The Flipside of Gaming
Before Mario is a Blogspot blog (remember them?) devoted to Nintendo’s company history before they made video games. Well, their December 13th post doesn’t fit that bill entirely, since the museum is quite new, but they did focus on those aspects on display that don’t deal with their freakishly popular electronic products.
I found out about this program that runs in the background and plays time- and season-appropriate Animal Crossing music. It’s free, there’s versions for Windows and Mac on the site, and I found a copy on the Arch depository so there’s obviously a version for Linux too. It even has a rain option.
Pretty simple today, but it’s free and fun and free. It’s freeee!
Nook ($0, Windows, Mac and Linux)
Over on Bluesky there’s an extremely interesting thread by Max Nichols, that reveals a number of groups that are often thought of as divisions of Nintendo are, in fact, separate companies!
It’s a good idea to click through and read the whole thread, and there’s a number of people among the respondents, as well as Max Nichols himself, who are likely worth following if you’re on that platform. One of them, Hyrule Interviews, has this quote from old Nintendo of America employee, and idol of millions of preteen NES addicts, Howard Phillips:
SRD is such a strange case. When Phillips talks about working with external programming teams to develop arcade games, they’re talking about companies like Ikegami Tsushinki, who programmed Donkey Kong for them based off of Shigeru Miyamoto’s design. Brought into context with Nintendo’s “independent subsidiaries,” it becomes evident that they never really stopped doing that, but became more careful that they had the rights over whatever was produced.
It’s also interesting to put this into context with:
It causes one to wonder: is Nintendo’s reluctance to staff up on the people who actually construct their games old-fashioned, very modern, or just idiosyncratic of them?
I am SO ENVIOUS. Kit & Krysta, formerly of the official Switch video podcast Nintendo Minute, currently of their own projects and Youtube channel, got cell phone video of an amazing place, a location in Tokyo somewhere that gamedevs sometimes meet at, and is crammed tightly with game memorabilia. It’s almost a museum all to itself, and unlike the Nintendo Museum, seems like they don’t mind video footage escaping their confines, although on the other hand this doesn’t seem to be open to the public. It doesn’t look like a lot of people could fit in there at once, anyway!
I usually steer well clear of the hard sell, or “prompt for engagement,” when it comes to asking you to follow links and view videos from here. I figure if you’re interested you’ll click through, and if you’re not, then maybe tomorrow. But I’m breaking through that reserve just this once, as this place is amazing. You really have to see this if you have any interest in Nintendo, APE, Pokemon, Dragon Quest or their histories (12 minutes):
Our Private Tour of the Top Secret Nintendo Game Developer Hangout in Tokyo (Youtube, 12m)
So it seems that Nintendo has made another pronouncement about that least necessary piece of gaming lore, the timeline of the Legend of Zelda series.
If you don’t know anything about this, you are truly blessed by Din, Nayru and Farore. In summary, Eiji Aonuma, Nintendo’s overseer of the Legend of Zelda game series, has declared that almost all of the game in the long series fit into a massive set of timelines. Not a single timeline, because Ocarina of Time had a time travel plot, and that gave them the opportunity to split the series continuity, from that point, into three branches.
Most of this was described in Hyrule Historia book, one of three books that Dark Horse Comics put out, official tomes explaining much abo/ut the series and its canonical sequence of events. They also put up a website with the gist of things. Chronologically, the first four games in the series, unbelievably, are Skyward Sword, The Minish Cap(!), the Four Swords game that came with the GBA remake of Link to the Past (!!), then Ocarina of Time.
After that, there are three timelines: one in which Link didn’t defeat Ganon at the end of Ocarina of time, and the split timelines of Adult and Child link in that game. Why Ocarina gets special treatment for Link losing and none of the other games I can’t definitively say, except that it probably gives them more room into which to slot the series’ continued proliferation.
If Ganon in OoT wins, we get the timeline of A Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening, Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons, A Link Between Worlds (which is essentially a direct sequel to aLttP), Tri-Force Heroes (remember that), and then, at the end of this line, the originals themselves: The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.
Then we have two lines for Adult Link’s time and Child Link’s time. For Link the Elder, there’s Wind Waker, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, which is interesting since Adult Link creates a legacy where his descendants are all heroes as children, and indeed Hyrule is destroyed at the end of Wind Waker (I hope I’m not spoiling anything), Ganondorf is definitely killed, and the following two games take place in a new land. I’d love to see that era explored further, but we haven’t heard anything from it since the DS. “Meanwhile” Link the Younger has Majora’s Mask, Twilight Princess and Four Swords Adventures.
You might notice some interesting absences. What about Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom? People who have played all the way through those will notice a history that doesn’t jibe with the others, and the Triforce is hardly seen in either of them! In it the Sheikah is technically advanced, Hyrule has a history of technology, and Ganondorf arose all over again, not even to mention those Zonai people! What giveth?
Aonuma has said that those games don’t place on any of the current timelines! And Hyrule Warriors is its own alternate dimension, and the BotW-themed Hyrule Warriors sequel is probably also an alternate universe.
Until Echoes of Wisdom, the most recent game, those were the forefront of the Zelda metachronology, and seems to indicate that Nintendo was forging the series afresh. But on a different chronology page than the one I linked above, Echoes of Wisdom has been placed on the timeline, as part of the Hero is Defeated branch coming off of Ocarina of Time, after Tri-Force Heroes, but before The Legend of Zelda.
All of this is largely meaningless, of course. Some games refer to past games, but just as many forge ahead with only incidental callbacks. Aonuma has said that they don’t really pay much attention to where a game will fit into the timeline when making it, which explains why BotW and TotK throw away all that continuity, other than some familiar place names. But now we know that, somewhere in Nintendo, there is a poor shlub whose job it is to try to make it all fit together, and that they threw up their hands with the two open world games.
A thankless task. And who knows how long it can even be kept up? Eventually they’ll end up pulling a Castlevania, reboot the whole damn thing, and where from there? Crisis on Infinite Hyrules? Secret Imprisoning Wars? Nintendo52? I don’t even like to speculate upon it.
Obsession is simultaneously a wonderful and a terrible thing. Wonderful to behold from outside, awful to experience from within.
What kind of obsession produces an effort, not just to complete Pokemon Platinum, which after all was sold to kids with the expectation that they would be able to beat it eventually. No, what about an effort to finish every possible game of Pokemon Platinum, using a script that works on every possible random seed, of over four billion, that the game can generate? And also operates mostly on “Nuzlocke Challenge” constraints, where any defeated Pokemon (here, after the first battle) have to be released? But that’s okay, because after that first fight, the player is never defeated?
That this is possible at all is because of Pokemon Platinum’s use of a PRNG, a pseudo-random number generator. While figuring out how, mathematically, to beat over four billion possible games is a formidable challenge, it’s still better than beating every possible conceivable random sequence of events, which can’t ever be done conclusively.
So, that’s what MartSnack did. They found out how to swim through the deep-yet-discrete sea of probability to obtain just the Pokemon, and Pokemon stats, they needed to complete the game, regardless of any random event the game could throw at them, with the same sequence of button presses. It’s a journey that requires frequent synchronization, to make sure no one possible play breaks free of the others, sending that branch of fate down a rogue path. How is this possible at all, I leave it to you to discover in their Youtube video, an interesting hour and five minutes found by MeFi user (and former owner) cortex, here:
Beating Every Possible Game of Pokemon Platinum At The Same Time (Youtube, 1h5m)
Fact: even after the disastrous life of the Wii-U, Miis still exist on the Nintendo Switch, and even though a lot less fuss is made about them now, there are still games that support them.
There are also games that used to support them but no longer do. The version of Super Mario Galaxy on Super Mario 3D All-Stars doesn’t let you select a system Mii to use as the file icon. You’re limited to one of the Mario characters provided! It’s a shame that. But, Nintendo Switch Sports, Smash Ultimate, and of course Miitopia supports them, as do four other games on the platform.
I’ve actually been through the process explained in the below video, by CJCat, which involves using Amiibo to transfer Miis over one by one from a Wii-U that had a Mii collection brought over using the Wii import channel. We played a lot of Wii, and it’s nice to know all the goofy characters we made, and the memories they carry, are on the Switch, even if few games use them any more. I hope the Switch 2 doesn’t forget about them, and that it makes them easier to bring over!
Bringing a Mii from Wii to Switch (Youtube, 9 minutes)
In a 12-minute video on Youtube, the channel Almost Something discusses Nintendo’s lawsuit against Blockbuster Video over photocopying game manuals. First off, here it is:
The lawsuit was really about Nintendo trying to stamp out the game rental business in the US, which they were largely successful at in Japan. Cartridge manufacturers were genuinely frightened of rentals cutting into their profits, and resorted to measures like increasing the difficulty of games in the US market to prevent players from completing games on a single rental and losing out on sales. Howard Lincoln of Nintendo of America called game rental “…nothing less than commercial rape.” While the Software Publishers Alliance (SPA) managed to get legislation passed that outlawed the rental of computer software, video games were separately defined and rental allowed to continue.
They sought out any legal means they could to make game rentals less attractive. Manuals were one way to do this. While rental stores couldn’t easily copy the games in order rent our more copies, it was fairly easy to make a good-enough reproduction of a manual using a copy machine. Nintendo sued Blockbuster over the practice, which was eventually settled out of court, but Blockbuster sent a letter to the four stores they had who were accused of the practice telling them to stop.
If you were around at that time, you might remember that for a time rented games would sometimes come with their own small makeshift manuals, sometimes taking the form of an adhesive sheet stuck to the plastic case. It seems these were a small industry that saw the lack of durable instructions provided with games as a little economic niche they could take advantage of.
The lack of manuals supplied with games may have been the reason for a weird quirk on one of Nintendo’s games. The game Startropics has one infamous place where the game asks the player to enter a code from materials supplied with the game. There was a sheet of paper that came with boxed retail copies of the game, an Infocom-style “feelie,” that if soaked in water revealed a code (747) that had to be entered into the game at one point to continue. The code wasn’t revealed anywhere in the game, so players without the sheet couldn’t progress.
Interestingly, while the WiiU Virtual Console version of Startropics has an online manual that reveals the code, the Switch online version has no manual, and leaves players stranded there unless they look up the answer online.
The Japanese versions of both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom have hundreds of characters in several fictional cultures. User Chubby Bub over on zeldawiki.com has a couple of spreadsheets collecting much of the naming inspiration of both these games’ many characters, and has put them up on Google Docs! Here’s the one for Breath of the Wild, and here’s the one for Tears of the Kingdom.
That’s all this time, but if you’re interested in this information it’s a lot to get through. They have information on character names, map names, the shrine Monks, monsters, items and quite a bit more! And if this isn’t that interesting to you? Well, we’re a daily blog here, so check back tomorrow!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
People remember the DK Rap, the theme song from Donkey Kong 64 back on the Nintendo 64. It’s certainly memorable, and arguably iconic, although most would agree it’s not great as a rap? It was written by George Andreas (who wrote and sang the lyrics) and Grant Kirkhope (who composed the music).
We’re referred to it before here in a Sunday Sundry about brentalfloss’ excellent (but very dark) 2018 parody version, which kept most of the music the same. Well here’s an update that’s changes the music and lyrics, with the music from original composer Kirkhope, and the words written and sung by rapper Substantial, and by all rights it’s a much better song. Hear for yourself (3 minutes), it’s (puts on monocle) remarkably funky:
Joshua Rivera on The Ringer reminds us of the history of comedy RPGs involving Mario, beginning with Super Mario RPG, then branching into the twin threads of the Paper Mario games and the Mario & Luigi series. They all share the common aspect of making Mario pretty boring, the archetype of the silent protagonist, and instead focusing on the world he inhabits.
In particular, the article mentions how the two of the principals behind Super Mario RPG went on to work on Mario and Luigi, and how Nintendo hasn’t made developing the series any easier with increasingly strict guidelines on how the characters can be used, like how modified versions of iconic, yet generic, types like Toads and Goombas can’t be created, possibly for fear of diluting their brands.
The article also notes that both subseries have undergone revivals lately, with Origami King and Thousand Year Door in the Paper Mario series, and the new Brothership in the Mario & Luigi line, despite the shutting down of AlphaDream, who made them. But it’s not getting easier to make new games in either series, with Nintendo’s growing strictness over outside use of their characters and the serieses painting themselves further into a corner with each installment consuming more of the feasible possibility space.
We are told by The Cutting Room Floor this interesting fact. Super Mario Bros. 3 has a debug mode that activates when a specific memory location contains 80 hex, that allows the user to grant Mario any powerup. In normal play this never activates because the cartridge initializes all of RAM to 0 as part of initialization. But the version of the game included in SNES Super Mario All-Stars, while it closely follows the original’s logic in many ways including including debug mode and its criteria for activation, doesn’t initialize memory when starting up. When the console boots up, its RAM contains random voltages that can be interpreted as nearly any value, and there’s a chance that there’ll be 80 hex in memory location 7E0160, and enable the debug mode for Super Mario Bros. 3.
While ordinarily this would be a 1-in-256 chance, some consoles are prone to favoring specific values, so some units will turn on debug mode more often. As a result a legend developed that certain Super Mario All-Star cartridges are special debug versions that accidentally got put into retail boxes and sold.
Supper Mario Broth made a short video (about 1 1/2 minutes) explaining how it works in crudely animated form:
As it turns out, Mario All-Stars has its own debug modes for each game in the compilation, but the one for Mario 3 is different, and buggier. Meanwhile the original debug mode for Mario 3 remains, intact, buried in the code, waiting for the value 80 hex to appear in its magic location to unveil itself.