Miyamato Magic
By: Steve Dixon
Shigeru Miyamoto. Two words that cause every
serious gamer to salute.
First it was Donkey Kong, then it was Super Mario Brothers, and
since
then, he has created at least 30 more hits. Among them, Star Fox,
Mario
Kart, Super Mario 2-3-World-RPG-64, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's
Island,
Wave Race 64, F-Zero, F-Zero 2 (sadly never released in the
U.S.),
F-Zero X, Pilotwings, Star Fox 64, Mario Kart 64 and Pilotwings
64,
all of which continued their respective series over to a new
system.
But the most notable game he ever developed was The Legend of
Zelda.
An experiment to see if you could create an entire game based in
one
room, Zelda wasn't much. A nice graphics engine and decent
control
were the games biggest sellers. Nobody really cared much for the
game
at first, but then, something clicked. People began to become
addicted,
always wanting to beat one more boss, find one more key, solve
one more
puzzle. Then, once they had found all the items, solved all the
puzzles,
beaten all the bosses, and retrieved all the pieces of Triforce,
Zelda
kindly asks them to try another quest, this time with harder
puzzles,
more enemies, and even cooler bosses. Who could resist a
challenge like
that? Last summer, Nintendo Power deemed it the 11th greatest
game of
all time, this is out of a field of over 1700 games available for
Nintendo systems, and people were upset over it! All of my
friends
said it should have gotten at least second. That would have been
impossible, though, because that spot was occupied by Zelda: A
Link to
the Past! In the #12 spot, the fourth game in the series, Link's
Awakening.
In the #36 spot, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. The eight games
in the series have sold a total of 13,000,000 units. That stat
includes
The Wand of Gamelon, The Faces of Evil, and another game, the
title of
which I have not found. Those three games were released for the
Phillips
CD-I, due to an agreement with Nintendo gone bad. Nintendo had
proposed
a CD add-on for the SNES, and Phillips and Sony both developed
systems.
Nintendo signed a deal with Phillips, leaving a bad taste in
Sony's
mouth. Nintendo later decided not to create the CD add on, but a
line
in the Phillips-Nintendo contract gave Phillips a loophole to
make games
starring Nintendo characters. They did just that, making three
Zelda games,
as well as a Mario game, for their new system, the CD-I. At the
same time,
Sony, who Nintendo had turned their back on, started developing a
system
of their own. Based on the SNES-CD design, their new system,
under the
working title "PSX" would almost destroy Nintendo a
couple years later.
Nintendo's Project:Reality, the code name for the Nintendo Ultra
64,
was just getting under way when Sony released the Playstation. 32
bit
graphics, CD quality sound, and unparalleled speed left the SNES
gasping for breath. Nintendo's dynasty was beginning to crumble.
Nintendo
was already taking heat from the powerful - not to mention
established -
Genesis, and the last thing the needed was a new system, much
less a far
more powerful system, taking away more sales. But after numerous
delays
and countless setbacks, the N64 was released. By this time, there
were
already 5 million Playstation in households around the U.S. Mario
64,
Wave Race, Star Fox and Mario Kart got gamer's attention, but
Sony
already had the upper hand. They needed something big. Something
really
big. Enter Miyamoto. Nov. 23, 1998. Nintendo drops a gold colored
bombshell
on Sony. Zelda 64. A new game with state of the art graphics, a
beautiful
soundtrack, flawless play control, and more of the adventure gamers
had
craved since the last new Zelda was released in 1993. The game
pre-sold
over 500,000 copies, including 100,000 the last week of
pre-ordering.
Nintendo's web page, Zelda64.com, is getting over 5000 hits a
day, from
players all over the world who managed to set down the controller
long
enough to connect. Zelda action figures are almost as popular as
that
Furby fellow, and more products are bound to come. As characters
such
as Lara Croft, Crash Bandicoot, Sonic the Hedgehog all center
around
what's happening in Pop-Culture, it's nice to know that there is
still
room for, as Nintendo once put it, A little short green guy with
a sword.
