The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (47 page)

Shigeru Miyamoto, the man who designed
Donkey Kong
, built the game around two main characters. One was the eponymous villain, a giant ape that stole a woman and hurled barrels at the man trying to save her. The other was Jumpman, the chubby, mustachioed carpenter who leaped barrels, climbed ladders, and saved the day. Over time, Jumpman underwent an interesting evolution.

The first step in Jumpman’s evolution was a name change—he became Mario in his next outing, a game called
Donkey Kong Junior.
Next, Miyamoto gave Mario a brother named Luigi and converted him from a carpenter into a plumber in the 1983 game
Mario Bros.
Up to this point, Mario always appeared in small games in which you could place the entire field of play on a single screen. That changed in 1985, with the release of
Super Mario Bros.

Super Mario Bros.
took Mario out of his single-screen setting and placed him in a huge, vivid world. Instead of simply climbing ladders and moving around on platforms, players now controlled him as he ran through a seemingly endless, brightly colored countryside filled with caverns, castles, and giant mushrooms. The landscape was much too expansive to fit on a screen. In this new game, the camera followed Mario as he ran forward through his two-dimensional world. Arnie Katz, editor of
Electronic Games
, dubbed it a “side-scrolling” game.
*

The goal of the game was to help Mario rescue a princess from a dragon named Bowser. To do this, players had to fight or slip past walking turtles, flying turtles, and little mushroom-shaped men called Goombas.

Super Mario Bros.
contained several elements that attracted attention. It had bright cartoon-like graphics, fast action, and a sense of humor. It also took
Warren Robinett’s concept of hidden “Easter eggs” to a new level with entire hidden worlds.
*
Most people continued playing
Super Mario Bros.
to find all of Miyamoto’s Easter eggs long after they finished the game. If players knew where to look, they could find free men and coins hidden in mid-air, not to mention beanstalks that took Mario into the clouds, mushrooms that made him big, flowers that enabled him to spit fireballs, and stars that made him invulnerable.
Super Mario Bros.
did very well in Japanese arcades and attracted some attention to the failing U.S. arcade industry.

By the end of the year, Nintendo engineers succeeded in creating a home version of
Super Mario Bros.
for the Famicom. This product defined the difference between games for the old Atari systems and games that could be played on Nintendo cartridges. Although the home version of
Super Mario Bros.
was not identical to the arcade game, it was an extremely close approximation.

By the end of 1985, Nintendo began packaging
Super Mario Bros.
with the Famicom. This marketing move was so successful in Japan that Yamauchi and Arakawa decided to do it in the United States. It took a few months to create an American version of the game, and the cartridge was available by the time Nintendo of America went national—the end of 1986.

Although 1985 was not a great year for video game sales, it was an excellent year for the five ex-Atari executives who had started a toy company called Worlds of Wonder. The head of the company was a man named Don Kingsborough, a former Atari vice president, who decided to start his own business when he ran across an invention that he believed would be a surefire hit as a toy.

Building off the original animatronic technology, Kingsborough and company designed a plush teddy bear with a tape recorder built into its back. Children could place tapes in the recorder, and the bear’s mouth would move as it appeared to tell stories and talk. The bear was named Teddy Ruxpin.

Once they had their product, the founders of Worlds of Wonder next set out to build a sales force. They could have tried to hire salespeople from within the toy industry but instead decided to go with people they knew who would be aggressive. They hired ex-Atari sales representatives.

Teddy Ruxpin was the toy sensation of the 1985 holiday season. Stores could not keep it in stock; public demand was too great. The following year, Worlds of Wonder came out with another major hit, Laser Tag. With these two products, the company became a major player in the toy industry and an attractive partner to Minoru Arakawa, who wanted a marketing partner to distribute the NES.

The offer Arakawa made to Kingsborough bore no resemblance to the one he had made to Atari. The Atari offer involved licensing—Nintendo would allow Atari to manufacture the NES and sell it as an Atari product. Arakawa wanted Worlds of Wonder as distributor. He simply wanted Worlds of Wonder representatives to market the NES, along with Teddy Ruxpin and Laser Tag. He hoped that being associated with the two hottest toys on the market would open doors to stores such as Sears, and he was willing to pay a fee for the help.

As former Atari employees, Kingsborough and many of his executives were very familiar with the NES. They had seen it launched as the Famicom in Japan, and most of them agreed that it was much more powerful than prior console systems. With this in mind, Kingsborough accepted the offer.

As Arakawa expected, the association brought new clout to Nintendo. Worlds of Wonder representatives had access to all of the top buyers. Suddenly, demonstrations of Teddy Ruxpin and Laser Tag expanded to include the NES as well. By that time, however, a new competitor had arrived on the scene.

The NES was not the only Japanese game console introduced in the United States at that time. In October 1986, Sega introduced a console called the Master System that featured the Zilog Z-80 processing chip and 128K (“K” in this case stands for kilobits which are one-eighth the size of the kilobytes normally referred to as “K”.) nearly twice the memory of the NES. The Master System’s additional memory and microprocessor made it more powerful than the NES.

Though it was a more powerful unit, Sega’s Master System, marketed as the Mark III in Japan, had not fared well in that country, where Nintendo controlled more than 90 percent of the market.

The controllers that came with the Master System appeared to be patterned after NES controllers—rectangular, with a directional pad rather than a joystick. In what appears to have been a small concession to the previous generation of game systems, Sega also manufactured tiny joysticks that could be screwed into the center of the directional pads.

Sega planned to market two forms of game media for the Master System. The first was standard cartridges. The other was a plastic card that looked like a credit card with little metal connections on one end. The cards could not store as much data as cartridges, but they sold for less. In the end, however, Sega published very few games on cards.

Like Nintendo, Sega was a company with a strong arcade presence. Sega’s long line of hits included early favorites such as
Astro Blaster, Monster Bash
, and
Turbo
, as well as classics such as
Pengo.
Sega distributed
Frogger
in the United States, though the game was created by Konami. One difference between the two companies is that while Nintendo slowly pulled away from its coin-operated games business, Sega remained very committed to making arcade games. Within the next few years, Nintendo focused all of its development efforts into making cartridges for the NES. Sega, on the other hand, had never launched a consumer product in the United States. Instead, it had licensed games to companies such as Coleco, while continuing to create games for arcades that could then be translated into home games.

To attract consumers, Sega packed a home version of
Hang On
, the number-one game in arcades, with the Master System.
Hang On
was a motorcycle racing game that did not translate well to the constraints of a home system. The arcade game had handlebars for controllers. A deluxe version even had a model of a motorcycle upon which people sat as they played. The home version seemed slow and plain in comparison.

The marketing arm behind Sega’s American release was considerably smaller than Nintendo’s. Formed in April 1986, Sega’s consumer products division consisted of two men, Bruce Lowry and Bob Harris, working with a couple of administrators out of a small room in the back of the company’s coin-operated games offices.

Lowry and Harris arranged for advertising and set up demonstrations for retailers. Harris, who had come from the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, helped create the packaging for the Master System. Within two months of joining Sega, Harris and Lowry had to set up and man an 1,800-square-foot booth at the Summer CES in Chicago. Some show attendees had never heard of Sega, and a few mistook the company for Saga Foods, commenting that it was strange that a food distributor would enter the video game business.

Although the Master System was not as widely distributed as the NES, it could be found in most major cities across the country in time for the holidays. Many electronics stores displayed the NES, the Master System, and the recently re-launched Atari 7800 side by side. Of the three game consoles, the Atari 7800 was the least expensive. Since it played both 2600 and 7800 games, it also had the largest library. The problem was that all of the games for the 7800 looked obsolete when compared to the top games for the two newer systems, and the 7800 eventually disappeared from store shelves.