Dear Malstrom,
Thank you for responding to my e-mail on your blog. A few comments,
though, that I hope you can again find the time to respond to:
You wrote:
“In your email, you make my own argument. You say how there have been
many Mario games, many various RPG Mario games for example. Mario Kart
as another example. RPG Mario games have a very different gameplay
than 2d Mario as does Mario Kart. What they do have in common is
Mushroom Land. The *content* of the game world is the same. Or,
rather, it would be more proper to say the mythos is the same. What is
Mario Kart but racing in a fantastical Alice and Wonderland type
setting?”
But if all those games you just mentioned did not deviate from the
mythos, why DID the Mario phenomena die?
But they did deviate. That is the entire point. The main issue is that Mario became a citizen of the Mushroom World instead of being the outsider. Without the outsider, the fantastical land no longer remains fantastical. It just becomes a setting like any other game.
You blame the death of the
Mario phenomena on the slow deterioration of the series mythos, but if
all that’s needed to stay true to the Alice In Wonderland type mythos
is the Mushroom Kingdom and it’s mushrooms (and really, the mushrooms
are the only Carrol-inspired thing about SMB) then I can say with
absolute certainty that most Mario games do that.
There is more to Mushroom Land than just the mushrooms. There is more of what was in Super Mario Brothers than Alice’s mushroom.
You can make that
argument about Super Mario Sunshine and Galaxy, sure, but even then
you have to acknowledge that as early as the American SMB2 Nintendo
was taking Mario and thrusting him into radically different
environments. Is nostalgia the only thing that makes that instance
forgivable?
SMB 2 USA, that continued Mario Madness, that even had Mario Madness on its cover, was a perfect and faithful sequel despite the Doki Doki Panic roots. The gameplay certainly wasn’t a natural evolution. However, the premise of SMB 2 was the same. Mario and Luigi, and this time Toad and Princess Toadstool (I dislike the ‘Peach’ name), are the outsiders. Instead of Mushroom World, it is Dream Land. And Dream Land is just as fantastical and amazing. Flying carpets, magical doors, Birdo (who, himself, is quite a wonder), magic turnips, Bob-ombs, Mouser, and the rest were all fantastical and amazing.
SMB 3 expands the Mushroom Lands to Mushroom Worlds and is like SMB 1 but just far vaster.
With SMW, it appeared like Miyamoto was dropping or forgetting the Alice (or Arabian Nights, pick your source) mythos and was making Mario more cartoon like. With Yoshi’s Island, the cartoon direction was very intentional, very noticeable, and extremely controversial.
Remember what happened when Zelda Windwaker was revealed? “Celda!!!” Miyamoto saw the Zelda series very differently than the fans. He saw it more as a cartoon.
Yoshi’s Island was the Windwaker to the Mario series. It split the Mario audience in the middle. Worse, as one reader reminded me, Nintendo retconned Mario to cease being ‘Alice’ to become a ‘citizen’, to have him ‘born’ in Dinosaur Island (or wherever Yoshi’s Island was at).
The result was that Mario Madness, whose momentum was a little slowed after the disappointment of Super Mario World (if that game wasn’t 16-bit and looked good, you’d never have heard the end of it at that time period), got totally wiped out by the time Yoshi’s Island appeared. Sonic the Hedgehog, which was essentially an inferior game to Super Mario World, was considered on par due to Super Mario World not living up to the (colossal) expectations that SMBs 1-3 set. SMW was a great game and added many things (like Yoshi). But it did not throw any logs onto the fires of Mario Madness.
Miyamoto has said that he wanted to make Super Mario Brothers a multiplayer game not unlike what is being done with New Super Mario Brothers Wii. This isn’t PR. In the roms, it has been discovered that Luigi was tried to be put in with Mario 64 and NSMB DS was attempted to be made into a co-opt experience. Miyamoto is absolutely telling the truth that he wanted to make the Mario games more of a multiplayer experience. This explains the odd ‘multiplayer’ modes in SMB 3 and in Galaxy for example.
Consider the early 90s. Sonic the Hedgehog comes out in 1991 and gets some attention. Super Mario World comes out and is essentially criticized (though it did drive SNES momentum). In 1992, Sonic 2 comes out and it did have multiplayer at the same time (and it is quite fun. Even my nephews still play it and they were born after the Gamecube came out). In 1994, Donkey Kong Country comes out and it had co-op in a way.
All these other 2d games having multiplayer in some way, and before Mario ever did, must have greatly annoyed Miyamoto. I guess he took his ball and went home. Twenty years later, no new 2d Mario games. Miyamoto is on record, prior to Galaxy’s release, saying that he wanted Galaxy to make 3d gameplay easier so it would sell at the same levels as 2d Mario. I get the impression he wanted 3d Mario to kill off 2d Mario.
Anyway, to get away from the tangent, the entire reason why I bring up the ‘Alice’ argument about the end of Mario Madness is to suggest another reason for the end of Mario Madness instead of the ‘Nintendo gamers got older and wanted hardcore!!!” explanation. The reason why Mario Madness ended was because of some very stupid things Nintendo was doing around the start of the N64 time (the Virtual Boy was just one of them).
One of these big problems was the voice that was added to Mario. Even today, when people do impressions of Mario such as Conan, they never do his voice. They always do the *boing Boing* of his jump. People like that. It, at least, adds in to the musical melody. Children might love the voice. But children also love clowns. When you slip Super Mario Galaxy into your Wii and it says, “SUPER MARIO GALAXYYYYY!!!!!” do you not cringe? It makes me want to take out the game! They’ve turned Mario into a clown with super powers.
Mario used to be cool. Sonic used to be really cool too though there was never any real ‘Sonic Madness’ as there was ‘Mario Madness’. And what happened to Sonic? He became presented in the games as a cartoon character, very ‘stylized’, and he has that annoying voice. Even as far back as Yoshi’s Island, the ‘whining’ Yoshi and the ‘crying’ Mario were godawful annoying.
Please keep in mind that the Mario games that have come are very good. However, we are talking a type of legendary killer app role that is difficult to see twenty years later (though the sales numbers speak for themselves). Only about a handful of games can qualify for this (Wii Sports is one, Tetris is another). Mario games in the last twenty years haven’t really performed on this level with the lone exception of NSMB DS and Mario Kart DS.
I think it’s fair to say that Nintendo did start to stray from the
original mythos of the series in the mid-to-late 90’s, but they were
also keeping the mythos very much alive in Super Mario RPG (and later
Mario RPG games) and Super Mario 64. Certain “Alice in Wonderland
gameplay” elements like the mushrooms that make you bigger were
downplayed after Super Mario World, but the setting of the Mushroom
land stayed 100% intact, even if it was never again explored on such a
grand scale as SMB3.
In Super Mario RPG and Super Mario 64, Mario was a ‘citizen’ of Mushroom Land.
And I think there’s something to be said here for
the other M word—mythology. Even if Nintendo did somewhat abandon
the mythos, they only added more and more to the mythology which I
can’t deny, as a Mario fan, is something I like to see. You’d get very
sick of Mario if every game played the same and starred only Mario,
Princess Toadstool, Luigi and Toad.
You mean like this?
Or this?
Yeah, these ‘additional elements’ since then have only harmed the series. No one likes them. After the addition of Yoshi, I can’t find any ‘addition’ to the mythology that Mario fans like. I can’t think of any ‘power ups’ they like or characters. It is as if even the mythology is still rooted back in the 2d games.
Mario mania did indeed start to die circa 1992. But you haven’t
addressed the other big thing that was happening at that time: Sonic
the Hedgehog. It wasn’t the presence of another great platformer that
killed gamer’s enthusiasm for Mario, it was Sega’s constant stream of
ads that hyped Sonic as a badass cool guy for gamers with an attitude
while simultaneously making Mario out to be some dweebish nice guy:
[yotube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an8OHLDNHRg]
These ads were aimed at the preteen and up crowd, and naturally it
worked. More and more Mario fans migrated to Sega. Perhaps they still
played Mario, but it was no longer cool to get excited about Mario
because Mario wasn’t exciting anymore. I don’t think it has anything
to do with the quality of the games or their mythos and everything to
do with Sega’s attempts to bury Nintendo in the early 90’s.
Ironically, what saved the SNES was Donkey Kong Country and that was not made by Miyamoto (it is obvious he was annoyed how well that game was received). When people asked him, years ago, why he stopped making 2d Mario because everyone wanted it, he cited Donkey Kong Country. Yoshi’s Island was directed to be very cartoony just to be different from Donkey Kong Country!!!
Donkey Kong Country became the 2d Mario substitute… for a while at least.
