The story of Mario: Part 2

By the close of the decade, technology was moving on apace. Mobile phones had become almost light enough to carry with one hand, and Nintendo weren't about to get left behind in the shift towards portability. The Game Boy was yet another attempt to alienate the female consumers that Yamauchi considered fundamentally inferior, but his plan backfired spectacularly thanks to Tetris, a Russian puzzle game whose appeal transcended gender boundaries. He was so cross that he stopped Miyamoto's pocket money and handed control of the Game Boy Mario titles to his colleague Gunpei Yokoi instead. Super Mario Land and Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins were the results: monochrome variations on the successful NES theme. Miyamoto sulked in his garden shed.

However, he was given another chance to prove himself a man when Nintendo's new home console, the Super Famicom (or Super NES) arrived on the scene. Boasting a sixteen-bit processor, mode-7 graphics and a palette of (wowee!) 32,000 colours, the SNES wasn't shy about flexing its impressive array of meaningless-to-non-computer-scientists numbers. "The plebs want another Mario game," decreed Yamauchi. "Make it happen, and don't skimp on the colours. I will personally check to make sure that you have used every single one.

"I abhor waste!" he added, before devouring the contents of a nearby flower pot.

Still smarting over his Game Boy rejection, Miyamoto reasoned that if his rival Yokoi could only give Mario a 'land', he could provide him with a whole WORLD. Thus were the seeds for the seminal Super Mario World sown. As per his instructions, Miyamoto crammed every screen with colour until the game had reached Munchkin Land levels of gaudiness. Mario could once again take to the skies above these psychedelic landscapes, but this time the raccoon hide was thrown out in favour of a much more sensible superhero-style cape. Other innovations included rideable elastic-tongued dino-dragon Yoshi, and a multitude of molar-erodingly obscure secret exits. It was great.

This screen from Super Mario World shows off the SNES's 814 shades of grey.

Not long after this riot of colourful platforming, Mario began to demonstrate that he had skills in areas beyond jumping really high and fiddling with boilers. One of the first examples was Super Mario Kart, which used the SNES's swizzy Mode-7 graphics to create a mind-boggling impression of perspective on its racetracks. The game was so influential that many teenage players were disappointed to discover upon taking driving lessons that real cars were not equipped with a 'hop and skid' powerslide function. Bah.

By this time, Mario was a phenomenon, and no medium was safe from his seeping influence. He'd already enjoyed his own cartoon series and inspired chart-troubling disco ditties, but Yamauchi wanted more. Hollywood beckoned.

Of course, when the idea of a Mario Bros. film was floated, Miyamoto immediately knew the men who'd be perfect for the roles. He looked up the Chuckle Brothers in his student address book, but when he dialled the number he was surprised to find himself being put through to a showbiz agent. It seemed that since he had seen them last, Paul and Barry had become very successful celebrities in the UK. "I'm very sorry, Mr. Miyamoto," said their agent, "but the boys can't be in your film; they're already booked for Puss in Boots at the Torquay Hippodrome.

"Let me see if there's anybody else on my books who might be available," the man continued. "Ah, yes; how about Bob Hoskins?"

"Bob Hoskins?" asked Miyamoto, confused.

"Yes, you know Bob: he played a booze-sodden dick in that popular film with the two-dimensional Looney Tunes characters and that rabbitty bird with the massive hooters. Y'know... The Long Good Friday."

Miyamoto agreed to his suggestion, and the Super Mario Bros. movie went into production. Hoskins later generously described it as "the worst thing I've ever done," and a "f**king nightmare." Cinema audiences concurred.

Yamauchi was even more enraged than usual. He was so furious that he was beginning to have difficulty appreciating that Mario was a fictional character. "That tubby plunger-merchant is a laughing stock!" he bawled. "We must punish him for besmirching Nintendo's proud reputation in this way."

And so, through no fault of his own, poor old Mario found himself relegated to a supporting role in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. In fact, he was reduced to a helpless mewling nappy-clad infant, sitting astride a succession of lick-happy dragons and occasionally drifting off in a bubble. "Hahaaha!" cackled Yamauchi, whilst throttling a puppy. "That will teach him a lesson in respect!" However, his mirth was interrupted by the poor sales figures: Yoshi's Island was released in 1995, by which time the fickle public had tossed their Super Famicoms on the bonfire to make room for for the next generation of hardware. "Blast!" cursed the Nintendo president, hurling his secretary through a fifteenth-story window.

It was a similar story with Super Mario RPG, a game which cast Mario in a Dungeons and Dragons-style, politely-take-turns-to-hit-each-other adventure. The game didn't sell enough copies in Japan and the States to make it worth releasing in the backwaters of Europe, and its developer, a company called Squaresoft, flounced off in a huff to produce mega-hit Final Fantasy games for Sony.

The technological goalposts were moving once again, and this time the shift was not in Nintendo's favour. "We must build the most powerful machine known to man!" decided Yamauchi. As usual, he sent a team of computer-literate slaves into the bowels of the Nintendo development dungeon. Two years later, the emaciated survivors emerged with the ultra-advanced Nintendo 64 console. By this point, however, everybody had got bored of waiting and bought a Playstation instead. "Balls!" muttered Yamauchi.

Fortunately, Miyamoto had also been busy during this time. Using a combination of geometry and voodoo, he had devised a method of producing seemingly three-dimensional spaces on a two-dimensional television screen, and not surprisingly, Mario was one of the first intrepid explorers of this brave new world. In Super Mario 64, the dungareed do-gooder cast off the shackles of flatness and cartwheeled, long-jumped and backflipped into gamers' affections once more. He was even given a voice for the first time, although his verbal outbursts were limited to such nuggets as "ha-ha!", "waa-hoo!", "it's-a me!", "let's-a go!" and mumbling soporifically about spaghetti. The Italian nation had finally found a representative to be proud of.

I saw Mario 64 for the first time on CITV's long-defunct videogames show, Bad Influence! It was, and still is, easily the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me.

In their excitement about Mario 64, however, Nintendo had forgotten to make any other games for their new console (except for an esoteric jet-ski racing title), and consequently nobody wanted to buy one. Not even the release of Mario Kart 64 some months later could persuade skinflint punters to part with their cash, even with the promise of red-hot four-way multiplayer action. Mario was starting to look a bit bland compared to his arch-nemesis, Wario, who was prone to uttering lovably complacent catchphrases along the lines of, "I'm-a Wario: I'm-a gonna weeen!" It was time for our hero to reassert himself: Mario was going to throw a party.

For those people that bought videogame consoles to escape the spirit-sapping tedium of board games, Mario Party came as something of an unpleasant surprise. It faithfully recreated the dice-rolling and interminable waiting involved in traditional tabletop games, but spiced matters up somewhat with the introduction of flesh-lacerating 'minigames'. The whole process was entirely arbitrary, and the sanitised, Disneyfied niceness of it all was almost as conducive to vomiting as imbibing sixteen mugs of dubious unlabelled 'punch' at a freshers' week house party. Despite this, Mario keeps coming back for more: at last count, he was hosting the eighth instalment in the series.

In his spare time, Mario also took up golf, tennis and football in a series of sports-themed N64 games. It wasn't until late in the console's life that he returned to adventuring in Paper Mario, a cheekily self-referential role-playing game featuring wafer-thin character models. As with Super Mario RPG, nobody bought it: they were too busy snuggling up to their spanking new Playstation 2s.

This time, Nintendo were up to the challenge. "Behold the Nintendo Gamecube!" commanded Yamauchi at the American press-conference launch. "It is small and square and purple. You buy it, now!"

The assembled journalists began to file out, muttering that it looked "a bit gay".

"Wait!" cried el presidente. "We have a new Mario game. You morons love Mario, right?"

"Whoop!" whooped the crowd, turning back to the stage.

Miyamoto emerged. "This is Super Mario Sunshine! It's Mario, but this time he's on holiday on a tropical archipelago, and he's cleaning up gunky mess with his squirty backpack!"

The crowd looked confused. "What?" ventured a man in the second row.

"It's a right-on environmentalist theme, you guys!" Miyamoto explained. "It will teach selfish children that they must take care of the planet, or else they will be eaten by gigantic sludge monsters!"

Mario vs. disgusting effluence beast, Christmas 2002.

By the time he had finished his sentence, the American hacks had scarpered out of the hall and were screeching out of the car park in their SUVs. Nevertheless, Super Mario Sunshine proved popular, and was bought by ninety per cent of Gamecube owners (roughly 258 people). In their hearts, though, they knew it wasn't right for Mario to be sunning himself in the tropics, hosing raw sewage off the streets. They yearned for a return to the old days, which was handy, since Super Mario World had just been cynically re-released on the Game Boy Advance for £30.

Miyamoto was still convinced that the environmentally-aware approach was a good one, as evidenced by the enthusiastically over-punctuated Mario Kart: Double Dash!! This time, racers embraced the laudable notion of car-sharing, piling two characters into a vehicle to cut down on carbon emissions. Meanwhile, Mario Kart: Super Circuit on the Game Boy Advance advocated recycling by including all the tracks from the original SNES version. Nintendo was doing its bit for climate change.

Elsewhere on the GBA, the Mario brothers were putting aside their fraternal disputes and teaming up for Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. It was a tongue-in-cheek role-playing game in the same vein as the N64's Paper Mario, crammed with in-jokes about previous Mario games. One particularly memorable character - I forget her name - spoke in a badly-translated-from-Japanese dialect, like people used to do in computer games in the '80s. "I have fury!" she exclaimed, causing irony-compliant videogame writers the world over to fall about in paroxysms of delight. The actual game was quite good, too, and sold enough copies to prevent Yamauchi from burning its programmers at the stake.

Miyamoto realised that the time was right for a resurrection of the Paper Mario series, this time on Gamecube. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door was packed with clever origami antics, like folding Mario into a paper aeroplane and tearing off pieces of scenery to discover secret routes. Mario also had to put up with a bunch of whining two-bit sidekicks tagging along, including a blustery, busty operatic cloud-woman and a seafaring anthropomorphised bomb whose primary means of attack was to detonate himself in foes' faces. Was this seemingly innocent adventure in fact a subversive commentary on the War on Terror? Er, probably not.

Around this time, Yamauchi stepped down as president of Nintendo. In tribute, Mario was given his own version of Dance Dance Revolution, where players were provided with an electronic mat and encouraged to gyrate along to 'classic' Mario music and bona fide classical music. "Dancing is for sissy ladies!" spat Yamauchi, but nobody could hear him in his hermetically-sealed, radiation-proof retirement bunker, miles beneath the Earth's surface.

Nintendo might have lost their esteemed president, but they soon gained a powerful ally in the form of sonorous frizzy-wigged Angry Kid-doppelganger, Reggie Fils-Aime. "I'm about taking names," he boomed; "I'm about kicking ass!" His first act of foot/ass interfacing was the launch of the Nintendo DS, a double-screened, touch-sensitive, gender-neutral handheld successor to the Game Boy. Sony sneered at this gimmickry, confident that their sleek Playstation Portable console would wipe the floor with Nintendo's feeble effort. Soon, however, Sony's buttocks were smarting from the boot of Reggie, and the DS was flying out of the shops, along with its new, ruinously fiddly version of Mario 64.

Reggie and Angry Kid. They must be cousins, at least.

Before long, the DS had its own new Super Mario Bros. game called, um, New Super Mario Bros. It marked the return of the series to two-dimensional side-scrolling platforming, and reminded everyone who wasn't disgustingly young of how much they loved the old NES Mario games. Again, this was lucky, since Nintendo were soon to announce an online service where retro titles could be downloaded, for a (very reasonable) price.

The service in question was an integral part of their exciting new Wii console. Inspired by Reggie's wild on-stage gesticulation, Nintendo's designers realised that conventional control pads were yesterday's news. In their place came a remote control-style handset that could sense motion in all directions. Suddenly, people who had previously considered computer games beneath them wanted a piece of the Nintendo action, and the Wii became the must-have gadget for iPod-wielding executive yuppies the world over.

Mario quickly made his presence felt. As well as his downloadable retro outings, he starred as a hyperactive football chump in online multiplayer cheat-a-thon, Mario Strikers Charged, and reprised his role as dangerously skinny explorer in the whimsical dimension-flipping escapade, Super Paper Mario.

What everybody really wanted, though, was a proper follow-up to Mario 64. After the tropical stylings of Mario Sunshine, fans demanded a return to the more abstract design of previous instalments. It was time for another press conference.

"Ladies and gentlemen," bellowed Reggie (by this point, Nintendo's marketing strategy was sufficiently inclusive to allow female journalists to participate); "do you like Mario?"

"Woo-yeah!" yee-hawed the slavering press-packers.

"Do you like adventures set in outer space, for example Star Wars and Babylon 5?"

"You're darn tootin' we do!" responded the frenzied crowd.

"Then, my friends, I give you... Super Mario Galaxy!"

Everybody in the audience passed out in a communal fit of hysterical euphoria. Once they'd been revived and heavily sedated, they were allowed to watch videos of the new game. It was amazing: Mario hopped from planet to planet, encountering all his old friends and enemies and toying playfully with the universe's most mysterious force: gravity. Nintendo's mascot had broken through the final frontier and silenced the petty griping of the loyal gamers who loved him most. For about a week, anyway.

Yes, yes; very clever. But where does gravity come from, exactly?

From his humble beginnings as an ape-wrestling Chuckle brother twenty-six years ago, Mario has transcended his mildly offensive Italian stereotyping to become an international icon. Whenever trouble has reared its ugly head, Mario has been there to jump up and down on it, shouting "waa-hoo!" In these dark times, it is often said, we need heroes more than ever; what better hero could civilisation ask for than this intrepid and adaptable handyman?

Mario, we salute you.

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[Thanks to Eurogamer and Wikipedia for their help with the occasional facts to be found in this article, along with all the all the other websites that I've pilfered pictures from. Credit is also due to NGamer/NGC/N64 Magazine for the 'Yamauchi is a psychotic maniac' idea and the provision of general Nintendo-related knowledge over the last ten years. There goes my carefully cultivated aura of cool...]