You know who is a really weird mascot? Mario. Seriously. It’s not just that his origins are muddled and absurd. I mean, he’s been a circus hand, a carpenter, and most notoriously a plumber. Nor is it that he always seems to square off against large, oddly named anthropomorphic enemies, from Donkey Kong to Wart to Bowser. It’s that really, other than his propensity for stomping on stuff and his ridiculous voice, we don’t really know anything about him as a character. Yet we all know who Mario is. In the quirky, eight-bit era, where games could star miniaturized Japanese dancer/ninjas or baseball playing robots, that was about as much depth as people were looking for in their gaming protagonists. But the field is very different now, and whether you are looking to macabre titles like Alice, noir adventures like Max Payne, or thought provoking excursions like Metal Gear Solid (itself derived from a very bare-bones eight-bit ancestor), our gaming heroes are all expected to have personalities, back histories, and even deeply rooted flaws for their narratives to exploit.

Not that Nintendo has always been known for its deep character sketches. Amongst its most popular icons, Link’s emotions are often superficial and obvious. Even Samus Aran, the only central Nintendo heroine to have a consistently linear (if staggered) time line, reveals exceptionally little about herself over the course of her ten various titles. But none of them have as little going for them, from a character standpoint, as Mario. He’s an Italian plumber that never does any plumbing, doubles in size when he eats fungus, likes stepping on turtles, and shoots fire out of his fingertips. He is absolutely surreal and, if you get right down to it, a bit creepy.

Yet he stands for something, clearly. He’s the flagship icon of the longest running and arguably most successful gaming company in the history of the business. And despite being cartoony and almost cuddly, even those gamers that consider themselves hardcore enjoy Mario games. And yet if you ask most of them about Mario, they’d probably tell you that they wish Nintendo would change things up a bit more and invent some new IPs instead of trying to bleed their old stanbys dry. Personally, I think the idea of Nintendo presenting a series of new IPs is an awful, awful idea.

For one thing, Nintendo doesn’t have a reputation for deep character analysis, so I don’t even know if they’d get it right. But to a much larger extent, Nintendo’s cast of characters serve as shorthand for the games they star in. I mean, it’d be one thing if every Mario game played out exactly the same. The same levels, the same control schemes, the same gameplay and so forth. Quite the contrary, Nintendo’s original games take familiar architecture and present it in new and different ways. Sometimes it works brilliantly, as in Mario 64. Other times, it isn’t quite as clever a game, as in Super Mario Sunshine. And while we’re on the subject, while I didn’t especially enjoy Super Mario Sunshine, I still contend that part of its mediocre score was because it had to live up to the mythos of Mario 64. Had Sunshine been an independent IP, it probably would have sold fewer copies, but gotten friendlier press.

Nintendo’s mascots set the “given” quantities for their games. You know Mario can jump and stop. You know Link will get a boomerang and a bow. You’re aware that Samus can roll into a ball. But every time they present these characters, things are different. The characters are baselines on which to expand. They are the control group in the game’s scope of experimentation. Nintendo isn’t pulling a Madden on us – releasing the same game over and over with miniscule variations to the gameplay. Rather they are using their mascots as a context for what sort of game people can expect.

And that is taken to a whole other level with the Mario characters, since they star in so many non-platforming games. They play sports and race buggies and engage in life-sized board games. Mario sports titles tend to be goofy and eccentric – not a genuine recreation of a sport but more of a caffeine fueled head butt to the sport they are playing. They are wild and absurd, while still retaining the core sports mechanics. Those of you who have played Strikers know exactly what I mean here. Or look at Mario Kart – in theory, it should be infinitely less popular than Nintendo’s other racing offering, F-Zero. And while the F-Zero series still has its fans (as it well should), you can’t argue with the phenominal success of Mario Kart.

So why does a game like Mario Kart work, even though the racers are all out of context and the premise is incredibly arbitrary? Well, for one thing, it’s no more arbitrary than an Italian plumber who stomps on evil mushrooms to save a princess from a fire breathing turtle. In many ways, simply the inclusion of the Mario IP frees Nintendo from the consistent burden of realism that so many games insist upon. But more than that, the game provides its players with so many known quantities and so many understood mechanics.

Gamers know that if they pick Bowser, they are going to be slow but strong. If they pick Toad, they will be light and agile. If they pick Mario, they will be well rounded. Gamers know what a koopa shell does, more or less. They’re aware that getting the star is something that they really want to do. Could Nintendo have invented a completely different racing game, with all new characters that no one had ever heard of before, instead of treading out their standard mascots to race go-karts? Absolutely. And once again, it was called F-Zero. Guess which series is the greater success.

What Nintendo is suggesting by re-using its mascots is that the window dressing is only that. It doesn’t really matter what your character looks like or what your objective is, as long as the gameplay is solid and engaging. Nintendo IPs exist as a sort of quality guarantee on a game. You see Mario on the cover, and you have some idea of what sort of game you are going to be playing. If the game stars a dude named Link, you’re aware of the sorts of adventure / puzzle elements you will come across. With very few exceptions, Nintendo has taken care of its stable of mascots and icons. Think about it. Which game would you be more likely to shell out $50 for: Super Mario Touchdown or Wacky Fun Time Football?

All of this brings me to Super Smash Brothers Brawl, a game that originally wasn’t going to star Nintendo’s mascots. The original idea was to create a different kind of fighting game, where health gauges weren’t the cut-and-dry indicator of victory or defeat. And, more specifically, to rework the Street Fighter II formula so that more than two people could play at once (since the N64 came with 4 controller ports). It wasn’t until well after the game was in development that the choice was made to have it star Nintendo’s established gaming characters. Some tellings of the story even suggest that because the game didn’t have any graphics worked up for it yet, Mario was used almost as a placeholder.

But once again, the inclusion of Nintendo character game Super Smash Brothers a baseline to work off of. People could pick up a controller and have some idea of what characters they were playing and how they could expect them to interact. And Nintendo routinely plays loose enough with its characters – especially in these non-canon style games – to make sure that the inclusion of their icons doesn’t get in the way of the fun of the game. I mean, let’s be honest. In a “fair” fight, Samus Aran would be able to splatter most of the other characters in SSB into smears on the floor in a matter of seconds. Hell, if the game were forced to stay true to the very loose storylines of its respective series, there’d be no reason to ever rescue Princess Peach again – she could just kick Bowser’s ass and be done with it. Instead, Nintendo has set up an interesting and damn near unique pseudo-world with Smash Brothers, where their established avatars retain their appearances, abilities and concepts, but those concepts are fitted around the greater architecture of their new game. It’s sort of like a great big Nintendo-fueled game of Rifts.

Nintendo’s original IPs will always have a place in the mainstream of gaming so long as Nintendo takes care of them, prevents them from being exploited for awful schlock, and consistently uses them to show us something new. One bad thing you can’t say about Super Mario Sunshine is that it was the same old Mario platforming game all over again. You may hate the look of Wind Waker and get bored by the constant sailing, but it was a radical departure from Ocarina of Time. Though perhaps no departure was more severe, more risky, or more well received than the Metroid Prime games. And it looks like there is, in fact, a new Kid Icarus title in the future (my money is on Factor 5 as the developer).

Long live Mario.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.