Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [74]
Nintendo had nothing to worry about. The two Pokémons were enormous hits, helping keep the Game Boy dominant for years. Pokémon games for other consoles followed, beginning with Pokémon Stadium for the N64. (One Pokémon game featured a Mario cameo, a HAL calling card: Iwata also snuck Mario and friends into the crowd of a Kirby Super Star game.) The original’s graphical simplicity was part of the draw, forcing players to focus on strategy. Pokémon was a new type of chess: Charmander is a fire Pokémon and is great when attacking ice Pokémon, but not other fire types, or water types. Every Pokémon has a type, and each type is weak or strong against other types. How you stack your “deck” of six Pokémon, what order you play them, when is it time to waste a turn to retire an old one: this was the game. The boundless creativity of the punny edition’s names (Charmander, a fiery lizard, is a mix of charcoal and salamander) would make J. K. Rowling jealous.
Pokémon would soon become the world’s second-biggest gaming franchise, selling two hundred million copies, mostly to eight-year-olds. (A covetous Miyamoto, who joked about fans sending him loose change because Nintendo didn’t pay him any royalties, reportedly said that Pokémon would only be a hit until his next Mario game was finished.) The pocket monsters’ various games would all sell well—save for Hey You, Pikachu!, a microphone game where players told a Pokémon to go pick up a carrot and other humdrum tasks. They even showed up in Super Smash Bros. They’d be that many more nails in the coffin for the idea of Nintendo being seen as more than an entertainment company. Mario was Crime and Punishment compared to Pokémon , whose appeal surged among the younger set, and diminished with puberty. For crying out loud, a plastic Pikachu was being hot glued to special editions of the N64: who would accept it as a computer with a cartoon gerbil (or mouse, or whatever he is) on it?
The rumors of the 64DD continued for years, much like how the N64 rumors spread soon after the SNES’s launch. In both cases, the crafty result was to keep gamers (and developers) from flocking to other consoles. But it wasn’t to be: after five years of talks, Nintendo quietly snuck out the 64DD in Japan in December 1999, releasing it exclusively through a mail-order subsidiary. The online service was shuttered after two years, due to low usage.
The biggest success of the 64DD, if such a term can be used, was the Mario Paint sequel Mario Artist. The first title in the series, Paint Studio, was a reworked version of the painting and stamp-making tool: Mario wore a beret on the cover. Then Talent Studio, which let artists add 2-D faces onto prerendered 3-D bodies and animate them South Park – style. After that was Polygon Studio, to allow users to experiments with three dimensions. Finally Communication Kit let users share their creations with others in the microscopic 64DD fan base. If it hadn’t been shut down, future Mario Artist titles would have included Game Maker, Graphical Message Maker, Sound Maker, and Video Jockey Maker.
Of the dozens of rumored and halfway developed games, only nine eventually saw release. The most notable was Sim City 64. Many others, such as sequels for Earthbound, Kirby, a platformer called Banjo-Kazooie, and two Zelda games, were reworked as regular N64 games (or in one case, stripped down for a portable edition.) Most were canceled, giving its various developers further proof to stay far, far away from Nintendo for its original projects.
Not many company presidents would have pushed for the 64DD, after the Satellaview and the NES modem both went belly-up due to lack of interest. But Hiroshi’s neuroses had driven the company for decades into some odd choices, and they were rarely wrong. It might be several decades ahead of the curve, but Nintendo had geologic patience. Perhaps Yamauchi was secretly a rock Pokémon.
18 – MARIO’S MELEE
THE GAMECUBE
There are no Mario amusement park rides. It’s a bit surprising, considering