Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [82]
This was playing Nintendo’s game Nintendo’s way, of course. Sony couldn’t rerelease its 1990 games; it didn’t have any. Neither did Microsoft. The argument for respecting the past continuum of games was another way of keeping customers thinking Mario. But looked at another way, it was Nintendo’s admittance that the best it had to offer were reruns.
Nintendo freshened up the GBA’s look in 2003, because they realized it looked like a Game Boy. The Game Boy Advance SP (for “special”) resembled a wee laptop, moving the screen to the top flap and the controls to the base. It was squarish, and looked like the world’s smallest multimedia player, or maybe a PDA. Anything but a Game Boy. Which was exactly the point: don’t make it look like a game, and adults will come calling. Sales doubled.
Ironically, the GBA SP’s design aped the two-screen Game & Watch design from 1980. This was taken to the nth degree with the limited Game Boy Micro, which carried over Game & Watch design elements down to the gold-on-maroon color. Nintendo also released a series of NES games on GBA to celebrate the Famicon’s 20th anniversary. Such naval gazing would make Narcissus proud—well, prouder. But where were the new ideas?
The apotheosis of this self-promotion was Mario vs. Donkey Kong, an original Game Boy Advance game that paid tribute to everything from Mario’s ubiquitous marketing to Donkey Kong to Miyamoto’s 1994 Donkey Kong tribute. (When an entire game is an homage to a game that was itself a homage, you’re low on gas.) The plot had a jealous Donkey Kong steal Mario dolls, and Mario run around Donkey Kong – esque boards to get the Nintendolls back.
Games like this shouldn’t have been passing muster. Where were the innovators? Shigeru Miyamoto didn’t have an original game for the GBA until the Mario & Luigi RPG game, three years into the system’s release. He had better things to do with the Gamecube, and so popped his greatest hits into the microwave every few months to satisfy the GBA audience. Other developers agreed: this was a portable SNES, and they had designed plenty of SNES games back in 1993. They’d rerelease those hits, and crank out subpar licensed dreck to tie in with new movies or cartoon shows. But write new games? No way. Despite huge sales, the GBA was fourth on most people’s console-priority list.
20 – MARIO’S SAGA
SUNSHINE AND DARKNESS
The word “opera” calls up great Italian names: Monteverdi, Pagliacci, Tosca, Caruso, Pavarotti. Opera’s mix of song and theater doesn’t necessarily require a classical protagonist such as Salome or Don Giovanni. California Institute of the Arts grad student Jonathan Mann, for instance, aimed his sights so low for a star that he found him in a sewer.
Plotwise, every Mario game is already an opera. We know the what of the plot—big surprise, Bowser has kidnapped the Princess—but not the hows. We are the show’s performers, though, not divas in Viking outfits. We act out the life-and-death struggle, we experience the ever-so-slightly modified emotions of each repeat performance.
The Mario Opera begins where many operas end: a wedding. Mario crawls through a pipe, finds Princess Peach, they fall in love and get married. Then Bowser arrives and steals the princess. After being taunted by a Goomba, Mario stomps him to death, and is horrified by how good it felt to end another’s life. He rushes forward, transformed from Figaro to Sweeney Todd, killing all in sight in a berserker frenzy.
Then it gets weird. In a metafictional twist, first Bowser and then Mario become aware that this is not their first, or second, or even millionth time reenacting this conflict. They’re pawns being controlled by us the gamers, and have no free will of their own. What sort of hero is Mario, then? What sort of villain is Bowser? The first acts ends with Mario dead at the hands of MagiKoopa (called Lizard Wizard, for rhyming purposes), sure to be resurrected to try again. (Mann never finished the opera, but currently writes and posts a new