Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [96]
The Wii’s popularity became a self-feeding fire, generating more attention and exposure, which prompted more sell-outs. Most consoles sell out for the first few weeks, or maybe until Christmas. The Wii sold out every month for three years straight. Retailers didn’t bother stocking them: shoppers would sniff them out in the supply room. Assisted-living facilities and nursing homes now have Wiis as a mainstay, right alongside the History Channel and stool softeners. Cruise ships have them. Malls and theme parks have Wii zones, where tourists can try out some archery with Link or racing with Princess Peach. Hard-core gamers sneer at the Wii the way they would a family film. But guess who tops at the box office, time and again? Steve Martin. Tim Allen. Robin Williams. More than eighty-four million Wiis have been sold at record speed.
Mario games still came out for the Wii, and on a regular basis. Mario Party 8 finally had a new reason to live: despite subpar graphics and the same warmed-over content as before, the minigame boardgame format was a hit with the Wiimote. (That same year, the virtual became real when the Mario characters showed up in a branded Monopoly game.) Super Smash Bros. Brawl finally came out, after years of development, and has become a top-selling game. A half dozen Mario games were released for the Virtual Console in 2007, with more every year since.
A Wii sports game tied into the 2008 Beijing Olympics was the digital equivalent of Ragnarok, matter and antimatter colliding, cats and dogs living together. The title? Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. Developed by Sega Sports, but supervised by Shigeru Miyamoto, it added double the star power to the minigame Olympic format. The Sonic canon (Amy Rose, Knuckles, Tails, etc.) and Mario’s klatch go oversized-head-to-oversized-head in a wealth of Olympic events. The game’s ads neutered Sonic by having him be the straight man, trying to give an interview while Mario foils it in slapstick fashion. Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games followed.
Super Paper Mario was a spiritual kin to New Super Mario Bros., plunking Mario down in a sedate side-scroller, then turning that world topsy-turvy. Super Paper Mario did so by letting Mario swivel the camera around to show the three-dimensional world hidden by forced perspective and overlapping images of 2-D. Clever. But the years of development (it was going to be a Gamecube game way back when) had a price: for a Wii game, there was next to no motion sensing. Also clever was the premise for the newest Mario & Luigi RPG game for the DS, called Bowser’s Inside Story. Mario and Luigi have to defeat a giantsize Bowser by traveling through him, fighting his cells.
Finally, there was the Mario game that everyone had been waiting for: Miyamoto’s true Mario sequel, which arrived once per console. Super Mario Galaxy did not disappoint. It took the unused gravity-field idea from the 128 Marios concept and applied it to an outer space setting. Mario blasted off from world to world, each a tiny sphere circumnavigable in seconds. Miyamoto, perhaps feeling his French oats, had followed up becoming a chevalier by essentially making Le Petit Prince as a video game.
Whatever dissatisfaction there was for Super Mario Sunshine disappeared with Super Mario Galaxy, which has sold nine million copies to date. Mario gains a new primary attack: spinning, performed with a satisfying shake of the Wiimote. The camera somehow never gets lost. Kōji Kondō wrote orchestral music for the game, to suit the bombastic sci-fi feel. There are new power suits (ghost suit, spring suit, bee suit), and even a modest two-player cooperative mode: one person is Mario, and the second is his star buddy, who mouses around the screen gobbling up valuable star pieces.
Miyamoto, who had serious involvement with the project, even agreed to put out Super Mario Galaxy 2 a few years later, filled with all the