Twenty-five years ago this month, a small Japanese playing card company changed the world forever. October of 1985 saw the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in the United States, and American youth hasn't been the same since.
The system, which had been on the market in Japan since 1983, was released first in New York City as a test market, with a nationwide rollout occurring in the latter half of '86. There were 17 launch titles for the New York test, some of which have been long since forgotten — "Donkey Kong Jr. Math," "Wrecking Crew" — while others, such as "Duck Hunt," "Kung Fu," "Ice Climber," "Excitebike" and "Baseball" have gone on to become classics, sure to be included, should a videogame canon ever be created.
Before the NES, the home-video game market had been in a slump since the early 1980s; the Atari 2600 was seen as a mere novelty, and the other systems available at the time — Mattel's now-forgotten Intellivision and the semi-defunct Coleco's ColecoVision being the two biggest alternatives — didn't have the necessary appeal to pick up the market. Despite the NES's high price — it retailed for around $200, or roughly $400 today — it was a hit.
Where other consoles attempted to recreate the arcade experience at home, Nintendo tried to distance itself from the world of "video games" — or at the very least from the term — marketing their console as an "entertainment system." The company was, in essence, creating a new market that now sees revenue in the realm of billions of dollars per year.
But it wasn't "Duck Hunt" or "Baseball" that ultimately gave Nintendo the industry-leading clout it has held for the past two decades.
It was an excitable little Italian man.
Birth of a plumber
Shigeru Miyamoto is something of a god in the world of videogames. He's the man who created and brought to life some of the most famous video game characters: Donkey Kong, Fox McCloud, Link and one very important guy who likes to jump around. While Nintendo had the equipment, it was Miyamoto who had the ideas for the games that would ultimately sell it.
Miyamoto's first major contribution to the world of games came in 1981 with "Donkey Kong." The game, which is now the stuff of legend, features Donkey Kong, a giant gorilla with a penchant for kidnapping and throwing barrels; Pauline, a woman with a penchant for being helpless and getting kidnapped; and Jumpman, a little carpenter with a hat (in interviews, Miyamoto has claimed that he couldn't think of a good hairstyle and that it was too hard to animate hair anyway) who likes to jump over said barrels and save Pauline.
Soon after, Miyamoto revisited his Jumpman character, then known in Japan as Mr. Video, and re-envisioned him as the star of a new adventure game. When the game was localized for America, the character needed a less generic name, and when the landlord who owned Nintendo of America's warehouse in Seattle, Mario Segale, came around demanding back rent, the Nintendo of America employees decided that Mario was the perfect fit. Soon enough, Mario had a brother (Luigi), a new profession (plumber) and a new game, "Mario Bros.," which arrived in arcades in 1983.
The first game featuring Mario and Luigi, "Mario Bros." is a simple arcade game where the goal is to clear all of the enemies from each level or "phase." It bears little resemblance to the prototypical Mario adventure games that gained popularity with the NES and its descendants — Mario, for example, can't jump on enemies, but rather he has to stun them, run up to them and kick them — but it introduced the world to Mario nonetheless.
Two years later, Miyamoto would work his magic yet again, this time creating what is undeniably one of the most important, most beloved video games of all time: "Super Mario Bros." While the general idea of Mario existed since 1983, it wasn't until '85 that he became a fully formed pop-culture icon, introducing the world to the wonders of the Mushroom Kingdom.
The story line is simple and echoes that of "Donkey Kong": Mario — a simple plumber who lives in a world of monsters, bottomless pits, randomly scattered bricks and pipes, moving platforms, strange plants and gold coins — must save the helpless Princess Peach from the evil Bowser, a giant turtle monster-thing.
The adventure spans eight worlds, each with multiple levels. It's short by today's standards but holds infinite replay value. Hidden areas, shortcuts and secret items abound and compel replay after replay. And who can forget the theme song — which has become one of the most popular ringtones of all time — that's been stuck in our collective head since the '80s?
"Super Mario Bros." would go on to sell over 40 million units on the NES and helped skyrocket the NES to its current spot as one of the top five best-selling home video game consoles (not including handhelds) of all time, selling over 61 million units.
25 and going strong
Over the past two and a half decades, Mario has appeared, in some form or other, in more than an astonishing 200 video games with sales of over 240 million units, making it the best-selling video game series of all time. He has inspired a television show, a live action movie, a series of books and all varieties of officially licensed merchandise imaginable.
And he isn't showing any signs of letting up.
To celebrate their star's silver anniversary, Nintendo will be releasing a number of unique bundles for their current systems — the Wii and the DS — in early November. The Wii bundle features a limited-edition red Wii console, a copy each of "New Super Mario Bros. Wii" and "Wii Sports" — the only video game to sell more copies than the original "Super Mario Bros." — and will retail for $199. The DS bundle features the DSi XL system in red, adorned with the Mario series' famous power-ups — the Starman, the Fire Flower and Super Mushroom that give Mario and Luigi their powers — and a copy of "Mario Kart DS." It will retail for $179.
It's impossible to overstate Mario's importance to pop culture over the past 25 years. He's changed the way we think of video games and, in turn, our culture in general. In a quarter of a century, Mario has gone from an unknown collection of pixels to one of the most recognizable fictional characters of all time.
Luckily for us, video games aren't showing any signs of stagnation.
Looking toward the future
Since the Mario we know today debuted back in 1985, dozens of other high-profile characters have appeared on the scene. From "Tomb Raider's" Lara Croft to "Halo's" Master Chief, "Half-Life's" Gordon Freeman, "Final Fantasy VII's" Cloud Strife and "Pokemon's" Pikachu, the video game scene is constantly evolving and changing — not just in graphic capability and the number of buttons on a controller — but in terms of what video games can be.
The most recent Mario games for the Nintendo Wii, the "Super Mario Galaxy" series, feature 3-D physics, with Mario traversing spherical platforms (planetoids in outer space), constrained by realistic gravity, taking full advantage of the Wii's unique motion controls.
But now that Microsoft and Sony have both jumped on the motion sensor technology (Xbox 360's "Kinect" and the "PlayStation Move" ), the world looks to Nintendo for yet another game-changer, and Nintendo, as usual, never fails to amaze: Their next innovation is 3-D gaming without glasses.
The upcoming Nintendo 3DS will offer full 3-D in the palm of your hand without the need for special eyewear. How they did it is sort of a mystery too complicated for the layman. For all it matters, they might as well be doing it with magic.
But it's Nintendo that we're talking about, the company that made a little ethnic workman into one of the most important figures in popular culture; the company that made it socially acceptable to live in a fantasy world; the company that, for all intents and purposes, is video games.
In some ways, it really is magic.
