NES Replay: Donkey Kong 3

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: 1986

I'll set the stage for you.

I was about 12 or 13 years old. My aunt was having a wedding reception at a bar with a banquet hall. We were told to stay in the banquet hall and not go into the bar, but I noticed arcade games in the bar. Naturally, I wandered over there just to get a peek.

Now, I was just as video-game obsessed at that young age as I am now, if not more so. I kept a notebook where I wrote down the name of every game that I had a chance to play, even I had only played it for a minute or two. I read every video game magazine that I could get my hands on and even studied up on games that I knew I would never have a chance to play. I prided myself on my knowledge of every game possible.

So imagine my surprise when I found an arcade game called Donkey Kong 3. I was absolutely stunned and refused to believe that such a thing existed. I thought there was only Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr., and this game had to be a mistake. I had to play it.

My mom hated video games with a passion and refused to give me a quarter. Fortunately, I had an aunt who was more than willing to give me some change, so I got a chance to try out Donkey Kong 3. What I found was a pretty weird game, but one that my young mind thought was pretty good.

So, almost 20 years later, Donkey Kong 3 and I meet again. Would I still like it after all this time?

Short answer: No.


Donkey Kong 3 was a radical departure from the previous games in the series. Instead of playing as Mario, you play as Stanley the Bugman. He's in a greenhouse, and Donkey Kong hangs from bars up above. In every level, Donkey Kong stirs up some bugs by punching some beehives, and Stanley has to shoot them down with bug spray. Shoot down enough, and Donkey Kong gets bored and leaves. You also need to keep shooting Donkey Kong in the butt with bug spray, or else he'll drop down to the bottom of the screen and you'll lose a life.

It's such a radical departure from the first two games that its mere existence is strange. After all, why is Donkey Kong in a greenhouse? Why is he punching beehives? Where is Mario?

Here's my completely unsupported and wildly speculative theory: Donkey Kong 3 was more than likely designed with other characters in mind, and at the last minute Donkey Kong was slapped in there just to get more sales. The facts add up: Mario isn't in this game, bugs and plants were never a part of Donkey Kong, and Donkey Kong 3 is more of a shooter than a platformer.

It's also just merely an OK game, and Nintendo had to know what they had on their hands. If they released a game called "Stanley the Bugman" into arcades, no one would have bought it. But if they released a game called Donkey Kong 3, it would automatically get sold on name recognition alone before word got out about its quality. I can't verify this theory, of course, so it's all conjecture on my part.

The NES port of Donkey Kong 3 is extremely faithful. The graphics look almost identical to the arcade game, the sounds are correct, and everything is dead-on. As with the first two games, the NES hardware was more than capable of rendering Donkey Kong 3.

However, what kills this game is that it plays exactly like an arcade shooter shouldn't. In a typical shooter, the first level should get you acclimated to the controls and ease you into the game. You don't hammer the player immediately with too much, especially when you're introducing new gameplay mechanics.

You could make the argument that when Donkey Kong 3 was originally released in 1982, players should have been able to balance a lot of different tasks at once, even at the beginning of a game. However, other developers didn't think so.

Consider: Galaga was released in 1981. At the beginning of the first level, you're presented with a ship and a few enemies that move in a tight formation. They're not firing at you yet, just flying into formation. Then there's the next batch, and the next batch, and after a few they finally start firing at the player.

Arkanoid was released in 1986. At the beginning of the first level, you have a paddle and a ball that you bounce off the bricks up above. The ball moves fast, but you have about 30 seconds to get used to the controls before things get crazy.

Compare this to Donkey Kong 3. At the beginning of the first level, two enemies immediately start floating down to you. Your shots don't travel very far, so have to get in close to the enemy to kill them, but wait! The enemies don't travel in a predictable pattern! They zig and zag a bit, more like leaves falling from trees. Meanwhile, Donkey Kong inches down the bars, and there are some flowers you have to protect, and there's a spray can at the top of the screen, and-

When you compare what Donkey Kong 3 expects the player to do versus what other games of the period expected players to do, it's insane. No wonder that Donkey Kong 3 was virtually forgotten for years. Some people love that style of play, and good for them. However, as Nintendo learned in time, if you chase after the narrow demographic that wants crazy difficulty, you'll only have those players and no one else.

Final Rating:

NES Replay: Donkey Kong Jr.

In the last article, I put forth the theory that Donkey Kong's NES port was edited to keep some value in the arcade game. If you still don't agree with that assessment, here's another nail in the coffin: Donkey Kong Jr. was ported over to the NES with all four levels intact.

Keep in mind that Donkey Kong Jr. is a more complicated game than Donkey Kong. There are more enemies with different behaviors, more moving parts onscreen, and more complicated controls. And yet, Donkey Kong Jr. is intact on the NES while Donkey Kong isn't. However, Donkey Kong Jr. wasn't as popular in the arcades as Donkey Kong was, so Nintendo didn't have as much to lose by porting Donkey Kong Jr. over to the NES intact.

What's immediately noticeable about Donkey Kong Jr. is the fact that Mario is the villain in this story. In Donkey Kong Jr., Mario has trapped Donkey Kong in a cage, and Junior runs through the levels trying to free him. It's a very strange role reversal. Nintendo had made a bona-fide mascot in Jumpman (who was later renamed Mario), and he was starting to get recognized the world over. So why would Nintendo take their hero and make him a villain? That doesn't make much sense, does it?


There are a couple of reasons that they probably did it. First of all, it's entirely possible that the designers of Donkey Kong looked at the first game and noticed all the black space in each level. They then possibly asked the question, "How can we let the character move around in that space?" Once you add in the idea of vines, it's not too much of a stretch to come up with the basic framework of Donkey Kong Jr.

There's another important factor at play, though. At this point in gaming's history, most video game characters didn't have distinctive personalities. They were fluid, filling whatever gap the designers needed them to fill. For example, no one really stopped and asked why exactly Pac-Man needed to eat pellets and avoid ghosts. We just accepted it and moved on. Why is Dig-Dug blowing up monsters underground? Who cares?

If we apply that logic, it's easy to see why Nintendo didn't really see an issue moving Mario into the villain's role. They viewed Mario differently than everyone else did, and it took them a bit to catch up to the idea that Mario must always be the hero. However, if having Mario as the villain in Donkey Kong Jr. really bothers you, just imagine that it's Wario in disguise and you'll hopefully get over it.

Leaving aside the "Mario as villain" issue, what makes Donkey Kong Jr. great is the extra dimension of movement that they gave to the player. Enabling the player to move around by climbing and moving from vine-to-vine just feels right. It has a very tactile feel, which is unusual for such an early game. Each level also has its own unique challenges, culminating in a level where you have to snap keys into locks in order to set Donkey Kong free while birds fly at your face.

So which game is better? Donkey Kong or Donkey Kong Jr.? I have my own opinion, but I could see an argument being made for either one. While Donkey Kong is certainly the most enduring, Donkey Kong Jr. is way more unique. It may repeat the same basic structure of Donkey Kong, but since the levels are more varied and the mechanics so much more fun, it's superior in my book. Either way, though, they're both good games and definitely worth playing, especially for their historical value.

Final Rating:

Should Bonds, McGwire and Clemens be in the Hall? Yes.

I was on Google+, and the question was raised, "Who should get in to the Hall of Fame?" I said that players like Bonds, Clemens and McGwire should go in. A commenter named Chris Pratt (not the actor) had this to say:

Steroids were illegal in every other professional sport at the time and against the law to sell or possess.
There is no way Bonds did what he did without steroids. That's why you keep them all out.
I'm a native of St. Louis and was at the game where McGwire hit 62 and 70. Those were two games I will never forget, but they are tarnished because of the fact that they wouldn't have happened without the roids.
None of them deserve to go into the hall.

These are common points, and we'll go through each one of them, one-by-one.

"Steroids were illegal in every other professional sport at the time and against the law to sell or possess."

Here's something crazy: The NBA didn't test for marijuana for years. In recent years, they've started doing tests, but as recently as 1997, there was no testing in place. All the other major sports leagues had it in place, and it was, of course, illegal in the US to sell or possess.

So, if an NBA player was found to be using marijuana during that time, should they not be allowed in the Hall?

You could say, "Marijuana isn't a performance-enhancing substance! It's used for relaxation and recreation!" However, if a player has a PED in his system, we don't care what they used it for. It's banned, right?

Let's use an example of something that is, in fact, a performance enhancing drug. Baseball allowed amphetamines up until about 2006. Some say that it's more responsible for the drop in power than steroid use. However, amphetamines were illegal in other sports and illegal to sell or buy.

So, should all players that used amphetamines be kicked out ot the Hall? If you do that, get ready to kick out Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and practically every great player you know.

Putting it all together: If we're going to base our opinion of steroids in baseball on what other leagues allowed or disallowed, we're going to go down a weird path that includes a lot of doublespeak and weird contradictions.

"There is no way Bonds did what he did without steroids."

Does Barry Bonds hit 72 home runs in 2001 without steroids? It's highly unlikely. However, as the story goes, Bonds saw the adulation that was thrown at McGwire when he broke the home run record. Bonds always felt underappreciated for his skills, so he decided to take steroids starting in 2000 in order to beef his home run totals.

The estimable Jonah Keri compiled Bonds' stats up until 2000, and came up with this career:

2,000 games played
445 home runs
1,299 RBIs
1,455 runs scored
460 stolen bases
.288/.409/.559
3 MVPs
102.5 WAR

Here are his money quotes:

"The next-highest WAR during that 1986-99 stretch belongs to Ken Griffey Jr., at 68.5."
"Bonds's first 14 years work out to the sum of Jimmie Foxx's entire career. And of course, this exercise twistedly assumes that without PEDs, Bonds would've been eaten by wolves on Christmas Day 1999 and never played again."

He also looks at another player of the era, Roger Clemens:

"Just for fun, let's try the same exercise with Clemens, counting everything up to the Rocket's otherworldly numbers in Toronto:
2,776 innings pitched
2,590 strikeouts
3.06 ERA
83.4 WAR
The next-highest WAR during that 1984-96 stretch belongs to Greg Maddux, at 58.5. Clemens's first 13 years top Warren Spahn's entire career."

I think those numbers speak for themselves. These are players who would have been great with or without steroids.

However, the next quote really sums up what's really bothering the voters and the fans.

"I'm a native of St. Louis and was at the game where McGwire hit 62 and 70. Those were two games I will never forget, but they are tarnished because of the fact that they wouldn't have happened without the roids."

I'll always argue that there were three events that brought baseball all the way back from the 1994 strike: Cal Ripken breaking Lou Gehrig's consecutive games record, the Sosa/McGwire home run chase, and the 2004 Red Sox/Yankees series. You may have your own choices, but I think we can all agree that these were some pretty big events.

Knowing what we know now about the so-called Steroid Era, it seems silly that the home run chase had such a huge effect, but it was all anyone could talk about in 1998. McGwire and Sosa seemed to be good guys, they were having fun, we were having fun and no one seemed to care.

At the time, though, there were journalists who were poking around McGwire and brought to light his use of andro. We all knew that he was taking, but no one said anything or seemed to care. It was just swept under the rug.

When we talk about how we feel "hurt" or "betrayed" by the players that hit all those home runs, it's a little odd. We knew that players were taking things. We didn't care at the time. We wanted them to do it. It would be like a boyfriend encouraging his girlfriend to cheat on him, then having people tell him that she's cheating and he does nothing about it and ignores it. Then, years later, he decides to throw that back in her face and break up with her.

We, the fans, saw players using substances and did nothing. Look at McGwire as a rookie:

And McGwire years later:

Only those with their head in the sand refused to believe he was on something. We knew about steroids, and we knew they were in McGwire's locker. We didn't care.

Now, years later, we're going to hold players like Bonds, McGwire and Clemens responsible for what we as fans allowed them to do with impunity? That's unfair.

"None of them deserve to go into the hall."

So then who does? Only players like Maddux who are skinny and don't look like they took steroids? Is a player's build a guarantee that they never took anything? The first person suspended for steroids was Alex Sanchez. He was 5'10" and 180 pounds soaking wet.

Steroids also help a player come back from injury faster. Maddux was pretty durable. Is the fact that he wasn't injured a lot a sign that he was taking steroids?

I'm not saying anything against Maddux, mind you. For the record, I believe he was clean. I'm just making a point: If you start suspecting everyone of steroids and lumping them all together, some weird mental arithmetic starts to happen. You start believing players are clean because you believe they're clean, and that some players are dirty because they're dirty.

You simply can't do that. When deciding who goes into the Hall, you have to stack players up against players of their own era, apples to apples. If a player is head and shoulders above players of their own era, they should go into the Hall. That's what the Hall is: A place where the best players of their era are enshrined. You can try and make the argument that a Hall of Fame is some sort of moral museum, but that argument falls apart when you look at the fact that Ty Cobb, one of the game's worst people, is in the Hall, as well as Kennesaw Mountain Landis, a virulent racist who fought to keep the leagues segregated.

The truth is, we want to keep players out of the Hall because we're mad. That's it. We're just angry. But, frankly, it's our own fault, not the fault of the players for doing what we wanted them to. For that reason, we have to get over it and let the best players of the era into the Hall.

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/26/sports/marijuana-and-pro-basketball-a-special-report-nba-s-uncontrolled-substance.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/baseball-experts-amphetamines-ban-steroids-biggest-reason-steep-drop-offense-article-1.182105
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/10155321/breaking-baseball-hall-fame-ballot

Review: NES Remix

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo

Nintendo has a deep bench of games they can go to when they need to. They have old franchises that they've never used properly, like Balloon Fight. They have old favorites that still remain fresh, like Mario and Zelda. They have the most history of any game company currently existing.

The games they released during the NES era have been picked over and picked over so much that it's hard to find anything new to do with them. And yet, Nintendo found a way.

NES Remix is, at its heart, a celebration of old NES games while providing players with achievements and challenges. It can be by turns incredibly satisfying, incredibly challenging, and incredibly frustrating. It includes classic games like Donkey Kong and The Legend of Zelda as well as not-so-classic games like Clu Clu Land and Ice Climber.

Your enjoyment of the game will hinge on how much you like these older games, and some of them really don't hold up well. The good news is that if you don't like one of the crappier games in the collection, you can usually move on to a game that's more fun to play.

The best part are the remixes, where they take a game and change something major on it. For example, in one remix, you play through level 4-1 in Super Mario Bros., but it's completely covered in ice. In another remix, you do a lap in Excitebike in the dark with nothing but your headlights lighting the way.

The only downside of NES Remix is that right now it only includes 16 games, all from the first two years of the NES. One hopes that they'll expand it with DLC (or free DLC? One can dream) so that it can include games like Kirby's Adventure, Mario 3, Punch-Out!! and others. Even if they don't, it's still a ton of fun and worth the $15.

Final Rating: B+

Baseball Player Ryan Freel Had CTE: Why Aren't We Freaking Out?

Ryan Freel was a utility player, bouncing around the major leagues for about eight seasons. During his career, he took a few shots to the head and had problems with memory loss and headaches. He finally retired in 2010 after he couldn't shake the injuries caused by a pickoff throw to the head in 2009.

Ryan Freel committed suicide in 2012. The family had his brain investigated, and found that Ryan Freel had evidence of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) in his brain. CTE, if you'll recall, is the disease that destroys boxers and has ravaged the NFL. It's a degenerative disease that appears to be caused by repeated head injuries.

This is the first case of a baseball player being diagnosed with CTE. So why aren't we freaking out like we do with boxing and football?

More and more, it's appearing that there is nothing that can be done to make football "safe." For example, Rob Gronkowski of the New England Patriots got injured a few weeks ago. The defensive player went low to avoid hitting Gronkowski in the head, and ended up destroying Gronkowski's ACL in the process. However, Gronkowski still suffered a concussion on the play, rendering the defensive player's attempt to protect Gronkowski's head meaningless and destroying his knee and career for nothing.

During a game, there are only three people on the field that are not guaranteed to have contact with another player: The quarterback, the kicker and the punter. Most of the time, even those three players are not immune. Every other player is bound to have contact in some form or another, whether it's blocking or tackling. Contact is part of the game. Remove contact from football and you're just playing tag.

It doesn't matter how you legislate football. The game is always going to be about collisions and hitting, which has been proven to cause brain trauma and eventually brain damage. You can try and prevent players from hitting high, give them extra padding in their helmets and flag players for rough hits, but the result is the same: People will get hurt, and seriously so.

Likewise, how would you remove head injuries from boxing? Remove knockouts? Disallow punches to the head? If you make changes like those, then it's no longer boxing.

Baseball, however, is not a contact sport. Yes, Freel sustained injuries while playing, but those were, for lack of a better term, accidents. For example, a baseball player shouldn't normally get hit in the head on a pickoff throw. When you play baseball as it's meant to be played, concussions and head trauma do not happen.

Baseball has also made efforts to curb the contact, like removing collisions at the plate. (Side note for those who think the rule change is a sign of the further wussification of America: Why was it that the catcher could block the plate but no one else? If blocking the bases were allowed for everyone, Prince Fielder's value would skyrocket.) A player still might fling themselves into a wall or get hit on the head, but our ongoing understanding of head trauma is going to make sure that players keep themselves safe.

Now, do head injuries happen in baseball? Absolutely. Head injuries can also happen if you're working construction, or working as a welder. Head injuries are an abnormal part of the job, not a normal part.

Freel's case, while tragic, is an outlier in the sport. In the last ten years, we've learned so much more about head injuries, which should help keep players safe in the future. The key takeaway, though, is this: Unlike football, baseball can and will be made safer. Hopefully, the sad case of Ryan Freel will spur the process along.

NES Replay: Donkey Kong

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: 1986

As influential and far-reaching as games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda were, none of them would have existed without Donkey Kong. By 1986, it was clear that the NES was a hit, so it was time for Nintendo to make a home version of their most important game.

Donkey Kong put Nintendo on the map in more ways than one. Obviously, it was very popular game and made Nintendo a lot of money, but it also helped Nintendo in a more intangible, indirect way. When Donkey Kong was released in 1981, Nintendo was sued by Universal Pictures for copyright infringement. Their claim was that the names "Donkey Kong" and "King Kong" were too similar, they both had a giant ape that the property was named after and both of the apes were on the top of a structure with a damsel in distress. Nintendo's counter-argument was, "Nuh-uh."

Yet, surprisingly enough, Nintendo won the lawsuit. They were the smaller company, with smaller coffers and less of a footprint, going up against one of the biggest movie studios in the world. A video game company wasn't supposed to roundly defeat another entertainment entity in court like that, especially one as entrenched as Universal.


That win helped Nintendo realize that they weren't just fighting against the big boys, they were one of the big boys. That was a huge boost, not only for Nintendo but for gaming as a whole.

As a result of the ruling, Nintendo could keep on making their Donkey Kong arcade machines with impunity. There was another problem, though: Arcade machines are a very difficult business model in general. At the time, each arcade machine retailed for about $2000-3000, so it represented a considerable investment on the part of the purchaser. An arcade machine that wasn't popular would just sit there, gathering dust. Purchasers like arcades and bars could only invest in a game that would get them their money back. If an arcade game wasn't immediately attention-grabbing or wasn't good at getting money out of players, it wasn't going to find a buyer.

That meant that arcade machines were frequently an all-or-nothing proposition. There weren't sleeper arcade hits. For a game to make any money, it had to sell a lot of units, and fast. Nintendo could offset costs by licensing their games to other companies who would, in turn, make and sell the arcade cabinets, but it was still a business model fraught with risks.

At its peak popularity, there were about 60,000 Donkey Kong machines in the wild. That's about $120 million in revenue by a conservative estimate (over $250 million if you adjust for inflation). That's a good chunk of change, but you have to remember that Donkey Kong was an all-time hit. Other companies weren't always so lucky.

For that reason, developers of arcade games tried to port their games to home consoles. That came with its own problems. For example, Namco had made Pac-Man and raked in money at the arcades. Taito made Space Invaders and made a ton of cash too. Yet, in order to port their games to other systems they had to rely on other companies to provide the console and do the porting. In Taito's case, the port of Space Invaders was brilliant and sold millions of Atari 2600s. In Namco's case, the Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man was a historically bad game. A bad port could be someone's first experience with a game and could almost destroy a brand irrevocably.

Nintendo, on the other hand, controlled their own console and controlled their own software development. With that much control, they could do whatever they wanted. That sort of freedom should have been liberating. Instead, though, there was a troubling problem. Donkey Kong had four levels in the arcade version. The NES version excluded one of the levels because of "space reasons."

Do you believe that reason? I don't. It's completely ridiculous, and nothing you can say can convince me otherwise. They were able to squeeze 32 levels into the cartridge of Super Mario Bros., weren't they?

The "space reasons" argument is more than likely bunk. While Donkey Kong was six years old at this point, people were still buying and playing Donkey Kong arcade machines. Nintendo didn't want to cut off one part of their business to pump up another part, and by eliminating one of the levels in the console port the arcade game was still relevant. While it makes sense from a business standpoint, it's still kind of a crappy move on Nintendo's part.

As far as the game itself goes, Donkey Kong still holds up fairly well. Donkey Kong has been out for 30 years, and my heart always stops for a moment during the second level where Donkey Kong is throwing trampolines at the player. The physics still feel great, and it's a fantastic introductory game for a new player. When you stack Donkey Kong up against other arcade games of its era, it's great.

Donkey Kong is also interesting because of the point of the game. It's not necessarily about defeating enemies, and the fastest way to beat a level is to avoid killing any enemies altogether. It's more about avoidance and movement than anything else, which was a revolutionary concept in 1980 and still makes waves today.

It's still odd, though: Donkey Kong for the NES was the best console port of one of the most popular arcade games, hands down, and yet it was still missing a key part of the game. It was a weird discrepancy that very few arcade ports would rectify.

Most notably, though, the next game on our list would just about nail it.

Final Rating:

NES Replay: Balloon Fight

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: 1986

As we've mentioned before, Nintendo reuses assets habitually. Some may chalk this up to creative bankruptcy, but it's not exactly true. When you have an enormous backlog of music, art and physics at your disposal, you'd be crazy not to use it. It makes perfect sense for Nintendo to reuse good ideas as long as they're sufficiently remixed.

For example, in one of the craziest cases of Nintendo reuse, there a piece of music that's tucked into the Japanese Famicom system. It was reused years later. Where? They slowed the track way, way down and played it as the background music in the Gamecube menu. Here, I'm not lying:

That's wild, isn't it? However, this isn't a recent phenomenon. Nintendo's asset cannibalism started years ago during the supposed peak of their creative powers, and one of the earliest demonstrations of asset cannibalism happened all the way back in 1986.


Balloon Fight basically reuses the swimming physics from Super Mario Bros. and builds an entire game out of it. In Balloon Fight, you're a guy with some balloons attached to your back, and you flap your arms to float around in the air. They took the player out of the water and put him into the air with some minor physics tweaks, which is kind of a neat idea. Balloon Fight was originally released in the arcade in 1984 and then ported to the NES. That means it was under development at the same time as Super Mario Bros, so the math checks out. Of course, the swimming physics are a little better in Super Mario Bros., but the basic idea between is the same.

The NES port has two modes of play, and the main mode of Balloon Fight shows its original arcade roots. It's a combat mode where you try and pop the balloons of your opponents in order to send them to their deaths, and it's lifted shamelessly from 1980's Joust. There's really nothing exciting about it: Try and fly into your enemies' balloons and pop them before they pop yours. Rinse, lather, repeat.

However, Balloon Trip is the other mode in Balloon Fight, and it shows a lot more initiative. The screen scrolls continually as you float your way through an obstacle course. Get hit once, and you have to start over at the beginning. It's a precursor to the future "free-running" genre, which includes games like Canabalt, Temple Run and others.

So what was the point of releasing Balloon Fight along with the second wave?

At this point, Nintendo didn't need to convince people to buy the NES. The NES was a hit already. However, arcade games were still the most powerful games out there. Nintendo's job at this point was to convince people that the NES was just as powerful as what they were playing in the arcades, and the best way to do that was with near-flawless arcade ports.

To that end, Balloon Fight was an important game. It's not great, but it's fun for a bit and served its purpose well.

Final Rating:

NES Replay: 1986

And on the seventh day, Nintendo rested.

For eight months after the NES launch, no new games came out. For a modern console, this would be suicide. Why didn't it kill the NES?

As mentioned before, one of the things that nearly killed the North American video game market was the glut of low-quality games that deluged consumers from all sides. Sure, good games were still being made, but it took a lot of time to pick through them and find the good ones.


Still, though, good games were being made. Why didn't Nintendo just release more good games? After all, today we like having lots of choices. If anyone tried telling us that we couldn't have as many choices for our own good, we would freak out.

What's the difference between the 80's and today? We like choice nowadays because of all the resources we have to tell us what choices are good and bad. Are you not certain if the movie you want to watch is any good? Look at Rotten Tomatoes! Look at IMDB! Look up reviews on Amazon! Read one of the thousands of reviews on Metacritic! Ask people on forums!

At the time, however, there were only magazines, newspapers and word-of-mouth. The Internet was but a glimmer in Tim Berners-Lee's eye, and mass media ruled the day. Video games were barely mentioned in mass media unless they were huge, like Pac-Man or Space Invaders. That made it difficult to decide what was good and what wasn't, so having too many choices was overwhelming.

Nintendo also waited to make more games because the NES was far from a sure thing. The North American console market was dead in 1985. Nintendo wasn't going to pump money and resources into something if it wasn't going to be profitable.

So, what Nintendo did to counteract that is let word-of-mouth build. They released a bunch of games, let players decide what they wanted to see more of, and then let the players tell each other about the games.

What did players want more of? It was obvious: They wanted Mario.

Super Mario Bros. was a runaway hit. By the time the NES finished its run, Super Mario Bros. sold 40 million copies. Let's put that in perspective:

If you set all the purchased cartridges of Super Mario Bros. side to side, you would reach from Los Angeles to New York with 500 miles of cartridges to spare. If you stacked all of the purchased Super Mario Bros. cartridges on top of each other, you would have a pile 473 miles high, meaning you would have Super Mario Bros. cartridges in low earth orbit. If you attached the cartridges end-to-end and dug a hole into the center of the Earth, you would reach the inner molten core.

With that sort of success, Nintendo got the message loud and clear. They stopped making games for R.O.B. They mostly stopped making light gun games. Sports games became few and far between unless they had Mario in them. They were no longer going to make "gritty" games, just well-made ones with bright colors.

It would have been all too easy for Nintendo to rush another Mario game into production just to get more cash, or maybe become a Mario-only company. Yet, to their credit, Nintendo didn't. They knew they couldn't ride Mario forever, so they had to diversify. The next batch of games would prove that.

Other companies started waking up to this new world as well. While many companies were initially afraid to rejoin the console fray after the disaster of 1983, the runaway success of the NES was too hard to ignore. The first batch of third-party for the NES games came out in 1986, and the rest was history.

Notable Events In 1986:

January - The space shuttle Challenger explodes.

February - Jean-Claude Duvalier flees Haiti.

March - Microsoft holds its IPO.

April - Chernobyl.

July - The Statue of Liberty is reopened to the public.

September - Desmond Tutu becomes archbishop in South Africa.

November - Mike Tyson becomes world heavyweight champion.

NES Replay: Wrecking Crew

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: 1985

Almost as soon as the phenomenally successful Donkey Kong launched, Nintendo knew it was onto something. Nintendo finally had what no other video game hardware company had: A marketable mascot that they could put anywhere.

Mario clicked almost immediately with players. He was easy to identify with his red and blue outfit. The overalls and boots he wore made him a working-class character, and you could put him anywhere and he would mostly make sense.

Now, there were other mascots before Mario. Pac-Man's face was one of the most recognizable in the world for a time, but he wasn't a very flexible character. He's just a yellow disc with eyes, and in drawings he has stubby arms and legs that aren't visible in the game. Take Pac-Man out of his game's context, and he makes no sense whatsoever. What made Pac-Man popular wasn't Pac-Man himself, but the game around him.

Plus, try and picture Pac-Man in a different environment. For example, how would Pac-Man look playing golf? How long are his arms? Are his arms attached in the middle of his body? Then how will they reach out to look like a normal golf swing? Will they be able to wrap around his body on the follow-through swing? How will he lean over the ball?

What about putting Pac-Man in a platform game? Well, what's would he be doing in a platform game? That’s not really his thing. Why isn't Pac-Man instead running around in a maze? Why can he jump here but not in his normal game? Where do you incorporate the ghosts? Where does Ms. Pac-Man fit in all this?

These are the sorts of questions that Nintendo didn't have to ask with Mario. They didn't have to try and come up with any complicated stories or explanations for Mario because you could stick him into literally any game and he'll fit. In most games, Mario’s motivation is as simple as, “Rescue the princess,” and you know what? That works. That’s all he needs. You could have him jumping, climbing, playing golf, or even go-karting. He just fits. He's a chameleon in blue coveralls.

An early example of Mario’s flexibility was Wrecking Crew, an early puzzle-platformer. In Wrecking Crew, Mario uses a large hammer to knock down walls and destroy ladders while avoiding enemies. In a nice touch, Mario can't jump because the hammer he's holding is too heavy. That means you have to pick your route carefully in order to complete each level. Otherwise, you could get trapped with no hope of escape. However, unlike some other games of the time, it feels fair in a way that some arcade games didn't.

Wrecking Crew was built for consoles, and it shows. Since it's a little slower paced than other games of the time, cheap deaths are rare. When you die, you can usually understand where you made the mistake and adjust accordingly through your next playthrough. There's also a level creation system in Wrecking Crew, but it once again requires the Famicom Data Recorder.

There's a big reason that Mario is such an enduring character, and it's on display in Wrecking Crew: When Mario is the main character in a game, there's a good chance the game's going to be good. There's an expectation of quality in Mario games that you don't find with a lot of other mascots, so you know that you can buy any Mario game and enjoy yourself. That's something that's carried Mario (and Nintendo) through some lean times.

Nintendo learned early on that Mario can fit in any game they want to put him, but if you're going to put him in a game you had better make sure the game is good enough to bear his name. Wrecking Crew is a ton of fun, and demonstrates that commitment to quality.

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