Super Mario by Jeff Ryan

Japanese crowd thought it was too hard, imagine the American audience’s reaction. The Big N couldn’t release it: skittish retailers already were saying the NES was a one-year fad, and this game might prove them right. Mario’s lone appearance for that year would be as a guest referee in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out . (Arakawa scored a coup signing up the then-heavyweight champ for his likeness to be added to the boxing game.)
    Miyamoto didn’t have time to go back to the drawing board: his team was already working on another game. He had tried vertical and horizontal side-scrolling, so this one would be a top-down tile-based game. Each board would be a grid populated with traversable ground, obstacles, enemies, and hazards. The square hero would run from board to board, free to explore a vast map of territory. He could even find hidden caves, just like from Miyamoto’s childhood, to further his fantasy quest.
    And since Nintendo’s two biggest franchises were named after the hero and villain of a love triangle, why not name this one after the captured heroine? There was an American name he had come across, reading about F. Scott Fitzgerald: Zelda. Sounded like a princess. And keeping with the triangle theme, he’d make the MacGuffin device a mystical triangle called the Triforce.
    While Miyamoto and company were limning The Legend of Zelda (in the credit he was “S Miyahon”), other designers were hard at work at transforming a standalone video game into a Mario game. Dream Factory: Heart-Pounding Panic ( Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic ) was an Arabian-themed NES game, based on a Fuji Television cartoon. Players could choose one of four family members to play as, each with a different skill. They used genie lamps to hop into a backwards midnight world, rode flying carpets, and fought giant rodents, masked opponents called Shyguys, and living desert cacti. One opponent was a bow-wearing cross-dressing dinosaur who shot eggs from his (her?) mouth. Most notable was the family’s attack: they pulled vegetables out of the ground to hurl at opponents.
    What Nintendo would do, to make a new Mario game, was the same thing hackers were doing to make an Alice Cooper game. They’d swap out the sprites of the four main characters, and replace them with Mario folk. Imajin, the son, was changed to Mario. Papa, who was strong, became Toad. Mama, who had a springy jump, was Luigi. And Lina, who could float if her jump button was held, was Princess Toadstool. The lizardlike villain became Bowser once again.
    Yume Kōjō’s plot of someone attacking dreams was replaced by Bowser attacking the kingdom for a second time. A few other changes were made, to generally make the game easier than the original. (No point going through all this just to release an equally hard game!) But even when it was finished, it didn’t feel in the same spirit as the other Mario games. There were hit points. Mario didn’t get bigger or smaller. There was no score—and hence no way to compare friends’ best games. No Goombahs or turtles. If Mario jumped on an enemy, nothing happened: the bad guy would just keep trundling along, like a rhino with a bird on its back. And suffice to say no one in the Donkey Kong games ever picked and threw rutabagas.
    But Yamauchi’s gut, once again, was proven right. 1987’s Super Mario Bros. 2 went on to sell more than seven million copies. It was a step down from 40 million, to be sure, but about 6.75 million more than Dream Factory would have gotten sans Mario. Indie comics hero Scott Pilgrim was a fan: he named his fictional band Sex Bob-omb after a SMB2 villain. The game prompted a video game giveaway for drinking Pepsi’s soda brand Slice, which gave Nintendo millions in free publicity. It’s one of the more successful Mario games, even if everyone agrees that it doesn’t play like a Mario game. It’s been rereleased for multiple Nintendo consoles as well, where its reputation has been rebolstered. So, though, has