So yesterday I was talking about the birth of videogames, and how the gaming industry boomed in the 70s and early 80s, and then crashed monumentally. The industry by 1985 was like that newly-hatched monster at the end of Studio Ghibli's film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind: an enormous beast rearing up to take over the world, but not being able to support its own weight, and collapsing back into itself.
Maybe that image is in my head because it was Nintendo, a company very like Studio Ghibli in its focus on the importance of childlike wonder, that would emerge during this period of turmoil to nurture gaming's nascent form and ultimately transform it into the shape in which it still exists to this day.
Great ape
Nintendo had started life as a trading card company in the late 1800s, transitioning into a toy manufacturer in the 1960s, and by the 70s were focusing on the burgeoning arcade gaming scene.
They achieved some success with arcade games in Japan, but America proved a tougher nut to crack, and by 1981 they were stuck with a heap of arcade cabinets for their mediocre shooter Radar Scope that they were unable to sell, and were teetering on the verge of financial collapse. Their president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, tasked a young apprentice designer with converting the wasted Radar Scope cabinets into a new game. That young designer's name was Shigeru Miyamoto, and the game he rapidly came up with was called Donkey Kong.
One of the earliest platform games (a genre involving running and jumping between platforms), Donkey Kong was an immediate and sensational success, and helped reverse the fortunes of the ailing Nintendo. It also introduced the world to its protagonist, a portly Italian carpenter named Jumpman. You might know him, however, by his name in the American translation: Mario. He would go on to become the most recognisable videogame character in the world, and the face of the industry for decades to come.
Nintendo, harnessing the game design genius of Miyamoto, continued to find success in the arcades, through sequels to Donkey Kong, and then a two-player game involved Mario, now a plumber, and his brother Luigi, leaping about the sewers of New York jumping on the heads of turtles and crabs. This game was called Mario Bros.
Entertainment systems
Buoyed by profits from these titles, it was to the home console market that Nintendo now turned. They released their Family Computer, or Famicom, in Japan in 1983. It included ports of their arcade hits, and sold well. But then the North American videogame market crashed, and the industry appeared doomed.
Nintendo, however, simply refused to let this happen. Retailers in the US were loathe to stock consoles on their shelves, believing they wouldn't sell, so Nintendo redesigned the Famicom into a Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES for short, threw in a light-gun and toy robot peripheral, and convinced retailers that this all made for a product sufficiently removed from the consoles that had gone before. Not even a console, in fact, but an "entertainment system". The wave of the future.
And where a glut of knock-off, low-quality games had flooded the market and confused consumers of the earlier consoles, Nintendo set in place a practice, since becoming commonplace, of licensing third-parties to produce games for their system. They stamped these games with their "seal of quality", minimising choice while maintaining worth.
And lastly, bundled with the NES, they gave away Miyamoto's follow-up to Mario Bros. This new game was something not available in the arcades, taking the platforming concept and expanding it into a continuous adventure from left to right, a journey, through varied, interesting levels, with power-ups and collectables and hidden areas. They called the game Super Mario Bros., and it was nothing short of a revelation.
It brought together previous concepts and theories and encapsulated them, galvanised them, into something greater than had ever gone before, with elegant game design, perfectly precise controls, but also a focus on character, narrative, and structure. Mario's new world, the Mushroom Kingdom, was a place surreal yet strangely archetypal. Goombas, Koopa turtles, fire flowers, warp pipes - it was as if this stuff had arrived fully formed, from some other dimension; as if it had, somehow, always existed. You could plonk your friend, your neighbour, your nan, down in front of Super Mario Bros., and they would all instinctively and instantly get it. They would understand what they had to do, and why they had to do it, and they would love it.
Thanks to Nintendo, and Mario, and Miyamoto, videogames had finally arrived.
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