Table of Contents
TO BILL RUDOWSKI
IMMA GONNA WIN!
THANKS, MARIO, BUT OUR NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ARE IN ANOTHER CASTLE 277
BIBLIOGRAPHY 281
INDEX 285
INTRODUCTION
MARIOS INSIDE STORY
While Super Mario is a plumber by profession, exploration is at the heart of his stories. As with other distinguished explorers of Italian descent, such as Christopher Columbus, the place he discovered was already inhabited. It was the world of play, a world to which all of us are born holding passports. (As one Royal Geographical Society wag presciently put it more than a hundred years ago, Explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and a need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men. He could have been yelling it down the stairs into a modern rec room.) Most of us let that passport expire, but Mario gives us a way to renew it, and revisit our homeland.
There are 240 million Super Mario games out there. Just one game, the original Super Mario Bros., has more than forty million copies in print, not counting releases on other platforms or the uncountable emulators that let you play samizdat versions on your computer. Broken down by hour, its an extremely economical buy: few will spend twenty-five hours watching a single twenty-five-dollar DVD, but most everyone who purchases a fifty-dollar Mario game can put in fifty hours or more to explore its nooks and crannies.
Lets talk about economy some more. Do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: the number of Mario games sold times fifty bucks each, the average price of a game. This number is going to be off, since it doesnt account for games being bundled with consoles, which are discounted. But it also doesnt account for merchandise and tie-in games like Dr. Mario, or for anything else Nintendo sells: Mario games are only one or two of its hundreds of titles a year, and thats all just the software. Hopefully you used a commercial-size envelope: the ballpark figure of Nintendos Marios sales is $12 billion. If each one of Marios gold coins was worth a million dollars, to collect that much moola he would have to knock his head on a coin block for almost three and a half hours.
Mario is unique in that he seems to offer so little appeal. What person who had been living in a cave the last few decades would have picked Super Mario as the dominant game franchise, over the Halo (30 million sold), Tomb Raider (35 million), Guitar Hero (40 million), Resident Evil (43 million), and Madden (85 million) game franchises combined? And that doesnt even count Marios other appearances, such as Mario Kart (12 million) and Mario Party (5 million). The other top franchises let you experience the adrenaline and horrors of war, or deep fantasy worlds, or pro sports. A Mario game lets you pretend to be a middle-aged chubster hopping onto a turtle shell. Huh? No superheroes? No soldiers? No wizards? What sort of cut-rate wish fulfillment is this?
Theres something to Mario more than just looks. Games are different from all other entertainment due to their interactivity: they light up totally different parts of the brain than watching a movie or reading a book does. And Marios bland persona is part of his appeal: hes a one-size-fits-all hero. For twenty years everyone tried to create distinct memorable avatars for us to control: Sonic, Lara Croft, Mega Man. That trend has reversed, and popular games now feature silent, unknown characters such as Halos Master Chief and the faceless grunts from Call of Duty and SOCOM. Yet theyre still copying Mario, who is both wackily specific (an overalled plumber) and vague as fog (anyone ever see him unclog a drain?).
My own Mario memories probably arent too different from anyone elses. My first experience was with the cardboard box the NES came in, rather than any game. A schoolmate brought it on the bus every day to show off, and we crowded around to look at the screen shots on its obverse side. A few months later our parents bought us a NES, and my brothers and I put it through usage that would put a Miami air conditioner to shame. We traded games with neighbors, kids older and younger than us, even traded out of the middle-school caste system with the cool kids. We started a neighborhood fan club: to get in, you had to beat a game and find a secret. Most everyones secrets were from Super Mario Bros., which had them in spades.
Then high school and college and life happened, and I stopped gaming, save for a PC shooter once a year or so. I never chose to quit gamingit just fell off my priorities list. Then about ten years ago, I landed a copyediting job at a dot-com. No one had any copy for me to proof before noon, yet I was coming in at 8:30 A.M. I asked my managing editor if there was anything I could write, to help out.
There was. She gave me a press release about a Pokmon tournament. The company had been using a freelancer for its irregular reporting of video game news and reviews. Having me write for this section of the site would bolster that coverageand for free, since I was salaried. I typed up the piece, handed it in, and a few minutes later heard my editor on the phone firing the freelancer. She said they had just hired a new video game expert. Gulp.
In the months that followed I studied video games in a way very few others have. I wasnt actually playing them, since I was at work. I wasnt designing them, either, so I didnt need to know alias coding or texture mapping. I needed to know why they were popular, what made one title better or cooler than the next. I made myself an expert in all things Sega, Sony, and Nintendo.
And just about all things Nintendo, I found out, were connected to Mario. He was everywhere: in sports games, fighting games, role-playing games, puzzle games, racing games, and every bit of branding imaginable. He had become a one-word shortcut for Nintendo, for gaming itself, and (Im sure Nintendo hoped) for the concept of fun. Streets were named after him. There was even an unofficial holiday for him, on March 10 (MAR 10, get it?).
Super Mario has become the default nickname for any Mario. Formula One champion Mario Andretti (born in 1940) sometimes gets asked if hes named after Super Mario. (He says he is, to the delight of the seven-year-olds who ask.) Chef Mario Batali is called Super Mario as well. If youre good at a professional sport, and your name is Mario, you know what your nickname will be. Just ask hockeys Mario Lemieux, footballs Mario Williams, ultimate fightings Mario Miranda, cyclings Mario Cipollini, and soccers Mario Basler, Mario Gomez, and Mario Balotelli. They are, respectively, Canadian, American, Brazilian, Italian, German, Spanish, and Ghanaese. The nickname cannot be avoided wherever on the globe you are a Mario.
At some point I realized that the life story of Super Mario is the history of gaming itself. Yes, its a history of Nintendo and its creators: designer Shigeru Miyamoto, billionaire Hiroshi Yamauchi, and his underestimated son-in-law Minoru Arakawa. But at its core, its the biography of a man whos not real, but has a Q rating up there with Mickey Mouse. A figure whose specific tale of the tapepudgy Italian plumber from Brooklynmerely serves to make him as perpetual an underdog as that undertall Italian boxer from Philadelphia, Rocky Balboa. A world-beloved character with roots across three continents: Asian invention, American setting, European name. A character almost totally blank, yet beloved. A hero who is at once us, more than us, and so much less than us. A guy with a brother named Luigi, and a princess to save.
