Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [91]
For the first time since 1992, Mario was in a side-scroller. Credit producer Takashi Tezuka for doing what music producers Rick Rubin and Dae Bennett did for Johnny Cash and Tony Bennett, respectively: revitalized their long careers by cutting away artifice and showing them doing what made them great. In Tezuka’s case, it was injecting a breath of fresh air into supervising producer Shigeru Miyamoto’s original side-scrolling style of game play.
Don’t believe, though, that this meant Mario wasn’t getting more exposure than a Speedo wearer in the desert. Just about every Mario game you can think of—Mario Kart, Mario & Luigi RPG, Yoshi’s Island, even Mario Vs Donkey Kong—received a sequel or two. He showed up in original titles as well: Taiko Drum Master, a mah-jong game called Yakuman DS. And Mario Hoops 3-on-3 added yet another sport to Mario’s Thorpe-ian letterman’s jacket, basketball—he also cameoed his rock skills in NBA Street V3, and snowboarded his way into SSX on Tour.
In March 2005, Shigeru Miyamoto, who let so many millions chase after stars, received one of his own. He was one of two video game creators to be given the first stars in the new Walk of Game in San Francisco’s Metreon mall: Atari’s Nolan Bushnell was the other. Bushnell’s picture shows his large frame in a gray silk shirt, no tie or jacket, top button undone: the portrait of a software pioneer. Miyamoto’s is covered with stuffed animals: Mario, Wario, Yoshi, Donkey Kong, a hidden Bowser over his shoulder. He wears a blue blazer and cream ribbed turtleneck that, combined with his unkempt hair, makes him seem to have walked off the Regal Beagle set from a Three’s Company taping. Four game franchises were inducted. Two of them were Miyamoto’s: Zelda and Mario. Halo and Sonic rounded out the list. Miyamoto did not attend, but sent a foam-headed mustached emissary in his place. The Metreon stopped giving the award out the year after, but Miyamoto’s steel star remains. He left his mark in San Francisco.
A short stroll from that star is a Sony-branded PlayStation store, selling nothing but PS2 this and PS2 that. Starting in 2005, it and every other video game store in the United States started stocking the PlayStation Portable, the biggest-ever threat to Nintendo’s handheld hegemony.
Sony didn’t seem to have many weak spots in its frontal assault on the DS. The PSP had a big screen: a whopping 4.3 inches wide. Its capacity was big; it used optical discs for its storage, and could play entire films on special Universal Media Discs. Its memory was big: it had 16 GB of flash storage. Its controls were big: it had a modified PS2 controller hidden around the wide screen, including a nub of a joystick. Its games were big: it played note-perfect PlayStation ports, and launched with some of the best initial games ever: Spider-Man, Need for Speed, Tony Hawk, Tiger Woods, NBA Street, Metal Gear, Twisted Metal. Its extras were big: it had Wi-Fi access. Aha, Nintendo maniacs countered, but its energy drain was big: players had four to six hours on a charge. And that $250 price tag? Big.
The PSP roared in popularity in 2005. Its promised connectivity with the PS3, its widescreen movies, its software-running abilities, its hit game franchises: the PSP could do no wrong. Then, as if living up to the PlayStation heritage, a wave of piracy began, aided by Internet access and capacious memory sticks. Despite regular security patches,