Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [77]
Learning from their mistakes was what Nintendo’s new console was supposed to be all about. The Gamecube would have no more heavy expensive cartridges, for instance: Nintendo was finally going with discs. Yamauchi, ever in love with proprietary formats, had Matsushita design a special smaller disc, measuring eight centimeters across, not twelve. A smaller disc allowed for an overall smaller machine. The missing circumference meant that a few games would have to be dual-disc affairs, and many more would have to compress their audio and video.
It also meant that unlike the PS2, the Gamecube couldn’t play CDs or DVDs. This kept its retail price down to $249, and stymied pirates, but made it seem like a lesser console. It also included a port for a modem (Yamauchi could never give up the modem idea), but only one or two unpopular games ever allowed for online play.
The wing-grip controller was designed to discreetly house lots of buttons: there was a big green “A” button that fit above the thumb, promoting the idea of simple one-button games. A smaller red “B” button, two eyebrowlike gray bottoms around the green A, and three shoulder buttons gave plenty of options for designers who needed lots of inputs. The controller also had two control sticks (one gray, one yellow) and a gray D-pad.
The Gamecube’s insides were powered by a special IBM chip called Gekko, designed at a billion-dollar price tag to do everything the N64 could, but better. The N128? Not quite: the numerical nomenclature began to break down because the chips’ design matters more than sheer horsepower. The 485-MHz Gekko only had a 32-bit integer unit, but a 64-bit bus, a 64-kilobyte cache, and a 64-bit floating-bit unit, which was often used as two 32-bit vector instruction units. What was that, 128 plus 32 in total? In any case, the Dreamcast had a Hitachi 200-MHz processor, and the PS2’s “emotion engine” was 64-bit bus clocked at close to 300 MHz. There were no apples-to-apples comparisons anymore.
The look of the machine, a compact purple cube, wasn’t anything like previous Nintendo consoles. Purple was a new color, one Nintendo promoted heavily for the next few years. Color theory links purple to feelings of royalty: hail to the King, baby. Dreamcast had chosen white with neon orange highlights: orange was the color of happiness. Sony’s PlayStation was gray, but its PS2 was black with distinctive blue piping: blue is the color of intelligence. These weren’t accidental choices.
Miyamoto had had two launch games lined up for the new console, and two more for the weeks after. Wave Race: Blue Storm showcased sloshing, sloppy water in sun-soaked tropical locales. A companion title, the snowboarding sequel 1080: White Storm (featuring a golden calf – ish Mario ice sculpture), was delayed for years, and ended up being quietly released as 1080˚ Avalanche. As with previous launch games, Blue Storm was a showoff of the Gamecube’s physics engine first and a racing game second.
Also on tap was Pikmin, which had started out life as a trade-show demo called Super Mario 128. The demo, now an urban legend due to Miyamoto’s insistence that it was a game and not a demo, showed Mario, who divided into two Marios, then divided again and again. The Mario army stood on a sphere so small they filled the whole globe. It showed off two new Gamecube developments: the ability to have lots of different characters on screen (128, as promised) and the planetary gravity system to allow some Marios to stick upside down.
Super Mario 128 would never come out, but its two key ideas were salvaged. The multiple-character