Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [8]
Yamauchi wanted the replacement game to be based on the cartoon Popeye, since a live-action movie starring Robin Williams as the titular sailor was in the works. Twenty years ago Nintendo, in a bout of corporate identity confusion, had tried to be a food manufacturer: one of its products was Popeye Ramen. Thus, it had an in for the rights, and Yokoi was designing a Game & Watch Popeye title. Whatever that turned out to be might be good enough for an arcade game. Yokoi and Miyamoto would figure out the details. Even if the game stunk, what great marketing!
But Yamauchi found out it would take years for Nintendo to acquire the rights to a global property such as Popeye for the arcades. If he wanted to play with the big boys, he had to follow their rules. So no Popeye. It was probably for the best: anyone who knew arcades knew that game play was more important than the often laughable story. Sega’s Motocross didn’t do any better when it was renamed Fonz, after the Happy Days character, did it?
Miyamoto, though, was committed not so much to the story of Popeye as to its goal: defeat the villain to save the girl. The main characters were the barrel-chested hero (“I just made a vague set of characteristics for him as a middle-aged man with a strong sense of justice who is not handsome,” he would later say), the enormous hairy opponent, and the tall, willowy heroine who needed rescuing. These storytelling archetypes made the hero an underdog, gave him a noble reason to fight, and even gave some sympathy to the villain. No hero named Popeye? Fine, Miyamoto wouldn’t call him Popeye. No boulder-size Bluto? Fine, “Bluto” would be someone else. Popeye by any other name would play the same. And Miyamoto liked the idea of naming a video game after the bad guy, as in Space Invaders or Sinistar. It’d be easy to come up with a good name for a big gorilla of a villain.
A big, angry gorilla. What a perfect antagonist. A big, angry, dumb gorilla won’t let Olive Oyl—er, some other lady—go free. Miyamoto decided to use King Kong, a Japanese synonym for ape. King Kong, after all, had scaled the Empire State Building and fought Godzilla: a shared cultural foil for a Japanese American game.
Miyamoto then took a stab at translating. He understood English pretty well since his dad taught it in school, but never could get his tongue around speaking it correctly. He wanted the English word for “stubborn,” since a stubborn gorilla was the heart of the game he envisioned. And what animal was more stubborn than a donkey? Thus, a game about an ape was named after a pack animal. (Miyamoto, like many true artists, has since told this story a few different ways.)
Miyamoto now had both a name and a villain in Donkey Kong. The story would be a brave man fighting the big dumb ape to get his girl back. A love triangle. Recognizing that actions and motivations were more important than mere names, the damsel in distress would just be “Lady”—a generic MacGuffin of a character. Even the hero lacked a true name: he was “Jumpman.” (Miyamoto originally thought of him as “Mr. Video,” or just ossan—“middle-aged man.”) Borrowing the mukokuseki concept of ethnically generic people from the manga comics he loved, Miyamoto set about building his digital hero, pixel by pixel.
And as his name would suggest, Jumpman jumped. Quite a phenomenal gravity-defying leap at that: from a standing position, he could spring his full body height. While walking or running, Jumpman could clear an obstacle the relative size of a trash bin. In bold defiance of the one-button controls, Miyamoto came up with a second activity for the athletic Jumpman. He scattered hammers throughout the level that Jumpman could acquire by touching them. With a hammer he was unable to jump, presumably because of its weight. But he could pound away on obstacles with a well-timed wallop of the (now dual-) action button.
Jumpman, like most