...and then came “Yoshi’s Island.”
The game that was initially advertised as “Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island” is today remembered as one of Miyamoto’s masterworks—a triumph on every level of game design. The history of its production is legend: taken aback by a Nintendo boss’s suggestion that he make the game’s appearance less “cartoony” and more like “Donkey Kong Country” (a spin-off series that used pre-rendered 3D images as sprites to try and match the graphical power of the emerging CD-based consoles), Miyamoto doubled-down and ordered that the games visuals be tweaked to resemble children’s crayon drawings. The result: a mega-selling, award-winning classic and a stern reminder to Nintendo not to question their Golden Boy.
While it was a game I loved then and adore today, at the time it was the Mario game that, well... that sort of “broke my brain” just a bit, and served as an early signal that my relationship with Mario and his world was fundamentally changing whether I wanted it to or not.
Like SMRPG, “Yoshi’s Island” offered the tantalizing prospect of a more narrative-oriented Mario adventure and the irresistible idea of finally setting up a Super Mario Bros continuity. The game was a prequel, set long before the events of even Donkey Kong (presumably), wherein the wizard caretaker of a still-infant Baby Bowser foresees the coming of the Mario Bros and schemes to kidnap them as babies (from The Stork, since this is a Mario game) to change history. Things go wrong, and Baby Mario winds up in the care of Yoshi (whoa! They’d actually met before!!??) on a quest to rescue his brother.
The idea of seeing Mario’s “origin story” had me playing through this game like a man possessed, even though by that point a teenaged social-life was leaving less and less time for gaming. I knew the end, I figured: Mario and Luigi would find their way back to Brooklyn. Along with seeing their Earth Realm digs visualized for the first time in a game, I was intrigued to see if any indications would be made about how and why they found their way back to Mushroom Kingdom years later. The possibilities!
And so, after a climactic battle against a towering, Godzilla-sized Bowser (another image I’d always wanted to see!), I settled in to watch as the games’ ending credits played out over an animation of The Stork flying Baby Mario and Luigi back home. Any moment now, I just knew, I’d see a 16-bit New York skyline come into view... but, instead, the closing text and final image tell a different story, as the Bros. are delivered to “...Where Mom and Dad live...”
“...THE MUSHROOM KINGDOM!”
...What?!
Mario and Luigi were born in the Mushroom Kingdom? That doesn’t make any sense! How’d they grow up in Brooklyn, then? Were they sent there at some point, like Superman, unaware of their real origins? And how were they Italian-Americans if they came from a world with no Italy and no America? Oooh! Maybe that’ll be the plot of the next game! Maybe...
I didn’t have a “breakdown” or anything. It’s not as though I was knocked into some kind of system-shock over this. But the dissonance stuck with me for a while. By now I had more important things to worry about in school and life to be completely consumed by this. College-prep classes, girls, sex, drugs and social-hierarchy were giving me my headaches—high school, after all. If I’d learned to keep my Nintendo worship (relatively) in check in the “Sega is cooler!” days, I could hold it back for the age of “everything but Playstation is for kids!”
Mario games had been “my thing,” my refuge from everything else when I needed them. Now that refuge was tinged—ever so slightly—with doubt. It wasn’t that “not from Brooklyn” changed anything fundamental, but it felt so... “cavalier.” That it wasn’t presented as a surprise drove home the reminder that most of what Generation NES considered “canon” for its games was often just hastily-composed faux-mythos for U.S. ad copy; and part of the story I’d been “devoted” to might’ve just been a narrative placeholder for Nintendo.
There’s a moment—vitally important in the development of any geek,
nerd or whatever else you want to call it—when it finally sinks in all the way
that the people creating whatever character or property you’ve let colonize
a part of your imagination just aren’t as “devoted” to it as you are – that, to
them, it’s a job. For me, this was it. How much sense did it make to be trying
to work out the bigger relationships between the characters and the broader
scope of their world? What was the point of keeping meticulous mental (and,
yes, also physical) lists and chronologies of Mario’s friends, enemies, worlds,
abilities, all that? What did it matter if I could point out, on a moment’s notice,
that Nokobons (exploding-shell Troopas) were only found in Sarasaland and
only in one game? Why should I put so much of myself into this… when
Mario’s masters couldn’t even keep his origins straight?
It all happened so gradually (and in the background of so many bigger
things) that it didn’t register until much later, but this was probably a turning
point for me as much as it was for Mario. Young adulthood now coming into
full effect. It was the best possible time to free up some mental space now
that school and life-choices were going to start counting for something. I had
college to get ready for, and a career path to start actually charting. (I’d long
since transitioned from filmmaking to game-designing as a dream trajectory.)
It was time to move on—if only a bit—from Mario and Nintendo…
…just not all at once.
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