The 20th anniversary of the Game Boy was a few days ago, as I’m sure you all know, and there’s been some fine retrospectives, personal reflections and historiography on the plucky little machine that moved so much product for Nintendo it kept them high above water even as its popularity with gamers waned. Seek and ye shall be rewarded, wanderer of the aether!

I’m sitting here trying to think of a way to articulate exactly what I want to say about the first and, in a way, only portable gaming console that I owned. Sure, I was one of the few lucky kids to have an older brother who instinctively wanted everything that his younger sibling didn’t (which is also a roundabout way of saying that we had a Game Gear in our household at the same time since he wanted a portable console that was “not Game Boy”), and I did later buy the successor to Nintendo’s savior, the Game Boy Advance. Heck, I’m currently playing Rhythm Heaven right now on my DS Lite, so it’s not like it was the ONLY portable system in my possession.

But, yes, in a way it was. My memories of Game Boy mostly consist of it being the first palpable object that I always took with me on long car trips and into doctors’ offices (save for my trusty yellow Sports Walkman). Most of my experiences with my DS have actually been indoors, on my sofa or at my day job on a slow day, and these play-sessions almost always have a tinge of boredom attached to them; its just a way to pass the time that also involves videogames. This wasn’t so with my Game Boy. There was an omnipresent THRILL in being able to play a videogame away from a television, with the screen and your hands so close together it almost felt as if you were symbiotically bonding with the machine, with all of your actions somehow becoming more immediate and empowering. This was the system that gave us Donkey Kong (1994), our first taste of the way our modern Mario games would control in a 3-D environment. The funny thing is, looking back, debuting Mario’s new move-set on Game Boy was the best method possible, as that instant and visceral feel of interacting with a screen so close within your personal space made the jump to 3-D realism pretty intuitive. It was a personal extension of character control on two different levels, but the results were one and the same.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on Link’s Awakening (1993). This game is championed by many, and I can certainly echo those sentiments. In fact, quite by accident, I made the overworld map of Koholint my desktop background at work a week before I realized that the Game Boy’s anniversary was approaching, but even before I decided to sit down and try to hash out my feelings on it, I was admiring the thought and care that went into the overworld design (click to view fullscreen):

Looking at this map as a cohesive whole, one can see how an area blends into the next in a natural geographic way. There aren’t really any jarring transitions from one environment to another, yet all of the standard Zelda ecosystems–graveyards, deserts, mountains, towns–are still intact. It actually seems like a living, breathing world, clearly evolved and alive well before you even turn your Game Boy on (which is all the more ironic and heartbreaking considering the story’s ultimate outcome). What’s even more brilliant about the layout of Koholint is that it begs to be explored: there are dense pockets of marshy swamps and shorelines and bushy fields that are TOO enticing for an explorer to simply scuttle through. The developers employed the perfect way to encourage this kind of exploration as well: an overhead map broken down into a grid of blacked out squares that are “filled-in” one by one, as you move from screen to screen. The temptation to “reveal” the entire map ensured that you would travel to every nook and cranny, leaving no stone unturned or rock wall un-bombed.

Well, I said I didn’t want to get started but I did anyway. Suffice it to say, I obviously have a very soft spot for Link’s Awakening since I’m gushing about the MAP. The game kept my eyes glued to that small green screen for hours. I remember taking a family trip to Napa during that time, but to be honest, I couldn’t even tell you what the landscape looked like. I can’t describe a single vine. I do, however, know every square inch of Koholint from memory.

So far, no other portable system has lived and traveled with me in quite that same way, and I don’t know if another one ever will. There are many great games for DS, and I certainly have the hope that maybe I’ll find another Link’s Awakening or Donkey Kong (or Picross or Metroid II or Super Mario Land 2 or Tetris), something that will grab and beckon me to take it out, to have its narrative meld with the one I have to follow every time I step outside of the escapist glow in my electronic sanctuary. In the meantime, Dear Game Boy, I have my memories…and frankly, isn’t that part of the fuel that sustains our passion for this medium anyway?

Koholint map courtesy of VGMaps.

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Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on April 23rd, 2009 :: Posts :: Tags : Donkey Kong, Game Boy, Interactivity, Link's Awakening, Mario, Nintendo, Zelda
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The greatness of game composer Koji Kondo has been expounded upon in countless articles, books, and blogs, so–as I’ve reiterated a few times already–I don’t want to use this precious space (or your time) to simply retread ground and talk about how great the man is. But seriously: this man is GREAT. His sound work really has proven to be monumental for video games, and not just because he crafts instantly recognizable and catchy melodies, but also because of the way in which these themes interact with the player within the context of the gameplay happening at any given time.

A concept that Kondo has mentioned in numerous interviews, and which appears to be more and more prominent in the work that he both composes and oversees, is that of “interactive” sound that morphs and changes depending on what action is taking place on-screen and where; in other words, dynamic composition.

We can trace this technique in Kondo’s work all the way back to Super Mario World (1991), in which an energetic percussion beat would accompany Mario as he rode Yoshi, and stop whenever he dismounted. I suppose if we thought about dynamic composition in this way, we can trace the concept even further back, all the way to Super Mario Bros. (1985), in which the music would speed up to a frenetic pace as the in-game timer winded down, adding a sense of urgency to a level that was, up to that point, a usually cheerful and exploratory game experience. It’s a small temporal detail that has a huge impact on the gameplay, something that Kondo would expand upon in his later musical scores.

In Super Mario 64 (1996), one can really get a clear picture of what Kondo was driving at concerning fluidity in game music, especially during the “Jolly Roger Bay” level, the first in a Mario game to feature swimming in a 3-D environment (discounting the castle moat in the hub-world, of course, which serves more as a sand-box for experimentation and practice than an actual stage). At the start of Jolly Roger Bay, a lone electric piano plays the soothing main theme, unaccompanied by any other instruments. It is only upon entering the water–in essence, beginning the level proper–that a string section enters the arrangement, and as you venture further, eventually reaching an underground cave and sunken pirate ship, the rhythm section fades up and the different layers and complexities of Kondo’s piece are fully revealed. While a player could simply marvel at the expanse of the lake and the beauty of the rendered environment from the shore (well, beautiful at the time, at least), that’s not the main objective that the designers wanted to convey. The true excitement, the “meat” of the stage, was beneath the surface of the water, and having the full score swell in if and only if you actually “dive in” is the perfect way to encourage the player to do so. One of the challenges of creating a good 3-D environment is to compel the player to explore and investigate areas that they can already see in front of them (pop-in and fog, consistent visual blemishes in Nintendo 64 games, are precisely the wrong way to go about doing this, as you’re constantly breaking from the reality of the space, and who wants to explore somewhere or something that’s always undermining its own construct anyway?); achieving this goal with an appropriate and, more importantly, CONTEXTUAL music cue is a stroke of genius on Kondo’s and Shigeru Miyamoto’s part.

While Super Mario Sunshine (2002) also exhibits these kinds of traits–Yoshi, once again, has an accompanying bongo drum beat whenever Mario rides him, for example–Super Mario Galaxy (2007) takes Kondo’s concepts of dynamic sound in videogames to another level entirely. In Galaxy, specific sound effects harmonize themselves with whatever music is playing in the background. So, not only does the music shift and change elastically according to what action is taking place and its location, but the sound of grabbing a coin, for example, actually has a different pitch depending on what chord the music is on the moment Mario grabs it. A tense moment in a level, say, the Ghost Ship, results in an appropriately tense sounding score, which itself results a coin grabbing sound effect that doesn’t feel inherently positive, like a major chord, but is instead a tad dark and mysterious, like those Halloween-y sounding diminished 7th chords in music. This seems like a fairly innocuous mechanism, but it really helps to bond the player and environment together (see Flower (2009) for a recent application of this).

We can also hear this same type of aural effect at the main menu screen, where the twinkling sound of selecting your file can vary depending on the temporal position of the musical interlude occurring at that same moment. Again, this is a small and seemingly inconsequential detail at first, but it results in a videogame that has an almost anthropomorphic nature, constantly resonating with itself in an immediate and organic way so that every nuance of sound is in perfect harmony with each other…AND the player. The result that Kondo and his team is trying to achieve, I think, is one of total immersion, with every aspect of the game fitting together like a giant interlocking puzzle or sculpture. This isn’t a case of different departments coming together and simply combining their parts, but instead, much like a symphony, is a collective voice made up of many smaller components that are all performing in the same key and with the same timbre.

And this is all without even taking into consideration the actual music of Super Mario Galaxy itself, which is amazing stuff! Having lush symphonic orchestrations accompany the player from level to level gives the game a much deeper sense of space and scope, creating sonic expanses that appropriately echo the notion that Mario has moved beyond pipe mazes and Cheese Bridges and has become a full-fledged astronaut, soaring between planetary masses with dignified resolve (credit must be given to composer/arranger Mahito Yokota, who helped create most of Galaxy’s score under Kondo’s supervision). What’s more, there are wonderful judgements regarding when to use these epic arrangements. My favorite example is the Comet Observatory, which serves as a hub-world in the way that Peach’s Castle did in SM64. As the player progresses through the game, unlocking new areas by collecting stars and restoring power to the gigantic floating structure, the music shifts from a thin, mostly synthetic arrangement–save for a few recorded instruments, such as flute and harp–to a majestic, swelling live orchestra. These kinds of thoughtful touches result in a score that’s not only the best for the Mario series, but one of the best game soundtracks in the last ten years.

Throughout the Mario series, we can see (or rather, hear) Kondo’s philosophy of dynamic composition shining through, reinforcing the solid standards of gameplay that Nintendo has made their bread and butter, and actually making it more fluid, more interactive and, ultimately, more fun. While Koji Kondo is certainly not an unsung hero in game design, the work that he and his group put into Super Mario Galaxy is more than just a part of what makes the game so good, but may very well be the cornerstone for the entire Mario series and a crucial element in that mysterious formula that keeps gamers enthralled by the squat Italian-American plumber again and again and again. It seems to me that the “essence of Mario” that Kondo has spoken of is also the essence of the composer himself, and both just happen to be perfectly in tune.

Related Links:
Iwata Asks column featuring the sound team of Super Mario Galaxy
1up Interview with Kondo (October 2007)
Video of Jolly Roger Bay from SM64

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Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on April 22nd, 2009 :: Posts :: Tags : Flower, Koji Kondo, Mahito Yokota, Mario, Music, Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Shigeru Miyamoto, Super Mario 64, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Galaxy, Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario World
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I remember acquiring Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990) at a Sears shortly after the game was released. I think I simply stumbled onto its giant display area by chance: I don’t recall being too keyed into what new games were coming out and when, although I did have a subscription to Nintendo Power at the time so I’m sure I knew of the game at least. The best thing about Mario games is that, as a kid, you’re pretty much guaranteed to have your parents buy you one, because EVERYONE knows about Mario and that having his name plastered on a video game means the game is going to be, above all else, familiar and non-threatening (and, not to mention, of a relatively high quality too, third-party licensed garbage aside).

So, home we went, and I had a brand new shrink wrapped Mario Bros. game in my possession. I remember twisting the yellow box in my hot little hands and being VERY EXCITED about the cover. Mario had raccoon ears! And a tail! It was going to be a totally different game than the ones that came before it!

And man oh man, was it ever. The sheer variety of stuff to see and do and have done to you was immense at the time. I dare say that almost every single level in the game is different, and I don’t mean merely in the layout of the levels or “theme” of the world, but significantly different in terms of gameplay, enemy type, and objective. Remember that stage with the Angry Sun following your every move and then actually swooping down in an attempt to sear through Mario’s very flesh? At least, that’s how I remember it, and it frightened the hell out of me. I also remember thinking that riding in Kuribo’s Shoe during certain levels was a nice addition…it was essentially a vehicular control segment, but when translated into the Mario universe of hopping along, jumping and being able to traverse over obstacles—like spikes and Munchers—that would otherwise kill you, it didn’t feel like you were just in a tank-like object ; you were utilizing a tool in a very fleshed out and breathing world, carving your own destiny out among all the other creatures that share the same habitat.

I could go on and on about how great the music is (seriously, using Latin percussion samples was a stroke of genius at the time); how the Koopa Airships and Super Tanks evoke the white knuckle difficulty of  Bowser’s castles in the first Super Mario Bros.; how the card and “line the pictures up” mini-games help to break up the otherwise relentless flow of levels, right before the feeling of fatigue and frustration sets in (you cannot save in this game, after all)…but unfortunately, this story isn’t about how I grew to love Mario Bros. 3. It’s about how I lost my copy of it.

There was only one other family on my street that had an NES, and they would come over on a regular basis to borrow games from me (the mother of this particular household did day-care as well, so there were always new “clientele” dropping by). They would want to borrow Mario games mostly, but occasionally they would ask for other titles like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 or Adventure Island or Double Dribble. I could always take a game in trade, but there wasn’t much that they had that I actually wanted to play…maybe Ikari Warriors, but that’s about it. In any event, I was happy to do it—I mean, this is MARIO we’re talking about. I couldn’t imagine a house with a Nintendo system that didn’t also have more than one Mario game. Mario games are the BEST.

One day, I remember going over to their house to get my copy of Mario 3 back, and on the way back home a few other friends rode up on their bikes (baseball cards clothes-pinned to the spokes, naturally) and we chatted about something or another for a while in my driveway. Whatever nine year old boys in 1991 talked about. The Oakland Athletics, I guess?

Later that evening, the family (Mom, Dad, and older brother) piled into our beige Jeep Cherokee to go visit my Grandmother, who lived maybe 45 minutes away from us. As our Jeep turned onto the main road that would feed into the freeway (680 North, for all you Bay Area readers), I heard a pretty prominent scraping sound coming from behind my seat. I turned around and, out the back window, I saw my copy of SMB3 slide off the roof of our car and onto the road. Earlier, while I was talking with my friends in our driveway, I placed the cartridge on the roof of our car, so nobody would make a grab for it (yeah, nine year old boys in 1991 thought like that).

“OHNOMYGAME!” I shouted as the rest of my family looked at me, confused. I furiously tried to explain what happened and my Dad pulled over and jumped out of the car, thinking that maybe he could recover the game before someone else ran it over. He made it about four steps into the road before another car barreled past. No sound. It was still safe!

Another car hurdled by.

KA-FWOP.

My Dad turned on his heels and, without breaking stride, returned to the car, where I was witnessing all of this transpire, horrified. He put the car into drive and, without looking back at me, said (in that matter-of-fact tone that all Dads are able to conjure up when they need to):

“Well, that’s the end of that.”

Say what you will about the sorry state of Virtual Console, digital distribution, and how Nintendo seems to be milking every dollar out of every game that comes out of their pipeline—having Super Mario Bros. 3 available for an eight dollar download is one of the best things that company has ever done. Now I’m able to finally tell my story of childhood heartbreak with a miraculously happy ending. And I can discover the joys of platform gaming all over again.

Have your own Mario 3 memory? Please share in the comments!

Links:
Bob Mackey on Nintendo Power’s SMB3 strategy guide (which contained meticulously hand-drawn maps!!)
The Retronauts‘ podcast on the NES Mario games, in which they share their own fond personal memories/perverted fantasies
The Angry Sun
The Sun
The Sun

Screenshots courtesy of VGMuseum. Thanks also to the Mario Wiki for jogging my memory on the more esoteric enemy names. The amount of detail in that thing is frightening. Seriously, they have separate articles for the Sun as a character, the Sun as an enemy, and the Sun as a cosmic entity in the Mushroom Kingdom. That alone demands respect (?).

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Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on March 2nd, 2009 :: Posts :: Tags : Mario, NES, Nintendo, Super Mario Bros. 3, Virtual Console
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While, from a business point of view, Nintendo’s recent strategy of giving select GameCube games a second wind as Wii titles with remote-centric controls makes absolute sense (a new, millions strong install base of Wii owners who never owned a GameCube—or any game system, for that matter—are probably hungry for any type of good game that doesn’t involve throwing darts or brushing hair), I can’t help but feel like this also may simply be a knee-jerk reaction to the “core” demographic that are complaining about the lugubrious state of first party titles.

I’m bringing this up because I’m extremely worried that Nintendo has just given up on any sort of originality or frequency for their games developed in-house, and are instead focusing their corporate energy in designing (or, as in the case of the new Wii Play Control titles, half-hearted re-packaging) software that directly applies their new futuristic and sterile aesthetic. If you’ve ever seen any of those “world of tomorrow” reels and exhibits from the 50’s and 60’s, then you know what I’m talking about: The family of the future, enjoying sanitary autonomous meals being served from spotless machines. Safe, reliable and clean create an environment that exudes the comforts of home without the inherent danger. Kids, remember to finish your Veggpak, or you won’t get any Yogurt Pump!

While Nintendo has seemed to nudge us in that direction with things like the Apple influenced DS Lite and the benignly communal atmosphere of Wii Sports (2006), I feel like Mario Kart Wii (2008) has proven to be the ultimate perpetrator/offender in this regard. Let’s look at the box art:

To me, this box is the absolute epitome of Nintendo shedding their old “electronic toy” image. Everything that characterizes the classic, colorful, rubber-burning weapon-throwing appeal of the previous games has been erased. And I mean that literally. THE ENTIRE KART OF MARIO KART has been removed (save for some vague shadows on the ground), leaving only strange floating aberrations of Mario and Luigi holding their pristine white wheel controllers against an equally stark background that evokes the prison in THX1138 (1971) more than the Mushroom Kingdom. The future is here, and there’s no need to worry about crashing your kart or getting hurt. Just make sure to wrap your controller in silicon, so No One Gets Hurt!

But this sanitizing doesn’t stop with the box art. The title screen of the game matches the box art exactly—has this ever happened in a video game? Likewise, the in-game menu and option screens look and sound more like the touch screen at an airline ticketing kiosk than a rollicking mascot-filled chaotic kart racer that defines the very genre that Mario Kart itself defined. I know that there are perfectly cogent arguments for the actual gameplay, the tracks and online play, and trust me, I’m not trying to downplay the true meat and bones of Mario Kart games. But it would be very naive to not admit that first impressions are very important, and for a tried and true Nintendo fan myself, I felt the pangs of skepticism travel up my spine as soon as I saw the box.

Showing characters of a video game actually holding their own means of interaction is a little disturbing to me as well. I was going to write that it’s sort of like a puppet holding up its own strings and pointing out the artifice of it all, but I think it’s instead more akin to a puppet holding their strings steady and sliding the entire stage underneath their feet around to make themselves dance—they’re not only bringing to light their lack of control over their own world, but they’re undermining the entire construct of that world as well. I don’t know what wall/s that’s breaking, but it’s at least a few. Mario and Luigi are not only fictional totems of a fictional universe but, as Mario Kart Wii implies, they are aware of that in some devastating way, and they’re letting us know that they know by using their own controllers to play themselves. Is Mario actually controlling himself in Mario Kart, or is he the one responsible for Luigi’s gasp of horror as they edge their anti-karts over a phantom cliff that no one will ever be aware of, not even themselves? Are they driving each other’s souls perhaps?

I suppose I shouldn’t be too critical of a game’s box art. At least Mario Kart Wii HAS art. I snapped a few blurry cell-phone pictures while browsing one of the local game purveyors, and came across this:

The game we’re looking for is Puzzler Collection (2008), published by Zoo Games:

Hopefully you can make out when I saw, but if not, I’ll break it down for you: A third party Wii title WITHOUT A LABEL ON THE SPINE. If you were to line your games up on the shelf, it would be a mystery game, a flaming grab bag if you’ll indulge me. I know that the Seal of Quality has been a tad lax lately, but I mean, Nintendo! *wags finger* Are there no standards for disc packaging now as well? Can I publish a game with no original content and NO LABEL and get away with it, as long as it adheres to your neutered corporate vision of family entertainment?

May I interest you in some Yogurt Pump? With hot fudge dust?

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Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on February 2nd, 2009 :: Posts :: Tags : Box Art, Gamecube, Mario, Mario Kart, Nintendo, Wii
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