Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [78]
Third on Miyamoto’s Gamecube launch list was Super Smash Bros. Melee. The updated fighting game crammed in a dizzying array of music, characters, and weapons. The sequel added a hundred different winnable trophies, each one a mounted piece of Nintendo history. It would have been unbearably in-jokey and obscure, if millions of fans weren’t winningly enthusiastic about being able to, say, have the Ice Climbers attack Mr. Game N Watch with Ness’s home run bat in the Pokémon Stadium, to win a Super Scope.
And then there was the haunted house game, with a ghostbusting character who stunned ghosts with a flashlight, then twirled a control stick to wring the hit points out of them. His weapon of choice, a vacuum, prompted one game rival to scrap plans for a Hoover-powered character. It featured wonderful light sourcing and a creepy feel: Nintendo’s version of a survival horror game like Resident Evil. Add one Luigi searching for the ghostnapped Mario, and the game found its title: Luigi’s Mansion. It sold well (more than 2.5 million copies), but it was not a sign of confidence in the new system. All previous consoles became hits with their long, captivating Mario games . . . but a Luigi game? The Frank Stallone of the Mushroom Kingdom? (Trivia: Frank Stallone played a Mario brother in Hudson Hawk.) There was a full-on Mario game in the works, but the Luigi game was a bad omen that the Gamecube wasn’t as comparatively worthy as previous Nintendo consoles.
If Sega had chosen to go the Nintendo route by foregoing third-party developers on the Dreamcast, Nintendo went the Sony route by trying to woo them back for the Gamecube. Its eleven launch titles were from eight different companies, including heavy hitters like EA, Activision, and LucasArts. It locked in some exclusive titles, and made porting games developed for the PS2 over to Gamecube as simple as it could. Developers were more than happy to be wooed by Nintendo: it beat being bullied by them.
One of Nintendo’s wooed developers delivered two arcade hits, Crazy Taxi and Super Monkey Ball, as launch titles. Super Monkey Ball was even a Gamecube exclusive. Its initials, SMB, were the same as the legendary Super Mario Bros. but the simians in this SMB looked more like Sega’s aborted mascot Alex Kidd than Mario. Which made sense: Super Monkey Ball was a Sega game.
Seeing the writing on the wall, Sega had bailed on the Dreamcast, announcing in early 2001 (not even two years since its U.S. release) that NHL 2002 would be its funeral cortege, its final game. All other games would be converted to more popular systems. It was a smart move. Sega’s great strength was in developers like Sonic’s Yuki Naka and Virtua Fighter’s Yu Suzuki, and studios such as Visual Concepts, which created Sega’s brilliant 2K sports lineup. Now regardless of what console gamers voted for with their MasterCards, they could play NFL 2K2, or a Sonic game. Sonic the Hedgehog became a Gamecube exclusive. Sega’s console and arcade games would still sell, but years of debt racked up trying to compete with Nintendo had hobbled the company’s books.
Nintendo had played a very good hand leading up to the Gamecube release. And if its opponents had been ascending Sony and descending Sega, it would have been in a solid contest for the gold. But a fourth company had thrown its hat into the video game ring. That company, with its superb console, finger-of-God marketing power, and literally billions of dollars in ready cash, had been what really scared Sega out of the console business. Hell, it scared Sony so much the PS2 started paying for big games like Grand Theft