And I was going to grab some popcorn when I read the first part. It just don't have that typical Maelstrom sting to it.
Email: I didn’t believe you
When you were talking about how Super Mario Bros. 5 would supposedly “bomb” in the eyes of “Industry” gamers, I thought you were joking. I thought to myself, “Haha, Malstrom is certainly a funny guy. Even Super Mario Bros. 5, a game that has been awaited for seventeen (!) years, was supposed to be a “non-game” in their eyes! How utterly unbelievable, how could anyone think such a thing?”
Well, it turns out that I was wrong.
I am sure that you have heard quite a lot (perhaps more than you’d like) about Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, a man known more as an internet celebrity than a game journalist, but he has also been rather vocal about certain things concerning the Wii and its games. His most recent review, as you can probably guess, was Super Mario Bros. 5 (coupled with Left 4 Dead 2). Now, I had been expecting a Zero Punctuation review of Super Mario Bros. 5 for some time, and I was mostly expecting Yahtzee to do what he always does with Mario, go on about how he saves the same princess from the same villain and complain about the focus on multiplayer like he always does, but since this was a double review, Super Mario Bros. 5 only got some few mentions. However, watching the review shows that Yahtzee’s opinion of Super Mario Bros. 5 is one of ignorance. Here he claims that the game does not deserve a spot in modern gaming, that there is nothing new about it, and he is promptly backed up by his fanbase, otherwise known as the many forum dwellers of the Escapist.
I suppose it may not surprise you one bit. Afterall, you are the one who have been speaking of the “Industry” gamers and their resistance against Super Mario Bros. 5. I doubted your words, and I see now that there are indeed gamers who would throw Super Mario Bros. 5 away like a “non-game”. So, I send you this email with two things to say: first and foremost, that I should not have doubted you, or rather the “Industry” gamers.
Second, I am curious as to what your stance is on innovation. This I saw a lot of within the thread over at the Escapist. What kind of purpose does innovation serve in making games, and how important is it for a game to be innovative?
Holy cow! Look at that Yahtzee video. At one point he even says that Mario 5 “has no right to exist”.
For the flack I get when my annoyance seeps out at star-finder Mario, at least you know I have over a decade of completely being ‘abandoned’ by Nintendo as well as watching star-finder Mario call itself the “successor” to the classic Mario series. But Mario 5 has not replaced star-finder Mario (Galaxy 2 is coming out next year). Why is there so much hostility to good old Mario 5? What did Mario 5 do these people to cause such anger?
Your question on innovation was really good. The definition of innovation really is at the heart of this generation.
Based on the works of Clayton Christensen, we are told there are two types of innovation. There is sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation. So far, I keep trying to stick to the main console strategies for talk on disruption and try not to apply disruption in odd tangents (because disruption is often applied in ways Christensen would not approve). But let’s make an exception and look at software itself through the disruptive lens.
Sustaining innovation for video game software would depend on the series, of course. For the most part, sustaining innovation would mean better graphics, better sound, and more ‘modes’. For RTS games, it would be something like more units. For FPS games, it would be something like more guns. Sustaining innovations build on whatever is there.
Disruptive innovation for video game software would be not upping the graphics or even going backwards to improve something that no one ever considered. Wii Sports may have “bad graphics” but the controls of the game are very new and cannot be done in any other game. Disruptive innovations hit gamers or non-gamers who are not being served by the ’sustaining’ innovations.
Super Mario Brothers 5 is not a game with sustaining innovations. Its graphics, music, and gameplay is not “better” than what we have seen before. However, Mario 5 does do something no other Mario game has ever done before: four player multiplayer.
The bedrock of disruption is overshooting. The point is that a product with constant sustaining innovations ends up overshooting the customers’ needs. So a game like Mario Galaxy, as beautiful as that game is, is ending up overshooting many gamers’ needs. This gives potential rise to a disruptor who uses a different value to “innovate” the product. For example, Amazon isn’t a better brick and mortar book store than Barnes and Nobles. Amazon was a book store that had very different values and appealed to people brick and mortar book stores were not appealing to.
From someone who the star-finder Mario games are overshooting, they will look at Mario 5 and say, “Wow, they made a Mario game for me!” For someone who is still not overshot by the star-finder Mario games, they will look at Mario 5 and say, “WTF!? Games should be EVOLVING. This game is going BACKWARDS.” Both of these opinions are correct.
The person who says Mario 5 is going backwards is correct since he is viewing gaming only in traditional sustaining terms. These same people will look at the Wii and say, “Backwards console” because it isn’t as fast and doesn’t have as much horsepower as the other consoles.
Understanding disruptive innovation, as opposed to sustaining innovation, is the key to finding out why the Wii appeals to so many. It is also why Mario 5 is appealing to many people where the “more evolved” Mario games do not.
Here an interesting way to look at the Mario series which, I believe, has never been done before. Let us place the entire Mario series under the lens of disruption. What will we find?
Donkey Kong- This is the beginning. Let’s move on from here.
Donkey Kong Jr.- Sustaining innovation. It is more of the same.
Donkey Kong 3- I’m going to skip this one.
Mario Brothers- Disruptive innovation. This game was focused on multiplayer which wasn’t normally done at the time. The game did not improve along traditional lines. Mario Brothers had ‘less diversity of levels’ than the Kong games did.
Super Mario Brothers- Disruptive innovation. NES was seen as a generation behind game centric computers at the time. Graphics and more levels were not why Mario sold. (Though, this history has been whitewashed by comparing it only to the Atari Era and not the computers which were where all home gaming was at after the crash. Comparing it to Atari is dumb because Atari came out in the latter seventies, almost ten years prior to the arrival of the NES. This is not more levels of Mario Brothers. This game cannot be seen as a sustaining innovation.)
Super Mario Brothers 2- I’m going to skip this one since there are so many versions of it. But it is sustaining innovation.
Super Mario Brothers 3- More powerups! More levels! Sustaining innovation.
Super Mario World- More powerups! More levels! Sustaining innovation.
Yoshi’s Island- More Yoshi! More levels! Sustaining innovation.
Super Mario 64- Better graphics! More complex gameworld! More complex gameplay! Sustaining innovation.
Super Mario Sunshine- Better graphics! More gameworld! Water pack was adding onto the current gameplay. Sustaining innovation.
Super Mario Galaxy- Better graphics! More gameworld! Space and gravity were added onto the current gameplay. Sustaining innovation (as it is clearly an evolution of Mario 64).
Handheld Mario Games- One mistake game journalists are making is putting any of the handheld Mario games into the main series. Super Mario Land series was always seen as separate. NSMB is also different as it was designed for the handheld. (And this is why Mario 5 is advertised as a successor to Mario 3 and Mario 4 and not as the successor to NSMB DS in Nintendo advertising.) All the handheld Mario games are sustaining innovations. NSMB DS was a sustaining innovation from previous Mario games on handhelds.
Super Mario Brothers 5- Disruptive innovation. Mario 5 goes back almost twenty years towards the gameplay of Super Mario World and Super Mario Brothers 3. The game sheds off the 3d sustaining innovation entirely. However, this is done so Miyamoto can finally make his multiplayer Mario game. Multiplayer is a new value we have never seen in the Mario series before (the versus modes of NSMB DS and Mario 3 don’t count).
Super Mario Galaxy 2- This is more Galaxy levels. It is a clear sustaining innovation.
Keep in mind that I do not mean to imply that sustaining innovation means bad and disruptive innovation means good. Sustaining innovation is always good unless you are overshooting the customer’s needs. What this does show is why Super Mario Brothers 5 is despised and hated by many “hardcore” gamers despite it resembling the golden age of gaming.
There are gamers out there who hate disruptive innovation. This is because they are not yet overshot. From their perspective, a disruptive innovation is nothing more than a game going backwards. And then they get mystified that the game sells so well.
The people who live in sustaining innovations live in a very different universe from you and I. But I think Yahtzee’s video really highlights the very different perspectives gamers have in this titanic clash of disruptive versus sustaining innovations which is what this generation is about.
A flashy-first game is awesome when it comes out. A great-first game is awesome forever.
Plus, just for the hell of it: Kelly Brook at the 2008 BAFTAs
