Free Super Mario by Jeff Ryan

penetration.
    Then the Famicons started to break. Computers were indeed difficult to make: one little mistake on one little chip could cause players’ games to freeze or crash midsession. Reports trickled in of this happening with multiple consoles all over Japan. The batch of chips used in production, it turned out, was shoddy. Nintendo had put out a product with a bad component. When retailers found out, they would pull the Famicon off their shelves.
    Nintendo had never made bad products, and it wasn’t going to start now. In a move that echoed Tylenol’s voluntary recall after a tampering scare, Yamauchi ordered a product recall of every single Famicon, even those without the bad component. Those who had bought one could send it in and have it repaired free of charge. Nintendo would rip out the entire motherboard, not just the bad chip, and replace the whole system. Yamauchi knew Nintendo had the money to essentially rebuild each Famicon manufactured or sold. The question was whether anyone would buy them, or let them back on shelves, once the recall was completed. Recalls done wrong tainted the brand forever. Done right, though, they could be a blessing in disguise.
    Erring on the side of caution paid off. Japanese retailers liked that one high-tech company finally took responsibility for its errors and fixed them for free. (Nintendo continues to do so today, to the point of reapplying kids’ stickers onto a new console if the old one has to be replaced instead of repaired.) Sales were great for the rest of 1983: Nintendo moved half a million consoles, and Sharp started production of a TV set with a built-in Famicon. And as those new games from Miyamoto came out, the Famicon became Japan’s biggest-selling game console, selling three million consoles by 1984. Yamauchi even found a cheap way to drum up new arcade games: convert existing Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. cabinets to Nintendo Vs. machines, which played a series of beefed-up Famicon titles. Replacing it with new games would be as easy as restocking a vending machine. The same idea was reused for the Play Choice arcade games.
    Miyamoto wasn’t the only producer generating new games for the nascent Famicon. Yamauchi ran his R&D team with three divisions, run by three daimyos. (Daimyos were the medieval lords of Japan, all powerful save for the kingly shogun. Yamauchi, of course, was the shogun in this metaphor.) All could design games, hardware, accessories, whatever they wanted. Gunpei Yokoi was head of one of these three divisions now. Masayuki Uemura, who designed the Famicon, headed the second. Genyo Takeda, who would come up with the battery-save feature for the NES, headed up the third. All three of Nintendo’s daimyos had expertise in hardware, not software.
    In 1984, Miyamoto was given the honor of heading up a new fourth division. As a daimyo, his job was to rally his people to produce the most value, and the best advancement, to please the shogun—er, the president. Yamauchi-sama (no mere Yamauchi-san for him) was happy to play the role of judge; no game went forward without his express permission. He had a sixth sense for knowing what would sell well in which markets. Amazingly, he did this without ever playing a game, instead just watching a scant minute or two of game play. It’s wildly out of character for both Yamauchi and his company, but the image of a drug lord refusing to sniff his own product does come to mind.
    One of Miyamoto’s “rival” R&D divisions decided to make a game called Wrecking Crew , and Miyamoto “lent” them Mario and Luigi to star in it. The brothers play demolition workers taking down a hundred levels of concrete and brick, which much be taken out in the correct order. To keep the cerebral nature of the game, Mario and Luigi can’t jump. Mario received a makeover for the role: he gained a hard hat, switched to an all-red sleeveless ensemble instead of overalls, and trimmed his mustache to look like Tom