I first experienced a Mario game in the fourth grade, thanks to a friend of mine who had an almost unhealthy Super Nintendo addiction. Once my brother and I had pestered our parents into buying us the brain-numbing machine for Christmas that year, I developed one too — at least to the degree I could, given my household’s strict four-hours-a-week limit.
Of course, back then I didn’t fully appreciate the artistry behind Super Mario World — the colorful and well-designed levels, the music that perfectly captured the mood of every stage, the perpetually enjoyable and physics-denying way that Mario can jump several times his own height and change directions in midair. I also didn’t think much about how I, a kid growing up in Wisconsin, could be completely hypnotized by a product designed in Japan, a country halfway around the world with a very different culture.
Fortunately, all of this is explained in Jeff Ryan’s Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America. His writing is entertaining, even if he tries too hard in places — and he tells a story about human ingenuity, defying the odds, and, yes, corporate greed.
Nintendo has a long history in Japan; it was founded there as a playing-card company in 1894. But its rise to worldwide prominence is an oddly American story.
By the early 1980s, Nintendo was already a player in the Japanese video-game industry, having designed various arcade games and a popular handheld system (the Game & Watch). So the company’s head sent his son-in-law to open an American division. The division started off with a few thousand arcade cabinets of a game called “Radar Scope” — it was merely a rip-off of the smash hit Space Invaders, but it had sold well in Japan.
American arcades didn’t buy it, though, which put the new division in a precarious place: It was too expensive to ship a new game from Japan. So instead of starting over, Nintendo decided to program the cabinets with a different game.
The cabinets had been designed for shooting — they had a joystick to move the spaceship, and a button to make it fire. But Shigeru Miyamoto, then a lowly staff artist, had a different vision. The joystick would move a character, and the button would make him jump. Initially, the plan was to make a Popeye-themed game, but the licensing rights fell through — and that’s how “Jumpman,” who was quickly renamed Mario, was born.
The game was called “Donkey Kong,” after its antagonist, a hulking gorilla who stole Mario’s girlfriend. In each of four excruciatingly difficult stages, Mario had to leap over obstacles and climb ladders to reach Donkey Kong at the top of the screen. It was unlike anything on the market at the time, and after a slow start it took over American arcades. Miyamoto, using nothing but his own sense of what people might enjoy playing, went on to become a gaming superstar, creating everything from an adventure series (The Legend of Zelda) to a pet simulator (Nintendogs).
Donkey Kong’s success paved the way for Nintendo’s ascendance. The company fought off a lawsuit from Universal (which claimed to own the rights to King Kong, and argued that Donkey Kong was an infringement on that property) and released several sequels. It also decided to release a console for homes — a risky endeavor, considering that the home-console market had recently crashed.
The result was the Nintendo Entertainment System, and it too became an essential component of American culture, draining the hours from countless childhood days. The NES was home to three big-selling Super Mario games, which expanded the concept of Donkey Kong to include long, complex stages for Mario to explore, as well as a new enemy, Bowser. Several years later, Nintendo released the Game Boy, a handheld system that was just as popular.
Nintendo was, without doubt, the leader of the video-game world; no other company came close. In an attempt to keep it that way, the company developed an anticompetitive edge. Most notoriously, when other companies wanted to make NES games, they had to sign contracts agreeing not to make games for competing consoles.
But the free market tends not to tolerate such behavior for long. Nintendo’s Japanese rival Sega inflicted the first blow. The NES was an 8-bit machine, and in 1988, Sega released the Mega Drive — Genesis in the U.S. — which had 16 bits of processing power. Sega struggled at first against Nintendo’s monopoly, but then it found a strategy that worked.
One, it managed to find game developers that hadn’t signed Nintendo contracts — including Electronic Arts, which to this day remains a giant in the field. Two, it ran an aggressive advertising campaign that called Nintendo out by name (“Sega does what Nintendon’t”). And three, in 1991 it debuted its own Mario: Sonic, a hedgehog who had both the attitude that Nintendo’s plump plumber lacked and the speed needed to show off Sega’s superior hardware.
But Sega didn’t have Shigeru Miyamoto. Nintendo responded with the 16-bit Super Nintendo, along with numerous classic games, including the aforementioned Super Mario World. In the end, the Super Nintendo outsold the Genesis — but Sega had ended the monopoly and cleared the way for competition.
Over the next two console generations, electronics giants Sony and Microsoft joined the field. Sony’s PlayStation and PlayStation 2 outsold Nintendo and Sega’s offerings, as did Microsoft’s Xbox. Sega decided to stop making consoles, and it was rumored that Nintendo might, too.
But again, Nintendo had Shigeru Miyamoto. It also had an ability to make up for a lack of resources with creativity, as well as a recent success with the Nintendo DS, a handheld system that featured a touch screen with a stylus, which allowed for more intuitive control.
Sensing that a new control scheme could win over new customers, Nintendo released the Wii in 2006. Unlike competing consoles, it wasn’t all that powerful; in fact, it didn’t even work in high definition. What it had, though, was a remote-shaped controller that detected motion. In a tennis game, the remote becomes a racket; in baseball, it’s a bat.
Thanks to its simplicity, innovation, and low price, the Wii brought countless “casual” gamers into the fold, and even took on roles that can hardly be called gaming at all. Wii Fit, for example, is a workout program that allows players to keep track of their progress. “Hardcore” gamers scoff at the Wii, but in terms of sales, it outperformed its closest competitor, the Xbox 360, by tens of millions of units.
What does the future look like for Nintendo? At the end of Super Mario, the company is riding off into the sunset, but recent news has not been good. Earlier this year, Nintendo launched a handheld system called the 3DS, which offers a 3-D effect that works without 3-D glasses; it sold so poorly that the price has already been cut from $250 to $170. It also announced a new console, the Wii U — which will be the most powerful console on the market, but will be controlled by what might charitably be called an iPad with some buttons and joysticks glued onto it. (To be fair, I have not tried it yet.) A company official has promised it “is not going to be cheap,” and Nintendo’s stock fell after the announcement.
But that, after all, is the way things work in America — Nintendo didn’t “conquer” us, as Super Mario’s subtitle states, because we are unconquerable. Buyers will always treat unproven products with the skepticism they deserve. Nintendo did, however, make an undeniable — and for those of us who are fans, indispensable — contribution to our popular culture.
— Robert VerBruggen is an associate editor of National Review.