Why Game? 1 - TextFiles.com

tenaciously, though maybe not executed as well
as it could have been. The world is still learning
to deal with the third dimension.
Mario debuted as a videogame character
in a videogame released to a world that had
already played videogames. For Mario’s games
to be as successful as they were required them
to first reshape people’s perceptions of video-
games, which they did. Nintendo’s president
Hiroshi Yamauchi must have thought this mere
luck, because he refuses to pay Shigeru Miya-
moto more than a secretary’s salary even today.
It was no small feat, what Miyamoto did.
He looked at a medium that had been stagnat-
ing in games starring unlovable - sometimes
despicable - characters engaged in one-screen
labyrinth-like or straight shooting affairs, and
birthed a genre that scrolled and moved.
Mickey had the good grace to be crunching
on new snow with his debut. With “Steam-
boat Willie,” he created the perceptions of the
people who witnessed talking cartoon anima-
tion. Mickey also happens to be a mouse, and
a rather harmless-looking one. He was able to
grow up and evolve, looking rather the same
throughout the decades, and he’s never actually
done anything actively in a motion picture, and
supposedly that’s why people love him.
Mario, though - little, short, fat, Italian porn star
Mario, has this years-spanning platonic relation-
ship with the tall, blonde Princess Peach. And he
also has that . . . mustache.
I remember when I was six, and my dad
gave me sound advice. I think it had something
to do with his divorce, and his beer:
“Son - don’t ever trust a lawyer with a
mustache.”
Two years later, I noted the weatherman on
television, and said, “Dad, is it okay to trust a
weatherman with a mustache?”
He was drinking a cup of coffee, before
bed. He always drinks a cup of coffee before
bed.
“No. Don’t trust a weatherman with a mus-
tache, either. Especially not that one.” He went
on to explain that the man’s habit of shaving the
top mustache so it stood artificially apart from
the bottom of his nose made him look like “a
filthy liar.”
Super Mario has a mustache, and it was
because of this, maybe, once I started to think
about it every once in a while, that he seemed
so far away from me, so real yet so fake at the
same time. This mustached little chubby guy
had to surmount incredible obstacles worthy of
the real men my dad had told me about, men
like Patton and MacArthur, only he was doing it
to save a woman, which made him, well - what
did it make him? A man who saves women? The
princess is hardly the goal of the game. The goal
of the game, to the focused, pre-pubescent boy,
was merely to proceed, and to win, warps be
damned.
Yet the mustache is a target of confusion.
All it did to us, the pre-pubescent of the world,
was identify Mario as older than us. He was
like a big brother. He had a mustache - that
definitely meant he had pubes, and that might
means he’s already had sex, we once mused on
the playground, in those cautious weeks leading
up to the mysterious release of SMB3. There
was always that kid who claimed he had the
game already, and that Mario and the Princess
get married at the end, which totally means
they’re going to bone, like you know all those
Disney princesses and princes do in the Disney
movies.
This kid was, of course, a filthy liar. He
probably grew up to grow a mustache.
And now there’s me, at age twenty-six, and
I can finally grow a mustache. I guess I’m about
Mario’s age when he set off to rescue Princess
Peach the first time; thinking about his quest
in such basic, self-serving terms makes me
feel kind of stupid. I wonder for a second, who
thinks about the stories in these games? Not the
Life Non-Warp:DX 87