Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy

Alrighty, friends and neighbors. It’s that time again. Lately, I’ve been chronicling weekend adventures. This weekend’s adventure was going to church! Going to church is an adventure? you ask incredulously. Well, yes. It’s an adventure when you’re in Korea and not religious, only vaguely spiritual, and you’re going with some 37 year old English guy you met when the trains stopped running one night and you caught the same cab because you were going in the same direction.

…However, that’s a story for next week. I’m not sure exactly how I felt about the church adventure, so I’ll need some time to process that one. Rather, this week, I’ll be talking about my brand spankin’ new SNES! Y’see, last weekend I went and bought myself a Super Nintendo. During the hike, I decided it was too cold to do things outside and I promised myself I would stay inside more for the next month or so. So, I went to the electronics market in Yongsan and bought my favorite video game console of all time. It’s a little tough finding games, but I’ve got a couple, and I’ve already logged like 10 hours on the sucker. It’s a bit surprising to me to see how passionate I still am about these old games. I try new games sometimes and almost all of them just completely fail to catch my interest. It’s so great to revisit childhood classics and find that they still satisfy in ways most modern games just can’t. It made me want to write something about how awesome they are.

Now then, the game I want to talk about today is Yoshi’s Island. Yoshi’s Island was released in 1995, just a year prior to the debut of the N64. By this time, the PlayStation was the hot new product on the market, ushering in a new generation of games. The new generation of consoles would be significantly more powerful than those that came before, capable of rendering fully 3D environments and delivering cinematic storytelling. In other words, 16-bit games were already anachronisms by this point.

With a 3D revolution rapidly approaching, Nintendo calmly released another new platformer on its aging flagship. But it wasn’t just any platformer, slapped together to make a few more bucks off a solid moneymaker before retiring it. Yoshi’s Island was billed as a sequel to Super Mario World, one of the most acclaimed games of all time, and certainly the most respected platformer of the SNES/Sega Genesis generation. Despite the fact that SNES sales had slowed by this point, it remained essential to create a high quality game. Anything less than brilliance from a Mario game being released shortly before the arrival of a new Nintendo console could be a brand-tarnishing failure. More importantly, stylistically, the game was a huge departure from previous Mario games. Both in look and in feel, it was a completely different experience than its predecessors. On the eve of Nintendo’s own transition to the great unknown of 3D gaming, they decided to rock the boat with their most sacred franchise. Why?

From 1985 to 1995 Nintendo almost single-handedly rescued the video game industry from a catastrophic collapse in 1984, and then proceeded to mold it into its own image. Profits became reliable. There was greater quality control. And for the first time, games were connecting with audiences in ways that made them seem like more than just a fad. They were batting .1000 in this era, and it was only when the times changed on them in the late 90s that they showed a costly failure to adapt.

Almost all of this, good and bad, can be laid at the feet of a single person. During this time, and even through today, the dominant creative force at Nintendo was Shigeru Miyamoto. Talk to anyone with any interest in games, and they can talk to you for hours about Shigeru Miyamoto. Outside of that world, however, he is largely unknown. This would be akin to a person who doesn’t care for basketball being unaware of the existence of a man named Michael Jordan. Shigeru Miyamoto was to video game design what Isaac Newton was to physics—at least in the 2D era. He laid down the rules. He replaced chaos with something new, and it worked fantastically.

Miyamoto was an art designer at Nintendo in the 80s. Nintendo was making arcade games, getting by in an industry that was about to hit a wall at about a thousand miles an hour. It’s all but forgotten now, but in 1984, the video game endured a crash of such monumental proportions, that many commenters dismissed the industry entirely as a fad whose time had passed. Atari went under. Mattel ceased to support its Colecovision. Home consoles were dead. Most of the companies making them, or making arcade games, were now bust. The industry was a victim of its own success. Anyone could make a game and put it on the Atari, and everyone did. The market became flooded with garbage that no one wanted to play. Supply was high, but demand was low for horrible games. After a few years of easy success, investors were overreaching to obscene degrees. One story that sums up the whole period: Atari made a video game adaptation of the movie E.T., giving its single programmer just six weeks to design and test it. They manufactured 5 million cartridges, more than there existed Ataris to play it. The game was such an abomination that virtually every copy sold was eventually returned. With mounds and mounds of unwanted games, Atari buried them in a landfill in New Mexico. Here lies Atari. Born 1972. Died 1984.

The destruction of the 1984 crisis was widespread. Even companies that weren’t arrogantly lax about quality suffered greatly. Nintendo was no exception. Nearly wiped out, and with little resources to spare, they pinned their hopes of surviving the crisis on a 25 year old art designer. Shigeru Miyamoto was one of a very small number of employees remaining at the company. He was essentially told “We will die if you don’t make a hit game. Do whatever you want.” He delivered the arcade game Donkey Kong. It was a smash success, and Nintendo was now flush with cash at a time when none of their competitors could afford their bankruptcy attorneys’ fees. They decided to try their hand at the home console market. Known as the Famicom in Japan, the NES would dominate the home console market to a degree that was unprecedented, and very likely can never be seen again. And what game was packaged with it, utterly blowing kids’ minds and hooking them for life? Shigeru Miyamoto’s Super Mario Bros.

It’s difficult to objectively evaluate Super Mario Bros. 25 years after its appearance. (Yes. 25 years. I know, I know. You’re old. So am I. Only a 12 year old could still feel young after reading that.) It completely changed peoples’ expectations of what video games could be. It encouraged exploration. With secrets and warp zones scattered everywhere, it meant that one play-through was just the beginning. It also featured significantly better art design than anything that had come before. It looked like what it was, a game made by a young art designer filled with confidence and enthusiasm. It was cool!

Yet despite all this difference from the standard expectations of the time, it was still very simple. You had two buttons. You could run. You could jump. That’s all you needed. You had three power-ups. A star made you invincible and the music changed to reflect the fact that you were now DER UBERMENCSH. A mushroom made you big. A flower allowed you to shoot fire, and turned your overalls a nifty red and white. Okay. None of that makes any sense, but it’s simple enough. There was a story, which was, hilarious, more involved than most video game plots. This was the story: King Koopa kidnapped the princess and the chubby plumber will get her back. Bam! Kids can relate to that story. There’s a monster. There’s a princess. There’s some dude who could be your dad (he’s the hero). You’re into that story. It wasn’t much, but it was more than Pac-Man had.

And this basically encapsulated the Miyamoto method. He made off-beat decisions that somehow resonated instantly with vast audiences. This game featured flying fish, bullets from nowhere, crazy springs that could vault you over 30 foot gaps, tunnels all over the damn place, spinning wheels of fire, beanstalks to the sky, and God knows what else I’m forgetting. It all worked. None of it seemed out of place. We ate this up as kids. It was the coolest thing ever. And the thing that made it really remarkable was that it was still simple enough for a 4 year old to enjoy. There it is. That was the formula that was often imitated but rarely duplicated. Eccentric art design, a feeling of simplicity, and gameplay that rewards exploration. He just made a game that he’d want to play.

With a picture of Miyamoto in our heads, Yoshi’s Island starts to seem more inevitable than unexpected. The SNES had a great run. The Sega Genesis had given Nintendo a scare by capturing a similar market share, but the fact was, they made a ton of money and more good games than you could shake a stick at. Now, imagine you are Shigeru Miyamoto. You’re now too busy at Nintendo to actually direct many games. You’re mostly a producer now. You basically set the creative philosophy of your company, which has grown massive thanks in large part to the success of your Donkey Kong, Mario, and Zelda franchises. And now there’s time for one more Mario game before the SNES punches its ticket and steps aside to make way for the future. What do you do?

Here’s what you do. You make a game where all the backgrounds look like they were hand-drawn with crayons and colored pencils. You do that in response to your superiors asking you to make the game more high-tech. You take it totally in the other direction and kick so much ass at it that they say, hey, you know what, you’re right. That looks a lot better. You make a game with an “enemy” called Fuzzy that doesn’t actually hurt the player, but rather causes the images on the screen to toss around like waves on the ocean and distorts the music. You’re Shigeru Miyamoto. If you want to make an enemy that causes kids to feel like they’re tripping their shit, you do it! It’s the last Mario game of the 2D era. Go nuts! You make the game a prequel about Mario and Luigi as babies. You know why? I don’t know, probably because you drew it in your sketchbook and thought it was hilarious. Your sketchbook is worth its weight in gold, dammit. You’re Shigeru Miyamoto. You rescued not just a company, but a whole damn industry by designing whatever the fuck you thought was cool.

This game was trippy. Its art style was radical, and I don’t mean that in the 80s sense of the term. I mean it was actually such a significant departure from every single one of its peers as to be radical. Yoshi can’t even die by getting hit by enemies. You only lose by losing baby Mario for too long. This game dispensed with “health”. It was such a ridiculous wellspring of creativity that it still makes games today look stale.

And that’s why games have only regressed for me since the SNES. High-powered 3D graphics can be very immersive, but they’re so technically demanding, and so expensive to create (because of the manpower necessary) that this kind of free-wheeling creativity has to be put aside. In 1995, Shigeru Miyamoto could make the game he wanted and put in the elements he wanted, more or less on a lark. He could wake up and say, “You know what would be fun? An enemy that makes the screen rock back and forth but doesn’t hurt you.” And there it would be in the game.

Nowadays, innovation in games is as dangerous as innovation in heavily promoted Hollywood blockbusters. When your movie costs $200 million, it must make money. Even if that means delivering something utterly formulaic. When your game costs $50 million, it’s the same story.

Yoshi’s Story was the perfect swan song for the SNES. It was an exclamation point ending an era where it was still financially defensible to do crazy things with big franchises. It was weird and funky and proud of it. Its energy continues to make it a blast 15 years later. Those crayon and colored pencil backgrounds still look way too cool. Hats off to Shiggy. Now, excuse me, I have to make a dinosaur spit watermelon seeds at bad guys who are walking around on stilts.