Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [73]
While Miyamoto was ginning up original games, why not some original Mario games? (Making a Zelda character, the lazy rancher Talon, resemble Mario was cute, but didn’t count.) Mario Party was a board game, with Mario and company acting out the game pieces. A kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria of minigames determined who went first in each subsequent round, and so on. It was so true to the board game conceit, though, that it was no fun to play single-person against the computer. The N64 had ports for four controllers, and the variety of minigames made this an ideal game for families, siblings, anyone without six hours of spare time a day to devote to freeing Hyrule or collecting all hundred coins.
Yet another new Mario franchise, Super Smash Bros., served as a greatest-hits retrospective. It was a simplistic fighting game—games could be won by unskilled button-mashing, a cardinal sin in the world of fighting games. But the characters went beyond the Mario Kart/ Party assortment: you could also choose Kirby, Link, Metroid’s Samus, or Fox from Star Fox. And there were more unlockable characters, including Captain Falcon from F-Zero, Ness from Earthbound, and Luigi. The music and scenery were all tributes to Nintendo games, and power objects rained down from the sky like Coke bottles in The Gods Must Be Crazy. Ever seen Mario with a sword, or Yoshi with a gun? Overall, the game treated the Nintendo canon like Wicked treated The Wizard of Oz: with a dollop of sass and irreverence.
Both of these games were made by HAL Laboratories, a Nintendo developer that had been behind the Adventures of Lolo and Kirby titles, as well as porting over Sim City. (HAL had inserted the gag that Sim cities erect a Mario statue at half a million residents.) One of its lead developers, Satoru Iwata, had been programming Nintendo games since the early days of the NES, and worked part-time for HAL while he was still in college. HAL was contracted to develop a N64 version of a recent Game Boy hit, about collecting cute little monsters and arranging playdatelike “battles” for them. It was called Pocket Monsters—or Pokémon.
Pokémon was in development for years, and was assumed (upon its 1996 release in Japan) to be a strictly Japanese game. It was role-playing, with minimal graphics, battles that ended with one fighter “fainting” instead of dying, and an obsessive-compulsive goal of finding 150 critters wandering in the woods. Its developer, Satoshi Tajiri, had collected bugs as a child, and found joy in their variety and abilities. He studied under Miyamoto to design the game, and the illusory simplicity of the game was straight from Doc Miyamoto. Since the idea was to play against a friend using the Game Boy’s link cable, there were two different colored cartridges, red and blue. Pokémon Red had Satoshi (changed to Ash Ketchum for America), and Pokémon Blue had Shigeru (Gary Oak in America). Other than that, they were just about identical.
The game was a bigger hit than anyone in Japan could have predicted. It tapped into the gaming zeitgeist of completion by having completion itself be the goal, instead of any nobler cause. When it became a card game, “gotta catch ’em all!” basically translated to “gotta buy them all!” Focus testing showed kids didn’t care about trainers Ash or Gary: they wanted to be the trainers themselves, and the game allowed for just that experience. That in turn prompted a top-rated anime show. (The first most Americans heard of Pokémon was a 1997 episode of the show that caused seven hundred Japanese children to have seizures.) It was released in America mere weeks before the Game Boy Color’s launch—and it was black and white. Clearly Nintendo didn’t think this game would go over much better than Earthbound or Mario Picross, both flops. Only Minoru Arakawa believed in its crossover potential—and then only if the complicated gameplay