64 was designed for Nintendo’s benefit—more profits, no piracy, great Mario games—more than anyone else.
17 – MARIO’S COMMUNICATION KIT
THE NINTENDO 64DD
When the NES was the only game in town, Nintendo thrived, and kept its third-party developers kissing plumber posterior for approval. It arrived late to the 16-bit party with the SNES, allowing the Genesis to gain equal footing in the industry. Strong innovation helped Nintendo essentially wait out the 32-bit console cycle (not counting the Virtual Boy), so it could skip ahead and be first out the gate with a 64-bit system.
But it could no longer rely on the developers it had treated like peasants. Sony’s 32-bit PlayStation was a developer’s paradise, without having to learn the odd particulars of Nintendo architecture. Plus, a PlayStation game made more money for a developer per unit than a N64 game. One by one, Nintendo’s best Japanese developers started to make PlayStation games: first Konami and Namco, then Taito, Data East, and Capcom. American companies also joined: Midway, Acclaim, and EA. By the time Square defected, Nintendo was in panic mode: how to stop everyone from leaving?
Well, if a disc-based game system was so important to them, Nintendo would promote one. Nintendo’s 64DD, which sounds like a matronly foundation garment, would be an expansion disc drive (hence the DD) that attached underneath the N64. It would double the storage capacity of a typical N64 cartridge. A wild new DD program called Creator would add rich new textures, characters, and entire levels into games. It would have rewritable proprietary disks, and let gamers download updates to games and preview new ones. With it the N64 would be as invincible as Mario with a Starman.
Certainly that was the sales pitch for it. But from the time it was announced way back in 1994 (when it was still paired with the Ultra 64), it just seemed like the latest attempt to keep Yamauchi’s dream ofof a Nintendo network alive. Certainly the time seemed ripe. The “World Wide Web” had gone from some text-only bulletin boards to a series of walled-off networks by Compuserve, Prodigy, and America Online. Each offered a wealth of magazines, games, chat, and “community.” You could read sports scores, follow the stock market, look up recipes, read the news—everything the Nintendo Network had offered in Japan a decade ago.
But by 1996 there were even more players. Directory sites such as Yahoo and Alta Vista let people leave the walled-off compound and explore the Internet—as the information superhighway was becoming known. Newspapers and magazines started independently posting their content. Businesses began making “home pages,” along with individuals at GeoCities.com. Online stores even popped up: Amazon.com sold books, eToys sold toys, E-Trade sold stocks.
Yamauchi’s dream was coming true. Society had finally started using its computing devices as communications tools. Whole new media forms had developed: the web page, the e-mail, the instant message. Yet the various Nintendo networks had been only modest hits. Yamauchi could get people online for a fraction of the cost of a Compaq or Packard Bell “PC clone,” but they weren’t interested. Arakawa wasn’t even interested!
Mario was to blame. Mario was the de facto mission statement of Nintendo. He promised family friendly fun to kids of all ages. Nintendo would always be able to print money as long as Miyamoto and his ilk kept on cranking out quality games for its