Do you know After just three years, Nintendo’s aggressive move into the North American videogame market proved a complete disaster. Out of three thousand units built, its much-hyped, last-ditch arcade shooter Radar Scope only sold one thousand units. The rest gathered dust in a warehouse.
Minoru Arakawa, the man who placed the bold Hail Mary order, begged his father-in-law (Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi) to reprogram the useless Radar Scope machines into a new hit game. Anything less would be the nail in Nintendo of America’s coffin. Yamauchi agreed, handing the job toGunpei Yokoi, creator of the successful Game & Watch series, and his young protege, Shigeru Miyamoto… a graphic artist who’d never designed a game in his life.
For the first time, story came first and gameplay was designed around it. Miyamoto based his plot on the Popeyelove triangle, a license Nintendo pursued and lost. Very quickly, a giant gorilla subbed for Bluto while Popeyethe Sailor-Man became Jumpman, a carpenter leaping barrels and scaling his construction site to rescue “Lady.” Miyamoto wanted a linear progression through different stages. His four-man programming team didn’t want to code the same game four times. It was foolish, like redesigning a chess board every five moves.
Under protest, they delivered a whopping 20k of code while Miyamoto composed the music and designed animated “intermissions” to advance the story. Everything had to stay within Radar Scope’s hardware limitations.
Chips and conversion kits were shipped to America in 1981. Arakawa, his wife and a few others changed two thousand Radar Scopes into Donkey Kongs, but Arakawa knew “Jumpman” wouldn’t cut it with the Americans. The character needed a real name. His breakthrough came when their landlord burst into a board meeting, demanding long-overdue rent.
The man’s name was Segali… Mario Segali.
Might As Well Jump
Twenty-six years later, Mario is the face of videogaming, more recognized around the world than Mickey Mouse. He’s appeared in two hundred games, collectively selling over two hundred million units. He’s launched consoles, salvaged entire industries and led the charge into true 3D gaming. Six out of the top-ten best selling videogames of all time are Mario games. Orchestras perform his theme music. Operas have been written. He’s gotten his owncartoon series and, unfortunately for those that saw it, a live-action film. He propelled his creator from staff artist to legend, honored in America, knighted in France and in control of his own division at the third largest company in Japan.
Well before Mario became the official mascot of Nintendo, Donkey Kong’s runaway success – 60,000 cabinets eventually shipped – was attributed to its star: Donkey Kong. Mario barely registered. For his next appearance in 1983’s Donkey Kong Jr., he took on the whip-wielding villain role.
Miyamoto intended Mario to be his go-to character, a slightly pudgy, silly-looking fellow who could easily fit into any game as needed. Accordingly, he designed his little carpenter mostly by creating elegant solutions to practical, 8-bit problems. Overalls made the arms more visible. A thick mustache showed up better than a mouth and accented the bulbous nose. Bright colors popped against dark backgrounds. He wore a hat so Miyamoto could skip designing a hairstyle – not his favorite task — and to save programmers from animating it during jumps.
…Except Mario’s occupation didn’t sit right. A colleague told Miyamoto that his little sprite looked more like a plumber.
Accordingly, Miyamoto put Mario in a crab/turtle/firefly-infested sewer for his third outing. Further inspiration came from Joust, an early co-op game where players worked together or, alternatively, wiped each other out. For Player two, Miyamoto adapted his catch-all character again, swapping Mario’s color palette to create an identical “brother.”
Stories range on how Luigi got his name, from a play on the Japanese word for “analogous” to a pizza parlor near Arakawa’s office called Mario & Luigi’s. Regardless, the twins went to work clearing underground pipes of vermin in Mario Bros., their first headlining game. Players leapt across platforms, stunned critters by punching the ground underneath them, and booted them off-screen to reap their reward in gold coins.
Mario Bros. was only modestly successful. Arcade titles typically had a quick shelf life anyway, and Yamauchi wanted to move Nintendo into the more lucrative home gaming market… just as it completely imploded in the U.S.
Japan remained unaffected. By 1985, the Nintendo Famicom overcame its rocky, recall-stained launch to dominate Asia. However, after several false starts — including a scrubbed deal with Atari — North America remained elusive. Through it all, Yamauchi held to a simple philosophy: games sold consoles, and the best game designer in the world worked for him. He gave Miyamoto his own division, R&D4, to create Famicom games in time for Nintendo’s next pass at the American market.
Mario and Luigi left both sewers and arcades behind. The Mushroom Kingdom was their home now, and the Famicom their new platform.
A Series of Tubes
Early videogames were largely designed by the programmers coding them. Shigeru Miyamoto, on the other hand, was an artist by training. His approach was an artistic one. The games he designed were so different from everything else simply because he didn’t really know what he wasn’t supposed to do. That left him free to explore, and exploration soon became a part of his games.
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In Donkey Kong and Mario Bros., he created the first true platformers, and now he wanted to expand those concepts. Early on, Miyamoto played with the idea of making Mario and Luigi bigger and smaller as they gained and lost power-ups. Progression would be linear, but a little exploration and experimentation would reveal hidden items, rooms, and shortcuts. If you saw a blocked-off chamber, it was always somehow accessible once the right blocks were smashed.
Careful attention went into creating the Mushroom Kingdom’s challenges. Miyamoto wanted the player’s experience to be consistently good and constantly evolving… always interesting, never overwhelming. Enemies balanced threat with whimsy. “Mushroom traitor” Goombas and pokey turtle Koopa Troopas got their comeuppance when Mario (Luigi for Player two) stomped on them or punted empty Koopa shells in their direction. Power-ups turned him into giant-sized Super Mario, fireball-throwing Fire Mario, or made him temporarily invincible. Finding and collecting coins earned you extra lives and a ticking clock kept you moving. Pipes and warp zones let you skip ahead or skip entire levels. Miyamoto packed bright, colorful levels full of secrets to find, every inch stamped with his genius and set to Koji Kondo’s immediately catchy tunes. Even the springy buzz of Mario’s jumps pleased the ear.
Miyamoto spent so much time perfecting Mario, he was forced to put R&D4’s other major project – The Legend of Zelda – on hold, and cede much of Wrecking Crew, a Famicom game staring the brothers Mario, to others.
In October 1985, the Famicom, by then redubbed the Nintendo Entertainment System, went to America in several forms — one of which included a R.O.B. the Robot-less Super Mario Bros. bundled in the box. Arakawa found exactly one unenthusiastic distributor willing to gamble a limited stock in their New York stores as a test run. Expectations weren’t high. That fad was over. Everyone expected the NES to sit on the shelves and stay there right through the upcoming holiday season.
Only it didn’t. Word got out about a system that blew Atari away, and the amazing game that came with it.
The plot wasn’t deep, but it became the basis for virtually every Mario game to follow. A highly unpleasant turtle-dragon named Bowser (a.k.a. King Koopa, a play on the turtle-demon kappas of Japanese folklore) kidnappedPrincess Peach (a.k.a. Princess Toadstool) and conquered the Mushroom Kingdom. Tiny Mario leapt chasms, stomped foes, and traversed eight huge worlds rushing to her rescue. You couldn’t help but feel the little guy had a lot of heart.
All paths led to a fight with Bowser over a lava pit and eventually to Peach and a chaste reward… i.e. a nice “Thank You, Mario!” Anyway, heroes expected rewards. Mario was just a working stiff, doing what needed doing.
Super Mario Bros. was a sheer joy to play, and soon bore out Yamauchi’s philosophy. By February, tens of millions of Nintendo systems sold across the U.S., nearly every one representing a gamer playing Mario. Bundled or otherwise, a record forty million Super Mario games sold, ten million more than the nearest competitor even two decades later.
The videogame crash of 1983 was officially done, all thanks to a plucky little Italian plumber. A sequel was obvious, but that’s when things got tricky in every conceivable way.
In Another Castle
Super Mario Bros. became the last time Miyamoto could direct every last element of a game himself. His responsibilities overseeing R&D4 ate up his time, and severely limited his participation in the sequel. Out of necessity, his attention turned to finishing Zelda for the Famicom Disk System.
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The FDS was essentially an external disk drive that plugged into the Famicom. The games were cheaper, the disks held five times the memory cartridges did, and the results impressed. Zelda was the first Famicom Disk game. Super Mario Bros. 2 would be next.
Visually, it looked exactly like its predecessor, but it was harder… much harder. Smooth level designs were replaced by insanely tough obstacle courses, occasionally requiring a split-second bounce off a Koopa to clear extra-wide gaps. Latter stages were cannibalized from “Vs. Super Mario Bros.”, a largely redesigned arcade port of the original. Adding to frustrations, some mushrooms were poisonous, some warps sent you back instead of forward, and inclement weather regularly kicked Mario off-course in mid-chasm jump. Waiting at the end of every boss fight, Mario found a trussed-up Toad — Princess Peach’s mushroom retainers — grateful for rescue, “but our princess is in another castle!”
Nintendo decided Mario 2’s difficulty level exceeded North American skill level. Rather than risk the franchise’s popularity, they canceled its stateside release and looked for an alternative. They found one in Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic (Dream Factory: Heart-Pounding Panic), a game Miyamoto actually spent more time on than Mario 2.
It followed a platforming family of four — each with Mario-mirroring abilities — on a quest to rescue kidnapped kids in a strange fantasy land. If that wasn’t close enough, the playable characters corresponded nicely; Mario, Luigi, Peach and Toad were built on Brother, Mama, Sister and Papa’s models. Luigi got his first distinctive character traits in the original Mario 2 (longer jumps, less traction), and now he got his first original character model as well. Building on Mama’s model made him noticeably taller than Mario, too.
Of course, Doki Doki Panic wasn’t a Mario game and it didn’t play like one; no hidden secrets, no Koopas, no Bowser, no Fire Mario, few power-ups of any kind, and strangest of all, no more stomping enemies. They (or various fruits and veggies) were hefted up and hurled into other enemies. Mario defeated final boss Wart by tossing fruit into its mouth, choking the giant frog, and the whole game turned out to be Mario’s dream.
American gamers enthusiastically jumped on the Doki Doki Super Mario Bros. 2, unaware of the switch. In retrospect, it became the series’ big aberration, but both Mario 2s found huge audiences through various ports. The Japanese version became The Lost Levels in later collections with the more problematic elements cleaned up. Doki Doki Mario 2 got a complete overhaul to launch the Game Boy Advance, making it feel more Mario while keeping the unusual gameplay intact.
By an interesting quirk of timing, Doki Doki Mario 2 originally released stateside in October 1988, the same month Japanese gamers were playingSuper Mario Bros. 3. Americans wouldn’t get their first look at the newest Mario until the climactic final battle in a Fred Savage movie – The Wizard – two years later. And then it didn’t hit stores for another two months.
Miyamoto became intensely involved on Mario 3 from conception onward. He wanted new ways to power-up Mario, initially by changing him into a centaur and other mythical creatures, but the first sketch that really stuck showed Mario with a raccoon tail. New gameplay possibilities opened up, and Miyamoto went with them. Mario’s wardrobe further expanded with Frog and Tanooki suits, giving him flight, swimming, and stealth abilities. Miyamoto complemented those powers by creating ingenious levels around them, arguably some of the best levels ever designed for a videogame.
Dozens of new enemies like Boom Booms, Boos and Chain Chomps impeded a quest to rescue seven kings from Bowser’s seven bratty kids, the Koopalings. Naturally, this was merely a diversion so Bowser (now with a mane of red hair) could once again make off with Peach. Also new to the series, mini-games that bestowed power-ups, a handy map screen to track progress and collectable Warp Whistles (bearing a striking resemblance to the one Linkused in Zelda II) for those wanting to skip to the end. Not that many did, outside of speed-runners. The incredible amounts of secrets to discover in every level encouraged a complete play-through, and then complete replays to see it all.
Super Mario Bros. 3 fast became the second best selling videogame of all time, and the franchise’s NES swan song. Super Mario Bros. 4 would materialize under a new name, on a new console, and with new competition.
Sibling Rivalries
Mario already counted a dozen mobile games to his name at this point, mostly ports under the Game & Watch imprint. But now Miyamoto’s old mentor, Gunpei Yokoi, had invented a new platform: the Game Boy. Yamauchi wanted their star character on it. Yokoi’s R&D1 teamwent to work on the first original mobile Mario game in 1989… And the first Mario without Shigeru Miyamoto.
Super Mario Land gave gamers twelve levels of platforming goodness, including a few shooting sequences with Mario piloting planes and submarines. The story took him away from the Mushroom Kingdom to Sarasaland and another princess – Daisy – who needed rescuing from the evil clutches of mysterious spaceman Tatanga. On his return home in Super Mario Land 2, he learned it had been conquered by a new adversary namedWario.
Yokoi’s take on Mario helped the Game Boy surpass the NES as Nintendo’s best selling platform, and the game itself edged past Mario 3’s sales figures. That same year, a re-org changed R&D4 into Nintendo EAD(Entertainment Analysis and Development), giving Miyamoto responsibility over nearly all game content for Nintendo’s next console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. He went right to work on a Mario launch title.
Unfortunately, unlike the NES launch, Nintendo wasn’t the only game in town anymore. The SEGA Genesis had a two-year jump, and a mascot of their own.Sonic the Hedgehog came off as the anti-Mario… faster, hipper, attitude-ready. SEGA wasn’t shy about drawing the distinction, either. Genesis did “what Nintendon’t.” In a personality contest between the two, Mario was just too humble and selfless to be a badass, and that deficiency worried Nintendo execs. It even prompted Miyamoto to publicly admit his game suffered from a rushed production schedule.
Super Mario World arrived in 1991 alongside the SNES, and sold twice as many copies as the first two Sonic games combined.
Miyamoto’s mea culpa aside, Mario in 16-bit looked better, sounded better, played better than any Mario game before and sold better than all but the first. Nothing compared to knocking gigantor Bullet Bills out of the sky with a simple tap, or discovering the secret path to Star Road. Spin attacks combined nicely with Fire Mario firepower. Some blocks spun when hit to create revolving doorways. Bowser returned, as a proper nemesis should, and gamers were introduced to a Mario’s best friend, Yoshi.
The R&D1 design staff wanted Mario to ride a dinosaur ever since Super Mario Bros., but now the technology made it possible. Yoshi came in one size and all colors, with different powers and huge appetites. Players loved the new addition to Mario’s growing roster, so much so that Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island became a Super Mario game were Mario wasn’t playable. The focus was entirely on Yoshi ferrying helpless Baby Mario to safety.
It wasn’t much of a shock. Mario had branched across genres and game types since his first Golf game in 1984, to the point that by the mid-90’s, his name was synonymous with videogames in general more than with the stellar platforming titles where he made his bones. Mario played basketball, tennis, pinball, checkers, Go Fish, raced motocross and caught big air snowboarding down mountains. He was part of the Dance Dance Revolution. Dr. Mario prescribed Tetris-like puzzles, but Mario and Luigi also appeared in Picross and Tetris-branded games. Luigi searched for a missing Mario in riffs on Carmen Sandiego, and Mario himself taught numbers, letters, typing, painting, and sweater knitting.
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