Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [87]
Some games did try to push Mario into new territory, but met with resistance. Mario Pinball Land had Mario become the pinball to stop Bowser. The mix of adventure and rolling worked better with Super Monkey Ball. A Mario Mix version of Dance Dance Revolution came out, with Mario music and classical tunes to dance to. The attempt to lure in sports gamers with arcadey action continued with Mario Superstar Baseball (Mario knows baseball) and Super Mario Strikers (Mario knows soccer too).
Meanwhile, the PS2 and the Xbox were trying to be all things to all people. Continent-sized games routinely came out for both systems: God of War, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the Grand Theft Auto 3 series. In addition, Sony, Microsoft, and numerous third-party developers tried to make their own Mario-type platforming collection game. Jak and Daxter, Blinx, Ratchet and Clank, Sly Cooper, Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, Tak. They were added to the previous list of Mario wannabes—Spyro, Crash Bandicoot, Rayman, Bubsy, Gex, and of course Sonic. Only a few of these—Crash, Jak, Spyro, Ratchet, Sonic—stuck around.
Which meant, of course, that there was a big, gaping Mario-size hole in the lineups of the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Both systems had even more tremendous upgrades arriving soon: the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. Gamecube games that weren’t Nintendo-made were becoming more and more scarce. The user base for both systems was enormous, and growing. Sega had done very well making its 2K sports games, now rebranded ESPN, available for all three consoles. It was faltering with recent Sonic games, which were Gamecube exclusives. Was this the view from the top of the death spiral?
To an outsider, going multiconsole looked like Nintendo’s best bet. It’d receive a big increase in sales. Everyone loved the Mario franchise: it was parodied in everything from the Xbox sci-fi game Advent Rising (a secret room with three pipes) to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (with feuding friends Larion and Muigin, who complain about plants coming alive) to Assassin’s Creed II (with its Uncle Mario character). The Kyoto company would stay in business, and change with the times. Let other manufacturers make the razor blades—and at a loss. Nintendo could sell the blades. It’d be a step down, but it would keep them alive. If Yamauchi’s data about the gaming audience shrinking was true, how else could they survive?
Nintendo’s ship was being steered by Satori Iwata’s uncalloused hands now. When Yamauchi called Iwata into his office to promote him to president—Iwata has said he thought he was going to be fired—Yamauchi almost certainly demanded that Iwata not leave the hardware business. Nintendo made money selling its software, but also its hardware, a trick no one else in gaming had ever done long-term. It kept pushing gameplay innovations, but all the hardware was necessary for its premier software to be properly viewed. That was Nintendo’s essence: not Mario but Miyamoto, and Yokoi. (And Genyo Takeda and Masayuki Uemura, the underrecognized daimyos.) Bigger did not mean better, and quality of play was not related to quantity of megahertz.
Iwata had no plans for putting Nintendo games on anything other than Nintendo consoles. He and Fils-Aime were firm believers in Yokoi’s maxim. This belief had been recently reiterated in business guru Clayton Christenson’s “disruptive technology” theory, which said that new inventions—think of digital photography—could topple giants like Kodak. Nintendo was huge, but still David in the contest against the twin Goliaths Sony and Microsoft. But what could that disruptor be? Iwata and Fils-Aime started talking about disruptors all the time. Others might think them touched for believing this. But touching can be good.
PART 5
WII ARE THE CHAMPIONS
21 – MARIO’S REVOLUTION
THE DS
In the final months before the Game Boy Advance came out