Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [86]
Yes, it turned out. The choice of successor revealed Yamauchi’s skill at management, and at go. Go is a devilishly complex game, in which an opponent’s all-black board can be turned snow white with just a few perfectly placed white stones. Yamauchi was a famous fan: the first NES game he ever bothered to play was a game of go. He hardly ever lost. It’s just about impossible to become a billionaire without gamesmanship, not mere money, driving you. Yamauchi was placing some of his last pieces, and they were going to turn the dark board white as rice.
He picked Satoru Iwata, forty-three, the HAL Laboratories developer who was one of Nintendo’s second-party vendors. Iwata had been president of HAL since 1993, when he helped bring it back from the brink of bankruptcy. (Yamauchi bailed HAL out on the promise that Iwata become HAL’s president.) Before that he was a designer, working on the Kirby games. In 2000 Yamauchi had brought him into Nintendo’s fold proper, as head of corporate planning. In retrospect, it was a try-out job, to see what Iwata would do with the throne.
Iwata was aligned with Nintendo’s (and Yamauchi’s) belief that bigger wasn’t better. His Kirby games were designed for beginning players, yet were still fun. The Pokémon games certainly weren’t breaking new graphical ground, but they were a hit too. This was when developers were cranking out violent epics that cost tens of millions of dollars. That was great for hard-core gamers, but there was a whole world out there besides young males at 2 A.M. online sessions. Game-play innovations could lead to cheaper, quickly designed quality games that could outsell behemoths such as True Crime: Streets of LA and Battlefield: 1942.
Hiroshi Yamauchi stayed on as head of the board of directors, an honorary (read: rubber-stamp) position in Japan. He turned down his pension, letting Nintendo reinvest it. “Hiroshi” does mean “generous,” but as a billionaire, he could afford to turn down about $10 million—or he was canny enough to know it would net him more in Nintendo’s hands than in his own. He also started dishing out collateral-free loans to Gamecube developers, to entice them. After three years heading the board, he left at age seventy-five, passing the chairman/CEO baton for the Seattle Mariners to Howard Lincoln. He currently holds a 10 percent share of Nintendo stock, and due to Japan’s rebounded economy is no longer in the top five of Forbes’s richest-in-Japan list. The Yamauchi shogunate would continue, with a new shogun.
Within months of each other, Miyamoto, Arakawa, and Yamauchi all took steps back from Nintendo. Miyamoto was busy trying to come up with ways of making each new Gamecube game have a special connectivity feature with the Game Boy Advance, which had a rearranging-deck-chairs futility to it. Yamauchi had to adjust to not walking through the front doors of 11-1 Kamitoba-Hokodatecho like he owned the place. And Arakawa was free of Yamauchi’s taunts, professionally if not as his son-in-law.
This was the end of an era for Nintendo, and the years that followed certainly seemed like they were on a sort of gotta-make-thedonuts autopilot. Mario Partys 4, 5, 6, and 7 came out, with many shared minigames. Mario Golf was upgraded, with the GC-GBA connectivity between Toadstool Tour (GC) and Advance Tour (GBA). A similar arrangement was made for Mario Power Tennis (GC) and Mario Tennis: Power Tour (GBA), which features the Mario Kart items for a dodgeball feel. Dr. Mario was repackaged a few more times. A Gamecube Mario Kart came out, and another Paper Mario. One of the Mario Partys was turned into an arcade game, then one of the Mario Karts. To paraphrase Jan Brady, it was Mario Mario Mario.
Many of these were solid games, but they didn’t expand the Mario brand as much as continue it. With not much game-play