November 8, 2007 -

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 to Gunpei 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 Popeye love triangle, a license Nintendo pursued and lost. Very quickly, a giant gorilla subbed for Bluto while Popeye the 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 own cartoon 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.

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) kidnapped Princess 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.