A
paragraph from Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton, describing how he spent his
time confined in hiding, trying not to be murdered, has gone viral on video game related websites:
"Marianne came around and scolded him for playing video games. Thanks to Zafar, he had grown fond of Mario the plumber and his brother Luigi and sometimes Super Mario World felt like a happy alternative to the one he lived in the rest of the time. 'Read a good book,' his wife told him scornfully. 'Give it up.' He lost his temper. 'Don't tell me how to live my life,' he exploded, and she made a grand exit."
…
"Alone at
Hermitage Lane he reached the end of his Super Mario game, defeating the big
bad Bowser himself and rescuing the insufferably pink Princess Toadstool. He
was glad Marianne was not there to witness his triumph."
Rushdie’s
children’s novels, Haroon and the Sea of Stories and especially, Luka and the
Fire of Life (involving 999 lives, stages of increasing difficulty and punching
a golden ball to save progress) have been compared by many critics to
Nintendo’s Mario.
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| Salman Rushdie's work shows influences of Mario. |
***
In
1960, Mark McCormack achieved what he describes as (in his book What they
don’t teach you at Harvard Business School) winning the lottery three times
over. His first client, as a sports manager, was Arnold Palmer. The next two to
sign on were Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player. At the time, they were promising
but unproven early career pros. There was simply no way to predict that all
three would go on to become legends of the game. There’s another man who can
claim to have achieved something similarly singular, albeit in a slightly
different context.
Shigeru
Miyamoto.
Jeff
Ryan, author of Super Mario: How Nintendo conquered America, describes
Miyamoto:
“He
was raised on puppets and manga and baseball in the Kyoto suburb of Sonobo, and
was much more into music (he loved the Beatles and Bluegrass) than electronics.
While he preferred his left hand, Shigeru was cross-dominant, which put him in
the rarefied company of some of the worlds’ great thinkers: Nikola Tesla,
Albert Einstein, Ben Franklin, Michelangelo, Ludwig van Beethoven, Leonardo da
Vinci, and Mohandas Gandhi.
[Ed: You can add Sachin Tendulkar to this list]
Despite
all the potential, Miyamoto took five years to get his four-year engineering
degree. His father had to get him the job with Nintendo, helping design toys
and sometimes painting the cabinets. He hadn’t even been interested in video
games…”
We
should keep in mind that dropping a year at college is the literal Japanese
version of dropping out of university. So Miyamoto, the dopey kid with a wild
hair-style found himself assisting a sad-faced wise engineer named Gunpei Yokoi
at Nintendo.
Nintendo
at some point had tried to market Popeye branded ramen and had rights to the
franchise in Japan. Yokoi, who in characteristic Asian fashion preferred clever
games based on basic reliable technology rather than the norm of the industry: stupefying users with cutting edge shenanigans. Yokoi had designed a set of
handheld pocket calculator like game devices called the Game&Watch series
(that would eventually evolve into the Gameboy). A brief from Hiroshi Yamauchi,
to design an arcade machine for the USA, landed on Yokoi and Miyamoto’s desks.
Nintendo was going to take on Atari in its home-market.
Originally
conceptualised by the cartoonist, E.C Segar, almost every Popeye episode that
Fleischer Studios animated concerns rescuing Olive Oyl from the brutish Bluto,
usually with the aid of tinned spinach. These films were broadcast as
part of American war propaganda in theatres and were hugely well known and
popular even in territories under occupation. While a game for Game&Watch
based around Popeye already existed in Japan but it could not be branded as
such in the USA. It would take years and cost millions to land the rights and
this did not sit well with master strategy sensei Yamauchi. Popeye, Bluto and
Olive Oyl would need to be abstracted. As events would show, this kid Miyamoto
had somewhat of an expanded capability for discovering abstract commonality
between disparate things.
Miyamoto,
who liked games named after their villains, surmised that King Kong, who was
afflicted by a need to carry blonde damsels upwards, was remarkably similar in
disposition to both Bluto and the stubborn common donkey. His first arcade game,
thus, was Donkey Kong. Miyamoto’s second game would star Popeye but as the
‘Jumpman’ avatar of the Donkey Kong game. Mario’s roots in Popeye are evident:
eat to gain super powers and rescue the Princess. For visibility Jumpman was
given a moustache and overalls and from this a name and a profession. Mario the
Plumber. Both Bluto and Popeye had inspired Miyamoto and received characters in
memorial, but what of the spindly beauty: Olive Oyl?
Writes
our expert, Jeff Ryan, “And since Nintendo’s two biggest franchises were named
after the hero and villain of a love triangle, why not name this one after the
captured heroine? There was an American name he had come across, reading about
F. Scott Fitzgerald: Zelda. Sounded like a princess. And keeping with the triangle
theme, he’d make the MacGuffin device a mystical triangle called the Triforce.”
So
like McCormack, Miyamoto had three winners in his stable: Donkey Kong, Mario
and Zelda. They were all powered by the Triforce, the love triangle, that has
inspired authors from Valmiki, Shakespeare, E.C. Segar to Scott Fitzgerald
right down to Miyamoto himself.
***
One
novelist who credits his career with being inspired by Scott Fitzgerald is
Haruki Murakami. A New Yorker piece by Roland Kelts elucidates Japan’s relationship
to American literature according to translator, scholar and professor at Tokyo
University, Motoyuki Shibata:
“American literature arrived in
nineteenth-century Japan on the heels of its military—forcing open an isolated
nation with modern ideas and technology. Early translators and readers, Shibata
said, approached life and literature with a rigid racial hierarchy, with the
Caucasians at the top, the Japanese in the middle, and the remaining
ethnicities and colors at the bottom. Anything written by whites from the West
was deemed inherently superior, just because Japanese looked up to them [...]
Brautigan and Vonnegut are far more
famous and well-read in Japan today than American stalwarts like John Updike,
Philip Roth, and Toni Morrison. Readers are more likely to buy books based on
entertaining storytelling and plots, the quality and sound of the Japanese
prose, and the reputation of the translator. “I sometimes don’t think I
understand American readers,” Murakami told me in Boston several years ago when
trying to parse why a novel that he loved, Tim O’Brien’s “The Nuclear Age,” was
widely panned in the States. “I sometimes think they’re missing something.”
Due
to Baz Luhurmann’s adaptation of the Great Gatsby starring Leonardo DiCaprio,
the novel is enjoying an interest that it never has before. Even though its been critically acclaimed, the following Facebook thread shows what happens when people are forced to read:
The Great Gatsby, interestingly, has always had a cult following. It shapes culture in ways that are hard to see until you read it. Its like discovering a secret society that has littered the urban scape with its graffiti. As its popularity in Japan shows, even in spurious translation.
The Great Gatsby, interestingly, has always had a cult following. It shapes culture in ways that are hard to see until you read it. Its like discovering a secret society that has littered the urban scape with its graffiti. As its popularity in Japan shows, even in spurious translation.
I
had assumed that it was Haruki Murakami’s translation that inspired Miyamoto
but this is not true. Murakami’s translation is preceded by the Zelda video
game series by decades. Miyamoto either read another translation (the kind that
Murakami complains is unfaithful to the original) or a biography of Fitzgerald
in Japanese that described the story of The
Great Gatsby. Either way, it was powerful enough for Fitzgerald’s wife to
be immortalized as a Nintendo princess. The simple truth is that while critics
may try and lock away the objects of their study but the advice from a father
about the nature of the rich, the appeal of shimmering lights, a voice made of
pure money, parties in a grand giant mansion, automobile accidents and people
forever rowing in currents, is for everyone to touch, experience and yes, adapt to personal uses.
A
few days ago, John Lanchester (the author of Capital) gave a talk as
part of a series of lectures On Influence curated by Andrew O’Hagan at
King’s College London. The audience ranged from people who had no experience of
playing video games to those that designed and coded them. At one point,
Lanchester asked if anyone knew what Pong was and very few did, including the
young engineers. It was a discussion mainly on the story telling experience of
the two modes (with a comparison of gaming to golf; well spotted Mr. Lanchester). Afterwards, I asked the critic why he thought people looked down on
things like fantasy fiction or video games. ‘It’s something deep in the literary
culture,’ he told me.
How
deep are the apparatuses of semantics (defined as rooted in the Greek semantikos
and understood to be the processes to get people to believe and do things)- the
collective sub-conscious- that influences us all?
Hard
to say, but look at Salman Rushdie’s Twitter biography:
References:
Kelts, Roland. (2013) 'Lost in Translation'. The New Yorker.
Ryan.
Jeff. (2011) Super Mario: How Nintendo
Conquered America.
Portfolio/Penguin:USA.
Rushdie,
Salman. (2012). Joseph Anton: A memoir. Random House: USA.
McCormack,
Mark. (1984). What they Don't Teach you at Harvard Business School. Bantam: USA.
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