Your post about how Mario 3 felt like grand adventure through the Mushroom Kingdom really made me think about the kinds of games I replay time and time again.
I was just a kid when the NES and SNES were going strong, so I never had many games (I’d get a game for Christmas and maybe my birthday). I rented quite a few of them, but I would only ever own a game if I knew I could have fun on repeated playthroughs. The high-quality 2D platformers of that era were clear winners – the Mario series and the DKC series, for example. Also the classic Zelda games. These games all have something in common: even on repeated playthroughs, they are meaty adventures that are easy to escape into. From beginning to end, there is so much to experience that just starting up a new playthrough made me excited as to what would come.
Here’s a modern example with FPS’s (my favorite genre since I switched to PC gaming). Half-Life 2 feels like a grand adventure through City 17. The first third of the game takes you from the middle of the city all the way to the outskirts. The next third takes you along the coast and through a high-tech prison facility. The last third is a huge urban brawl through the core of the city. The whole game is a single experience with no jumps in perspective or chronology, and each area logically feeds into the next without any area feeling out of place – and yet, there’s so much to see and do throughout the game.
On the other hand, since going modern, the Call of Duty series hasn’t had campaigns that feel like adventures, and it’s been getting worse instead of better. Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops are completely laughable – they barely feel like a cohesive series of events, nevermind adventures. The levels are so disjointed that it doesn’t feel like you are progressing through the game, and instead are just beating level after level with no logical connection between them.
You hear a lot of complaints about game length nowadays, but I think the underlying frustration is that games don’t feel like adventures anymore, regardless of length. They feel like a mish-mash of narrative and set-piece moments instead of an epic journey. Most developers nowadays don’t know the art of crafting a memorable adventure, and instead throw together individual pieces of “memorable” (to the developers, anyway) content without taking the big picture into account.
This is where game content needs to improve. Games need to feel like large, complete adventures instead of a series of disjointed levels strung together with dialog.
In 2006, Nintendo was right to say the job of video games isn’t to provide escape and adventure, the job of some video games is to provide escape and adventure. Nintendo did a good job with Brain Age, Nintendogs, Wii Sports, and Wii Fit to provide games to those who did not want escape from the daily world with their video games.
But Nintendo’s performance on the ‘adventure games’ has been a failure even in the Seventh Generation. Mario Galaxy games had very nice sound tracks and wonderful atmosphere. But none of it seemed like an adventure. Everything was so disjointed as if the universe had no texture. Twilight Princess did have a couple of moments, but most of the game felt like a re-hash, like a formula.
Nintendo’s sports games and other games were popular back in the 80s. But the star of the show, the games that really sent Nintendo to the stratosphere were the adventure games. Games like Super Mario Brothers, Zelda, and Metroid.
2d Mario is so revered in part because it carved out the Mushroom Kingdom. Everything we know about the Mushroom Kingdom was established by 2d Mario. Super Mario Brothers 1 began the exploration, Super Mario Brothers 3 further explored it, and Super Mario Brothers 4 established Dinosaur Land and uniting Sub-Con to the Mushroom Kingdom (Doki Doki Panic enemies began to be more regularly used in SMB 4).
From the developers’ perspective, all of this might have been ‘random’ mish-mash of various ideas thrown into a pot. But the consumer experience was a cohesive fabric of a universe.
To give an idea of this adventure, what happens when you beat the first level of Super Mario Brothers 1? We get a cutscene.
A reader starts to talk over Malstrom.
Quiet, you. We did get a cutscene. It showed Mario walking into a pipe that led downward. When 1-2 begins, we find Mario falling to the underground. In the original Super Mario Brothers, the levels were connected to one another. The world had a cohesive sense. When you beat a castle and start the next stage (say 2-1), you start off with the giant castle in the background as if you just left it.
Doki Doki Panic also had a cohesive continuity. In one stage, should you be required to climb up into the sky, the next stage would start you in the sky. You did not mysteriously start underground. And if the next stage did vary wildly from the previous one, there was a room where you entered the bird’s head to travel to that area.
Super Mario Brothers 3 is the game that created the most cohesive tapestry of the Mushroom Kingdom we have yet seen. One of my favorite worlds is World 5: Sky World. At the beginning, Mario starts on the ground. Then he comes to a tower where he goes, up, up, up, up and exits the stage at the top going up. Then, we find Mario in the clouds and all the stages are set in the sky. All this makes sense and feels like an adventure.
Super Mario Brothers 3 could not be made today. A modern game designer would look at something like those pipes on the map that were nothing but empty rooms where Mario exited one pipe and entered another as ‘tacky’ and ‘wasteful’ and then remove them entirely. Even though there is no gameplay attached to them, they did help carve out cohesiveness to the world. In order for Mario to go from one side of the map to another, he needed to enter the pipe. He did not magically appear there.
What happened when you beat a stage in Super Mario Brothers 4? The entire map would change! A bridge would appear, a road would stretch forth, a path would emerge. Dinosaur Land felt like wilderness that Mario, alone, was paving a way throughout. (Personally, I think SMB 4 falls apart as an adventure in the later areas of the game. Somewhere around the Forest Area including the Chocolate Area and Bowser Area has never really felt right with me. The Bowser Area seems too nonsensical to be the final stage of the bad guy.)
Super Mario 64 deserves credit because it established Peach’s Castle, its fairgrounds, and the rich world inside the castle to the Mushroom Kingdom. But ever since then, no Mario game has added to Mushroom Kingdom. Not even NSMB DS and Super Mario Brothers 5.
To a younger person, the Mushroom Kingdom was ‘always there’. But it wasn’t always there. It was carved out. Super Mario Brothers 1, 2, 3, and 4 permanently established Mushroom Kingdom. Thanks to those four games, and those four games alone, it allowed a rich soil for the Mario spin-offs to grow. Super Mario Kart would be impossible to make without what the 2d Mario games had done. There could be no Mario RPG and no Mario Sports games.
When we saw a new Mario game, there was great excitement because it meant further exploration of the Mushroom Kingdom. No one got excited over the game because of ‘new mechanics’.
The main reason for any disappointment with Super Metroid, when it came out, was that it seemed like a re-hash of the original Metroid. We were already on Zebes, and we already killed Mother Brain. Must we do this again? But Super Metroid fleshed out Zebes much further adding Crateria, Maridia, and having Samus enter and exit her ship (which gave the game a cohesiveness).
Ocarina of Time is so beloved, largely, because it is the most cohesive and elaborate illustration of Hyrule to exist. The Zelda games that followed were largely re-hashes on what Ocarina’s world and never really expanded on Hyrule. I imagine someone whose first Zelda was Ocarina of Time would be very impressed by Hyrule and would look upon the older Zelda games as ‘lesser’ (because Hyrule wasn’t as well illustrated).
But the reason why Ocarina of Time has such an elaborate illustration of Hyrule is because of the pioneering work done by Zelda I, Zelda II, and Link to the Past. Each of these games kept pushing forward the definition of Hyrule and climaxed with Ocarina of Time. Ever since Ocarina, all we get are ‘Adventures in Hyrule’ with an insane timeline that makes no sense. Zelda games are no longer a further exploration of Hyrule.
Part of the reason for Metroid Prime’s reception had to be in how further illustrated the Metroid Universe became. The world felt more fleshed out… not because it was in 3d but because there was additional content. Metroid Prime wasn’t just Super Metroid in 3d. There were new areas added.
When the player comes to this area, that was when Metroid Prime asserted its identity and became cool. It was no longer just Super Metroid in 3d.
Nintendo (and perhaps the Game Industry) is in a content crisis because they no longer possess the ability to create enduring content for their franchises. They keep focusing on HOW we play , not on WHAT we play. Worse, it appears Nintendo is unable to create any new original adventures. It is like no one knows how to create content. They keep calling a rehash ‘new content’ when it is a new game, certainly, but not new content.
Content is what the ‘franchise’ really is all about. World of Warcraft, the most profitable video game perhaps ever made, could not exist without Warcraft 1, 2, and 3 existing to establish the game’s continuum, its world.
I have heard that Miyamoto is opposed to the idea of a ‘game universe’, of a game continuum. This is why Mario and Zelda do not feel like adventures any longer. But I think the reason why Miyamoto feels this way, if this is true, is solely because a game continuum takes power away from developers. In other words, it is a set of ‘rules’ the developers must subscribe in making the game. And Miyamoto doesn’t like that. He incorrectly believes the more freedom the developer has, the better the game will turn out. It ends up being just the opposite.
When we see the rise of games like Grand Theft Auto 3 or Call of Duty or Modern Warfare, what is striking is that the content of the game was established. In GTA 3, it was a highly detailed city. In Call of Duty, it was World War 2. Authors and movie makers know the value of adhering to the rules of the fantasy/historical universe their product exists in.
I believe the lack of content, the lack of adventure, is a symptom caused by the ‘Game God Disease’. Why, he’s a Game God! He doesn’t have to EXPAND THE UNIVERSE or ADHERE TO THE UNIVERSE’S RULES. Remember the recent Battlestar Galactica? Ron Moore thought he was a creative angel and threw out any rules making his series become a trainwreck.
The ability to create a universe, either fantasy or otherwise, is the ‘gold’ creating ability. In books, for example, most people rehash some other person’s work. In fantasy books, for example, most people rehash Lord of the Rings. Perhaps these stories are more polished and ‘better’, but Tolkien gets the credit for establishing the rules by which everyone plays.
I’d like to go into what I’ve observed what makes an actual ‘universe creator’. It’s not that these people are rare, it is that they do things and have a mindset that is unlike their peers. It isn’t about ‘how’, to them, or even ‘what’. It is about ‘why’. They are the true generals leading the war against disinterest in their medium.
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