Super Mario Bros., welcome to your fourth decade.
While the iconic, mustachioed plumber may have previously appeared in other games, Super Mario Bros. is what propelled him to super stardom. It made Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach and Bowser household names, and helped rocket Nintendo into its perch as then-master of the gaming space.
But Mario also helped save the gaming industry as we know it, after it nearly blinked out from existence in 1983.
To get some perspective on this occasion, Mashable sat down with Blake J. Harris, the author ofConsole Wars: Sega, Nintendo and the Battle that Defined a Generation. Much of Harris' research focused on the gaming titans of the 1980s and '90s.
Mashable: What was the American video game industry like in 1983/1984?
Harris:The video game industry in 1983 crashed. Some people called it "The Atari Crash" or the "ET Crash." It generally refers to this time period where video games were no longer considered viable products. The retailers who had purchased these video games thought the industry was dead.
In hindsight, that might seem ridiculous, given that video games are now a $60 billion-a-year industry. But at the time, I don't think it was that strange. With the personal computer revolution happening, it's very conceivable that [gaming] could have shifted to playing games on the computer and not any dedicated console.
IMAGE: NINTENDO
Arcade games were still around a little bit, and one of the more successful arcade companies was a newcomer to the scene, named Nintendo. It had been very successful in 1980-1981 with the game Donkey Kong. In 1983, while the video game industry was crashing in America, it was starting to boom a little bit in Japan with Nintendo's Family Computer [the Japanese version of the Nintendo Entertainment System].
Nintendo decided it was going to bring this over to America, and there was a ton of resistance at first. Within a few years, Nintendo would have 90-95% of a billion dollar industry, and it was considered the king, the Goliath. But just five years earlier, they were a David in their own David and Goliath struggle.
How was Nintendo a David in the U.S. market?
The environment was really such that nobody wanted to buy video games. They thought it was a fad. They thought it was like a Slinky or Cabbage Patch dolls. So Nintendo coming up with their supposedly better console didn't really matter.
A lot of the people at Nintendo I spoke with. [who] were tasked with selling the Nintendo Entertainment System, said they would go into these retailers to try to sell them this product. The retailers wouldn't talk to them; they wouldn't even take the meeting. They said,
"The reason I have my job is because the guy before me got fired for investing in video games."
To try to compensate for this negative stigma, Nintendo did a few things. Ultimately, what made Nintendo successful was great games, highlighted by Super Mario Bros. But it was also the way they positioned their product.
Instead of having consumers or retailers think about this console as another version of the Atari 2600 or the Mattel Intellivision, they wanted this to be an "entertainment system," something a little more sophisticated. So this was the Nintendo Entertainment System.
To play up that idea, the American product came with a robot, named R.O.B. He ended up being kind of useless, and not integrating with any games. But it was just a move on Nintendo's part to say, "Yeah, maybe video games are dead, but this is a whole new thing that you'll have to try to understand."
IMAGE: BLAKE J. HARRIS
The company did a lot of guerilla-type tactics of going to malls and just trying to get people excited about video games. The stories I hear from the people that were on the ground was really just that people thought they were stupid, and that video games were done. I was really skeptical of these past feelings until I did speak to the retailers, and they told me how dire it was.[Editor's note: Here's a story Harris wrote after interviewing a marketer who worked on behalf of Nintendo with these retailers.]
So Nintendo was this company that nobody [had] ever heard of — which had made Donkey Kong, but had only been making arcade games for five years. That was significantly less than other players, like Sega. They decided the gamble was worth it, and they were going to launch the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Since it was such a struggle, they couldn't launch it nationwide. No retailers wanted to buy it. So they decided to concert their efforts into one specific place. They selected New York, because of the adage: "If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere." In the fall of 1985, they did a "test launch," just to see if video games could be resurrected.
Nintendo did this test launch in New York. It wasn't a runaway success, but it was good. They then went to Los Angeles, and then they started rolling out the NES nation-wide. Within three years, it had financially resurrected video games, and the industry was booming. Sure, they were able to position themselves away from Atari. But at the end of the day, what made Nintendo successful then is they made incredible games.
IMAGE: BLAKE J. HARRIS
Super Mario Bros. was really that breakthrough game, that killer app you need when launching a console or new hardware. That was the game that put them on the map, and allowed them to really branch into other things. They eventually got into television and movies and general merchandising.
The games, Mario included, also carried a Nintendo "seal of quality." Why was that important?
The video game crash in 1983 happened because the quality of the games was severely diminished. People felt like they were making so much money off games [that] they didn't need to make good quality games. [Like] the E.T. game — Atari had to bury thousands of copies in a New Mexican landfill. The quality was so bad. It was just a gold rush mentality; they thought anything would sell. It was almost like the tech boom in the early 2000s, where if you were an Internet company, of course it would sell.
Nintendo prides itself on quality, and it wanted to be the opposite. It wanted to show parents and buyers that had been burned [by] the crappy games that Nintendo was different. They created the Seal of Quality. This was in the '80s; there were no Internet reviews, there was very limited game footage and very few commercials. It was very hard to know what you were buying based on what you were seeing on the back of the box.
Nintendo also wanted to support the consumers so they didn't feel burned. Two things they did that were very successful were creating Nintendo Power, a magazine to promoting games and showing screenshots, [and] they also created the game help line, a toll-free number you could call to get advice or help if you were stuck in the game. They did want people to buy the games and get maximum enjoyment out of them.
What was the marketing like for that new system? Did they use traditional TV commercials?
In the first commercial, you see the actual console for two seconds out of 30 seconds. What you mostly see is a family, and a robot, which kind of shows you what Nintendo was going for.
What was the reception like for the original Super Mario Bros.? Why was this such an important game?
Before Super Mario Bros., which obviously starred our friend Mario, Mario made his first appearance in the Donkey Kong arcade game. He was the little plumber trying to save the princess at the top of the screen from the gorilla. He was constructed with that red color palette because there were limited options for color scheme back then. Originally he didn't even have a name. He was just called Jumpman because he jumped over the barrels.
Mario then returned with Mario Bros., which wasn't a platformer. In 1985, they came out withSuper Mario Bros., and that really changed everything. It was the first real platformer game, and it was kind of the first time you felt like it was more than a game, that it was a piece of art. You felt like you were getting lost in another world.
Creator Shigeru Miyamoto, who also created Donkey Kong and The Legend of Zelda, was a very curious guy. He often cites memories of playing in the backyard, playing as a kid and exploring things. That's why the original Mario game had so many Easter eggs. Miyamoto wanted you to feel like a kid; there are all these places to explore, and you can do that, but you can also enjoy the game on a surface level.
And that's where it started?
In 1990, Mario surpassed Mickey Mouse's 'Q' rating [a survey on how recognizable characters were to the public]. He was then the most-recognizable character in the world. Even other Nintendo employees, like then-Nintendo Game Master Howard Phillips, was one of the top figures on this same rating. Nintendo was just that big, and a lot of it was on the back of Mario. He built Nintendo. He continues, along with Pokémon, to be the backbone of Nintendo.
So how long did it take for Nintendo consoles to be everywhere?
They only sold about 100,000 out of New York in 1985, which is what their goal was. The next year, it cracked a million. In 1987, that's when it took off.
Nintendo isn't the market leader it once was, but it's obvious that Mario blazed a trail for other games down the line.
Absolutely. I think video games, like any other entertainment medium, are very iterative. Whatever works will cause a lot of imitators and inspirations.
Take Sonic, for example. While the original Sonic the Hedgehog isn't too similar to Super Mario Bros., it was specifically designed by Sega to be their "Mario killer." They had Mario in the crosshairs. Without Mario there would be no Sonic, and I think compounded over several generations, without Mario we wouldn't have a lot of what we have today, if anything at all.
If Nintendo had failed in 1985, video games might have failed. If Nintendo hadn't succeeded in New York, I think it's very possible other video game companies wouldn't have tried. Or if they did try, it would have been twice as hard. People wouldn't have given video games the time of day. So Mario was really a game changer.
And they couldn't even paint Nintendo as a one-hit wonder, which helped dispel retailer skepticism. Super Mario Bros. 2 was successful, and then Super Mario Bros. 3 was the biggest selling game of all time. It showed Nintendo had staying power, and so did video games.
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