The Nintendo Machine That Ate Disneyland McKenzie Wark mwark@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au mwark@well.sf.ca.us He's short, fat and completely lacking in personality, yet he has conquered a goodly part of the teen universe. He doesn't sing, doesn't act and mostly just jumps up and down, yet he's a cult figure to millions around the world. His name is Mario, and he's the star of Nintendo video games such as Super Mario Bros and Superr Marioland 2: Six Golden Coins. Like Batman and Bart Simpson, Mario is a multiformat marketing success story from hell. His image is used to sell underwear, toys, fruit juice and the 'Nintendo Cereal System'. Unlike Bart and Batman, Mario began life in a Japanese video game rather than in a comic, TV or movie. He signals two possible changes in the direction of pop media marketing. One is the godzillaring of the pop media landscape by Japanese iconography. The other is, in Raymond William's terms, the emergence of the video game as a emergent media form and the possible eclipse of broadcast television and cinema as the dominant media forms. Mario ushered in a new cycle in mass media marketing, where the games move to the front line in pop fashion and cinema becomes an after market. Sales of Super Mario Bros 3 exceeded the box office takings of the movie ET. Not surprisingly this second development meets with a certain subliminal fear and loathing in the west, where new media are treated ambivalently as harmless fun fit only for children and as lethal brain-smack harmful to impressionable young minds. By comparison, Japanese popular culture appears to westerners at least to be more tolerant of such developments. As video artist Peter Callas says, media technology appears as a territory to inhabit rather than an evil force to fear in Japan. This difference in cultural ground tone may in part account for the relatively advanced state of Japanese video game culture compared to the west. Mario first appeared in a seminal Nintendo game called Donkey Kong in 1981. Actually, it was supposed to be called Monkey Kong, but due to a glitch in the fax transmission, the New York office thought the new game was called Donkey Kong and had the American market packaging and promotional material made up for that name. It was cheaper to change the opening screen of the game itself than all that printed matter, so Donkey Kong was launched upon the world Q despite the fact that there are no Donkeys in the game at all. At a time when most arcade games were primitive shoot'em up style killing machines, Donkey Kong was different. The players - and Mario's - task was to rescue a Fay Wray style character from a King Kong monster by jumping, dodging and climbing through a barrage of barrels, ramps and ladders. The wacky elements of fantasy and humour added to the platform genre game high-jumped it into a new league. It helped the games industry cross over from arcade style shoot 'em up games to the more varied and engaging genres of Nintendo System games for domestic terminals. It also helped to broaden the audience from the increasingly saturated core market of teenage boys. This was not the first game to try to create an alternative to simulated mass murder as an amusement. Game designer Toru Iwatani claims that his hit game Pac-Man was meant to appeal to female players. "I used four different colours mostly to please the women who play - I thought they would like the pretty colours." Mario does not go much further than Pac-Man in bridging the gap between the video game world and the female psyche. Most video games offer the player a male point of view and stereotypically masculine things to do, as Marsha Kinder points out in her book Playing With Power (University of California Press). The games allow young people to familiarise themselves with computers, but they also impart very traditional ideas about gender roles, not to mention some easy lessons in junk consumerism. "Video games are the first example of a computer technology that is having a socialising effect on the next generation on a mass scale, and even on a world-wide basis," says Patricia Greenfield in Mind and Media (Harvard University Press). As anyone who has played with game-addicted youngsters knows, they often have extraordinary semiotic skills. Describing the embarrassing experience of being thrashed at Pac-Man by a 5 year old, Greenfield makes the droll observation that "as a person socialised into the world of static visual information, I made the unconscious assumption that Pac-man would not change visual form. Children socialised with television and film are more used to dealing with dynamic visual change." At some things, it seems, our kids are destined to be smarter than us. Just wait till they master the new high speed 3-D graphics of Nintendo's FX chip, launched with the Star Fox game last February. Video games are a huge industry, and with 80% of the market Nintendo still has the lead over rivals Sega and Atari, although Sega is catching up fast. Last financial year Sega posted group earnings of 4416 billion (up 68%) compared to Nintendo's 4635 (up 13%). Still, Nintendo's turn-over is greater than either the Sony or Nissan corporation's. Already, more than a third of Japanese homes have a Nintendo game system. For every personal computer sold for home use there are two Nintendos. In the United States, there are about 6 million Macintoshes and 20 million IBM style computers in the home, but there are 30 million Nintendo machines. While the American computer and software companies may hold the high ground in the intensifying multi-media marketting push, the Japanese games makers and their software licencees have the marketing base in place. The games mario appears in are not the only ones tha are popular, but he was the first identifiable pop icon to originate in gamesland, closely followed by Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog. Mario's popularity led to TV and movie spin- offs. The first TV version, called Super Mario Bros Super Show began in 1989, followed by Captain N in 1990. This reverses the usual pattern, where Robocop, Terminator and Predator start as movies and are then marketed in video- game spin-offs Q including a pretty banal Predator meets the Alien game. Actually, any media image can end up as a game scenario. Batman or the Gulf war - its all the same. The controversial Sega game Night Trap even uses a reality TV style scenario straight out of Hard Copy where a gang of evil looking men trap and assult a young woman - unless you intervene to save her. Basically any scenario created anywhere within the media landscape can become a game. The industry takes familiar images and allows the player to explore the scenerio interactively. Where television beams images into everyday existence, games reverse the process, allowing the player to move out of everyday life into the media landscape itself. Games makes the mirror of media production appear as a two-way mirror. The TV viewer absorbs and interprets images spat out of a Hollywood babylon world on the other side of the screen. These images become the stuff of imagination, they become our dreaming within. The video game player gets to Alice their way across the screen's threshold, taking our media-dreams back with us, to act out incredible shrinking lives in screen dramas of our own. We even get to choose from a wardrobe of character roles for our swashbuckling adventures in an abstract, digital wonderland. Perhaps this is why the TV spin-offs from games are not always successful. Young people schooled in interacting within the media wonder-landscape may not take too kindly to being hurled back into mere passive reception by the TV image. The success of Mario and other game characters rests on the fact that while he was intensely cute, he had no definable personality whatsoever - a completely empty vehicle for young viewers to fantasy drive. Turning games characters into movies and TV is syptomatic of their pervasiveness and centrality to emergent pop culture, but basically TV may end up an aftermarket to games rather than the main event. Increasingly games culture swallows up any and every kind of popular image and transfers it to the emergent terrain of interactive media. Since older consumers don't understand the new world of video games, they will get their first exposure to Mario Land via the now rather old fashioned medium of cinema. The movie version is aimed more at adults than youngsters and features the short, stout, balding but very sexy Bob Hoskins as Mario. By selling the movie rights to Mario, the Nintendo game-makers doubtless hope to broaden his appeal and their market base. Actually, 41% of the owners of the portable Nintendo Gameboy model are adults. Perhaps they buy them for the personal organisers and other yuppie urban living accessories, but the chances are they are playing with Mario too. Many baby-boomers who grew up on visual media and post-war consumerism can easily assimilate this new twist in media technology on a conceptual and fantasy level even if they are too old to ever develop star player reflexes. Video games are a dialectical spinoff from television culture. We recieved its cartoon dreams, now we can play-act a part in them. The basic structure of Super Mario Bros 3 is a quest, like Donkey Kong. Mario has to rescue Princess Toadstool from a tribe of evil turtles. Along the way you have to dodge man- eating potplants on legs and other curious terrors, while seizing the opportunities offered by eating various magic substances which increase Mario's powers, making him fly or spit fire. These quests are organised in distinct phases, each with its own rules. While the premise is simple in theory, in operation it is extraordinarily complex. The player spends hours wandering about in imaginary worlds that have the distinctive look and feel of Japanese science fiction movies. The hapless Mario has to battle surreal images of nature turned malevolent, an appropriate scenario for the consumer craze of our times. These images have a curious trans-pacific history. The original malevolent nature movies where made in Hollywood in the 50s, like the classic Them!, directed by Gordon Douglas and released in 1954. In that film giant ants, the result of genetic mutations caused by atomic tests, threaten to take over the Unitied States. This development in the popular imagination died out in the United States, but such movies became a standard of the post-war Japanese imaginary. The most famous of these are the Godzilla films, which began in 1954 with Godzilla, King of the Monsters. This was not the only example of cross-fertilisation between American and Japanese popular cinema. The mutual borrowings between the great westerns of John Ford and the classic samurai films of Akira Kurosawa are another striking example. The success of Mario thus has precendents. Japanese and American popular culture are not as mutually unintelligible as many would like to believe. However, the success of Mario in Western markets is something of a new development in terms of a direct transplant of the Japanese version of this imagery into American popular consciousness. While the Japanese pop of Shonen Knife and the contemporary science fiction of Tetsuo II: the Body Hammer have achieved cult success in the West, only Mario has succeeded in going mainstream. Ironically, the character of Mario is Japanese game designer Shigeru Miyamoto's impression of the landlord of the Manhattan building where Nintendo has its American offices. Another source of video game aesthetics is the Japanese Manga comic books. Manga enjoy a greater status as art and as adult entertainment in Japan than American comic books do in the West. Japanese script also lends itself to far more flexible and creative approaches to integrating text and image design. Manga have a strong connection with video games in Japan. Many successful games are based on Manga characters, like the amazing Ranma 1/2. Ranma is a boy action-hero. Except when he comes in contact with water - when he transforms into a she. The popular Manga and TV cartoon character Doraemon also features in a game of his own, although this ultra-cute robot cat has so far resisted translation onto the Western comic and games markets. The incredibly successful games Street Fighter II and Dragon Quest have spawned their own Manga series - another sign of the rise of the game as the primary mode of circulation for pop imagery. There are even CDs of video game music for the total fan who wants to hear those sounds in full digital 8-times over-sampling stereo. Interpreting Nintendo games is something of a challenge, even for the sophisticated semiotic theories of the media developed in the 70s and 80s. Martha Kinder makes a start at adapting such theories to the new games media. Mario Bros, she claims, is an example of an 'Oedipal narrative.' They offer the male player a point of view which is that of the underdog, battling a powerful male figure which stands in as a surrogate for fatherly authority. The player tests his powers against this simulated patriarch and develops tricks and skills. In the style of classic Oedipal stories, the game ends when the player either slays the giant or elopes with the princess. While plausible, such an explanation has an all too reasuringly reductive feel about it. The big baddie you have to shoot at the end of each level is not called 'daddy', its called the boss. It is not necessarily male - it could be any one of a dozen genders. The appeal of these games may have more to do with far more abstact desires of becoming and overcoming than is usual in Tv and cinema. A game character like Ramna 1/2, where the hero magically metamorphoses into a heroine when in contact with water may have a far more fluid relatrion to gender dreamings than critics like Kinder could ever imagine. Some games offer a choice of characters to play in the game, including female ones. For example Street Fighter II has one female character, called Chun Li. Another popular example of the fight game genre, Tuff E Nuff also makes one of its four characters female. Kotono is described in her character profile as "a skillful female knife expert with a nice line is slash attacks." In the mirror world of the game zone, nothing stops and much encourages girl players to masquerade in the masculine and vice versa. Or better yet to become aliens of indeterminate gender. Nevertheless video games are still primarily a boy's toy. Sherry Turkle claims in her book The Second Self (Simon & Schuster) that girls tend to approach the computer differently to boys. Boys are 'hard masters', looking for ways to control the simulated world on the screen; girls are 'soft masters', more likely to look for ways of accommodating to its rules. Most games are definitely about hard mastery, leading Marsha Kinder to worry that the games will provide boys with basic skills for the computer age that girls may miss out on. One thing that tends to get lost in the debate over the gender bias of video games is the extraordinary cultural and ethnic mix of game imagery. The highly formalised aesthetic of the game can support a quite astonishing range of imaginary scenerios, into which all kinds of stray images can float. There is no reason why a cute dinosaur ought not to appear in Mario games, or why fight games shouldn't feature blue eyed wrestlers alongside Asian martial arts icons. The repertiore of images games combine comes from any and every source of the global media image pool. While there are firms all over the world making games under licence for Nintendo, its the Japanese games which often appear to make a unique contribution to the culture. While American software programmers may have a near monopoly on programming for PCs, Japanese programmers are out in front in programming for games. Given the difficulties the PC presents for the complex writing system and culture in Japan, it is no surprise that development has been slow in programming for this technology with its inherent Western bias. On the other hand, the sophisticated Japanese graphic culture seems to lend itself perfectly to the game technology. In his book Manga! Manga! (Kodansha International) Frederick Shodt develops an idea proposed by Sergei Eisenstein, that the complexity of the Japanese writing system lent itself to the complex, non-linear graphic forms of manga, or Japanese comics. The Nintendo game is an animated version of this spatial culture of information with a multilinear structure of possibilities. Nintendo can be seen as a further development in the rich graphic tradition of popular woodblocks, manga and anime - the popular Japanese animated cartoons like the fabulous Akira. The developers of the famous Street Fighter II game, Capcom, employs 100 people in California and 500 in Japan, of who 350 are programmers and graphic artists. This international software publisher certainly seems to know how to exploit both Japanese and American image culture. Its Japanese team also worked on The Magical Quest, a game starring Mickey Mouse! There is something suitably ironic about Mickey ending up trapped within a Nintendo game, battling it out with sprites and boss baddies from level to level. It sums up the shift from comic to cinema to TV to video game. Like all emergent media, games make the form of the old media they cannibalise the content of their new designs on the pop imagination. Only now the precession of pop images takes place on a global media landscape. Hence archetypally American mouse ends up in a Japanese designed game, while the Japanese invention Mario ends up as a suitable sequel to Hollywood movie producer Roland Joffe's world series epic tearjerkers The Killing Fields, The Mission and City of Joy. Put alongside the acquistion of Hollywood movie studios and record companies by Sony and Matsushita, Nintendo's cultural as well as market success signals the end of the era in which globalisation was synonymous with Americanisation. The challenge mounted by the emerging cultural technology of games to the dominant ones of cinema and television is felt also in Hong Kong - one of the world's great cinema capitals. Fight games like Street Fighter II cannibalise another great non-western pop genre, the Hong Kong martial arts film in much the same way as the latter ate up traditional Chinese performance and martial art forms. For example the low, sweeping kick which is part of the stylised repertiore of Street Fighter II is a traditional Northern Chinese Kung Fu manoeuvre known as the 'iron broom'. In Jackie Chan's film The Invicible Kid Jackie fights the flying kicks of a murder of bad guys in a video games room. Suddenly they all transform into the characters from Street Fighter II, using all their trademark moves. The scene was apparently a great success with Hong Kong kids, many of whom know the moves of the game and the moves in the movies equally well nowadays. Perhaps the ultimate sign of the rise of the video game is Terminator II. Of course there was a vid spin-off, but the main point is that the movie itself was already structured like a video game. The music mimicked the heart-starting rhythms of video game soundtracks, and the plot took the form of a series of 'levels', each of increasing difficulty. Some looked like the scrolling genre of game, like the chase through the storm water channels. Some looked like the platform genre, such as the final shoot out in the factory. And of course there is always the boss monster who appears at then end and requires a special trick to kill - in this case imersion in a vat of molten metal. Since the target audience for movies like Terminator II spend far more time on he games console than watching movies, its not surprising that the producers tried to reproduce elements from the common game genres within the film. Nor should it be surprising that any and every successful pop cultural meme is migrating out of the superceded media where they bagan media half-life into the expanding pool of interactive video imagery. Video games are now central to popular audio-visual aesthetics. We no longer has origins we have terminals. McKenzie Wark lectures in communications at Macquarie University. (c) McKenzie Wark June 1993