More on Tokuma’s Mario Guide

Back on Monday I talked a bit about Tokuma Shoten’s Super Mario Bros. strategy guide, the one that sold 630,000 copies in 1985 (1.3 million overall, in the end) and became the bestselling book in Japan for two years straight. What I failed to mention — because I completely forgot — is that you can read the guide today even if you don’t know Japanese, because Nintendo of America translated it verbatim into English and sold it via the Fun Club News and early issues of Nintendo Power under the name How to win at Super Mario Bros. (This book was never sold outside of mail order and is now extremely uncommon, but .cbz scans are available on the net thanks to Retromags.)

The book was entirely written and designed in house by the editors of Tokuma’s Family Computer Magazine in Japan. The first half of the book was largely recycled from coverage originally printed in the November 1985 issue of the mag, while the writing and screenshot-snapping for World 5-1 through 8-4 was handled by Naoto Yamamoto, who was a part-time writer that mostly worked for Technopolis, Tokuma’s computer hobby mag, at the time.

Here’s a word or two on the ’80s Japan game-mag scene from Yamamoto, courtesy of his weblog:

“We had planned to launch the guide in Japan with a run of 130,000 copies, but we already had plans for subsequent printings before the book was even released. Tokuma Shoten at the time held itself up to a very refined and literary image as a publisher, so it often divided up publication into several divided releases so it could produce a large number of printings and claim that as a status symbol for the book.

Famimaga continued on with strategy guides for Pac-Land, Mach Rider, Twinbee and Spelunker, but there was no such thing as a specialist strategy guide writer at this point. They would get written by production outfits that dealt in children’s magazines, or by part-timers hired by those outfits if they had no previous game experience. I moved on to Pac-Land right from Super Mario, and I remember that the sample ROM Namco gave me to work with had a completely faceless Pac-Man in the game. They told me it was in order to keep the ROM from leaking out somewhere in the middleman process, but of course I couldn’t take any screenshots off of that thing. I wound up having my bosses go through these tense negotiations with Namco in order to get me a usable ROM, and ultimately the schedule got so tight that I had to spent four straight nights staying in the office.”

If you think spending four straight days playing the FC version of Pac-Land sounds like fun, think again.

“I wound up passing out in the office, I guess because of all the fatigue that had accumulated since that summer, and I was taken to the hospital by ambulance. The hospital was really close by, to the point that the rest of the editorial staff arrived before I did, which became a funny story at parties afterward. I received some gifts and new clothes and such, and ultimately I rested up for about four days. Thus, the release date got delayed. Afterwards — and not that I was the reason for it or anything — but subsequent guides were written by outside production firms. They still had me running around for them with the Twinbee guide, though, since they had trouble finding anyone to play through the game’s ‘second quest’ and they needed screenshots.”

How much money did Yamamoto earn for co-writing the most successful book in Japan for two years running?

“The Mario guide was done entirely in-house, so I received no royalties for it outside of my hourly salary. My writing fee, in other words, was zero. Outside of physical production, [Tokuma] spent zero yen making the guide and sold such a vast number of copies of it. I did receive royalties for the English version, though, which arrived in my bank account a long time later — a grand total of 5,555 yen [about $37 in 1987 dollars].”

Mario Mania I (1985-6)

How popular did Nintendo’s Family Computer become after Super Mario Bros. was released on September 13, 1985? So popular that, as it turns out, a third-party Super Mario Bros. strategy guidebook was the top selling non-manga book in Japan for the entire year of 1985. And 1986.

Super Mario Bros.: The Complete Strategy Guide (スーパーマリオブラザーズ完全攻略本) was produced by the editors of Tokuma Shoten’s Family Computer Magazine, the highest-circ game mag in Japan until Famitsu hit it big in the late 1980s. Simultaneous day-and-date guide releases alongside games didn’t really happen until later, so this book didn’t hit shops until October 31 — and still it managed to sell 630,000 copies before the end of the year. What’s more, the 10th best-selling book of 1985 in Japan was another SMB strategy guide — Futami Shobo’s Super Mario Bros. Secret Tricks Collection (スーパーマリオブラザーズ裏ワザ大全集), shown below.

(In what was perhaps a sign of the times, the book that Tokuma’s Mario guide beat out to be #1 in 1985 was the Japanese translation of Iacocca: An Autobiography.)

Mario Mania didn’t truly take hold in Japan until 1986, though. In that year, Tokuma’s guide was again the top-selling book in the nation, with Futami’s getting bumped up to third place. What’s more, those two books were joined by five other guides in the top 25 — strategies for Twinbee, The Goonies, Spelunker, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, and Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken. In 1986, you could sell anything Famicom-related and rake in massive profits, basically — and then it happened all over again in America two years later. I knew I was born too late.

Sadly, the guidebook boom faltered in subsequent years as competition increased. From 1987 onward, the only strategy guides that made Japanese bestseller lists were Enix’s official guides for whatever Dragon Quest title they most recently released.

Smooth “Selling” (get it?!!)

Magweasel is now a year old, and I must admit to forgetting one of the main reasons why I launched it in the first place — to build a showcase for the office cabinet full of old E3/CES promotional material I have. While the great majority of the collection isn’t half as exciting as AMAZING SETA HELPS RETAILERS Volume 1, much of it is so old that it’s beginning to ignite twinges of — dare I say it? — nostalgia for the ’90s whenever I go diving through the files. Case in point: this fold-out flyer from the 1995 Winter CES shilling Ocean’s Waterworld.

As a high-schooler in 1995, my impression of Kevin Costner was that he was a self-centered, egotistical washout who liked to produce meandering snorefests starring himself. That period of his career was short-lived, honestly, but if you were unfortunate enough to grow up in the midst of it, that’s likely still the gut feeling you’ve got about the man. It’s perhaps a bit unfair, because Waterworld — despite being a  US box-office flop and certifiably a terrible movie — was a big hit overseas and wound up becoming very profitable for Universal, which still has special-effects stage shows modeled after the film running in three of their theme parks.

You can see why a company like Ocean would be excited about nabbing the game license. This was a company that practically built itself off big-ticket game licenses in Europe, among them RoboCop, Batman and The Addams Family (the C64 version of which I pirated off a BBS in 1992 and played to completion — hey, I was young, and it never got an official NTSC-compatible release anyway). Those few decent games, however, were dwarfed by all the crap licenses Ocean released over the years, and Waterworld was their last major shot at the “genre” they helped to pioneer. Presumably, developing movie games for the PlayStation generation was expensive enough that it stopped making financial sense for them.

Waterworld eventually came out on the SNES, Game Boy, and the Virtual Boy of all things, for which it was a launch title. Steven Kent called the Virtual Boy Waterworld the worst game ever made in an article once; I’d disagree with that, but it’s certainly the worst Virtual Boy game ever made. Genesis and Saturn versions were announced but never released; the Genesis ROM is easily available, but the Saturn version isn’t and I’m willing to bet that it wasn’t close to finished, a victim of Sega mucking around with the Saturn’s US release date.

Ocean’s Saturn project has nothing to do with the games Interplay had developed for the 3DO, PlayStation and PC at the same time. Not much is known about this lost title, except that it apparently has a “fully dynamic virtual ocean with staggeringly dynamic water surface,” which would make it kind of unique among Saturn games, wouldn’t it?

15 years ago…

I’m a bit ashamed to admit it, but I missed a notable milestone back on May 11 — the 15th anniversary of the Sega Saturn’s North American release, more or less.

The particulars are already well-known to most game historians, but in case you aren’t familiar with the story:

• Sega of America president/CEO Tom Kalinske announces in early ’95 that the Saturn will come out on September 2; Sony then announces a September 9 release for the PlayStation.
• At Kalinske’s keynote address, held 8:45 am on May 11 (the Thursday of E3 1995), the president announces that the Saturn’s actually on sale right now at select retailers for $399.
• The move seriously backfires. The Saturn’s library is starved for releases through the summer. US third parties, not tipped off to Kalinske’s release-date shift, are angry that Sega robbed them of the chance to release launch titles.  Retailers that weren’t selected for the launch are even angrier; Kay-Bee refuses to stock the Saturn entirely for a while.
• Sega sells 80,000 Saturns by September 9; Sony sells 100,000 PlayStations (which had its price dropped to $299 in response to the Saturn’s MSRP) during its own launch window. Sega thus loses the generation’s console war practically before it began.

I happened to fish this out of my shelves the other day. It’s a cardboard newspaper holder with a humorous Saturn-themed cover (you can read it by clicking on the top image). I don’t know how it was distributed — I need to look into this detail later — but it seems logical to assume that Sega set up a deal with some hotel near the LA Convention Center to place it on guestroom doorsteps on the morning of May 11.

As you can see, the holder comes complete with a vintage copy of USA Today from May 11, 1995. Top stories include Terry Nichols‘ indictment, public debate over talk-radio hate speech, and United Airlines raising their fee for canceling flights to $50 (they now charge $150). The Life section has a PR-y story about the upcoming 3D game-console revolution: “For the first time, video games approach reality: You’re in the driver’s seat, behind the punches, atop a dragon. The 16-bit games to date are two-dimensional environments with pedestrian colors; Sega’s Saturn and Sony’s PlayStation use multiple 32-bit processors, giving them power beyond the average PC and rivaling that of the advanced computers developers use to conjure video game magic.”

Getting cross over cross reviews

I’ve been talking about Famitsu reviews a lot lately, and that habit’s going to continue for a while, because today they’ve triggered something of an international incident!

The article on Kotaku gives the full story, but here is a summary:

- Enterbrain president and ex-Famitsu EIC Hirokazu Hamamura appears in Japanese advertising for Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker in an endorsing fashion.
- Famitsu gives Peace Walker a perfect 40/40 review score.
- Many overseas writers, including me over on 1UP, bring up concerns about the editorial independence of Famitsu’s review writers as a result of this. Brian Ashcraft of Kotaku writes a particularly long missive.
- Ashcraft’s article gets reworked a bit for Kotaku Japan and translated in a more direct fashion by other Japanese blogs.
- Kotaku Japan posts on its Twitter feed that Enterbrain has formally complained to them and that Konami has rescinded the site’s invitation to the Peace Walker release-day press event.

This was all out lined on the Japanese blogs today, and Jin’s post on it is particularly prescient because in addition to running a personal game-news blog, he also contributes articles (mostly covering press events) to Kotaku Japan. “You idiots!” he jokingly writes in the article. “Now I lost work because of this! What’re you gonna do about it?!”

The reader comments to the article are interesting — about half siding with Kotaku and half siding with Konami, as opposed to a much more unified anti-Japan-media response over on Kotaku itself — and so I thought I’d translate a few.

In particular, it’s fascinating to note that many don’t see Hamamura’s advertising turn as that much of a problem. This is perhaps because it’s not the first time he’s shown up in games themselves, having made all-but-official cameos in both 428 and Ryu ga Gotoku Kenzan! in the past. Many see him over there as a sort of avuncular father-figure for the game industry, a personable middle-aged guy with a funny mustache who provides comments to nearly every article written by Japan’s mainstream media about games, and they don’t make a direct connection between that and his position as the “man upstairs” at Famitsu’s company. There’s nobody quite like that in the American media, not since Howard Phillips left Nintendo Power and Thor Aackerlund stopped flogging Camerica’s NES games.

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IT’S A SAD THING THAT YOUR ADVENTURES HAVE ENDED HERE!!

Kurt Kalata writes:

I saw you wrote a bunch of FAQs for Shadowgate and such awhile back. I’m working on an article for ICOM Simulation’s games for my site, Hardcore Gaming 101, and I found something interesting – Shadowgate shows up on a bunch of kusoge lists, which I found pretty surprising. Apparently it was on a TV show awhile back [...]

It’s a ridiculous game, but it’s certainly nowhere even close to the depths of Deadly Towers or Atlantis no Nazo, and it’s usually at least relatively fondly remembered by the US fans. My question is – do you have any idea why they regard it as such? The Japanese Wiki entry makes mention of some of the wacky death messages – maybe there was something in the translation? Or maybe they just didn’t dig all the insta-kill stuff?

There’s a few reasons for this. First, kusoge is often as much a term of endearment in Japanese as derision — the game equivalent of saying a movie deserves to be on Mystery Science Theater 3000. A kusoge may not be a fun (or even playable) game, but it’s entertaining nonetheless because of its sheer silliness, whether intentional or not. It’s “hating” a game so much that you start to find it lovable, somehow.

Why does Japan single out Shadowgate for this title, though? As Kurt mentioned, it’s a game where you have the freedom to die in all kinds of inventive ways, many of which produce overwrought death messages. The Japanese-language version, however, is far more overwrought than the English one — it’s written wholly from a first-person perspective and consistently reads like a ten-year-old trying to imitate Shakespeare. (The way the NES/Famicom Shadowgate always uses two exclamation points where one would suffice adds to the cheesiness.)

Here are a few Shadowgate death lines, English followed by my translation of Japanese:

(after using your torch on yourself three times)
English: You finally set your hair on fire. The rest of your body soon follows!!
Japanese: Yaagghh!! My hair, my hair!! It’s burning!! The burns spread across my body!! I writhe in pain as I breathe my last.

(after using your sword on yourself)
English: You thrust sword [sic] into your chest!! Blood begins to flow!! Suicide won’t help in your quest!! The Warlock Lord will surely triumph now!!
Japanese: I thrust the sword’s blade into my left breast. …Blood pours out of the wound!! Ahhh!! How could I be so foolish? I took my own life, with my own hand!! …The world will surely be cloaked in darkness after I die…

(after attempting to defeat a cyclops with your bare hands)
English: A battle cry dies in your throat, as the cyclops crushes your skull with his club.
Japanese: Quicker than I could attack, the club descends upon my head!! My head has been cracked open!!

(after jumping out many of the game’s windows)
English: With a cry you jump to your death!! It takes only a couple of seconds before you hit the bottom with a thud.
Japanese: I scream in vain as my body floats in the air!! As I spin, various disconnected thoughts pass through my mind. The last thing I saw was a twinkling star, shining its eerie light in the midst of darkness.

(after awakening the chained female werewolf)
English: With a loud roar, the wolf pounces on you, taking your life!! The wolfs [sic] powerful jaws rip your throat out!!
Japanese: Agghh!! The woman transformed instantly into a wild, ferocious wolf. It’s angry!! It’s attacking!! Ahhh!! I’m done for!! Arrghh!! The wolf’s fangs glint in the light, and at that instant, I became the werewolf’s latest meal.

You get the idea, I think. It’s this rather odd writing style, unique among 8-bit console games in Japan, that makes Shadowgate so memorable over there for its kuso-ness. (The Japanese Famicom versions of Deja Vu and Uninvited aren’t nearly as pre-teen in their script, sadly.)

The Way Cross Reviews Work

The question of how susceptible to corruption Weekly Famitsu magazine is has come up in the news again after the publication gave Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (which publisher and ex-EIC Hirokazu Hamamura himself shows up in the advertising for) a perfect 40/40 score. There’s little doubt that the mag’s a bit freer with the 10 scores than it used to be, but is it any more or less corrupt than it’s ever been during its 24-year-old history?

To explore this, it’s time to go back to an interesting little 1999 interview, one of the few where Hamamura ever spoke very frankly about how his magazine evaluated and applied scores to games. This interview, conducted alongside indie developer Kenji Eno, was conducted by a manga artist named Miso Suzuki, who published a game-industry comic in Famitsu called Otona no Shikumi (おとなのしくみ, which I’ll loosely translate as ‘The Way Grown-Ups Work’) throughout the 1990s.

The context of this interview is as follows: In 1997, Famitsu reviewed Real Sound: Kaze no Regret, a Saturn adventure game that shows absolutely nothing onscreen and is instead controlled (and enjoyed) entirely through sound. The game garnered fairly average scores — 8/6/5/8 for a total of 27 points. Eno, annoyed at this, railed on Hamamura in an interview published in a 1997 edition of Otona no Shikumi, criticizing Famitsu’s capsule reviews and the extreme weight placed upon them by gamers. Hamamura didn’t really respond to Eno’s statements, and the two industry figures had an unsteady relationship until 1999, when Suzuki reunited them in the same room for an in-depth discussion into game ratings.

I’ve taken the liberty of translating the manga chapter that ensued from it, because it represents Hamamura’s official opinion on the “fairness” of Famitsu’s reviews back before the magazine had acquired a reputation for kowtowing to publishers with their scores. It’s also interesting to see how the magazine has shifted from the stance Hamamura laid out here — Eno would undoubtedly be happy with how lenient the modern Famitsu is with their 10′s nowadays, but chances are he’d have some more serious complaints about fairness.

Footnotes are below the images. I’m in a rush, so forgive any formatting ugliness.

This interview was published in April 1999, when Shenmue was in full development and facing a rapidly-slipping release date. Famitsu published a regular column devoted exclusively to Shenmue around this time.

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All about freelancing

The Tutorial: Freelancing

Mr. Demian Linn was the man who gave me my review assignments for EGM back during 2004, that glorious year when I lived in San Francisco, covering rent and everything, living entirely off freelancing for print (okay, almost entirely). Every month, I’d come visit his cube high up in the Ziff Davis Media office building, and he’d fumble through a plastic bin full of discs and say “OK uhm…hmm…okay, guess what, you’re lead review on McFarlane’s Evil Prophecy” and the like. Fine memories.

If anyone is qualified to tell you how to become a game-media freelancer, he’s the one…although in my personal range of knowledge, doing the supplementary-income stuff like strategy guides and consulting is pretty much a must these days. Anyone disagree?

Your 29-year-old future, courtesy Clive Sinclair

Clive Sinclair maintains an odd presence in computer history. At his prime, he’s like Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs all rolled up into one person, never missing a chance to bathe in the spotlight yet far more interested in inventions and tinkering than market share and profit margins. In the ’70s and early 1980s, nobody in the European electronics industry was more respected — and reported upon — than he was.

Sinclair got his start producing audio gear in the 1960s and branched out to pocket calculators (1972) and microcomputer kits before kicking off the ZX series of personal computers in 1980. The ZX Spectrum, despite having an abortive and unnoticed launch in America, sold in the millions in Europe — it provided fierce competition for the Commodore 64 and was the 8-bit system that many of today’s game designers and programmers first cut their teeth on. His successes earned Sinclair a knighthood and made him a household name in the UK, but his company was never far from financial ruin and, tiring of having to support a personal-computer business, he sold it to a rival in 1986 and went back to inventing. He’s still at it today, nearing 70 and working on fold-up bicycles and such, although you can’t help but think he’s a little daft when he talks with the press about how he doesn’t handle his own email.

At the height of his public career, in mid-1982, Sinclair gave a speech to the British chapter of Mensa where he discussed his vision of the future. The speech would’ve been perfect as a TED Talk if such a thing existed back then. Reading the article about it (above, from the October ’82 issue of Sinclair User) is pretty neat just to see how tuned-in and far-out he was, nearly three decades ago:

- He foresaw how massive storage and the power of networking will restore the power of the individual in society — or, to put it another way, he foresaw how blue-collar manufacturing wasn’t going to be the main economic sector of the West for long. “We have for some time been passing through a great industrial age in which the economic basis of society has demanded the bringing together of people in great numbers, many thousands per factory, many millions per city,” he said. “I believe that our move away from this type of organisation will restore the potential of the individual.” I can believe him there — I can work as an individual now chiefly thanks to cheap and abundant networking, after atll.

- He foresaw what GM assembly-line workers and most white-collar laborers my age or younger know all too well by now — big companies often see employees as disposable goods. “We must change the pattern of expectation,” he said, “no longer to prepare people for a life-time’s work in major organisations but to give them the self-reliance for a broader role in smaller groups.” He predicted a massive wave of small companies being founded, something that you could say manifested itself en masse in the dot-com boom.

- Where he maybe wasn’t so right (yet) is in the bit where he foresees a “Golden Age of man’s history” by the turn of the 21st century, thanks to machines doing all the brute-force heavy lifting for us. “Early in the next century we will have made intelligent machines ending for all time the pattern of drudgery,” he closed. “With them we can start the exploration of the universe. It may be that Western civilisation, seeded in seventh-century Ireland, is only just about to flower.”

All this while Steve Jobs was foundering about with the Apple III, no less.

It’s a shame Sinclair never quite had the sort of ruthless business sense the American computer bigshots were driven by. Whatever magic he had, it pretty much fizzled out by 1985 when serious US competition hit the European home computer market. A lot of what-ifs come to mind, though. What if Sinclair had a better US partner than Timex and the Spectrum was a budget-market success in America? What if it had been upgraded and expanded along the lines of an Amiga or ST? What if the QL wasn’t a pile of crap? A lot of ifs, yes, but I can’t help but like Sinclair and I wish his success was a tad longer-lasting than it proved to be. I dunno, he’s endearing.

Rich or poor, white or black, young or old, whether we want to or not, we’re all gonna have to go to our place in the sky and accept Officer Jim Walls (Ret.)’s final judgment upon our souls