Tag Archives: Super Mario Bros

We Talk to Shigeru Miyamoto About the Future

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e spoke to Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto yesterday after the company’s press briefing to get his take on our cover story topic for the week. How does his work inform the future? And is the direction the medium is growing necessarily represent the best possible future for gaming?

1UP: This year, 1UP is really interested in looking to the future of the medium and asking how the games we see this year speak to where video games are going in the future, where the industry and the medium both are traveling. Let me put the question to you: Where do you personally see games going? In what direction do you think the medium should go?

SM: I think, actually, that the future of gaming machines and games themselves is going to change from what it has been in the past. In the past, you created games for a game system, and sometimes we created a game system to be able to create a specific game. But now, what we’re starting to see is, we’re seeing elements from video games working their way into other media. So for example, you have broadcast television, where simultaneously you may have an ability to vote on what’s happening in relation to that TV, or to have an impact on it.

What I look at, with something like Wii U in particular, is that now we have a system that isn’t reliant upon the TV screen any longer. Because it has its own dedicated screen. In the future, what I think is going to happen is, people will go to that screen first. That’s where they will begin their experience, and it will become a gateway for a lot of different things that they can do, whether it’s socializing or whether it’s playing games or whether it’s going here first and then going to watch television from there. That’s where I see the future of game machines going.

In terms of games themselves, and more specifically game designers, as elements of gaming continue to permeate other media, just as I’m now doing work that is finding its way into an art museum, I think game designers are soon going to start finding themselves applying what they know about designing games and bringing that to other media in the future.

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1UP: You were talking about people going to something besides the television screen first. I don’t know if you saw Microsoft’s press conference, but they introduced something called SmartGlass. I saw a lot of criticism in response to that. I know your stage presentation mentioned something about tablets and phones and pulling all of these experiences together for Wii U. What differentiates Wii U from SmartGlass?

SM: I think that obviously, perhaps we’re thinking along similar lines. And obviously, maybe consumers think that that’s something, some functionality, that they want, or that they’re already trying to use. So perhaps it’s that the two companies are moving in a similar direction. But where I think Nintendo’s true strength is that when we take an idea like this, the first thing that we think about is, how can we bring this together in a form that is affordable to everyone, and is simple for everyone to use from the moment that you start it up? It’s a very natural flow. I think that we have the greatest chance of realizing this idea in a way that amass audience can really enjoy.

1UP: The criticism I’ve seen most in response to SmartGlass was that there were all these other screens around the television that didn’t really have anything to do with what was going on on that screen. So you see a movie, and then you get this database information, you can browse Wikipedia and see information about that movie… But that takes your attention away from the movie. The Wii U strikes me as an evolution of the Connectivity concept that you put forward a decade ago. But when you start bringing in all these non-game elements, as you say, other media… Do you worry about that diluting the video game experience and distracting people? You have all these different screens showing different things that are not necessarily directly related to the game. How does that impact the game experience?

SM: That’s a challenge that we’ve actually come into direct contact with in the past. Both in the creation of the original Nintendo DS, and of course, as you mentioned, in the work that we did with connectivity many years back. How do you make that information relevant and useful? With what we’ve seen in what Microsoft is doing, obviously in concept they have some ideas, but how does that all work together? There’s information that’s useful and usable, but if those screens are providing information that doesn’t have any meaning or that you can’t take advantage of, or if the response time between what’s happening on the TV and when you’re getting that information isn’t good, then ultimately what happens is it becomes something that’s very difficult to use.

That’s where I come back to Nintendo’s strength, which is that we look at how we can bring these ideas together in a way that actually makes it a tool that’s very easy to use, and that brings meaning to the experience. That’s where we’ll draw on the experience we have from the past to make that a reality.

And this maybe isn’t really a good example for your question, it’s probably an example better suited to a Japanese audience, but obviously in Japan we’re very fond of karaoke. You always have somebody who’s singing off of the television, but then you also always have the next person who’s waiting to sing. When you have a small screen like this, it then becomes much easier for somebody to sit down and be choosing their song and select it and send it to the system while the previous person is finishing up their song. It makes for a smoother experience. That’s just one kind of small example, but it shows how having that ability to have two independent things going on simultaneously, at one time, can often give a different way of looking at situations we’ve seen up until now for a group of people.

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1UP: You made mention, on stage, of some sort of integration between Wii U and 3DS, but you didn’t really go into a lot of details. Where do you see that going in the future? For example, you have two new Super Mario Bros. games coming out very close together. Will there be any connection between those games? And if not, why not?

SM: As to the last part of your question about the two Mario games, there’s an “Iwata Asks” video with Mr. Tezuka that’s being released this week. So you can take a look at that, and that’ll give you an idea of what the difference is between the 3DS Mario game and the Wii U Mario game.

But as far as the idea of connectivity, there are a number of different examples that we could think of. So for example, if you think about Nintendogs as a game that you play on Nintendo 3DS, and having that similar two-screen structure, it would be very easy to create a Nintendogs that perhaps would allow you to take your Nintendogs data for the dog that you have on your Nintendo 3DS and bring that into the living room on a larger screen where the entire family could enjoy seeing you play with your dog on the bigger screen.

On stage, I talked a little bit more about how some of the uses of this screen, independent of the television, can allow for some of those unique experiences that cross between these two screens, rather than talking specifically about connectivity. But of course, given the long experience that we have trying out different things in that connectivity space, we’ll certainly build on that as we continue to think about what the possibilities might be. And of coruse we have, taking the example of something like the Miis, which originated on the Wii hardware, and have now migrated over towards the 3DS hardware, and as you can see they’re also taking a prominent role in the Wii U hardware…

What this does is it creates a sort of unique dynamic, where on the Nintendo 3DS, you have the StreetPass data that you get by walking past people in real life and connecting with them, and on the Wii U, you have a similar type of connection with people, but it happens over the internet. So I think that can also create some interesting dynamics in terms of what we can do with that type of experience.

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1UP: I think the Miiverse concept looks really interesting, but I’m wondering, will you still be incorporating safeguards and restrictions, things like friend codes, to kind of keep people separate and help them regulate their connections? Or will Miiverse actually open up to a broader audience?

SM: I actually can’t directly answer the question, but what I can say is that we are looking at how we can have people connect with as many people as possible in the safest way possible.

1UP: The Miiverse Mario example you presented reminded me a bit of the games Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with those, by From Software, but those games have a very interesting kind of similar connection: When you die you can leave a note and offer advice to other players. But it’s all anonymous, you don’t know who’s left the advice, you don’t know if it’s helpful or harmful, but it adds this extra dynamic, this extra layer. I think that the openness of it is what makes that effective.

SM: It’s a little bit different with the Miiverse, because the comments do come with an image of that person’s Mii, so you do have some indication of who they might be. But the basic idea is, as you’re playing through the game, to give you an opportunity to see what that shared experience that you may be having with others who play the game could be. The goal is to try to make that as broad as we possibly can, and at the same time try to maintain some of those safeguards that you were talking about. Of course, I’m somebody who loves to draw little doodles and share those, but those also become very difficult to monitor as well. So we’ll obviously pay special attention and have a lot of ideas for how we can work on some of those elements.

1UP: Speaking of that, if I’m not mistaken, before you began working at Nintendo, you wanted to become a manga creator, is that right?

SM: Yeah.

1UP: That’s a very story-based medium, but at the same time I feel like most of the games you create tend not to have a strong focus on story. Do you see the Wii U as opening new avenues for presenting stories in video games? Do you see new possibilities there when you look at the system?

SM: Well… I don’t know if it will open up new possibilities for me to create stories or not, but we’ve been doing a lot of different things with… It’s not creating comics, but doing things with AR or drawing or things like that. Sketchbooks, or picture books, I should say. It’s not really an answer to your question, but maybe some time in the next year I’ll be able to share something with you that shows how I’ve been working in some different areas.

1UP: I’ll look forward to it, then. Thank you.

What If the Cost of Games Continued to Rise Since the ’80s?

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December 12, 1985

You’ll never guess what I got for my birthday! I woke up this morning, walked into the living room, and saw Dad playing Nintendo in front of the TV! He was having trouble with the first level of Mario, so I sat down and helped him jump over the pits until we got to the flagpole at the end. After that, we brought out the Zapper and played Duck Hunt until dinner time. Mom got kinda mad at Dad for buying something so expensive, but he told her that my birthday only comes once a year.

February 25, 1990

I had to get a paper route during this winter in order to save up enough money to buy Super Mario Bros. 3. I had to spend a lot of cold mornings slowly making my way up and down the streets of our neighborhood, but I finally saved up enough to buy the game. It felt kind of strange to hand over so much money at the store for something so small, but that all those bad feelings melted away as soon as I stuck the cartridge inside of my NES. The game just looks so amazing. Still though, I beat the thing in a single afternoon. I know that I’m going to play it again and again, but I won’t be able to save up money for another game for quite a long time. What if I ended up spending my money on a game that wasn’t so great?

September 28, 1995

It’s a bit strange being at school with my friends and talking about video games, because none of us are playing the same things at the same time. Games have gotten so expensive that we can only afford to buy one or two a year, so we’ve decided to each buy different games and swap them with one-another once we’ve finished. So far this year, the only game I’ve been able to buy was Chrono Trigger, but through swapping with my buddies I’ve been able to play through Yoshi’s Island and Earthbound. While having friends to trade games with is great, I do have to say that it’s certainly weird to not be able to go back and play those games whenever I get an inkling. Imagine if games were cheap enough to be able to build up an actual collection, instead of just having to trade them off for another one as soon as you’re finished?


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March 5, 2000

There’s no way that a college kid could afford both; I had come to terms with that. That being said, I don’t even know anyone who’s been able to buy last year’s Dreamcast, let alone the newly released PlayStation 2. I mean, come on, just take a look at those price tags — each one costs almost as much as an entire semester’s worth of tuition. Do they honestly except college kids to be able to afford these new systems? I just got around to buying a used Nintendo 64 last year, and even that cost so much that I had immediate buyer’s remorse. Don’t get me wrong, playing Goldeneye and Mario Kart with my buddies is great, but a simple hobby like video games shouldn’t have such an astronomical cost.

November 22, 2005

When I look back on my own personal history with video games, I feel like I’ve been suffocated by the continually rising cost of hardware and software. I’ve been forced to gravitate towards genres that offer substantial adventures or encourage multiple playthroughs. Worst of all, my gaming has been all-but relegated to the still-wildly-expensive-but-better-than-the-alternatives Game Boy Advance. Don’t get me wrong; I love my little portable that could. But having completely missed out on owning a Gamecube, Xbox, and PlayStation 2 because of their insane price tags has caused me to really lose touch with that entire chunk of gaming in general. Hell, with the impending release of the Xbox 360 and its five digit price tag, it’ll be years before I’m able to afford anything more than my GBA. I’m now starting to understand why my parents got in a fight so many years ago when my Dad got me an NES and Super Mario Bros. for my birthday.


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June 15, 2010

I have no idea why I still watch feeds of the various press conferences at E3. It’s like watching one of those reality shows where you peer inside the lives of a bunch of rich, entitled coasties who have literally nothing in common with me. The games I’m seeing may look great, but what does it matter? I have about as much of a chance of playing them as I do of buying a penthouse high above Abu Dhabi. It’s a bit masochistic of me to ogle over something that I no chance of ever getting my hands on, and yet I still do it. Why couldn’t the price of games have just risen at the same rate as a movie ticket? I saw Iron Man 2 a few weeks ago, and paid $30 for a pair of tickets on a Saturday night. That’s about three times as much as it cost to go see the original Batman back in ’89. If only games were three times as expensive as they were when I was a kid — being able to buy a new 360 game for $150 sounds like something out of a dream. Too bad this is reality.

May 22, 2015

I’ve sadly come to terms with the fact that video games are a luxury that I simply cannot afford. Like private jets and top shelf liquor, video games are a commodity that distinguish yourself as a certain type of person, and as a lowly writer, I will never be that cut of man. Gaming is something that I look back fondly on, but am well aware that I can never go back and become the type of gamer I was when I was a kid. But I still can’t help but ask myself, “what if?” What if there was a world out there where games cost the same as they did back when I was a kid? A world where I could buy the latest Zelda game for $50 instead of the joke of a price it costs now? Wouldn’t that be something?

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Marty Sliva

Associate Editor Marty Sliva is glad that the cost of video games haven’t steadily risen over the course of his life time. That gives him more money to spend on his gnarly pog collection.

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Yes, I used a fair dose of hyperbole with the trajectory of the cost, but that was just to highlight how fortunate we are to live a in a time where games are so easy to purchase. Unless you want to buy some sort of wacky collector’s edition, very few games over the past decade have run you over $60. That is a price that I’ll gladly pay to play my favorite games.

“It’s a bit masochistic of me to ogle over something that I no chance of ever getting my hands on, and yet I still do it.”

Book Review: Exploring Video Gaming’s Near-Death with "1983"

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ith his latest book, 1983, game journalist and historian Chris Kohler has chosen to take a slightly different tack then he employed for his massive treatise Power Up: How America Gave Video Games an Extra Life a few years back. Rather than approaching the topic of video games from a wide-ranging, all-inclusive perspective, Kohler instead drills down here into a single crucial moment in time for the young medium: The near-crash of the industry in year 1983.

Despite the Orwellian overtones of the title Kohler has selected for his work, there’s nothing ominous about the story contained herein — perhaps, except, the idea that video gaming could have been snuffed out entirely a mere decade after Pong’s debut. A combination of gold-rush greed, incompetence, and ’80s corporate culture nearly suffocated the fledging entertainment medium just as it was hitting its stride. The Warner corporation’s eagerness to cash in on their purchase of Atari, combined with the influx of low-quality, externally developed 2600 games after Activision broke away to become the first third-party developer, nearly buried the industry beneath a deluge of self-cannibalizing mediocrity.

Thankfully for fans of the medium, Atari’s own management recognized the looming danger and nipped it in the bud. The company collaborated with competitors Coleco and Mattel as well as top-tier third parties like Activision and Imagic to develop industry-wide licensing standards and convince the country’s major retailers to distribute only titles from publishers willing to adhere to those hardware-centric licensing mandates. While this led to an ugly few years as disgruntled third parties pursued legal action and bogged down Atari et al. in anti-trust lawsuits, the industry ultimately managed to avoid a bottoming-out of game prices.

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With Game Boy‘s blurry monochrome screen, the only advantage it offered over the Atari Lynx was better battery life and a slightly lower price; it never stood a chance in the U.S. market.

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Kohler’s book details the ins and outs of the licensing process and the slightly shady backroom dealings that made the industry-wide accord possible. Between the klout of Warner’s wide-ranging entertainment distribution network and the hold Coleco held over retailers on the strength of its Cabbage Patch Kids line of dolls — holiday best-sellers three years in a row — the major hardware creators effectively strong-armed retailers into playing by their rules by threatening to withhold merchandise. Despite resistance from a handful of established department stores (including Sears and Montgomery Ward) as well as five-and-dime retailers like Walgreens and TGY, most major chains acceded to the industry’s requirements.

The book is light on subsequent history, most of it having been addressed in Power Up and falling outside the domain of 1983′s specific, eponymous focus. Atari remained a major presence in home consoles well into the ’90s, and home consoles managed to keep pace with the impressive (albeit fractious) microcomputer market throughout the ’80s. Most American studios focused their development resources on console design, with PCs relegated to slower, more thoughtful titles. By and large, most top PC software hailed from Europe, though that distinction in turn began to blur with the 1993 release of the Amiga Box, a CD-based home console that married the strengths of both computers and consoles into a single set-top box.

Rather than dwell on the fallout, Kohler instead spends much of the book by exploring fascinating what-if scenarios. What if the industry had crashed, he asks? His extrapolations paint a grim picture for the studios whose games defined our childhoods. In the bleakest of Kohler’s scenarios, the American console market effectively vanished, with Atari and Coleco games relegated to clearance bins and most development talent jumping ship to the PC. While this scenario might have lead to a more vibrant PC gaming market than we know today, the downside is that American console games might have vanished more or less altogether.

Interestingly, most of Kohler’s scenarios place a major focus on Japanese manufacturers Sega and Nintendo. The former found considerable success in the U.S. when Mattel elected to distribute its Mark III console as the Intellivision Mark III (which in turn led to the Intellivision Genesis, the stunning 16-bit machine that brought gamers the first true arcade-quality home game experiences); the latter, however, was a giant in its homeland but was unknown to all but a handful of hardcore import enthusiasts in the U.S. Its Famicom console utterly dominated Japan‘s living rooms for a decade, but it never stood a chance in the U.S.: Atari licensed the system’s home distribution rights as the Atari Entertainment System, but ended up sitting on those rights in favor of selling its own internally developed 7800 instead.

Nintendo made a second foray into the U.S. with its Game Boy portable system, but its late arrival (1989) behind Atari’s Lynx (1987) made it downright laughable. With its blurry monochrome screen, the only advantage it offered over the older system was better battery life and a slightly lower price; it never stood a chance in the U.S. market. Nintendo eventually made a more determined effort with 1991′s Nintendo 16 (called the Super Famicom in Japan), but despite easily blowing away the Intellivision Genesis in terms of raw power its software library largely depended on franchises established on the Famicom — games that most Americans never saw. While some older gamers remembered Mario from his turn in 1981′s Donkey Kong, the demand for 16-bit follow-up Super Mario World was practically non-e/games/gba/super-mario-advance-4xistent among gamers who had never experienced import treasures like 1989′s Super Mario Bros. 3.

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Imagine if games like Super Mario Bros. were global hits and not niche favorites available only from import specialists listed in the seedy back page ads of game magazines.

If Kohler’s speculative writing is to be believed, though, Nintendo likely would have been a major force in the U.S. market if the events of 1983 had gone differently. Without Atari to suffocate the Famicom with red tape and indifference, the console (along with cult classic franchises like Zelda’s Legend, Metoroid, Rock Man, Fire Emblem, and Castle Dracula) could have dominated the American living room. With most American studios either crumbling alongside Atari or moving to PC development, as Kohler suggests, Nintendo stood poised to revitalize the U.S. console market with a powerful machine sporting an unprecedented number of truly great games. While most people today know Nintendo as the company behind the ever-popular Pokémon cartoon franchise, in this alternate reality they might be just as loved for Mario and Zelda as they are for Pokémon — an all-ages company rather than one just for kids.

And what of Atari? In Kohler’s estimation, they might not have survived the ’80s… or if they did, it would have been in a diminished form. While in reality Atari remained the vital market leader for years, using the synergy of its home, arcade, and PC presences to create content without boundaries and lock down a majority share of the console market even in the face of Intellivision’s partnership with Sega, a 1983 crash might have ended the company or even split its various divisions in a bid by Warner to minimize its losses with piecemeal sales.

While it’s fascinating to contemplate what might have been, the author’s biases definitely show through in the book’s fixation on Nintendo. Kohler, having worked for years in Japan, seems to have an unreasonable bias toward Japan‘s games. While Nintendo has definitely put out some amazing software over the years, it’s hard to imagine a world where their quirky and deeply Japanese games could have ruled the American market. Still, there’s no harm in speculation — and for gamers who grow weary of contemporary gaming’s growing obsession with realism and violence, Nintendo’s imaginary dream land of pastel colors and family-friendly games makes for a compelling alternate reality. Still, it does dominate a book that should ostensibly be about history. The real history is meticulously researched, no question about it. But I found myself wishing there were more of it to be read here.

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Jeremy Parish

1UP editor-in-chief Jeremy Parish spent most of 1983 playing with G.I. Joe toys. In an alternate reality, Russia invaded America, just like in “Red Dawn,” so Jeremy took up real arms to become a patriotic child soldier… code-named “Raiden.”

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Atari found huge success in the late ’70s and early ’80s with the 2600 game console. Unfortunately, it lacked any real control over the platform. Once Activision went rogue and managed to secure the legal right to make games for Atari’s machine, the 2600 market became flooded with poor third-party software that confused consumers and drove down prices. Retailers were forced to slash price tags, publishers went out of business, and the U.S. console market effectively died for three or four years. Surviving developers scurried to the P.C. market, while Nintendo dodged a bullet when Atari chose not to distribute the Famicom — leaving Nintendo free to distribute it as the NES, which revitalized the market at the cost of crowding western devs out of the console space for the better part of a decade.

Your Retro Reference Guide to Community’s "Digital Estate Planning"

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Community creator Dan Harmon isn’t a stranger to video games; he’s been public about his love for the medium, so it wasn’t surprising to see the first episode of last night’s season finale hat trick devote itself completely to old-school gaming references. What would have been a throwaway gag in any other sitcom took over most of “Digital Estate Planning’s” 22 minutes, as Jeff, Britta, Pierce, Shirley, Abed, Annie, and Troy found themselves participating in a multiplayer platformer in an attempt to wrest the Hawthorne Wipes fortune from the grasp of a bastard child. This episode overflowed with visual gags devoted to the blocky roots of gaming culture, most of which flew by at a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pace; but, thankfully, your friends at 1UP are here to comb over this chunk of comedy gold to dig out the purest pieces of retro gaming nostalgia. Read on, and be sure to let us know if any references slipped past our intricate knowledge of gaming’s past.

Your Retro Reference Guide to Communitys "Digital Estate Planning"
“Digital Estate Planning‘s” title sequence doesn’t seem to point to any specific title; it’s more of a pastiche of retro games that gave the player a brief preview of all the playable characters and their awesome abilities. Though Gilbert‘s fake game offers a resolution and color depth the NES could only dream of, the opening credits feel a lot like the intro to the NES version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Your Retro Reference Guide to Communitys "Digital Estate Planning"
Jeff and company beam into the Greendale study lounge from an impressive skyline, similar to how Mega Man made a dramatic exit at the beginning of his first sequel.

Your Retro Reference Guide to Communitys "Digital Estate Planning"
Again with the beaming. We can only assume that the cast of Community can’t check their inventory and climb ladders at the same time. It’s a terrible side effect of this particular mode of transportation.

Your Retro Reference Guide to Communitys "Digital Estate Planning"
Yes, here’s yet another nod to Capcom’s forsaken series. Jeff Winger strikes a very Mega Man-ish pose while jumping, even if he looks very unimpressed by the act in question.

Your Retro Reference Guide to Communitys "Digital Estate Planning"
This scene brings us an assortment of references, with a very Super Mario Bros. 2 waterfall, a raccoon leaf from Super Mario Bros. 3, and some Guts Man-style blocks to Abed’s right (which Jeff tries and fails to break through later in the episode).

Your Retro Reference Guide to Communitys "Digital Estate Planning"
Gilbert crafts his way to murderous success with a very Minecrafty system. Notch’s masterpiece might not be retro, but it sure looks old — and that’s what really counts, doesn’t it?

Why Donkey Kong Country is a Better Platformer Than Super Mario Bros.

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I
know that it’s absurd to compare two games that were released over a
decade apart, but what the hell, but I’m going to do it anyway. I’ve
recently become a bit of a pariah among my fellow 1UP editors due to my
opinions on Donkey Kong
Country, Rare’s 1994 foray into
the world of the SNES. While few would dispute the game’s technological
merits, not many around these parts agree with me that DKC is a far
better and much more playable platformer than the original Super Mario Bros.

Please set down your pitchforks
and extinguish those torches.

Donkey Kong Country was the
game that began Rare’s ascent to creative bliss. Anyone who owned a
Super Nintendo or a Nintendo 64 has undoubtedly fond memories of
playing any number of the British developer’s classic titles, whether
it was slapping down Jago in Killer Instinct
or planting the perfect proximity mine in GoldenEye,
and this hot streak all began with the reinvention of Mario’s original
nemesis. A few years after the plumber journeyed around the world,
Donkey Kong was tasked with exploring his island in search of his
stolen banana hoard. The game was a dense, cutting-edge package that
showcased the power of the SNES and provided what I feel to be a
perfect platforming experience. As you can probably tell by the video
below, my fellow editors do not share in these views.

Why Donkey Kong Country is a Better Platformer Than Super Mario Bros.

I was shocked to discover that
DKC‘s visuals have grown to become divisive, with one of the main
complaints being that the entire world has a plastic sheen to it. As
one of the pioneers of pre-rendered 3D graphics in games, DKC didn’t
resemble a cartoon so much as an extremely detailed toy box. I fell in
love with the character models because they reminded me so much of the
action figures I grew up smashing against each other on the carpeted
floor of my bedroom. The fact that Rare was able to create an entire
world that out of the performances that I imagined with my toys evoked
a feeling in me that has yet to be matched to this day. Super Mario
Bros. asked you to imagine the expanse of the world you were running
through. Donkey Kong Country didn’t need to ask this of the player.

As much as the game’s visuals
resonated with me, it was the soundtrack that managed to burrow deep
into my mind. SMB may have a handful of the most memorable music in
video game history, but it’s DKC‘s amazing suite of jungle tunes that I
still find myself listening to 20 years later. Each track manages to
utilize elements of the environment, from wind to animals to the
morphing of sounds underwater, and incorporate them with truly
unforgettable melodies. Each track feels like an extension of the
visuals that represent the varying locales of the island. As you dive
to the bottom of a lagoon, the distant ambiance of the music highlights
the untapped majesty of the space you’re exploring. Likewise, when you
travel to the peak of a snowy mountain, the tracks become as ominous
and foreboding as the endless crevices that dangerously pepper the
landscape. The music pulls more than its weight in creating a succinct
and memorable world that unravels in varying amounts depending on how
much you put into the game.

SMB may have perfected the
concepts of timing and inertia in platformers, but DKC built upon these
pillars by adding a wealth of optional moves and techniques for players
to learn throughout the course of the game. One could make it through
to the end by using a rudimentary moveset, but by experimenting with
both characters, you quickly realize just how deep your control over
the pair of primates really is. Combat, exploration, and jumping all
change based on which chimp you control, giving the game unseen depth
for those willing to dive in. Super Mario Bros. demanded perfection
from the player; Donkey Kong Country encouraged experimentation. I’ll
take the latter over the former.

The scope of each game’s
control mechanics also go hand-in-hand with their respective level
designs. Despite having a majority of the game take place outside,
Super Mario Bros. consistently feels like you’re controlling the
plumber as he barrels down the length of an impossibly narrow hallway.
The extent of your exploration rarely exceeds the dimensions of the
frame that is presented before you. Part of this is obviously a
limitation of the 2D perspective, but Donkey Kong Country managed to
use a combination of level design and slight of hand to convince
players that the world they were exploring went on far beyond the
boundaries of your television. Walls to destroy, secret cannons to
destroy, and areas only accessible with the help of your fellow members
of the animal kingdom all combined to give the island a sense of scope
and wonder that made it feel like these locations actually existed long
before your character entered the frame.

Despite all of this, the most
important reason that I choose DKC over SMB is simple: Donkey Kong is
possibly the most dapper character in video game history. Just take a
look at DK as he rocks that red tie without even the slightest hint of
pants. Seriously, he’s as close to a Kennedy as we’re going to ever get
in video games. Wardrobe aside, I am in no way discounting the
monumental impact that Super Mario Bros. had on our medium. Without it,
not only would there be no Donkey Kong Country, but our industry would
be an unimaginably different beast. But in 2012, when I sit down and
want to experience platforming perfection, I’ll choose Rare’s
masterpiece every single time.

Re-Examining the Role of Digital Death

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There
is possibly no greater representative icon for the entirety of
gaming than that of the game over screen. That negative void with
stolid letters painted cryptically across; there is a certain mysticism
surrounding the screen, the dark back corners of arcade holes that once
used to thrive, and the natural competition to overcome the
inevitability of failure that it represents.

Bore with the
medium’s creation in arcade cabinets and the surrounding
culture that developed after their inception, the challenge of
prolonging play time and avoiding inevitable failure in death became
the central function for nearly every game created to date. In the form
of a barrel throwing gorilla, the simple existence of a play clock,
infinite and unseen pits that trail into the unknown below the screens
of any number of platformers, or even in competition between players,
video games have always been a participatory form of near exclusive
survival.

Despite what takes the
lion’s share of gaming experiences, a handful of titles have
worked to reverse this trend. Most significant of these is
thatgamecompany’s most recent release, the penitent
juggernaut, Journey.
Those who entered the throngs of
Journey’s pale and dissonant world have been afforded a much
different view of the afterlife; a view that was both end and
beginning, and single-handedly turned the quarter emptying game over
screen into something more.

Re Examining the Role of Digital Death

The
Cold Grip of Arcades Past

Outside of titles like Pong
that worked only to imitate established sports in digital forms, the
earliest games, those that have proved most prominent in the
medium’s formative years in arcades like Pac-Man
and Donkey
Kong, all challenged the player
by the difficulty of staying alive.
Avoiding ghosts’ ethereal potency in Pac-Man. Navigating the
vortex of pits with greased boot in Super Mario Bros.
Possibly the most
famous code ever created- the Konami code used in Contra
and onward,
was proof to the expendability and difficulty of video games’
earliest and most celebrated titles. Even a game like The Legend of Zelda,
which
proved a more complex fiction, was riddled by the fallacy of escapable
death, and that with a reset or a load the player would be pulled from
eternal slumber to begin anew.

Whether on consoles via a
collection of 1-ups or in arcades where lives were as expendable as the
handful of tokens one had to replenish them with, the lightness with
which video games have dealt with death has always been, at least from
a narrative standpoint, one of the medium’s most glaring
weaknesses. Games have functioned around the notion that life is
fleeting, death is imminent, and rehashing parts of gameplay to succeed
is expected. In life there is nothing more sure or true than what lies
inescapably ahead for us all. While other media commonly explore death
in a mature and enlightened manner, games, which largely still remain a
medium of hyper fantasy, have sadly failed to acknowledge death with
the same maturity or importance.

This isn’t to say
some games haven’t attempted to integrate the element of
death in digital experiences more succinctly. Point and click adventure
games of the late ’80s and early ’90s like
LucasArts’ Maniac Mansion
introduced the idea that certain
actions taken during the course of the title could cause any of the
player’s characters to die permanently and affect the final
outcome of the game.

Super Mario 3D Land: Game Design Before Fan Service

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After feeling little soured on Super Mario 3D Land, I’ve gradually come around to enjoying the game more for what it is. Certainly hearing director Koichi Hayashida’s musings on the thinking behind 3D Land’s design has been illuminating. He delivered an interesting presentation yesterday at Game Developers Conference 2012 which outlined the development process, then met with me this morning for a more in-depth interview. The point that Hayashida kept circling around was that the game, being a “reset” of the 3D Mario series (as he calls it), was built with playability and functionality in mind first and foremost. This means that familiar elements of the past, like Super Mario Bros. 3′s Tanooki Suit, were added later as the team began fleshing out the game’s details.

He’s quick to clarify that the original plan for Mario 3D Land was not simply to borrow ideas from 1990′s NES classic. “There are simply a lot of fans of Mario 3 on the team,” Hayashida said. “It’s the game everyone seems to love most.

“I think it may be a generational thing,” he added, noting that he himself has been a fan of Mario since Donkey Kong, which came out when he was in grade school. (“Before I even knew his name was Mario!” he joked.)

As a point of fact, Nintendo EAD Tokyo’s pragmatic, design-focused approach to Mario 3D Land is what prevented the inclusion of familiar elements like flight for the Tanooki Suit.

“If we had tried to simply mimic the exact same use of the tanooki suit as in the previous games, you might have been able to do some things that didn’t make it into the final product,” Hayashida admitted. “But we were approaching it from a functional sense, not simply including the exact same elements that have been used in previous games.

“That isn’t to say we didn’t try it out! Of course we tried letting players fly around a little bit, but we realized very quickly that it wasn’t going to work out too well. We would fly around in debug mode and see all sorts of things that we would have had to change if we were going to let you fly in the game. It’s sort of like a movie set — as soon as the camera gets too high and goes over the set, you see the other side of the backdrop and things can get a little strange… which requires us to spend too much time managing what the player can see from any angle.

d5e90 448 Super Mario 3D Land: Game Design Before Fan Service

“There was always a discussion of whether or not flight was necessary from a game design perspective. So, that led us to — for example — a slight modification, which was the white tanooki Mario which powers him up and makes him invincible; you get it from an assist block, and it’s meant to ease the game once people have had a certain number of game overs. But it’s lowering the difficulty in an interesting way — rather than just flying over the game field and not having to worry about enemies or platforming, you don’t have to worry about enemies because you’re not taking damage from them. That allows you to practice your platforming. We felt like that was the right decision, because it eased the game in the correct way while still giving the player a chance to have some interaction with the course.”

Interestingly, the flight ability wasn’t excluded because of the “stereo window violation” Hayashida mentioned in his panel (a problem in which near-field objects in a stereoscopic image occlude one eye and break the illusion). Hayashida stresses that the ability simply didn’t fit the more linear, objective-focused levels the team had built versus his other Mario projects like Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy.