Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [9]
Making video game hair look realistic was (and still is) a problem—especially blue hair. So Jumpman got a hat—a red one. And because red fulfilled the three-color quota, that meant Jumpman’s pants would have to be red as well. By adding more and more pixels, and crucially placing a single peach pixel to suggest a button, Miyamoto was able to make Jumpman a credible pair of overalls. And quite a paunch, especially for a high jumper. (Author Steven Poole has hypothesized that game characters’ bodies are so squat because it gives more proportional room for their head and eyes, which allows the gamer to connect with them better.)
The Lady was designed differently. She was more than a head taller than Jumpman, a Barbie next to a troll doll. She had flowing orange hair, a cinched pink dress with white trim on the bottom, and skin as white as the font flashing the game’s high score. Hotter than Olive Oyl, Miyamoto joked.
Donkey Kong (nicknamed DK) himself was built bigger still, to fulfill Miyamoto’s idea of having three characters of different sizes mixing it up. DK used up about six times as many pixels as Jumpman, as befitted a true heavy, and was technically multiple sprites Voltroned together into one body. Dark and light brown did most of the color work, showing a thickly muscled, nippled chest; big, hairy arms; legs that ended in wide-splayed simian feet; and ears that would have looked comically big if they hadn’t bookended a mouth the size of an August watermelon. His teeth and eyes alone were white, which made them stand out that much more.
Who wore overalls? People in construction jobs such as carpentry and plumbing. So Jumpman gained an occupation: he would be . . . a carpenter. His plumbing years were to come, but he wasn’t the first video game plumber. That honor goes to 1973’s forgotten safecracking arcade game Watergate Caper, where gamers played as one of the leakplugging “plumbers” who broke into Democratic National Committee headquarters.
If Jumpman died, he would return at the bottom of the screen, ready to take on the challenge of the level again. Each game created three Jumpmen (three lives were standard in gaming), with more earned for high scores. There was something quite spiritual about the concept of a man returning from the dead again and again to complete a task left undone. Facing the monster was a ritual of purity for Jumpman, with impurity of form (i.e., getting clobbered) punished by death. This game of Miyamoto’s, and most every video game since, could be seen as a digital Shinto purification ceremony.
It was all coalescing. Donkey Kong would be situated at the top of the screen, with Jumpman fighting his way up: gamers were used to enemies up top. What better setting than a construction site? Donkey Kong could roll barrels down the bare I beams, and Jumpman would have to jump to avoid them. The “sloping” girders were progressively tiered, since angling them wasn’t possible with mere raster graphics.
Miyamoto gave Jumpman a choice of ladders to ascend. (Yokoi had suggested seesaws instead, but that would have strained the Z80 processor more than angled girders.) The farther ladder was safer, but it took longer to reach. This gave players a true choice right away: take the quick and difficult