Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [99]
It wasn’t working: sales figures of the three consoles side by side by side looked like pencil marks of a child’s height at age five, six, and nineteen. Nintendo, whose plebian console wasn’t even HD, had been the one to redefine terms, really: coming up with a whole new market-place with new preferences. Its console sales bested Microsoft and Sony combined. If Nintendo had just stayed on the same playing field it would be in third, where it belonged!
For Nintendo execs, the E3 challenge was to have as much spring in their step as possible. They were coming off a lackluster year: few exciting games, a wounded stock price, and increased competition. Execs that year lowered sales estimates by more than a billion dollars, mostly due to the strong yen, which strangled export profits. They were still winning, but the profits weren’t miraculously growing every year. Nintendo had learned from past success stories (notably Microsoft in the nineties) to always feel the underdog, never rest on your laurels. They weren’t even taking the easy out of blaming low sales on piracy or the yen: Iwata stated that Nintendo’s job was to “increase the number of our consumers who are willing to shell out their money to purchase our products.”
So they started setting up “Nintendo Zone” Wi-Fi hot spots in Tokyo McDonalds. They gave out baseball stats to folk who brought their DSes to Mariners games. They arranged for the best game designers in the world to fall over themselves praising Super Mario Bros. for its twenty-fifth anniversary. Miyamoto had the month before E3 earned global applause for Super Mario Galaxy 2. Even the NASCAR car GameSpot sponsored, which was painted with Mario and Yoshi, won its first race: a good omen.
Nintendo had perfected the art of attracting casual fans with one hand, while luring over the core fans with the other. It has taken years for third parties to figure out how to make decent Wii games, but now they were cranking out hits like EA Sports Active and Tecmo’s We Ski. But the casual fans had deep pockets: they would buy the Wii, a Wii Board, Wii Fit, and even the Wii toys given away at Wendy’s, and then never use them. They also picked up an ever-growing pile of one-game-only peripherals: billiard sticks, cooking gear, crossbows, helmets, steering wheels, paintbrushes. All three consoles were guilty of this for instruments, thanks to Guitar Hero and Rock Band, selling hundred-dollar plastic axes. The cash of the fair-weather fans who try out video games like a hobby was just as green as the fanboy’s.
The Wii’s new stated goal, Satoru Iwata said, was to break the PS2’s record to become the world’s most popular console. That was a steep cliff. The Wii already had eighty-four million units after five years, spurred on by a 2009 price drop. That number looks great—it’s more than twice as many Atari 2600s sold—except when measured next to the PS2’s 143 million (and counting). In 2009 the PS2 was still outselling the PS3 certain months. There are more PS2s than there are residents of Japan. Could Wii sales still be practically doubled? No one could tell Iwata he wasn’t setting his ambition as high as Yamauchi.
The yearly product demos of the three console makers, as well as A-list publishers like EA and Ubisoft, are true stage shows. Microsoft brought out Cirque du Soleil. Sony had rising comic Joel McHale host for them. Nintendo was not averse to playing this game either: it had sent a Mario mascot into zero gravity with Buzz Aldrin to promote the first Galaxy game. For E3, Nintendo used not celebrities or performers but its own in-house celebrities. No, not Mario and Link.
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata walks on the stage, introduces himself, then lets a white screen drop down. Iwata (wearing the same suit) appears on screen, picks up a DS console, and sees Mario’s hand sticking out. Mario slaps a fake mustache on him, and then Iwata is sucked into the machine like it’s a Ghostbusters floor