It all started innocently enough. Several years ago, this somewhat goofy-looking (by today's standards, at least) video game came out in the arcades. The basic premise of the game was this mustachioed plumber jumped over a bunch of stuff throwin in his general dircetion by a primate of unusual size who could certainly sleep anywhere he wanted to.
In an era when the general public thought that a yellow hockey-puckish thing running around a maze eating dots was a pretty swell idea, a seemingly mundane task such as jumping over barrels caught on pretty quickly. This rather humble coin-eater was titled "Donkey Kong," Nintendo's first foray into the video game market. Although few knew it at the time, both the gorilla and the plumber would eventually become superstars.
Mario, the plumber and nemesis of Donkey Kong (or was it the other way around?), got a brother (Named Luigi, so nobody would suspect that Mario wasn't Italian. At least this is my best guess. If anyone knows the real history behind this, drop me a line :-) The pair starred in another coin-eater which, for lack of a better name, was called Mario Bros. It sounds like the guy in charge of the name was kinda' lazy about the while thing, and didn't even feel like spelling it out.
In this heyday of 8-bit technology, a parent's main concern about their kids playing video games was that they were wasting their money. There was the Atari 2600, however, with what could be considered stunning graphics, sound and gameplay... in 1978.
Nintendo put out several games featuring these characters over the course of the next few years, including Donkey Kong Junior (which also featured Mario as the guy keeping Donkey Kong in a cage) and Donkey Kong 3 (which had some beekeeper named Stanley trying to prevent being flattened while controlling a swarm of angry bees.) After this point, Donkey Kong faded into a semblance of obscurity, until the S-NES revived his career, with the help of a whole bunch of 3-D rendered graphics to mask the platform paradigm behind the whole thing.
Mario's career, however, took off at this point. With another game called Super Mario Bros. (the naming of which must have been quite a burden to Nintendo's name guy.) This game bore little resemblance to the original Mario Bros. other than the turtles and pipes. SMB enjoyed some success in the video arcades, but would soon help ensure that McDonalds would never want for prospective employees.
Super Mario Bros. enjoyed it's day in the sun when Nintendo decided to put it directly into our homes. With the advent of the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (also known as "that stupid Nintendo" by parents,) the world was separated into two categories: those who could save the Princess, and those who couldn't.
Note: I am guilty myself of wasting many hours on the NES. My personal favorite on that system was always "Metroid", although I could never quite finish it. The only reason I stopped playing Nintendo was when I got my first PC about 5 years ago.
Then came Super Mario Bros. 2 (which continues to milk this overused moniker for all it's worth,) which, after playing it enough, could be beaten with over 35 lives left over. After that came Super Mario Bros. 3 (do you think there's some sort of pattern involved here?), which could also be beaten with a tidy little number of lives left over.
Then, just about the time that computers were starting to move into the 32-bit world in earnest, the Super NES came out, bringing 16-bit brain-rotting technology into our living rooms. The flagship game for the S-NES featured, of course, Mario. This time, Nintendo must have hired a new person to name their games, since the new one was called Super Mario World! Now Mario got a few new friends, including a minatuarized dinosaur with a tongue possibly stolen from a frog.
If anyone out there is still awake at this point, I'll try to cut to the chase. Now that Nintendo has released the next generation of home video game systems. We await with trepidation for the privilege to fork out $200 to buy one of the things to further the brain-rot caused by the previous generation of said systems.
The technology behind these machines, however, is rather impressive. Where Sega and Sony each recently released their 32-bit game systems (the Saturn and PlayStation, respectively), Nintendo decided to pull out the stops and go for a full 64 bits. On paper, it seems that the technology behind one of these machines would blow our PC's out of the water. Don't throw out your PC for a N64 just yet... One point to consider is although the machine runs in 64 bits, all it has to deal with is input from a controller and output graphics and sound to a low-res TV screen and speaker. Trying to get it to do much more is a tall order.
Also, where the competitors have switched to CD-ROMs to distribute their games, Nintendo opts for the more pricey and older cartrige-based paradigm. They claim that this will reduce access times and make for faster games. With the speeds of CD-ROMs today, this becomes less and less relevant with each passing generation. We have only to wonder how fast CD-ROMs can get before the centrifugal forces exerted on the disks cause them to shatter, sending shrapnel into our bodies, expensive hard drives (if such a thing exists anymore) and other components. I could imagine us when we're all old geezers showing off our old CD-ROM injuries.
As for the N64, So far I haven't had a chance to try one, so I can't say much of the playability of the machine, but all I can say is that on screen, it appears to be Mario in full 3-D glory... Now if only they could come up with a new plot to go with all of that new technology...