How the 30-Year-Old Super Mario Changed the Games Industry | QDaily Business History

Mario is a star, a workhorse, and the games industry's savior

Uncle Mario has just turned 30. At thirty he is still going strong: counting only from 2014 onward, he has shown his face in more than 10 games. And his 30th-anniversary title, Super Mario Maker, has taken over every major gaming site.

In a field with a short history to begin with, Mario is without question the oldest and most famous character video games have produced. Calling him the face of video games would not be an exaggeration.

Mario started out as a supporting character in Donkey Kong, where he was still called Jumpman. Two years later, in Mario Bros., he finally got a name — and a younger brother, Luigi. Then Super Mario Bros. made him a sensation overnight, and over the next 30 years he appeared in hundreds of games across dozens of genres, living through both of Nintendo's rises and falls.

Mario is, in a sense, a living fossil of the video game world. But his standing is not a matter of age alone. In important ways, Mario shaped the look and structure of today's games industry. As he turns 30, let's look back at some of his lesser-known achievements.

How Mario Made the Famicom — and Nintendo

Since president Hiroshi Yamauchi set up a games division in 1969, Nintendo had made toys and light guns, manufactured the first home console — the Magnavox Odyssey — for Magnavox in Japan, and designed and produced its first handheld, the Game & Watch. But as late as 1980 it was still only a Japanese company, and no product of its had ever sold more than about a million units.

The Family Computer — the FC — released on July 15, 1983, changed that.

The FC was widely nicknamed the "Red and White Machine" for its colors; its formal name, Family Computer, means exactly what it says. In the personal-computing wave of the 1980s, two very different paths opened up. One was the path Bill Gates and Steve Jobs took: build personal computers that could do everything, from spreadsheets and writing to design and games. But personal computers were expensive then, and were bought mainly by companies for their employees' office work.

The other path was Nintendo's: use processors and circuitry similar in principle to a personal computer, but build a cheap entertainment device that could only play games. When Nintendo's first console launched in the US in 1985, it cost US$299 — while the Apple Macintosh, released around the same time, carried a price tag of US$2,495.

At first the FC sold only in Japan, where it moved more than 3 million units in two years, already Nintendo's most successful product ever. But that was only the prelude. Its real glory began in 1985, when the FC, under a new name — the NES, or Nintendo Entertainment System — landed in the US market.

The scene from Super Mario Bros. that could not be more familiar

More important still, Super Mario Bros. went on sale that same year.

The game's success was almost impossible to measure: it sold 40.24 million copies, and it became the reason most people bought a Famicom in the first place. By 2003, cumulative Famicom sales had reached about 67 million units. It is fair to say every one of those machines ran Super Mario Bros. at some point.

From that year on, Nintendo — a company with just over 1,000 employees — was posting net profits above US$500 million. Super Mario Bros. took Nintendo from a games company confined to Japan and made it, in one leap, a giant of the international games industry.

Leading the Platformer Craze for More Than a Decade

Beyond its commercial success, the Mario series was a genuine innovation as a game.

For the platform game, Super Mario Bros. was essentially the template: nearly every platformer that came after it looked a lot like it.

A platform game is one in which the player uses jumps and similar moves to cross platforms and obstacles on a 2D plane. Before Mario, games in this genre were stiff and mechanical — characters did not even have a concept of acceleration when they jumped.

Super Mario Bros. tied jump height to the angular velocity at takeoff and to how long the button was held, and players got an entirely new feel for controlling a character. The big jump, the small jump, and the running jump opened up endless ways to play, and the underwater stages that followed — along with the ice stages in Super Mario Bros. 3 — pushed the range of platformer controls to a height no one had reached before, and few have surpassed since.

Super Mario Bros. 3 introduced the idea of a map

Super Mario Bros.'s innovations for the platformer ran deeper still. The rules we know from games like Contra, Sonic, and Adventure Island — the player advancing from right to left, the inability to go back, the camera tracking the character — were all standards set by Mario.

For more than a decade after Super Mario Bros. came out, "console game" essentially meant "platform game." That was the limit of what people could imagine a game to be; even McDonald's made one of its own.

Super Mario Bros. was only a few dozen kilobytes in size, but it was a technical breakthrough for the industry. No scrolling game before it had ever scrolled so smoothly, and — harder to believe — it did so with that much detail on screen. As late as 1990, five years after the game came out, no one had managed to reproduce the effect on a PC.

John Carmack was the first game designer to do it. He made the first first-person shooter, Wolfenstein 3D, and brought true 3D graphics to Destroyer (《毁灭者》). Today's Counter-Strike and Call of Duty are, at bottom, continuations of those games.

When Carmack first started designing games, his opening goal was to reproduce Super Mario's graphics on a personal computer — and by then Super Mario was already five years old.

Saving the Home Console Industry

The success of the FC and Super Mario Bros. did not only make Nintendo and reshape the next decade of the games industry. It did something more important: it saved the American home console business.

Just as the FC was selling briskly in Japan in late 1983, Atari was dragging the American console market into an abyss. Third-party developers were then free to make games for any machine, which left the American games industry a mix of good and dreadful.

Atari dug its own grave. It spent more than US$20 million for the rights to make a game of the film E.T., then threw the game together — one designer finished it in six weeks. Predictably, it met a storm of terrible reviews when it arrived for the 1983 holiday season, and unsold cartridges piled up in warehouses. It became the last straw that broke the American console industry.

Newspapers at the time reported that Atari had buried more than a million E.T. cartridges in a New Mexico landfill. The story was so strange that it gradually turned into urban legend. Then, in 2014, Microsoft applied to excavate the site — and really did dig up a large cache of cartridges, confirming Atari's burial scandal at last. Microsoft's Xbox studio even made a short documentary about it, Atari: Game Over.

The E.T. cartridge excavation site

America's shoddy games industry eventually cost consumers their confidence in home consoles altogether. Console makers including Mattel, Magnavox, and Coleco announced they were giving up on video game development, and the US games business went cold.

Selling a console in America therefore looked, at the time, like an impossible job for Nintendo. Yamauchi moved carefully. First he renamed the FC: it became the NES, the Nintendo Entertainment System. Its look was redesigned too, on the principle of making it resemble a game console as little as possible.

The Japanese FC (left) and the American NES (right) were in fact the same machine

But however much effort went into the hardware design, what finally turned video games back into a hot business was the software, led by Super Mario Bros.

Yamauchi once put it this way: "However excellent the hardware, without fun software to go with it, it is no better than scrap metal.… Games are not a necessity of life, so the moment consumers decide something isn't fun, they will drop it without hesitation. We should live with a permanent sense of crisis."

As the games sold, the NES became a huge success in the US. It brought the American games industry back quickly, from retail all the way to manufacturing. Game stores that had shut down were soon packed again, and factory machines started running once more. In the capital markets, shares of Nintendo and other games companies were taken seriously again.

Cheap Hardware, Money from Software: A New Business Model

At a product briefing before the FC's 1983 launch, Yamauchi told other game developers: "The new console, named the Family Computer — the FC — will be priced at 14,800 yen. Honestly, there is very little profit to be had selling at that price.… But I personally believe hardware is merely a tool for making money. I promise you will get far richer returns from the stream of quality software to come."

A home console is, in essence, a computer that can do only one thing: play games. One of the most important breakthroughs in Nintendo's thinking was to make good games and earn money from the games rather than the machine.

When work on the FC began, Yamauchi set three requirements: the retail price had to be under 10,000 yen; the console had to face no real competitor for three years; and it had to be able to run the arcade game Donkey Kong.

Nintendo's "light on hardware, heavy on software" philosophy is plain in that list. The finished product sold for 14,800 yen, above the original target, but next to what other manufacturers charged for their consoles the FC was cheap almost to the point of a loss.

On game prices, though, Nintendo gave no ground. FC games cost roughly what earlier games had cost, and big titles like Super Mario Bros. were priced a little higher.

This way of running a games business was a real disruption. Companies like Atari had made their money mainly from hardware, and some console makers barely developed games at all; hardware and software were two entirely separate businesses. Nintendo understood that a good games company needs a single experience made of hardware and software together — and that inside it, software matters more than hardware.

The Nintendo Seal of Quality, stuck on the box of a game cartridge, was also part of the royalty system

In the end, the runaway success of Super Mario Bros. proved Nintendo right. Tens of millions of copies covered the cost of both hardware and software and left the company an enormous profit besides. From then on Nintendo made its money from game software, and its startling hardware sales were driven mainly by the software that ran on it.

This model — software carrying hardware — was adopted by nearly every console maker that followed, and became the standard for the industry. Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox both built their games businesses the same way.

Mario Defined Games Again — This Time in 3D

By the end of 1993, John Carmack and John Romero had built Doom on Microsoft's DOS, a 3D game that marked an era. But apart from its 3D graphics it gave players no real sense of being there. The shooter had no mouse support at first, relying entirely on the keyboard, which tells you what the experience was like.

The first 3D game in the modern sense also came from the Mario series: Super Mario 64, released in 1996 and regarded ever since as the benchmark for 3D games.

Super Mario 64's graphics still don't look dated today

This oddly shaped controller, nicknamed the trident, defined how players interact with 3D games

Beyond the lifelike graphics and the fluid running and jumping, Mario 64's real value to 3D games was that it defined how they are controlled: the player moves the character forward, back, left, and right with the d-pad while choosing a full 360-degree view with the stick. It modeled how we behave in the real world remarkably well — a simple idea that solved the crucial problem.

That control scheme is what gave 3D games their soul. Today's console makers, Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox alike, copied the dual-stick design wholesale, and every shooter and action game now uses the same feel.

Making Music Matter

Super Mario Bros. broke ground in every direction, down to music, the part of a game that gets the least attention. Mario's 8-bit music left a deep mark on everything that followed.

For Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr., the important titles that came before Mario, Shigeru Miyamoto wrote the music himself. On Mario he handed the job to Koji Kondo, until then an independent musician, who became Nintendo's first full-time composer.

In the 8-bit era, writing music meant working under heavy constraints: weighing the purpose of every note and simplifying each sound as far as it would go.

A waveform of the music Namco composer Junko Ozawa wrote for The Tower of Druaga, from the documentary The Evolution of Japanese Game Music (《日本游戏音乐发展》)

The whole of the original Mario game was barely more than 30 KB, against today's high-quality tracks that routinely run tens of megabytes each. Kondo was less composing than arranging notes byte by byte.

Before Mario, music in games was optional; some games went silent altogether to save space. In Mario, music became a central part of how the game spoke. When that cheerful first-level theme starts up, Mario appears in your head on his own.

After Mario, developers everywhere treated music as essential. A whole cohort of 8-bit and 16-bit game composers came out of the industry.

Defining What a Character Is Worth

Mario is also a workhorse in the fullest sense: he has rescued a princess, caged a gorilla, driven race cars, played golf and tennis, treated patients as a doctor, and, of course, fixed drainpipes. In fact, the "IP" that China's games and entertainment industries have talked about nonstop for the past two years is only an imitation of what Mario has been doing all along.

IP is short for Intellectual Property. In the games industry the term has come to mean a copyrighted character that can be ported from one product to another; the characters in Dota are a good example.

As the most valuable such character in games, Mario has been ported into every kind of game. In 30 years he has crossed five console generations, more than 10 genres, and hundreds of titles.

• Action: nearly 20 games, including the Super Mario Bros. series and Super Mario Land;
• Role-playing: more than 10 games, including Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario;
• Sports: more still, over 30 games covering tennis, racing, golf, basketball, soccer, baseball and more;
• Casual: over 20 games, including Mario Party and Dr. Mario.

Any Nintendo game with Mario's name on it has its sales guaranteed. Players are glad to see Uncle Mario's face; this made-up character pulls a crowd like a movie star.

Whenever Nintendo releases a new console or handheld, Mario is among the first games to arrive — Super Mario Land on the Game Boy, for instance. And whenever Nintendo wants to try a new genre, Mario again leads the way — Super Mario 64 for the 3D adventure game.

Beyond games, Nintendo has tried to carry Mario into other kinds of entertainment.

Amiibo figures of the Mario family

There is the 1986 animated film Super Mario Bros.: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach!, the 1989 television program The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, and the 1993 live-action film Super Mario Bros., among others. Mario has also appeared repeatedly in Nintendo's recent line of Amiibo figures.

As Nintendo's most important character, Mario's own commercial value is beyond measure. Judging by earlier statements from Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's former president, one reason the company held off so long on mobile games was the fear that Mario's value as a character would be diluted in that unstable market.

Yet a character like Mario can only keep and realize his full value by continuing to appear in games that succeed commercially.

If Nintendo is a sinking ship, then letting go early — letting Mario float free and start again on other platforms — is the best way to hold on to what he is worth.